All posts by hannahviolin

I am a violinist. I also enjoy running, working out, reading, and hanging with my friends and cat.

This post has a cat picture but it’s not my cat

You guys know I love twitter, right? (Come follow me there, @hannahviolin)…

Anyway, I played a couple of weddings on Saturday, of course.

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The first was a Catholic mass at St Francis Xavier College Church. What a beautiful church!

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The second was a wedding and cocktail hour at the World’s Fair Pavilion in Forest Park.

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We were told by the wedding coordinator that Claire McCaskill (Senator) was in attendance. I didn’t see her, but later that night she tweeted some pictures, so I tweeted at her that I had played at the cocktail hour (and that the wedding and weather were GORGEOUS—seriously, it was the most perfect weather for an outdoor event—) and she sent me a direct message saying…

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She doesn’t follow me on twitter so I couldn’t respond privately, but I was so touched!

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My fingers at the end of the day…

I’ll leave you with an adorable cat picture courtesy of my sister Leslie. We were chatting on the phone when this happened at her house.

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Fast Food is probably worse than Yogurt but more delicious

Important facts about Hannah: I have a great love of Taco Bell. I have loved eating at Taco Bell ever since Taco Bell was invented, or at least until the early 90’s. That being said, I do occasionally (very occasionally, since it’s generally not healthy and I also prefer to spend my dollars at local restaurants) partake in other fast foods.

That brings us to my latest sponsored post—I know I just had one for yogurt (and seriously, go click on that coupon, go get some discount yogurt!) but I was asked to try the new Wendy’s Flatbread Chicken Sandwich, make a video, and tell you how YOU can make a video to have a chance to win Wendy’s #6secondsflat sweepstakes aka become famous and win $6,000.

I hate making videos, so mine isn’t very good, but here it is anyway. Enjoy the heavy breathing in the background. Also it is 11 seconds long. Don’t hate me. I tried the Asiago Ranch flatbread (it has bacon!) and it was pretty tasty.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk2qbmVxxXk&feature=youtu.be

(Wendy’s probably hates me for mentioning Taco Bell so much in the first paragraph of this post, but honestly, I have to be true to myself and my readers, right? I’ve never been one to worry much about SEO and I’m not going to start when I don’t think it fits the needs of my blog.)

I was also asked to share a story about my life that relates to this post. (I’m telling you all the secrets…)

On family trips when I was a child, we would have the primary choices of Wendy’s or McDonald’s for food. My sister Leslie was a picky eater and hated hamburgers, so after many years of throwing fits, occasionally being made to wait in the car while we ate, and many, many tears, my parents finally decided she would be allowed to order the more expensive McNuggets. This was long before Wendy’s offered a variety of foods on the 99 cent value menu, including some chicken options. I was a little bitter about this, because while I would eat my cheeseburger and be fine with that, I would have much preferred chicken nuggets. Lesson learned: throw more fits, or be born later in the birth order. Next time!

When we went to Wendy’s, we would often get Frostys and then we would either dip french fries into them, or get a bunch of (free) packages of saltine crackers and dip THOSE into the chocolate Frostys. (Back then there was only one flavor.) I don’t recall if Leslie would partake in this but my brother Jesse and I definitely did. (This was during the pre-Carrie years, so that’s why I’m not mentioning her…not because I don’t like her.)

Anyway, once we discovered Taco Bell we would generally just eat there as it was somewhere Leslie would happily eat, but before that I have many happy memories of having meals of cheeseburgers, frostys with crackers, and a sobbing younger sister, without me even having to do anything to torture her.

After Carrie was born, it turned out that she didn’t like Taco Bell (I know, what??), so the family was torn apart again, and would often try to find two fast food restaurants side by side so that we could all be somewhat happy. This once turned into Leslie having to eat her Taco Bell outside because a hamburger place wouldn’t allow her to bring it in to join the rest of her family enjoying burgers and fries.

I’d recommend the Flatbread sandwich overall: it was tasty, it had crunchy bacon, and the flavor was good. The other flavor, smoked honey mustard, is lower in calories (370) and is probably pretty tasty too, so if you are on the road and need a quick fix, give one a try: for a limited time only!

Thanks to Wendy’s for sponsoring this post and allowing me to continue to mainly blog about my cat and how I’m not running.

Why blog

Why do I blog?

It’s my creative outlet. I enjoy writing about my life, and I enjoy sharing it with you people. I don’t really have a focus to my blog, other than it’s about stuff that interests me. 

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To answer a question from one of my twitter followers: yes, I basically wrote a yogurt commercial. Why? Well…I can use the extra cash. Not going to lie about that. I have this little piece of the internet that is mine and why not get a little money to at least cover costs (there are actually costs!). Besides, as much as I love being a freelance violinist and teacher, it doesn’t pay so much.  So I’m willing to sell out a little. The other reason I did it: I actually really like yogurt. I’m cool with telling you guys that hey, there’s a new product and here’s a coupon, and we’re all adults here, and tomorrow I’ll just be posting a ton of cat pictures, you know? I’m not one of those bloggers who will do anything for a free whatever, but I’m also not one of those bloggers who has super high moral (or high and mighty) standards and won’t ever do anything on the blog for payment. And yes, there will be more “commercials” in the future, but I promise you I will more than balance them out with posts about nothing, about my cat, about music, and maybe even about working out or running! I appreciate you all reading, and hope you continue to do so.

This is not a paid advertisement: I really like these crackers. They are especially tasty with chicken salad or tuna salad. Plus they put the tune “Some Enchanted Evening” in my head which is an added bonus.

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If you have some free time, you should go see pictures of a three legged kitten wearing a bunch of tiny hats. It’s pretty much, minus pizza, all my favorite things added up together.

Thursday Again??

I feel like I just had a weekend, and now we are at the cusp of another one. It doesn’t help that I don’t necessarily work on Fridays (that is, I don’t teach on Fridays but if a job comes up, I take it) but I generally work on Saturdays. That means my weekend is Friday and Sunday, unless I have work, and then who knows. In reality, aren’t we all still recovering from Labor Day?

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If you didn’t notice, I didn’t run that mud race last weekend. I decided I didn’t want to get up early to do something by myself, and I wasn’t ready anyway. I’ve been “running” more lately, but it’s really hard, and man, do I really prefer walking anyway. I don’t know what I want out of fitness, or life for that matter, but I’m just doing what I feel like right now, and it’ll all sort itself out.

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I have that kind of exhausted feeling that comes with trying to do lots of different things. I’ve been hanging out friends, new and old, teaching lots of new students (new and old also!), playing lots of chamber music, and trying to keep up with all the requisite emails and phone calls that go along with being self-employed. I feel like I’m mostly dropping the ball on getting things done in a timely manner, but I finally feel like I have a handle on things enough to feel like they WILL get done, sooner or later. My current priority needs to be practicing for an upcoming sub list audition for the symphony here (just over a month) but I keep getting distracting by a thousand other things (this here blog too, but that’s just ten minutes or less a day).

My friend April brought me a fun little gift last night. I posted this video on Instagram, so I apologize for the repeat if you’ve seen it. Nothing like a fat bird to make everybody feel welcome, right?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14JbuRZJMro

To think like a child

I was having lunch with a fellow music teacher and we got on the subject of what makes somebody good with kids. To be a good teacher, it really helps to be good with kids. Being a good violinist is basically unimportant, because if the student doesn’t see you as a real person, or if they don’t think you are being genuine, or don’t understand them, they won’t pay attention to you or what you are trying to teach them.

I think I’m good with kids because I remember how it felt to BE a child. It’s easy to relate to people when you understand where they are coming from, and weren’t we all children once? I hadn’t really given it a lot of thought, but it occurred to me during our talk that many adults have forgotten how it felt to be a child, a preteen, or a teenager. I guess one of my special skills is remembering my emotions from earlier in life (could be related to my violin playing, as I rely on my emotions to inspire my playing…) and that helps me relate.

“I am mentally preparing myself for the five-year-old mind. I want to come down to their physical limitations and up to their sense of wonder and awe.”—Shinichi Suzuki

Sometimes I feel like I have a much harder time relating to the adults. Maybe it’s because I still feel like a child so often! There’s that famous quote from the bible:

When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. 1 Corinthians 13:11

Why should we put away childish things? In my living room I have the complete Harry Potter series, a Lord of the Ring Pez Dispenser collection, stuffed animals, a couple of tiny sombreros, and a cowbell, for starters. I also have boring adult things like wedding contracts, various legal forms, my checkbook and bill paying materials…but I’d say the childlike items are far more fun. When new kids come in and look around, I like for them to see that I am not so serious about things. Once you relate to the student, then you can convince them to listen to you, to trust you, and to play those 4 notes over and over and over.

I do have a problem though: I want my students to practice scales, but I recall that, as a child, I refused to practice scales. I pretended I did, I blatantly lied to my teachers about whether or not I had practiced them, but I didn’t practice them. But I DID practice them in college, and now I practice scales quite a bit, and I KNOW they are important and good for us, and should be practiced. But I have a hard time convincing my students of this. Perhaps because I remember how much I hated doing it when I was younger. So there’s a flaw here in my thinking…but I try to learn from my students too, in the hopes that I can give them my strengths and not my weaknesses.

 

 

September is a busy month

I don’t know if you’ve picked up on this fact, but I play for a lot of weddings. If I’m lucky, I have more than one each weekend.

Friday night was at Chaumette Winery in St Genevieve.

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We rode the golf cart from there (parking) up to the house in the background. It was a little frightening: riding on the back of the golf cart, holding onto my violin, stand, my friend’s stand, and the bag of music, and it was quite uphill. Luckily I work out!

I should add that Siri was no help in getting us there. At the last turn, she proudly announced we had arrived. We had not, but luckily the winery had signage. I guess they want people to find it.

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It was a pretty nice night—not too hot, for once.

Saturday morning Jen asked me to go to the Tower Grove Farmer’s Market. Neither of us had ever been and thought it seemed like something we SHOULD do because people always rave about it.

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Amazing toasted cheese sandwich. I say toasted because that is what they called it.

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And why yes, I did purchase a purple vegetable.

Saturday’s wedding was at the Japanese Garden at the Botanical Gardens. It was very hot, and I ended up getting to the site before the previous wedding had finished, which was pretty funny. We listened to the earlier quartet play some nice recessional music. We also ended up having a short conversation with some very early guests for the next wedding—we always feel bad when people think we know the bride and groom, or perhaps even, know what we are going to play before we open up the music bags. We feel even worse when the guests tell us they couldn’t find a bathroom for the little girl so she just went “country style”. Somewhere—on the carefully landscaped Botanical Gardens. I’m really good at smiling and nodding!

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That’s the earlier quartet, still playing. Yes, we all knew each other.

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I feel like every time I play with the Rosewood Ensemble we play “Only Time” and every time I play with Serenade St Louis we play “Yellow.” I have a feeling demo recording are responsible.

Saturday night dinner at a new (to me) Vietnamese place:

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Sunday afternoon I went to the Cardinals Game. I’m not actually a Cardinals fan—I’m a secret Braves fan—that is, I follow the Braves, but only out of the corner of my eye. I find if I start to root for them everything goes wrong and I just end up really disappointed, so I try not to follow or watch. I made the mistake of checking the standings before I went to the game to determine if I could root for the Cardinals without feeling bad, and decided that I could. Probably that will be a mistake.

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Nice seats! And what’s a ball game without ballpark nachos?

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Anyway, since this blog post is turning into a bit of a photo dump rather than anything with actual content (content, what’s that? Something overrated, like SEO, right?)…

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This is now in my kitchen. You may or may not have noticed that I have a rather dry sense of humor.