Category Archives: Hope

Thanksgiving Break

November 29, 2020 hannahviolin

I still have the rest of today, but it has been a wonderful and refreshing Thanksgiving Break.

One week ago today I had an online recital for my students and they were awesome. I was so proud of them for continuing to rise to the occasion.

Then I took off private teaching all week, which was a fantastic decision. I had a few things to do work-wise but I got to have my afternoons and evenings free AND I got a break from hearing violin over the computer. It was absolutely the best thing for me.

I did a few new to me things over the week, one of which was taking a short online workshop on “self-care for creative types.” It was amazing. I had forgotten to think about what I actually enjoyed doing as I have been so focused on “getting through the pandemic” and “keeping my students happy and challenged”. So I spent Tuesday after the workshop doing some brainstorming and starting to work through a book I’d bought a few years ago but never used called “Your Best Year Yet!”.

Wednesday was lovely as I was able to sleep in a bit, exercise at my leisure, and spend some time cooking. For Thanksgiving I ended up making a cranberry-rhubarb sauce (which was delicious, absolutely delicious) with some rhubarb I had in the freezer, and Smitten Kitchen’s Corn Pudding, which was good but drier than I like (Louie absolutely adored it.) I picked up bread and rolls at Union Loafers and Louie picked up our dinner for the next day from Treehouse, a vegan restaurant we really like. (We decided not to eat a real turkey this Thanksgiving.) That night we went to the Garden Glow at the Botanical Gardens—it’s a light event they do every Thanksgiving through the New Year, and I’d thought of trying to go many years but we never did. This time the weather suddenly looked okay and I snapped up the last few tickets for the night. The crowds were capped at 25 percent of the original capacity, and it felt fine walking around with people wearing their masks and lots of space.

Thursday morning I made an egg and potato casserole to go with one of the breads and then we met up with some of Louie’s colleagues (when you work at a college, you end up being invited to do things on Thanksgiving day!) and we took a nice long (masked) walk in Forest Park.

After that we popped over to his mom’s house and visited on their porch for a bit and had some tea, before heading home to relax. We had some appetizers his mom had given up (prosecco, caviar and blinis!) and then after a few hours, started heating up our Thanksgiving dinner. Dinner was a delicious and we were pretty stuffed afterwards. We watched TV for a bit, and then managed some dessert as well.

Friday we went to Rockwoods Reservation and hiked the Lime Kiln Trail to another trail and then across the road to the Rock Quarry Trail for a little over 5 miles. It was the most crowded we had ever seen it there and that didn’t surprised me as it was a gorgeous day outside! Louie had some work to do after that so we went home. I got all of my holiday decorations out and started putting up the tree. The cats really loved having a tree inside to climb, and I guess I am just fine with that. At night we had Thanksgiving Take 2 and it was just as good as Take 1.

Saturday was an entire day spent at home, and it was glorious. I was able to again sleep in a bit, exercise, and finish decorating the tree—I ran out of hooks before I was done, so I’ll finish the rest in a few days after I get some more hooks. My trick with cats is to not put up my most breakable ornaments, and otherwise to shrug and laugh. The tree seems sturdy enough for them to climb up without it falling over. We put it in a slightly more central location than previous years since I won’t have any students coming and going, which meant I ended up being short on ornaments—I was used to having one side against the wall! I also went ahead and worked on Christmas cards and got those mostly done. I’m still collecting addresses and don’t plan to send them for another week or two. We had Thanksgiving for the third time for dinner and managed to finally finish off a few of the dishes. There’s still corn pudding, salad, and cranberry sauces left, but otherwise we did a good job.

And that brings us to now. I ended up waking up quite early, so I’ve already done quite a few things…I actually have realized it’s nice to be awake as the sun comes up since it sets so early (4:41 today, for instance). I thought having a teaching job where I had to get up so early would be a terrible thing, and while it’s awfully hard some mornings, it has been kind of fun. I’m trying to focus on the good things, and on some of the ideas that were brought up in the Best Year Yet book and the Self-Care workshop and between that and you know, a vacation, I’m feeling much more like myself than I had in awhile: more focused, relaxed, and enjoying life. This pandemic is still hard, and I believe some of the worst is yet to come, but we will (hopefully) weather the storm…

Back to work tomorrow for just over 3 weeks…

Hope

Relief

November 10, 2020 hannahviolin

I feel like a huge weight has been lifted off my chest. I know that times are still tough and we have to get through the next few months, and this is bad week for COVID cases, but I feel like maybe we can do something different in our country.

Fall is here, and it’s been a gorgeous month. Having more time to enjoy it on the weekends has been nice too.

The leaves are so gorgeous and the weather this past week has been unseasonably warm and wonderful!

COVID cases are bad here…I keep waiting for another shutdown. I’m already working from home still so hardly anything more can affect me, but Louie has been teaching classes in person. Exponential growth is a scary thing.

I do feel like the days are all the same though…I can’t decide what exactly I miss about my old life, but I miss it. I miss the freedom of it all the most. If everybody wore masks, we would get some of our freedom back, but that’s not the country we live in.

I thought about trying to book some sort of getaway for us over Thanksgiving, but if we are going to go somewhere and just be stuck avoiding people who aren’t taking the virus seriously I’d rather just stay home. I’m hoping the weather will be nice over Thanksgiving (it OFTEN is) as we have a couple of hikes further away that we might try. I also have a little more frozen fruit in the freezer that I want to turn into jam, and there are always baking ideas! There’s no shortage of things to do: my reading list is long, there’s plenty to do around the house, etc, but as far as things that take you away from the everyday…it’s harder. I just have to remind myself that I’m lucky to still be so busy with work, lucky to have a nice home to live in (not everybody would agree, but I like it), and lucky to have so many things to do.

I’m enjoying the semester for the most point: my new teaching position has given a focus to my days, and makes me get started really early in the day (class starts at 7:15 am) which means nights have gotten earlier as well. It works well, but makes some days long. At some point it will be in person rather than in my living room, but not this calendar year. And I had a great time teaching a tiny Improv/CAD class on Saturday, and plan to go to weekly classes in the spring.

This week I’m recording some music for a Christmas Concert, and I’m waiting to hear the final recording of the play I helped create music for last month. I also finally finished all my MMTA judging (so many fantastic student performances!) and I’m still participating in some teaching seminars. I’m getting tired of it all and need a break soon, so Thanksgiving can’t come soon enough. I’m not sure what we are doing, if we are going to just do Thanksgiving the two of us, and cook or order takeout dinner from somewhere, or try to do some sort of dinner with Louie’s parents where we mostly wear masks and stay far apart. We know just the two of us is the safest, but there are inherent risks in other activities, such as driving in a car for a three week road trip, and perhaps having a mostly masked dinner with a few other people who have also been being quite careful is okay? I also like the idea of getting a dinner from a restaurant and supporting them (I don’t want to make Thanksgiving dinner for two).

What are you doing for Thanksgiving, do you know yet? How are you holding up?

Hope

Benefit Concert and other good stuff

September 27, 2020 hannahviolin 1 Comment

Today I shall dedicate to good stuff happening in my life.

1) One of my high schoolers on Friday asked if I thought she was on track to go into music education with the goal of being a music therapist. She’s a junior, and I was excited to hear this. I hope I gave her a good answer, and I think I expressed that I thought she was on a good track though the more she practiced (more carefully) the better. She’s more of a fiddle player and we’ve been also working on theory and rhythm practice. I am excited about her future.

2) Today is my band’s benefit concert at 4 pm. We are playing a short set with another friend playing a short set to raise money for the Oregon Food Bank, in order to help people misplaced by the fires. Check it out, and even better, please donate if you can.

3) I had rehearsal yesterday (responsibly of course) for an upcoming recorded but “live” concert. It will air Sunday, October 11 at 4 pm CST and I recommend you watch. This is a concert that was supposed to happen in late March. It is nice playing with people again. Visit this link to see the information about the Couts Music Series, which I am thrilled and grateful my friend and colleague, Andy Peters, has put together (with funding during these times.

4) I am so far quite enjoying my new early morning teaching job. I’ve sort of made two goals for the next few years and one is to improve my teaching and push myself out of my comfort zone in teaching, which I’m doing through this job and also starting an improvisation class.

My other goal is to be a more confident and creative musician, and playing with my band helps that (by creative I mean, not just playing the same old classical music and worrying about what some dot a composer wrote 200 years ago means) as well as a few other things on the docket. One is a potential opportunity I just found out about yesterday, and the other is a longer-term online course working with a teacher who has ten years experience teaching improvisation and Creative Ability Development to children in order to improve my own skills and my teaching skills.

I have realized I am a bit happier being out of the “rat race” of the freelance world….worrying about who was asking who to play what and how to stay on top of the list for this and that and worrying if you said no that they wouldn’t ask again. It’s exhausting and a bit soul crushing. I do enjoy playing violin, so much, and it’s great to get paid to do it, but I’m just tired of it. And it’s so nice to just finish teaching and then be done, or to have so much more time on the weekends. I enjoy being busy and doing a lot of interesting things, I don’t think I’ll ever be happy just sitting around all weekend or not feeling like I’m making a difference, but taking the ego out of it (freelancing and performing is SO MUCH about ego) is a happier way to be. I will never win the freelance game, because it’s sort of like the Game of Thrones, you don’t win, you just die. And then some weird person ends up on top after you’ve spend years and years practicing, being nice, showing up early, saying yes to things and missing out on so many other opportunities in life. I’m declaring myself officially out, and I will continue to play things if they seem interesting when I’m asked, but I’m not running around, I’m not saying yes for fear of not having another chance, and I’m not going to play things that make me feel bad.

5) We got delivery from Stone Soup Cottage with Louie’s family last night. It was delicious! It’s definitely expensive but delicious.

We have gone over to Louie’s family here in town for dinner a few times, and we eat out on the back porch at a socially distanced table. Otherwise we wear masks if we need to go in the house or move around. I don’t normally eat meat but occasionally make an exception.

I snapped a quick picture of the soup course. I had a small amount of red wine as it was the suggested pairing and it didn’t give me a headache at all today, which was good. I think I had about half a glass.

It was getting quite dark on the porch by the time we ate the pheasant, and then dessert was entirely too dark. It was all very tasty! I would recommend ordering from them for a special occasion. There were some things that needed to be heated up and some other things to be done, so it wasn’t a meal you can just unpack and eat, but it was fairly easy to do I believe, and the advantage is that everything is hot when you eat it as well, which is one of the problems with takeout. And did I mention it was absolutely delicious? They don’t do any dietary adjustments or substitutions to their menu, but if you are okay eating whatever is on offer (the menu is listed online so you’ll know) it is a wonderful meal.

6) I just made social plans with a friend for next weekend, just me and her! I haven’t hung out with anybody without Louie since before the pandemic. I love Louie and we are used to spending a lot of time together, but I do sometimes wish I had more of a social life without him, and I often feel we are too codependent. So yay! We also have dinner plans with another couple this weekend (at least tentative) and then I have a million other things to do work wise this week (all fun stuff, but there is practicing to be done.) All of this is good: it’s good to focus my energy on positive things rather than all the bad in the world.

Hope, Teaching

Wednesday

June 10, 2020 hannahviolin

This is the first week in a long time that has gone by fairly slowly. As I texted to my sister last night, it’s because I finally have something to look forward to…she and her kids are visiting!

They are en route to their summer job location and are stopping by. Is it a little risky? I suppose so. But they’ve been being careful (I’m talking about the virus right now, in case you forgot there’s a pandemic) and I’ve been careful, and we are all low risk and will be careful after our visit as well. So I’m super excited to see them! What will we do? Well, nothing really. Run through the sprinkler in the backyard? Cook at home and wash a lot of dishes? Take a socially distanced walk through the neighborhood? These are all thrilling possibilities.

So that means a bit of cleaning since one of them is a crawler. Thinking of a toddler poking around your stuff really makes you see how dangerous your house is. Bottles of bleach, just sitting around. Boxes of cat poo. Stacks of books! Maybe I should just build a small toddler cage and make life easier.

I’m just kidding…to an extent. After all, I have two cats. All my valuables have either been broken by now or are on the one shelf Muriel can’t get to.

This is just a sort of mundane post. All of the anti-racism stuff will be a long haul. It’s still great everybody is talking about it. I hope this energy continues and translates into real systemic change. I’m not naive enough to think that most of the companies and institutions that posted statements last week will actually do much, but I’m just naive enough to think that change will happen, starting with all of us talking about racism. Last Tuesday I saw the thing on Instagram about putting a black box and was really touched by how many of my friends did it. Did it mean anything? I don’t know. But it told me that unlike a few years ago during the Michael Brown protests, this time people were paying attention and looking beyond what the president was saying. This time people believed that George Floyd shouldn’t have been killed by the police, and this time people are saying, enough, and what can we do to help. So the support will come from all of us, and that’s where it has to come from. I have hope, again, and that hope was lost for awhile. I am looking at everything my eyes wide open though, and definitely that includes my own behavior as a white person.

On a lighter note…CATS.

I celebrated my birthday on Sunday. My mom sent a few old birthday pictures of me.

It was a pretty low key birthday…not the best ever, but certainly not the worst. I had made myself a Texas Sheet Cake a few days earlier, which is just a rich chocolate cake I often had when I was younger (I think we started making it for my birthday when I was in high school). Louie and I got takeout from Peacemaker Lobster and Crab then—it’s sort of become a birthday tradition to get takeout from there and I have a lobster boil. We keep saying we’ll go another time not on my birthday to try some of the other less extravagent things on the menu but we never do! But yes, a lobster died so I could celebrate my birthday and it was delicious (also the biscuits are to die for).

So now I’ve got three more days of teaching, and then I am taking two days off teaching to enjoy the visit with family, and it’s the first break I’ve had since getting back from Atlanta which was sort of in the before times. I’m more and more hopeful that we will indeed go on our vacation at the end of July, and things are just looking up generally.

I’m still teaching online, in case you were wondering. Especially with having family visit and such, it’s important to minimize contact. I know some of my students have been traveling and I can’t trust them to be safe, so the best thing is to continue avoiding each other. I think it’s a little easier for people now that they have started doing a few more things outside of the home, and now that school is over. A few of mine are not loving being online so much, but I do still think at this time it’s the best thing. We’ll see what happens for the future.

Hope, Performing, Random thoughts

Unseasonably warm and support the Arts

February 22, 2017 hannahviolin

It feels like spring is already here. I suspect (hope) it isn’t, for no other reason than I worry the mosquitoes will be unbearable this summer. I don’t know if that’s scientific or rational, but it feels right, and that’s the only thing that matters, right?

The spring semester is in full swing. I’m 5 weeks into my college teaching (out of 14 total weeks), I’m near spring break, I’m overwhelmed and stressed yet this week I’ve found more time than I really needed to get things done, which is great. I haven’t done as much exercising as I would like as the time has been awkward and perhaps, just perhaps, the lack of planning and wanting to get up earlier falls on me. I must do better!

I’ve got some fun performances coming up: Carmen with Winter Opera, and then the Ravel String Quartet. Solo wise I’m playing a piece or two on a recital at the end of April (Prokofiev Sonata, I believe, and maybe one short piece too, I’m only one performer on the concert.) And I’m learning Astor Piazzolla’s The Four Seasons to play with the Metropolitan Orchestra of St Louis in the fall, and I’m totally psyched and excited (and honored!). It’s going to be a blast.

I find myself fretting quite a bit over the news. I wrote a half dozen postcards yesterday and mailed them (the ones listed on this activism checklist) and I’ve been writing and faxing letters to my congresspersons. The news is stressful and worrisome, and while I’d love to hide my head in the sand and hope for the best, the fact is: I can’t afford to do that because others can’t afford to do that. I must stand up for those who cannot, and for those who need me to. You may disagree, but that’s your right. My right is to call, write, protest, fax, and blog Smile

All the while playing music. Come see Carmen! Go see your local symphony or opera company. Support local artists: don’t JUST go to the big symphony or big opera company, go see a small group, a chamber group, a start-up troupe. Just like going to a mom and pop owned restaurant puts more money directly into their pocket, going to a concert by a small organization supports them more than going to the concert by the well established organization does! Don’t assume you won’t like it as much. Of course, I also attend the symphony here and go to Jazz at the Bistro, but I also try to see smaller groups (well, when my friends play, and when I’m not playing!) as those are important too. Don’t just attend Opera Theatre St Louis, go to Winter Opera and Union Avenue and more. Don’t just see the St Louis Symphony, go to the Metropolitan Orchestra of St Louis, the Arianna String Quartet, the Perseid (hah, that’s me). Go see local productions of musicals. Support artists, and support your heart and soul.

There’s my sales pitch. Maybe the federal government sees no need for the arts, but I think they are incredibly important on so many levels, ranging from emotional levels to economic levels. The arts boost the economy.

Oh, and I mention classical music mostly, but pick what you love best: visual art, musicals, plays, etc. It’s all great!

Apologies for the random post. I had a lot of ideas and typed them quickly. Publish now and off I go!

Hope

It was a good day for a March

January 21, 2017 hannahviolin 2 Comments

If I were a superstitious person, I’d say it was a sign that yesterday was raining, but today was bright, sunny, and warm. As much as I enjoy sleeping in on a day off, I got up early and went downtown to march. Today was the Women’s March. To me the March was about equal rights for everybody and solidarity, for starters.

I didn’t make a sign. Maybe next time. I must admit, I have been upset, but I haven’t called my representatives. That will change. I get phone shy sometimes, but that’s no excuse. People were complaining that the March won’t change anything, that people can’t just march and expect change, that women wearing pink hats represents everything that is wrong with women, and that calling it a Women’s March excludes men. I think all of those things are wrong-in fact, the only complaint I heard that I might agree with is that more people of color weren’t represented. I wish I’d seen more people of color at the March, but I think we start here, and we hopefully get better. If women want to wear pink hats, they can. I was surprised by how many of my friends can knit! Louie wanted to go to the Women’s March, and if more women insisted on dating men who were strong enough to handle being around strong women, if more women and men raised men who were strong enough to handle being around strong women, well, then perhaps we wouldn’t be arguing that women’s rights ARE human rights. And I don’t know what will bring about change, but I am pretty sure sitting back and complaining about everything won’t. Plenty of us have already tried that, and look where we are. I think it’s time to try something new.

We marched up Market street for about a mile to near the Arch. Soon the construction will be done and we can march all the way to the Arch. It was a non-violent march, and the police were helpful with directing traffic, leading, and bringing up the rear. People had lots of great signs, and it was just great. I felt lifted up by all the positivity and hopefulness around me, and when the crowd started chanting “Yes, we can” I felt very emotional. Our current leadership won’t stop our message of hope. I know we will have some difficult times ahead, and that we have been through difficult times, and that many people have it much worse and much harder than I do, and part of my job is to help when and how I can. I felt that marching today was the least I could do. We saw one of our senators, Senator Claire McCaskill, marching too. It was a good day for St Louis.