I’ve been working all week setting up my studio schedule for the fall. I’ve also been working on using a new website/program for my calendar…I have hesitated to use a program for organizing my lessons just because I already have my systems in place for invoices, tax prep, etc, and it seems like anything I add is trying to duplicate things I already use but not the way I want. I’ve decided to bite the bullet here though, and try it out for the year, and I’ve gotten 95 percent of the data uploaded.
I’ve changed the way I run my studio for the fall to a set monthly rate and by the semester, and it’s been a challenge getting that information out. I know parents get a lot of things to read, but when I send something with the subject line Very Important Please Read, it usually is, because otherwise my emails have subject lines like No Lessons Tuesday or Recital is November 17th or things like that. Yes, I tend to summarize the email in the subject so people know what it will be about.
It’s a busy time for new referrals, and I wish I had another day I could add students to and still have weekends, but that’s just not possible at this time. Anyway, I’m excited to make a bit more money this fall and streamline my operations! (And if you are a current student reading this, seriously, just at least skim my emails and mark your calendars, okay? I spend a lot of time crafting each one and it’s much easier if I don’t have to then go through and talk with 40 people individually…)
My sister and her kids visited last week, and we had a lot of fun. We went to the Aquarium one morning, and the kids loved it. I wouldn’t say it is a great Aquarium, but there were some nice exhibits and it was very well done and fun for young people.
We made shark hats. My coloring isn’t much better than hers…hers is definitely better for her age.
We went to Grant’s Farm another morning and it was a bit hot and crowded for us, but we still had a nice time. Not much mask wearing, even in the cramped quarters on the tram or in the Biergarten. They didn’t require it, but common sense should (and it should be required.)
Grant’s Farm is always trying to get more money out of your pockets. We paid them money to feed their goats, cows, llamas, birds, etc, and also shelled out for a camel ride for my niece.
Otherwise we just hung out, tried to stay out of the heat, had some nice meals, went to playgrounds, and such. It was exhausting but great to spend time with the kids, and of course my sister Leslie as well.
We had some bad storms the other night. We were fortunate that we didn’t lose power that night as many did, though we did lose power the next day for a few hours, likely while the power company was trying to restore power to others. We did have a chair get blown over.
I saw this the next day and texted Louie about how we had some storm damage. Before he got too worried, I sent that picture.
My nephew really liked sitting in the blue chair.
Louie went away for the weekend to visit some friends, but I have some stuff tomorrow so I stayed behind. I decided to make some jam and mustard today, so I made rhubarb strawberry with stuff from the freezer, a bourbon brown sugar mustard, and a swiss chard walnut pesto with swiss chard from the garden that we kept not using to cook with. The first two are canned and the pesto is in the freezer for the future. I also have a basil plant, so I might should make some traditional pesto this week as well!
I’m taking this upcoming week off from teaching to get ready for the fall. I think it’s important to have down time in order to recharge. We have a short airbnb trip planned for a couple nights, but otherwise I’m around, taking one more online course and catching up on things around the house.
It’s been a minute since I blogged (I hate that expression but I’ve started using it to fit in, haha), so let me pop in and say hello. I’ve been busy, more than you’d think for summer.
I’ve taken two different online teacher courses (I’ve been learning tons, and really just trying to take advantage of this opportunity to learn online: if it goes away, taking one week of training in person, when you factor in travel, taking off work, and the tuition, would cost about as much as the nearly 5 different courses I’ve taken over the past year!) so that kept me busy, plus teaching. I’ve been working hard these past few weeks on getting my studio and my studio schedule organized for the fall. One thing I am telling myself is that if somebody can’t fit into the schedule, that’s okay. It happens, and I don’t need to lie awake stressing over how to make it work for everyone. (Yes, I do that sometimes. Yes, it is a little insane.)
It’s also been a bit of a stressful time. I got exposed to COVID from a student (vaccinated) and then had to do the whole teaching online/testing/waiting for test results thing. I know I wouldn’t technically have had to quarantine, CDC guidelines don’t say you should, but I imagined how I would feel having to tell my students if I tested positive, and that was enough for me to ask them to be online for a few days of lessons. I’m glad I’m mostly seeing folks in person though, because I didn’t love being online all day again. I still teach some students online, but I see more than half in person. I assume something like this will happen again this fall, with the delta variant running rampant through our area, but I hope that more vaccinations (come on, vaccinations for under 12’s) and going back to intense mask wearing will help. Oh, and I found out I had tested negative just in time, as my parents were visiting for the day.
Louie and I camped for two nights at Hawn State Park. We’d camped there before, but this time we took a walk-in site. It was a nice location, though the walking in was a little annoying. The first night we had the area to ourselves and it was beautiful…then a group of young people had two or three of the sites, so we lost our solitude. They were perfectly nice and respectful though, and we had a weird incident involving a man walking through the sites poking around at about 5 to 6 am in the morning, but nobody was hurt. I noticed him first, and quietly awoke Louie, and we weren’t really sure what to do, but my impulse ended up being to start yelling and wake up the other 12 people sleeping nearby, while Louie had evidently been planning to go out and approach the guy calmly, and either way, we got the guy to leave (he had a lot of excuses for why he was there) and blah blah blah. I don’t really feel like talking about it more.
The day we spent at Hawn was nice, except I was dealing with a migraine and the heat was pretty bad. We did a hike of about 4 miles, and then ended up eating dinner at a nearby restaurant. This was when we still trusted our vaccines, which we may not anymore: we ate at a patio last night, and I think it’ll be awhile before we eat indoors again unless it’s a place we really trust to be either vaccinated or mostly vaccinated and well spaced.
Our tent siteThis little area was right behind the camp ground, very beautiful!We really liked the shower icon.
Anyway, after we left Hawn we headed to St. Genevieve just to visit the National Historic Site–it had recently been turned into a National Historic Site, and I wanted to see it. We visited the Visitor’s Center and watched a short movie and saw a few displays, including a wonderful model of the town.
Not the model of the town, but some house models. This vertical post construction is what the town is known for.
Then we took a house tour (the Felix Valle House) and learned quite a bit, and then we just walked around a bit and had lunch at the Anvil Restaurant. There are other houses we could have toured, but we were ready to go home at that point.
Anyway, then another week and more went by and then my parents visiting, just for the day and overnight on their way somewhere else. We did a little sightseeing, and went to see the Ulysses S Grant National Historic Site, which none of us had been to even though it is less than 20 minutes from my house. It had a really nice museum and we took a ranger guided tour of the grounds. It is a small site, but very educational and well done. We were probably there about 1 1/2 hours total.
From the museum, these were Ulysses’s parents, Hannah and Jesse Grant. They were abolitionists.The backside of the house with the laundry and kitchen building. The Grants did own enslaved people.
We had more time after that, so we headed down to visit the Arch Grounds, which my Mom hadn’t been to since they were redone. We didn’t go inside there due to worries of too many people, but just walked around a bit. The weather was really quite nice, not too hot and sunny, so it was a lovely day for it.
We had pizza from Pizzeria da Gloria that night, which is quickly becoming Louie and I’s favorite pizza place. Try the mushroom pizza!
My sister and her family are visiting for a few days, starting today, so I’ve been cleaning as well, getting the house ready for more visitors (okay, full disclosure, I haven’t been doing much cleaning, but we did move some things around and then we had to set up a futon) and planning some fun activities. We are planning to visit Grant’s Farm, the Aquarium, and the new Playspace at Forest Park. We have reservations for one outdoor patio meal at Katie’s Pizza and Pasta, and otherwise are cooking or doing takeout: if we need to wear masks again, we shouldn’t be unmasking inside in front of strangers whose vaccination status is unknown. It’s too bad, because I was enjoying going to some restaurants and sitting inside, but…
Have you been to the NPS sites I mentioned above? What is your take on eating inside? Any other thoughts?
Last year around Thanksgiving we got a robot vacuum. It is a Shark brand, and since we also have a regular-sized Shark vacuum, we started calling it “Baby Shark” and of course sing the song as well. So I sit here, about to write down a few random thoughts while my baby shark vacuums around me. I usually run it once a week and then use the regular Shark vacuum on the high traffic areas on a shorter basis during the week.
I do find that the cat hair gets so embedded into the front rug, it’s obnoxious. What do you recommend for getting cat hair out more easily? Now that I have students coming back to my house again regularly I am trying more to keep it cleaner as we like to sit on the rug sometimes too.
One thing that I think I’ve mentioned here and that I’ve been thinking about a lot career-wise is how there is this dichotomy between what I want to be doing and what people think I want to be doing, and what I think people want me to be doing. The pandemic has really made me reevaluate what I want to be doing, but it’s so hard to shut off that switch of “oh, I should be doing {fill in the blank} because that’s what people will be impressed by.” The music world doesn’t happen in a vacuum (see what I did there, using an analogy poorly)…whenever I’m meeting new people and they ask me what I do for a living and I say “I teach violin” then they ask do I play also and I say, sure, around town, and then they ask do I play in the symphony. They ignore that I first said “I teach violin” and they only perk up when I say, no but I do play at the Fox sometimes for visiting shows…but nobody ever seems to be remotely interested in furthering a discussion about teaching.
Now, I’m fully aware that I shouldn’t care about this, but when it happens literally every time I meet somebody new, it makes me think about what our society thinks of teaching. I’ll tell you what, it’s actually an important and useful thing, to be a teacher, and I find that when I give myself space to really do it that it’s fun and I’m good at it. But when I treat it like something less than or something that I’m only doing because I’m not good enough for a symphony job, then it feels bad and I can get super annoyed at my students.
So my switch is to say, yes, I’m a teacher, and yes, I taught online during the pandemic, and out of the 40 plus students I had before the pandemic, I lost TWO and gained about 8. So that went pretty well.
It is nice to play concerts of course, and I even have some scheduled, and I hope to play some shows at the Fox this year as well. It’s entirely too easy to sit there and see who’s playing what and wondering why so and so didn’t ask me for this or that, and you can drive yourself crazy with that, or you can just say to yourself, whatever, it’s all good. I don’t want to be on that roller-coaster, and I’m okay with it.
And I think, that it gets easier to MEAN it, that it is okay. It’s a mantra, that it’s okay that other people are playing stuff you used to play, and for a variety of reasons, none of which are that you aren’t a good player, and mostly because you take trips sometimes and don’t drop everything for a gig…(and because you did notice, that during the pandemic once everything got settled, you actually made more money from just teaching and being regular with that than you did trying to scramble around, and while…it’s obviously not only about the money, making a living doing something is better than not doing so.)
I know I’ve pontificated on this concept a lot over the past year, longer, and it’s a tricky thing, isn’t it, trying to decide if what you are doing for a career is what you are meant to be doing? Is your life heading in the right direction, are you happy, what even IS happiness? How lucky am I to be able to ponder these questions! How lucky am I to be sitting here while a small robot vacuum cleans my house!
After lunch we are going to go for a bike ride, probably on the River Des Peres Trail. It doesn’t seem too hot today which is a nice change. I spent some time this morning trying to figure out how to set up my tripod in order to record some lessons for something I’m working towards. And my fridge is filled with zucchini, mushrooms, and a few other veggies from my CSA pickup on Thursday that still need to get eaten, so we’ll do some cooking this evening! Yesterday I canned 6 jars of dilly beans, which is my favorite pickled veggies I made last summer. Half were from my garden and half were green beans I bought at the grocery store.
So that is and was my weekend. Relaxing, cooking, “cleaning”, writing, thinking about the meaning of life and my career path, reading, and biking. How about you?
I was so busy telling you about our Arkansas Trip that I haven’t told you about our trip to visit family in Chautauqua, New York. My sister Leslie and her family own a house in Sherman, New York, which is near the Chautauqua Music Festival where her husband works in the summers. This is the third year in a row we’ve gone out to visit, and it was lovely.
I won’t do a play by play, but instead share some pictures and tell you a few things we did.
Walked around the grounds of the Chautauqua Institute–this is near the belltower.Hiked down to the Chautauqua Gorge but it was too watery to go further, so we went back up and hiked along the Cusamano Trail instead for a few miles.
I believe this was at Long Point State Park, where we walked around a little bit.
Not pictured: Southern Tier Brewery Company–great place to have some beer and some food, nice patio.
Luca driving a wooden car around.
We didn’t go on the Chautauqua Belle, but maybe another time. We walked along the Lake aways from here, and then got ice cream nearby. We eat more ice cream while in Chautauqua than we do all year long!
The grounds of the Institute again, you can see the Bell Tower on the left.
Luca wearing cool sunglasses for the Fourth of July.
We walked around the Audubon Community Nature Center in Jamestown, NY and saw lots of birds and chipmunks.
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I taught Luca awhile back to show us his “bebo” or belly button and never tire of asking.
We also got ice cream at Bemus Point, had dinner at a place in Sherman called Pine Junction, lunch at Stedman Corners Cafe, and coffee and lunch at Crown Street Roasting Company. And we ate some delicious meals at “home” as well.
Leslie went above and beyond with this meal!
It was a week long trip, which was pretty long, but it was nice to spend time with the kids and just hang out and relax. There are always more things to do next time!
We stopped at Taco Johns on our way home!
Anyway, then we got back home to this…
What else have I been up to? We had our annual fireworks barbecue, which is a cookout we have the night of the Sublette Park/Hill fireworks. We weren’t sure if it was happening due to COVID, but it did, and it was small but fun. We’ve been eating out a bit more than before, though trying to keep cooking, so usually just once or twice a week. I’ve been keeping up on the garden and just pickled a whole bunch of green beans today, three jars from the garden! (I make dilly beans, which might be my favorite sort of pickle.)
I played an outdoor concert with Metropolitan Orchestra of St Louis, which was held in a parking lot…have I played a concert in a parking lot before? I want to say, yes, actually. I played a concert with my band as well, in a front yard as part of the Kingsbury Ensemble’s A Little Lawn Music.
That made for a busy weekend, so I was happy to have this weekend entirely off. I don’t have the energy I used to have…or the desire to run around as much. I have been trying to be mindful of that when accepting jobs for the fall, how much I teach now in addition to how much I do actually really enjoy having some downtime. I’m behind on gardening tasks anyway!
I’ve been doing a lot of reading of course, and thought I’d share some of what I’ve been reading lately for you to consider:
Books I really enjoyed: Caul Baby by Morgan Jerkins, Big Summer by Jennifer Weiner, American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins,, The Midnight Library by Matt Haig, The Red Lotus by Chris Bohjalian, These Tangled Vines by Julianne Maclean, Anxious People by Frederick Bachman, 28 Summers by Elin Hilderbrand, Nomadland by Jessica Bruder
Books I liked well enough: Ready Player Two by Ernest Cline, The Elephant of Belfast by S. Kirk Walsh, The Light in the Ruins by Chris Bohjalian, The Psychology of Time Travel by Kate Mascarenhas, Milk Fed by Melissa Broder, We Love You Charlie Freeman by Kaitlyn Greenidge
Cozy Mysteries I enjoyed: The Bennett Sisters Series by Lise McClendon
Nonfiction I found interesting: The Body, A Guide for Occupants by Bill Bryson, How to be a Victorian by Ruth Goodman
I know I didn’t give you any information about the books, but you can read a bit of them online 🙂
Anyway, we have some interesting plans coming up: biking tomorrow on the Katy Trail (at least that’s the plan), a camping trip to Hawn State Park, various family members visiting. We also bought tickets for Jazz and for the Symphony for the fall so that’s going to be different than this year! Work wise things are still pretty busy these next two weeks because I’m doing another online seminar (I am obsessed with learning right now) and teaching as well. I am taking a whole week off in August though, just to relax, and we are getting away for one more weekend before school starts up again. I don’t want to think about summer ending, but I know that life moves on…and I do love fall weather. I am hoping to get a better life-work balance going forward, though I know that is unlikely to happen while I have my early morning school job.
What have you been up to? Read any interesting books to share? Done any interesting things that you recommend to others?
That leaves our last two nights on the Arkansas journey, two nights south of Fayetteville at a lovely airbnb in a bit of a rural area, but not as rural as in the Ozarks, since it was about 15 minutes drive to Fayetteville.
I had forgotten until we were getting close that our last airbnb had not only a hottub, but a pool as well. It was a hot day, so we thought we’d check in, get unpacked, and go for a swim before dinner.
What a beautiful building this was!
The cottage was designed by a couple who were an architect and landscape designers teaching at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, so it was gorgeous and well designed.
And the pool was lovely!
We had a nice swim and enjoyed just relaxing in the pool. We learned that Louie can’t float on his back–I tried to teach him, but while I can float on my back, I cannot teach somebody else to do so.
We had a dinner reservation at Vetro 1925 in Fayetteville, so we got cleaned up and headed to Fayetteville a little early. I wanted to see the house where the Clintons lived while they were in Fayetteville–it was technically a museum but not open anymore, partly due to COVID, partly (it seemed) due to state budget cuts.
It looked like an easy walk there from where we parked near the restaurant, but it ended up being really hilly, up and down and up and down, sometimes very steep!
It was sort of anticlimatic when we got there! And I’m not sure what the deal is with the pig.
It is a pretty house though, and I’m sorry it wasn’t open as a museum.
Then we got to back to where the restaurant and car were, and got seated ahead of our reservation.
Wow! This meal did not disappoint. We split a bunch of things, which we like to do, and while I was marginally annoyed that they charged us for splitting, when we never actually asked to split and only said we would be sharing everything, I decided that was a small thing. (To be clear: we shared about 4 dishes, and said we were sharing, and they brought some of the dishes on two plates, which we did not ask for, and they did charge us extra for that.)
Not pictured, the salad course. Everything was tasty, though the tiramisu was a bit over the top and might have focused more on something other than chocolate syrup…
We went back to the cabin or whatever you want to call it after dinner and relaxed. I actually don’t recall if we got in the hottub or not, but I bet we did.
The next morning we were heading to Bentonville and the Crystal Bridges Museum of Art. We ate oatmeal in the kitchen, made coffee, and headed out.
This is where the day got very Walmart centered. Bentonville is where Walmart got started and it is a scene there. Mountain biking, tourism, and this gorgeous Museum. I have a lot of feelings about Walmart, few of them good, but we had heard that the Museum was excellent.
I wrote a long rant about Walmart and how they are responsible for so many issues in our country through years of political lobbying, low wages, etc, but I decided to just let it go…I’ll just sum it up to say that I was excited to see the museum because I love art, but I won’t wax poetic over the Waltons for spending a small amount of their fortune on a museum which only improves their social standing. They have a lot of money. I do things for free too and give many charitable donations and I don’t make signs all over my house bragging about it.
ANYWAY sorry about all my soapboxing! Back to the trip report 🙂
I have to say, the Crystal Bridges Museum is really lovely. It’s a little confusing at first, because there is a lot going on between indoor and outdoor paths, a bit of construction, COVID, and a sort of open area you enter without obvious maps or welcome area. But we found our way, first to the outside paths because we were afraid it would start raining soon…
And then we made it inside. The galleries were well laid out, kept things moving while being interesting and informative. We didn’t find the collection to be overwhelmingly large, which was nice. We walked around for a few hours and decided to take a break to have lunch at the cafe, which was very nice.
After lunch, we decided to leave, so we headed to downtown Bentonville to check it out. It was…lovely. Like a disneyland version of what small towns used to look like before Walmart decimated them! So glad they kept one! It was cute and shiny, and full of art and bicycles.
We didn’t get to see the Walmart Museum as I’d hoped, because COVID meant reservations and I hadn’t made one, because my priority had been the art museum–which had originally required reservations as well but then changed recently. We walked around, visited a bike shop, a coffee shop with the worst bathrooms we’d seen in such a nice area for awhile, a fancy Walmart grocery store, and some lovely paths through some Gardens.
We decided to eat an early dinner in Fayetteville, and went to Hugo’s, which was a long running favorite of locals Burger place. It was great! We had a bit of a wait even at 5 pm, but nothing bad at all and we enjoyed the ambience and the food. It felt a bit more “real” than Bentonville, and we appreciated that. I’m sure that Bentonville feel is right for many, just not me.
We enjoyed the hot tub and visited with our host’s horses after dinner, and then watched some tv while it rained a bit outside.
The next morning we headed towards Pea Ridge Military Park, which is an NPS site, so you know it’ll be well done. It was a gross rainy day, so we decided against any hiking, and just visited the Vistor’s Center and then did the loop road. We did pop out at every stop and took short walks as they were there (it wasn’t raining too hard, but it was soggy and buggy for sure). It gets tempting sometimes, to just stay in the car, but we decided since we were there we were going to pop out at every stop. There weren’t any we regretted.
It was interesting to learn about a Civil War Battle and really made me think about how awful War is and how there are many people who glorify violence, when it isn’t that at all. So many soldiers (and civilians) died and were wounded, and for what? Surely there are better ways. There are so many wars going on, right now…it just makes you really think about life, and how so much of what we have in our lives we take for granted and it could all be taken away in an instance.
In any case, we learned quite a bit. The museum in the Visitor’s Center was a nice start, and then the signs and brochure are helpful along the way. We had visited somewhat nearby Wilson’s Creek National Battlefield in a previous year, and this was a later battle. If I’m remembering correctly!
Also the Trail of Tears went by here. What a horrible thing that was.
They had all the cannons lined up where they would have been.
There was some nice scenery as well!
The Elkhorn Tavern, which I think was rebuilt for this, but I’m not sure. Sometimes the NPS is sneaky like that, you think something was still there and it is actually a reconstruction, so I don’t know. I could probably research it, but where’s the fun?
Anyway, after visiting Pea Ridge, we hit the road for home. It was about a 4 hour drive home, and we made it by dinner time.
Arkansas was a lovely time. We especially enjoyed our last two airbnb’s, the Buckstaff Bathhouse, Pinnacle Mountain State Park, Little Rock Central NHS, the grounds of the Clinton Library in Little Rock, eating at Brave New Restaurant, visiting Crystal Bridges, eating at Vetro 1925 and Hugo’s, and just generally being away from St Louis! We are sorry that the Bill Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock was closed due to COVID, and that the visitor’s center and museum in Ft. Smith were closed for the same reason as those would have been great to see.
As more time now has passed, I will still say we enjoyed the trip, though we are sad we didn’t get to do a bit camping/out west trip this summer. Arkansas was nice, relaxing, and a lovely place to spend a week. If you are a Missourian especially, I recommend visiting sometime! We have also visited Eureka Springs in the past and it was great.
By many measures summer is already halfway done. I only mention this in order to freak myself out.
I promise I will still tell you about the portion of our trip to Fayetteville and Bentonville, but life got too busy! I just got back from a trip to visit my sister and her family, and I was busy doing very little there but the time flew by. Before I left I did a very intense online conference on Paul Rolland Pedagogy while doing a normal week of teaching and life…so things were a bit slammed.
The pandemic has brought some great online educational opportunities into my life, and I’ve taken advantage of quite a few, but it means adding things onto an already somewhat busy schedule. That week was intense…livestreams or videos from the time I got up until when I went to bed with the exception of the times I was teaching or some meals. I didn’t even finish all the videos, so I’m halfheartedly playing catchup this week, because everything goes offline this Sunday. I say halfheartedly because I definitely will watch all the main track videos but my original goal of watching all the videos isn’t likely to happen, and that’s okay.
I have two more courses I’m taking this month, and I’m looking forward to them both. I’ve gotten a lot of wonderful ideas and inspiration over the past year and my brain and heart are absolutely full of ideas on how to be a better teacher. I’m working through ideas in my head about what kind of teacher I want to be going forward and how to use and incorporate some new ideas I’ve learned.
I read an article recently about “drift” (that one of my friends had posted online). The idea behind “drift” is that you end up doing things in your life by just sort of “drifting” into them, rather than making deliberate choices. Going to grad school because it was next in life, getting married/having children because all your friends are, taking a good job offer because it seemed like a good job offer and others encouraged you, etc. I sort of drifted into teaching to supplement my income and because people thought I would be good at it. I never felt like one of those teachers that was really into it or loved it or any of that, but in the past year my attitude and approach has changed.
I have been immensely grateful for my ability to teach during the pandemic, and have found such satisfaction in my ability to relate to my students and help them through this time. It has changed my idea of my career and made me feel much more satisfied with what I’m doing.
On other notes: fun stuff! LIVE MUSIC! We bought symphony tickets for next season AND jazz tickets for next season. I have a band performance this Friday, and a concert with the Metropolitian Orchestra of St Louis on Sunday night. (I think I overextended myself this weekend, but it’ll be fine.) I find myself wanting to schedule and do things, and feeling like it’s a slippery slope back into the world of being too busy, yet I am ready to LIVE again, and I think (this may sound crazy but) I’d rather be out and about doing interesting things than sitting at home. The park near our house is doing fireworks this weekend so we have an outdoor party planned, and well, there’s just good things happening.
I watch the delta variant numbers with caution, and found the study out of Israel about the Pfizer vaccine being less effective against the delta variant to be concerning…but I will hold steady and hope that my Pfizer vaccine keeps me healthy, until the CDC tells me otherwise.
We have two more weekend getaways planned before the school year, one camping in a State Park, and a weekend stay in Southern Illinois at a little cabin on a pond. Between then and now, lots of teaching, reading, music, gardening, friends, etc.
