Dear readers:

Thank you for all reassuring me, both over the internet and in person, that you don’t think my blog is boring. I wasn’t seeking validation, (or was I, some would argue I suppose) but it was still delightful to receive it. That being said, I will still do my best to make my blog even more interesting. Interesting life equals interesting blog (combine with two parts of humor and bad writing).

I wrote a guest post on Meg’s blog about my trip to Paris. She made an error and said it was Kate’s post, but it was actually my post 🙂 Click over there and give it a read—it’s brand new content, never been published here!

I failed you all again though: no new guest Caturday post. I think I’ve learned that I need to write the post earlier in the week or it isn’t going to happen. I “promise” I’ll have one next Caturday. (Submissions are being gladly taken, just email me!)

Friday I went to get my nails done with my friend April—it was her birthday Saturday and she wanted an afternoon of fun.

The nail salon ladies definitely thought we were crazy.

I like my green nails!

I had a ton of gigs this weekend: three weddings and a church service.

A fair amount of time was spent in my car going from place to place.

I played a wedding at the zoo! I had never been, believe it or not. I keep talking with a friend about going but we haven’t made it yet. Soon I think.

Then it was April’s birthday party. One of her friends made homemade red velvet cupcakes for her.

(I like the cupcake stand.)

Dinner at Kim Ngan, a fairly new Vietnamese place on Grand Blvd. I love when I order something and the waitress looks at me skeptically and says, have you had that before? I often think it’s because I order the weird stuff (this had lots of seafood, including fishcakes which are awesome, but I think maybe most Americans don’t like it?). Anyway, the dish was fantastic—I forget what it was called but it was #30.

Oh, I saw this link on Facebook:  6 helpful reminders for the overwhelmed person. I thought it was interesting and helpful. This is a stressful week for me and I often react to stress like number 6 on the list.

So I promised guest Caturdays, and even though most of the time my blog is (I’m sure) one giant disappointment to you all, this time I’m totally going to do it!

I wanted to start with my friend and blog reader Michelle, who can be found on twitter @mamarcus17 and also has a food and restaurant blog at www.stlcheesegirl.com. The guest feature was really her idea, so I wanted to feature her cat, Haley today:

I kinda feel like I’m running a weird cat dating site right now. Haley is a beautiful black cat with glowing eyes. I suppose you don’t want to let her cross your path, huh? She probably doesn’t enjoy long walks on the beach or holding hands.

Unlike most cats, it seems that Haley will sleep in a bed designed for her. But she won’t be happy about it.

This one was labeled: “Haley’s new hat.” Which makes me wonder a) what her old hat looked like, and b) what the person who made her wear this for the picture looked like afterwards. That’s not a happy cat. I would like a closer look at the hat though!

This last one is my favorite. Imagine this staring at you when you wake up from a lazy afternoon nap…

SCARY. But that’s what you get for being so lazy. Judgment.

Anyway, if you want your cat to be featured or included in a future Caturday post, email me (hannahviolin at gmail dot com) your pictures and information. I’ve already gotten quite a few submissions so if I’ve gotten yours already, thanks! Should we make it a weird contest where you vote on your favorite? The winner could receive something like a free can of cat food or a handmade cathair sweater (does anyone knit with cat hair?)

Check out my post on Wendy’s Flatbread Sandwiches. Help a girl out by checking out the links in the posts, okay?

People get all up in arms about television spoilers.

Now.

Maybe I’m just old and lame, but if the shock of what is going to happen is the only thing keeping a show from being ruined, then it probably wasn’t that great to begin with. For instance: was the Sixth Sense such a great movie, really? Is the Star Wars Trilogy ruined once you know that Darth Vader is Luke’s father? And did you know that the Titanic SINKS??

I like rereading books and rewatching shows and movies that are good. Maybe I’m just not a fan of suspense and plot twists and surprises? Nonetheless, I don’t worry too much about spoilers.

Which brings us to the latest season of Breaking Bad. Currently I don’t have cable television but I got jealous of all the vague tweets and people raving about the latest season, so I purchased it on iTunes.

Hmm. I should have known better. I didn’t really think the first half of the “final” season was that great, and I’m not loving the rest of it either. For me, the show has lost what made it so great in the beginning. And honestly, it’s not that shocking OR unpredictable. Or I’m jaded and bitter and have a cold, black heart. Who knows.

I was getting really excited about practicing the same two bits of the Nutcracker Overture again. Practicing is hard work and serious business.

A friend sent this picture from the baseball game the other night. They do a promo of the Symphony playing “Meet Me in St Louis”. The season started this week and I’m excited to see Ein Heldenleben next week!

Probably this is too super classical nerdy for anybody outside of the strange world to get, but whenever I think of Ein Heldenleben—I think of this PDQ Bach quote—I believe it was for the piece “Bach Portrait”, a great work about What Copland did for Lincoln, what Beethoven did for Wellington, what Tchaikovsky did for little Russians, and what Richard Strauss did for himself. (I tried to find a video of it on the Youtube, but failed—I found Bach Portrait, but I believe the quote is from the introduction before the piece plays. Nonetheless. I promise you it’s very funny to hear it.)

Repeat of blog business from previous post: SEND ME YOUR CAT PICTURES FOR A VERY SPECIAL CATURDAY POST…read on for more information.

A few blog business items:

Check out my posts on Yoplait Fruitful and Wendy’s Flatbread Sandwiches. Help a girl out by checking out the links in the posts, okay?

Oh, and a great idea that started with a comment from a dear reader: want your cat to be included in a semi-regular kitty round up? (I imagine it’ll be on a Caturday)—email me (hannahviolin@gmail.com) with some awesome pictures of your kitty or kitties and I’ll include them in an upcoming post! If you have a blog I’d be happy to link to it, or a twitter handle or whatever. This could be a one time post or an ongoing thing, depending on YOU.

I feel like I just had a weekend, and now we are at the cusp of another one. It doesn’t help that I don’t necessarily work on Fridays (that is, I don’t teach on Fridays but if a job comes up, I take it) but I generally work on Saturdays. That means my weekend is Friday and Sunday, unless I have work, and then who knows. In reality, aren’t we all still recovering from Labor Day?

If you didn’t notice, I didn’t run that mud race last weekend. I decided I didn’t want to get up early to do something by myself, and I wasn’t ready anyway. I’ve been “running” more lately, but it’s really hard, and man, do I really prefer walking anyway. I don’t know what I want out of fitness, or life for that matter, but I’m just doing what I feel like right now, and it’ll all sort itself out.

I have that kind of exhausted feeling that comes with trying to do lots of different things. I’ve been hanging out friends, new and old, teaching lots of new students (new and old also!), playing lots of chamber music, and trying to keep up with all the requisite emails and phone calls that go along with being self-employed. I feel like I’m mostly dropping the ball on getting things done in a timely manner, but I finally feel like I have a handle on things enough to feel like they WILL get done, sooner or later. My current priority needs to be practicing for an upcoming sub list audition for the symphony here (just over a month) but I keep getting distracting by a thousand other things (this here blog too, but that’s just ten minutes or less a day).

My friend April brought me a fun little gift last night. I posted this video on Instagram, so I apologize for the repeat if you’ve seen it. Nothing like a fat bird to make everybody feel welcome, right?

I don’t know if you’ve picked up on this fact, but I play for a lot of weddings. If I’m lucky, I have more than one each weekend.

Friday night was at Chaumette Winery in St Genevieve.

We rode the golf cart from there (parking) up to the house in the background. It was a little frightening: riding on the back of the golf cart, holding onto my violin, stand, my friend’s stand, and the bag of music, and it was quite uphill. Luckily I work out!

I should add that Siri was no help in getting us there. At the last turn, she proudly announced we had arrived. We had not, but luckily the winery had signage. I guess they want people to find it.

It was a pretty nice night—not too hot, for once.

Saturday morning Jen asked me to go to the Tower Grove Farmer’s Market. Neither of us had ever been and thought it seemed like something we SHOULD do because people always rave about it.

Amazing toasted cheese sandwich. I say toasted because that is what they called it.

And why yes, I did purchase a purple vegetable.

Saturday’s wedding was at the Japanese Garden at the Botanical Gardens. It was very hot, and I ended up getting to the site before the previous wedding had finished, which was pretty funny. We listened to the earlier quartet play some nice recessional music. We also ended up having a short conversation with some very early guests for the next wedding—we always feel bad when people think we know the bride and groom, or perhaps even, know what we are going to play before we open up the music bags. We feel even worse when the guests tell us they couldn’t find a bathroom for the little girl so she just went “country style”. Somewhere—on the carefully landscaped Botanical Gardens. I’m really good at smiling and nodding!

That’s the earlier quartet, still playing. Yes, we all knew each other.

I feel like every time I play with the Rosewood Ensemble we play “Only Time” and every time I play with Serenade St Louis we play “Yellow.” I have a feeling demo recording are responsible.

Saturday night dinner at a new (to me) Vietnamese place:

Sunday afternoon I went to the Cardinals Game. I’m not actually a Cardinals fan—I’m a secret Braves fan—that is, I follow the Braves, but only out of the corner of my eye. I find if I start to root for them everything goes wrong and I just end up really disappointed, so I try not to follow or watch. I made the mistake of checking the standings before I went to the game to determine if I could root for the Cardinals without feeling bad, and decided that I could. Probably that will be a mistake.

Nice seats! And what’s a ball game without ballpark nachos?

Anyway, since this blog post is turning into a bit of a photo dump rather than anything with actual content (content, what’s that? Something overrated, like SEO, right?)…

This is now in my kitchen. You may or may not have noticed that I have a rather dry sense of humor.

One of the things that I didn’t really mention on the blog was that I moved over the summer. One of these days my life will be more settled and I’ll maybe even have a house that I live in, but today is not that day.

I was thinking back as to how many different places I’ve lived in since moving away from my childhood home to college.  Quite a few really—the dorm, my first apartment in Cleveland, basically another two apartments there, my place in Charlotte, back to Cleveland (3 different places) and now 3 different places here.  I’ve become an expert on moving really, and on packing and unpacking.  (Let’s see, that makes 11 places I’ve lived as an adult, and 3 before. Not counting long summer festivals! How many of you have lived in at least 14 different places for at least 9 months each?

Well, I lied. I’m hardly an expert on unpacking. Or any of those things. I just know I do it, and it is always a big pain! One thing that helped was that we had been saving all the boxes in the basement, so I didn’t have to stress over finding quality boxes. Another pro tip: you can just BUY moving boxes to begin with and then reuse them over and over. If you are a checklist type of person, there’s a neat little checklist from Real Simple that could be helpful.

My latest move was a bit of a challenge due to a timing constraint. We had to be out of the old place by a certain date, but weren’t guaranteed the keys for the new place until… the same date. It turned out we were able to get the keys the night before and drop off a few things, but it was a stressful time. I wasn’t sure if we needed to rent a storage place or if we’d need to park a truck somewhere overnight. In the end, the old landlord was super cool and we ended up hiring movers to load up, and then there was a brief window of time to frantically clean before the final walk through.

Other things I’ve learned about moving. The older you get, the less likely you want to do the move yourself. It isn’t that bad to hire movers. I’ve done moves all by myself in my car, I’ve rented a truck  and driven it (never again), I’ve rented a truck and hired movers, and this time, I rented movers and a truck. It was definitely the easiest and lowest stress option. It was a bit more expensive, and the stress was hoping that they would finish up in the amount of time/money I thought it would be, but it was a safe move and nothing got broken. And my friends do enough for me: I can’t ask them to help me move anymore, and I’m not willing to do it for them! Also by the time you pay for pizza and beer for everybody, it’s really only a little move to just have somebody else do it for you. (So yeah, that means I don’t help friends move either, sorry I’m not sorry, even though I work out 😉 )

I suppose the final suggestion to make moving easier would be to stop doing it so much, settle down, buy a house, that kind of thing. But, as I say, life’s an adventure, and moving is part of that. Getting to live in different neighborhoods and experience different places is part of the fun!