Category Archives: Random thoughts

Random thoughts, Teaching

Winter Was Here

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It’s been quite the week of cold and snow, but nothing like many in Texas and other places are going through.

Monday was already off my public school job, but it was snowing all day and my college class also got canceled. Since all my private students are online I taught them as usual, except one who was having internet issues, for about 2 hours of students. I got a lot of other stuff done on this day!

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Tuesday was a snow day from my morning job, but the rest of the day was still on, with the exception of two students who had to cancel for weather related issues. Tuesdays are a busy day this semester, with 3 hours of college teaching on top of an already long private teaching afternoon and evening (6 hours, which is a long time to teach from one chair.) It was nice having the early morning off.

Wednesday was still very cold, but school was on. I took Louie’s Subaru into my morning job and that ended up being a great decision on my drive home, when it was snowing again. Not a lot of accumulation thankfully but the roads were awful for my return home commute. Wednesdays aren’t so bad, and I just had a morning class I’m taking, 1 college student, and about 3 1/2 hours of students.

Thursday wasn’t as cold as the other days, but it’s thankfully the day I don’t have to go into school at all, so I taught my morning class virtually (I wouldn’t mind going in, but I do get a little more sleep not doing so, and I don’t have to go out in the single digit morning temps!). I have one morning student on Thursday but got a workout and shower in beforehand, and then the afternoon had 1 college student and about 4 1/2 hours of private teaching.

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Friday ended up also being fairly easy, with only 3 hours of private teaching and 1 hour of college teaching. One student on Friday I let move to Saturday due to big tuning problems (the problem with virtual teaching is that it is hard to help them and even those that have gotten pretty good at it still have trouble with the extreme temps).

Saturday was my busiest Saturday in months. I had a morning student, my usual improvisation class, and then I had a recording session (I had been oddly stressed about it, but it ended up being easy) and then a quartet rehearsal for an upcoming streaming concert we are playing on.

So that was my week. I had probably a few more cancellations than normal, due to the snow and some serious tuning issues. It was a pretty decent week…I often feel as if I just work and each day is a slog to the end, but there are wonderful moments within. I think it’ll be easier when things get back to “in-person” teaching, hopefully by fall.

As far as playing with people again, it was nice to play with the quartet and it was a fun rehearsal. I don’t know what it means though, but I wasn’t that excited. I see my friends on social media and a few in person saying that they are so desperate to play together again, that they are missing their whole life and their whole identity, not playing with others, and I’m sitting here figuring out my studio policies for the fall and working on a slight change going to a flat rate policy and planning to say no to gigs likely until people stop asking, and feeling okay with that. I don’t miss it. I miss having colleagues and seeing people and chatting, and that will never be as nice, working from home and having a private studio, but I do have colleagues at my school jobs and get to chat sometimes, so that’s nice. I miss playing Mahler Symphonies, but I wasn’t doing that pre-pandemic anyway.

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Fun stuff this week:

We got a box from Purple Carrot, a vegan meal kit place. I have enjoyed the Purple Carrot boxes and I find them to be easier to make and slightly less involved than Blue Apron. Blue Apron meals do tend to be delicious though.

We have been watching Dr. Who. I knew we were behind a few seasons, and thought I’d figured out which seasons we hadn’t seen, but it turns out that I was totally wrong and had completely forgotten two entire seasons. We are watching them again and have mostly forgotten things but not entirely. We’ll get back to where we need to be soon.

I spent a good amount of time this week reading. I have been working through a lot of cozy mystery series’ by Dianna Xarissa through an Amazon Kindle Unlimited membership. I’m not sure if I mentioned a few other recent reads, so I’ll just do it again: The Nature of Fragile Things by Susan Meissner and The Book of Lost Names by Kristin Harmel. I think I did mention them, as I type this…but either way both are good, with a preference to the Book of Lost Names. That reminds me of another great book I enjoyed this year by Jodi Picoult, The Book of Two Ways, which I loved, and you should also read the American Royals by Katharine McGee.

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The house across the street from me is for sale, so if you want to be my neighbor that’s an option. Our neighbor said the market is really hot right now so he is selling and plans to rent for awhile and then buy again when things settle down. Sometimes I think I must know nothing about money, because I’m happy to just stay in this little house that needs some work because it’s home and it’s nice enough, and I don’t want to move again…but then again there’s no mortgage on it and the electric bill is only about $75 a month average and that’s being pretty comfortable year-round. I don’t know…it would be nice to have a house that wasn’t kind of weirdly set up and needed some work done (the kitchen here is particularly awful) but I’ve spent so much time here over the past year that I just don’t even know any better! I’m not sure where I was going with that beginning though, except to say that, I would worry if I sold my house and got out of the market that it would just keep going up. I’m not sure why the market is going up, but imagine if you lived in California in the 90’s and figured you’d buy again when the prices dropped.

Nonetheless no one wins the comparison trap, and thankfully I never worry too much about my house: I know I will never win any interior decorating awards, and it is easier just to know that if you invite someone over it is likely their house is nicer, but perhaps my cooking is better. My cats are probably cuter too Smile But really, how better to be a friend that let your friends feel better about their own houses? At least, this is what I tell myself.

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Louie’s office: he set up a place on top of the filing cabinet for the cats to hang out. This is  a room that is very functional and useful but ugly: wood paneling and a mini-blind! The room also doesn’t have good heating and cooling because it was an additional at one time, so he sweats in the summer and runs a space heater in the winter (it gets very toasty and warm!). It overlooks the backyard and gets lots of natural light though, and he has all of his computer equipment set up and works from home many hours a day.

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After Louie finishes his doctorate we have some longer term house goals. This is looking like the end of Summer 2022. It was supposed to be earlier, but COVID and all the online teaching work has pushed it back. But the longer term goal is to remodel the garage in the back yard into a studio/guest house. We’re thinking pull out couch, full bath, and then I can mostly use it for my teaching, but when we have guests they can stay there as well. It seems far away, but I’ll still have a good 20 years left of my teaching career so that seems well worth it, even if it takes a few more years. I think once we start the project, if we really work at it, we can get it done in a summer. So maybe that means 2023 is garage summer, but gosh that seems far away! Maybe we’ll be able to start working on it a bit this summer, at least the big task of clearing it out.

Truly clutter is still our biggest issue. Both Louie and I are clutter people, in different ways, and while neither of us wants to be minimalists, we do have too many random things. I’m also realizing we probably just need two or three big bookcases to replace a few shorter ones and that could help a bit as well. (If you are local and getting rid of a large bookcase, let me know, as I’m not quite ready to look in the marketplace yet.)

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In any case, I think that’s enough randomness today! I had grand “week in the life” plans for this blog post, but then I started overanalyzing my house, and feeling bad about it. I think I’ll do a little cleaning and tidying now and then I’ll read Smile

Random thoughts

MORE SNOW

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We have been having quite the week of winter weather! Nothing deep, but lots of little bits of snow and ice. Sadly, there have been no snow days for me. I would have thought the best part of being a public school teacher (I’m doing a part time class) would be not driving in the bad weather, but NO they keep making us come!

It’s been an exhausting week, but I slept great last night and feel terrific today. It’s only Wednesday, but as I’ve finished my “driving to school” classes for the week, Wednesdays feel like the week is nearly behind me. That’s a fallacy though, there are many many more students left to teach.

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Boring stuff: I did a lot of paperwork before this in order to get my students signed up for festival. I’m catching up on some of my online observing (I observe recorded classes for the improvisation course I’m taken) and I planned my own improv classes for the week. I will likely finish what I’m doing and take a short reading break before lunch.

I finished two good books over the weekend: The Nature of Fragile Things by Susan Meissner and The Book of Lost Names by Kristin Harmel. Both are historical fiction, the first during the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906, and the second during World War 2. I recommend both, but the second I liked better.

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Miles doesn’t always pose well, but he does enjoy attention. We are getting closer and closer to the one year anniversary of having him home, which oddly coincidences with the one year anniversary of being “safer at home.” It will be an odd thing to celebrate, or not to celebrate. I will celebrate my parents having gotten their second vaccine shot, but it’s hard to celebrate much, when so many have lost so much.

I am trying to focus on positive things, and be more in the moment. In the moment, my house is warm, I am currently safe at home, and Miles probably has no memory of being anywhere other than here.

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Random thoughts

The Groundhog was right

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It’s been cold and snowy here, so I guess the groundhog was right! Fingers crossed for a snow day…sometime…

I have to say, I received some positive comments from my post the other day, and I welcome your thoughts. So often we musicians are expected to be thankful no matter what for our work and it’s considered bad form to be negative. And it may also seem that all other musicians you know are genuinely happy to play at any time, and it can feel quite lonely if you are questioning things!

Another thought I was rolling around in my head was a question one of my former classmates posted online: how do you definite success in your career? It may feel like if you aren’t making a living primarily playing music that you have failed your training, but I can tell you that isn’t true! Of course, you could also just say that I’m a failure so why can I give you advice Winking smile

Other random thoughts: my brother said he noticed I mentioned that two of my sisters had gotten their first vaccine shots. Now, this is a weird way to word things as I only have two sisters. So I guess I should clarify that both of my sisters (that I know of) got their first vaccine shots. This is because they live in different states than me. Here in Missouri, we are expected to teach children in the schools without having any vaccinations or testing.

I have been enjoying every aspect of my new teaching position this year except one…getting up really early. My entire life has changed. Since I’m getting up between 5:30 and 6 am I like to go to bed by 10 pm. I don’t know how I can reconcile that with playing any concerts ever again, because I hate being too tired. I guess time will tell!

I should really be taking more cat pictures, but I guess I just feel like they keep doing the same things. Sit in the basket. Sit on the cat tree. Sit on the file cabinet. Sit on the bed. Run around the house at top speed as soon as I go to bed. I’ll try to do better this week!

It’s Festival application time, so if you are a long time reader of my blog, you know that means lots of paperwork and stress for me. I have a group of students that participate in the National Federation of Music Clubs Spring Festival each year. It’s a great incentive to practice for them, but it ends up being a lot of work on my end once a year, in order to get the paperwork going. There is a book and lots of guidelines, and it’s very involved. I think I’ve got a few students this year that should be up for a trophy though, so I hope they do well! The Festival is online this year (again) so that means they are just making videos of themselves, and no live pianists are required. (Or dead pianists.)

I’m also working on observing more Improvisation Classes and learning how to teach Improvisation and Creative Ability Development further. I’m fascinated by how this will play out longer term for the students in my studio, but the ones doing the improvisation have been having fun, and I have been amazed at their creativity and musical ideas. This month is pentatonic scales leading up to some blues improv, and it’s been so much fun to work on.

It’s a busy time, but the school year is like that. I go back and forth between feeling like I’m totally overwhelmed and too busy, and feeling like it’s all absolutely fine and I have plenty of time. I blame the pandemic for the mood swings and worries…I never quite know how I’m going to feel on any given day. For instance, this morning I got up and felt like this job was the worst idea ever, but after my shower I felt just fine and I enjoyed teaching my class, and even felt like I did a pretty good job of getting them to have good technique and maybe they even enjoyed it. The good thing about teaching is that you can have your own goals for your students, and while teaching in a school program means I have to follow their goals, I can still have my own goals. And right now, my goal is to get and keep them playing, and give them a positive musical experience, because that’s all we need for being in a pandemic!

Sorry for all the randomness and odd details, but that’s what’s on my mind on this Monday morning. How are you?

Quarantine, Random thoughts

Saturday Morning

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When you have to wake up around 5:30 am several days a week, waking up after 7 am feels like an absolute delight. I didn’t need to get up today at any particular time, so I didn’t get up to make coffee until nearly 8 am. WEEKENDS.

I ordered seeds last night for the garden. I am planning on green beans, lima beans, and Swiss chard (Louie loves chard.) I think that’ll be it as I planted too many different things last year and only a few worked. I learned from some mistakes though, and look forward to fresh green beans as well as making some dilly beans, which are a pickled green bean with loads of garlic and dill and after they are done pickling, you can eat them right out of the jar and they are delicious.

Last weekend I made a quiche. I had broccoli and mushrooms on hand so I used those, along with a frozen pie crust I’d bought before the holidays but never used.

It was delicious!

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I also made Rhubarb muffins last weekend. I felt like doing some baking I guess! This weekend I have no baking plans, but the preserved lemons are ready so we may make my favorite chickpea and preserved lemon dish (Double it and serve with rice). We found last summer it is excellent with chutney on the side, and since I have some canned chutney that we should be eating as well, that will work. I haven’t been doing any canning lately because we have enough still.

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I have a long online class tomorrow and today we are expected to get some bad weather, so I don’t know if we will make it out of the house much this weekend. I guess we will see! I am not looking forward to the cold weather this week: we are looking at weather in the teens and lower, which we have been fortunate enough to avoid so far. Leaving the house at 6:30 am in that weather will not be fun!

I’m looking forward to next weekend: we are celebrating Valentine’s Day on Friday night with a dinner from Stone Soup Cottage. They deliver to the house, and by the time I went to order (a few weeks ago!) Saturday and Sunday were already sold out. Friday is our takeout night anyway as it’s a nice way to end the week, so we’ll celebrate that night. Stone Soup drops the food off at your house between 4 and 7 pm, then they leave directions on how to reheat everything, so it isn’t cold and soggy. We’ve done it at Louie’s mom’s house once when it was nicer outside (ate outside together) and once at our home for Louie’s birthday. I’ll let you know how it goes! Spoiler alert: it does contain steak.

I saw that the National Park Service has an app that you can download that tells you about all the various parks. I downloaded it and now I’m wanting to go visit more places. We are hoping to do a little traveling this summer, visiting some family members and maybe some sightseeing along the way, if we are vaccinated by then (and them, though pretty much everybody in my family and Louie’s dad have their first shots), and now I’m looking up random NPS sites along the way. I realized we haven’t even been to all of the NPS sites in St Louis, so that’s on the list (the Ulysses S Grant Home) once we have a decent day for it. Also COVID concerns, so maybe that’ll be something for a bit later…I know people go inside for things, but it’s a question of limiting our risk. But I especially want us to go west, as there are many parks west (Utah, Nevada, California) that we need to visit. I suspect the next few years will be particularly busy, as people get to travel again, and maybe it’ll always be busy.

Anyway! It also looks like maybe today it won’t snow until later in the day, if at all, so maybe we’ll bundle up and do something after I teach my improvisation class this morning.

Quarantine, Random thoughts, Teaching

Career musings

It’s tough being a freelancer. Or maybe I should say, it was tough? I have had several phases of my career, and this latest one is certainly less stressful in many ways.

I started out as a full-time orchestra player, right out of grad school. I also taught and added in extra gigs and tried to make as much money as possible to start paying off student loans and start saving. I was young and had energy, drive, and a great love of music. My job tried to take that away from me, and ultimately I made a very personal choice to leave. I haven’t regretted that choice, though I sometimes wonder what my life would be like if I had stayed.

I then spent a few years being a more full-time freelancer and teaching in the Cleveland area. I played all the gigs I could, was a member of up to 5 different regional orchestras, and spent a lot of time driving to and from with small groups of friends. It felt very temporary, but it was a lot of fun and I had a large amount of satisfying and fulfilling musical experiences. I worked nearly every day and worked long hours, and it had its ups and downs.

I moved to St Louis then, and hoped to continue in  much the same way, but there weren’t the same opportunities…there weren’t 5 or more regional orchestras in driving distance, and in fact only one really, and that wasn’t even really within driving distance, so I tried to up my teaching and did what I could. I played a bunch of gigs, here and there, everywhere, trying to get my name out there, and ended up being really busy as well, but not having that many satisfying or fulfilling musical experiences. Truthfully my great love is orchestral playing, but my second great love is doing things my way, and the two are hard to reconcile.

I talked with a student yesterday who had her first full orchestra playing experience before her lesson, and she described it as overwhelming. It is! I recall my first time playing in an orchestra (with winds and percussion and all) and it is overwhelming, the sound is unlike anything you can ever experience, but it is amazing. As I’ve gotten older, I have come to terms with the fact that that just isn’t something I will do very much in my life, if at all, and that just might be okay. It’s a hard thing to come to terms with, honestly, but getting upset over a $150 gig that takes up two nights a week isn’t the same as playing a Shostakovich Symphony with a group.

I have a lot of thoughts about orchestral musicians, and what work is worth, and the music world, and they are often jumbled, every changing, and not without a little bit of bitterness but also with love and hope. I won’t share most of them here, but I will just say this: I’m tired of the stress, and I’m tired of the hustle. I have been busier teaching than I’ve ever been in my life, but it’s so much happier. I miss seeing colleagues, but I don’t miss feeling so replaceable and being belittled.

I have a group I’ve played with for years that I have debated quitting for awhile, because of how it makes me feel. Sometimes I really enjoy it, and other times I feel taken advantage of. I’ve been yelled at, I’ve had a score thrown at me by the conductor, and to add insult to injury, my position wasn’t even considered worth mentioning to a new contractor. Nothing about the group ever made me feel good as a person (or hadn’t in a long time), but I hung on because I occasionally enjoyed playing the music…that’s how my performing career has felt over the past few years, maybe since I moved here.

That’s not to say that every experience has been that way, but enough for me to say, enough. I read other musicians who say how much they miss playing together. Maybe I’ve made other musicians feel bad as well, but I don’t miss being made to feel bad. I don’t miss pouring my playing into a job only to be passed over in the future to somebody new or somebody who grew up here, or somebody who was more “connected.” Maybe people read this blog and say, well, she doesn’t want to be hired anyway, she has a bad attitude, but there have been years that I have said yes to every single job I could, showed up early and prepared, practiced for hours and hours, and that didn’t matter either. And then once I stopped working, during the pandemic, I didn’t miss it. I filled up my schedule with students and there I am.

I have thought about this because there are gigs coming back. Now, some of those are an easy no, because, well, there’s a pandemic. But how to balance it? There are people I do want to play with, and there will be jobs I do want to take, but there will also be ones I don’t want to take. I know if I say no jobs will dry up, but they also dry up when I say yes, so I’m not living in fear anymore.

I’m being honest here, because this is a tough profession, and you should all know it. I don’t want the accolades and the pressure anymore. I’m tired of it. I don’t miss the audiences. Maybe that will change, maybe I’ll want something different in a few years, I don’t know. Maybe once the pandemic is over I won’t be afraid of crowds anymore, but maybe I’m just tired. I know I play well enough to play anything I want, and I’m okay with that. I’ll always be asked first if I play in the St Louis Symphony, and unless the answer is yes people won’t ever think I’m any good, so who cares what they think anyway?

So, those are my current career musings. I added it up and I’m currently teaching about 40 hours a week, counting a little bit of driving around, but not counting grading or admin work. No wonder I feel so busy! We’ll see what I decide to do next fall (I think I need to drop something) but for now, I’ll just work and work, which is something I’ve always been good at, and I will hope that I make a positive impact on some of my students. I’m not going to pretend that music is some sacred thing, that being a music teacher or musician makes me a better person, because I think that’s rationalizing something that we are worried we are wasting our time doing. (A good friend once said, “Musicians always think they are doing the Lord’s Work” and that made me think!) I think music is worthwhile and it is fun to play the violin. I think learning to play an instrument is good thing for kids to do and helps them in their lives overall and that’s a good enough reason.

But that would be going off on another tangent, so I’ll just say…lots more students to teach today, and then a nice weekend of relaxing and trying to do something fun in the cold and during the pandemic before another long week of teaching.

What about you? Do you feel like the pandemic has made you second guess your life choices or change your trajectory or work-life balance?

Deep Thoughts, Quarantine, Random thoughts

Rainy Day

We’ve had some snow here, finally, though no snow day. And today I think all the snow is going to get washed away with rain…the weather says currently we are having a frozen mix but it just looks like rain to me so I think my app is a little off.

The weekend ahead is like all of the weekends, nothing really going on after my Saturday morning CAD (Improvisation) Class. I’ve been enjoying teaching two classes a week to a small amount of students, though I need a few more to really make it fun for everybody. Time will tell though, I’m sure.

This week was difficult as far as being exhausted and headache-y. The fall semester started up for both of my colleges so I had a full schedule, lots of computer time, plus getting up around 5:30 am to get to my before school classes in person three days a week. I am going to three different elementary schools in my district each week to teach one small class (ranges from 2 to 4 students). The district is good in that we are only teaching kids who are already in the same classroom, and we leave before the rest of the kids show up for the day. But it’s still a lot of being around people, compared to not being around people at all. I also started teaching a small ensemble class in person, only 4 of us total in a very large room.

The good news is that my parents and two of my sisters have gotten their first vaccination shots. I’m happy for them, but I’m a little jealous that other states are already inoculating teachers and Missouri says it’ll be a few more months. It’s odd, reading news stories about how children need to be back in school and we need to get teachers vaccinated so they can return to the classroom…they are back here in Missouri, with varying degrees of being allowed to work from home and varying degrees of how many students are back. My district is good in that they require mask wearing (no issues with the kids and that) and that they seem to be doing a good job contact tracing all illnesses. But still, it’s a risk, and the only thing I could have done to avoid the risk was to quit my job.

It’s also odd seeing people so upset about places reopening indoor dining here and there…I can’t imagine eating indoors at a restaurant. I just can’t. I haven’t eaten a meal with anybody except Louie since it got cold (we had a few outdoor get-togethers with friends earlier) and I haven’t eaten a meal indoors with anybody since my sister Leslie and her family left after visiting in early September. We knew their visit was a bit risky but they had been limiting their exposure at that point and so had we. Once Louie went back into the classroom in the fall I felt our risk as a couple was higher and now that we are both in person 4 to 5 times a week I continue to believe that any level of socializing outside of our house, barring some sort of very spaced/distanced outdoor activity would be incredibly irresponsible. It is both our responsibility not to bring COVID home from work but also not to take it there.

How do you all deal with the isolation? I spend entirely too much time online, yet I feel like that is one of my limited connections to people. I feel pretty isolated from any friends I had before, and I had already been feeling like most of those friendships were surfacey and limited anyway. Other friendships seemed to be based more on doing things which will likely return when doing things returns…I’d love to have a few more friends I could talk to, but I don’t feel like scheduling more zoom meetings, and sometimes texting feels exhausting. My work schedule this school year has been pretty exhausting, and though having the weekends free helps recover, I find myself just wanting to spend the weekend lying around reading and don’t have the energy for anything more, including social interaction of any form. Likely this is a bit of depression, but I’m hoping it’s all due to circumstances and will change with the change of weather, if nothing else.

I’ve been enjoying reading a ton of mystery novels lately. I like to find a long series and read the whole thing, so I get to experience one character finding dead body after dead body and helping the (often bumbling) detective solve the case. I particularly enjoy novels set in another country, usually England (currently reading a second series on the Isle of Mann, which is now on my list of places to visit someday.) I find reading is a nice break from hearing violin over the internet and it’s a quiet activity to do lying down.

I often wake up in the middle of the night stressed out about my work schedule and the future. The days are long, but absolutely possible, but I think it’s just getting up so early that gets me, and I (especially in the middle of the night) worry. I just worry, about the future of my career, the future of our country, and of our planet.

But I guess we will all continue pushing through, and keeping on. I think I’m just tired and need a change of scenery but that’s unlikely until after the school year finishes, so I’ll manage. I always remind myself many people have lived through worse, and while that’s true, it is pretty stressful living through a pandemic, dealing with the stress and worries of the coup and civil unrest (I find I cry a lot more often after January 6, it was some sort of breaking point for me), and trying to make it all work and hold it together all the time to be strong for the students. It’s a lot! I know other people have different or similar concerns, but we are all going through a lot right now.