Spring Break isn’t really a thing that adults have, but I sort of have one. This coming week the college is off and the following week the before-school school is off and so I get some days off (with some finagling of my private students and careful guardianship of my days and having to say no to things.) Anyway, so I’m really looking forward to having some downtime and doing a little trip which I’ll tell you about later.

We’ve been pretty busy here, though not overwhelming. I was going to take a local audition here but it got canceled so I’ve been a little lazy with practicing outside of being ready for various gigs (one of which takes up quite a bit of today.) I had been having some buzzing on my violin since…all winter?…and I found a time to take it in. It turns out there was a small crack and then some open seams, and at one point my luthier sent this picture.

But I have it back now and it is sounding much better!

I say we are busy, but it’s really just normal stuff lately. We did see a concert last Sunday night as part of the Great Artists Series at Wash U–Tafelmusik, which was really terrific. I have to say, the GAS has been pretty intense this year: 5 concerts in 3 months I think. But it’s all been really high quality and terrific stuff and I’m glad we are subscribers.

Friday night we went out to dinner at Lily’s, our favorite family owned mexican restaurant, and inadvertently just beat the rush: evidently they’ve been swamped all month due to a social media post. Which is great for them but less great for us, haha. After that we needed to watch a movie for the film club we belong to, so we watched All of Us Strangers, which was very thought provoking though we both had trouble keeping our eyes open.

Yesterday we went out for a late morning walk and ended up deciding to get brunch at Winslow’s which is a nice 30 minute walk from here. I had a gig after that downtown at the Hyatt, and snapped this nice picture of the Arch.

It’s just on the other side of the highway.

After the gig we went to see the Arianna String Quartet play with the Kyo-Shin-An Arts at the Touhill Theater at UMSL. I really enjoyed the concert! We came home and watched an episode of Mr. and Mrs. Smith (which we started a few nights ago, it is not great, and might actually be terrible, but it’s entertaining enough) and then went to bed early to prepare for the time change, haha.

My neighbors’ tree looks so pretty out the window of my teaching studio.

I’m deep in planning mode right now, trying to work out the summer plans. We have a big trip planned in the late summer and a small trip in May. We plan to visit my sister’s family in Chautauqua at some point, and I have some interesting work things that I’ll find out about for sure next week. I don’t know if it seems early or late for you at this point: do you have your summer travel plans set or does it seem way too early? I find people are in one mind or the other, but I got asked to play a concert in February 2025 the other day, so it’s just how my schedule operates. This job requires advance planning and so many details!

Miles has been using this one part of the cat tree that he never did before. It’s always exciting when they do something new! I wonder how they decide these things. Wouldn’t it be amazing to be a cat for a day, or an hour, just to learn how they think?