It’s been quite the week of cold and snow, but nothing like many in Texas and other places are going through.

Monday was already off my public school job, but it was snowing all day and my college class also got canceled. Since all my private students are online I taught them as usual, except one who was having internet issues, for about 2 hours of students. I got a lot of other stuff done on this day!

Tuesday was a snow day from my morning job, but the rest of the day was still on, with the exception of two students who had to cancel for weather related issues. Tuesdays are a busy day this semester, with 3 hours of college teaching on top of an already long private teaching afternoon and evening (6 hours, which is a long time to teach from one chair.) It was nice having the early morning off.

Wednesday was still very cold, but school was on. I took Louie’s Subaru into my morning job and that ended up being a great decision on my drive home, when it was snowing again. Not a lot of accumulation thankfully but the roads were awful for my return home commute. Wednesdays aren’t so bad, and I just had a morning class I’m taking, 1 college student, and about 3 1/2 hours of students.

Thursday wasn’t as cold as the other days, but it’s thankfully the day I don’t have to go into school at all, so I taught my morning class virtually (I wouldn’t mind going in, but I do get a little more sleep not doing so, and I don’t have to go out in the single digit morning temps!). I have one morning student on Thursday but got a workout and shower in beforehand, and then the afternoon had 1 college student and about 4 1/2 hours of private teaching.

Friday ended up also being fairly easy, with only 3 hours of private teaching and 1 hour of college teaching. One student on Friday I let move to Saturday due to big tuning problems (the problem with virtual teaching is that it is hard to help them and even those that have gotten pretty good at it still have trouble with the extreme temps).

Saturday was my busiest Saturday in months. I had a morning student, my usual improvisation class, and then I had a recording session (I had been oddly stressed about it, but it ended up being easy) and then a quartet rehearsal for an upcoming streaming concert we are playing on.

So that was my week. I had probably a few more cancellations than normal, due to the snow and some serious tuning issues. It was a pretty decent week…I often feel as if I just work and each day is a slog to the end, but there are wonderful moments within. I think it’ll be easier when things get back to “in-person” teaching, hopefully by fall.

As far as playing with people again, it was nice to play with the quartet and it was a fun rehearsal. I don’t know what it means though, but I wasn’t that excited. I see my friends on social media and a few in person saying that they are so desperate to play together again, that they are missing their whole life and their whole identity, not playing with others, and I’m sitting here figuring out my studio policies for the fall and working on a slight change going to a flat rate policy and planning to say no to gigs likely until people stop asking, and feeling okay with that. I don’t miss it. I miss having colleagues and seeing people and chatting, and that will never be as nice, working from home and having a private studio, but I do have colleagues at my school jobs and get to chat sometimes, so that’s nice. I miss playing Mahler Symphonies, but I wasn’t doing that pre-pandemic anyway.

Fun stuff this week:

We got a box from Purple Carrot, a vegan meal kit place. I have enjoyed the Purple Carrot boxes and I find them to be easier to make and slightly less involved than Blue Apron. Blue Apron meals do tend to be delicious though.

We have been watching Dr. Who. I knew we were behind a few seasons, and thought I’d figured out which seasons we hadn’t seen, but it turns out that I was totally wrong and had completely forgotten two entire seasons. We are watching them again and have mostly forgotten things but not entirely. We’ll get back to where we need to be soon.

I spent a good amount of time this week reading. I have been working through a lot of cozy mystery series’ by Dianna Xarissa through an Amazon Kindle Unlimited membership. I’m not sure if I mentioned a few other recent reads, so I’ll just do it again: The Nature of Fragile Things by Susan Meissner and The Book of Lost Names by Kristin Harmel. I think I did mention them, as I type this…but either way both are good, with a preference to the Book of Lost Names. That reminds me of another great book I enjoyed this year by Jodi Picoult, The Book of Two Ways, which I loved, and you should also read the American Royals by Katharine McGee.

The house across the street from me is for sale, so if you want to be my neighbor that’s an option. Our neighbor said the market is really hot right now so he is selling and plans to rent for awhile and then buy again when things settle down. Sometimes I think I must know nothing about money, because I’m happy to just stay in this little house that needs some work because it’s home and it’s nice enough, and I don’t want to move again…but then again there’s no mortgage on it and the electric bill is only about $75 a month average and that’s being pretty comfortable year-round. I don’t know…it would be nice to have a house that wasn’t kind of weirdly set up and needed some work done (the kitchen here is particularly awful) but I’ve spent so much time here over the past year that I just don’t even know any better! I’m not sure where I was going with that beginning though, except to say that, I would worry if I sold my house and got out of the market that it would just keep going up. I’m not sure why the market is going up, but imagine if you lived in California in the 90’s and figured you’d buy again when the prices dropped.

Nonetheless no one wins the comparison trap, and thankfully I never worry too much about my house: I know I will never win any interior decorating awards, and it is easier just to know that if you invite someone over it is likely their house is nicer, but perhaps my cooking is better. My cats are probably cuter too But really, how better to be a friend that let your friends feel better about their own houses? At least, this is what I tell myself.

Louie’s office: he set up a place on top of the filing cabinet for the cats to hang out. This is  a room that is very functional and useful but ugly: wood paneling and a mini-blind! The room also doesn’t have good heating and cooling because it was an additional at one time, so he sweats in the summer and runs a space heater in the winter (it gets very toasty and warm!). It overlooks the backyard and gets lots of natural light though, and he has all of his computer equipment set up and works from home many hours a day.

After Louie finishes his doctorate we have some longer term house goals. This is looking like the end of Summer 2022. It was supposed to be earlier, but COVID and all the online teaching work has pushed it back. But the longer term goal is to remodel the garage in the back yard into a studio/guest house. We’re thinking pull out couch, full bath, and then I can mostly use it for my teaching, but when we have guests they can stay there as well. It seems far away, but I’ll still have a good 20 years left of my teaching career so that seems well worth it, even if it takes a few more years. I think once we start the project, if we really work at it, we can get it done in a summer. So maybe that means 2023 is garage summer, but gosh that seems far away! Maybe we’ll be able to start working on it a bit this summer, at least the big task of clearing it out.

Truly clutter is still our biggest issue. Both Louie and I are clutter people, in different ways, and while neither of us wants to be minimalists, we do have too many random things. I’m also realizing we probably just need two or three big bookcases to replace a few shorter ones and that could help a bit as well. (If you are local and getting rid of a large bookcase, let me know, as I’m not quite ready to look in the marketplace yet.)

In any case, I think that’s enough randomness today! I had grand “week in the life” plans for this blog post, but then I started overanalyzing my house, and feeling bad about it. I think I’ll do a little cleaning and tidying now and then I’ll read