u/Sivy17

I'm returning to learning piano as an adult after some years of very haphazard lessons as a child. I'm working through Alfred's 2 right now, but every time I work on a song as written, my teacher will change all the fingering and dynamic on me! I'm not talking about reminders of a Forte after a crescendo or something, but I mean adding all sorts of staccato, accents, and renumbering fingering or even what hand to play with, sometimes even adding in grace notes. Is this kind of thing normal? She said it's to practice making the songs sound more "musical", but honestly a lot of it just feels like gilding the lilies when all I care about at the moment is getting through the book and regaining lost ground. Undoubtably I'll focus on this kind of stuff when I'm playing actual songs later on, but I just found it really curious right now.

I feel like I've never gotten a good answer to what kind of pavement treatments vs what kind of asphalt distress is observed in the field. I've gone back and reviewed our DOT design manual and the FHWA Distress Identification manual, but they don't seem to offer much in terms of when to recommend a crack sealing, 1.5" Mill and Repave, a 4" Mill and Repave, Full Depth Repair, or even undercuts should it come to that. Any resources would be appreciated!

31m trying to drop from 185 to 170 at the moment. I have my seventh marathon scheduled for early November. I frequently hear about how you can't or shouldn't try to lose weight during training. My question is, when are you supposed to lose it then?

I ran my sixth marathon last month and felt great to the point that I immediately rebounded back up to 50+ miles per week for the next few weeks. Then I caught a cold last week and was slammed with work the week after and couldn't get out to run Suddenly, dinky four mile jogs are having me walk at the two mile mark. This weekend I had to bail on my long run at mile 11 at a pace two minutes slower than my full marathon pace. What gives?