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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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!

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

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:

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.

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

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?)…

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

One of the things that I didn’t really mention on the blog was that I moved over the summer. One of these days my life will be more settled and I’ll maybe even have a house that I live in, but today is not that day.

I was thinking back as to how many different places I’ve lived in since moving away from my childhood home to college.  Quite a few really—the dorm, my first apartment in Cleveland, basically another two apartments there, my place in Charlotte, back to Cleveland (3 different places) and now 3 different places here.  I’ve become an expert on moving really, and on packing and unpacking.  (Let’s see, that makes 11 places I’ve lived as an adult, and 3 before. Not counting long summer festivals! How many of you have lived in at least 14 different places for at least 9 months each?

Well, I lied. I’m hardly an expert on unpacking. Or any of those things. I just know I do it, and it is always a big pain! One thing that helped was that we had been saving all the boxes in the basement, so I didn’t have to stress over finding quality boxes. Another pro tip: you can just BUY moving boxes to begin with and then reuse them over and over. If you are a checklist type of person, there’s a neat little checklist from Real Simple that could be helpful.

My latest move was a bit of a challenge due to a timing constraint. We had to be out of the old place by a certain date, but weren’t guaranteed the keys for the new place until… the same date. It turned out we were able to get the keys the night before and drop off a few things, but it was a stressful time. I wasn’t sure if we needed to rent a storage place or if we’d need to park a truck somewhere overnight. In the end, the old landlord was super cool and we ended up hiring movers to load up, and then there was a brief window of time to frantically clean before the final walk through.

Other things I’ve learned about moving. The older you get, the less likely you want to do the move yourself. It isn’t that bad to hire movers. I’ve done moves all by myself in my car, I’ve rented a truck  and driven it (never again), I’ve rented a truck and hired movers, and this time, I rented movers and a truck. It was definitely the easiest and lowest stress option. It was a bit more expensive, and the stress was hoping that they would finish up in the amount of time/money I thought it would be, but it was a safe move and nothing got broken. And my friends do enough for me: I can’t ask them to help me move anymore, and I’m not willing to do it for them! Also by the time you pay for pizza and beer for everybody, it’s really only a little move to just have somebody else do it for you. (So yeah, that means I don’t help friends move either, sorry I’m not sorry, even though I work out 😉 )

I suppose the final suggestion to make moving easier would be to stop doing it so much, settle down, buy a house, that kind of thing. But, as I say, life’s an adventure, and moving is part of that. Getting to live in different neighborhoods and experience different places is part of the fun!