As of today there are exactly thirteen days left until the big event of Saturday April 5, 2014.  I swing back and forth between waves of anxiety and surges of excitement as it creeps closer.  I feel like I’m juggling strangely shaped objects as I scramble to put the rest of the pieces of the big night together and yet somehow they are all still in the air.  My senior recital has been a long time in coming, and there have been many peaks and valleys on the way both in and out of school.  While I have “technically” been in college now for five years, it really has taken nine years to get to this point.  Five years ago a close friend told me that I was “an amazing flute player,” and that I should try to get into to a nice school somewhere.  I didn’t believe him; in fact my heart sank when he told me this because I wanted so badly for it to be true.  At the time I was stuck in a real mess and had very little hope for the future.  I remember all this as I write out the acknowledgments for my program and the emotions are making it really hard to say what I want to say.  In brief, I never thought I would make it to this point.  But here I am, and I look forward to the night of April 5^th with eager anticipation.  I hope you all have marked your calendars and I look forward to celebrating this special event with all of you.