Back to School

Last week was my first week back to school.  People get confused sometimes when I say I teach at a school.  To clarify:  it’s a music school, not a full day school.  We offer private lessons, group and studio classes, theory classes, and have lots of recitals and performance opportunities.  It’s a great place to teach, and we started back last week.

People always ask how many students I have.  Honestly, I never really know.  It’s probably about 25 to 30, but I’d have to really sit down and count.  And then by the time I finished counting I probably would have either gotten a new student or one would have dropped, and then I’d probably mess up and have to start all over.  I teach five days a week, though I’m thinking about cutting back to four days to give myself more time to gig…but I’m not turning much down.  We’ll see how this year goes. 

I had two weddings yesterday.  As I was driving to the first church, I realized I had played there before.  I guess that means I’ve been living here for awhile—I’m getting to the point where I know the various venues and really starting to know my way around town.  Here’s a picture from inside the first church:

church

The second gig was at the Randall Art Gallery, which is a pretty cool venue.  I briefly looked into it for our wedding, actually.  We were playing right near the cakes, so I made this fancy instagram collage.

cake

The white ended up being a bit washed out, but I had to take these pictures, collage them, and instagram them, all during the ceremony—I did it after we finished the processional and before the recessional.  (Yes, we were in the back!)

Last night we went with Melissa and Steve to the Shaved Duck.  They hadn’t been so we had been trying to come up with a good time to go for awhile.  We had to wait awhile for our table, but it was pleasant outside and well worth the wait.  We also ran into an adult student of mine and his wife (St Louis is a great example of the song "It’s a Small World After All").  We had the nerdiest conversation I’d been part of in awhile.  Topics included:  World of Warcraft, Hitchhiker’s Guide, Rule 43 and Godwin’s Rule, various youtube videos, and then a long time spent talking about our cats and their strange behaviors.  I love hanging out with those guys!

I’m about to go for a run, and then later today my friend Vanessa and her fiancé Russell are coming to town and staying with us tonight.  I haven’t seen her since early July, so I’m really looking forward to it!  I’m sure since they are engaged now they’ll be acting more smug and whatnot like most people do 🙂