I’m feeling quasi-inspired to write a year in review post. Here we are at the end of 2015..what a year!

I’m torn about how my year went. On the one hand, I had several amazing trips.  I also had some great meals, great hikes, read a bunch of good books, hung out with Louie and a few other friends, had fun with the pets. I played a bunch of fun concerts with the quartet, with Jen, and with other groups. I was in a play! I went to some parties and dinners, I ran some fun races and enjoyed challenging myself. I maxed out my IRA for the first time and met some other financial goals, putting myself in a really good place for this year, and I have good insurance (thanks Obama!).

But, this year was stressful. I let my emotions get the best of me sometimes, I compared myself to others too often, and I let myself worry too much. The pets are having health issues. I worry that I’m not working enough and that I don’t have enough friends.

By any measure my life is going really well. I guess I still just have that niggling fear that I’ve failed, that I should have a full-time job in a full-time orchestra, and that I made mistakes in the past putting my relationship in front of my career…even though today my relationship is going really well, and I often think that I’m lucky I ended up where I am in order to have met Louie when I did.

In other words, I’m probably really normal. I like to reassure myself by telling myself that most people don’t feel like they have their shit together, that I’m really normal. Don’t dissuade me of this notion!

So I’ve been giving some thought to what I want to improve and work on for the new year of 2016. I want to work on my relationships with colleagues and friends. If you are reading this, get in touch with me. Email, comment, call, facebook message, what have you. Let’s talk. Let’s do lunch. I want more people in my life. I have limited myself for a few years. I’ve let my relationships limit me. I want to do more, I want to talk to more people, I want to open more doors (and windows!) and network and find common goals and aspirations, and feel like we are all here in this world together. And of course, always, I want to make more music…I’ve made some mistakes over the years, I’ve cut some people off, I’ve cut off opportunities for various reasons. I want to build bridges and create new opportunities, I want to say hello and clink glasses together, and I want to make new friends.

And I want 2016 to be more relaxed. Another blogger I read came up with the theme of “peace” and I think I’m going to copy. To have peace to move forward, to let go, to relax, to misunderstand, to grow, and to realize that people’s outsides don’t match their insides, to calm down and not overreact, to let things go, to be okay when new stuff comes up that isn’t on my calendar, and…to realize that when people invite me to something on Monday at 5 pm it isn’t out of spite, that they don’t know my schedule, to be peaceful and realize it’s okay to say, no, I’m sorry, I can’t do it, I have to work…and to not feel like a horrible person because my work hours are slightly different than many people’s work hours. Peace.

So there you have it. My year-end wrap up. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Let’s network…I want to reconnect with old friends and meet new people and play, always I want to play the violin. I love teaching, sure, but I love playing more. That’s why I do this all. And if you are reading this, and you want to play more too, or to network, or to get to know me better or to get reacquainted, contact me! So my two goals for the year: the one word goal to rule them all, Peace, and then…network.

What are your goals for 2016? How did 2015 go for you?

Every since there were three inboxes for Gmail (are they more or did I choose three) I have a harder time answering emails from anything NOT my regular inbox. Does that even make any sense? The other emails languish until days and days go by. I was just trying to clean them out and realized there were a variety of things I’d missed. And then I archived a ton of stuff. I’ve mentioned this before—my email goal is to be able to see everything on one screen without scrolling. I don’t care about Inbox Zero because that doesn’t suit my needs.

Louie is back from his vacation. To Hawaii, did I mention that? I was a bit jealous that I wasn’t able to go with him, but he had a wonderful time with his dad and family on that side. I got to enjoy a week of alone time, with FOUR pets.

Olive has been fitting in really well though. (Don’t worry, I’m just dog-sitting for my friend April; I haven’t gotten another pet!) I never thought I liked dogs before I met Louie’s dog, and I never thought I liked little dogs, until now. She is a total sweetie, and also likes to sleep totally under the covers, sometimes even down near your feet, which is awesome and really warm!

I have one more day of teaching until vacation! I’m taking two weeks off this week—one to travel to visit home (South Carolina) and another to rest and recover and get geared up for the spring semester.

I’d been feeling pretty down about things in December, mostly about not feeling like I had enough work and doubting myself.  I was feeling like everybody but me was out working and playing fun gigs and making extra cash, and then I saw this on timehop:

Here I was, having some downtime to make cookies and relax, and the whole time reading facebook and being bitter I didn’t have two church services and a couple of Nutcrackers, and to think, six years prior I’d been on the other side, and bitter about that. In a nutshell, perhaps I am never satisfied. Or perhaps there’s a happy medium?

Food for thought. But either way, I need to be proactive about my career. Playing the victim is never attractive, and things go well, it’s generally from putting myself out there.

This isn’t going to be a long post, because I’m exhausted! It’s not an ongoing exhaustion, just that I took Louie to the airport very early this morning and then had a normal day afterwards.

Sometimes I question if I want to continue blogging. I’m not terribly regular, though I’d like to be, and then I worry I overshare, no one cares, I look like a narcissist, and more. Maybe everybody is out there laughing at me. (Maybe everybody is out there having fun without me.)

But blogging is enjoyable for me.  I enjoy sharing, I enjoy the community I gain from being online, and I enjoy looking back and seeing what I’ve written over the years. If that’s narcissism, so be it

I don’t always want to sit down at the computer and write something about my life. Sometimes the thoughts I have are negative and I feel I should keep them to myself. Other times I have too many thoughts. Sometimes I have a lot of other things to do at the computer and I do those things instead. (I always have a lot of things to do at the computer, but I don’t always do them!).

It’s easy to become negative, to worry that nobody cares, that nobody values you or your time. Especially in my freelance career, it’s very easy to become negative! This month has been especially hard, because I see all my friends and colleagues (yes, ALL OF THEM, ha!) on facebook being overly busy and complaining of all the performances they are doing, and here I am, having less gigs than normal and struggling to get my students to show up for their lessons, and feeling like the end of the year is a real financial struggle…and it’s easy to feel rejected and overlooked. But the truth is, maybe it’s a light year for work. Maybe I need to network more (lunch/coffee anyone?) or put myself out there more. Maybe people think I’m overly busy and didn’t ask me to do stuff for that reason. My brain starts to tell me, oh, it’s because I’m not from here that nobody is calling, or because my ex is in the symphony so I’m quasi-black-listed, or because they read my blog and think I’m a little bit crazy…and who knows. Maybe some of those things are true, but I can’t change it! And frankly, probably the only true things are that I have to keep putting myself out there, and I need to not panic and know that October and November were great months and I’m doing just fine.

Sigh. This fall has been particularly challenging because of all the pet issues. I’m living in a house with THREE elderly pets, all of whom are now on medications, some more challenging than others, and I worry about the furry guys. So there’s lots of stress: pets, money, climate change (seriously, where’s the cold weather?), and there’s quite a bit of jealously and comparing my inside to everybody’s outside (ALWAYS a bad idea) and there you have it. That’s why I blog. Because it’s a journal, sure, but a journal that I share, about my thoughts, and I always feel better afterwards, AND I hope that other people reading it feel better too. I want to share in the hopes that other people feel like I do, or understand me, or have something in common. Because sometimes I feel so darned isolated, especially working from home, not having colleagues, and when twitter is messing with me and putting my timeline all out of order (this doesn’t sound like a real problem, but it’s been going on for over a week and I just want to see all the tweets in reverse order IS THAT TOO MUCH TO ASK?)…and blogging makes me feel like there’s  a chance I’m not so unique, that my feelings are like other people’s. So tell me. How are you doing this holiday season?

Things that are fun:

1. Continuing to journal and blog about our recent road trip. I love going back over the pictures and remembering all the awesome things we did and saw. More blog posts to come!

2. Planning fun activities for the fall. On deck: lots of concerts and (hopefully) a backpacking trip in the Taum Sauk area.

3. Practicing new music, including stuff for an upcoming private concert and our quartet concert in November. Lots of Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms right now.

4. Running and biking when the weather is this gorgeous! Since getting back we’ve been enjoying temperatures between 60 and 80 and have really gotten spoiled. I’m training for the Go Halloween Half Marathon on October 11 and this weather is really great for my running. And for biking: Saturday night we are riding in the Moonlight Ramble, which is a midnight race through the city. Louie and I went on a ride last weekend on the River Des Peres Greenway in order to “train.”

5. Seeing old friends. My best friend from childhood is/was in town this week and we got together for lunch the other day. I hadn’t seen her in…20 years? It was so much fun to meet her family and catch up.

I’m sure we look exactly the same now as we did back then 🙂

I decided to make this list because I was letting myself get overwhelmed with what I’m not doing…and focusing on the positive stuff really helps. The rest will fall into place as it always does (with patience and hard work behind it). And transitioning from vacation to work is always a challenge…my schedule is just free enough that I have time to be a little neurotic 😉

I grew up in South Carolina.

This latest mass shooting hit particularly close to home. I’m tired of mass shootings. I’m tired of all shootings. I’m tired of our politicians saying nothing can be done, when this really only happens in the US. And I’m tired of people acting like racism doesn’t exist, when it so obviously is alive and well. I feel terrible for the victims of this current shooting, just as I feel terrible for the victims of every shooting. This has to stop. It’s just ridiculous. We have to stop killing each other.

So how do I go from a serious topic to a frivolous one, like what’s happening in my life? How do I blog at a time like this? Then again, if I didn’t blog on the days or weeks of a mass shooting…when would I blog? And that sounds like a joke, but it’s not. How many more have to die before we start getting rid of the guns?

I guess I’ll focus on what I always do. Music and teaching music to other people. They say you can’t hold a gun in your hand if your hands are full of a musical instrument.

So…this was a busy week. I was coaching sectionals for a local strings camp. The camp had 3 different orchestras, from beginning to more advanced, and I helped with the violin sections of each group each day. I got to practice my excellent conducting skills on many occasions, sing, play violin, and try my darnedest to keep my voice steady and remain patient in the face of adversity (such as children who refused to stop plucking their violin strings after you just asked them directly to stop). You know, a normal teaching day. After a morning of sectionals each day I had my regular teaching schedule…so the days were long! I’m also practicing for my upcoming recital and some other pieces I’ll be doing in the fall (summer is repertoire planning time, I guess) and running and trying to clean up the house.

It’s been raining basically nonstop this week due to Tropical Storm Bill (and no, we aren’t really on the coast, and sending a tropical storm our way just kind of rubs it in) but we finally saw a break in the rain last night, so I got a 3 mile run (or so, I messed up and accidentally stopped my app) in before going out for some tacos with Louie. That’s a long, poorly written sentence! I’m planning to start training for the MO Cowbell Half Marathon next week—I’m going to do a 12 week training program with a 3 week break in the middle for our Western Road Trip. We will be active on the trip but I don’t plan to stress out over running or anything, because I want to hike and sightsee and take a million pictures and relax.

There were lovely raspberries from the garden though! The rain kind of ruined what was left, but this picture is from last weekend.

Other events of the week:

Brunch at the Botanical Gardens with April and other friends.

Dinner later in the week at Meskerem Ethiopian Restaurant.

Lobster ravioli from Trader Joe’s with a butter/garlic sauce with perhaps a bit too much garlic…

This guy

On a follow up note to my previous blog post …thank you for your comments. I’ve decided that I’m tired of being polite and nice to people who are being rude to me and won’t leave me alone about whether or not I am planning to have children or when I’m getting remarried. After writing that post, I had a very frustrating conversation with a colleague who kept badgering me about my life and whether I was going to have children, and he didn’t take the hints that I felt uncomfortable in the conversation. Reflecting on that has led me to feel like, yeah, I’m done. Unless you are my grandmother, I’m done validating my choices, I’m done answering your questions and I’m done with you all telling me that I need to have children before it’s too late, and I’m done with you all judging me for my divorce and worse, asking me what went wrong when you don’t even know how to correctly pronounce my last name or what state I grew up in. Guess what, you don’t know me well enough to ask those questions, and if you did know me well enough, you wouldn’t have to ask because I would have already told you.

Don’t worry, I’m not even that angry, I’m just getting worked up. Well, I am angry about the state of our country in many respects, but I hope that we can channel our collective anger into progress. As far as nosy and rude people, well they are everywhere. I feel more relaxed having made a decision on how to deal with them…I’m sure I’ll get to practice that soon!