I have to say, this month has been the busiest in awhile. I think I say that every month, so I don’t even know anymore. I do know that I have 7 more mornings to wake up for class and then it’s SUMMMMMMMMMMMERRRRR!!!!

Last weekend was full. It started early with a Thursday night mini golf evening with Louie and a friend at nearby Magic Mini Golf. We were going to get dinner there, but the kitchen was closed (at 7:30pm?) so we went to Nudo House first and enjoyed dinner there instead. The weather was crazy, with heavy rainstorms all night long, and we definitely got a bit soaked going back and forth but we had a fun night with quite a few hole in ones. Holes in one?

I had two concerts Friday evening so I was busy working! I wasn’t super happy with my performance on either concert, but I suppose they were okay. I was really focused on getting my students ready for Festival the same weekend and hadn’t been able to practice as much as I might have, plus the constant weather changes were negatively affecting the way my violin sounded and bow felt, so I was a bit out of sorts.

Saturday was festival day #1 with 5 students playing, and afterwards we walked up to the Thurteen Carnival for a bit (before it was shut down), and then went to the Symphony concert that night. It was a nice concert with better seats than we usually buy because we got the tickets from some friends 🙂 They played a lot of Sibelius which was fun (and was getting us more excited to visit Finland this summer.)

Sunday morning I was at the festival all day, proctoring and grading theory tests. I didn’t get back until late afternoon (it was an easy job, but I just needed to be there for a long time.) I had 3 students perform that morning as well. After that we wanted to just do nothing, but Louie and I had made plans to do some work at our old house (someday this thing will go on the market but not yet) and then grab dinner nearby. We started watching Killing Eve that night as well, which is a fun show with Sandra Oh on Netflix with four seasons (at this time?).

Monday was back to work except that night we went to Louie’s mom’s for a Passover Seder, so it was another late night. It was just the four of us and we had a nice time.

And then the rest of the week just flew by: teaching, getting juries ready, getting performances lined for students, getting some things ready for four gigs this weekend, and keeping the house running (laundry and groceries are my main jobs). This is the last week of classes at Wash U: next week is juries and a few makeup lessons. I have 3 more weeks of private teaching but only 2 until the recital, and we are hard at work getting the school (my before school program) kids ready for their spring concert. I also have one student playing a concerto with his college orchestra (not Wash U, a local community college), and another playing with her school orchestra the same night as my own school that I hope to attend afterwards (she is sure it will be a longer concert and she is near the end, fingers crossed!). This weekend is mostly full of work for me: a wedding, a mass, a memorial service, and a concert, plus the Great Artists Series on Sunday night. If I can make it to May 13 things settle down tremendously after that.

It is not to say that I have been running around only working, but simply that I have been working enough that I haven’t had much bandwidth beyond that. I read a fun book this week: The 7 1/2 Lives of Evelyn Hardcastle (not to be confused with the 7 Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, which I am pretty sure I did for awhile). I’ve gotten in some nice walks and exercise, and listened to lots of podcasts. I have NOT done much cooking, but that’s fine, and I have done more practicing this week than last, as I didn’t care for the feeling of not playing as well as I would like last weekend. It makes me grumpy 🙂

How has your week been going? Any fun plans for the weekend?

I won’t say I always did this, but in recent memory I take Labor Day entirely off and it’s wonderful. Yesterday had that amazing feeling of, it’s Sunday but we have another day off! Maybe someday I will only teach four days a week and make Monday a second day off (or a day off, in the case of gigs.) In any case I’m looking forward to my day, though I have a few errand type things to do this morning (including grocery shopping).

The past two weeks have been good but busy. Work is ramping up, and there have been ups, downs, stressors, and relaxing/fun activities. Stressors include playing viola on a chamber music concert and feeling inadequate about it, some other performance things, and of course generally worrying about having overextended myself this semester with my teaching schedule. Ups include getting to teach the Tchaikovsky and Mendelssohn Concertos both TWICE last week, having a fun wine dinner with friends at the Whittemore House Friday house (this would doublecount as a relaxing/fun activities), feeling valued by being asked to teach more students than every at Wash U, finding out both of my students who auditioned for orchestras at the Community Music School got in, and more.

Downs are things like: worrying about a friend’s upcoming surgery, feeling inadequate at the viola and sort of missing out on playing the violin on the concert instead, sometimes feeling left out in social settings (though I’ve been working on it), feeling overly tired some days and not giving students my best (I was BRAINDEAD by Friday evening.)

Relaxing and fun activities: Other than the Whittemore house wine dinner, we had dinner at a new to us restaurant called Diego’s Cantina. It was fine but not my favorite, but we sat outside and the weather was lovely…but then the table next to us started playing music on their phone, I kid you not, even though there was already music playing over the speakers. It was infuriating and ridiculous. In any case, we ate and left and then went home to relax and watch Suits, which Netflix finally convinced us to start watching.

We’ve also hosted some friends for brunch AND dinner recently, as well as having gone out to eat with various other friends and Louie’s family-the end of August was a flurry of social activities and I hope to continue hosting people and seeing friends. It’s so easy to get caught up in the busy-ness of the fall season (this is truly the post-COVID schedule, not that COVID is gone, but that any ill affects COVID put on concert scheduling are gone, and perhaps more people are playing violin than ever) and it’s nice to keep seeing friends and feel like there is slightly more to life than fixing bow holds and telling people when to taper a phrase more.

I know I go back and forth on this blog about what I want to do with my schedule. In June I was thinking I wanted to cut back on teaching a bit, and while I actually haven’t added many new students to my private studio, I am teaching my highest college workload ever. This is a variable thing, and I figured the opportunity might not present itself again (I usually have 4-6 hours and I’m actually at 10) so it was worth doing, especially to get to teach some more advanced students, and I always love my Wash U students. But it’s a lot on top of other things…I will make it work, but I think it’ll be an exhausting fall. I’m a little stressed about my before school job starting and the early morning hours: I feel like right now I have plenty going on but I’m not overwhelmed yet, and I worry it’ll push me over, but I also know I can fit it in because I’ve done it before. This may be my last year there, but I haven’t decided for sure–we’ll see in April or May.

I got up early this morning and went for a little run in the rain. It was probably better than running in the hot sun, but I get nervous about slipping so I didn’t go as fast as I might have otherwise. (Which isn’t very fast). I’m working on run/walk intervals and focusing on my form.

I start PT (as the cool kids say) on my knee next week. This excellent for-profit health care system we have meant that I had to wait three weeks for an appointment, totally logical right, that’s capitalism, for ya. Also I have no idea what it will cost, since again, that’s capitalism. But my doctor said that I should be fine running, and what better time to re-enter the world of running than when you have a knee injury? (This is a joke, but it seems to be working okay anyway.)

July has been fun but busy lately. I had a busy weekend of gigs, and I adored it. I go back and forth so much, do I want more work, do I want less work, but the truth is that I feel great satisfaction from completing things when life is busy and I enjoy performing, and this past weekend had a lot of both. I enjoyed my downtime and my free weekends during the pandemic, but I’ve been feeling more personal satisfaction from keeping my calendar a bit busier. I’ve also done a little more viola lately which has been a fun add-on activity, and I’m enjoying things right now where they are!

This week I’ve been working at a composer’s camp as part of a piano trio: the students are writing pieces for piano trio and we play them for them and give suggestions and advice. Tomorrow (wow, tomorrow is Friday already) we play a concert of all the pieces for the students and their parents. It’s been a really fun week! We also have our third Gateway Festival Orchestra concert this weekend–I’ve been playing Principal second this summer and enjoying that, and otherwise, the weekend is not so full of work. I am okay with that as I need a little recovery time from the past few weeks.

I’m off now to do another trio session at the composer’s camp. I have a full afternoon of teaching after that: teaching this summer has been good overall, and it’s fun to have a different schedule each week as some students are on vacation or have this or that camp. I enjoy the variety, which is probably why I have thrived so much as a freelancer!

I slept in this morning. I didn’t set an alarm. I woke up a few times, but didn’t check the time for awhile. Finally I checked the time, and…it was 7:46 am. I suppose that’s sleeping in, but if there is one thing that makes me feel old, it’s my inability to sleep in!

When I was younger people always told me once I had kids I wouldn’t be able to sleep in as much. I first started waking up early more naturally after the election of 2016, the worry and stress woke me up. Then the worry and stress became a constant…it never went away, I never was able to sleep in again. I go to bed earlier as well, rarely seeing past midnight and often asleep before 11 pm. Once I got my morning job, I would find myself in bed before 10 pm, and felt like sleeping past 6 am was a decadent proposition.

So, here’s the thing about aging: you do it, regardless of whether or not you have kids. In my own personal experience, I wake up early, I can’t sleep like I used to, I pee often (another thing I was told would happen once I had kids).

Aging happens regardless, doesn’t it, and it sneaks up on you. The pandemic took so much of our time and energy that everything else fell apart, but as we rebuilt our lives after it (not that it is over, but that is no longer new) I realized that we had been aging, that somehow we felt middle-aged, and responsible, and that our parents were even older and that everything is changing and that life is going on in that inexorable march towards death. And that sounds very dark and all of that, but it’s just the truth, and it’s good to accept that, and to figure out, what are we doing with the time we are given?

This may be why so many people changed what they are doing in their lives, and why people change along the way. I often feel that my fellow musicians judge me for teaching as much as I do. It is a badge of honor to play poorly paid gigs and to struggle, whereas teaching means, yes, dealing with lots of children and working hard, but also making a decent and regular living, but without as much glory. The students, they don’t always listen, they don’t always do what you say, they often play out of tune!

I keep thinking I need to cut back on teaching, that I am doing too much, I don’t know. My Music Staff says I have 46 active students, but that’s not entirely true: 6 of them are starting this summer but 5 of them are quitting at the end of May or over the summer. It is probably too many, but this is the American way, to work too much, isn’t it? The stock market is crashing, we are heading towards fascism, my body is not my own, and somehow working more and more feels like something I can do, to cover unexpected medical bills, to save for a hoped upon one day retirement, to save for a new car and to pay for trip to Norway! And I hope that I make a positive influence on every student I see, that I make their day better, not worse, and that they find music lessons a source of solace.

Kitties sleeping with their feet together.

I played a wedding job yesterday on viola, and really enjoyed the challenge. I hope I can do more of that! I know I am HannahVIOLIN but the viola is a fun part of my musical life now as well…

I mentioned our little catio a few posts back: the cats absolutely love sitting out on it. We can open the inside window, or keep it closed with a little cat-door, so the cats can come and go as they please. Miles can be found on it late at night or early in the morning, as well as all day long.

It’s screened in so they can enjoy the breeze, and get the full view on the sides as well. They sit there and get to yell at birds and squirrels and such also.

One more day of my early morning class and then it’s summer break! I can’t believe we are hear, that we have made it to the last full week of school. Tomorrow I am meeting a former student for lunch as well, which is always fun. I love catching up with former students and hearing how they are doing!