I’ll take a break from (not very quickly) writing trip reports to writing about my day to day life as is. And technically yesterday was the first day of school, but today is the first day for some people.
The last few weeks before school started went by quickly, and I didn’t get very much done. I had some high hopes for a few home projects, but I found myself just wanting to catch up on my reading and podcast listening.
One thing Louie and I both did that has been fun is we joined a gym. We have been debating this for a little while, and we decided to join the Wash U gym, which is a great deal. You have to be careful about when you go because it gets horribly busy, but the first few weeks were great. Yesterday the students were back, but I found mid morning still wasn’t too bad. When we toured the gym the student made sure to inform us of all the pickleball options and also pointed out that most faculty show up early, around 6 am to get their workouts done before the work day. We are not most faculty, I guess!
Other fun things: Leslie stayed for two nights en route from New York to Arizona. We had food, chatted, and took a long bike ride on the Katy Trail.
Her cats lived in our music room for the time. My cats were upset by this, as you would expect.
I went to an art class at Bowood Farms.
Muriel enjoying the couch on another day.
We’ve also been to an opera and out for dinner for friends, and I’ve met up with a variety of friends for lunches and brunch. So, it’s not that I haven’t done anything at the end of my break, it’s just that my constant guilt of say, not having completely finished decorating the house kicked in.
I am looking forward to a good year! I am limiting my new students, in fact, not taking any new students at home for now. My schedule is pretty good and I have plenty of students, and the nice thing is that I only teach past 8 on one night instead of 3, so that’s better for getting to bed early, plus it’s better for the nights I have to reschedule for rehearsal: less students to reschedule. So either I get free time/more sleep, or simply less stress. And when I reschedule, it doesn’t always work out so I often lose that teaching income, so my hope is that having slightly less students still works out well.
Performance wise, there’s nothing terribly exciting in the immediate future, but more fun stuff later in the year. Maybe I’ll keep you posted!
The other fun thing later is that I finally caved and got an apple watch. This fits in with my gym going: I’m working on improving my fitness so we can do a bigger hike in Europe next summer, in addition to healing my feet, ha! So having a watch is a great way to monitor my heart rate and activities, but I learned yesterday that it picks up violin playing and counts it as steps, oops! So from here on when I play unless I want it to appear that I have walked extra miles, I have to turn off fitness tracking for it. I wish there were another way, but that’s what the internet tells me is the best solution: do you have any better ones? And putting it on another wrist isn’t an option, and I’d rather not just take it off.