Since late June, things have been rolling, rolling, rolling, just almost out of control... but not quite.
The final week of that month, Jared taught at the Oregon Suzuki Insitute, just 15 minutes from his parents' house, and everyone in our house and theirs was sufficiently vaccinated for them to feel comfortable seeing us. So down we all went for the first visit in more than a year and a half!
I was quite busy, too. Jared had found out that the Indiana University Violin and Viola Teacher's Retreat was available online this year for a ridiculously low fee, so I was up and on the computer each morning at 7 am, onboarding little nuggets of goodness. And then in the afternoons, I was teaching my regular schedule online. I have close to 30 students who were all owed six summer lessons; some chose to take many more than that... The kids all had a wonderful time with the grandparents, and were like to have worn them out.
In July, there were more and more and more lessons.
There was a short weekend camping trip to Staircase in the Olympic Naional Park.
There was a week of teaching strings camp in our studio/backyard with a final concert at the neighborhood park, all while Anne was shuttle back and forth to the summer day camp associated with her after-school program.
And there were the chamber music concerts. For two wonderful weeks we collaborated with our pianist friend, in town from Cleveland, and our clarinetist friend, who lives up in Snohomish. Rehearsals happened in Renton, Seattle, and Snohomish with kids in tow. (One week the kids and I also squeezed in daily VBS attendance in the neighborhood.) Our studio/alley concert was less-well attended than expected due to record-breaking heat, but we still had a wonderful audience!
We played a French half with the Louise Farrenc Clarinet Trio and Chausson's Poeme for violin, and there was a German half with the Beethoven Clarinet Trio and Emilie Mayer's B Minor Piano Trio. Two days later in Snohomish, we mixed it up and did a clarinet half, then a violin half, again with kids in tow. But only two kids. Because Anne had gone off with Aunt and Uncle to eastern Washington to a five-day star party in the Okanogan Highlands. The slept in a little cabin after staying up to all hours, hanging out with telescopes and their operators, and apparently during the day kept cool by swimming in a lake and standing in an air-conditioned grocery store. Anne had a marvelous time, and she is lucky to have such interesting family who also take an interest in her!
The day after all that wrapped up, it was August, and that means Japan-Seattle Suzuki Institute week. This required having the instruments, the kids and their toys, and food for the day loaded into the car by 7:00 each morning, dropping Anne off at day camp, and being in place at Seattle Pacific University, ready to teach by 8:30... videos, video games, and food ready to help the other two kids through our first two hours of teaching. It was a wonderful week, and so nice to reconnect with musical friends and colleagues from around the country (in person!) and help prepare young musicians for end-of-week performances, and hopefully provide bits new technical and musical inspiration. End of the day - roll back to Renton, pick up Anne from her friend's house after camp, plan classes for the following day, head out on my daily walk (accompanied by my dear friends, the Austins, on audiobook) get dinner, get everyone to bed to do it over again the next day...
And the day after all that, we were on the road to Oregon again. It wasn't until Tuesday that Jared's uncle had invited all of us on a milestone birthday boat ride on the Columbia, but Jared wisely talked me out of a down-and-back scheme the day of. I slept a lot over the weekend and did teach a couple of my Monday lessons online, but I moved most of them to Thursday and Friday, with the provision to work around my to-be-announced jury duty schedule. We also did our Fall lesson scheduling, which is sort of horrific looking - I lost one student due to a move, but I gained one, and a large number of existing students are going up to longer lesson lengths. It feels sort of relentless, but those three-day weekends will save me.
As it turned out, Renton Municipal Court did not have any cases to try that week, so I served my patriotic duty by calling a hotline and listening to a message. I do think it might have been interesting to be part of the justice process, but I don't know that I had a lot more to give at that point. Anne ended up staying with the grandparents when the rest of us returned home Tuesday night, so after teaching for three days and running errands, we were back to Oregon on Saturday and home again Sunday.
This brings us up to now: this week is our vacation week. Originally planned as a North Cascades camping trip, it then switched plans to become our Adams Fork camping trip (as that had been canceled when our chamber music concerts got scheduled after the summer calendar was in place.) Then it became a huge question mark, as I was awaiting jury duty instructions.
It has now become Preparation Week for unexpected new adventures which are launching later this month, all of which will be reported upon in the future. I have also tried to take a stacation mentality, and have taken the kids out to parks and read a book for an hour and started working on cleaning up the debris of back-to-back events for two months... I may get up the nerve to do something for my birthday this weekend, or maybe I will just take a nap.
I finished the complete Austin Family Chronicles twice in a row on my walks this summer, and with some trepidation decided to take a break before my third round. I switched uneasily back my dear friends the Penderwicks, and am settling in nicely. Thank goodness for this little daily touchpoint, paired with enjoyable motion.
