News, news, and news

Don't worry, I don't have anything revolutionary to share today.  Just newsy tidbits.

For those of you who aren't facebook afficianados, here are a couple of my stati from the last two days:

Anne has been saying something the last couple of days that sounds like "shoo bwah" and I can't figure out what she means. Most of her words are things I understand, but I can't crack the code on this one.

My child's afternoon was made complete by: 1) Walking past a construction site where guys were using power tools to build houses, and 2) Watching the road crew paving the road by our apartment. They even waved to her!

Here is my friend Abigail's little video about what she learned from losing her daughter two years ago this week: http://abigailsday.blogspot.com/2014/08/two-years-ago-today.html

Also, heard from a dear friend of mine some amazing and unexpected news this week, and I can't stop thinking about it.

Yesterday we went (for the second time, and successfully at least!) to the Des Moines post office so that Anne and Jared could apply for new passports. (That's not Iowa - Des Moines is just west of Kent.)

Also I finally sold the bulk of the diapers I bought off Craigslist earlier this year that didn't work for Anne.  Hopefully the buyer in Pennsylvania will find them to be extremely useful.  I still have a little pile of odds-and-ends diapers that didn't work for us that are on the auction block.

This morning I drove up to north Seattle to meet a violin maker named David van Zandt.  I'm borrowing his newest violin for two weeks help break it in before he puts it on consignment.  The bonus is I get to try it out for some free fun.  The neck is a little thicker than I'm used to, the strings are ever so slightly higher, and the chinrest is a teeny bit thicker.  All of those things add up to requiring a bit more muscular effort to play than mine, but the response is quick and loud so far - new violin syndrome; and hopefully it will settle as it gets played in.

Lastly, here are some photos from Anne's piano practice session last night.  If you scroll through them quickly you can watch her in action!

Annie in the garden

Anne spent some quality time in Grandma's and Grampa's enormous garden this weekend.

Her other Grandmother and Granddaddy and GiGi have a new country home, too.  Anne will get to spend some lovely outdoor time there on our next trip.  I don't mind her living in run-down suburbia between old apartments and strip malls because of all the fascinating people we live with, but I'm so glad these wonderful country places are part of her childhood.

Pageant Research

I've spent some time today doing some research for my pageant consult student.  I'm writing all this down so I won't forget what I'm learning.  She studied violin from the ages of 6 to 12 and made it to Suzuki book 2.  She does not really read music.  Her pageant date is November 15th.  The talent segment is 90 seconds.

She is playing a violin cover of this song from the Twilight series.  The song is very chill, and I looked up a couple of videos for her to watch of professional violinists playing art music pieces with some chill moments.  I want her to start working on her body language now and not try to paste it on to the finished product when we reach November.  I sent her this one of Anne Akiko Meyers playing the Barber Concerto and this one of Lana Trotovsek playing Part Fratres.  I thought in particular she might connect with the second movie, because it is very clearly a music video, and it has a very similar ethos to the official music video of her chosen Twilight song.

Some questions for my student next week:
1. Is 90 seconds the stage-on/stage-off time or the actual playing time?  This will make a difference because I need to cut down the cover to fit the allotted time.
2. Will she have a pianist to accompany her?  If not, I will need to do some more arranging to make sense out of what she's playing solo.  (I sure hope she gets a back-up pianist!)

Things we will need to work on:

• Vibrato.  This Tuesday I will introduce her to some exercises from Viva Vibrato which are designed to get everything loosened up and moving.  The week after that we will investigate the proper vibrato motion and get a build-up going with the metronome.  She'd better be committed to doing a lot of work on this if she would like to use it by November.  It's not out of the question, but she needs to devote some time!
• Third position.  She's going to need some of it for this cover to sound remotely classy, and I don't think it is worth dumbing the arrangement down for her.  We'll figure it out even if I have to put tapes on her violin and draw a chart over every note on the page.
• Some exercises from Rhythmic Training: #28 in 6/8 covering eighth notes and longer durations, #52 and #53 in 6/8 covering the basic patterns of sixteenth notes in compound meter,  and #16 in 2/4 covering quarters and eighths.  We will also need to practice 2 against 3 so that she can really feel the difference when she gets to the duples in the 6/8 tune she's playing.  Christina Perri sings it that way, so my young friend is going to have to figure out how to play it that way.
• Double stops - I'm going to edit some of the fifths out because they're not going to be worth the hassle, but we don't need to dumb the whole thing down.

Also, I've asked her to bring a photocopy of her part next week so that I can do some arranging and figuring on my own.  The good news is that without having heard the tune before our first lesson, my instinct about what sort of bowings to put in her part made sense with the real piece when I watched the video.

Fluffy

I'll tell you up front that I'm not sure what this post is about.  I just think I want to put something more fluffy here to go with all the intense theological stuff I've been writing lately.  I don't want to lose all my readers who are not theologically inclined.

Fluffy - marshmallows, pillows, cotton seeds, meringue, my long-haired cat...

Today happens to be my birthday, and unrelatedly I slept until 10:00.  I've been up in the 6's and 7's for weeks on end, but I had nothing scheduled until 2:00 and a feverish baby who nursed all night, and the "stars aligned" as they say, and I came out of the bedroom to hear Jared practicing in the living room (that can happen even when I'm up in the 6's and 7's) and glanced at the clock, shocked to see 10:00.  However, I still had some morning time to myself, because my fevered sleeper stayed in bed until 11:45.  So I did some reading and went for a run and ate brunch and tidied up the apartment and folded laundry before her appearance.  I am officially in my mid-thirties now.

Now she's down for her belated afternoon nap, and I am off to practice some more Bartok with the mute on (violin seems to be harder on sleeping baby's ears than cello) before my final lesson of the day.  I am closing in on playing the entire first movement at half tempo.  Maybe today is the day I'll hit that goal.  (You know you're working on a "reach piece" when...)

It is a lovely day in the 70's with sunshine, although it was cloudy earlier in the day.  The rose bush outside of our dining room window is still blooming beautifully.

I'm getting really excited about all of our group classes this fall, because we have a group performance scheduled in January, and I got some new teaching input from watching others this summer, and I feel like I'll now be trying to do something specific with the classes rather than just filling time in an educational manner.

Nutmeg loves sleeping in the stroller, and sometime last week we rolled out the door with Anne in the seat only to discover when we were outside that Nutmeg was curled up in the basket.  Kinda wish it were fully encloseable so that she could go on a walk with us, too.

Pageantry isn't my cup of tea, but I had my first lesson with a high-school pageant consult student yesterday evening.  She is preparing a tune of Katie Perry's, and with her proposed practice schedule and my coaching acumen, I think we'll be able to produce something that sounds good and has dramatic stage presence for her 90 seconds of allotted "talent" time.  I think I will have fun doing, it, too.  I'm not used to teaching high schoolers who wear false eyelashes and look 28 and who will need to come to some lessons in ball gowns and high heels.

If you're not on facebook, you will have missed the big news that I've done my once-every-four-years dramatic hairstyle change.  I cut off 14 inches.  It was so long this time that it's still shoulder length.  I like having long hair, and I like having short hair, and I wish I could switch it around a couple of times a week, but it doesn't work that way.

Jeffrey and Linda are coming to dinner, and I think that Jared is making something wonderful for desert which involves fresh peaches.

Ok, I think that's sufficient fluff for now and sufficient attempt to postpone my practice.  Happy Wednesday!

Rambling through mine fields

The other night Jared and I were walking in the neighborhood and I mentioned a mutual acquaintance of ours who, in the course of becoming a mother in the last year, has become very involved in the cause of stopping man-made global warming.  (I'm not here to debate the science with some of my dear readers who don't believe in such things, although I will say that it seems obvious to me that human destruction of the environment is very real and very tragic and damages untold numbers of human lives every year, and the human race is not currently on a trajectory of becoming less destructive any time in the near future - we're way too greedy and interested in ease and comfort.)  I was thinking about how this woman, who can now envision her child growing up and outliving her, is thinking very hard about his future; this is what has triggered her commitment to environmental action.  I admire her efforts to do something tangible and not just sit and worry.

Jared remarked that some of the man-made environmental destruction that we're seeing and think we will see more of in the future sounds like some of the terrible things symbolically described in the book of Revelation before Christ's return.  He's mentioned this before, but suddenly the specter of such devastation and pain caught me in the throat and I told him we had to change topics IMMEDIATELY.  Jared was confused by my reaction (this is a common occurrence, believe me!) and said in gentle perplexity, Don't you want Jesus to come?  (NEW TOPIC NOW! I CAN'T SPEAK.)

Actually, if you read my recent post called A Sunset you'll know that looking forward to Jesus' return is on my mind, and for the first time I feel that I am honestly eager for it.

...I'm not quite sure which direction this current post is going.  I have to write to sort out my brain sometimes, because it doesn't seem to sort well in conversation or in strictly sitting and thinking....

I've been sitting around this week wondering how to live my everyday life in the tension between it-could-all-end-tomorrow-in-a-car-wreck/it-could-all-end-next-year-if-the-Lord-returns and the I-personally-will-probably-live-for-another-100-years-and-I need-to-plan-for-my-retirement-and-my-child's-college-studies-and-the-long-term-future-of-others-on-this-planet.  Peter says that to the Lord a thousand years are like one day and one day like a thousand years.  God's got that paradox wrapped up, but I don't.  The problem is one of priorities, because I have to live as if both are true at once, and that is very tricky.  In certain ways it would be easier to know the end from the beginning, but then I'm sure that truly knowing the details of the future is kind of awful.  You have too long to dread the certainty of the bad stuff and can't be surprised by the good stuff, and would you even have true freedom to make choices?

Speaking of dreading bad stuff, how much bad stuff has to happen before Christ's return?  How many more people need to be murdered?  How many lives need to be lost to debilitating sicknesses?  How many children need to be stillborn?  How many people need to lose their dignity or their minds?  How many people need to see their means of earning a living destroyed?  How many people need to be driven from their homes?  How many beautiful vistas need to be strip mined or piled with trash?  How much drinking water needs to be polluted?  How many dead animals have to float in the oceans?  How many forests have to be leveled and burned?  How many fragile and wonderfully created ecosystems need to melt into oblivion?

I'm not really maudlin.  I am uncomfortable with the level of crud happening in the world; it is too painful to watch.  Maybe in thinking about Jesus' coming I'm merely entertaining escapist fantasies.  I just can't hold all of that bad stuff in my mind and go on with what I need to do.  I have to look around and see the good, beautiful, noble, brave, funny, generous stuff, to enjoy it with gratitude.  And I wonder - will it all have to rot, too, before Jesus returns?  If we have to wait for all that is good to disintegrate  before we see HIM, I'm not really interested in waiting around too long.  Can we just skip straight to the nice parts of the story and not suffer through the bad parts?

So I have to shove all the nasty into the back corner of my mind and go on with my little projects - like running and learning the Bartok Solo Sonata and eating muffins and figuring out some new approaches to help my violin students develop more dynamic balance and cleaning out the office and playing with my toddler and chopping off my hair for a new look and catching up with the laundry.

And wondering if I trust God enough to stand in the face of any more ill.

Questions.

My brain is full of questions this week, many of which revolve around our fall scheduling.  We'll be starting the school year of teaching at home and in Gig Harbor (yes, WE - because Jared will not be teaching in West Seattle any more!) on September 1st or 2nd, and the scheduling process begins this coming Monday, although I already did a bit of prescheduling today to get an idea of what we're up against.

Here's what we're up against: seventeen current full-time violin students, approximately fourteen current full-time cello students, group classes in two locations, some bonus students (like my snow-bird every-other week retiree, the pageant consult student, and a possible student or two studying for the quarter from a local community college), managing our own child care, and managing personal things (like my Tuesday morning Bible study), and accounting for adding more students during the year.

Gig Harbor is where many of the questions lie.  We have to plan an hour each way for the drive.  I have four and half hours of after-school teaching there on Tuesdays plus the new hour-long group class which will be starting September 2nd.  Jared will have three and a half hours of after-school teaching there on Tuesdays.  We need to manage Anne well between us and not get in the way of the family who lives in the house.  (Don't worry! They are getting a good deal; their two kids get lessons at home and for a reduced rate.)  I also have three very promising new student contacts in Gig Harbor, so I'm trying to figure out if I can and should add Wednesdays if those contacts go through.  One of those contacts has been advertising us to his son's fancy preschool, and I just created an informational flyer and sent it off to the director this morning.  So then I may need to add a new pre-Twinkle class to the schedule and figure out how to shuffle all the Kent students around so I can be in Gig Harbor on Wednesdays as well without upsetting Anne's equilibrium.  It's a big juggle with several unknowns hovering about.

Jared and I are work towards having 20 hours of private teaching, each of us, so that we have a solid and dependable income.  (Mind you that means more than 20 hours of work a week.  There's the group teaching on top of it, plus all of the secretarial and advertising and teacher-education work that goes on top of it, as well as double-timing the teaching and the childcare.)

There are other questions on my brain this week, and I've been slowly reaching out to other people I know with special interests in these areas to get their input.  Those questions include: Should I worry that Anne is not yet night weaned?  If she did night wean, would that affect her nursing longevity during the day?  How do I show God's love to the neighborhood kids we play with most days?  In what ways should I see my teaching as a ministry above and beyond its function as my business and my fun?  Who should I call about cat sitting next weekend when both we and my brother will be out of town?  Should I or should I not make a pinata to share with the kids for my birthday?

Be of good cheer

Wednesday was fun on the heels of an exhausting Tuesday.

Anne was scheduled for another experiment at UW.  It was actually one she participated in before as a younger baby, but with toddlers they are tweaking how they study the topic with the use of an interactive touch screen.  Anne didn't really know what to make of it, since she has virtually no experience with a touch screen, but it was still interesting to watch.  And she got to pick out a new ball to bring home.

As it happens, this week Jared is working at a Dalcroze workshop taking place in a old historic school building less than a mile up the road from the Early Childhood Cognition Lab.  So we popped over during his lunch break.  He had fun showing off his daughter to all of his Dalcroze colleagues, I had fun seeing this lovely, old repurposed school (now houses tons of arts and educational organizations and the front yard is a community garden), and Anne had fun running around outside and climbing on things.

Anne only took a bit of a nap on the way home, and despite LOTS of efforts on my part (nursing her for a half hour in the dark and later taking her on a two mile walk), she stayed awake until bedtime.  Fortunately there were no meltdowns until said bedtime, so Jared and I taught in relative peace.  We had five different lessons come in - three violin and two cello.  Fortunately there were some siblings to play with (including a couple of her absolute favorites - which involved a lot of crawling around at high speed and ghosting and shrieking and Scramble Bugging), and I discovered that my fourteen-year-old-boy student is virtually undistractible under any circumstance owing to the fact that he has a two-year-old sister.  I'm taking careful notes on who is distractible and who isn't right now, because our fall scheduling starts next week, and we will be making decisions about when to double book the parental units teaching and when not to, so that Anne gets the care she needs and the students can get the environments they can work in.

Also, I've been letting Anne run around the apartment in the nude when students aren't here, because she uses her potty if the diaper isn't available, and the temperatures are quite comfortable.  She's been happily carrying said potty from room to room.  I wonder when she'll wean herself from diapers?

Celebratory hike

Here are two photos from the celebratory birthday hike for my brother on Saturday.  This lovely place is reached after a four mile uphill hike through the woods.  It was logged by Weyerhauser a long time ago and is called Poo Poo Point.  It's in Issaquah and is where paragliders and hang gliders jump.  It was worth the challenge!

Spectacular, exhausting

It was a very. full. week.

Here was my facebook post on Thursday:

Since yesterday morning I received three genuine and encouraging compliments from parents of students, got a wasp sting on my leg which is hugely swollen and itchy, spent way too many hours in traffic, had my daughter tell me several times and in several ways that she is done-zo with institute week, petted a tiny and adorable puppy, had an incredible lesson with a new student who had practiced everything, had a terribly frustrating lesson with a lovely student in which we spent an hour exhuastedly cleaning up collateral damage from orchestra camp while Anne whined, finished A Tale of Two Cities, and sat at lunch chatting with teaching colleagues who taught me at Suzuki institutes when I was a kid.... among other things. Today my daughter is exactly 16 months old, and drew on my dry-clean only pants with marker, as well as adorning the leather couch with ballpoint. Also, she has been busy impressing numerous adults with how patient, good-natured, and engaging she is. It's only 6:30, and I'm ready for bed.

I had my first ever opportunity to teach at a Suzuki institute this past week, and I'm so glad I got to do it.  It's very different from normal week-to-week teaching; it's something I've long felt I would be very good at, and this week confirmed that to me.  I did not teach a full schedule, which was a blessing given the fact that Jared was completely booked up at the institute between taking a training class and doing administrative errands, and we had to work out our child care situation.  

Actually, we had a pretty miraculous babysitter deal, which worked itself out about three days before the institute started.  Anne came up with me each morning (this was a leave-home-at-6:45-am-in-the-hopes-of-missing-the-worst-of-the-traffic-so-that-I'd-arrive-in-time-to-teach-at-8:30 kind of week), and a wonderful mom who was following around three of her kids and two of her nieces was able to add Anne's stroller to the mix.  Anne did so well with the crazy week, but it really was quite a lot to ask of her.

One real highlight of the institute were getting to work with a couple of elementary school book-four students who study with teacher trainers and were set up so beautifully.  I had plenty of good things I could help them with since neither of them sound like Perlman yet, but it was so good for me to see what *can* be normal and have a reminder of what I'm aiming for with my students.  Another highlight was feeling that I really helped several kids with some specific skills and answered some questions that had been plaguing them and their parents.  In most cases, it's not that I told them something dramatically different or better than what they've already heard from their own teachers - it's just sometimes helpful for any of us to hear the same things from a slightly different perspective so that we can really *get* it for the first time.

*****

Thursday, after institute, and after teaching my own students at home, when it was finally outdoor playtime with the neighborhood kids, I finished A Tale of Two Cities.  Now I miss it.  I might have to read it again soon.  I fell in love with the characters and appreciated who they were and how they changed during the course of the story.  Also it was a good, if horrifying, reminder of this historical happenings of the French Revolution.  I loved so many writing techniques Dickens used.  I loved how he started the book in the middle of the story and it took me until the end of the book to learn the beginning and end.  I love how he started with lots of different seemingly unrelated bits and wove them all together.  I loved how he brought the spiritual into the story in a natural way without being the least bit preachy or moralizing - he let the facts speak for themselves.  I also love so much of his dry humor in his descriptions and his unexpected and erudite word choices.  I think I might now be a Dickens addict, and although I have now re-started another book off my shelf - an excellent nonfiction book on creativity and learning and habit by dancer Twila Tharp - I am going to have to read more of him.

*****

Friday was my brother's birthday, so yesterday we went on a celebratory hike after church - Jeff and Linda, Anne and Jared and me, and two of my brother's long-time friends.  We hiked almost four miles uphill to Poo Poo Point on Tiger Mountain in Issaquah, which is where the paragliders and hang gliders take off.  We got to watch several jumps, and it was quite spectacular.  All seven of us thoroughly enjoyed the view and the action.  Then we hiked the almost four miles back down.  I am sore today, but quite proud of myself... because I did those eight very hilly miles with twenty-one pounds of adorable toddler on my back.  I thought of these women in various parts of the world who are experiencing subsistence living and realized that many of them do something like this every single day.  I'm not that fit, but I feel pretty good for an American.

*****

One final note.  I use a cell phone, and this handy device stores all my phone numbers for me, so if my dear phone and I are ever parted, I only have five numbers I can call from memory... most of which won't do me any good.  I can call my own cell phone (which I do frequently when I lose it around the apartment.)  I can call Jared's cell phone.  I can call the land-line number I had for six years in Cleveland (I went to college back when people had land-lines.)  I can call the number my grandmother had for about twenty years but gave up this week.  And I can call the number my parents had since 1982 but gave up this week.  That is to say, my grandmother and parents all moved to a new house together, and they have a collective new phone number, and I'm fixing to put it in my phone.  Whenever I'll want to call, I'll dial them up from my digital rolodex and never be forced learn the number by heart.  Next time I'm in jail and get two phone calls, I sure hope that Jared is answering, because he's the only lifeline I've got in ten digits.

A Sunset

Yesterday evening (it was Saturday), we were strolling at Clark Lake Park.  We wound through a stand of trees on the gravel path and out onto the flat place where the outline of Mount Rainier was visible through a hazy covering.  We continued down the hill through the cool spot which is hidden from the afternoon sun and then around and up though the part of the trail that is deep in mud most of the year but is easy footing now that we're in the dry season.  We followed the trail as it turned right and then left, and we came to a sudden standstill next to an old, gangly apple tree.  Looking up the hill to the west, a bank of luminous clouds stretched across the panorama, above the horizon of spiky evergreens, and out of the bank shot rays of sunlight, not downward as I have seen after storms in the Plains, but up to the zenith of the sky, up past the backs of our heads.  The rays formed pale blue bands against the clear and deep blue sky, some wider and some narrower, and as we stood and watched for many minutes, the clouds continued to shift shape and glow, and the rays of sunlight changed widths, sometimes joining together and sometimes separating.

I have never seen a sky like this before, I said to Jared.

It looks like pictures you see of the Second Coming, he replied.

This probably isn't it, I remarked.

It will happen when you least expect it, said Jared, ever sagacious.

I thought of a stained glass window, called The Flight of Souls, which forms the centerpiece of the Wade Memorial Chapel in the Lakeview Cemetery in Cleveland:

It suddenly struck me that one day I will look up, and unquestionably we will see Jesus coming on the clouds.  What will I feel?  At that moment, I heard my inner voice shout to Jared and Anne, "Look!  It's him!"  I saw myself gathering up my child with awe and joyful anticipation, my heart bursting, wanting to run to the clouds on the horizon, and my feet rooted in place, trying to take in every detail of our glorious moment of salvation.  None of my plans and hopes and dreams are worth hanging onto when there's this weight of eternal splendor before my eyes.  New hopes and dreams arise for the coming Eternity of peace, health, beauty, joy, glory, learning, worship, fullness, and unimaginable heavenly wealth in the presence of a God whose name is Love.  I am a child again and the future is only brightness and possibility.

I cannot shake the beauty of that sky out of my mind.  I tried reducing it to its scientific parts - dust and water droplets, a mixture of gas particles, photons...  The whole is more than the sum of the parts.  Specks of matter cannot explain the beauty.  If we are merely accidental creatures of this accidental earth, how can such beauty move our hearts so much?

Jesus was taken up into a cloud while the disciples were watching, and they could no longer see him.  As they strained to see him rising into heaven, two white-robed men suddenly stood among them.  "Men of Galilee," they said, "why are you standing here staring into heaven?  Jesus has been taken from you into heaven, but someday he will return from heaven in the same way you saw him go!"

-Acts 1:9-11