Every year I usually try something new. I had ambitions to have riding lessons last year, but ended up running instead. Unfortunately I injured my ankle so my big goal was unobtainable. (The injury was a stretched nerve, which seemed to respond best to a lot of rest. I think I also need to be totally reconciled to being a Very Slow Runner. Every time I got ambitious for speed bad things happened, usually to the same ankle.)
This year, I am having singing lessons. My mother has always believed I am pitch deaf, which I suspected was not true, but didn't have the internal strength to overcome. But singing was being forced on me - I had to sing for an assignment last year, and then at a mass at the end of school term, and it appeared I wasn't hurting anyone. So I rang up Lyn who has an ad in the yellow pages, and said "Teach me to sing". I had to audition, presumably so she could check I wasn't pitch deaf and could be taught. Her judgment on my rendition of Silent Night..."That's fine". (It should be noted mother just laughed when I told her I was having lessons, along with a couple of comments on me being no good at singing.)
So every Thursday night I go to singing lessons. I really like it, and I am starting to sound pretty okay. I don't make nice 'i' sounds especially in my upper register, but they are not sounding like mice dying anymore either. And my volume has definitely got greater. I don't get to pick what I am singing, Lyn does, and I am doing 'I dreamed a dream' from Les Mis, and 'As long as he needs me' from Oliver (I think). Both of them are slow sad songs, and both the protagonists in the shows die not too long after these songs - they are Not Me. I am a pretty positive person who doesn't let men push her round, and though I feel a lot of pity for these two women, I don't relate.
Apparently, I get to keep these songs till I get them right. My motivation is therefore to sing them well enough that I don't have to sing them all the time anymore.