Cat, Performing

Keep Swimming

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I haven’t been writing here in awhile, but thought I’d take a little time to catch you up. There’s a bit of guilt as I still need to finish telling you about my trip to Morocco, so I feel like, oh, if I’m going to blog I should be doing that, but you know what they say about shoulds.

Life! It’s so stressful, especially with all of the horrible things being perpetrated by the government. And I’m partway through my taxes (most of the way) and will have to send money, and for what, to bomb schools of children in other countries and to buy warehouses for concentration camps. It’s nauseating. And worrying about gas shortages and what will happen next. I know there’s no point in worrying, but knowing and doing…

In my own life, my schedule for the next few weeks is a little too much. This is my fault, for overscheduling myself…I took on a few too many gigs, and I know exactly which ones I should have said no to, but it’s too late now. Hopefully I can remember this for the future. I’ve also been thinking about NOT taking any new students this summer or fall and letting my schedule get a little more open, so that when I need to reschedule for a rehearsal there is somewhere to move people without giving away my entire weekend and working for 6 weeks straight.

I did have a nice few weeks of “spring break”–one easier week when Wash U was off but I was still teaching at home, and then an even easier week not teaching most of my home students. It was lovely to have some evenings free early, though I had taken on a fair number of gigs.

Things I’ve played recently or am playing soon: an anime concert with screens, an all baroque concert, an all Bach Concert, two concerts with a group that plays a lot of baroque music, Swan Lake, a quartet pop concert, a short quartet concert, a candlelight concert, and coming up soon: a full week of Holy week services. That’s about a months work of stuff I’m talking about.

Oh, and recently I had the worst thing happen, a musician’s nightmare. I was getting ready for a 10 am rehearsal and at 9 am I got a phone call asking, was I coming to rehearsal? I was like, yes, isn’t it at 10 am? No! The rehearsal started at 9 and I had failed to update my calendar. I ran out the door and arrived 20 minutes late. The conductor was very understanding and it was okay, but I was so embarrassed!

Louie and I have managed to get out for a couple of hikes though, and then weather has been…decent. Up and down like crazy, but not too rainy. We have a 5 day Inn to Inn type of walk in Japan coming up in May, and we want to be ready. I’ve also been walking and exercising regularly, so hopefully this will be a fun thing and not a slog! We’ve got a few concerts we are attending this weekend as well, so it’s not all work. There are 5 weeks left (counting this week) at the college and then it’s SUMMER there…

We had an evening of snacks and wine on the front porch and opened up the window so the cats could visit.

How’s your spring going? Are you worried this is like the pre-pandemic times and everything is about to get completely destroyed? Are you busier than ever or are you managing to keep things under control?

Random thoughts

In like a lion

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It was SLEETING when I left my gig last night! Truly March comes in like a lion, and hopefully out like a lamb. Let this apply to world events as well, please.

I know you are eagerly awaiting the remainder of the story of my Morocco trip, and I plan to finish another post this week, if not two. It’s been a crazy two weeks: I was playing Phantom of the Opera at the Fox Theater, which adds 8 shows a week to my schedule (in addition to the rehearsals at the start), so my life has been, shall we say, a bit full. But we finished last night, and it was a fun experience, and I’d like to say that this week is all full of free time to relax and catch up on everything, but no, I have two concerts this week also. But I have more evenings free, so life will return as normal.

The weather has been typically insane here: one day was like late spring, highs over 70. And then sleeting last night, as I mentioned. It is so important to check the weather before leaving the house, and pack a jacket just in case, probably.

I feel like we all spent a lot of time distracting ourselves from the horrors that the current president is inflicting on the world. It’s hard.

Morocco Uncovered, Travel

Day 10 of Morocco Uncovered: Watch your step!

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Let’s continue the recap of my trip: Morocco Uncovered (with Intrepid). It’s been a minute!

I took this trip in December/January. For previous posts (I recommend you at least skim them!) look at the following.

Day 10: I was still in Bou Tharer in the M’Goun Valley. Today we would head off to the next stop, Ait Benhadou.

Breakfast was in the dining room instead of the cave room. But! Barb from the trip read that I hadn’t gotten any pictures of the cave room and shared some with me. Can you tell why it was called the cave room?

I didn’t make a note of what breakfast was, but my memory says bread and jams with juice, as well as hard boiled eggs and yogurt. Then back to the room to finish any last minute packing and get ready to Get in the Van!

We started down the road and after driving a few miles, one of the people suddenly realized she had forgotten to return her room key! Since these were real keys, it was important that the hotel get it back. Aman and the driver flagged down a cab driver going the other way from us and asked him to take it to the hotel. We were all tickled by this, but it made sense: it was a road that only went back and forth so the driver would be going right by it. I believe then Aman called the hotel to tell them to expect the key delivery.

We did a cafe and bathroom stop after an hour or so. I really needed that break, too much coffee or something. They had a lot of rose products for sale as it was a local specialty.

Our next stop was Kabash Amerdil to visit an Amazigh nomad museum. We had a guided tour and it was a really interesting place.

This cat didn’t move while we were there–it must have been used to sleeping through a lot of commotion.

There were beautiful gardens with roses and grapes and other plants.

I enjoyed seeing the old phonograph as well as many other artifacts. Isn’t it funny that a phonograph is an artifact? Is it?

There were a lot of tiny doors and staircases as well. They told us that was to keep out invaders: if they had to duck going through a door it was harder to attack right away.

It was a lovely sunny day as you can see, and we were surrounded by beautiful mountains. It was a bit windy though.

Our next stop was a restaurant in Ouarzazate, called the city of movies, because so many movies are made there. If you have seen a movie with a desert, it was likely made in Ouarzazate. I would have loved to have spent more time there, but we just went to the restaurant. It was in a square, but no time for exploring or shopping.

The food was good: I had a goat cheese appetizer (fried) and an Argentinian meat wrap. After lunch we drove by Atlas Studios and other places where films were made. We also saw the world’s largest solar city, a shiny thing in the distance.

Solar power city/station in the background
Movie Studio

We made it to Ait ben hadou in the afternoon. There it was very cold and windy! We visited the rug collective first and learned how rugs were made. It was quite funny as the guide (a woman!) told us that three of the women working there were named Fatima, so we met Fatima 1, Fatima 2, and Fatima 3. The guide also kept referring to the place as a queendom. Of course they wanted us to buy rugs, but that wasn’t in my budget/suitcase space.

The old city was across the river from the rug collective and that’s where we headed next. We walked through the village and headed up towards the top.

We saw the special art they make there, which is like invisible ink in a way, as it is heated by a flame to bring out the colors. I did buy one print.

The artist!
What a view!
Selfie from the top!

On the way back down, I must have been looking around too much and I messed up my foot down a stair and fell and rolled my left ankle…it hurt like the dickens and I had to sit for awhile and let the nausea pass. Everybody was really nice about it and helped me out. I was a little worried it would be too swollen to enjoy the rest of the tour, but after waiting a few minutes it didn’t seem too awful, so I was able to slowly make my way down to the bottom of the village.

We all had tea and cookies at another women’s collective. While we had a decent amount of mint tea on the trip, I have to say that I actually thought we would have even more than we did, and also that it wasn’t as sweet as I was led to believe. This is probably because I grew up in the south (in the US) where sweet tea is a way of life and am accustomed to tea so sweet it hurts your teeth to drink it. But I enjoyed sitting and drinking some tea and letting my ankle rest.

Our last stop for the night was our hotel, which was nearby, but not walking distance really. In fact, Aman warned us to be careful if we went out walking as there were sometimes packs of wild dogs. NICE.

The hotel was a very nice, old building, and my room was large. I had a balcony but the pigeons seemed to have taken it over. It was cold outside anyway. The room had good heating however.

My room
Part of the lobby

I took a few pictures before dinner as I had some time to explore the hotel. There was a nice looking pool but of course it was too cold to swim.

We had the coldest dinner ever! The heaters in the dining room weren’t working properly so they brought over a few space heaters, which helped a bit. We all shared food: soup, meatballs, chicken and vegetable tagine. There were also little noodles that looked good but then seemed to have rose water flavoring, which I really don’t care for though I know others love it. Dessert was fruit, bananas, and apples. Interesting fact: the bananas in Morocco are a smaller breed than those in the US.

I went to bed early, after dinner, and enjoyed reading before falling asleep.

Random thoughts, Teaching

Admin Work

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One thing that’s sporadically time consuming as a freelancer/teacher, is admin work. This week has had a lot as I’m in the process of signing students up for the Music Club Federation Festival, as well as working out some rescheduling for February, updating invoices due to snow days/festival registration, and more. It varies from week to week: some weeks there is hardly any and other weeks it can be a few hours (Gah!).

I try to keep organized by keeping a running “to do list” on my phone, as well as having a calendar of monthly tasks for the home studio. I have two to do lists in the reminders app on my phone, labeled “work” and “personal”, which works well enough. If something comes up in a lesson or pops into my head at a time I can’t deal with it right away, I add it to that to-do list. And then when I have more time I try to do the task. Some weeks I get everything done, other weeks I get nothing done. I can also add deadlines through the reminders app, and that is good when a task is particularly time sensitive.

This week I’ve been clearing out a bunch of lingering tasks. The rest of the month is going to be BUSY so I don’t want to have too many things hanging over my head. There are usually a limited number of times that I want to do admin: a few mornings a week I like to spend 30 to 60 minutes, or less, and that counts personal admin as well as business admin. This doesn’t count short emails and texts, that I will respond to as soon as I can, or doing basic things like attendance.

This probably seems very boring to read about, but in case you are another teacher, maybe it’s not. I probably spend an average of 1-2 hours a week doing admin tasks, so it’s not very much but also not nothing. Using an automated lesson system (My Music Staff) helps tremendously, and using an automated system for keeping track of taxes and tax deductions does as well. Email is so much easier than phone calls used to be, and texting too. I think back to when I was younger and email wasn’t as popular for contacting parents, and when I needed to reschedule lessons I literally had to call them, one by one. So thankfully it’s a bit easier now…but still annoying.

I am excited to continue writing about my Morocco Trip, but I just haven’t had enough time to sit down and do the next post. I have selected the photos, so I’m making progress–don’t worry: it’s coming!

We have a weekend getaway this weekend (part of the busy-ness, not the main part) which I am looking forward to. We are going to visit Phoenix and my family there, and I can’t wait to see them and perhaps equally, have some nicer, warmer weather. They don’t even have snow on the ground! (We are so tired of the snow here).

I can’t believe it’s February already, but I was also thinking how less than a month ago I was still in Morocco, and that seems like a dream. How times flies as we get older!

Random thoughts

Groundhog Day

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I’m taking a little break from telling you about my Morocco trip to telling you about life now. It’s been COLD and the good thing is that today gets above freezing so more of this snow should melt. Snow: it’s great at first and then it is annoying and you just want to wear normal shoes.

We got about 8 inches of snow last weekend, and it was a “snow day weekend” where everything was canceled, and it was pretty nice to just hang out at home. I didn’t even leave the house for 3 days, and that literally means, didn’t step outside. Louie took a walk over to Forest Park and took some nice pictures, but I didn’t want to get cold and wet.

The front yard, taken from upstairs. Louie was a champion and shoveled it all. Well, the walks.
Art Hill at Forest Park, where people go sledding.

It’s another busy teaching semester: at first when I was setting up my college students I thought I was at a lower number of hours than last semester, and was fairly happy about that as I have too many students, and then in the last two days of drop/add period I got 3 more hour long students and now I’m actually higher than last semester by 30 minutes with one more student. I got everybody scheduled fairly well, but my Thursday starts very early…but we are already 3 weeks in so only 11-12 weeks left to go (every student is supposed to get 14 lessons, so some have gotten 3 and others only 2).

Vegetable Thali dish at Himalayan Yeti. SO MUCH FOOD.
Coming out of Jazz St Louis the other night, what a pretty scene!

There’s been some time for fun: we’ve done a few Jazz Stl shows, we saw a hilarious play at Upstream Theater. We’ve eaten some dinners out just the two of us and also with friends. We did a jazz brunch with a friend yesterday, and we’ve watched a bunch of good TV shows. I’ve spent some time making decisions on our Japan trip in May, and planning some other trips further down the pipeline.

And some performing too: last weekend a concert got canceled but we managed to schedule the entire chorale and orchestra to yesterday! That meant yesterday was a double concert, one with the Metropolitan Orchestra of St Louis, which was especially fun as a student of mine got to play with us too. And then the American Kantorei concert, all Bach Cantatas. Louie and I ended the night hanging out in front of the fireplace chatting.

The cats have been keeping warm the best way they know how: by sitting directly on top of the radiators. It’s adorable.

Note: It’s hard to pretend like life is normal as our country is run by a fascist government. And even worse, is knowing that many people in the country don’t see it, or WORSE, see it and agree that it is great. Every day brings new horrors in the news, children being kept in detention centers, the Epstein files and seeing that apparently almost everybody in the current admin/regime is a sexual predator, the government shutting down and the democrats being more concerned about sending money to Israel who is committing a genocide, the threat of nuclear war with Iran and other countries, the president stealing money from Venezuela and trying to loot the treasury even more, taking money from all the businesses, foreign countries, etc. And seeing people being gassed in the street, murdered in the street by ICE and by police, every day. Journalists and comedians being arrested and sued for exercising their free speech. I could go on for a long time.

I find it’s hard to cope. What do we do? We just keep on keeping on, right? And trying to find joy in our lives amongst the pain and suffering.

Morocco Uncovered, Travel

Morocco Uncovered Day 9: Hiking and more Oranges

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Let’s continue the recap of my trip: Morocco Uncovered (with Intrepid). I took this trip in December/January. For previous posts (I recommend you at least skim them!) look at the following.

Day 9: I woke up and got ready for the morning’s activity, which was a hike through the valley. Breakfast was in the “cave room” in the hotel, which I forgot to get a picture of. We had Moroccan doughnuts with various jams, yogurt, fresh squeezed orange juice, coffee, and maybe hard boiled eggs?

We would not be riding on the van at all today, which was very exciting to know…the van is fine, but we had spent a lot of time in it over the previous two days, to and from the desert.

We met our guide (who also worked at the hotel, everybody here seemed to have multiple roles) and headed out through the village into the mountains.

No shortage of doors in this village either.
We got to see some goats! And the man there was our guide, just an fyi.
I didn’t take this photo or I wouldn’t have been it in, haha.

The mountains reminded me of Utah, particularly Capitol Reef Park. Our hike was pretty easy, but I watched my feet. I just wore sneakers, since I had decided not to pack hiking shoes for one hike, and found it was fine. The dirt would stain shoes a bit, so if you are taking this same trip, keep that in mind.

We walked through the valley, and then got to a river with a bridge over it…the river was flowing pretty well but the bridge was just a log.

It was a little scary, but we all managed to cross without incident. Check out this video to see my crossing.

After that we headed up to the top of a mountain to view the village from above. We could see snow covered mountains in the distance.

Snow covered mountains, do you see them?

Then we walked back down along the river and finally back to our gite.

The Amazigh Flag

We had a short amount of time to clean up and then all met for lunch on the roof terrace. We ate berber omelets, cooked salads, chicken skewers and fries.

The afternoon was free for us to do what we wanted, but there wasn’t much to do. I read in the sun and took a short walk around the village, but I didn’t enjoy the walk because some kids started following me and yelling out, madam, madam and I wanted to ignore them (sorry kids) but it was annoying. It was a nice afternoon though, and the weather was beautiful.

I also explored the gite and took photos.

This was the view of the restaurant from a terrace I found in the main part of the hotel.
View of the main part of the guesthouse from the terrace of the restaurant.

We met in the late afternoon for henna tattoos: a young woman drew on my hand and we had more tea and snacks like the day before.

Dinner was soup and chicken couscous, with fruit for dessert: sliced oranges and pomegranates. The food here was very good.

And that was the end of the day. I went back to the room to organize my things since we would be leaving the next day, and I read after that. I finished reading the Correspondent, which was a really good book. The ending was very sad and I pretty much ugly cried through it for 20-30 minutes. I started worrying at one point that my neighbors would hear me and think something was horribly wrong, haha.

thoughts about violin, teaching, running, life.