'Twas the Night After Christmas...

...when all through the house, not a creature was stirring, only Feathers the cat purring...

So I had time to finally write a blog.  It has been nearly two months since I have written, a sad record to have set.

As alluded to in the second-to-last post, we bought a house.  "A gem in the rough" as the sellers' agent described it. 

Can I just tell you that between October 27th and December 2nd, we were pretty much hanging by threads?

In list format, here is everything that went down in those five weeks and one day...

• Closed on house
• Reinspected it on our own to determine attack list for making it livable in the one month between closing and last possible move date and determine what furniture we would have to offload ahead of time
• Two week-long work visits from Jared's parents in which incredible amounts of work was done.  I don't know how we could have done this without their help.  They have lots of experience with house-fixing, and they have an incredible amount of energy.  What can I say?  Hire them if you every need help.
• Jared working on the house every morning and coming home to teach while I managed packing and cleaning and children pretty much solo on the home front and taught full time
• Packing the apartment into boxes
• Cleaning out the apartment (how can stuff get SO dirty???)
• Tore out chimney from former fireplace and '70's wall-to-wall mirrors
• Took out baseboards, interior doors, and door frames/trim
• Temporarily removed gas living room stove and its base
• Temporarily removed three ceiling-mount light fixtures
• Re-sheetrocked the ex-chimney wall
• Re-sheetrocked the ceilings in the living room/dining room/hall/two bedrooms
• Taped and floated such
• Sanded
• Taped and floated again
• Sanded again
• Taped and floated again
• Sanded again
• Applied primer
• Applied texture
• Applied primer
• Painted kitchen cabinets (took three coats)
• Tried for days to strip paint off of five interior doors before giving up
• Pried up random parquet floor on top of older wood floor by the front door
• Removed hardware from no-longer-in-use window treatments around the house
• Rebuilt floor and frame of bathroom closet
• Cut down new wood flooring to 1942 size and covered hole in floor left by chimney demolition
• Rented huge randomized orbital sander
• Sanded living room/dining room/hall/two bedroom floors within an inch of their lives with medium grit
• Sanded living room/dining room/hall/two bedroom floors within an inch of their lives with heavy grit
• Sanded living room/dining room/hall/two bedroom floors within an inch of their lives with medium grit

• Sanded living room/dining room/hall/two bedroom floors within an inch of their lives with fine grit
• Sanded living room/dining room/hall/two bedroom floors within an inch of their lives with very fine grit
• Cleaned stripped floors with vacuum, tack cloth, and then floor cleaner.  And then cleaned them some more.
• Rolled and painted on sealer
• Rolled and painted on first finish coat
• Rolled and painted on second finish coat
• Rolled and painted on third finish coat
• Approximately 5,000,000 trips to the hardware store (I may have exaggerated, but for the record a trip to the hardware store with a 1-year-old and a 4-year old counts the same as three solo trips.  So you can do your own math.)
• Called to get the electricity switched over
• Called to get the gas turned on - had to wait for water to get turned on first.
• Called to get water turned on.
• Called again to get gas turned on - and wait for a visit from a technician
• Waited for behind-schedule sewer repair so we could use toilet and sinks...
• When it was finally done, more negotiating with realtor and plumbers to get new sewer line attached to house drain pipe so we could use toilet and sinks...
• Measured the size of the hole under the house.
• Got bids on and ordered seven cubic feet of coarse gravel to fill it in
• Had the gravel delivered and built a chute to get the gravel from the driveway into the hole under the house
• Worked a lot of man hours to actually move the gravel from point A to point B in cramped conditions
• Fixed the post which held up the front corner of the roof overhang
• Copious amounts of cleaning in the new house, especially after all the sanding
• Attached address numbers to the front of the house
• Change of address with the post office
• Attempted to get the internet switched over the day of the move so that we could have our Skype lessons on Day 1.  It failed, but the Skype students were sick that day anyway...
• Scoured Craigslist for rugs to put on the wood floors and drove around the Eastside to look at them.  
• Bought moving boxes and tape
• Picked up some more from Linda
• Rented a truck for the right day (which was hard to predict until about four days out)
• Order floor finishing stuff via Linda's Amazon Prime account
• Ran out of checks so spent time running to the bank for cash for a variety of needs
• One day I left the apartment for literally eleven minutes (to put a flower on the baby's burial spot) while the kids were asleep and Jared was teaching, and Jared ended up getting sick and his student found our neighbor and when I got back the ambulance was on its way, and we ended up with what turned out to be an unnecessary long evening in the ER where I drove back and forth with the kids three times and had to schedule make-up lessons... (He was fine.  If I had only been home during those few minutes!)
• I was the primary organizer of two big group concerts (one in Federal Way and one in Tacoma) which involved lots of emails between the venue and myself, all the different students and myself, and my co-teacher and myself.  Involved getting attendance numbers, rehearsing all the music, figuring out part divisions and program order, chairs and music stands, call time, driving directions, and costume....
• I was the primary organizer of three solo recitals (two in Auburn and one on Fox Island) which involved determining repertoire, working out accompanists, setting program order, sending order off to my typist, contacting venues again, and communicating with students about attire, call times, rehearsals, and reception food, and showing up with the printed programs, paper goods, accompaniment parts, and instruments.  The Fox Island venue ran into a problem the night of the recital when we had fifteen minivans parked out front and families standing around in the dark in long coats waiting to go in, so we had to be quick about our wits and move our recital spontaneously back to the house where we teach in Gig Harbor.
• On the same day as one of the Auburn recitals, I also had a student present his Book 1 recital at his home in Gig Harbor, so I drove there to accompany him with the kids in tow and get back in time to manage the solo recital.
• Our studio joined forces with some other studios for a big double-header Christmas concert in Maple Valley, and I rehearsed our group class for it, helped my students learn new music for it, and passed on communications from the organizing teacher.
• Anne broke her cello in half at our group class on Halloween, so she had to switch over to violin performing for three solo recitals, the second group concert, and the Christmas concert.
• Everyone in our family had a cold, except Jared had two.
• There was teething.
• Panicked trying to find babysitters for random bits of my days off so I could help Jared with the house prepping.  It was intense, and thankfully several people came through for me.
• Oh, and the day of our move... it was the Sunday after Thanksgiving.  We finished refinishing the floor around 4:15 on Thursday, Thanksgiving Day, after lunch at Linda's, which meant we could start putting furniture down at 4:15 on Sunday.  So the Thanksgiving week, we taught Monday at the apartment, and then went crazy the rest of the week.  Sunday morning we got the truck and loaded in most of the boxes and little stuff.  Jared took it up to the house and one of my work study families helped unload it into the garage.  Meanwhile my dear Afghan neighbor took the kids for the day, and her husband and another Afghan friend helped Jared load.  I'm telling you, if you ever need strong, helpful guys, meet some Afghans!  Before we got the furniture loaded, it turned out my brother had a few more furniture items he needed to move so Jared went and helped him with that while we had the truck.  Then the amazing Afghans then got our furniture loaded after dark.  Jeffrey and Linda came to the house and helped unload (which we desparately needed) and brought dinner from our favorite Indian place.  (Have you ever tried to move a piano?  Ours is only a spinnet that we got from Freecycle, but that thing weigh at least 400 lbs.  Quite a physical and engineering challenge.) We had the furniture in the house by 10:30 pm and then we brought the cats in (who had been sitting in cages in the moving truck for a couple of hours), had dinner, and went to bed.  And we were up and ready to teach by 10:00 am the following morning in our new location.  During my first lesson, Jared put up curtains in place of three absent room doors by using a power drill to screw in eyelets, tying in picture wire, and then using cafe curtain clips to hang up queen size sheets from our collection.  So we have "privacy" on the bedroom, bathroom, and teaching room for now...
• In the few days following the move Lazarus was a bit out of sorts and acquired the nastiest looking bruise I've ever seen on an ear.  And then another nasty bump on the forehead.  And also threw his one paci that we could find down one of the vent holes in the floor prompting another trip to Lowe's to find new vent covers.  And then the final day of our lease Jared was trying madly to clean out our apartment and one of our cars wouldn't start so he had to take the one with the carseats in it, and I was home alone at the new place with the kids teaching some make-up lessons when Lazarus pulled the modem off a shelf and sliced his toe open and there was blood EVERYWHERE, and I had to cancel the rest of the evening of teaching, and the amazing Big Anne came with a loaner car and took my Anne home with her and I sat at urgent care with Lazarus for a couple of hours until the doctor was ready to glue his toe back together.  
• So anyway, the following day we had to have the battery and alternator replaced on the car.
• And also then the modem broke due to its fall, and my phone charger broke just because, and Jared had to go out and get replacements.
• And also the disc drive on our computer broke, due to Lazarus throwing the computer off the table.  But Merry Christmas to us, it suddenly started working again yesterday...

I'm sure I missed a few things there, but anyway, life has calmed down a lot, and we no longer feel like we are hanging by threads.  We still have quite a bit of work to do on the actual house, and lots of unpacking.  But there has been a lot more work done in the last few weeks (work on insulated the ducts under the house, more painting on walls and ceilings, putting in our washer and dryer, more curtains here and there, fixing an electrical problem with the dining room light, reinstalling the gas stove in the living room, acquiring pads for the rugs...) and we are getting settled in.  And we got a rare white Christmas here, as we didn't get organized to visit Texas in time, although we will be there for New Year's.  Eventually... we'll have enough stuff done on the house that we can start on converting the garage to teaching studios, and believe me, that is going to be a HUGE project.  Not ready to think about that yet!  I am enjoying my two weeks off work immensely.  Doing house stuff, fighting with our former rental company about bogus charges (I tell you, that apartment is the gift that never quits giving), PLAYING with my kids, and sleeping.

Anyway, in case you wondered what we've been up to, that is the summary version.  Happy Thanksgiving, Merry Christmas, and Joyous New Year to you, and I hope to be back on the blogging bandwagon a bit more in the coming months.

The Day Between

October 30th marks two full years since my miscarriage, and in honor of that tiny life, I wanted to share with you a book.  The author, my friend Abigail Wilson, is someone I met through a mutual friend, although for the first long while I basically knew her through her blog.  I finally got to meet her in person during the course of the events described in her book.

You need to know that Abigail is a great storyteller.  She has big feelings, and you get to feel all of them right along with her.  I think you will be forced to laugh out loud and to cry out loud as you read.  Also, she has a genuinely dramatic story and a thoughtful spirit.

Her book starts with a meditation on Christ's death and resurrection, and what the disciples were doing on the helpless day in between those two (nothing).  That is where the book title comes from.  Abigail, in her confusing and dangerous pregnancy with her twins, experienced "a day between" where she knew the beginning, not the ending, and felt helpless waiting.

The book especially centers around the deep grief of losing her tiny daughter Priscilla and the nagging questions of whether her second daughter Tabitha would survive.  I can tell you that I have met Tabitha on multiple occasions, so you don't have to wonder about that part now.

Abigail is a woman of great faith, and I have been inspired by so many of her faith-filled words over the years.  I read this book at a time where I was studying chapters 2 and 3 of Romans about the deep and abiding nature of our sin condition, and where I was doing some introspection with regard to the Day of Atonement.  And what stood out to me most of all in this book is that there are NO good Christians.  No one has it all together.  No one is consistently kind or faithful or gentle or any of those other things that Jesus is.  Even the best of people is a downright train wreck.  But God...  But God is full of grace and he walks with us through our wreckage.  Not because of any good we have done, but because He is good.  And that is grace.

Human sinfulness and the grace of God.  That is the deep and stunning theology of this book, and it is beautiful.  The book is about pregnancy loss, but more so, it is about the awesome work of our generous God.  Whether or not you believe in God, though, you will appreciate the story Abigail tells.  I can't recommend this book highly enough!

Moving Along

If any of you have been following Seattle real estate, you'll know that the market has gone absolutely and verifyibly nuts.  Granted we're WAY out in the burbs, not in the Seattle city limits, but it's nuts out here, too.  Just for fun, I did a little internet research to see what our price range could get us in Rochester, the cheapest place we've lived for four years.  Just one example... a gorgeous 3700-square-foot turn-of-the-century home on two acres with mature landscaping and trees in a desirable suburb, which also has a separate mother-in-law home on the property.  What the same amount of money gets us out in the Seattle burbs is JUNK.  Here's a fun one we looked at for about the same price as the Rochester one listed above: bank-owned 1100-square foot 1960's house two blocks from a huge and noisy motor race track where drunken fans show up on your lawn during the weekends amidst the deafening and constant roar of engines.  The real estate tag line said, "This one is perfect for commuters - only 30 miles from Seattle and 25 miles from Tacoma."  Evidently that was the BEST thing they could say about the property.  Anyway, I tell you all this, not to garner any sympathy, because I LOVE living here, but to give you the kind of background you might need to understand the story I am about to tell.

Having sold our Alabama condo in July a year ago, we were ready to embark on finding a more sustainable living situation here.  We met an incredible realtor back in February through a loan agent who was recommended to us by another family.  We first went out house shopping on March 5th, and made an offer on this short sale home the following day.

If you are not familiar with short sales, it is a situation where the owner has more debt than the current value of the home, so they are hoping to sell the house where the mortgage-holding bank accepts a loss, rather than awaiting the inevitable foreclosure.  It can happen if someone buys the house when the market is really high and is forced to sell when the market is much lower.  Or it can happen when the owner somehow ends up owing on something else huge, too, and they can't afford both things.

Anyway, the home we made an offer on is only a mile and half from our apartment, has a lovely, large, fenced yard with a couple of trees, a covered back patio, three bedrooms, a bonus room and a freestanding garage out back which could eventually be converted to teaching space.  It is on a quiet street in a quiet neighborhood.  So there is a lot of potential.  That's the good about it.  The bad - well, hoarders lived there, so we actually couldn't see a ton of the property.  The house was up to the brim with stuff, but the back porch and garage were so full of *stuff* - including multiple industrial refrigerators!? - that we couldn't really see much about the condition of the house.  And there were several junked cars parked in the back yard, possibly impacting the condition of the septic system.  And it is definitely a "starter" neighborhood.

But we made the offer.  It was the best thing we had seen for our needs at that point.

With a short sale, you will have to wait MONTHS to hear a yea or nay from the owner's bank.  So you sit and wait.  Which we did.  But we also kept looking.

Then a house I walk past almost every day on the way to my favorite city park came on the market in May.

It had been empty for as long as we have lived here, and it was bank owned.  Pluses of this home: split level, three bedrooms, TWO bathrooms, TWO extra basement rooms, TWO-car garage, lots of parking, great neighborhood, nice trees, big back deck, AND so close to the park.  Minuses - needed beaucoup de work.  Our realtor estimated that if we were VERY thrifty, buying all the supplies on sale, and doing all the work ourselves, it would easily be $15K just to make it livable.  We were ready to take action.  It was on a five-day online auction, and there was no inspection contingency allowed.  We waited until day four of the auction and checked the bidding.  And it had gone OUT of our price range.  So we didn't enter the fray.

(As an after note, clearly a flipper bought it, because it is back on the market now, listed as a four-bedroom, and at nearly twice the list price of when we looked at it.)

Then in June, another house a few blocks from that one which I also walk past on the way to the park came up.

This one was also going to a five-day online auction, although it was currently lived in (not by hoarders, but certainly by *collectors*).  This listing provided a detailed pre-inspection report for our perusal.  Our realtor sent me all the documents on the house while I was visiting in Texas, and my poor parents nearly died looking at the horror of its condition online.  Anyway, we did go have a look at it when we returned to Seattle a couple of days later, and it had some great plusses - three bedrooms, two bathrooms, separate living room and dining room, big fenced yard with nice trees, outbuilding, and a HUGE two car garage which could make a pretty incredible studio or two.

Again, we waited until day four of the auction, and again it was OUT of our price range.  Done.

A week or two later I drove by "our" short-sale again, and I really started feeling I didn't like the neighborhood in terms of having students show up there.  Not like it was unsafe.  But a lot of it is run down, and it didn't seem like a lot of the houses were being cared for.  Not the sort of place you dream of when you are looking for quality music instruction.

Then the next week, the bank said "No" to the short sale on some really strange technicality that both our agent, and the owner's agent (who ONLY does short sales) couldn't quite understand.  We were right back where we started, which was absolutely nowhere.

Very shortly thereafter, I was walking through my favorite town-home development a couple blocks from us, where an unprecedented five three-bedroom/two-bathroom/one-car-garage homes had sold during our fruitless search through all the neighborhood junk.  And I was lamenting not having jumped on that bandwagon.  Initially I hadn't, because we and our realtor thought we could find something suitable and freestanding in our price range.  Which only matters because of all of our music noise and the number of people looking for parking for lessons.  And I noticed that a three-bedroom place was getting new carpet on a Monday.  My this-house-is-going-on-the-market-soon radar went up.  A few days later, a sign appeared in the window by the front door saying that this HomePath property (*means it is owned by Fannie Mae) was not on the market, and all questions could be directed to thus-and-such agent.

I called our realtor, and she called the agent, asking if we could submit an offer before it went on the market, asking when it would be up for sale, and what the list price would be.  The answers were "no", "don't know", and "don't know."  We walked by it nearly every day and waited.  And then it came on the market suddenly one afternoon in August and our realtor called us.  The asking price was at the VERY TOP of our price range, because they'd fixed it up really nicely - granite countertops, stainless steel appliances, and everything.  And we made an offer, and it was a multiple offer situation, and we had no room to escalate, and it was gone.

I felt frustrated, and as I am prone to do under the circumstances, I was ready to take action.  I printed out two maps of the Seattle region.  I located all of our students' homes on one map, and I located all the Suzuki teachers I could find by zip code on another map.  The first map had an obvious purpose in showing us how to sustain our current business, and the second map told us where there were enough students to support multiple teachers.  These two maps had one little bit of overlap - North Renton/Newcastle.  We had already looked up there, but you have to know that as you travel north from where we are, the housing prices go up, and up, and up.  We were already scraping the bottom of the barrel down in south Kent.  We had looked at a couple of places in the Renton Highlands area when we started our search, and they were big fat no's.  One was a funny little bank owned house in a peculiar field of houses and trailers on a weird and winding network of dirt roads (not gravel - actually just dirt, aka mud), which you reached by making a scary left turn off a big multi-lane highway.  It was nearly tucked under a bridge, and had a septic tank issue and backed up to a river, putting it in a flood plain.  It was sort of like a place you might stay at summer camp.  Interesting, but absolutely not what we were looking for.  The other was an Airstream trailer on a horrible corner lot, also in a flood plain, which had been cut open and added on to, and it already had several offers on it.

So I started a search in earnest up that way (sadly thinking of leaving my favorite park behind), and I came up with a cute 1942 house with a mostly-finished basement in a neighborhood of 1942 houses, and a three-bedroom condo just off a major roadway.  We looked at both of them the first full day they were on the market.  The house was promising, but it already had a cash offer we couldn't compete with.  The condo was also very promising.  It was a corner unit, and the inside was very nicely redone.  Two of the bedrooms were only on outside walls, and they immediately said "teaching studios" to me.  The complex was quiet, and looked like it had a lot of kids.  And mature trees.  There were basically two concerns with it.  First of all, the parking was a bit tricky, although we could buy an extra spot a block away for $50/month.  And second of all, the exteriors of the buildings were horrifically depressing.  They were an unfortunate accident of 1980's experimental architecture, and I sort of felt sick to my stomach looking at them.  But, we talked it over, and persevered, and decided we should make an offer.  Intellectually it was the right thing to do, and put us in fantastic proximity to future student flow.  That evening I opened up the computer to email our agent to ask her to put in an offer for us, but I just decided to glance at the listings before I wrote to her.

And then I saw it.  There was another 1942 house in that same neighborhood (built by Boeing during the war just up the hill from one of its plants for the influx of workers.)  Being sold "As Is" but very charming.  Only 840 square feet, including the addition that had been put on at some point.  BUT it had a large one-car garage plus an attached shed in the back yard  My studio space monitor went on.  We went up and looked at it the next day, and we decided right away to make an offer.

Our agent souped up our offer to the maximum in every way.  She delivered it to the seller's agent in person the next day.  She told the agent all about us and what we wanted to do with the house.  She suggested the agent should have the sellers review and accept our offer right away without waiting the posted week for all the offers to come in.  The agent said no, they'd wait the week.  So we sat around waiting.  One day later, our agent heard personally from the seller who told her that she herself was a music teacher and really liked us, and while they needed to wait and look at everything for the financial perspective, she hoped we could get the house.  It also turns out she had lived in the house for six years when her two children were small, and she liked the idea of our two children living there.  The following day we wrote her a letter telling her how much we liked the house and what we would like to do with it again, and enjoying our connection as fellow music teachers and parents.  A week later on the evening of the offer review date, we got a call saying they had accepted our offer.  We were not the highest of the six-plus bidders, but we were high enough, and we had waived the inspection contingency via a pre-inspection, we had bid WAY up from the asking price, and we had asked our amazing loan guy for an expedited closing.  The closing was set not quite four weeks out for September 19th.  Everything felt so Providential.

Now, there has been a bit of a known issue with the sewer line which runs from the house to the main in the street, and many of the houses in the neighborhood, due to their age, have had similar problems.  Our agent had already talked to the people who had been snaking out that line twice a year for the last twelve years, and a city official who was in charge of sewer stuff.  It looked like it would be manageable.

A week before the closing, the underwriter for our loan mentioned they had a concern about the sewer condition, so our agent jumped on it and started doing everything she could to get it taken care of for us.  She got the video footage of the sewer scope the owners had done in May, which prompted them to have some intrusive roots trimmed.  We paid to have a new sewer scope done.  And... it appeared that the line was now completely blocked by roots or more possibly, completely collapsed.  Do you know how much sewer repairs cost?  I did not.  They start at about the price of a brand-new Honda Civic.  It turned out that the owners now had an unsaleable house on their hands unless they were to start over and only accept cash offers, or we would have to work together on this and come up with a solution.  We and the owners decided pretty easily how to work out the pricing on such a repair, but getting bids which the underwriting could approve was much harder.  There were weeks of phone calls back and forth between our agent, our loan guy, Jared, and contractors.  Contractors would come out to the house to make bids *when they felt like it.*  They each had different sets of concerns, so in the end the bids we received were wildly different prices and were like comparing apples and oranges.  We kept signing extensions to the buying contract, not sure if we'd ever get closure.  Twice things were looking so bleak that our agent thought we should give up on the house and wait for something else.  Wait, of course, was the operative word, because she and I kept up our search this whole time, and there was NOTHING else popping up in our price range which would meet our needs.  The market just kept going up and up, and we were getting left behind.

But finally, the whole thing has gotten itself worked out.  The house closed on Friday, and we got the keys.  Jared's dad is going to show up Monday morning to help Jared start on the work that needs to be done before we can move in (there is a lot - to make it safe and functional.)  We are going to be moving the week of Thanksgiving, and there is likely going to be a lot of DIY in the next few months and maybe years as we work on getting the house to be quite livable.  Not to mention a huge jumble of lesson rescheduling.  As we will be TEN miles away from our current home, it will impact quite a number of people's timings with their lessons.

The pros of this house - fenced yard, bigger laundry area and bathroom, a nice-sized fenced yard, the aforementioned garage which will become two studios at some point, the storage room, plenty of parking with TWO driveways, a paved alley behind the house just right for bicycling, two blocks from a playground, and it is quite cute.  And NORTH from here.  Cons of this house - far from Lake Clark Park and Jeffrey and Linda's new place, pretty much everything is much smaller- bedrooms are smaller, and the kitchen is MUCH smaller, less closet space, needs a lot of work over time, but most of all, we'll miss this neighborhood and our wonderful neighbors.

I am in full-blown clean-out mode and have already offloaded two pieces of furniture, as well as broken appliances, and various bags of random stuff to Goodwill and Value Village, and I'm advertising things on Craigslist bit by bit.  We've packed lots of books and CDs over the last few weeks, and are trying to get this show on the road in the little gaps of time between everything else.  Our poor cats have no idea what is coming.

Hoppin' Mad

Yesterday morning I was out for a walk with the kids when we happened upon some fences down the street where there is often graffiti.  It gets painted over and then more appears.  I don't know what most of it is - is it gang related?  or just some high-schoolers trying to be cool?  I'm guessing the latter.  This time I saw one marking which made my blood boil. 

I will not have such cowardly things in my neighborhood threatening my friends and neighbors.  I don't care if some kid thought it was a joke.  Not funny. 

I remembered an article I read last year.  One paragraph said: "Take responsibility for the face of the world.  Notice the swastikas and the other signs of hate.  Do not look away and do not get used to them.  Remove them yourself and set an example for others to do so."

Between violin lessons, this lady gathered up her skirts, stuffed her two children into the stroller, collected a canister of paint from the closet as well as a paint brush, and she marched right back down the street.  She and her daughter covered up that nasty thing, and she intends to keep her eye out on that spot for any reappearances.  She will obliterate them immediately.

Tabernacles Real Time

We didn't do a ton for Tabernacles.  We talked about it a bit.  And Anne watched a couple of her "Jesus movies" apropo to the topic.  She practiced her cello in her tent one day.  We visited the Carpinto harvest festival one day.  But the best thing, by far, which was Jared's suggestion, and was not photographically documented for reasons of others' privacy, was a field trip to the Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in south-east Seattle where we walked around and peered at families sukkahs from the sidewalk.  Got some good ideas for putting one up some year if we want to copy them...  Very fun.

       

Mt. Rainier was wearing her rain cap...

Week-old baby piglets

She is named "Sweetheart"

Getting into some old tractor grease

The chickens were his favorite.  They talked to him.

Memory

Last night during clean up time, Anne was pretending to be a baby named Forrest.  We had a great deal going for a while as I cleaned up the bedroom enough to find our beds.  Anne would crawl in and say, "Mama" in the baby-est voice she could muster.  I would answer, "Baby Forrest put away ______."  She would obediently pick it up and take it to another room, crawling on all fours, and her tiny brother would go trotting after her on his two little baby legs.  A few minutes later they would return, the large one on all fours, and the small one trotting on tiny feet, waiting for their next assignment.  Anywhere "Baby Forrest" went, the small brother went trotting after.

Sunday morning I was lying on the living room floor doing some stretches, and Lazarus came over and lay down with me, using my shoulder as his pillow.  He said "uh oh" and giggled.  So I said "uh oh" and giggled.  And it became a thing.  He flopped around on the floor and on top of me for about ten minutes, and we took turns saying, "uh oh" and giggling.  It was our own personal laughter yoga session.

Goal!

At the beginning of the school year I asked my intermediate and advanced students to fill out this form:

Goals 2017-2018 

Practice:

Listening:

Mental Discipline/Character:

Technique:

Expression:

Repertoire: 

Performance:

Music Theory/History:

Aural Skills:

Reading:

Ensemble Playing:

Masterclass/Workshop/Competition:

In the course of reviewing their answers with them I have learned a lot!  All of these students have previously studied from other teachers, which means that at some point they have been on a different learning track than I am intimately familiar with.  Each of them has some things they have not learned yet which I wish they would have by their level.  And many of them have covered some things with a previous teacher I would not have covered with them, because they're not on my teaching highway.  Thanks to having them define some goals, I am discovering things that I know how to work on with them, that they WANT to learn, that we hadn't been doing together...  

Several students have told me they want to understand the key signatures.  I am ON that.  I have a great hands-on-violin method of teaching the circle of fifths, the key signatures, and all the one octave major and minor scales which I learned in the book 4 class I took with Ed Sprunger.  We are burning up the violin strings and the white board.

One student has told me she wants to know what all the Italian words in her music mean, so every week she has the assignment of looking up certain terms and reporting back to me on them.

One student wants to be able to hear music of famous composers and know, by ear, who wrote it.  We are starting with Vivaldi, since he is learning a Vivaldi concerto in his lessons and another in group class.  He has been listening to the Four Seasons, Gloria, and La Stravaganza.  After a while we'll switch to another composer and give him an earful of that one.

One student wants to know more facts about the music he is playing.  As he is working on a quartet by Beethoven, I've had him look up some facts about Beethoven's life, his quartets, and do some special listening along those lines.  Next we'll move over to researching Kreisler since he is working on the Rondino.

I've learned that one students really likes SLOW pieces, so we are working on St.-Saens arrangement of The Swan for violin in the midst of all the faster pieces available to us in book 5.

Several students have talked about how uncomfortable they are performing, and we have been working on visualizing performances and viewing what they are doing as giving a gift to their audience.  Giving their listeners a one-time emotional experience.... Rather than a show of skill where they will be judged, as one student sadly expressed his thoughts to me.

One student has told me he wants to do a senior recital, and another has told me he wants to do a workshop in the spring.  So we are starting to plan repertoire.

Another student wants to learn to read bass clef so that he can be more useful in an ensemble he is part of, and so that he can convince his parents it would be worth it for him to take piano lessons.  I have been digging into a lot of the old sight-singing books from college theory, helping him sing the bass clef excerpts with note names, and then having him play them on the violin.

Another student wants to get better at reading ledger lines, so he has made himself flashcards which he now practices identifying, singing, and finding on his violin with an assortment of fingers.

I have another student who has been doing quite a lot of practice, but without any focus, such that her time investment hasn't been showing in her lessons.  Now she is making a point of checking herself frequently on a timer to make sure her brain is working on the problem at hand, not thinking ahead to dinner.

I had another student who was constantly getting distracted in his practice, and we figured out that his problem was that he was practicing while looking out the window of his bedroom.  He was spending the time thinking about what he wanted to do outside.  He has moved his practice to a different part of his bedroom so that he can keep his eyes on his work.

I have another student who realized he was having trouble with note reading because he was viewing it sort of like paint-by-number, rather than hearing the music in his head the way we do when we are reading words.  So he, too, is being subjected to a lot of my old college sight-singing to strengthen the connection between the notes on the page and his audiation.

It has been good to get a re-focus with a lot of these kids, and I want to check in with them in January to find out if we really are making progress on their personal goals.  I always have a huge pile of goals for them (button under your hear!  arm weight!  tune that octave!  think about where that phrase is going!  thumb-sides!  release that base joint!  feel the subdivisions!  step the beats!  open your bow arm from the elbow!......), but I am loving helping them meet their own goals, too!  The more I teach, the more I am mystified about how to fit in all the education I want for my students in the allotted lesson times and homework assignments.  Truly, it is a conundrum. 

Gig Harbor Door