I’m taking a little break from telling you about my Morocco trip to telling you about life now. It’s been COLD and the good thing is that today gets above freezing so more of this snow should melt. Snow: it’s great at first and then it is annoying and you just want to wear normal shoes.

We got about 8 inches of snow last weekend, and it was a “snow day weekend” where everything was canceled, and it was pretty nice to just hang out at home. I didn’t even leave the house for 3 days, and that literally means, didn’t step outside. Louie took a walk over to Forest Park and took some nice pictures, but I didn’t want to get cold and wet.

It’s another busy teaching semester: at first when I was setting up my college students I thought I was at a lower number of hours than last semester, and was fairly happy about that as I have too many students, and then in the last two days of drop/add period I got 3 more hour long students and now I’m actually higher than last semester by 30 minutes with one more student. I got everybody scheduled fairly well, but my Thursday starts very early…but we are already 3 weeks in so only 11-12 weeks left to go (every student is supposed to get 14 lessons, so some have gotten 3 and others only 2).

There’s been some time for fun: we’ve done a few Jazz Stl shows, we saw a hilarious play at Upstream Theater. We’ve eaten some dinners out just the two of us and also with friends. We did a jazz brunch with a friend yesterday, and we’ve watched a bunch of good TV shows. I’ve spent some time making decisions on our Japan trip in May, and planning some other trips further down the pipeline.

And some performing too: last weekend a concert got canceled but we managed to schedule the entire chorale and orchestra to yesterday! That meant yesterday was a double concert, one with the Metropolitan Orchestra of St Louis, which was especially fun as a student of mine got to play with us too. And then the American Kantorei concert, all Bach Cantatas. Louie and I ended the night hanging out in front of the fireplace chatting.

The cats have been keeping warm the best way they know how: by sitting directly on top of the radiators. It’s adorable.

Note: It’s hard to pretend like life is normal as our country is run by a fascist government. And even worse, is knowing that many people in the country don’t see it, or WORSE, see it and agree that it is great. Every day brings new horrors in the news, children being kept in detention centers, the Epstein files and seeing that apparently almost everybody in the current admin/regime is a sexual predator, the government shutting down and the democrats being more concerned about sending money to Israel who is committing a genocide, the threat of nuclear war with Iran and other countries, the president stealing money from Venezuela and trying to loot the treasury even more, taking money from all the businesses, foreign countries, etc. And seeing people being gassed in the street, murdered in the street by ICE and by police, every day. Journalists and comedians being arrested and sued for exercising their free speech. I could go on for a long time.

I find it’s hard to cope. What do we do? We just keep on keeping on, right? And trying to find joy in our lives amongst the pain and suffering.