Check out my Facebook page if you are interested. It’ll only be about 15 minutes. I’m playing just a few selections during my lunch hour. I am just me, no partner who plays music (though Louie does possess some guitars and is probably better at the ukulele than I am), so it’s just violin. It’ll be fun though, I hope, or perhaps take you away from your day to day for a few minutes. (As always, tips appreciated! And you’d think it would be free to put these things on, but there is some licensing involved for a few pieces I’m planning, plus, there’s me, I deserve to be paid )
My lunch hour becomes much longer after next week-it’s the last week of college teaching. Then I’m just doing my private students…nothing else until concerts and events start up again. I’m hoping my students are enjoying their online lessons enough. I’m planning a recital next month (online) and will just keep at it online until we can have in person lessons again. I have literally no idea when that will be…it will be quite sometime before I am comfortable having a parade of people coming into my house.
(Remember, I am accepting new online students!)
It probably won’t happen, but I’m planning a hypothetical summer vacation back to Yellowstone. We decided that would be great, to get out, camp, see some bison. I’m not expecting that it will happen, but we do have (refundable) camping reservations. Haha! I’d also really like to visit my sister and her family in Chautauqua this summer—they spend their summers there for a job and just bought a house, and we were planning to visit them. They are still hoping to go to and we are still hoping to visit, but only if it’s safe.
Today is a rainy day. I’ve done laundry, worked out, made burritos to freeze for later, made granola, attended a zoom birthday party, watched a facebook livestream concert, and practiced. Somehow it’s almost time to start cooking dinner and I don’t even remember how life functioned {before}. We wait until evening to have a drink, and I don’t wear real clothes anymore.
Tomorrow might be nicer. It’s possible a squirrel has eaten all the seeds from my garden, so my hope is to plant more seeds and maybe do another plot (it’s partly ready). It might be too wet for that but we’ll see.
How is it the date is it? Time is so slow…yet so fast. How long do we go on like this, and yet, how do we NOT go on like this?
I definitely feel like my life has gotten smaller. I am happy to watch things online, and Louie and I have enjoyed especially watching my sisters and brother-in-law play various concerts and stuff online too. But we are just here all the time, no events to attend, no colleagues to have random conversations with, few people we observe to tell somebody about later. No musicians to play WITH, no audience to play for. Just here. In my house, listening to the front storm door rattle against the wind. It feels busy here though, with two cats, plenty to do…so much media to interact with, but yet it’s a different kind of busy. There’s nowhere to go, did I mention that?
People ask each other, what do you miss most? I mean, I don’t even know. Everything. Being able to just go and do things, to run an errand, to go to work, to say, sure, see you tomorrow night, or sure, can’t wait for you to come visit in June! It’s the big things, like planning holidays and visiting friends and family. It’s the small things, like going for a run without worrying about how busy the sidewalks will be, or going to the store for milk only, or getting a hair cut. What will I do first when the world reopens? Nothing really…there isn’t going to be a reopen date. Gradually things will become more open, and we’ll venture out more…maybe this summer there even will be travel, with mask and sanitizer, who knows, maybe?! and then things will again flare up and we still won’t reliably be able to find toilet paper in the store and the pasta selection will be limited and we’ll be told, there are no shortages. I miss being able to go the store (I call the grocery store the store) and buy everything on the list, and if there isn’t something on the list, to just go on over to another store and have a huge change of finding it there, and not worrying about whether you are going to be getting or spreading a horrible virus to everybody around you.
But yet, we tell our friends, no, things are fine. Because in a way, yes, there are. If you have your health, if you are safe, if you are lucky enough to still be making some money, well, there are others who are not okay, and that is not me. I am okay enough. I am scrappy, I am used to working from home, and I am used to working hard. And I’m lucky that I have an amazing quarantine partner and we enjoy enough of the same TV shows to get along, and we have been having a decent time hanging out together every evening and cooking a lot of meals together. He is (as always) crazy busy with work and with his doctoral degree research so nobody here is bored. There may be occasional twinges of boredom, but there are too many books to read to actually be bored…I always say that adults can’t be bored, only children, and I am sticking with that even if it’s unpopular It’s also overwhelming at times, and while oddly, no I haven’t even really cried, that’s partly because this sort of thing is what anxious people like me thrive on. I am in my element with this. I am still worrying a lot, of course, but THIS is worth worrying about and therefore, I am handling it all pretty well.
So yeah. Check out my livestream on Monday if you can (and it’ll be up afterwards for later watching) and how are you? Are you hanging in there? Do you need anything that I can help with?