Day 1, May 17: The day after the tornado, we were leaving for a trip to Vancouver and then a cruise to Alaska. And by the day after the tornado, I mean, our flight was at 6 am, and it was an international flight, so they always say, oh get there 3 hours ahead of time. Of course, then everybody says, oh, you don’t need to do that, and “it’s just Canada” and “that’s really early” so we really had no idea what to do. We decided to compromise and plan to arrive at the airport two hours ahead of time, which was likely entirely too early, but Louie and I are THOSE people who would rather be early to the airport than late. Also we would be able to get coffee and charge our phones there anyway, because we had no power.

So let me set the scene. No power. Thankfully we had water. Oh, and the main access to our street was blocked by a tree, so how would we get picked up by a Lyft/Uber? Which we needed to be picked up around 3:45 am? I decided our best bet would be to meet them at the end of the block by a main street instead, and go from there. Frankly, on the best of days some drivers can’t even find the house, so I didn’t want to tell them how to find it by using an alley and dodging trees! But the driver called and he insisted he would come and get us, and he did find the house. It was surreal leaving. It was pitch black and we were indeed dodging trees and wreckage, and then…it was absolutely normal within a few blocks, nothing had happened at all.

Anyway, we got to the airport, drank our coffee, and flew to Vancouver via Minneapolis. We took the Sky Train from the airport to Downtown and were planning to walk from the stop to our hotel, but first we were starving and realized a restaurant I had noted on the map as a good option was right there, so we ate first. It was a terrific vegan restaurant called Meet in Yaletown and I think everybody would like it, but those that eat plant based would especially love it.

I forget exactly what this was called, but it was potato patties with vegan caviar on top, and we split it for an appetizer.

It was lightly raining as we walked to the hotel. It was a fairly long walk, but we thought it was nice to walk anyway, and enjoyed looking around. Finally we made it to our destination and home for the next four nights, the Sylvia Hotel.

It is a historic hotel with ivy growing up the walls. It was one of the best deals I could find and still be in the downtown area. We were right by English Bay Beach.

We cleaned up and relaxed a bit, and then went out to explore.

It was important for Louie and I to get accustomed to our usual vacation selfie pose–we had walked up Denman Street from English Bay and I think this is overlooking Vancouver Harbour.

And we changed direction so you can see the buildings now.

The Olympic torch from the Vancouver Olympics in 2010! There was a seagull on top so I guess it is a nice place to have a nest now.

We had a reservation for a sushi dinner at 6 pm so we were just wandering around getting the sense of the city and working up an appetite. It kept raining off and on, but never too much. Some of the streets were just full of restaurants, we were blown away by how many and how many nationalities were represented. I think you could eat at a different restaurant every day for years!

This building was bigger on top!

We had dinner at Sushi Bar Maumi, which was a great experience. The reservation was for 6 pm and they said they would unlock the doors at 5:45 and we should arrive 10 minutes early. We ended up being there a little early, so we waited outside, and at 5:45 on the dot we heard the doors unlock! We went in and got seated at the bar: everybody was seated around the bar, and we all ate the same thing, all in turn. The man you see above made all the dishes in front and his wife helped out with everything else, and it is just the two of them that run the place, one seating a night. We had a great time and really enjoyed ourselves.

After dinner, I was completely exhausted, between the time change and the early flight, so we walked home and I fell asleep pretty much right away.

Day 2, May 18: I thought it would be fun to do a bike tour to get a good overview of the city, so I booked a tour with a guide through Airbnb. His name was Ian and he came highly recommended. We took an uber to the meeting spot, which was near a bakery called Terra Breads, so we ate breakfast there first.

The rain had stopped, so this is another view of the hotel, while we were waiting for the Lyft/Uber.

We met the guide near this giant bird statue. It may be hard to know how large it is, but trust me. Large.

It was a small group of us on the tour, just 5 and the guide, which was a good number: small enough to easily stay together, but large enough not to feel awkward. And the weather was gorgeous, not rainy at all like the day before! Off we went.

Ian immediately showed himself to be a great guide and good with bikes as well. He got us set up well, and did a great job helping us feel comfortable, giving us great information about Vancouver, and having a nice mix of riding and stopping. I was able to take plenty of pictures along the way but still we felt like we did plenty of riding. It also helps that Vancouver is a terrific biking city with dedicated bike lanes!

We saw the skinniest building in the world? Or at least one of, and certainly very skinny. It’s just that black part, and is an insurance company. The insurance company has another building nearby where they do more of their business.

The famous Gastown clock. We didn’t see it go off on the hour, but we did catch it on the 45 minutes. It was very exciting. Very.

And then we headed into Stanley Park, which Ian said was bigger than Central Park! It seemed to not be bigger than Forest Park, though I believe it is a bit wilder and I hate to say it, prettier and certainly has more bodies of water around it.

Gotta have our biking pictures! I wore that black zip up hoodie practically everyday of the trip–it was super versatile and I loved it. It was black, wool, had zip up pockets AND thumb holes.

The camera keeps getting further away!

You can see the Lions Gate Bridge. Spoiler alert: later in the trip we will go under this bridge on our cruise ship.

This was some of the “wild” part. If you don’t know, Vancouver is in a temperate rain forest climate, which basically means it is super green with lots of plants and ferns and mosses. I was blown away by how lush and well, green, everything was. We had to walk our bikes on this path a little ways.

We got to this beautiful lagoon with some dams built by beavers. At one point we started biking again and I ALMOST crashed into Louie but I did not. But I almost did.

This is a stump from when they did logging back in the day. You can’t really tell from the picture but it was gigantic. When you hear about “old growth” wood, it’s really something to see what they mean by that. And to imagine how people would cut these trees down using hand saws, and then roll them out without using machinery.

We continued on our bike tour around Stanley Park, past English Bay Beach and the Stanley Hotel (hi hotel!) and then we got onto a ferry over to Granville Island.

Technically it was an aquabus.

It was a quick trip across the water and then we had probably our most dangerous bit of biking because it was Sunday afternoon on Granville Island and it was wall to wall people and cars. It was a bit much for me! Too many people and cars. We lived, and we made it to a lovely bike path and then back around to Terra Breads to finish our tour. Overall we loved the tour and we would definitely recommend it to anyway who wanted to learn more about Vancouver and do some biking while they were at it.

After the tour, we got some sustenance at Terra Bakery again (ha!) and then ended up deciding to go back to Meet at Yaletown for lunch again. I was feeling hot and thirsty and we had seen quite a few things on the menu the day before that we wanted to try, so another visit seemed like a good idea. After lunch, we walked back to the hotel to relax.

Our friends Ben and Roz got into Vancouver and were meeting us for dinner this night. We had been texting, but it seemed to make sense just to meet for dinner. They were going on the cruise with us, but they were staying at a different hotel which wasn’t really near ours.

Louie and I walked around the water a bit before dinner, just enjoying the air. We thought it would be easy to get an uber, but it ended up being kind of annoying, but we managed finally. We were going to Kissa Tanto for dinner, which is a restaurant with a Michelin Star, the only one I have ever been to. We had a great time, enjoyed some lovely food, especially this pasta, which I didn’t photograph well, but I did propose marriage to.

It was also great fun to catch up with Ben and Roz: we actually hadn’t seen them in St Louis for awhile due to our busy schedules (the end of the year was insane, as you may know) so we were excited to spend more time together.

Kissa Tanto was right across the street from the Dollar Meat Store, which made me a little nervous with the title. Should meat cost a dollar? What is the quality of that meat?

That’s where I will leave off today. Next: more Vancouver!

It’s the law, every year I have to write a blog post called April Showers, because every year it rains for several days straight and I get depressed. That was last week.

But seriously, this has been a crazy time. I know I say that every year, but this year we added on getting a house on the market to the usual April craziness. Take on the usual getting ready for the end of the semester, preparing students for recitals, festivals, juries, tests, etc. Performances, rearranging schedules for a week of the Wizard of Oz. Louie taking a trip to Germany for a conference. The dryer breaks down and we need a new one. We get the old house on the market. This means we get it cleaned out and ready for pictures, no small feat. Louie spends spring break on this. I spend spring break working, because I do that. Then we spend all our free time continuing to work on it, and it goes on the market, and he goes to Germany and we get a few offers and we go under contract, woo hoo!!!

So then I went to Chicago for a weekend for a quick trip, which was super fun! I went to see a violin recital with Julia Fischer and Jan Liesiecki. I drove up with my friend Manuela and her husband one day, stayed overnight and then drove back the next.

I had a week not worrying about the house, air drying clothes because I needed to wait for Louie to return home to get the new dryer (we needed to deal with a gas line issue as well, thankfully the washer still worked well enough) and I even managed to get my taxes done! And now I am in the home stretch, the show I’m playing is super fun, my taxes are filed though not yet paid (I will wait till the last minute for that), the world is burning but what can we do other than protest and call and I’ll protest when I’m not working I guess, and Louie is spending the weekend working on the house and I’ll spend the weekend at the Music Club Festival and playing the Wizard of Oz and seeing a student perform at Wash U. Two weeks left of class AND we close in two weeks. It’ll be a nice time to have a cash infusion. Long story as to why we moved two years ago and are selling now but it involved some renting, some repairs, some issues with a bunch of stuff, but I think it worked out for the best. And we ended up having a really terrific real estate agent for us.

Fingers crossed the rest of the month works out smoothly enough and there are no bombs dropped on us, figuratively or literally. I guess keep an eye on your signal chats, if you have them.

Okay, so I’m completely over COVID and have felt fine for some time, in case you were worried. I did fall off the map here a little bit, but that was due to us deciding to take a cruise in May! I never thought I would cruise again since Louie was opposed, but I convinced him to try an Alaskan cruise in May out of Vancouver. We are very excited, and I’ve been doing research on it when I have time rather than blogging. But today I thought, maybe I’ll blog a bit and catch you up on things.

February has been an odd month. I missed a bunch of stuff due to COVID, and then I was back at it, feeling great, not contagious (I hope, who really knows) and had a VERY busy Valentine’s day weekend. I played for three different romantic concerts and had a blast doing it, then it was a Metropolitan Orchestra concert and hearing a concert at the 560 with Karen Gomyo and Orion Weiss.

Dressed up for the concert, this one on viola.

Karen and Orion, smiling at each other after a successful performance.

The following week was a bit derailed by bad weather, with one rehearsal getting canceled and more online teaching. I finished off the week with a long day playing just a few songs with the St Louis Children’s Choirs, but it was fun.

In between it all I have been researching Alaska as well as working on an asynchronous online Violin Teaching Course I’m taking with the Royal Conservatory of Music (Canadian) but there are due dates every month. I have most of our trip planned as well as flights, hotels, and many excursions. It will be a blast!

March looks very busy: both Louie and I have some trips, mine very small overnight trips here and there and him a trip to Germany to present at a conference and visit an old friend. Luckily work has already reimbursed him for the flight so he doesn’t need to worry about funding–the situation with universities right now is scary and a bit dire, and we don’t know what will happen. Here’s an interesting article about university funding and why they can’t just “use their endowments” to cover things.

But we won’t let them ruin things, as I’ve said. Everybody has to do their own thing, but in my household we are doing our best to continue living our best lives WHILE doing what we can to make other people’s lives better too. I continue to donate to groups that are important to me (I donate regularly to Planned Parenthood, Kiva, Safe Connections, and a few more) and I call and email my representatives, for what it’s worth (more than it feels, I hope!). I would love to get out for a protest, but life is too busy right now, so I’m doing what I can. But I’m also continuing to do fun things and plan for the future, because I am hopeful…somewhat.

Here are two cats lying on top of radiators for warmth. The colder it gets outside the warmer the radiators get, and the happier the cats are!

This week is warmer though, highs in the high 50’s/low 60’s. It’s great!

Louie and I went to Jazz St Louis on Friday night with friends. We had dinner there and enjoyed a great show by Kendrick Smith and his band. I had a delicious salmon dinner and we had a great time.

We used to do a small subscription but the new CEO took away the parking perk so we figured it wasn’t worth subscribing. We also heard and read some bad things about him, and aren’t fans, but we wanted to support Kendrick Smith, as he’s a terrific local musician.

Anyway, this weekend is busy with some out of town gigs–for some reason this year I started getting invited to play some things further afield, nothing fancy or exotic, like southern Illinois and Kentucky, and I’ve done a few of them. I don’t know if the trend will continue, but the other weird thing is that they are mostly on viola…if the trend continues I’ll have to get a whole new blog for this thing, which seems tiring and difficult at my age!

Anyway, if you’ve been on an Alaskan cruise, I’d love recommendations, though don’t be mad if I don’t take them. We are visiting Vancouver for a few days, then sailing Holland America and stopping in Juneau, Skagway, and Ketchikan.

What a week it has been. Thursday I tested positive for COVID (symptoms, sore throat, congestion, chills) and then I spent some time telling various contractors for weekend gigs and that was a whole thing. I was really quite disappointed about missing stuff, but that’s the way of it, right?

So then I did some online teaching, not a lot, which was good for a few days because I definitely had two days of feeling quite lousy. But now I’m feeling much better but possibly still contagious, as I’m still congested. I haven’t taken a new test yet but might today.

It’s been a lot. This whole “living through an administrative coup” is tough, and takes a lot of emotional bandwidth. And today they are talking about how judge’s can’t tell people what to do, so I guess we know what that’s all about.

We are pretty stressed in the house, worrying about what these cuts to the NIH and NSF will do to Wash U and Louie’s job and our health insurance, but we also don’t want to let them win, so it’s a lot. A LOT. I left a whole bunch of voicemails on my senator’s voicemail boxes last night telling them how I felt about them ending cancer research, and I suggest you do to. If you don’t think this will decimate medical research, you are wrong.

My quartet played a concert at the Kemper Art Museum last week–isn’t that a fantastic backdrop? Also, I believe it was made with legos, if I’m remembering correctly. (The brain fog is real!)

We had a nice crowd and had a fantastic time. We played a piece by a fairly unknown composer named Maddalena Laura Sirmen and Debussy’s String Quartet. Side note: when I was a girl I was told that we didn’t play music by women because women didn’t write music that was any good. I have since learned that of course that wasn’t true at all. And IN REAL TIME I am seeing how the men of the current regime are making people cover up evidence of women and people of color achieving greatness…if that isn’t a true lesson as to how much women and people of color have truly accomplished, yet these white men are so fragile that they can’t handle it…anyway, the piece by Sirmen was lovely and we plan to play more of her quartets. And of course Debussy was lovely as well, because women can write music and men can write music, and neither need to compete with one another.

While I was sick, which I arguably still am, I spent a lot of time lying in bed reading and petting these cats. I also spent too much time doomscrolling.

Things to do: make sure you are calling your reps. Yes, they may not care, but you may also give them strength to do the right thing, who knows. Protest if you can. Do nice things for others. And be sure to take time for yourself as well: do not let them destroy your mental health. They love making you upset! We can still have joy through our troubles.

Things nationally are bad (and internationally), but I figured, I should pop on and say hello on this sunny Monday.

Louie and I have attended quite a few events in the past few weeks: we saw two plays, one at the St Louis Repertory Theatre–Athena, and another at the Marcelle this past weekend by the Upstream Theatre, Pictures from a Revolution. Both were terrific.

We saw the symphony play with James Ehnes, and we saw two Great Artists Series concerts at Wash U: Emmanuel Pahud with Alessio Bax, and last night, Stephen Hough.

We also went for a hike one day, and I went to a needle felting class and felted a little bear.

Teaching has been good, but busy. And this week I have two performances and three rehearsals, so there’s a lot going on.

The cats enjoy the cold weather because it means cuddles and lots of radiator time. It’s been a bit warmer the past few days and I think they must be confused! “Why aren’t these hot metal chairs hotter?”

Muriel just does what she wants, and I’m so jealous.

Seen at a church near our house. We walked up to the Loop for dinner on Saturday night, Thai food at Fork and Stix, so yummy!

Anyway, that’s the quick rundown on me. Mentally, not too stressed, but I have moments of sheer panic and worry: Louie and I waffle between whether we need to get OUT and what that would mean, or whether we need to just take some deep breathes. I’m heartened by seeing protests, and I find that contacting my (useless, but still) senators and representative helps my mental state. Do what you have to do, but don’t give up.

And go see a play! We really have been enjoying it!

I have chosen to focus on my world. Last time, I spent 4 years being stressed out and horrified…this time I plan to keep an eye on the news (which is already both horrifying and exactly what we all thought would happen even as others, including many major media outlets, told us we were fearmongering and overreacting…but I digress…though at least there is the feeling of, yes, I was correct, I was not overreacting…) WHILE focusing on my personal world. Like, how would we be living if there weren’t news?

Of course, this makes me feel guilty that I do have such an insular and privileged life that if I ignore things I can mostly just live my life (for now!) while being concerned for many things. Because living my personal past reproductive age life is easy, but many of my friends are women of child-bearing years or before, many are on the ACA, many are lgbtqia+, many are immigrants…not to mention all the destruction from the fires in CA and how inadequate the federal government response to the next disaster is likely to be.

Focusing on what is right here: teaching started up last week and OH MY GOD IT IS SO COLD OUTSIDE–my phone says it is currently -1 degrees and for my international readers, that’s FAHRENHEIT. I would say I am grateful that I don’t have to go outside today and my students come to me, but I really need to go grocery shopping, ha! I’m grateful I have a giant purple winter coat that keeps me quite warm on days like today, and I’m grateful for my seat heaters. And my amazing radiant heat in the house: radiators are seriously where it’s at and we feel warm and cozy here.

Stay warm and stay informed, but stay calm and collected. We won’t let them ruin our lives: they love “triggering the libs” so the important thing to do is not be “triggered” but that doesn’t mean what they are doing isn’t also real. Gosh, it’s so awful and complicated, isn’t it? How sad that making other people upset is such a main priority! The thing I try to remind myself is that mostly they just want money and power, and again, how sad is that? It really shows me how glad I am about the choices I’ve made in my life about what’s important to me.