This has been a rough school year: I have been incredibly busy, with entirely too many students. This is a problem of my own making, because I always think, well, what if this new student ends up being my most favorite student, and I also think, if I don’t teach them, who will, what if they can’t find a teacher. I have to let go of these thoughts for a bit though, because my goal for the next school year is to NOT accept any new students and pare my schedule down a little bit by attrition. I don’t actually think this will cause me to make less money, but it will help me be a little less stressed out. TIME WILL TELL.

Truthfully, being too busy doesn’t really stress me out. It’s if the “busy” stuff is stressful, i.e. difficult performances or things like that. Otherwise, it’s easy to go from thing to thing, but it’s annoying to realize you ate all of your meals in the car or that you haven’t had a night off to relax or a morning to sleep in (not that I can sleep in anyways, but you know, to relax) in weeks. I’m beyond needing a day off, what would I do with a whole day off work anyway, but what about an evening off?

The good news is: summer is near! Unbelievably yesterday was the last day of classes at Wash U, so I just have a few more makeup lessons to teach as well as some juries to listen to, and I’ll be done until late August. That’s about 12 hours of my life that will be free again, which is going to be huge. You might even get the last installments of my Morocco trip on the blog in the next week, if you are lucky.

I love teaching at Wash U–it’s fun, the students are great–but it’ll be great to have some time off. The semester really flies by though: it’s just 14 weeks of lessons, and boom, done. So for the whole year that’s 28 lessons out of 52 weeks. Seems very part time, doesn’t it?

As far as my private students: we had Music Club Festival last weekend and next weekend is the recital, with about 20 students performing. We have another week of lessons after that, a makeup week (I do one makeup lesson for the whole year, though they can rearrange into empty spaces through the year if they want), and then it’s vacation for a bit before summer lessons.

Socially I haven’t been doing much, but Louie and I have gone to a few cultural performances: in the past two weeks we went to two plays (The End of the World Cabaret with Upstream Theater and The Half Life of Marie Curie with the St Louis Actors Studio), and a concert at the Sheldon with Edgar Meyer and Christian McBride. I did manage to get breakfast yesterday morning with a friend and have some lunch dates on the calendar for the next week. I also plan to get my first pedicure of the spring. Things really are tapering off and summer will be here, and then I’ll say to myself, how did I manage that schedule in the spring?

Louie and I are planning to get out for a hike today. We did a short bike ride last weekend on the Riverfront Trail: it was my first time out on the bike in several months, since late summer or early fall I think, and I felt it the next two days every time I sat down! I don’t know if I mentioned but I had hurt my foot somehow in March and have been letting it heal. It’s finally feeling a bit better–I’ve been always wearing supportive shoes and that has helped a bunch–so now I’m trying to get back into building up my walking so that we are ready for our Japan trip.

I know many people have jobs that don’t change seasonally. To me that must be so weird, because my job is SO seasonal and the ebb and flow of the year is such an integral part of it. How does your job work?