I decided to take two weeks off from teaching, which coincided with the days off from my school job. It’s not the same as all the schools, of course, and some students are very conscientious about life and don’t want any weeks off at all, but I think I needed the break.

It’s weird being IN the break, in a pandemic. I’m not used to having so much time off at home. Usually I go places when I’m off work (why wouldn’t you, with limited vacation time, of course you travel if you can afford it) so this is probably the longest I’ve been at home with nothing to do in a decade or more.

I’m glad I’m taking the break though. I could have taught some these first few days of the week, I’m sure, as most students are simply around, and the weather isn’t so great that people are dying to get out of the house. But I think taking a little break is good, and important, and soon enough we’ll be back to having lessons every week and school and that will go all the way through May, which seems like a few very long way away, but will likely fly by.

I am returning to “in-person” teaching for my school job. I say returning, but since it is a new job, I have never taught in-person there, so I’m a little nervous but excited about it. I’ll only be seeing students two mornings a week and the other two are online still. I feel reasonably good about the school’s precautions: I’ll be teaching a very small amount of students and the students stay in their classrooms. In school, they have only been staying with the other students in their classrooms, so we will teach the students in their classroom. The other thing that is good is that I’ll be there early, before school starts, so hardly anyone will be there and by the time all the students in the school are arriving, I’m leaving. And the school has done a good job keeping the numbers low and they don’t hesitate to quarantine classrooms as needed, which would involve me if necessary. I’m sure some of my in-person days will end up being online or canceled due to this sort of thing, but I am feeling pretty good about returning, and I’m looking forward to it (except for the cold, early morning commutes).

Teaching online for my private students will continue though, because it’s just too much, obviously, to have anybody come to the house, and I see too many kids spread out across various districts. I’m not sure when this will end…I needed a break from hearing violin over the internet though…it doesn’t help my headaches, being on the computer all day long.

We went to the Missouri History Museum on Saturday morning. We were probably two of about 10 total people that were there, so it ended up seeming like a good thing to do. I wanted to see the exhibit “Beyond the Ballot” which was about various women from St Louis or living in St Louis who helped or encouraged women’s rights over the years. I learned quite a lot, and then promptly forgot a large swath of it. One thing that stuck with me was that when St Louis become part of the United States (after the Louisiana Purchase) women lost a lot of rights they had previously had, such as the ability to purchase and own property. It’s amazing how horrible the United States has been in terms of white male supremacy for its entire life, and that as much as we are taught that it was same everywhere, I keep learning that it wasn’t.

After that we walked around Forest Park for awhile, which was lovely.

After that we watched entirely too much TV and that was it for the day. I did start getting back into cross-stitch after taking off from it the entire pandemic! I was really gung-ho about cross-stitch last fall, and then did too much over last Christmas break, and hurt my hand a bit, so I took a break, for evidently about a year.

I finished this little ornament which I had just barely started before. I also started on another project and have taken stock of what I’ve got on hand and what I want to do next.

Sunday we went out to Greensfelder County Park and hiked the Eagle Run Trail, which is a really nice trail for the area, about 3.5 miles, nothing too steep but not too boring. It was a bit muddy in places, but nothing too bad. We did run into another couple who said there were places that were practically impassable, but I think we lucked out on a different path than they had been on.

This creek had frozen and then the ice was all broken up when we saw it.

Hiking in Missouri is, as always, mostly just wandering in the woods, but after spending most of the day in your own house, it’s a nice thing to do, wander around the woods.

After hiking on Sunday I did some things around the house and then did the weekly “roll call” zoom meeting with my family. It was my parent’s anniversary (52 years!) so we all had a nice time chatting about Christmas and seeing all the gifts we and other people had given my 6 year old niece. My nephew has learned how to say “bye-bye” on calls, so at the end he gets really excited and yells it a lot and it’s hysterical, I guess ending the call is his favorite part.

Oh, and yesterday my aunt’s box of cookies was delivered, yay! Only one more to go, with no word on it.

Today I have a dentist appointment: I called up yesterday to make my next appointment and they had one the next day, why not! And my jury duty I thought I had next week is now postponed a year (I started worrying and sent a concerned email and they just postponed it a year) so I just have a small handful of things to do: get grades in for my school job, write one thing for another job I’m doing, and at some point I have some things to do for an online pedagogy class I’m taking, but I think I’ll put those off until after the New Year. Otherwise, more needlepoint, cooking, working out, and reading. I could be doing a lot more things around the house, but that all just seems like NOT vacation to me. I did clean out one closet, and perhaps I’ll do one more closet that needs it before school starts up again, but also, maybe I won’t.

How are you doing? What are you up to over the holidays?

And sometimes the days don’t even feel that long!

I thought I’d just pop in really quick to say hello. I worked through the weekend, but only because I took a really great online teaching seminar. I have a small addiction to online seminars, but hey, it’s not like there are any concerts to spend my money on. Well, actually the symphony here is putting on some small scale concerts, but I haven’t considered this because 1) they are only selling 100 tickets or something and 2) I don’t want to be inside with 100 people for an hour. Besides which, I’ve learned a ton, and my lessons are full of even more stuff for kids to learn.

Every time I think I get some great ideas figured out on how to teach and help my students get better, wrenches get thrown in. It’s not a straight line from, accept new student, make them commit to practicing 5 to 7 days a week, move on. Life happens, and even families with the best of intentions have issues with practicing regularly. So there is always a lot of troubleshooting! I also probably have a few students who I should encourage to move elsewhere, but it’s most for attendance issues. I do bug my students about their practicing, I ask them how much they practice and how often, and they sometimes get defensive, but it’s not a privacy thing…practicing between lessons is the only way to make any progress. A weekly music lesson won’t do a damn thing without practice in between.

Anyway, the weather has been really lovely lately. I’m still waiting on two butternut squash from the garden, but nothing else seems to be growing anymore.

I’m working on an interesting project this month with a local college, doing music for a play. It’s not going to be a live performance, due to COVID, but a sort of radio-style performance in which I will play some violin music in between scenes and acts and such. Rehearsals will be on the weekends (see, I get to work weekends again, haha!) and I’m looking forward to starting this weekend. It’ll mean I won’t have my free weekends almost all month, but it isn’t a huge time commitment. The director is the woman who wrote the Runaway Cupcake which I played in a few years ago, and she was great to work with, so I’m both nervous and looking forward to it.

Well, I’d better get moving on my day. I had off this morning and yesterday from my early morning class, and the same next week. The school is transitioning into in-person class…I’m not yet sure how that will affect us yet, but at some point we will be back in person. I guess that’s okay if we are all wearing masks and the classes aren’t too long—it looks like things are working out well for that sort of thing.

Sometimes I can’t believe we live the way we are, can you?

This is the real “back to school” week, as my new job started this morning. I have to get used to getting up at something like 6 am weekdays, which is early for me! (It’s early for anybody, I think.) I naturally woke up earlier than that because I was stressed. In any case, we had some technical glitches this morning, not due to anything I did, and only half my class showed up but it went well for what we had. Mondays are one of my busiest days with 7 hours of teaching! I have one new college student this week and several returning students, and it should be a fun week.

This past week was kind of crazy: I had three different playing jobs which was so weird! I was actually kind of stressed about it, because I have gotten used to only teaching and not having to worry about what to wear and when to be places other than, in front of my computer. But I did a recording for a church service, played at a retirement community (outside) and then played an orchestra concert, outside, in a park, with Leonard Slatkin! Which was awesome—it was with the Metropolitan Orchestra of St Louis, which is a group I play with quite often. The conductor of MOSL, Wendy Lea, set up a whole program and really went above and beyond. I don’t know if we were safe playing together, but we followed the best practices we could: everybody was on their own stage, spread out six feet or so, we were outdoors, and everybody who could play their instrument wearing a mask did so. The flute players had these weird caps on their flute heads that blocked their breath from going too far.

The audience may or may have been safe, I can’t be concerned about everybody. It looked like maybe only about half were wearing masks, which is concerning, and makes me NOT want to go back to St Charles (that’s where we played, at Frontier Park in St Charles) but they were pretty well distanced from one another. I don’t know if I would agree to do another large event like this one during the pandemic, but getting to play Beethoven’s Symphony no. 7 with Leonard Slatkin was pretty much well worth it!

The masked violinist!

It was really nice to see some colleagues…I hadn’t seen any of those people in six months or longer. It doesn’t feel like we’ve been doing this isolation thing for so long, yet it feels like forever, doesn’t it?

Other weekend happenings: baking zucchini muffins with the last of the garden zucchini! I made a recipe that made over three dozen muffins, but since I only have two muffin pans, rather than do in two batches I decided to make 24 muffins and a small loaf with the rest. I added some coconut and chocolate chips to the recipe because I had them on hand and wanted to use up the chips.

I think the next time I’m baking quick bread it’ll be pumpkin time! I can’t believe it’s almost fall and we are still in this pandemic with no end in sight. I read an opinion article recently talking about how we are in the risk mitigation part of the pandemic: we can’t stay at home all the time and avoid risk completely, but we have to make decisions about what to do and how to live our lives in the least risky way possible. Louie is off to the classroom today, but he is hopeful that the safety protocols the University has implemented will work for him (I think if he and those in the classroom follow the rules they will work).

Miles joined this little stuffed cat for a catnap in the kitten hammock. He barely fits but he makes it work.

I was excited to see two of the reviews of sheet music that I had written in the past year were in this month’s American String Teacher Journal.

We moved this green chair to make room for something else and Muriel immediately started sitting on it. She loves when furniture is in a different place.

I have done some serious meal planning this week, hoping to stay on top of things. We don’t have the option of running out for a quick meal out after a long day (whether or not we technically do, my risk assessment says no) so that means lots of cooking. I prefer to cook dinner after work and then have leftovers for lunches, so that means we often eat late, but it’s been working well. I have thought about cooking and doing dinner leftovers but it’s just not as fun. Louie and I tend to do our best chatting about the day while cooking so it is a good bonding experience as well.

I’m reading two books right now, switching back and forth between them. The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson, and The Broken Heart of America by Walter Johnson. Both are good reads but heavy.

How was your weekend? Reading any good books?

This has been a far less busy fall than usual, but I’ve managed to fill my days enough that writing blog posts has fallen by the wayside. Partly because I don’t actually think anyone is reading, but if you are, I am going to write more about Yellowstone soon, I promise.

I can’t believe we’ve been back a month! So much has happened, yet so little. I applied for, interviewed for, and accepted a new teaching position. It’s just in addition to my other positions but in the early morning. And it’s online for now, so it doesn’t seem terribly real, but it pays decently, I’m excited (it starts next week) and I figured in today’s world it wasn’t a good idea to turn down jobs because they are too early (7:15 am). It’s a before school strings position.

I have often said I don’t love teaching groups, but I haven’t tried it in awhile so I have probably grown enough to be fine with it. I have taken the attitude towards my career that when things fall into my lap I should take advantage of them, and it has mostly worked out well. Worse case I end up being entirely too busy and have to quit something at the end of the school year, but since performing isn’t really on the table, and I’m not even sure I want to return to the level of performing I was doing before, taking on more teaching makes sense.

The more I think about it, the more I realize I don’t actually miss performing that much. I do miss the warm feeling afterwards, but I don’t miss the stress before, worries about getting places (even a wedding can be quite stressful, would you believe) and being in the right place at the right time. Rarely was I able to perform with people where I felt I was having a transcendental musical experience….my true performing love is playing with a full orchestra, and since I’ve only done that about three times in the last 10 years, I have already said good-bye to it and made my peace (mostly) with not having orchestra in my life anymore. (The wash of sound around you and the feeling of contributing to something so much bigger than you are, in addition to the amazing repertoire.) So leaving more performing wouldn’t be a big deal at all. I attempted to fill the orchestra void with chamber music, since so many others seem to love that more, but my experiences have never been the same as those people. I do enjoy playing in the pit because it’s a fun time (and the stress of actually performing is a bit lower, with the camaraderie bumped up) and will continue to play Broadway shows when I am able and when they come back, but I’m just not sure about the rest.

I have been working on my teaching, as I’ve mentioned, and been really going over everything and reevaluating my methods. I’ve also been taking a lot of online workshops and getting even more ideas. My teaching lately has never been so good (I hope my students are appreciating it, honestly!). Just last night I participated in a wonderful seminar about tension release and the teacher leading it was so wonderful and creative. I have also been learning more about improvising and teaching improvisation and am planning to do a twice monthly online class for my students (and others) starting in October, so yesterday I spent an hour working on those ideas.

It’s a lot to do, actually, even if I just feel like I’ve sitting around. I’ve also been practicing viola to make a recording to do a little bit of online Suzuki teacher training on viola. I don’t have any formal viola training at all, and though occasionally I think of trying to take some lessons I’m not sure with whom (perhaps my sister Carrie, online!) and I also figure I would be better off at the time simply attempting to practice the instrument more and figure things out by practicing. Unlike the kids, I know that learning an instrument isn’t a magical experience and it really does take hard work.

So there’s my brain dump. I do feel like I mostly just think about teaching. We also have had a few socially distanced gatherings with a few friends here and there, and my sister Leslie and her family stopped by for less than 48 hours while they were driving cross country back home to Phoenix from their summer employment home. (Unemployment in this case, since they are musicians, but that’s another story).

I made an excellent zucchini cake with zucchini from the garden. I made black bean burgers, baba ganoush. pasta salad, roasted eggplant and pickled beet sandwiches, and potato salad.   I have become a much better cook during the pandemic though I still mostly follow recipes. I was talking with someone the other day who was saying they get blue apron but don’t really follow the recipes, they just cook using the ingredients. Which seemed weird to me, because while it IS nice having the precise amount of ingredient to use, it is the precise amount for the recipe on the card, so why not follow it? Sure, use your best judgment on how long things should take if the numbers don’t work out, but it makes more sense to attempt to make the actual dish, otherwise you might not have the right amount of ingredients, which defeats the whole purpose.

Books: I never write about what books I’ve read, but I recently have been working hard trying to catch up on my kindle. Lately I’ve read “How to Be an Antiracist” by Ibram X. Kendi, “Hood Feminism” by Mikki Kendall, “The Night Watchman” by Louise Erdrich, “Stony the Road” by Henry Louis Gates, Jr, and a decent amount of books from the cozy mystery genre that I will list only if somebody asks me to. (Email me or comment below for recommendations, I guess!).

Okay, it’s time for me to get going. Work out next, then get cleaned up and do some teaching.