This whole week has been full of gorgeous, beautiful, 60 and 70 degree days.  And yet, have I managed to run outside?  No.  In fact, I’ve barely managed to run at all, due to my schedule, a bit of laziness, and a stomachache one day.  Hopefully tomorrow I can get outside!

So what have I been up to?  It’s been almost one week since I got engaged—the week has flown by!

I’ve done quite a bit of wedding research already, and have determined that very little can actually be decided at this point.  We need to wait until Chris finishes a few auditions before deciding when to get married…probably in May we can set the date.  I’d love to get married here in St. Louis, but if we were to end up moving, then there wouldn’t be any point.  We’ve also realized we do want a nice wedding with lots of family and friends there to celebrate with us.  Other than that, I don’t really know.

I made an account with theknot.com and they gave me a “handy” checklist of items I need to do.  For instance, right now I should be doing the following:

• Get organized! Start a notebook/file folder to house all your wedding-planning paperwork in one place, browse our Wedding Planning Basics area, and download The Knot Toolbar for easy access to all your online planning tools.
• Envision your wedding style and wedding colors — formal, eggplant-and-gold hotel reception? Or a modern, black-and-white loft? Colorful, tented, backyard barbecue celebration? Or exotic, orange-and-yellow beach wedding?
• Send out a just-engaged video Ecard and submit an engagement announcement to the local newspaper. You may also want to have your engagement photos taken in time for this.
• Having an engagement party? Set a date, draft a guest list, and order the invitations.
• Start your guest list! Decide approximately how many people you want to invite. Request “wish lists” from both sets of parents, then compile.
• Envision your wedding dress. (It’s never too early!) Begin by figuring out which wedding dress style will look best on you.

That’s not even all the tasks on the checklist that I should be doing right NOW, just some of them.  Should I be putting a wedding announcement in my hometown paper?  Getting engagement photos taken?  I am definitely “envisioning” my wedding dress though, I do love a good dress-shopping occasion.  I am beginning to realize that wedding planning can be a full time job—even though I am a wedding vendor myself, I don’t think I realized quite how much CAN go into wedding planning.

I love planning things.  Before the cruise last summer I spent weeks planning our excursions and researching the various options, printed out an elaborate itinerary with each day planned out with what to wear and bring and where to meet tours.  It was great!  I really enjoyed the process.  I want to plan my wedding in the same way.  The different would likely be that it is all in one day and involves many more people, both in the planning stages and of course at the event.  I want to consider simply what Chris and I want but need to take other people into account as well.

Okay, enough wedding mumbo-jumbo:  What else has been going on?

I finished Ed Kreitman’s new book, Teaching with an Open Heart.  Wow!  It’s a great book.  Really inspiring and beautifully written.  I can’t say that I agree with all the new age energy talk, but do love so many of his teaching ideas.  I have never seen him teach at an institute and I should change that. Not this summer though—I may go to Kansas to do Book Five with Susan Kempter but nothing else.  I know her course would be great, and the Kansas Institute pricing is really quite reasonable.

I taught a bunch of students, as usual.  Some of the students are doing just great, and a few have Solo and Ensemble competition coming up in a little over a week.  Some are disappointing me in their lack of practice and focus…I keep trying to inspire them, but sometimes it just gets too exhausting.  I know every teacher has thousands of inspirational ideas to get students to practice, but sometimes I just feel like giving up—how hard do I really have to work for each student?  I’m talking about students who are old enough to know they need to practice in order to get better and just don’t.  Why do I have to make all the effort and get absolutely nothing back?  This is why I am making some changes next school year…I am tired of making all this effort for very little return.  I can definitely relate to school teachers—you can’t make a child learn.  And yet you are made to feel incredibly guilty or like a failure when the child doesn’t learn, when perhaps the failing ISN’T on your end.  And maybe it’s not a failing of the child either, but the circumstances.  Just a little vent

This weekend I am playing La Traviata with Winter Opera St. Louis.  I’m also teaching a group class at the St. Louis School of Music tomorrow afternoon, and I’m planning to run 8 miles, plus my spinning class on Sunday.  I am excited that Monday is a school holiday, particularly as I work through the weekend.  I think it’ll be a fun weekend though—Chris has off work Saturday night so we might go out to dinner.

Oh, and fun fact:  the owner of Franco, where we went after we got engaged, also works out at my gym with a trainer.  Mike evidently talked to him about that earlier in the week, and I saw him today, but was shy and didn’t talk to him.  Perhaps I shall work up the nerve another time.

What are your weekend plans?

This week, in order to help me maintain my sanity (well, starting on Wednesday, after a horrendously negative attitude at the start of the week) I decided to focus on one technical problem that many of my class students share. 

Pancake wrist.

I don’t even know how that expression got started.  What does a collapsed left hand wrist have to do with a pancake? 

I guess it’s because pancakes are floppy?  One of my students also invented “waffle wrist” in which your wrist bumps in and out of pancake wrist.  You know, because waffles are bumpy.

For those who aren’t violin teachers:  you are probably asking yourself, what IS pancake wrist?

Well, it’s NOT this:

though that woman DOES have a pancake wrist cushion.

That is an example of “pancake wrist”.

It should look more like this:

In any case, we had a great time laughing about delicious breakfast food!  Perhaps next week I shall choose another technical issue to address in a funny breakfast manner.  Thoughts?