I could start my post with all sorts of caveats, that I know it isn’t normal, that so many in the world are still struggling, etc. But, we are a fully vaccinated household, the vaccines are still working well against the variants, and we are doing things again and it is wonderful!
Not all of us are doing things all of the time
Louie is going to work in person most days. I have a lot of students coming to the house for lessons. It feels more like a workday when he is gone, so we both get more done.
We’ve done a few social activities, which is great! We had dinner with friends Saturday night, I had my first lunch with a friend date since the before times, and we went out to dinner last night at Louie in Demun for Louie’s stepdad’s birthday. (It was delicious, though we ate too much and then went to bed so I woke up in the night and tossed and turned a bit.)
This was on the wall behind me at Louie: it’s by Joshua Bell, a well known violinist At the opera!
We had purchased “Young Friends” tickets to Opera St Louis for Sunday night, and enjoyed a little picnic first and then saw Highway 1 by William Grant Still.
Our seats were not very good though!
Anyway, it’s been hectic here, but after a week in Arkansas it’s been a lot easier to handle it. I needed that break, and right now, I need another break, but I know it is coming up soon so I am doing well getting through my schedule. I think I’ll teach through July then like I said and take at least one more week off in August: I’m still waiting to hear more certainly when various family members might be visiting in August and that will inform my decision on time off. I’d love to take another trip somewhere, but I think it might just be a staycation with family visiting, with maybe some day trips.
We are planning to camp this weekend, however. I have reservations for two nights at Cuivre River State Park, but currently the weather is looking…not great! We’ll see what happens with the forecast over the next two days I guess. Thunderstorms and camping are not super fun, nor fun for the hiking we hoped to do on Saturday in between our camping nights. I made reservations because things get pretty full around here on the weekends, but who knows how the weather will be, right?
We’ve had some good stuff happening from the garden. We’ve been eating peas, chard, lettuce, and raspberries!
Day Lilies under the new tree.This lovely platter was a gift from Leslie. We enjoyed a home “happy hour” which just turned into dinner.
That’s it for now…people keep asking me do I have a lighter schedule in the summer. The answer is YES because I don’t have any 7:15 am classes, but I took a bunch of new private students, a few for probably year-round and a few for just summer lessons (keeping up between school orchestra years). I wanted to make sure to replace my graduating seniors, but many of my now-graduated seniors have not stopped lessons yet…so there are some busy teaching days! July is a bit lighter as people get more into camps and vacations, but I won’t fool myself. My schedule won’t be any lighter until I really make it so sometime. I have been fortunate during this time to have an incredibly full violin and viola studio with inquiries nearly every week for possible new students.
I have started 5 beginners in the past month and it’s been fun! I haven’t had so many beginners at once (not counting my school job) in over a decade, so it’s great to try some new strategies with old favorites. I could go on about how I teach beginners, but this isn’t a violin specific blog, so I won’t, but feel free to reach out 🙂
Keep your fingers crossed for the weather being decent this weekend! and tell me, what have you been up to this summer so far? Any interesting activities?
This is part 2 of our Arkansas Post-Covid Vaccination Trip. Go here for part 1, Two Nights in Little Rock.
It’s just about 1 hour drive from Little Rock to Hot Springs, so we did that rather easily. We couldn’t check into our Airbnb until after 3 pm, so we figured we would hit up the National Park first and see what there was to do and get the lay of the land.
Hot Springs National Park is unusual in that it is in the middle of the town of Hot Springs. Hot Springs is an interesting place, for sure, but it also is one of those places that you know has seen better days.
In a nutshell, there are a variety of bathhouses that are from the early 1900’s that have been preserved. The bathhouses were built to use the hot water from the hot springs in order to (the idea goes) improve people’s health. People came from far and wide to take baths and steam in the hot water fresh from the springs in Hot Springs. As time went on, this sort of thing fell out of fashion, and eventually the Park Service decided to preserve the houses for future generations. Only one bathhouse has been functioning the entire time and you can take baths there just like people did back in the day. Other houses have different purposes: a museum, a modern day spa, a store, a brewery, a small hotel, and more. They are all on one side of the street, called Bathhouse Row. On the other side of the street, there are all manner of tourist shops and restaurants, none of which are particularly good (yes, I’m a restaurant snob, but I also don’t need to buy any rocks on my vacation!) and the whole places feels a bit sad. Oh, and there are 4 lanes of traffic whizzing by with limited places to cross.
The National park is great! The surrounding infrastructure needs help. In addition to the bathhouses there is a hill with a grand promenade you can walk on, a variety of scenic drives through the surrounding mountains and quite a few hiking trails. The Park Service also did a great job with a bathhouse museum.
Things that could be improved: more crosswalks, perhaps less lanes to cross—why not make it a two lane road, widen sidewalks on both sides, more crosswalks (did I mention more crosswalks?) That would make it easier to go back and forth and ideally attract slightly more people to improve the eating establishments? Then, the brewery wasn’t open at all one of the days we were there: if you want this to be a tourist destination, day of the week must be irrelevant! And the bathhouse that functions like the old-timey bathhouses, Buckstaff Baths, are nearly impossible to reach via the phone. They need to work on that and answer the phones! Anyway, those are my actual suggestions…I also had other ideas like, add a herd of buffalo…I suppose part of the real problem is that visiting ARKANSAS just isn’t as exciting as visiting Colorado, Yellowstone, or France, and we now have easy access to hot tubs all over the country. But you know what, as you’ll see reading this and my other posts, it was a wonderful place to spend a week of vacation!
Anyway, back to the recap! We found parking easily and headed to Bathhouse Row. We arrived on Memorial Day, and it seemed pretty busy. The sun was shining and it was warm but not too hot. Perfect weather!
A view of bathhouse row. The buildings are each amazing in their own ways, beautiful architecture in a variety of styles.
The Fordyce Bathhouse was our first stop, as there was all manner of terrific information and brochures outside, and a wonderful museum about the history of the bathhouses inside.
I love when Parks do this: just give you ideas of what to do. I usually plan our activities in advance, but sometimes on a longer trip it is impossible to get it all ready and it’s so cool to be able to show up to a visitor’s center and say, okay, here are the cool things to do!
I should digress and say that I had been to Hot Springs before, as part of a road trip in 1989 with my family. I kept a diary of the trip, and gave four pages to Hot Springs. During that visit it seemed we camped at the Gulpha Gorge Campground and went to the museum as well. You can attempt to decipher my handwriting if you want: I did a great job describing the steps of the bath and also documented everything I ate. It starts on June 25.
We went into the museum, which was one way due to COVID. Masks were ambiguously required, so we wore them. It was neat to see all the steps of the baths, especially because…one of the activities we did have planned was a “traditional bathing package” at Buckstaff Baths the next morning.
The men’s floor had some elaborate sculptures and decor!
Where the water came in originally…supposedly…
After the museum, we walked around a bit, just to get a feel of things.
There are really quite a few trails. We followed some short ones, and then decided to do one of the scenic drives, the one around Hot Springs Mountain.
There were a few nice views, and at one point we decided to park and go off on foot on the Hot Springs Mountain Trail. It wasn’t terribly scenic (too many trees!) but it was very nice to walk around on. And it was very pretty!
There is a lookout tower on top of the mountain that you can go up for a price. We decided not to, but I’m sure the view is even nicer up there.
When you get to the end of the scenic drive, you go right by a spring that you can drink from. We filled up some water bottles, and yes, the water WAS very nice! Some of it is hot, some of it isn’t, and it all seemed to taste very clean.
We checked into our Airbnb next. The description said you could walk to the bathhouses, but a few commenters thought that wasn’t the best idea. I had thought we would, but we decided against it…it was a long walk through a less exciting neighborhood. However, it was a perfectly lovely place to stay and was a very short drive from the action.
We decided to have dinner at the brewery since it wasn’t open the next day. We had eaten a very early lunch so we were hungry earlier, and off we went.
The Superior Brewery is in an old bathhouse, which means there are old tile floors everywhere. It was pretty cool, even though we were sort of put in a less exciting room that we’d hoped for. We split a beer sampler and each got a sandwich. It was a fun time!
As we are old people, we went home after dinner and a short walk, and ended up watching TV.
The next morning we woke up to get ready for our baths at Buckstaff Baths. We ended up being ready to go early, so we drove up the other mountain, West Mountain, first, and just stopped at a few viewpoints. It was a rainy/foggy morning.
It was easy to find parking in town at a huge garage which was free and conveniently located. We were still early, so we walked around a bit more and looked at the various nooks and crannies of Bathhouse Row.
Our appointment for Buckstaff Baths was at 10:30 am, and they meant it, not a minute early. So we waited a few minutes, and then everybody who had the 10:30 am time waited in line to get our hands sanitized and fill out forms. Like, literally, they kept wiping down the table in between parties…I totally get businesses are having COVID protocols, but this would all be done if we all just got vaccinated, or if businesses could say, okay, just show your vaccine card and then we don’t have to pretend that taking your temperature and using hand sanitizer will stop the spread of COVID, when the thing that really stops it is the vaccine some of us have gotten…but I digress.
There are separate men’s and women’s floors, so Louie and I said adieu to each other and went our separate ways. (Pandemic living: it is still often weird not seeing him for a few hours). They take you up an elevator to a row of dressing rooms that look like they are from 1912, which they ARE. Buckstaff Baths has been in continuous operation as a bathhouse since then, with limited remodeling, though it was very clean and well taken care of. You get undressed and put your things in a locker and then the attendant wraps you in a sheet, toga style. You go into the next room and get into a bath (this was all described in my journal entries from 1989), and the water is pretty hot. Your attendant helps you get into the bath (be prepared to be undressed in front of her) and then you relax for 20 minutes. They may bring you hot spring water to drink, and you have a loofah to scrub with if you like.
Next you get out and go to an area with places to lie down, and they put hot towels under you and over you, and you lie there and continue relaxing. They will put a cool towel over your face. Next was the steam cabinet, where you sit in literally a cabinet, but have your head out, and you steam. Then you sit in a sitz bath, which is a tiny bathtub you yes, sit in. For me, all of the things in this paragraph I did wearing a sheet, though not always the same one, but Louie said in the men’s baths they were mostly totally naked for these parts. I suppose they think women are more modest. Lastly is the needle shower, a shower with dozens or perhaps hundreds of little needles of water coming at you from all directions.
After that they might take you to a cooling room, but I went straight into my 20 minute massage, which was part of the “traditional bathing package”. Louie ended up waiting in the cooling room for nearly 30 minutes, so I finished first and waited for him outside.
For obvious reasons I didn’t take any photos in the bathhouse, but it was lots of tile and marble and old timey looking stuff. I loved it and would highly recommend! It is really difficult to get in touch with them though, so plan ahead and keep calling. I think I booked about 6 to 8 weeks in advance, but I don’t know if that is necessary.
After our baths we were quite hungry, but wanted to get out of the downtown area for a bit, so we headed out to a restaurant that was near Lake Hamilton. That restaurant ended up being closed, but we found a nearby Mexican place called Jose’s and had a lovely lunch. We decided to visit Garvin Woodland Gardens next which was about 15 minutes away from the restaurant.
The gardens were really beautiful! They were lush and green and full of plants, well thought out, and wonderful to walk through.
There were various paths and bridges to take. We saw a lovely pond with koi which were fun to watch.
You can see it was rainy looking…we had umbrellas with us, but hoped it would hold off.
The gardens were right next to Lake Hamilton and had a few miles of trails that went further from the visitor’s center.
There was an area called the Children’s Gardens with a cave and a huge wooden structure called the Tree House and other neat stuff. We enjoyed it! This picture is taken from inside the cave.
The Treehouse from outside and from inside.
We decided to extend our walk onto a little connected almost island area which was called the Hixson Nature Preserve. It started raining after we walked for a bit though, but we were glad to have our umbrellas.
Until it started pouring, and then we were glad to be wearing shorts, and finally it was thundering and we were just walking as fast as we could to get back to the regular part of the gardens and ideally some sort of shelter.
Just as we were getting back to the Treehouse area we came across a garden employee driving a golf cart, who informed us that the gardens were closed due to the storm and we should head back to the visitor’s center to either wait it out, or we could ask for a refund. Well, DUH it was storming. What he did not do was offer us a ride back! So we got a little further and there was a pavilion of sorts so we stopped under it to take a little break from the rain, and then finally headed the rest of the way back. We didn’t ask for a refund because we had already seen all of the islands anyway, and so we just left.
The pavilion where we rested, which seems to host events and such. I believe it was called the Garvan Pavilion.
After the garden we both just wanted to be drier, so we headed back to our airbnb and cleaned up. We decided to relax a bit, and after awhile headed out for dinner.
We decided to have dinner at Rolando’s which served South American food. When we first got there it was a bit too crowded, so they told us to come back in 30 minutes. We went to walk around, but popped in at the Hot Springs Winery a few doors down and ended up doing a tasting and then purchasing a few bottles. The employee who helped us was super nice and friendly, and it was a nice thing to do while waiting for dinner.
Dinner was good. At this point it was pouring rain outside so we were just glad to be inside!
But also glad to eat some fish tacos, shrimp quesadillas and drink a couple of margaritas. After dinner we went home and watched TV: we watched Unorthodox on Netflix during this segment of the trip.
The next morning we woke up early due to a rooster crowing. He had been crowing the previous morning, but was extra excited this morning. I forgot to add that there was a stray cat around outside that had had food the first night but none the second night, and she was begging us for food for herself and her two kittens who were nearby. I can’t believe I didn’t a take a picture! Louie was heartbroken because we didn’t have any food, but I assume she will be okay: they all looked pretty well fed, not overly so, but good for feral cats. Hopefully whoever left the food will return, or she’ll make it on her own. (We were unclear by something our host had said, whether he was feeding them or if others were.) We checked out of our place then (which just meant we loaded up and left the key in the lockbox, love it) and had one more luxury planned.
Our airbnb in Hot Springs. It was the middle apartment of a triplex, and while it was nice, it was probably the least interesting place we stayed.
We went to Quapaw Bathhouse next, for the Quapaw package for couples. We had decided to splurge a bit on our vacation as we hadn’t done much of anything all year long. The Quapaw package had a couples bath, a massage, and a foot/scalp massage. We checked in and got changed into robes, and then were taken to our bath. This was a modern bath, a large jacuzzi tub, and we got to spend 20 minutes in it relaxing, then we were given cucumber water and sat around a bit. Next we went to another place to sit around, and finally were taken in for our massages. The massage and foot/scalp massage were one after the other and it was very nice and relaxing. The building was obviously modernized but the area with the baths still had many aspects from the past, but since I was in a robe and didn’t have my phone with me, I didn’t get any pictures either. We both really enjoyed our time at the Quapaw Bathhouse and Spa, but agreed if we had to pick one day, we would do the Buckstaff because it was more unique.
After that, we said goodbye to Hot Springs and headed north. Our next stop was a remote cabin in the Ozarks and was supposed to be about a 3 hour drive, so we planned to arrive by dinner. We had to get some groceries for the cabin, so we stopped at a Walmart about 30 minutes north and then after another hour or so ended up stopping at one more Mexican restaurant for lunch! We decided we had finally gotten caught up on eating at Mexican places after that: we both love Mexican food and hadn’t been to restaurants in so long it seemed like we were making up for lost time, but after the third one in a row we felt satiated, ha!
Let me know if you’ve been to Hot Springs and how your visit compared! Or if now you plan to go to check it out for yourself.
School’s out! I survived the year of teaching before school classes! It hasn’t hit me yet that I don’t have to wake up at 5:45 am again until September, but it will once…I don’t have to wake up so early.
For those reading, my studio recital on Sunday went really well. It was hot but no rain in sight, and occasionally a lovely breeze. Most people seemed to be happy to be there and had a good time. I’m SO glad I took a risk and did the recital outside, and I may do it again in the future because I personally thought it was fun. It might not have been the serious musical experience one gets inside, what with all the extra noises from people, sirens, and helicopters, but it was still a good performance opportunity.
Today is my last day of work for a week, yay! We are hitting the road for a bit and taking the week off to do so. When I get back I have a bunch of new students, some for only the summer and one or two who might be long term. I’m doing a fair amount of teaching this summer, which I hope I don’t regret. June will end up being pretty busy between this trip, a weekend camping trip, seeing an opera, and doing two online teaching seminars before we leave again to visit my sister and her family in western New York. It’s so wonderful to be able to travel again and go to restaurants and teach students in person. I hope as more and more get vaccinated that our COVID numbers really go down: there are still 1000 people dying a day, and that is ridiculous with the efficacy of the vaccine. Get vaccinated or wear a mask, please!
I have had to say goodbye to a few students this year. It was probably my biggest graduating “class” yet, with 4 high school seniors, two college seniors, and one grad student. I also am leaving Lindenwood University so I will miss some of those students too, and a few others moved away this year as well. (This is also why I’ve been taking some new ones!).
The cats are really enjoying their catio. Louie put a little cat door on it too, so that it can be open while the air conditioning is on inside. It has taken them some time to get used to the cat door though.
I will say, it’s been weird getting ready to leave town. We haven’t gone anywhere in ages…I suppose we don’t travel that much, compared to many…but I’m really looking forward to getting out of town. I know we traveled some last summer when others didn’t, but I hadn’t spent a night not at my house since we got back from our camping trip last August. I’m excited to see somewhere new!
Today is my first in-person studio recital since before the pandemic! I booked a pavilion at Tower Grover Park, and I am looking forward to having 22 kids and their families come and play and watch. Hopefully it goes well enough…naturally I’m a bit nervous about the details, and perhaps more so what with worrying about COVID and how it will all work out. The weather looks good: hot, but no rain. I think it’ll be a lot of fun for the students. If it goes well I will likely make this an annual event.
Life has been gradually changing to more “normal.” Last year for my birthday Louie’s mom gave a me a gift card to my choice of two restaurants, The Crossing or Acero. I didn’t want to use it for takeout, so we decided to go Friday night. (It was busy: I made the reservations over a week in advance because the weekend I first wanted was booked up). I highly recommend going to The Crossing for a special occasion dinner. The food and the service was fantastic. It was kind of odd being in a restaurant again, and just sitting and ordering food and eating and such, but it was wonderful. I’m so grateful to all the scientists who developed the COVID vaccine, and grateful to have gotten my vaccine and all of that. It was worth it for that buttery four course dinner. I had goat cheese and beet salad, tagliotelle with trumpet mushrooms, halibut, and fried strawberry pie. They also brought out a baked blue cheese spread with little toasted breads, and regular bread service which was so buttery it resembled a croissant.
Yesterday I taught and played a wedding. I don’t think I have any more weddings on the books right now, believe it or not. I don’t mind though I’m sure a few will pop up over the summer. I’ve been lucky enough to have more than enough teaching to keep me busy, and I’ve got a garden to tend to and other things to do on the weekends.
This was the peas a week ago or so. And now the lettuce on the ground is ready to harvest, in fact we ate a small salad of it yesterday, and the peas are another 6 inches taller and starting to flower.
You can see it is a constant battle in my yard against the weeds. I didn’t know we should be cutting back the raspberry bushes either (I am such a novice gardener!) so they are encroaching: after this summer we’ll prune them way back. And the grass is mostly clover and violets and they keep encroaching. We’ve had so much rain, and this picture was right after days of it, so lush and green! When I was younger I didn’t know cities were so lush and green.
I was really excited about the flowering until I realized that might mean the peas are ready while we are on vacation. We are going to Arkansas for a week right after school is done, and I’m worried we’ll miss the ideal time for peas. Oh well, it can’t be helped, I’m not changing the trip for the peas. Hopefully we won’t miss them all.
Random: awhile back my mom got a bunch of old slides put into digital forms and sorted them into albums. There was an album called “Hannah’s Childhood” and I decided to have it made into a photo book. This is a delightful collection of old photos of me and my family.
The last week of school is coming up, and I’m ready. It’s been a tough year for everybody, kids, parents, teachers, other people, and I think it’ll be a good summer. It often feels like the pandemic is over here. It’s not, but we are so fortunate in this country to have such excellent vaccines widely available! (The pandemic will be over when the performing arts have opened back up normally, and not until then.)
(I didn’t know what it meant at first to have a vaccine be 95 percent effective: at first glance it might seem that means you have a 5 percent chance of catching COVID. But that’s not what it means. Your chance of getting COVID is 95 percent lower with the vaccine, and may be as low at .04 percent chance of getting it.)
We ordered some patio furniture a few weeks ago from Overstock.com. It didn’t seem to really be overstocked though, because it said it would be shipped in 6 to 10 weeks! I looked around and found the same furniture at Home Depot, but it cost about $80 more for the set (two chairs, small table) so we decided to just wait it out. Well, we got “lucky” and it only took about a month to get here. I am pleased with it, and think it makes the house look sharper. It’ll also be a nice place for people to hang out outside, whether that is me and Louie, my students, friends, family, whatever.
We did a lot of organizing and some cleaning yesterday, and between this weeks organizing and last week’s garden extravaganza, I feel like we are starting to get a real hold on the house and its surroundings. The garage is still a bit of a mess, and a few closets here as well, but mostly I know what we have and where it is, and that now includes the garden and landscaping areas. My peas are growing well and grabbing onto their little poles.
The pictures are from Tuesday, so they’ve grown more since then. We are predicted to possibly get snow on Tuesday, but my understanding is that this should be okay for the peas and the chard also (I have a few tiny chard seedlings popping up), though my flower pots, I’m not sure. I have a few pots with things in them, some of which have some tiny tiny leaves popping up, do I bring them inside where the cat will definitely eat them? That’s a no, but maybe I could put them in the garage. I’ll keep my eyes on the forecast.
Other stuff going on: my parents are visiting next weekend, so I’ve taken Friday afternoon and Saturday morning off from teaching. I basically have a full week ahead though, but getting to the end of April means getting to the end of college classes….there’s only 3 more weeks and then I’ll gain about 9 hours a week back. That will be huge as far as having my days more free. I’ll have my early morning classes until the end of school, and I still regularly teach from 3 to 8 or 8:30 most days with a few morning or earlier students, but having more time during the day means I can relax a bit more and get things done during the week.
Another fun thing we did yesterday was put up a few tiles I wanted to hang in the bathroom. Louie is always hesitant to put things on the walls when it’s a “new” wall (aka dry wall rather that the old plaster with wood paneling on top) so I have to really convince him and let him come around. He agreed that the tiles looked really nice.
This was one I bought from Etsy awhile back because I thought it reminded me of Muriel and Miles and also matched the color scheme well.
The walls are light blue, though the photo doesn’t reflect that as well. They are definitely a little bluer in person.
And this little tile: I think it was a gift from Leslie years and years ago and I just never hung it up. I had it sitting on my dresser instead, but this is better.
You can see it is very small.
I am happy with the little touches I’ve made on the house over the years. I was thinking how Louie’s mom, who lives in a beautifully decorated house, full of art, plants, and other personal touches, once said she wished they had bought a vacation home just so she would have another house to decorate, that once she got hers full of things she loved she kind of wished she could keep going. Of course she moves things around and it’s not always the same (and I also think she was speaking a bit tongue-in-cheek), but I think that idea is what keeps so many people keep redecorating and remodeling: it’s fun to live around new places, and look for new little things to buy and display, isn’t it?
I also feel like we here in my house move a bit slower, and that’s okay too. Maybe it takes a year or move to finally decide where to put a tile, but that just means we are more deliberate people.
I can’t believe two things: 1) my parents are visiting next weekend, after this whole pandemic thing kept them from traveling for a long time and 2) my students are coming back to my house next week. Not all, but some. (It is absolutely their choice.) It will mean real pants, but I think it’ll be really great to see everybody after so long.
Oh, and 3) that snow is predicted for Tuesday. Nothing really big, but still. It’s late April!
We have been having a lot of rain, though I noticed my flowers in the front of the house still looked like they needed more. Maybe they actually needed more sun, I don’t know, they got all droopy and sad looking, so I watered them and moved them to the back where there is full sun. In the front the roof might have been keeping them from getting enough water from the rain, and also from the sun.
In any case, it’s been a busy two weeks, but things are settling down. I had some extra stuff for Holy Week (as the Catholics call it), a rehearsal one evening, and then some services on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday morning. I also got/had to attend one of my student’s senior recitals, which was wonderful, but was another thing to do. This week has been better but I was still exhausted from the previous week, so I’m really looking forward to relaxing and working around the house/garden today and tomorrow. I’ve gotten a bit obsessed with the garden. I got a few new tools, some great gloves, and all kinds of flower pots. I’ve already planted various flowers, trying to get some rhubarb going in one place for the future, and made a super crude pole area for some peas to climb up. Those I planted about a month ago and they are doing well (last I checked.) Today or tomorrow I need to do some weeding and keep working on the rest of the garden soil to get it ready for planting in early May. I also want to fill some new tiny pots I got and plant some flower seeds in them and see how that all goes.
I’ve been really excited about flowers this spring. It is likely because this spring feels so much more hopeful, what with vaccinations and perhaps returning to life, and also because I am getting older, and growing things is more appealing because time goes by faster, and also because I think I feel more settled into this house and have a better sense of ownership over it and the outside. And frankly, Louie doesn’t care if I plant things or weed, and he is happy if I make things better because he barely has the time for anything what with teaching all of his hybrid courses and working on his doctorate.
I’ve been working on some policy changes for my private studio going forward and trying to figure out what I want things to look like for the next few years, at least. It’s been fun, but it is phenomenal how much time I can spend revising a document to send to my students, and working with other stuff like that. I hope to add a few more students in the next month, and I’ve been trying to figure out how to make it all work. I also have been trying to streamline the “onboarding” process and have some ready to go materials to send people. It doesn’t really matter, because only about half of them read it anyway, and I know that I can be wordy, so another thing I’m doing with my new policy document is to make a quick “here’s the important stuff” list, followed with the real details.
I’m planning to start teaching again in person in about two weeks, and I realized I wanted another music stand. I used to give my students the music stand and not use one myself and I decided not to do that anymore, that I want a stand for my music and things. So of course I didn’t want to buy a black stand, because I am a colorful person, and it didn’t cost much more to buy a green stand! It matched my carpet more on the computer screen but I still love it. I can’t believe I’ll be having kids back in the house soon!
For anybody wondered: by then my household will be totally vaccinated, as well as quite a few of the parents of my students, as well as most of my adult students. I will ask everybody to wear masks nonetheless and we will run an air filter and have the windows open as long as possible. I will only be teaching about 1/2 of my students in person at this time, and I’ll limit each lesson to the student plus one parent or sibling in the house at once. They will be asked to have an online lesson if they have been exposed to anybody with COVID or have any potential symptoms/illness. Lastly, I will have each student wait outside if I am teaching an in-person student before their lesson so there is only one extra party in the house at any time. I think these precautions are MORE than the schools are doing yet also similar than what the schools are doing. We’ll also wash hands frequently and such, but I think if we are wearing masks it really covers most of the issues, especially with me being vaccinated.
Things I’m not doing: taking extra time between lessons. Some guidelines say to do that, but I don’t have the time. There will be many times I have online lessons in between in person lessons, but I’m not setting it up in any specific way. Everybody coming back has signed an agreement that they know COVID is contagious, that there is an inherent risk of some kind, and that they will follow all protocols and stay home if exposed or sick, and I think it’ll work out. Our vaccinated numbers here are only getting higher and higher.
I was thinking about how as a household with two adults, we can really say our household is protected against COVID after we are vaccinated, and those with kids have to wait longer. I was also thinking about the sort of fights between those with and those without kids, and how both sides always feel they are getting the brunt of the pain. As a childfree person, it is only in the past few years that people have stopped asked me when am I having kids, or why don’t I have kids, or telling me that I will understand (fill in the blank, ranging from true unconditional love to how to teach the violin properly) once I have kids. I have been insulted for not having children or told I’ll regret it, experienced overly personal questions about why I wouldn’t be having kids, and so on. At this point in my life, it doesn’t really bother me. There were times earlier in my life where I know I said similar things to people, said that not having kids was selfish, or asked overly personal questions about why people didn’t have kids, because I didn’t know any better either. We grow up surrounded by people with kids and you don’t realize there are people without kids, really, until you get older. At least I think for most people!
I think the pandemic was hard (IS hard) on everybody, and those with kids may think it is harder on them, and it may well be, but I know that the past year and months has been incredibly difficult for this household, and we are ready to be done with it. I know many have suffered more, and that many have had much more loss. I think we will have a collective grieving period, trying to recover, and I imagine it will be more difficult trying to grieve and recover from something that many never saw as a big deal, even as people died around them.
So those are my Saturday morning thoughts…mortality, grief, not having kids and disappointing my mother, and rain. The rain is lovely, and I hope it means my pea plants will grow tall.
