All posts by hannahviolin

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

Back to School

August 12, 2012 hannahviolin

Last week was my first week back to school. People get confused sometimes when I say I teach at a school. To clarify: it’s a music school, not a full day school. We offer private lessons, group and studio classes, theory classes, and have lots of recitals and performance opportunities. It’s a great place to teach, and we started back last week.

People always ask how many students I have. Honestly, I never really know. It’s probably about 25 to 30, but I’d have to really sit down and count. And then by the time I finished counting I probably would have either gotten a new student or one would have dropped, and then I’d probably mess up and have to start all over. I teach five days a week, though I’m thinking about cutting back to four days to give myself more time to gig…but I’m not turning much down. We’ll see how this year goes.

I had two weddings yesterday. As I was driving to the first church, I realized I had played there before. I guess that means I’ve been living here for awhile—I’m getting to the point where I know the various venues and really starting to know my way around town. Here’s a picture from inside the first church:

The second gig was at the Randall Art Gallery, which is a pretty cool venue. I briefly looked into it for our wedding, actually. We were playing right near the cakes, so I made this fancy instagram collage.

The white ended up being a bit washed out, but I had to take these pictures, collage them, and instagram them, all during the ceremony—I did it after we finished the processional and before the recessional. (Yes, we were in the back!)

Last night we went with Melissa and Steve to the Shaved Duck. They hadn’t been so we had been trying to come up with a good time to go for awhile. We had to wait awhile for our table, but it was pleasant outside and well worth the wait. We also ran into an adult student of mine and his wife (St Louis is a great example of the song "It’s a Small World After All"). We had the nerdiest conversation I’d been part of in awhile. Topics included: World of Warcraft, Hitchhiker’s Guide, Rule 43 and Godwin’s Rule, various youtube videos, and then a long time spent talking about our cats and their strange behaviors. I love hanging out with those guys!

I’m about to go for a run, and then later today my friend Vanessa and her fiancé Russell are coming to town and staying with us tonight. I haven’t seen her since early July, so I’m really looking forward to it! I’m sure since they are engaged now they’ll be acting more smug and whatnot like most people do 🙂

Giveaways

TGIF and Giveaway winner

August 10, 2012 hannahviolin

People who work in "regular" jobs are always excited about Fridays. I enjoy them too, because occasionally I’ll have a weekend free. I like Mondays too though, because that’s a really light work day. But I do work tomorrow, as well as later today, so it’s a little less exciting.

First off: the winner of a free copy of Running of the Bride from my giveaway:

Comment #7 was Mandy! Mandy, please email me your address (hannahviolin at gmail.com) as you didn’t leave an email with your comment. Everybody else, thanks for entering. I would recommend reading the book anyway :) And there will be more free books and other stuff in the future!

I’m hungry and sweaty right now. I ran about 4 miles this morning and it was amazing! The weather was perfect, somehow, just around 70 degrees. I don’t know if we are in a time warp and it’s actually November, but I’m happy with it. If only the weather would stay this way…anyway, after my run I had to do some errands and now I’m blogging, and I realized that I smell and should really take a shower. I’ll get right on that.

My mom posted this picture on facebook: Chris and I on moving day.

She is the master of taking pictures at the greatest, most attractive times! Then again, I’m posting it here, aren’t I. Maybe I should reexamine my life?

Last but not least. Did you guys see this? It’s been floating around facebook.

What are your plans for the weekend? I’m looking forward to dinner at the Shaved Duck and a nice long run. You?

Random thoughts

Three Things Thursday

August 9, 2012 hannahviolin 2 Comments

First off, if you haven’t entered my giveaway to win a free copy of Running of the Bride, you should! You can have up to three chances to win, and each requires a new comment, just fyi.

Oh crap, that’s already one thing. Is this the right blog meme? I think I’ve used these things incorrectly in the past. Quickly! I’d better post a cat picture!

Okay, WHEW, got that out of the way.

Second thing: Body image. Who has body image problems? I was invited by my (favorite) photographer Sarah Crowder to participate in a photo shoot yesterday for a magazine article about the upcoming Mo Cowbell Half Marathon. I was happy to do it, and excited to participate. But then I got there, and naturally the other girls were like six inches shorter and way skinnier, and I felt super awkward and uncomfortable. In fact the guys, except one, were also shorter and skinnier. I don’t know why I let that sort of thing bother me, but I did. Plus I figured everybody else was a faster and better runner, so it wasn’t just body image, it was feeling inadequate as a runner. Ugh. I hate feeling like that. And it was still fun, but I just felt out of my league. Hopefully some of my shots turned out okay…I know that Sarah will have done a great job. I guess I’m also really hoping to be in the magazine (that would be SO cool) but worried that the others were more photogenic and well…thinner. Ugh.

I may not be America’s Next Top Model.

Third thing: Music. When I’m driving, I often like to listen to NPR but lately I just can’t take it anymore (politics). When that happens I switch to a CD (yeah, my car is old school with the CD’s…). I usually listen to the same CD over and over for weeks. I just moved on from a few weeks of Vadim Repim playing the Prokofiev Sonatas to a recording of David Oistrakh playing both Prokofiev Concertos. But yesterday I was SO angry and impatient with everything, and then I was the same in the car this morning, and it occurred to me that the music I was listening to might be making me angry. I switched to the Brahms Sonatas with Henryk Szeryng, and as the G Major Sonata started…those first few piano chords…I felt a huge sense of relief, and I physically got chills all over, started shaking a little, and started crying. I stopped myself because I was in the parking lot at the gym and I didn’t want to go inside all teary and look like a lame loser. (Alliteration, good for writing.) But…it’s times like that that I remember why it is I do what I do, and how important music truly is to me. Sometimes I choose music based on my mood, but other times music sets my mood. Or maybe that tells you that I am an incredibly moody person.

Boulder, Colorado

Food

Boulder Beer Day

August 7, 2012 hannahviolin 3 Comments

Readers: Have you entered my “contest” to win a free copy of Running of the Bride? I recommend you do! It’s a fun read, and who doesn’t love FREE?

Now…where were we? Oh yes, Boulder, Colorado.

While we were in Boulder we wanted to do some beer tastings. One of the days our friends had a double rehearsal (meaning two rehearsals in one day) so Chris and I had some time to kill. We decided to drive to Longmont to visit the Left Hand Brewery Company and also hit up Oskar Blues Brewing Company, which neither of us had heard of until the night before, but figured two breweries were better than one. Then we planned to return to Boulder (30 minute drive) and meet our friends at Avery Brewery Company.

If you’re saying, that sounds like a lot of beer, you’d be correct. (Mike gave me a little bit of a lecture today about the beer drinking and whatnot on vacation. Yes, yes. I know.)

The more beer I tasted, the more photos like this magically appeared on my camera.

Anyway, we headed northeast to Longmont, getting to travel on a fantastic highway called the Diagonal Highway, which was like the hypotenuse of a triangle. Oddly Google maps gave us the option of taking the what-should-be-named “right angle” highways, but that would have added ten minutes to our drive. (And don’t confuse that with he-who-shall-not-be-named. That’s when the real trouble would start.)

We started at Oskar Blues. They had a tasting deal, 5 samples for $10 or $12, so we both ordered that.

The bartender was awesome and helpful, and made recommendations. She gave me an extra sample of her favorite, and then later gave Chris a few more to try. We ended up at the restaurant rather than the brewery I guess, but there were plenty of beers to try. I particularly loved the first one, Dale’s Pale Ale, and Chris liked the Deviant Dale’s IPA best, but we enjoyed all of them, even the dark ones, which I usually don’t care for. (I’m a hops gal.)

Then it was time to go to Left Hand Brewery Company. That was a different experience, but still nice. It’s soured a bit by the fact that we ended up leaving Chris’s credit card there (we had to give them a card to hold the tab, then when we cashed out I ended up paying and they didn’t give us the card back, we had forgotten, and ended up having to go back the next day to retrieve it AND discovered they had charged his card for the tab as well as my own…super annoying.)

4 samples for some price. I can’t recall but it was cheap. I don’t remember what my favorite was. It might have been the pretzels, honestly, because by this point I had definitely had PLENTY of beer already. But we were having fun.

I debated buying a purple tee shirt with a cow on it. But do I really wear tee shirts?

So, after we finished our samples, we headed back to Boulder. It was time for our third and final brewery of the day, Avery Brewing Company. Avery was cool because you could order small sample size beers, just one if you wanted. I ordered a couple, of course.

Dave and Chris

My beers. Alls I know is that they were IPAs, or at least pale ales.

What is your favorite sort of beer? We tried to tell some people at the bar that here in St Louis we have a fancy brewery called “Budweiser” that they should come visit if they like beer. Not sure why they laughed at us and then slowly backed away.

Giveaways

Running of the Bride

August 6, 2012 hannahviolin 7 Comments

I promised you all another book giveaway, and I’m about to deliver. Happy Monday! (And congrats to Melissa for winning my last giveaway—I used a random number generator and it came up with comment #4. I’ll be using a similar technique this time.)

I was sent a copy of “Running of the Bride: My Frenzied Quest to Tie the Knot, Tear Up the Dance Floor and Figure Out Why My 15 Minutes of Fame Included Commercial Breaks” by Rachel Eddey. Yes, that’s a very long title, but really it’s just titled Running of the Bride with the rest in subtitle, if that helps.

As a recent bride, you can bet I was excited to dive into this book. It’s based on the author’s actual experience, but reads like a light, humorous, chick lit book. I really enjoyed reading it (actually read it twice), and I think you will too… I don’t want to spoil the book for you, so I’ll just summarize—in a nutshell, Rachel got engaged to her boyfriend, and then they only had four months to plan her wedding. If you recall, Chris and I got engaged in February, started wedding planning in May for a January wedding, and a lot of people freaked out over our timeline. So you can imagine how ridiculous it was for Rachel, and she lives in New York City.

The other fun part of reading the book was that I had a few email exchanges with Rachel, the ACTUAL AUTHOR OF A BOOK. Which is SO cool…I’d love to be a published author (that means I’d have to write a book, which seems like a lot of work, and so even MORE props to her and to all authors.) Anyway, she seems like somebody that I would totally be friends with, plus after reading my blog entry about knee “injuries”, she sent me a picture of HER knee, which she bruised in a 5k mud race. (Speaking of, who wants to run one of those with me? I think it’s time.)

Rachel told me I could use the picture if it gave her street cred. I think it totally does, right? Don’t you want to read her book even more now? (Honestly I really liked her book, knee bruise not withstanding.)

Oh, and here’s the blurb from the website/book jacket:

When Rachel’s handsome studio exec boyfriend proposes to her on the Sex and the City movie set, she can’t fathom the dizzying adventure about to begin. Accepting a once-in-a-lifetime venue deal helps their budget, but it puts them on a crash course to get married in just four months — and time isn’t their only challenge. They battle a wacky assortment of vendors, including a hair stylist who fakes a car accident and a makeup artist channeling Marilyn Manson, all while testing their love amid tastings and tulle.

Using her nervous energy productively, Rachel enters every contest she can find, winning diamond earrings, a honeymoon, a photographer, and two wedding gowns, and her pop culture obsession lands the entire wedding party on two hit reality TV shows. There’s just one problem as the clock ticks down: Her staunch perfectionism and fear of dancing threaten to derail everything. She has to redefine perfect and embrace the mistakes—or risk losing it all.

So who wants to win a free copy of Running of the Bride? (giveaway now closed!)

Three ways to enter (separate comment for each, if you do more than one!)

1. Leave a comment. About anything, but about a knee injury would be most awesome. I reserve the right to award an extra entry for any particularly awesome pictures.

2. Tweet “I want to win a copy of Running of the Bride from hannahviolin.me @hannahviolin” and leave a comment saying you did so.

3. Like the Running of the Bride Facebook page here, and leave a comment saying you did so.

Woo-hoo, let’s get this contest going!! You have until this Friday, August 10, at noon CDT to enter. And if you don’t win, you can always buy the book the regular way.

Food

Hiking in Boulder

August 5, 2012 hannahviolin 1 Comment

When you tell people you are going to the mountains for vacation, they generally tend to assume you are planning to do a lot of hiking. My one issue with hiking is that I have a pretty bad fear of heights. To clarify, I have a pretty bad fear of falling, and the higher I go, the more that fall is going to hurt. That said, I wanted to get an "easy" hike in just to be able to tell people, why, yes, I did hike in Colorado.

Leslie and I decided to hike up to the Royal Arch. The trail started near where the orchestra rehearses, which is at Chautauqua in Boulder. I had been to Chautauqua in New York before, but didn’t realize the connection until that day.

The sign said to read the important information below so we did.

Anyway, the hike started pretty easy and then got harder. It was pretty rocky and went pretty uphill. Here in St Louis I’m used to running uphill, particularly at the ends of races (I’m looking at you Benton Park 5k and Go Half Marathon) but not QUITE as steep.

I made Leslie take a picture of me "Hiking". You can see the path ahead. It looks harmless, doesn’t it.

Then it was a bit rockier. Ultimately we were just climbing up "steps" of the rocks. It wasn’t easy.

The sign pointed that way, so I decided to point. This picture was more effective in my mind, like most things I do.

That’s the sort of rocks we had to climb up. FUN, right? (not fun).

View from the top! We made it! Now we just have to hike down, right?

Oh, yeah. That’s the Royal Arch.

The way down was easier, though not EASY. My feet were hurting…and I was tired…and we were hungry and wanted Taco Bell.

So, yeah, that was my view most of the way. Leslie’s backside (I hear her backside is her best side though!). We got to the bottom and decided we needed to get Taco Bell. I didn’t take any pictures there, but it was delicious.

Oh, and I forgot to mention, the true highlight of the trip was Leslie attempting to drive Peter’s car, which is has a stick shift. She didn’t stall out but I think she may have run over some pedestrians because she was afraid to stop. It was hilarious. And by hilarious I mean frightening. I offered to drive but I think she enjoyed the challenge of it.

Later that day we went to a couple of different Boulder restaurants for Happy Hour and then dinner.