Another Day, Another Dollar

 I am with two kids at a park and was just thinking maybe I didn't want to miss writing at least once in December, although I don't have anything deep to share at the moment. 

I am knee deep in various projects which may or may not impact the peaceful routine of this school year, and those are taking all my devoted and intense interest right now - things along the lines of reorganizing physical space at home and moreso, things along the lines of music-making. 

...A week and a half ago I finished reading Tolstoy's Anna Karenina for the first time - 34 hours of walking and listening.  Just before that I listened to Jane Eyre for the second time, which was 21 hours.  I thought I might listen to the Einstein biography again after the Tolstoy (also around 21 hours), but thirty minutes in, I had to turn it off.  Anna Karenina was such a journey, I am just not ready to travel anywhere new for a while.  I am therefore lost on my literature trek just now and have been happily walking in silence, other than muttering to myself and talking to animals and plants I pass on my journey.

I was surprised to not feel sentimental about the holidays this year, and am happy to just do one day and then another without great feelings of moment or portent attached. No sadness or eagerness about the turn of season or the solstice either.  I missed out on Christmas Eve, but considered that there will be another next year, and experienced only the smallest tinge of disappointment. I am glad for the time to breathe a little but also not horrified to return to our routine soon.

I have been listening with deep interest to lots of incredible recordings - mostly chamber music but also some orchestral.  

Gravel Pits

 A few months ago, I got a new app on my phone for locating former mining sites in the US, of which there were very many here in Renton and nearby, and this answered why there were a couple of much newer developments mixed into our neighborhood....

Renton was believed to have once been on the edge of a large volcanic tropical island, in a low swampy area filled with palms and such, which eventually collided with the North American plate, leaving behind its boggy forests in the form of several coal seams. These coal seams, now tipped at approximately 40 degrees, approach the surface in Renton, Newcastle, and Black Diamond and are a large part of what put Seattle, etc. on the map as an industrial center in the late 1800s.  

The Newcastle coal was exported, especially to San Francisco.  

The Renton coal powered the industrial revolution locally in the riparian  Cedar and Black River Valleys. A large brick factory on the site of today's Cedar River Dog Park provided the paving for the city of Seattle streets. Another large factory, still extant, less than a half mile from our house, produced the first railroad cars on the West Coast. These days it produces post-market parts for Kenworth trucks.

Much later than the coal-depositing events, Renton was near to the southern end of the ice sheets which dipped south from the Arctic at the glacial maximim in the most recent Ice Age. When those glaciers receded northward as the climate warmed, they not only carved out Lake Washington which currently starts here in Renton (initially filled with salt water), but the other fjords which make up the Puget Sound. The shapes of the southern end of the Sound and the rivers which feed it have been altered over time by massive pyroclastic flows of Mt. Rainier (called Tahoma or Tacoma by Indiginous groups.) And the hills, such as ours, were left mired in glacial deposits of sand and gravel.

In addition to all the Renton coal mines, our neighborhood was once home to four gravel and sand mining operations, all of which were active, at the very least, in the 1960s. They were all on this very hill, south of our WW II Boeing housing development.

Recently, I had opportunity to walk south from home rather than on my usual west-east loops, and I took photos of the three of the four former pits. I got distracted from taking a photo at the furthest south pit, as two hawks were soaring and calling, and I was trying to find a back way into the historic Mt. Olivet Cemetary which adjoins it. That venture was futile, as the more civilized ways in were locked, and I did not want to attract more side-eyes and law enforcement by the less civilized routes.  

The photo-neglected pit was called Pit A 262, and belonged to the Sandway Dock Co. in 1960.

The eastern lobe of the Liberty Ridge development, built in the 2000s, features houses all built below grade.  The hillside is cut away sharply at certain points and meets the cliff descending to the Cedar River on the southern edge.  This was the very large Rainier Sand and Gravel Pit.

Just across the main road to the north was the Sartori Pit, owned by the Department of Highways in 1960.  There is no longer mining behind the chain link fence, but it is still owned by the state and labeled as the Renton Maintenance Facility.

Two blocks north of that is a 1980s housing development, built in the depression left behind from the Renton Pit, owned and operated by King County in 1960.  That former pit starts just about five blocks southeast of my house.

DUI Report

A couple of weeks ago, when I was on my early morning one-mile loop before my two -mile loop, I came upon the scene of a midnight crash.  The damaged car was no longer there, of course.  Someone had not made a corner coming up hill and taken out a beautiful,  small ornamental maple turning brilliant autumn colors, and spread it across two front yards, while tearing up turf and a gravel driveway, and moving some large landscaping bricks about.

A few blocks away the same morning, a front-yard chain link fence and mail box were crumpled to bits and tire tracks smashed the grass of another house. Same drivers?  This one wasn't on a curve but could have occurred during a 3-point turn.

This very morning, on the very same one-mile loop, I came across a different curve which was missed in the middle of last night, tearing up turf, smashing up yard ornaments, and most obnoxious of all, smashing into someone's truck parked in their driveway, shifting the back end about three feet uphill.  Debris fallen from the chaos car was left in a neighbor's yard.

And then shortly after on my two-mile loop I saw another mishap from last night.   Another curve: the driver had driven straight up on the sidewalk  and hit a substantial tree.  Again, the car was no longer there, just the evidence.  

Who is careening around the neighborhood at night smashing up vehicles???

A Tuesday Story

 Over the weekend, I had the sudden inspiration to glance at the expiry date on my driver's license. It was two months out of date... So I have been driving illegally for many weeks. Thanks to scheduling systems developed, I believe, during the pandemic, I got an appointment in West Seattle at the DOL for this morning between my early lessons and my afternoon lessons. As this would impact my traditional constitutional time, and as I have a kid who can still get quite anxious if I leave home without them while they are awake, I rolled the events together and took my first visit to Lincoln Park.  

I strolled the beach, which was almost overwhelming due to wind, walking on shifting rocks at an incline, and the sound of the waves. I walked the uphill woodland paths, which was just perfect and full of nature, light and dark.  

As I rounded a perfect bend, I suddenly thought to myself...

Wouldn't it be wonderful to live near this park and walk here every day! And then a quick moment of panic: No!!!! I don't want to be trapped!!! What if I don't want to walk here every day, even though I moved here for the park?!!! I can't ever come here again!!! I'll be stuck!!! Rational thought kicks in: I wouldn't HAVE to walk here every day even if I lived here.... But then again, I probably would, because once I find a routine I like, it sticks with me for a long time and I don't want to leave it.... But again, I am not moving, and I couldn't afford this neighborhood anyway. 

...and then: This sounds like the thoughts of my PDA friends. I checked in with my fave later in the day and confirmed that everything, all the time, day in and day out, is accompanied by the automatic no of the brain and ridiculous internal arguments, even when the thing is wanted. So it was a tiny microcosm, lending clarity and empathy.

Scripts

Recently before a church service I was playing, one older woman walked up to another older woman and cheerfully asked: "How's your other half?"  

The second woman replied: "He died last week."

The first woman looked stricken, muttered an "Oh" or an "I'm sorry" and walked away.

I watched this with curiosity as I did not know what I would have said either if I were the first woman.  

A third woman walked up alongside the bereaved widow.  I took note of her words carefully and put them in my mental "script files", as they seemed compassionate and helpful.  I share them here in case anyone else needs them some day in a conversation.

Woman 3: "Do you have people surrounding and supporting you?"

(Woman 2: "Yes, where I live.")

Woman 3: "I am so glad to hear that.  Are you accepting visitors?  Would you like a visit?"

...I was not able to hear the rest of the conversation,  but I knew that while both women cared deeply for the widow and her situation,  one of them had a set of words that was helpful and meaningful.  I also noticed that Woman 3 sat next to the widow for the whole service.

I made use of these scripts in altered format later in the day.  

I got a text that evening from a neighbor saying that her offspring had been hospitalized.  Immediately I went back to my study of empathetic responses and came up with an I'm sorry; that must be so hard.  Then I thought back to the morning's conversation.   It seemed that a family hospitalization might also be a situation where someone would require support, so I asked the question about support... and realized that this person probably reached out to me hoping I would be part of the support team.  So I asked what support I could offer, and she had an idea, so we came up with a concrete plan.

It was nice to know how to help rather than just feeling badly on the sidelines, and the right words got us there.

So Very Many Shades of Grey

 In sixth grade, I first read the Diary of Anne Frank.  I can't remember if it was required reading for our world history course, or if I fell into another way.  Regardless, it became mine and an integral part of my life.  That summer, my father's excess airline mileage from work took our family of five plus two of our grandparents on a two week tour of northwestern Europe; one important stop for me was the Anne Frank Huis in Amsterdam. For the next few years, pages from that Diary were my nightly after-lights-out reading, and it set me on my side-course of studying and reenacting Judaism in great detail.  This also put my eyes onto my friends and acquaintances and becoming hyper-aware of who around me was Jewish; plenty of our neighbors around town shared that deep heritage. One of my seventh grade classmates became particularly admired for that reason.

The Netherlands, and more particularly, the Dutch language, also became an important interest.  I studied some Dutch on the side with my German, and found the linguistic comparisons and contrasts helpful and informative. 

In the aftermath of building Holstig-Mon (You can search up a December 2022 post by that name) in the back yard, I was formulating dreams of building my own city state on farmland in the Netherlands.  As part of my research for this, I would check the weather page in the newspaper daily for both Amsterdam, and the German city closest to the Dutch border, averaging the two temperatures to estimate the weather for my proposed location.  The city plan was fairly well organized.  The whole thing would be a circle,  modeled on some circular streets I'd seen in London and Bath on that aforementioned trip.  It was to consist of a round of stone town houses with four paths leading into the center.  The center was to be natural/plant filled, and a common area, as in the colonist towns of New England.  Behind each townhouse was to be a slice of pie extending to the edge of the circle, which was for farming and grazing lands.  In keeping with the past, and also in looking to a more judicious future, each home would grow its own food, and the inner workings of the houses would not require piped-in electricity.  Using ancient Roman fountain technology, water would be pumped through the plumbing system.  The top floor of each house would be a green house, for the growing of plants and the harnessing of solar energy for heating.  Many details were left unaccounted for - access to information and ideas was rather different in those days, but the concept was fleshed out as best as possible with what data I could store in my brain.  I kept tracking weather data for those two locations through twelfth grade.

Recently, I have been back on a kick revisiting the Jewish/Dutch/WWII topic.  I started to listen to an audio version of Anne Frank's Diary, but I had to quit after about ten minutes, as the narrator had such a different interpretation to what I had heard in my head that I couldn't stand it.  However, I have recently listened to a number of other audiobooks...

My Friend Anne Frank by Hannah Pick-Gosslar, the close childhood friend of Anne's; they met as immigrant toddlers.  It tells of their family's deep friendships and life at school, the Frank family's sudden disappearance, presumably to Switzerland, and their surprise and painful re-meeting in the Bergen-Belsen camp where Anne and her sister died.  Hannah survived the camp and eventually fulfilled her now-dead father's dream of emigrating to Israel. 

Anne Frank Remembered by Miep Gies.  Miep was one of Otto Frank's Gentile employees, and she took on huge responsibilities in helping to hide the Frank family, their friends, and several other individuals the Franks never knew about.  It really fills in all kinds of gaps in the Diary that a teenager in hiding could never have known.  It also covers Mr. Franks's return from the death camps and how he lived with Miep and her husband for many years after the war while grieving the deaths of his family and friends.

The Betrayal of Anne Frank by Rosemary Sullivan.  A former FBI investigator put together a team to study mountains of data from many sources to try to discover exactly how the Frank family's hiding place was betrayed to the Nazis.  While I found their likeliest explaination convincing, the book was also valuable to me in terms of explaining lots of the ins and outs of Dutch society during the German occupation.

The Hiding Place by Corrie ten Boom.  She tells the story of working with her family and the Underground to hide Jewish individuals in her own home in Haarlem, her family's and teammates' eventual arrests and the story of her time in Dutch prison and concentration camps, where her father and sister both died.

...My Jewish classmate from seventh grade returned to me in an unexpected way during the pandemic.  She now works in public health and has written articles for The Atlantic.  I read a piece she wrote on her work with the difference between perfect practice and harm reduction in STD transmission and how those lessons could be employed in better messaging to help people making choices to protect themselves and their loved ones from covid.  She pointed out that when we tell people that to protect themselves from covid, they must do X, Y, Z, and Q, many people for whom that plan seems difficult or unworkable will opt to do nothing at all.  If instead we let people know that J offers some protection in this circumstance and P can offer this type of protection and C is better than no action at all, more people are empowered to take action to reduce harm for a better net effect across the populace than if we only give the X, Y, Z, Q information.

I have found her thinking on how seeing a black-and-white best-practice vs avoid-less-than-best-practice framework can make for impossible rigidity in life, and especially in parenting.  I see how the concept of harm-reduction is helpful in the practical application of day-to-day workings out of how to raise my kids, not merely in the realm of covid.  There are some practices which would be ideal in my mind around learning, play, screens, eating, supervision, chores, etc.  And in reality, I do not have the energy or time to enact all of that to perfection.   I am working full time, tired, and permanently disorganized on certain levels, and dealing with my own challenges and pains and questions as overthinkers do.  Sometimes, impossible situations present, and there are no good solutions - only lots of bad ones.  I find it is more helpful to look at things through the framework of: several of these options are not my preference, but which of these choices causes the least harm to the largest number of people long-term?  When perfect isn't possible, what is the best harm-reduction when I look at all the factors of this very complex, soupy calculus?  Things are rarely black and white but so very many shades of grey.

The stories of protecting Dutch Jews from the gargantuan, red-taped beaurocracy of discrimination, kidnapping, imprisonment, neglect, cruelty, and murder, are filled with so many small, difficult decisions in so many shades of grey, too.  All those shades of grey added up to a better-than-worst-case-scenario outcome for a lot of people.

Haphazard Fabric

 As far as I know, this is the first time I've ever relayed this first small incident, and though it felt very awkward for a few minutes, I don't recall worrying much over it afterward. 

My first or second year at CIM, I was sitting in the small 3rd floor dorm lounge, alone. Was I looking for a place to study away from my roommate?  Was I hoping for a friend to pop in with a topic of conversation or an invite to head to the cafeteria for a meal?  Was I exhausted and staring at the wall?  No idea.

But at some point I was not alone; two other violinists showed up to make Ramen or popcorn or something in the kitchenette.  I had my back to them, and, engaged in the task at hand and their own banter, they did not notice me.  

Presently, they were speculating about who of their fellow students might be a lesbian. (This was not a particularly juicy topic, as in a music school one expects some sexual diversity amongst the cast.)  The one I knew less well suggested my name.  The one I knew only a little better said, "No, she's a Jesus Freak."  The first one, bewildered, said, "Why would anyone be that way?"  The second one said, in a tone of voice, which in retrospect, I think, suggested a respect for my person while completely disavowing the idea for themselves: "I don't know. Jesus saves?" A couple of other names I don't recall were mentioned as candidates for the lesbian category, and they were on to another topic....I waited for them to leave the room before moving a muscle.

I sort of wondered why they thought I was gay, as I had not dated anyone of any sort, and though I was privately religious, I really didn't like being called a Jesus Freak. I think if I had dared (which I did not!) share that epithet with some other of my church-going friends, they may well have suggested I should be proud of it; I know I would have felt uncomfortable in my own skin taking that praise.

Recently it has occurred to me that at that time, I had copied my basic mode of dress from a male I only vaguely knew, because I happened to have admired their musicianship.  Perhaps if I were in the right costume,  the talent I was actively seeking would flow?  Plus, it was comfortable and not fussy and would not draw attention to me.  It had not occurred to me that anyone would read anything special into the boring fabric draped somewhat haphazardly over my skinny frame.

A year or two later, I went to a Bible study which I frequented with some friends, and the man in charge that night gave an impromptu lecture, which seemed vaguely directed at someone who should know who they were, on not trying to be fashionable but rather being modest instead.  Although I do not agree with everything he had to say, I had no reason to believe I was any subject of the lecture - I cared literally nothing for fashion, and mainly just wanted to be comfortable.   Some hours later, I suddenly and horribly realized I was the target of this anonymous verbal delivery, as everyone else in that room had been wearing their same clothes, and I was wearing some new clothes my mom had sent me in the mail in the ever hopeful attempt at improving my appearance to the general public.  As it turned out, I did not wear the specific items from that day more than once or twice afterward - not out of guilt, but because the fit was uncomfortable. 

This reminds me of another time when I was probably 11 or so, I was wearing some sort of something odd from my closet, and it was demanded whether I thought my garb to be racy.  This was a word I did not know, though I could tell from the tone of voice it was a bad thing.  After I asked for and received a definition, I still had no way of answering the question, as it would involve my being aware of various social norms and the ability to measure others' perceptions of my adherence to them. As it was, whatever I was wearing at that moment I imagined to be a costume from the Ancient world, and I was immersed in that very different century, having no care for the social expectations of the 20th.

Another time in my middle school years I was asked to change as I was wearing too many layers and there was a concern about the heat.  That time I was in clothing vaguely consistent with my temporary habitation of the Victorian era.

I am sure that there are more stories along these lines, but this selection is what stands out to me just now.

Voices

 Once when I was a child, elementary school aged, I told my parents that I heard voices in the wall at night when I was in bed.  Immediately they reacted with a very worried/upsetting look which hit me in the chest like shrapnel. I realized I'd said something that should.not.be.said.  I fumbled to retract the statement.  But it was true.  And in the last few years I figured out what I was hearing.

When I used the hated electric pump a decade ago to extract milk for Anne before I went off to teach up north two days a week, its rhythmic noise sorted itself into nonsense words in my mind.  "Breco breco breco Greco greco..."  I tried to hear it as mechanical noise, but it insisted on becoming words that still ring in my mind.

My hearing used to be far more sensitive before violining, and I remember hearing all kinds of tiny noises at night both inside my body and inside the walls - flowing water and electricity and brain synapses firing and such, I presume.  And all these little noises became nonsense words in my mind, just like that pump, and particularly as my mind was entering that wierd state of unreality in the process of crossing the threshold into slumber.

I happened to hear a story on another topic while watching a web seminar a couple of years ago, when I learned, as an aside, that this reaction to inanimate sounds is a known experience for some people.

First Responders

Some things I have come across during the course of normal life in the last two weeks:

There is a house about three blocks from us that has seemed vaguely sketchy since I have lived here, and I cannot put my finger on which exact detail pushed it over the edge into that vibe.  It has been inhabited by two or more males who seemed to be hanging around in various states of undress at random hours, sometimes arguing or climbing in and out of basement windows, music blaring, smoking or drinking on the front steps or out of the broken basement window.  Nothing was well kept.   The yard contained occasional broken stuff. 

Last week while walking by, I noticed seven unmarked county sheriff cars  (unmarked, but still identifiable en masse) parked across the street.  Seven nearly plain clothes sheriffs in flack vests were chit-chating on the sidewalk in a very congenial and clubby way.  The following day when I walked by the same location, I turned my attention to Sketchy House, rather than to where the rather shockingly large number of officers had been taking up space on the opposite sidewalk the previous day.  I noticed that the house was empty, and there were none of the usual cars present in front of it.  A free upholstered chair and a free dog cage sat on the yard, and there was posted a No Trespassing notice from the King County Sherrif's Department on the door.  A couple of days later the chair and crate were gone, and a for sale sign went up.   The house, with good bones, but in poor condition, sold in a day or two.  I imagine a flipper is going to make something out of it, as a large number of houses in the neighborhood get that treatment these days.

A few days later and a few blocks further from home on the eastbound part of my walking route, I noticed two Renton police cars calmly turning onto a small side street I was about to turn onto.   When I got three blocks up, I met up with them again, quietly parked on two sides of a corner.  I continued on, and saw two more cop cars parked at two sides of another corner. And then I came round a bend and saw two more cop cars parked nose to nose, with an officer standing in the street flying a drone.   I figured maybe they were looking for an unarmed suspect whom they surmised was on foot in a yard, and they had lots of quiet back-up ready in case they needed it.  They weren't shooing pedestrians away and I was soon out of range, so it was more curious than alarming.  It was the first time I had seen a drone used in policing, and though I typically have a visceral negative reaction to drones, it seemed so much nicer than the typical helicopter chase that I found it almost pleasantly quaint.

This morning, a few blocks further on my walking route when I was again west-bound, I came upon a ladder truck, two cop cars, and an ambulance on another quiet residential street corner.  The ambulance doors were being closed by police officers who were returning to their cars.  As I passed, I could hear a woman's voice screaming imprecations from the inside of the ambulance,  begging to be let out.  It was very upsetting thinking about what might have led to that scene, and how everyone involved in it might feel, and how the story might continue after I walked out of sight, and how there may be no possible satisfactory ending.  I had to discontinue my audiobook for the rest of the walk, because it was just too much to bear.  All that could be done was to pray.

This afternoon when I went to pick up Anne from school, I passed a car wreck just about three blocks from my destination where one car had the bumper off, and the other, an SUV, was on its side.  As it was across the street from the fenced lot where the Tukwila police store their vehicles,  three cop cars were there already, including their giant RV-sized thing. Otherwise no first responders had arrived yet.  When we came back south a few minutes later, all northbound traffic was being diverted after the freeway, and  the fire department was there working with  the overturned SUV.  They had affixed large red and blue jacks on the underbelly and roof to keep it from rolling any further, and one firefighter was using the elephantine clippers I've heard referred to but never seen, to cut open the vehicle's roof to reach the occupants.  (Instant thoughts on the folly of a world rushing around in gas-powered metal machines of death like so many ants in a hive flashed through my mind's screen.) Quite a crowd had gathered on the sidewalk to gawk, and an ambulance was arriving.   Given the road and intersection,  it could not have been a very high speed crash. I can't quite imagine what tipped the SUV, and I imagine the occupants were not mortally wounded...

One Step Forward

I have finally had enough experience to understand that life and learning are not linear.  One step forward,  two steps back, a step to the side, and doh-si-doh, is the real nature of things.  Some of you have probably known this for decades, but my pattern-loving brain really wants things to fit into tidy boxes and narratives and sequences, just like I have read in books. Of course, this may not be obvious, as my physical life tends to appear rather lassiez faire and random and messy.

Last year at this time, the heat was on, so to speak.  Eldest had just started public school for the first time and wanted to be there,  though the transition was overwhelming for her and for the parents who were now driving two hours a day.  Middle was signed up for two days a week at outdoor school for Kindergarten, which parents dreamt up for him but was not his dream.  Youngest was feeling left out and was in the throes of intensive brain development and was experiencing a lot of separation anxiety.  I ended up having to attend every single day of forest school, usually with a distraught, whimpering, shrieking, biting toddler on my back while trying to support my little Kindergarten participant, who felt incredibly anxious and out of place.   We were trying to move the whole family's sleep schedule from musician-time to early-morning-school-time, while still teaching late, as circumstances required. I had a record number of teaching hours each week. It was really, really not fun.

In the year before, we had finally agreed, grudgingly, on a parental strategy of allowing each kid unlimited, unmonitored screen time on their own separate devices, first while both parents were teaching, and then any time I was teaching, in addition. Both adults, having grown up with more active, imaginative, nearly screen-free childhoods, knew that this was NOT what we had dreamed of for our own brood.  But we, and mostly I, was under intense pressure trying to calmly and judiciously meet the needs of three children plus the student in front of me simultaneously,  with the added pressure of knowing that the students were paying customers who were helping me keep a roof over our heads.  From nursing times, I had been the preferred go-to parent for all requests.  It felt panic-inducingly impossible to me, and our physical and financial circumstances,  not to mention long-harbored assumptions, made childcare nearly impossible.  

I feel in the last month we have turned a corner.  One step forward, for now.  While the younger two have played well together for years, they have had some mental and emotional leaps in being able to sort out squabbles with less violence on average, have found themselves able to obtain preferred foods on their own, and are able to fully manage their own toileting, and are weaned....  They have reached a new stage of independence and interdependence as a team.  They are also often able to help in group projects around the household as part of a team now, too, and often enjoy feeling needed.

So now we are starting a new school year, and we are trying out a much more limited screen time schedule, which has evolved from the August camping trip.  The two younger ones are playing creatively for hours and hours and hours more together, and it feels do-able from an adult perspective and seems really healthy, too.  They also play with kids on the alley some days a well.

Eldest had a month of angst about what this school year might hold and what format schooling should take.  Every option on the table had some big upsides and some big downsides, but for the moment, it seems the choice is a happy one.  May that continue... and I am ready to make a change at any time if it seems there is a risk of serious decline in mental health.

Littlest likes the idea of routine and homeschool, and thus is happy, so far, sitting at the table during middle's first grade instruction time, playing at her own schooling, so I have enough brain to divert to the coveted-in-my-life One Thing At A Time.  This, in itself, is a new unknown pleasure in my decade of being a parent.

I have learned a lot about learning since my eldest was a homeschooler at this stage.  I knew she needed a more relaxed approach, so I took that to mean: just do one subject or curriculum at a time and follow instructions more or less.   How I wish I knew how much that was NOT the right approach for her.  My middle likes routine in a way eldest does not (and indeed struggles mightly with) and that makes the tricky bits for him easier to handle.  But also, when I see a struggle, I do not assume it's just a bad behavior we need to get around, and I do not see it as a lack of motivation.  Instead, I see it as an invitation to step back and watch.  Watch to see what connections are already happening, to see what learning is already going on, watching to see where my expectations are strictly my own wishes or cultural constructs, watching to see where I may have created the problem myself by rushing on some level or being rigid to ease my own anxiety.  I so wish I had had this viewpoint when I started the homeschool journey with my oldest, but the intense burnout we both experienced was a catalyst for my learning some of these new things...

Eldest is not yet onboard with the new screen-time cut back, and I am sort of letting it slide, while we are encouraging the exploring of more long-format documentaries instead of constant, quick drivel.  School, despite what is loved about it, uses up a lot of "spoons," and eldest has a lot of difficulty (as her mother did at that age and beyond) regulating her sleep schedule.  Experience has taught us that you cannot force someone to sleep, and this child needs their own learning experiences and victories and mishaps around sorting out their sleep times and sleep "hygiene" as it's labeled these days, and their general free time.  So when she is not at school,  she may well be using devices, or crafting, or napping, or calling up her best buddy to arrange get-togethers, or cooking things at weird hours, as she doesn't generally want any food we offer.  And she is getting more and more capable of managing those things herself, though not in a traditional way.  I am sure many would be (and are!) horrified at our seeming negligence in managing her and training her, and our weird mix of very high and very low expectations for her - including, at times, our selves.  Yet, this approach is not without careful thought on our parts, and it is borne out of a decade of experience that many, even those who know us well, cannot imagine.

So for the moment, the new school year is feeling manageable and positive.  Group classes have been rearranged and lengthened, and I think they are going to be more fun and productive.  We are working on monthly studio foci, and while we may not improve the lives of every student this way, if we can just help a few, it will be worthwhile.  Jared is unexpectedly teaching a bit less, but he has more performances on his docket, which is a dream and joy for him.  I was also slated to be teaching a bit less, but thanks to a generous colleague, I have picked up two new students this week who seem eager to learn what I have to offer, even though it will be a lot of difficult work for them.  One student, whose lack of progress in the last year felt a depressing conundrum for all of us, seems to have come round with a collaborative solution for the moment.  I have managed for a few weeks now to stay the course several days a week of doing some excercises for my foot that I messed up five years ago and had gotten far worse....

Teacher In-service

When Jared and I were planning out our summer schedule (which is totally a separate meeting or two from our school year schedule planning), I was looking at what we were penciling onto our three monthly pages each.  Some weeks of teaching 5 days a week, some weeks of 4, and many of just 3... and yet I felt so very, very tired. I look at Jared and said, "I just need a break..."  He replied that we should take off two weeks in August.  I felt sort of skeptical.  Don't I need to see my students???  

But... it worked out really well.  We had time to camp on the Peninsula, to go to the opera, to try to get Anne settled into her first week of school, to stay home due to covid...  and I did watercolor and read and knitted....  My students were all fine without me.

That left me with one week at the end of the month to finish all my summer lessons, and to do all the get-ready-for-fall-schedule stuff without feeling totally exhausted and burned out.  It worked well, which is to say, I think it could become a tradition.

Jared said it was my teacher in-service week.  Good call.

Projects done:

• Finalized everyone's new lesson times and sent out individual schedules and tuition numbers to each (29 students and counting)
• Sorted the older group class into chamber groups, selected pieces for them, marked and recorded parts, and sent recordings and scores around
• Did some thinking and planning for younger group class goals 
• Prepared a complete in-house weekly graph with all of our regularly scheduled lessons, classes, school transport, homeschool, and dinner serving
• Dreamed up and orchestrated our September studio focus (video if you care to watch... ) and sent it around to our students
• Bought a beautiful sheet at Goodwill and turned it into a new curtain to divide our kitchen annex/mudroom/utility room from the dining/living room of our small cabin for when we have students in three rooms for our Monday group classes 
• Planned out the essentials of our homeschool year with the younger two and collaborated on daily charts for them

Now we have the long weekend, and then we dive into the new schedule and celebrate Lazarus's seventh birthday!

The Saga of Grey Kitty

Shortly after we adopted NASA, he started busting outdoors seven times an hour, and we finally gave in.  Feathers decided if NASA was going out, she was, too, thank-you-very-much.  And then Grey Kitty appeared.  I had the vague sense he lived somewhere to the south of us, but I didn't know for sure.  He would come round, particularly in the night.

By come round, I mean, he would spot Feathers sitting at 2 am in the window sill 12 inches above my sleeping head, and climb our porch furniture to try and get at her.  She would attempt to defend her territory from inside the window, and enormous chaos and noise would ensue.  I would be dashing out of bed and chasing him off.  

When he caught NASA by our front steps daily, they would more or less try to murder each other.  One time, NASA wound up with a badly infected wound from a tail bite after one of these skuffles, which involved a spendy trip to the emergency vet.  It also propelled Anne away from sleeping in her top bunk and back into my bed for a year.

Another time, he was jumping at Feathers in the wee hours while she was sitting in the window over my desk.  He managed to slash the screen open and Feathers fell out the window.  So there I was running outside at dark o'clock to collect her and bring her back in.

I said once to Jared that I have never disliked any cat, but I hated Grey Kitty.  Any time I saw him near our property, I chased him off. He was super inconvenient and expensive, and I was annoyed at his anonymous owners for letting him run around all night and be so difficult and expensive.

Black Bean was pretty good at putting him in his place.  All Beaner had to do if Grey Kitty came in the back yard on his watch was to sit up tall and make the merest, faintest hissing noise, and Grey Kitty would tuck tail and run.

One evening this June we were eating dinner on our back patio, when we heard the traditional sounds of Grey Kitty beating up on NASA.  So to war whoops of "Cat fight!  Cat fight!"  I went running through the gate to chase off the scoundrel.  Our neighbor across the street and one over was out and asked about the commotion.  She had many stories to tell, including the sad tale that her husband had passed away and she would be moving out of state.  I learned from her that Grey Kitty was a stray, and she had been feeding him.  (No wonder he had been hanging around!)  And that he was really sweet and loved to be petted.  And that when she left, she was thinking of trying to get him to a shelter so he could be adopted into a good home.

At the end of July, said neighbor took off for Illinois after a lot of selling, packing, and dumpster throwing; a crew of workmen showed up and began the remodeling process.  And Grey Kitty continued showing up for show downs with NASA.   We realized she hadn't found a home for him, and feeling sorry for his poor, hungry tummy and scrappy life, we started feeding him.  We fed him at night, after our cats were safely in, right out by the sidewalk, as far from the house as possible.  He started showing up on cue, though keeping out of sight.

As we felt more and more responsible toward him, we had our cat sitter feed him while we were camping on the Penninsula.  Then, we started moving his feeding location closer and closer to the house.  He started turning up at other times of day and flopping down to get petted.  As the neighbor had said, he was really sweet (when he wasn't beating up NASA.)  With closer contact it became clear he was not fixed, and he had lots of small scars and scratches on his head from fighting.  He was hypervigilant when we fed him, and he was hypervigilant about anyone walking down the street, even when their path was parallel rather than intersecting and they were many yards away.  He was clearly acquainted with the neighborhood 'Possum and gave 'Possum his passing rights.  Everything about him screamed 'stray who had made his own way for a long time', though I estimates he was young-ish - under five years.

We all, especially the kids, started getting rather attached to him, and decided we had better just adopt him.  I called the vet and scheduled an appointment for him few Fridays out. I would have the day off from work and could do what it took to capture him.  Once we got his food dish to the front porch, we brought out our largest cat carrier and started feeding him in there.  And then we would close the door for a short time. I started picking him up briefly.  The next step was to move the carrier with him in it.  We were helping him acclimate to his new home, and he made a couple of brief, supervised forays into the house when the other cats were out back.  We started heading off fights before they happened and worked to keep all the animals calm. 

Sunday at noon, Grey Kitty had come around, so I had fed him, and I was on the front porch socializing with him (he was so sweet and cuddly!), when a budget car (that's mostly the kind we see on our street) rolled up, stopped in the middle of the street, and disgorged a pajama-clad young woman.  She called to me: "Have you seen a grey cat?"  I pointed to Grey Kitty and replied, "This one?" assuming that it must be some other grey cat she was after.  She walked up to the porch, took a look at Grey Kitty, cried out "Charlie!" and scooped him up in her arms!

It turned out she was the teenage daughter of a man three houses south of us (who was the owner of two dangerous and unruly dogs.  He did not maintain his fence and repaired it with random pieces of broken plastic stuff.   The dogs were in the habit of chasing anyone who walked down the alley, so in the last many months we have avoided that part of the street.  They have terrified grown men who have come yelling down the alley with their aggressive behavior.   Long ago, another alley neighbor had tried to speak with this man about his dogs and and was told she was the one disturbing his dogs' training.  We were concerned about the situation here and had discussed who at the city to contact about the dogs and fence issue.)  The cat, Charlie, was hers, and she had gotten him three years ago before her mother died.  She had graduated from high-school this June and moved up north to start her adult life.  Her father and the younger three kids living in the house (and the dogs) had just moved to Bothell and left her cat behind. Because of those dogs, the family never closed the back door of the house, so Charlie was free time come and go at all hours.  I'm sure the girl had no idea what all her cat was up to in the middle of the night, and really didn't know he'd be better off neutered and with vaccines...  

Anyway, she thanked us for taking care of him, I called the kids out of the house for an unexpected and precipitous goodbye, the girl walked back to her car with Charlie snuggled in her embrace, and Grey Kitty disappeared from our lives forever.  I was stunned,  and I have taken it hardest of anyone in our family.  Worst enemies can easily become best friends, and it doesn't help that Jared pointed out that Grey Kitty would probably have had a nicer life if he's stayed with us.

Human Speed

 I am nearing the end of two weeks off from work, and it has been glorious.  

I have no desire to step back onto the treadmill.  I keep reading (well, listening to audio) books, written in other eras, where people were able to move at human speed.  I know there were not the innovations of modern medicine which have saved many lives and made other lives more comfortable.  I know that there has been (and is) unbelievable poverty and hunger and slavery and abuse.  And... My life seems much more titillating and dystopian than the lives of so many characters I love.

The dystopian part hit me this morning as I was juggling parcels on my daily walk and near-daily stop off in the neighborhood grocery.... So many mass produced, brightly colored, plastic packages full of foods trucked from factories all over the world, made from stuff which barely resemble the raw ingredients, screaming from the shelves: "Buy me and satisfy your cravings!" - cravings we never knew we had until the industrial psychological manipulation machine called innocuously, 'advertising,' pointed it out. Noisy and chaotic, impersonal, electronically edited music - duplicated two million times over - blaring over the thoughtlessly installed loudspeakers.  Strange beeps and pieced-together, sampled human syllables of the self-check-out machines; every warm-bodied human I pass is a stranger, but front-end employee Jessica (I have read her name tag many times and thought of the connections to Shakespeare and to Valley Girls) probably recognizes me in my mismatched and random exercise attire.  I walked out the door operated by the motion-trip, invisible, electronic butler into the radiating wrap-around parking lot - a meadow of asphalt, a lake of asphalt, an entire forest kingdom buldozed and drowned in asphalt - and covered with temporarily lifeless giants: noisy, metal transport modules, belching pollution, surprisingly fast and dangerous when activated by the small person at the interior left.  A drab metal box takes up two parking spots: industrial lock on its wheel, solar battery lifted on a sturdy tendril toward the cloud-covered sun, moronic blue flashing lights, an electronic all-seeing eye producing presumably grainy and perspective-distorted, two-dimensional camera footage; suddenly a cheerful, preprogrammed, disembodied man's voice addressed no one in particular: "Welcome to Safeway.   This unit is installed for your comfort and convenience.   No loitering allowed.  Have a nice day."

Keeping some semblance of order amongst food, clothes, possessions, caring for cats and kids, time enough for sleep and some small projects... it is enough outlay for this week.  Last week's quiet oasis: hiking in the forest and along the wild coast was deeply, mindfully, viscerally satisfying - and easier to leave than usual, knowing there was still breathing room on the other end.

But soon we add back in some small, daily bits of formal academic education for my middle child, the daily commutes for schooling for my eldest child, and the directing and tutelage of musical education (and attendant secretarial and psychology work) for close to thirty students, and one is no longer traveling at human pace...

At times I have thought myself lazy.  Unable to narrow my focus -  and feeling overwhelmed and avoidant - is a more accurate descriptor.  My life is enough for multiple people to divy up.  But my brain is, naturally,  I think,  running all the tracks and hopping rails - sometimes smoothly.

Cold Water

Throughout my childhood, I don't really have memories of being uncomfortably hot.  I must have been, on occasion,  as I grew up in Texas! However, I have lots of memories of being cold.  

I most especially take note of this looking back to seventh grade.  

I have always leaned night-owl-ish from birth.  You can ask my mom about that....  I have many diary entries from elementary school which say preposterous (but true) things like: "Here I lay down my pen at 10:23 pm."  My bedtime was squarely and regularly at 8:00.  The night-owl-ing went into hyperdrive around seventh grade.  This meant I was perpetually underslept at school.... Hyperbolically speaking, I think I had more respiratory infections that year than the CDC has cataloged, and of course in those days, we kept slogging through at school with occasional medication and a box of Kleenex unless we had one and a half feet in the grave.  The long and short of it is, this was a recipe for terrible thermoregulation.   I remember freezing all the time, unless the temperature was at least 80 or 81 F.  

My extremities were regularly icy, and this was very problematic from a violin-playing-obsession perspective.   Violinists are small-muscle athletes, and athletes need warm, flexible, active muscles.

...Cold water has always been tricky for me, at least for bathing and swimming.   After visiting the Roman baths in Bath, England,  I did some historical reenactments at home, and while I enjoyed living in that ancient era,  I did NOT enjoy the cold water.  I can wade ankle deep in the Pacific, but once cold water passes my knees, it is a fight to keep moving forward.  By cold water, I mean water less than about 80 degrees... I can't really imagine being a swimmer outside of our summer evening outdoor city pool visits in Texas when it was in the 90s F.

All those years freezing in Texas....  When I was around 24, I tried an experiment of eating ONLY plant foods, and minimally processed plants at that.  Within a few days, my constant chilly extremities and shivering was gone!  Decent thermoregulation was a surprise side-effect of the diet.  Please note that this experiment was conducted in the late Autumn/Winter in Ohio where I regularly experienced snow and uneven heating in old buildings. Yet I felt warmer, on average, than I had in decade(s).

Afterwards, I really did feel cold a lot in Rochester, New York.  But you have to know that due to the uneven heating in old buildings,  it was not uncommon for our apartment to be in the 40s in the mornings, and only get up into the low 50s with space heaters and the oven door open in Winter.  I did love the snow there.  Outdoors was a Winter dreamland.  Indoors was hell frozen over.

In Alabama I had the opposite problem.  The humid heat sucked the life force out of me, and I regularly burst into tears on my daily walk.  I was hot and uncomfortable and stickily miserable. Worse than the soggy warmth, though, was that we had left the musical spot I had loved and the North I had longed to return to since probably my toddler years, and I was afraid I was stuck...

My violin playing is happiest well into the 70s.  My outdoor weather enjoyment really hovers in the 60s to low 80s depending on barometric pressure,  shade conditions,  cloud cover, water and wind conditions.  But I can be extremely happy outoors down to 5 F (the coldest I have personally experienced) with the right clothing and activity.  Water, on the other hand: I like it hot.  I often wish for an outdoor hot tub in the dark, rainy months.  If I am feeling overwhelmed, one of my go-to solutions is to stand in a very hot shower.

Popcorn

 If you spend time at my house, or I at yours, for more than a day or two, you will discover that one of my major habits in life is to eat large quantities of air-popped popcorn.  In addition to the possibility of eating it for breakfast or lunch, dinner, snack, or dessert, it can be munched on while reading or practicing.  I am eating a bowl of it now (in addition to some carrots and fruits I sliced to help rebalance my sensations after a lot of gelato and cheese yesterday.  (Ha, can you tell my regular chef, Jared, is out of town?) I have been on this daily popcorn (and also Tiger tea) kick for over 3 years now.

I had a similar habit in my school years in Cleveland. Every afternoon, I would walk from my practice room to Vendoland, where I would put in my 75c (Quarters were for laundry, parking, and this snack break!) and take out a bag of peanut M&Ms to crunch on while practicing. I felt religious guilt about spending money on something so frivolous.  And I also knew I needed some calories and some other things about the ritual to get through the day.

I have always felt that I had sort of a slightly odd relationship with food.  My mom tells me that as a baby I would eat anything, but around the age of two I got very particular.   That part is pretty normal.  Apparently, though, the foods I really liked were not the usual beige-bland that evolutionary history seems to have saddled too adventurous toddlers with for their own protection.  It was pickles and olives and sauerkraut.

As an elementary child and older, I remember being unbelievably slow eating foods I did not like, to the point of meltdown.  At the same time I felt completely unable to listen to my body signals of satiety when I was eating something that tasted good.  My sense of taste was obviously a very strong, nearly uncontrollable driver.

Later, when I was serious about dancing, and afterward, even into college, I often did not put enough calories into my body on many occasions,  while still eating huge amounts on others.  It was never quite in eating disorder territory, but never felt regulated or something that I had agency over. Plus, there were those little niggling thoughts - the proverbs against overeating, and the medieval insistence upon gluttony as a deadly sin, and the news pieces about famine victims which carry with them a vague survivors guilt, and the memory of childhood admonitions to finish everything on one's plate because of the starving children in Africa.  Going down that line, I do care about the starving children in Africa and elsewhere, and I now realize that the whole thing is way more complex and interwoven than eating peanut M&Ms can effect, though there is some likely tangential relation.  Ethics are not so simple as I once thought, or as they were when he world was less industrial and interconnected, sometime long before I arrived on the planet.  I can't tell if I have more agency than I can ever imagine or far less than I even fear.

One interesting and helpful piece of information I lit upon in a book I borrowed from a friend in my 20s set me on a better path, though self-control is not my strong point when danger is not obviously present.  This has to do with mounting and multiplying research about the design evidence from the human organism and its evolutionary history, plus broad data about the relationship of food to the diseases of wealth - stroke, heart disease, diabetes, cancer.  It seems to be turning out that if we eat what our bodies are truly designed for - whole plants, preferably in similar ratios to what is available in nature, we are not in danger of overeating.  Of course, whole plant foods are sort of hard to come by, or to prioritize, amidst our array of commercially produced, easy-prep, pre-flavored items, designed to hook us as brand-loyal consumers.

Once I fell into the popcorn habit, I eventually recognized two things.  One is, I would not need to worry about obesity and heart disease and cancer from eating popcorn, so I would not need to attempt to limit my intake on that grounds.  The other, to use clinical terminology, is that my strong desire for plain crunch for hours on end is a sensory-seeking behavior, which my body intuitively uses to help me regulate; in many ways it is not about food at all.  It helps me focus and stay calm - two things, that despite my exterior presentation to the world, are actual challenges for me.  If I took popcorn away, I would need to fill the void left behind with something else that fits my current lifestyle and fulfills the same needs.

So I eat a lot of popcorn.  But guilt free now.

Spicey Sauce

Two decades ago in Cleveland when Jared and I were first friends, he would occasionally cook a meal for me at his apartment, and at another time I would reciprocate at mine.  I noticed that he put crushed red pepper flakes into dishes, especially spaghetti sauce.  Not being much of a cook, and usually more of a scavenger when it came to feeding myself, I figured this was how Jared did things and followed suit.  It escalated.  Over time, each of us got bolder with the red pepper flakes until we were both steaming at the ears, almost unable to choke the meal down. We would both be sitting in front of our heaping plates of spaghetti, blasting through several glasses of water, running noses, trying to carry on conversation, pretending we were not in pain!

 I am not sure how we deduced that this was a dead-end path and the truth came out. It seems that it all started when Jared learned that I liked salsa with fresh jalapeño, and he inferred from this, and the fact that I grew up in Texas, that I would enjoy a little kick to my meal.  This is an example of Jared's thoughtfulness in doing quiet little things to benefit others, although misguided in this case.  And it is an example of my life-long tendency to copy others because whatever way I do things is probably not standard or generally acceptable. 

...Also around this time, I picked up a book at the neighborhood library about making bread using natural yeasts in the air.  It wasn't exactly sourdough technique, but the concept was similar.   If I recall correctly, I made one semi-successful loaf, and enjoyed the whole concept, because it seemed suitably ancient and fit in with The Way Things Were.  

...I had started to learn how to cook a pot of dry beans from scratch from Jared.  I would never have otherwise thought of it if I had not been exposed to his culinary habits.  I did not yet (and maybe still don't) have a good sense of which herbs and spices would best flavor a particular pot of legumes.   As a result, there was a giant, experimental pot of black beans, seasoned liberally with dill.  It... did not taste good.

Being ever thrifty and not wanting to waste (also a part of The Way Things Were, as well as extreme empathy, extending even to inanimate objects), I thought I might rescue this pot of beans by incorporating them into another batch of this complex-rise-with-natural-yeasts-in-the-cupboard bread.  The end result was...awful.  Dubbed Skunk Bread, even when role playing as a person in ancient times, I couldn't not choke the stuff down.  It was so bad, I voluntarily chucked it in the dumpster behind our rear fire escape.

Sometime after this, our dear friend Amy and I were at Jared's apartment for a meal, along with Amy's younger sister, who was visiting from out of state.  When the sister was gone to the bathroom, Jared pulled the cornbread out of the oven, and having little counter space but possessing of some empty cupboards, he set it in the cupboard to cool.  When the sister returned, he carried on a charade for some time about cooking in the cabinet rather than the oven, and voila, when the food was ready, he pulled the cornbread out of the cabinet.  It did not taste skunky.

Chamber Music

 

cham·ber mu·sic

/ˈCHāmbər ˌmyo͞ozik/

noun

noun: chamber music

1. instrumental music played by a small ensemble, with one player to a part, the most important form being the string quartet which developed in the 18th century.

The older I get, the more I love playing it.  And playing it with others whose skills are well matched to my own.  Too far in one direction and it is intimidating.  Too far in another and it is frustrating.  The range of relatively close skills can result in joy, friendship, and inspiration. It is tricky to find this range of close skills, because most of the musicians who are good matches already have busy professional lives and don't sign on for extra gigs which don't pay well.

I wish there were a way to make a good chunk of my living off of performing this incredible, vast, and intimate repertoire, but alas, that has not worked out to this point.  Fortunately I do love the challenges and relationships of working with my students at all levels, which does happen to pay the bills for now.

...Orchestra playing is fun, too, but chamber music can be done in smaller, quieter spaces, with friends, and more importantly, it is a vehicle for one's own exploration and creativity. In an orchestra, you have to sacrifice all personal artistry to the group.  That has its limits where my own joy is concerned.

The week we taught in Oregon, I got to perform a short violin duet - a transcription of a Kreisler piece I made - and a movement of a Beethoven string trio.

This past week we did our annual house concerts with piano and clarinet in Snohomish and in our studio.  We did a violin-piano transcription I made of a short work by Brazilian composer Ernesto Nazareth, the Mozart "Kegelstatt" Trio, and an incredible quartet by Viennese Romantic composer Walter Rabl.  I can't wait to play more of his music!

Additionally, since January,  I have been playing with a cellist and pianist around twice a month for the services at a church in the neighborhood, and we get free pick of what to share for prelude, postlude, and communion - and if the choir is ever on break, the offertory, too.  Free pick, that is, of things which are sight-readable in the hour before the service for all involved and fit in the allotted time frames.

All of the chamber music-ing is wonderful and very important to me, and enriches my teaching in large measure....

...Once upon a time, three friends and I, dubbed Alaska Quartet, were offered  job in a small, religious college town in Indiana.  We were offered to teach lessons in the community music school and provide chamber music for special occasions.  It might have been a good start for a career, but it did not pan out.  The pay was low, and the details nebulous; it was offered us on good faith by a lovely, enthusiastic, and safe person.  As it was, the cellist went alone and the group dissolved.

...Also once upon a time, a dear friend of mine at school and I argued good-naturedly about which of us would have the privilege of playing the important supporting second violin in our hypothetical future professional string quartet.  I am not sure why it did not occur to us to trade off first and second.... I am more sure about why it never occurred to us to work and push to create a career path together.  How to obtain or create a job was never addressed by our schooling, other than how to win competitions and orchestra auditions.  It mostly seemed like extreme talent (which we were pursuing but were not quite at the top of the pack) and lots of luck were the way forward.  That was all true, but the idea that there were other controllable factors never crossed my own mind, anyway.  And irrevocably committing to a course of action which might close certain doors seemed too frightening.  Still does.

Anyway, here we are.  I love performing in this context and wish there were ways to do a lot more.  Jared feels the same, I am quite sure.

Ticking

One of the most dreaded tasks of the year, I took on yesterday, voluntarily.  Said task consists of working out the school year lesson calendar and initiating the Fall lesson scheduling.  Actually, I like the writing up forms and tetris aspect.  The part that makes me writhe is being committed to a long-term schedule.  It aches and rankles, knowing that I am locked into a time box for nine months.

Beyond that, it is also a grim anticipation of the turning of the seasons.  The days will get shorter and shorter... and be full of rain... 

It seems each year that life is lived in anticipation of summer.  Summer, when the days are endlessly long and light... the world is in bloom... outdoor adventures await... music feels easier... the schedule is different each week, and little chinks of time open up to follow inspiration...

I have been savoring my evening ritual of visits to our roof to look at the sky.  The solar system has been shifting angle rapidly as Tellus tilts away from the Solstice.  I have been looking at Venus every night, but now she is setting before the Sun, so I have lost sight of her but for my astronomy app.  The other planets are all setting too early just now, as well... When the rains return, the roof will be wet and the clouds will cover the rest of the Universe from my two little eyes, trapped in the envelope of vapors.

After I spent an hour working on the calander for the next year, feeling boxed in by anticipation of clocks, rain, and dark,  I went up and sat on the roof for most of an hour and drank in the low, grey, lumpy rain clouds and cool breezes of an unexpected July weather system simulating Autumn, as well as the company of Laurel, Lazarus, NASA, and even out-of-state Anne -- not in person, but on the phone.

Enough clouds and breeze cleared out my head so I had the nerve to climb back down the ladder and teach four more lessons. 

Understanding

 It is easy to judge what we do not understand.

I have a phrase taped up in my house which says, "Don't get mad, get curious."  I need that reminder.  For most of my life until fairly recently, I was unable to notice when I felt angry.  Since I began to understand that anger is merely a signal, it means that I have an opportunity to collect data, as well as permission to listen to and ask questions of that anger.   

When I start to get angry, it is almost always true that there is something I don't understand in the situation I am facing.  If I stuff the anger, ignore it, or let it fly, that puts Anger in the driver's seat; then I cannot problem solve.  

I have referenced this before: the work of Dr. Ross Greene has been so unbelievably helpful to me.  I first learned of the Collaborative Proactive Solutions model, because I was trying to solve some dangerous situations with one of my kids.  In the end, it has been so helpful for ME in learning how to approach unsolved problems and disagreements with myself, with other adults,  and with work situations.  I think I need several more years of work with this model in order to be as regulated, kind, non-reactive, and helpful as I want to be.  There have been just a very few people I have met in life who embody the peace, self-control, and incredible ability to work through conflict that has made them feel really safe to be real with, and that safe person - that's who I want to be.

...It is easy to judge what we do not understand...and even to become unwilling to try to understand...assuming that our own thoughts about others and situations are the whole truth.  Curiosity is essential...

Minor Crises

 When I arrived home from my walk this morning, I was in a certain on-edge mood.  I have looped back around to my childhood deep interest associated with Anne Frank's diary, and I have been listening to some more recent audio books associated with her story.  This means I am listening to lots of major crises, terrifying happenings, and beaurocratic evil in German-occupied Netherlands during WW II.  I was informed by Jared that we were experiencing a minor crisis in the house.

The details are murky, as the only human witness arrived rather late to the scene, and the feline witnesses are not talking.  The upshot of it was, there was a nearly grown Western scrub Jay perched on a high shelf behind a bottle of honey and box of noodles, and NASA had been locked by said human witness into the front bedroom with two sleeping children.  Jared had found him atop the rolling dishwasher trying to get at the bird. 

I put Nutmeg behind a closed door, too, although she was not a real threat to the bird.  Then I researched how to get a bird out of one's house.  (At this point,  it was Jared's turn to go out for his run, so I was in charge.)  I closed all our cupboards and rubber banded them shut, quietly absconded with dishes and food items I and the kids might need, closed the two curtains to the kitchen, opened the window, and removed the screen.  Shortly after, kids started waking up, and I ran around keeping cats contained, procuring the children's breakfast, and trying to keep them away from the kitchen and the window.  I would also check on the bird, who would peek out from behind the box, then hide its face again.

Unfortunately,  as I knew it likely would, losing the autonomy of using the kitchen was triggering for my PDA kid.  Yesterday, they were asking to have breakfast brought to them and made for them, but suddenly today's off-limits kitchen made them loudly protest that they had been planning major independent cooking projects for breakfast and were planning on making several special types of tea, and now they would starve, and I had to get the bird out immediately.   I knew, however, that the same PDA kid is very protective and justice-oriented when it comes to the downtrodden, discriminated against, and voiceless, so once they saw the bird with their own eyes, they would go into protector and veterinarian mode and the loss of autonomy would be embraced for a good cause.  This occurred as predicted after some stressful minutes of trying to incur the least amount of damage to all parties. 

Meanwhile, I had also been on the phone with a local wildlife rescue to discuss how best to deal with the situation, and it was not clear if the bird had sustained any injuries or was perfectly fine but confused and stressed.  I had the information on how to catch and transport the bird to their facility, and how to help it escape, depending on the situation,  which was not clear up at ceiling level in the dark interior of the cubby.  I did put a plate up there with some seed and water in case it needed some sustenance before attempting its escape.

It was now 10 minutes until I had my first morning lesson, and I was looking ahead to a four-hour block of teaching in the afternoon with musicians sawing away just outside the open window, and anticipating that I really had to solve this problem completely between noon and two.  And then another child awoke and informed me that they had wet the bed.  So I used those ten minutes to get them in the bath, set out a towel and clean clothes for them along with some food, strip the bed, starting the first of two loads of wash which would need to be complete before we had students in that room at 5:00, sprayed down the mattress and put a fan on it, and ran out to teach...

Anyway, the denouement is as follows...  At noon I set up gear to capture the bird and transport it 40 minutes to the wildlife rehab place, with my vet helper in place.  After a couple of scrambly moments in which it became clear that the bird was in good shape, it flew out the open window and disappeared from our property entirely, and I cleaned up bird poo from the kitchen, reinstalled the screen, put away the equipment and my purse and shoes I'd readied for the drive, and put the kitchen back into commission again.  I still had time to eat, hang out the first load of bed wash, start my practice for next week's concerts, and visit with the kids a bit, plus vacuum and  reorganize furniture for group class before my 2:15 lesson.  It all happened, but I felt rather frantic.

Projects Afoot

When we were teaching at the Oregon Suzuki Institute,  an old friend asked about my year.  I told him things that seemed to answer the question.   Then he said, "I have learned to ask, Are you happy?"  I knew the answer to that, because I have thought about it recently, too.  I responded, "I am happy when I have creative projects to work on."  I should have added, 'self-generated' or 'personally invested', because it has to be something I care about.  And I have so many things, big and little, which fit the bill.  Collecting photographs from my life, researching a topic of current interest, reading, writing, painting, knitting, putting together a concert, making a transcription, sewing, rearranging the furniture...

We got back from Oregon and taught Thursday and Friday.  Saturday ended up being a beach with a neighborhood friend day.  Sunday I played chamber music and hymns at the neighborhood Presbyterian church.  

And...

...

There are many special things afoot.

This week is our annual studio summer workshop.  We had already done something like this with Anita at her house when we lived in Kent.  When we rolled over to the annual tuition plan for our business a few years ago, we decided upon offering a one-week intensive for group class rather than offering random group classes here and there in the summer.  

This July we have two Dalcroze classes and four ensembles going, taking up space in both studios (the smaller one for stowing cases), the patio, and the kitchen/utility/mudroom/dining room/annex.  We have a nice group of violins, viola, and cellos from early book 1 through the end of book 2.  With this younger group, I am rehearsing with them several items from our shared Suzuki repertoire, plus a fun Stanley Fletcher tune, Fiddle Blues.  The viola duet with my most junior violist and my most senior violist meets in the 10-minute break between classes.  They are putting together a duet which I hastily chose and transcribed from a cute little modern book of viola and piano pieces; it's titled Computer Games and has some sound effects in it.  I have a quartet playing a Haydn Menuetto and Trio (with a violinist playing a transcription I made of the viola part), and I have a string trio playing the March from Beethoven's Serenade.  I have the trio and quartet rehearsing simultaneously in adjacent spaces, with me popping back and forth every few minutes to coach them on next steps and giving them group autonomy as well.  I wasn't sure how this would work out, but the first day seemed pretty fun and smooth.   At the end of the hour, I opened the door separating them and they performed for each other.  At the end of the week, everyone will go to the park across and we will put on a pop-up concert under the trees.

Prep work for the week, in addition to finding, selecting, transcribing, sending around, and teaching the music and planning dates and times, was mostly heavy labor and fun to work out in my mind.  The back patio, which has been the creative domain of cats and small children for the last 11 months, was cleared of the extensive debris covering it.  Sand toys and random plastic objects went to the sand box zone, the wooden crafting table and cat bed went to the shade-hung zone between the annex and the small studio, and the glass dining table and six chairs moved to the back yard between the swings and garden, had their cushions installed and the huge amount of sand and other detritus (semi-melted balloons!?) removed.  We have been eating our dinner there now.  The patio also was cleared of small bits of trash and many larger organic objects, weeded (it's old and cracked), and swept.  By the time the sweeping has been pushed to the south quarter, the deposited sand was easily a quarter or half inch thick.  We bought a new rectangular shade sail and mounted it, which involved tools, ladders, and special knots.  The annex was cleaned up, and for the first time in several months we saw the middle of the dining table.  The living room rug was taken up and stowed, and the dining table took its place in the living room.  That meant living room debris was collected, the TV tables put away, and vacuuming and mopping done.  The newly tidied and emptied annex was fitted with the curtain rod and curtain from the back bedroom closet as well as the window shade from the annex to visually divide it off from the rest of the house.  I do enjoy all the curtains hanging about...  Then of course, chairs and music stands and benches and shoe racks and pencils were distributed in useful groupings around the property.  I am once again background brainstorming about if there are any new ways to distribute furniture and purpose in our small, overburdened living space.  It's a fun mental exercise.

For some months, my friend, who is a linguist and language acquisition/reading specialist and I have been pondering how to help Anne with her reading journey, and this past Sunday, with all parties in agreement, we moved forward on that.  I took Anne over to my friend's house (an 8 minute drive from us in the neighborhood) for an hour, staying just long enough to make sure she was comfortable there.  My friend handled the whole thing brilliantly.  She showed Anne every room in the house, introduced her to every person, and let her meet all the animals (two dogs and two snakes.)  She chatted with Anne about Anne's interests and found points of connections as they moved through the tour, talking with her little by little about how people learn to read and how she could help Anne with that skill.  Basically, it was like a job interview, where Anne was being invited to join a firm, and the firm put all their cards on the table so Anne could evaluate her willingness to join them.  It was a resounding yes, as it is a no-pressure environment with lots of opportunities for curiousity, novelty, and play, and Anne went for her first learning session yesterday.

Next week, our pianist friend from Cleveland will be in town, and we (meaning Jared and I) and our clarinetist friend in Snohomish are putting together a program which we will share Friday at her house, and Sunday at our studio.  We are doing a transcription I finally made for violin and piano of a Brazilian piano work I heard on the radio once when we lived in Huntsville and fell in love with and planned that very moment to transcribe.  The other three musicians are playing a Mozart clarinet trio, once upon a time premiered at a house concert with Wolfgang himself on the viola. We will finish the program with a late Viennese Romantic work in four movements for the four of us.  This concert was planned rather recently,  so I have done less about advertising, but I think it should work out nicely in the end.

Friday, Anne heads off on her first solo flight for many adventures with various family members in Texas, and I am trying to work out details of what the airline needs from me, as she will be picked up in Austin by one set of relatives and delivered back to the airline with Houston by a different set.

And in between all of this, I am practicing for our concert and teaching lessons.

Mazama

Since  a very young age, I have possessed a special interest in what I think I might call The Way Things Were.  How that looks has manifested in different ways.   When I was six and seven, it meant intense curiosity about life for white settlers in North America in the 1800s, and especially Laura Ingalls Wilder.  Most recently it has manifested in extatic interest surrounding plate tectonics and volcanism, especially in the Cascades in Washington state.  I have a piece of artwork in my small studio, supplied by my parents, depicting the Cascades in Washington,  including elevations of prominent peaks, and denoting the five active/potentially active stratovolcanoes, listed north to south: Mt. Baker, Glacier Peak, Mt. Ranier (Tacoma/Tahoma to our Indiginous people), Mt. Adams, and Mt. St. Helens.  I have also done some cursory research about extinct volcanos in Washington and a tiny bit about volcanism in Oregon, but I was too overwhelmed to add much data to my mental files.  For how much the subject interests me, I have very little data to share.

I really like to put things in mental boxes, to sort, and categorize.  Only...when I dive into a topic, I find it is more complex than I ever thought.  That can push me off it or make me hang onto the boxes too tightly for a time out of disappointment.  But when I lean into the reality, the complexity breaks down my assumptions and prejudices and sends me joyfully reeling deeper into data collection.  Along these lines,  volcanism is way more widespread, varied, complex,  chance-associated, important to life on this planet, and descriptively organic than I thought possible from my first grade science unit on the topic, and our recent visit to Mt. Mazama opened up even more of this nature to me.  I am disappointedly and happily reeling. 

Once when Jared and I flew from Portland to the L.A. area for a workshop, it was clear and sunny, and I excitedly picked out various Cascade stratovolcanos from the air.  Mt. Mazama was unbelievably impressive with a caldera five to six miles in diameter, and I knew I would want to see this behemoth which produced the largest volcanic explosion in the U.S. in the last 500,000 years, in person - on the ground.

Anne mentioned some time back that she wanted to go camping at Crater Lake (the more common name for Mt. Mazama), and when she makes a request like that which aligns with parental desires, it is worth trying to make it work.   As it is a pretty long haul from our house, we determined it would be best to do it from Jared's parents' house, as they are more or less the half-way point.  We were conveniently stowed away with them during the Newburg week.  And so very grateful that they and the kids have a wonderful relationship and that they were willing to engage with our kids for all the hours we were away each day!

...As much as I love nature adventures, I am not much able to specifically plan them far enough in advance to reserve camping spots 6 months ahead... which left us with first-come-first-served spots on a holiday weekend.  But ever hopeful, we set off with enough water for two nights and gratefully secured a quiet spot just 13 miles from the park entrance, in the Umpqua National Forest. 

I carefully kept in mind that this particular adventure was for certain particular people,  and that we did not plan all the kid details well,  and that certain inconveniences cannot always be forseen. So I expected some disregulation and sadness amongst the younger three, knowing what some of the "unlucky" behaviors might present and enacted Plan C's as we went to help mitigate my own lack of preparation.  (Since I started learning about it, I am SO glad to have Dr. Ross Greene's Collaborative Proactive Solutions framework in my thought process - on so many levels. As I learn more I am able to be so much more understanding of what might be going on when people are having a hard time - myself included - and am better able to move toward helpful solutions.  Getting curious rather than angry, and problem-solving rather than retaliating, is such a relief, when I manage to do it!)

Some of the things which caused disregulation:

Long car ride

Not knowing which campground would be our end point

Mosquitoes and more mosquitoes and more mosquitoes 

Itchy mosquito bites

Hyper-empathy for mosquitoes, as well as for other insects, plants, fungus, sticks, rocks, and pieces of trash (It wasn't me, but I feel it in my bones!)

Fear of the dark

Heat

Not having preferred foods with us

Waiting an hour in the 100-degree .heat to drive through the entrance gate to the national park

Not having the ability to arrange a backpacking trip

Not knowing exactly when a parent would return from a hike

Getting stuck on a dead-end road on the wrong side of a parked train

So there were some difficult reactions to all this, and some solutions.  Three of the solutions worked really well.  The others were OK at best.

But on to the good stuff:

Let's talk about the largest volcanic eruption in the lower 48 in the last 500,000 years.  (I assume most people head over to see the beauty of the lake - the color is quite intense, and due to the size of the caldera, it is the deepest lake in the US.  I did take some pictures, but mostly I was interested in the volcanic data.) There were people living in the area under 8000 years ago when it happened, and it's in their oral tradition.  It was not the last eruption of Mt. Mazama, but certainly the largest.  Mazama has been erupting for close to 500,000 years itself, and the remains of an eroded cindercone in the caldera, dating back around 400,000 years is visible.   The plumbing for the stratovolcano is still potentially active, and there are several cindercones in the lake and on the flanks.  This particular eruption in 5000-something BCE was so large that the ash could have buried the entire state of Oregon 8 inches deep, and ash traveled around the globe.  The mountain is believed to have lost 5000 feet of height in the ensuing collapse, which would have taken hours at least and a few days at most.

And here is the exciting part.  I got a chance to hike alone along part of the rim.  As I looked out this way and that, I would say to myself, "That looks like a stratovolcano."  "That looks like a shield volcano."  "That is obviously a cindercone. "  "That mountain has an odd shape; I wonder what it is."  And, I had enough phone connectivity to search for these points of interest on Google maps, most especially using my preferred terrain and satellite modes.  As I positively identifid various features, I was able to hop over to Wikipedia and get a sense of their histories.   I came back from the two hour hike with the realization that every single hill and peak I could see in that part of the High Cascades is either an extinct volcano or a potentially active one.  This seems to be different from the stretch of the Cascades  in Washington.  Although that sector has been a volcanic ridge for untold millions of years, including when a chunk of it bordering on Renton which left major coal depoaits was its own large island plate that drifted from Southeast Asia and docked with the Okanogan plate to become part of North America, most of the mountain features there seem to be uplift with the occasional stratovolcano.  Anyway, this is all very exciting and mind-reeling, and I want to look again at the list of calderas for the Yellowstone Hotspot, as the North American plate has drifted over it for untold eons, and there is evidence of major eruptions in a line from its current location as a National Park, all the way back into Oregon, and though that is far more ancient than anything visible in the Mt. Mazama region, which only dates back to the Pleistocine on the whole.  Though it is said that the region is built on much older shield volcanos, also derived from the subduction of the Juan de Fuca plate.

Anne yelled at me several times to stop hyperventilating over volcanos. And as annoyed when I laughed.

Other good things:

At night, we could see stars, the full moon, and satellites.

Also, the number of bats flying around after dark in the woods was truly spectacular,  and it was a joy to see them flapping by our noses rapidly, precisely, and nearly silently.

I learned that the occasional light tan, cement-looking rock along the Umpqua River Highway, which at points obliterated the view of the darker, redder, more obviously volcanic rock on the cliff sides was from the massive pyroclastic flows associated with Mazama's most spectacular eruption.  

There was a lot of snow near the rim at Crater Lake, which provided many hours of fun and cooler temperatures for the younger set on a hot day, while the adults took turns hiking.

Our campsite was above 4500 feet, and I met some wildflowers I had never seen before.

On the way back to Jared's parents' my cemetary-loving 4-year-old requested a stop at a tiny hillside cemetary in the tiny town of Wilbur on the side of Highway 99.  There was a pioneer cemetary enclosed within it, and I found a headstone dating to 1859.  This hillside spot on a gravel track is where we got stuck waiting for a parked train.  I found this very exciting, but some other of our party felt otherwise.  It was hot,  but there was shade from mature trees and a strong breeze.

Newburg

I just finished up teaching at a five-day workshop in small town in Oregon, which I learned last night is the second-oldest Suzuki Institute in the US.  I do like teaching at workshops, particularly the one-on-one masterclass component, as that is an easier and more minutely-studied social situation for me than running large group classes.  I like the five-day format best, as it feels like long enough to accomplish something important and have it settle.  In a materclass, I am NOt helping the students prepare for events, or churning on to the next piece or scale or etude... so I feel a lot of mental clarity, which I am sometimes missing in the normal trajectory of life, about deconstructing, reconstructing, and big-picture priorities. 

I got lucky, too, because I was assigned only masterclasses, and a large percentage of them were with fairly well put together advanced teenagers with a lot of intrinsic motivation.  I care about students of all ages and levels, but the afore-mentioned are a group I find particularly enjoyable.   So my nerd violin heart got to work on:

Phrase shapes, dynamics,  micro dynamics,  articulations, voicing, style, and harmony in solo Bach

How to use recordings to research artistic ideas

Body alignment

Choosing priorities and focus in practice

How to prepare for a sub gig in an orchestra

Bowhand balance at the frog

Developing stamina to perform a complete Concerto

Intonation via ring tones, singing, drone work,  and checking with open strings and double stops

Consonants, dissonance, and beats

Singing and gesturing to find drama and phrasing

Measuring rhythm via step and play

Using stepping patterns to feel 3-pulse patterns vs hemiola

Shifting with guide fingers and Yost

Building up the sautille stroke from wrist-based string crossings using the metronome

The role of the thumb in vibrato and building up control and the range of artist speeds using the metronome over time

Surrendering the bow to the string and using the hairs to pull the string sideways for tone

Poof bows

Which finger travels with the arm and which one travels independently while shifting in double stops

How to practice with intention so that each note, each shift, each bow, each string crossing, each rhythm is understood and acknowledged 

How to divide up limited practice time so that there is time for the nitty-gritty and the story-telling 

I did work with one masterclass of little beginners around Lazarus's and Laurel's age, most of whom had not been to something like this before.  With the very youngest class, I spoke a lot to the caregivers, and I worked on lots of things through ACTION:

Learning from watching our peers

Practicing, not until you get it right, but until you can't get it wrong - long-term practice habits

Using a checklist to prepare our bodies and bows to play

Bowhand balance, flexibility,  and strength

Left hand flexibility, strength, and speed, and the role of the thumb

Violin balance

Steering the bow

Using the right elbow hinge

How to practice the tricky parts

Musical form

In addition to all that, I met two generous  violin colleagues I did not yet know, practiced undisturbed for many hours,  and got to rehearse and perform two really fun, short chamber works with capable colleagues.

Yesterday while waiting for the final concert, I walked around the town, eagerly viewing a wide variety of houses of the Victorian era.

It was hard to transition into institute week, and now it is hard to transition out of it.