Morning! Chas those were my exact thoughts when I logged on here…is it coming or going…and is it more than one of something? 😊 (I am guessing it is a doe, a deer, a female deer…basking in a ray..a drop of golden sun!)
Good Morning. This is my last week before I start teaching again in August. I have a lot to get done but other things are popping up and it’s making me feel pressure and frantic. No one seems to understand I have things to do and work is one of them.
Ok…now I see the fawn…it has spots and the other does not!
Praying for you Kim…I have experienced that “everyone wants a piece of me and I have no more pieces left”! Praying for understanding for those who seem not to understand ❤️
Good morning. When I use my Word Press App Reader Feed it does not show the header photo. Now I am curious about that picture. If y’all have trouble with it, I will have double trouble.
Now I must ready myself for Bible study in Daniel three with my lady friends. Have a good morning.
Where we used to live, deer would walk across the field behind us on a regular basis. Problem was, our yard was deep and any photos I got from inside the house, they were too far away. So I would go outside and try to discreetly get closer–but it rarely worked. They were country deer and skittish.
Well, now the neighborhood deer are city deer, used to walking across walking trails 15-20 feet from people and eating in human gardens. The main trail where I walk, one sees deer at really close range regularly–except in May and June, pretty much, when the does are ready to have their babies or have just had them. You may see a doe without her fawns, but she keeps a greater distance from people.
And then, once the babes are big enough to leap the low fence next to the trail, you start seeing them again. Last year even in summer I saw very few on the trail. My first pair, first fawns I’d seen in a couple of years and first I’d seen all summer, a clueless fellow walker spooked when I was trying to get photos of them. (Lots of people will stop walking when they see me trying to take a photo, even if they can’t see what I’m photographing. I often tell people it’s OK, they can move on–either because they won’t spook whatever I’m photographing or because I’ve taken a couple of photos and don’t want to “hold them” forever. In this case, I said, “Do you see the fawns?” and she said she did and kept walking. It was quite frustrating to me at the time, especially since she wasn’t far past where the trail branches and she could have gone backward and gone on the parallel branch or she could have waited a minute or two. It was weeks before I saw another fawn, and it was pretty big by the time I saw another.)
This year has been a great one for deer sightings. One day I was at a park a mile away, and I saw two young bucks in velvet in good sightings, and the next day I was at my regular trail and I saw a single fawn and then twin fawns. I went back a couple days later and the twins were on my side of the fence, with their mother on the other side, and they ran along the fence but they didn’t know how to get across it. Then they got curious about me and walked toward me, and I got a bunch or good photos including one that I think is really a “keeper.” Having wanted good fawn photos for decades and not getting anything better than mediocre, I’m quite thrilled.
Speaking of camping: we had a very nice time. Well, I had an excellent time. Daughter and son in law less so though they enjoyed it. Tons of mosquitoes. But they chose that week to tweek their parenting skills. The children were doing lots of ignoring parents. So daughter asked me for suggestions and I pointed out how my youngest two behaved on arrival (approx same ages as grandchildren) and how they behaved shortly after and how we had dealt with it. No spanking involved. Basically, whatever you decide, be consistent with it and behavior that was not okay led to noses against trees. The grandchildren saw lots of trees and we saw improvement in behaviour though there was a curve.
We also had a deer in our camp. I discouraged son in law and husband from feeding it. Obviously young and obviously familiar with being fed.
I channeled Cheryl and took lots of pictures of wildflowers. Probably seventy five different kinds within a quarter mile of camp. We hiked a lot, glad to have taken the stroller. Not all hikes were stroller friendly and they had to take turns riding until we stacked them. But it is a jogging stroller because of the gravel around here so worked very well in the mountains.
All I can say about that photo is it looks dangerous to me . . .
Speaking of danger, my bi-weekly grocery shopping trip is on the docket, as soon as I get off the computer.
“I could go another couple days,” I said to Mr. Fit before he ran out the door. “But, I’ve got walking buddies the next two days in prime shopping time, so I guess I’ll have to go this morning.”
He shook his head. “We don’t have any milk, bread or soup that I like. The only lettuce is what you’re growing on the counter. How do you define, “go another couple days?”
I was planning to mow this morning but it is raining. So I don’t need to water the new fruit trees or the gardens. Meaning I can sit here regaling you with tales of camping adventures. But I already did.
I had one of those glorious dreams just before waking this morning, in which I was running with long strides, floating above the surface for most of the stride, and not getting the slightest bit winded.
Ever have that dream? I only have a few times, but it’s such pure pleasure when I do.
Too bad my knees don’t let that happen in real life. My running days are past, but I relish the dream of effortless, painless running when it comes. 🙂
I think I have finally hit my stride with piano teaching. For the past several years since I have resumed piano teaching after the 11-year break from doing it as a business, I had a hard time building up my student numbers to a satisfying number. I loved returning to teaching, but I’d have one, maybe two or at best three students a week, and then that would be it. Lessons would be done for the week almost as soon as they started.
The past year has been a great blessing. At the end of last year, I was up to five students, with a sixth preparing to start in January.
Now I’ve got 13 — three in high school, four in middle school as of this fall, six in grade school. Such a wonderful variety of ages, skill levels, family and individual music goals, student personalities. I am really in my element and feel like I’ve reached (or am heading toward, rather — it is a process) new horizons in my teaching philosophy and practice.
Granted, I am more tired at the end of a teaching day, but it is a good tired. All the kids seem to be enjoying their lessons, and I love meeting with them and learning to integrate piano lessons into their lives in a way that fits them as whole children.
I tried to “enjoy” running several times in my life, but it just never took. I never found it that enjoyable.
Now I just want to get back to walking. I asked the therapist yesterday if this recovery process and time I’m seeing was unusual in his experience and he said no, actually it’s rather common for meniscus injuries.
Walking through the house now I keep telling myself, bend-the-knee, bend-the-knee
It resembled a moose with the horns of an African antelope, with a head at both ends of its body. It would be a horrifying, and miserable, creature in real life, but in children’s fiction, it was somewhat amusing to contemplate. I never read Dr. Doolittle, but excerpts from the book, with illustrations, appeared in several of the old school readers we had.
One of those readers also had a tall tale about ridiculous North American creatures. Our favorite, which we will sometimes reference, was the sidehill gouger, which lives on hillsides and only ever circles the hill one way, as the legs on one side of its body were longer than on the other side: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Sidehill%20Gouger
I’ve had a dream that I’ve dreamed occasionally since childhood in which not only am I running effortlessly, I am literally not even touching the ground. I guess it’s rather like a soaring bird that doesn’t need to flap because it’s in a column of rising air, I am hitting the air just right that it allows me to keep running just above the ground. And every time I do it, I realize no one else has actually learned this trick and it’s something I can teach them to do. And then I wake up again, and I’m back in the real world where I’m not even a good runner, let alone one with unusual tricks.
By the way, speaking of grammar, which I know we weren’t, that is a phrase that I see used incorrectly 90% of the time. People use it backward. So a person may say, “I don’t even like spumoni ice cream, let alone ice cream.” The “let alone” is supposed to narrow the category, not broaden it. I mentioned that to my husband one time, and he hadn’t thought about it but agreed I was right. A few days later he used it, and I pointed out he used it backward. He was tired, and he said no, he used it correctly. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, I said OK, perhaps he had and I misheard it. A couple minutes later he told me he ran it through his mind again and realized he did use it backward.
My husband lay down for a nap. He has had a difficult few days physically and is finally back to nearly normal health–he ate lunch first, the first normal meal he has had in several days. A few minutes later the doorbell rang. Usually that means UPS has dropped off a package and wants to make sure we see it, but after ringing the person stood there. I went to the window overlooking the door (since I just don’t open the door to unknown people during a pandemic) and said, “Sir?” (I could see his finger on the bell, about to ring it again.)
“I ran out of gas, wondering if you could help me out with a couple dollars for gas?”
Great. Now panhandlers are going door to door. I really don’t need people ringing the doorbell when my husband is trying to sleep! Yeah, I know, first-world problems.
I have dreamed of flying. A sort of effortless floating, the direction of which I have some, but not full control over. My mother said she used to dream of flying in the same way. I have several recurring dreams, or rather dream topics, most of them nightmares. I have also experienced sleep paralysis, the “old hag”, and had hypnagogic hallucinations.
Piano/violin practice: As a beginner to intermediate, I practiced for about a half hour each day. As advanced, it was 45 minutes to an hour. My music teachers warned against overpracticing.
Our dear friend and relative and her sibling, were made by their father to practice the piano for five hours a day in the higher music grades. And when I say made, I mean made. They won competitions, and were wonderful to listen to, but neither of them does anything at all with music now. While having to practice and engage in routine to improve a musical skill is important, demanding unreasonable effort drains the learning of a skill of all joy or meaning.
My recurring dream, which I think I’ve shared here, is about that early 1900s apartment I missed out on like 30 years ago now.
In my dreams, I somehow own it, it’s my house (so kind of the apartment still but also my current real house), and I keep exploring and finding whole other floors and rooms with amazing built-ins and grand fireplaces and wood floors.
DJ, one of my recurring dreams is if a house, usually our family dwellings, but with ever more corridors and rooms, on a much bigger scale than in real life. I think my mother’s stories of a large old house that her family rented while in transition between homes, is behind it, as she described closests with doors at the back that opened into other closests that opened into another room, and doors under the stairs, and a great front room that was like a ballroom. Her stories seem to get blended into my dreams of a house. There is a fantasy series by James Stoddard called the Evenmere Chronicles, centred around a house that has evermore passages and rooms, in wings of which battles between good and evil take place. Reading that series was a bit like having my dreams written down, which is a surreal and somewhat uncomfortable experience.
Survived the grocery store but was horrified when, with TWO baskets full of groceries, I opened the back hatch and discovered/remembered I had not taken 20 boxes of work shipping to the post office . . .
The CRV handled it. I’ll head to the post office soon. 🙂
I’ve had the dream of flying quite a bit. When I dream of a dwelling place, it is virtually never a home I’ve actually lived in. I dreamed of my childhood home occasionally when I was younger, and I don’t know whether I ever dreamed of it while living in it. I think I have dreamed of only one other house I’ve actually lived in, and right now I can’t even remember which one, but I never dreamed about it till after I moved out of it.
The homes in my dreams are often elaborate and many-roomed houses, but never mansions, or at least never mansions in good repair. And there tend to be a lot of other people living in the home too.
Sleep paralysis terrified me the first time it happened to me. I’d never heard of it before. As far as I remember it only happened when I was a young adult.
I have no idea what hypnagogic hallucinations are.
Kevin, hallucinations that occur as one is falling asleep. A typical one is the sensation of falling that causes people drifting off to jerk awake, but I have experienced auditory hallucinations, generally of music playing.
Dreams! I have had a dream of flying over the fence at the home where I grew up, and I was flapping my arms/wings. It was fun. I’ve had a house dream where the house was barely hanging on to a mountain side, perhaps similar to some I have seen on Lookout Mountain where Covenant College is located. Too many people gathered in a room on the backside which made the house loose its stability and start tumbling. It was a scary fall but landing turned out okay.
Just last night I had one of my church dreams. It is the church I went to as a child only much more expansive. It has seating like in an arena instead of like most churches. I knew I was suppose to meet my mother there and I was at the lower level looking up trying to see her. I started climbing upward and finally saw her up on one of the top rows so she had entered from a door at the top. She had something she’d brought, maybe food, for a party we were to attend after the service. My father came in later and did not see us so he sat down at a lower level and I went down to get him. I asked him if I could borrow ten dollars to buy a book a church lady who had befriended me was selling. I think Wesley showed up in the dream, too.
I figure the dream is about those I miss and can’t see and church is included in that category, too, as I am missing being in church. At the end of the service Amazing Grace was being sung. We left by the door at the top and across the foyer was a double set of doors and when they were opened another sanctuary, like a twin, was there and people were singing Amazing Grace but maybe in a foreign language. It was a nice dream for me.
I’ve had that falling sensation while falling asleep. And I have heard that dreams of an undiscovered 2nd story or extra rooms in one’s house isn’t unusual.
For a long time it was simply a second story, dreaming I suddenly discovered a staircase in my house. “Where does this lead” I wonder, then I arrive at the top and, behold, all sorts of wonderful new rooms!
But it all hooks sort of back into that apartment in Long Beach and then also in a house I rented for a while after my mom died and I needed a house that would accept pets as I’d kept her 2 dogs and apartments here typically don’t allow any pets.
Psychologists say that everyone dreams every night.
However, I don’t relate to any experiences discussed here.
Sometimes, I seem to be thinking things, not experiencing anything.
But nothing has happened due to the thoughts.
Mumsee, 11:46: “Are children expected to practice their music between times?”
A timely question. A month ago and for the 40 or so years before that, I would have said yes, they are expected to practice. But in the last couple of weeks, I’ve rethought my approach to practice recommendations under certain circumstances.
The idea came to me after viewing one of the MTNA Virtual Conference sessions recently — a session on RMM (Recreational Music Making). I haven’t researched much about RMM, but my understanding is that it’s primarily for adult learners who simply want a relaxed approach to learning (or returning to) music lessons. The goal is to cultivate joy in music making at their own pace, rather than making the overarching purpose one that is achievement- and mastery-based, aiming for ever-increasing levels of musical proficiency at a steady and efficient pace.
The session got me to thinking: what if we took an approach like RMM and applied it to children’s music lessons? What would that look like? What would it involve? What would it not involve that we typically think is an integral part of the music lesson experience? Who are good candidates for this method of learning?
I concluded that the decision to practice outside of the lesson would be entirely left up to the student and/or the student’s parents if their goals were recreation-based rather than mastery-based.
I have one family currently who wants recreational piano lessons for their children. They aren’t interested in their children being trained as if they might become the next virtuoso players; they simply want their children to be taught basic skills that will lead to being able to play simple music that brings them joy.
So, in thinking about it, why would I need to approach practice with them like I do with those who want a mastery-based approach, i.e., “Try to practice 6 days a week [my standard recommendation] and be sure to get to your piano within 24 hours after your lesson so that you don’t forget a lot of what we discussed at your lesson…” and etc., like usual?
For the families that want for their children ever-increasing acquisition of skills, steady and efficient growth, performance and/or competition opportunities, and the like, then I’m going to continue to encourage frequent home practice and emphasize the importance of regular attendance at lessons throughout the year. (Well, most of the year — I do have a couple of 3-week breaks in a year where, for the first time, I’m going to give all my students a complete break from practice.)
I try to approach it now from a standpoint of what do the parents want out of the experience? Are we all on the same page, encouraging the children to practice regularly at home to develop their musical ability at a pace that fits with their proficiency goals? If the parents want home practice to be happening frequently (something I want, too, for the growth-based students) then I’m going to partner with the parents and encourage students to play early and often between lessons.
And for the rec-based students, there will be lots of smiles — OK, they can’t see it behind my mask just now, unless I smile big and they see it in my eyes! 😉 — and no “you need to practice more often, then this part will be easier and more fun” exhortations and such.
Anyway…somewhere in there I might have answered your question, Mumsee. 🙂
And regarding your 12:41: “I ask because when we finally did get a music instructor here, he said he preferred they not practice.” I’m wondering why he said that.
The only time I ever told someone not to practice was when I discovered a long time ago that one of my beginner students was hardly ever practicing until the day before her lesson, so then she would practice her assignment six times in a row to make up for missing practice all week. Well, by six days after her lesson, she had often forgotten the fundamentals of what I’d taught her the previous week. She might be on the wrong keys, or playing incorrect rhythms, or things like that, which meant that playing that way six consecutive times would effectively reinforce the errors and make it a nightmare to undo and retrain in the right way.
I told her mom, once I knew this was happening, that if the girl didn’t have time to practice until the day before her lesson, it would be better that she not practice at all until immediately after her next lesson, where I would reintroduce the music. So much easier to start fresh than to undo and redo.
Sorry for the marathon post! I’ve had a post for my blog brewing in my head since I saw that RMM session. I think I might have written part of it here just now. 🙂
Yesterday I received a shipment of books I’d ordered from Amazon, to be used for our homeschool year coming up. Also in the order was a set of 12 sturdy cardboard file boxes I wanted to store my music books better in my hall closet.
I still have most of my piano method books and supplementary student materials standing up in clear plastic tubs on the closet floor, but the shelf at the top of the closet was where I had stored all my books and sheets of standard piano repertoire, Christmas music, sacred music, song books, string music… For many years, that music was in six stacks on the shelf. It wasn’t the greatest organization system. I tried to stack things alphabetically by single composer, with anthologies in other stacks, and so on, but it was a pain to remove individual books that were in the middle or toward the bottom of those stacks. I’d sometimes just throw the more commonly-used books onto the top of the correct pile, which would eventually result in it not being alphabetized anymore.
Thin books would be hard to locate in the pile…
Then recently it finally occurred to me that I could stand those books up and see their spines (the thicker books, anyway) and find what I needed a lot more easily.
However, when you have probably 100+ titles across a 3-foot shelf and you pull something out of the middle, and later try to put it away and have to wrestle with a heavy load of books leaning against the place you want to reinsert the pulled book… well, that didn’t work the greatest, either, since the shelf was too short to be able to use bookends and arrange books in small sections between them.
Enter the file boxes… Today I organized all my piano repertoire in those 12 boxes, put them on the shelf, made a short stack of the songbooks, which I don’t use often, and stood up my small collection of string music in between the last file box and the stack of song books at the right side of the shelf.
It looks so nice!
All my Bach music is in the first box; Beethoven Piano Sonatas (I have his complete collection of 32 sonatas in two thick volumes, a total of — let me go look — over 850 pages!) in the second box; more Beethoven and other composers with last names starting with B or C in the third box; and so on.
Funny how it can take decades to think of the most basic organizational hacks — at least for me. 😉
I just learned about TCAPP: the church at planned parenthood. Sounds like a transforming idea. May God be glorified and the attenders blessed and the observers have their eyes opened.
There was a discussion here yesterday about city living versus country living. I’ve only lived in a city briefly, so mainly feel like a “country” person.
I was just last night speaking with one of my high school students about country living. He was talking about projects he and his dad and their rural neighbors like to work on together. We spoke of the generally relaxed nature of relations with our neighbors out in the styx or the boonies or whatever you like to call it.
So it was rather ironic when my husband called me today shortly after getting to work, asking me what route I and the girls have been taking when we drive into and back from town. (There is bridge construction on the county highway that runs past our dead-end road, so we’ve had to take different routes than usual this summer to go around the part of the highway that is closed.)
I told him which route I normally go, and which ones the girls take, and he told me not to go this one particular route anymore. It is the route he’d normally been taking, and today on his way to work, one guy who lives along one of those back roads told my husband he does not like all the extra traffic on his road now, and he took a picture of the license plate on hubby’s car.
Well, first of all, it’s not his road, and people have a right to be driving it. True, it’s not the official detour route, but in some ways it’s a safer route for people who live where we do because the official detour involves turning left onto a busy highway state highway at an intersection without a traffic light.
The guy along that other route, though, was rather menacing, and hubby didn’t want any of us women in the household having a run-in with a guy like that.
So we’re going to be going the other way now.
Some of my piano people who come to the house might be taking the route past that guy’s house, too, so I think I will have to warn them about that encounter my husband had.
Some people are difficult to deal with and are best avoided, and, sadly, they can be anywhere.
Ah, ok, so they wouldn’t practice wrong. Well, yeah, I guess I could see that; however, teaching students how to practice correctly is, for most of my colleagues and myself, part of our mission.
6, I have quite a bit of piano, violin, and organ music. I am still trying to organize it all (no pun intended). Some of it, I am going to send away, as even if I do teach again some day, I do not think it will useful. I currently have a collection of all of Mozart’s piano sonatas, but I only play five of them – I have tried the others, but they just neither suit my playing style nor appeal to my ears. So, I have been buying premium editions of those five sonatas individually and will send away the book with the entire collection, and I have been doing the same with other collections of other composers. That way, it will be easier to carry with me the pieces that I actually do play wherever I go. I do have some book collections of children’s piano pieces that I will keep – my niece and nephew like to hear them sometimes – but generally, I would expect my students to do what my teachers expected my parents to do, buy the grade books themselves, and then, if needed, supplement by lending from my own music library. But a great tome of all a composer’s sonatas is not something a student would want to borrow anyway.
Speaking of organization, I am going to have a room in the basement. My father is in the middle of moving over for me. Due to space issues, it is a case of certain things having to happen before the next thing can happen, and so on. But it is actually happening, with the whole household working together, and in the process, as we sift through old things, of recalling memories made together. It is good for all of us, though my allergies are not happy with all the dust being stirred up.
Six, he teaches in the public school as well so his standards were from there. I watched the previous teacher when one of mine got in trouble for his behavior. It was horrible, what the students did to him.
I’m doing a story on one of our orchestra conductors/film music composers in the area organizing music grants for one of the school districts (during this time when there will be no in-person classes this fall) so they can get instruments and some one-on-one, online time with musicians.
(His very popular, nonprofit community ‘pops’ orchestra, which focuses on music from the film industry, is now dead in the water, of course, with no performances scheduled for the foreseeable future — nice to see them venturing into something like this while everything is “on hold” otherwise.)
From his news release: “The Arts, and especially music, are a necessity to a well-rounded education. This is not only because music helps create better students and employees, but also because the human soul depends on emotional and artistic expression to balance its existence. Now is the time for dreamers, or ‘artistic types,’ to help with innovative ways to make our schools operate and provide the level of opportunity the students deserve.”
I’m with Kim on walking. But these days, let’s make that, oh, half a block or so — or across the back and front yard. Honestly, this knee is a long-term project. Don’t every get this kind of injury if you can help it.
Oh, wow, looks like this is 62, unless I get long-winded again and someone sneaks in before me.
Public school teaching can be brutal. I for one am glad to be out of that scene.
Roscuro, it’s amazing all the music one can accumulate over years of playing (and teaching), isn’t it? Especially being a multi-instrumentalist.
I’m not big on Mozart, either. None of my teachers ever had me study his music. I bought two volumes of his piano sonatas as an adult, but, like you, only find a few pleasurable to play.
On the other hand, I do truly enjoy playing most of Beethoven’s piano sonatas, and am glad my piano professor had me get the complete set in college. I have the Schnabel edition, which has extensive footnotes, thus the many pages in the set. Those books are really falling apart, though. I may invest in Henle editions of the sonatas sometime. It sounds like Murray Perahia is in the process of editing a new collection of Beethoven Piano Sonatas for Henle. I occasionally can get teacher VIP discounts through Hal Leonard Publishing, which is the U.S. supplier of Henle editions. Most of the Henle editions I’ve acquired have been at a 25% discount during one of HL’s sales promotions.
We had a copy of ‘The Gift of Music’, which I read cover to cover in my youth.
6, I cannot physically play Beethoven. It is too hard on my hands, as I have a small handspan and too many consecutive octaves make my hands ache – for our Conservatory exams, we had a technical portion playing exercises, among them, octave scales, which I never got quite to speed. I really like the Mozart sonatas I play, but ultimately, any kind of high output, even from a genius, is going to have mostly dead wood with just a few good branches among them. Not all Shakespeare’s plays are good, not all Jane Ausren’s novels, not all Johnny Cash’s songs. In my continually transient state, I have learned to keep the best and let the rest fall by the wayside.
On the topic of music, I noticed the songwriters of ‘Do, a deer’ cheated. The line I quoted, ‘so, a needle pulling thread’, ‘so’ is actually ‘sol’ in the Solfeggio scale: do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, to, do. In other languages, the musical keys we call C, D, E, F, G, A, B, are named after the notes of the Solfeggio scale, so there is the keys of Do, Re, etc. The key of G is equivalent to Sol. Many of the music books I own have the music titled in the language of the composer who wrote it or in Italian, which is the language of music like Latin is the language of science. So, what would in English be labeled as Mozart’s ‘Sonata in G major’, might be titled ‘Sonate in Sol-Dur’.
I asked my daughter’s piano teacher if they should be practicing more. She told me that as long as they could play what she asked them to learn, they were fine. They tended to sit down for a few minutes at a time in between other activities.
This teacher was also a big Lori Line fan. I have some of her CD’s and enjoy them. She used to play at the Dayton’s store in the Twin Cities area. I miss hearing my daughter’s playing the piano. Here is a Lori Line song I would hear when they were still home. I have no idea who this player is, however.
Our elders are meeting tonight, would have liked to have gone but the meeting starts now which is about when I’m officially off the clock. Will check in with my elder later this week to see what was discussed, but I’m assuming it has something to do with the state orders and how we’re handling it or will handle it going forward.
Music- I LOVE Mozart, Bach and other baroque composers’ music. I realize it is hard to play but I only listen to it and admire anyone who can “Handl” baroque music. All those 16th and 32nd notes “Haydn” in the measures.
I don’t know if I ever dreamed I was flying, but I have occasionally had dreams where I was bouncing as though with a pogo stick (but without needing the pogo stick) and with each bounce I went higher and higher (after a while I’d be way above the houses) and couldn’t make it stop. Not a nightmare, but not fun, feeling out of control.
I used to have church dreams, usually involving being late to line up for the choir to process in, and I’d be running to the robing area and realize I didn’t have my music and how was I ever going to get to my proper place in time. Usually the church building was huge, sometimes with an immense balcony where the organ was. I grew up in a church with a fairly large building (at least compared to all the churches I have belonged to since then) – I think it sat at least 1000, though it never had that many except on Christmas and Easter, and then only when I was little. But the churches in my dreams were like huge concert halls, and I’d sometimes be running up and down staircases trying to find the right hallway to the proper entrance to the sanctuary.
I can’t remember the last time I dreamed either of those, though of course I might have last night and just not remembered it. All I remember from last night was a weird dream where I was driving a forklift (or something like one) down a street, then suddenly instead of a joystick kind of control, there was something like a computer mouse, but instead of being on the panel in front of me, it was sliding down a small wire track overhead, and I wondered what would happen if it fell off the track, and then the track suddenly started going up and down and circling around itself, and sure enough, the mouse-thingy fell off, and the whatever-I-was-riding stopped. Right in the middle of a narrow green room. I looked back through the window at the room behind me and tried to explain what had happened, but the driver(?) behind me couldn’t hear me. At that point my alarm went off, which was probably a good thing.
Roscuro, one of the conference sessions is entitled Small Hands, Big Pieces: The Beethoven Sonatas Challenges. I watched that one, and the presenter’s suggestions included doing rolled chords, substituting one hand for the other in certain places, leaving out parts of a chord, using light pedal to sustain some inner voices that hold for a longer value than the outer voices… things like that.
My hands aren’t small, but I find some of his music fatiguing anyway. The outside of my left hand tends to cramp up with all the broken octaves in the first movement of the Pathetique Sonata, especially if I observe the long repeat of the first section. It goes too fast to be able to close one’s hand somewhat when playing the pinkie note or the thumb note.
Peter, I’m glad you pronounced “Haydn” correctly. 🙂
My husband worked with AL and we had many warden barbecues with him in Elk Island. I was standing about 15 feet away from him when he was gored by the bison. (They were handling the bison and it was in a squeeze and it managed to get him anyway)
I am glad that incident with the strange person along the road my husband was driving on the way to work didn’t turn out worse. Turns out the guy took a picture of hubby’s car / license plate while he was simply driving past. I don’t know what that guy thought he was doing, snapping pictures of identifying information on the vehicle of law-abiding citizens driving past his home, but hubby wasn’t going to have anything like that, so he stopped the car, got out, and asked the guy what he was doing. That’s when the guy started ranting about the extra cars going by.
Hubby isn’t intimidated by much, but even he himself decided he’s not driving past that guy’s place again. Who knows how he plans to use those pictures. Kind of creepy, the more I think about it, but then that might be my overactive imagination at night making it seem worse than it is.
You never know with people. Will it be something other than a camera in his hand the next time?
I am trying something different: my phone. I have never used it for anything but photos, texting, and a few phone calls. My chrome book is sputtering so I figured I needed to do something to stay connected to you folk. Hello? Does this thing work??
Kare, that is a really interesting article. I wouldn’t be interested in being a park ranger (especially the trickier aspects of that job), but portions of it definitely appeal to me, and I thought about applying to be a volunteer at one of our local state parks. (We have several within half an hour.) I’ve had enough on my plate without doing that, so I haven’t done so, but it seems like something I’d enjoy and could probably do well.
Wandering Views 
/?????
What is it?
Good morning everyone.
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Morning! Chas those were my exact thoughts when I logged on here…is it coming or going…and is it more than one of something? 😊 (I am guessing it is a doe, a deer, a female deer…basking in a ray..a drop of golden sun!)
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Look closer.
You see the mama with her head turned. But if you look lower and closer, you’ll see the fawn walking behind her. 🙂
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Me, a name I call myself…
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Good Morning. This is my last week before I start teaching again in August. I have a lot to get done but other things are popping up and it’s making me feel pressure and frantic. No one seems to understand I have things to do and work is one of them.
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Ok…now I see the fawn…it has spots and the other does not!
Praying for you Kim…I have experienced that “everyone wants a piece of me and I have no more pieces left”! Praying for understanding for those who seem not to understand ❤️
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Good morning. When I use my Word Press App Reader Feed it does not show the header photo. Now I am curious about that picture. If y’all have trouble with it, I will have double trouble.
Now I must ready myself for Bible study in Daniel three with my lady friends. Have a good morning.
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Good morning. A pushmepullyou.
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With eight legs.
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Where we used to live, deer would walk across the field behind us on a regular basis. Problem was, our yard was deep and any photos I got from inside the house, they were too far away. So I would go outside and try to discreetly get closer–but it rarely worked. They were country deer and skittish.
Well, now the neighborhood deer are city deer, used to walking across walking trails 15-20 feet from people and eating in human gardens. The main trail where I walk, one sees deer at really close range regularly–except in May and June, pretty much, when the does are ready to have their babies or have just had them. You may see a doe without her fawns, but she keeps a greater distance from people.
And then, once the babes are big enough to leap the low fence next to the trail, you start seeing them again. Last year even in summer I saw very few on the trail. My first pair, first fawns I’d seen in a couple of years and first I’d seen all summer, a clueless fellow walker spooked when I was trying to get photos of them. (Lots of people will stop walking when they see me trying to take a photo, even if they can’t see what I’m photographing. I often tell people it’s OK, they can move on–either because they won’t spook whatever I’m photographing or because I’ve taken a couple of photos and don’t want to “hold them” forever. In this case, I said, “Do you see the fawns?” and she said she did and kept walking. It was quite frustrating to me at the time, especially since she wasn’t far past where the trail branches and she could have gone backward and gone on the parallel branch or she could have waited a minute or two. It was weeks before I saw another fawn, and it was pretty big by the time I saw another.)
This year has been a great one for deer sightings. One day I was at a park a mile away, and I saw two young bucks in velvet in good sightings, and the next day I was at my regular trail and I saw a single fawn and then twin fawns. I went back a couple days later and the twins were on my side of the fence, with their mother on the other side, and they ran along the fence but they didn’t know how to get across it. Then they got curious about me and walked toward me, and I got a bunch or good photos including one that I think is really a “keeper.” Having wanted good fawn photos for decades and not getting anything better than mediocre, I’m quite thrilled.
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Speaking of camping: we had a very nice time. Well, I had an excellent time. Daughter and son in law less so though they enjoyed it. Tons of mosquitoes. But they chose that week to tweek their parenting skills. The children were doing lots of ignoring parents. So daughter asked me for suggestions and I pointed out how my youngest two behaved on arrival (approx same ages as grandchildren) and how they behaved shortly after and how we had dealt with it. No spanking involved. Basically, whatever you decide, be consistent with it and behavior that was not okay led to noses against trees. The grandchildren saw lots of trees and we saw improvement in behaviour though there was a curve.
We also had a deer in our camp. I discouraged son in law and husband from feeding it. Obviously young and obviously familiar with being fed.
I channeled Cheryl and took lots of pictures of wildflowers. Probably seventy five different kinds within a quarter mile of camp. We hiked a lot, glad to have taken the stroller. Not all hikes were stroller friendly and they had to take turns riding until we stacked them. But it is a jogging stroller because of the gravel around here so worked very well in the mountains.
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All I can say about that photo is it looks dangerous to me . . .
Speaking of danger, my bi-weekly grocery shopping trip is on the docket, as soon as I get off the computer.
“I could go another couple days,” I said to Mr. Fit before he ran out the door. “But, I’ve got walking buddies the next two days in prime shopping time, so I guess I’ll have to go this morning.”
He shook his head. “We don’t have any milk, bread or soup that I like. The only lettuce is what you’re growing on the counter. How do you define, “go another couple days?”
I laughed. We obviously prefer different food.
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We have had that discussion.
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I was planning to mow this morning but it is raining. So I don’t need to water the new fruit trees or the gardens. Meaning I can sit here regaling you with tales of camping adventures. But I already did.
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♫ …fa, a long long way to run… ♫
I had one of those glorious dreams just before waking this morning, in which I was running with long strides, floating above the surface for most of the stride, and not getting the slightest bit winded.
Ever have that dream? I only have a few times, but it’s such pure pleasure when I do.
Too bad my knees don’t let that happen in real life. My running days are past, but I relish the dream of effortless, painless running when it comes. 🙂
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“So, a needle pulling thread…”
The pushmepullyou was not a North American animal.
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I have never ever in my entire life dreamed of running. Or had it as a dream.
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I think I have finally hit my stride with piano teaching. For the past several years since I have resumed piano teaching after the 11-year break from doing it as a business, I had a hard time building up my student numbers to a satisfying number. I loved returning to teaching, but I’d have one, maybe two or at best three students a week, and then that would be it. Lessons would be done for the week almost as soon as they started.
The past year has been a great blessing. At the end of last year, I was up to five students, with a sixth preparing to start in January.
Now I’ve got 13 — three in high school, four in middle school as of this fall, six in grade school. Such a wonderful variety of ages, skill levels, family and individual music goals, student personalities. I am really in my element and feel like I’ve reached (or am heading toward, rather — it is a process) new horizons in my teaching philosophy and practice.
Granted, I am more tired at the end of a teaching day, but it is a good tired. All the kids seem to be enjoying their lessons, and I love meeting with them and learning to integrate piano lessons into their lives in a way that fits them as whole children.
God is so good in His provision.
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I have never heard of a pushmepullyou. The things one learns on this blog. 😉
OK, so now tell me what it is…
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Are children expected to practice their music between times?
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Pushmepullyou was observed in a garden centuries ago. Just after Adam and Eve heard a stern lecture.
Psychologists say everyone dreams every night.
But I seldom recall a dream. Sometimes, when half awake, I think a lot, but nothing ever comes of it.
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Pushmepullyou was the two headed llama like thing in Dr Doolittle. The book. I don’t know about the movie.
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I tried to “enjoy” running several times in my life, but it just never took. I never found it that enjoyable.
Now I just want to get back to walking. I asked the therapist yesterday if this recovery process and time I’m seeing was unusual in his experience and he said no, actually it’s rather common for meniscus injuries.
Walking through the house now I keep telling myself, bend-the-knee, bend-the-knee
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I do dream quite a bit and usually remember the dreams
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It resembled a moose with the horns of an African antelope, with a head at both ends of its body. It would be a horrifying, and miserable, creature in real life, but in children’s fiction, it was somewhat amusing to contemplate. I never read Dr. Doolittle, but excerpts from the book, with illustrations, appeared in several of the old school readers we had.
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I ask because when we finally did get a music instructor here, he said he preferred they not practice.
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The above was in relation to the pushmepullyou, of course.
I dream and sometimes remember them sometimes not. I have awakened myself with both laughter and sobbing.
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One of those readers also had a tall tale about ridiculous North American creatures. Our favorite, which we will sometimes reference, was the sidehill gouger, which lives on hillsides and only ever circles the hill one way, as the legs on one side of its body were longer than on the other side: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Sidehill%20Gouger
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I’ve had a dream that I’ve dreamed occasionally since childhood in which not only am I running effortlessly, I am literally not even touching the ground. I guess it’s rather like a soaring bird that doesn’t need to flap because it’s in a column of rising air, I am hitting the air just right that it allows me to keep running just above the ground. And every time I do it, I realize no one else has actually learned this trick and it’s something I can teach them to do. And then I wake up again, and I’m back in the real world where I’m not even a good runner, let alone one with unusual tricks.
By the way, speaking of grammar, which I know we weren’t, that is a phrase that I see used incorrectly 90% of the time. People use it backward. So a person may say, “I don’t even like spumoni ice cream, let alone ice cream.” The “let alone” is supposed to narrow the category, not broaden it. I mentioned that to my husband one time, and he hadn’t thought about it but agreed I was right. A few days later he used it, and I pointed out he used it backward. He was tired, and he said no, he used it correctly. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, I said OK, perhaps he had and I misheard it. A couple minutes later he told me he ran it through his mind again and realized he did use it backward.
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“La, a note to follow so…”
The Rex Harrison version of Dr. Dolittle did have the pushmepullyou. I haven’t seen any other movie versions.
Mumsee, KJ’s piano teacher wanted her to practice between lessons, (more than she wanted to practice).
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My husband lay down for a nap. He has had a difficult few days physically and is finally back to nearly normal health–he ate lunch first, the first normal meal he has had in several days. A few minutes later the doorbell rang. Usually that means UPS has dropped off a package and wants to make sure we see it, but after ringing the person stood there. I went to the window overlooking the door (since I just don’t open the door to unknown people during a pandemic) and said, “Sir?” (I could see his finger on the bell, about to ring it again.)
“I ran out of gas, wondering if you could help me out with a couple dollars for gas?”
Great. Now panhandlers are going door to door. I really don’t need people ringing the doorbell when my husband is trying to sleep! Yeah, I know, first-world problems.
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I have dreamed of flying. A sort of effortless floating, the direction of which I have some, but not full control over. My mother said she used to dream of flying in the same way. I have several recurring dreams, or rather dream topics, most of them nightmares. I have also experienced sleep paralysis, the “old hag”, and had hypnagogic hallucinations.
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Piano/violin practice: As a beginner to intermediate, I practiced for about a half hour each day. As advanced, it was 45 minutes to an hour. My music teachers warned against overpracticing.
Our dear friend and relative and her sibling, were made by their father to practice the piano for five hours a day in the higher music grades. And when I say made, I mean made. They won competitions, and were wonderful to listen to, but neither of them does anything at all with music now. While having to practice and engage in routine to improve a musical skill is important, demanding unreasonable effort drains the learning of a skill of all joy or meaning.
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“Ti, a drink with jam and bread…”
And here it is lunch time. Except I’ll have ham and cheese wrap.
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My recurring dream, which I think I’ve shared here, is about that early 1900s apartment I missed out on like 30 years ago now.
In my dreams, I somehow own it, it’s my house (so kind of the apartment still but also my current real house), and I keep exploring and finding whole other floors and rooms with amazing built-ins and grand fireplaces and wood floors.
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I’ve heard that dreams about flying are quite common but I don’t remember ever having one. I’m too busy exploring old houses.
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DJ, one of my recurring dreams is if a house, usually our family dwellings, but with ever more corridors and rooms, on a much bigger scale than in real life. I think my mother’s stories of a large old house that her family rented while in transition between homes, is behind it, as she described closests with doors at the back that opened into other closests that opened into another room, and doors under the stairs, and a great front room that was like a ballroom. Her stories seem to get blended into my dreams of a house. There is a fantasy series by James Stoddard called the Evenmere Chronicles, centred around a house that has evermore passages and rooms, in wings of which battles between good and evil take place. Reading that series was a bit like having my dreams written down, which is a surreal and somewhat uncomfortable experience.
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Are we back to Doe yet? 🙂
Survived the grocery store but was horrified when, with TWO baskets full of groceries, I opened the back hatch and discovered/remembered I had not taken 20 boxes of work shipping to the post office . . .
The CRV handled it. I’ll head to the post office soon. 🙂
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For those of us who never made it to L’Abri: https://www.labriideaslibrary.org/
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I’ve had the dream of flying quite a bit. When I dream of a dwelling place, it is virtually never a home I’ve actually lived in. I dreamed of my childhood home occasionally when I was younger, and I don’t know whether I ever dreamed of it while living in it. I think I have dreamed of only one other house I’ve actually lived in, and right now I can’t even remember which one, but I never dreamed about it till after I moved out of it.
The homes in my dreams are often elaborate and many-roomed houses, but never mansions, or at least never mansions in good repair. And there tend to be a lot of other people living in the home too.
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Looks like a fun place, Michelle!
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Sleep paralysis terrified me the first time it happened to me. I’d never heard of it before. As far as I remember it only happened when I was a young adult.
I have no idea what hypnagogic hallucinations are.
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Kevin, hallucinations that occur as one is falling asleep. A typical one is the sensation of falling that causes people drifting off to jerk awake, but I have experienced auditory hallucinations, generally of music playing.
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Dreams! I have had a dream of flying over the fence at the home where I grew up, and I was flapping my arms/wings. It was fun. I’ve had a house dream where the house was barely hanging on to a mountain side, perhaps similar to some I have seen on Lookout Mountain where Covenant College is located. Too many people gathered in a room on the backside which made the house loose its stability and start tumbling. It was a scary fall but landing turned out okay.
Just last night I had one of my church dreams. It is the church I went to as a child only much more expansive. It has seating like in an arena instead of like most churches. I knew I was suppose to meet my mother there and I was at the lower level looking up trying to see her. I started climbing upward and finally saw her up on one of the top rows so she had entered from a door at the top. She had something she’d brought, maybe food, for a party we were to attend after the service. My father came in later and did not see us so he sat down at a lower level and I went down to get him. I asked him if I could borrow ten dollars to buy a book a church lady who had befriended me was selling. I think Wesley showed up in the dream, too.
I figure the dream is about those I miss and can’t see and church is included in that category, too, as I am missing being in church. At the end of the service Amazing Grace was being sung. We left by the door at the top and across the foyer was a double set of doors and when they were opened another sanctuary, like a twin, was there and people were singing Amazing Grace but maybe in a foreign language. It was a nice dream for me.
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I’ve had that falling sensation while falling asleep. And I have heard that dreams of an undiscovered 2nd story or extra rooms in one’s house isn’t unusual.
For a long time it was simply a second story, dreaming I suddenly discovered a staircase in my house. “Where does this lead” I wonder, then I arrive at the top and, behold, all sorts of wonderful new rooms!
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But it all hooks sort of back into that apartment in Long Beach and then also in a house I rented for a while after my mom died and I needed a house that would accept pets as I’d kept her 2 dogs and apartments here typically don’t allow any pets.
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Psychologists say that everyone dreams every night.
However, I don’t relate to any experiences discussed here.
Sometimes, I seem to be thinking things, not experiencing anything.
But nothing has happened due to the thoughts.
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Yes, definitely confused by the header. I can’t make head or tail of it, literally.
Janice
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Mumsee, 11:46: “Are children expected to practice their music between times?”
A timely question. A month ago and for the 40 or so years before that, I would have said yes, they are expected to practice. But in the last couple of weeks, I’ve rethought my approach to practice recommendations under certain circumstances.
The idea came to me after viewing one of the MTNA Virtual Conference sessions recently — a session on RMM (Recreational Music Making). I haven’t researched much about RMM, but my understanding is that it’s primarily for adult learners who simply want a relaxed approach to learning (or returning to) music lessons. The goal is to cultivate joy in music making at their own pace, rather than making the overarching purpose one that is achievement- and mastery-based, aiming for ever-increasing levels of musical proficiency at a steady and efficient pace.
The session got me to thinking: what if we took an approach like RMM and applied it to children’s music lessons? What would that look like? What would it involve? What would it not involve that we typically think is an integral part of the music lesson experience? Who are good candidates for this method of learning?
I concluded that the decision to practice outside of the lesson would be entirely left up to the student and/or the student’s parents if their goals were recreation-based rather than mastery-based.
I have one family currently who wants recreational piano lessons for their children. They aren’t interested in their children being trained as if they might become the next virtuoso players; they simply want their children to be taught basic skills that will lead to being able to play simple music that brings them joy.
So, in thinking about it, why would I need to approach practice with them like I do with those who want a mastery-based approach, i.e., “Try to practice 6 days a week [my standard recommendation] and be sure to get to your piano within 24 hours after your lesson so that you don’t forget a lot of what we discussed at your lesson…” and etc., like usual?
For the families that want for their children ever-increasing acquisition of skills, steady and efficient growth, performance and/or competition opportunities, and the like, then I’m going to continue to encourage frequent home practice and emphasize the importance of regular attendance at lessons throughout the year. (Well, most of the year — I do have a couple of 3-week breaks in a year where, for the first time, I’m going to give all my students a complete break from practice.)
I try to approach it now from a standpoint of what do the parents want out of the experience? Are we all on the same page, encouraging the children to practice regularly at home to develop their musical ability at a pace that fits with their proficiency goals? If the parents want home practice to be happening frequently (something I want, too, for the growth-based students) then I’m going to partner with the parents and encourage students to play early and often between lessons.
And for the rec-based students, there will be lots of smiles — OK, they can’t see it behind my mask just now, unless I smile big and they see it in my eyes! 😉 — and no “you need to practice more often, then this part will be easier and more fun” exhortations and such.
Anyway…somewhere in there I might have answered your question, Mumsee. 🙂
And regarding your 12:41: “I ask because when we finally did get a music instructor here, he said he preferred they not practice.” I’m wondering why he said that.
The only time I ever told someone not to practice was when I discovered a long time ago that one of my beginner students was hardly ever practicing until the day before her lesson, so then she would practice her assignment six times in a row to make up for missing practice all week. Well, by six days after her lesson, she had often forgotten the fundamentals of what I’d taught her the previous week. She might be on the wrong keys, or playing incorrect rhythms, or things like that, which meant that playing that way six consecutive times would effectively reinforce the errors and make it a nightmare to undo and retrain in the right way.
I told her mom, once I knew this was happening, that if the girl didn’t have time to practice until the day before her lesson, it would be better that she not practice at all until immediately after her next lesson, where I would reintroduce the music. So much easier to start fresh than to undo and redo.
Sorry for the marathon post! I’ve had a post for my blog brewing in my head since I saw that RMM session. I think I might have written part of it here just now. 🙂
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He said so they did not practice wrong, which made sense.
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I learned about a new phenomena recently, called aphantasia, which is the inability to see with the mind’s eye, or to call up mental imagery at will: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/when-the-minds-eye-is-blind1/
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Yesterday I received a shipment of books I’d ordered from Amazon, to be used for our homeschool year coming up. Also in the order was a set of 12 sturdy cardboard file boxes I wanted to store my music books better in my hall closet.
I still have most of my piano method books and supplementary student materials standing up in clear plastic tubs on the closet floor, but the shelf at the top of the closet was where I had stored all my books and sheets of standard piano repertoire, Christmas music, sacred music, song books, string music… For many years, that music was in six stacks on the shelf. It wasn’t the greatest organization system. I tried to stack things alphabetically by single composer, with anthologies in other stacks, and so on, but it was a pain to remove individual books that were in the middle or toward the bottom of those stacks. I’d sometimes just throw the more commonly-used books onto the top of the correct pile, which would eventually result in it not being alphabetized anymore.
Thin books would be hard to locate in the pile…
Then recently it finally occurred to me that I could stand those books up and see their spines (the thicker books, anyway) and find what I needed a lot more easily.
However, when you have probably 100+ titles across a 3-foot shelf and you pull something out of the middle, and later try to put it away and have to wrestle with a heavy load of books leaning against the place you want to reinsert the pulled book… well, that didn’t work the greatest, either, since the shelf was too short to be able to use bookends and arrange books in small sections between them.
Enter the file boxes… Today I organized all my piano repertoire in those 12 boxes, put them on the shelf, made a short stack of the songbooks, which I don’t use often, and stood up my small collection of string music in between the last file box and the stack of song books at the right side of the shelf.
It looks so nice!
All my Bach music is in the first box; Beethoven Piano Sonatas (I have his complete collection of 32 sonatas in two thick volumes, a total of — let me go look — over 850 pages!) in the second box; more Beethoven and other composers with last names starting with B or C in the third box; and so on.
Funny how it can take decades to think of the most basic organizational hacks — at least for me. 😉
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I just learned about TCAPP: the church at planned parenthood. Sounds like a transforming idea. May God be glorified and the attenders blessed and the observers have their eyes opened.
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There was a discussion here yesterday about city living versus country living. I’ve only lived in a city briefly, so mainly feel like a “country” person.
I was just last night speaking with one of my high school students about country living. He was talking about projects he and his dad and their rural neighbors like to work on together. We spoke of the generally relaxed nature of relations with our neighbors out in the styx or the boonies or whatever you like to call it.
So it was rather ironic when my husband called me today shortly after getting to work, asking me what route I and the girls have been taking when we drive into and back from town. (There is bridge construction on the county highway that runs past our dead-end road, so we’ve had to take different routes than usual this summer to go around the part of the highway that is closed.)
I told him which route I normally go, and which ones the girls take, and he told me not to go this one particular route anymore. It is the route he’d normally been taking, and today on his way to work, one guy who lives along one of those back roads told my husband he does not like all the extra traffic on his road now, and he took a picture of the license plate on hubby’s car.
Well, first of all, it’s not his road, and people have a right to be driving it. True, it’s not the official detour route, but in some ways it’s a safer route for people who live where we do because the official detour involves turning left onto a busy highway state highway at an intersection without a traffic light.
The guy along that other route, though, was rather menacing, and hubby didn’t want any of us women in the household having a run-in with a guy like that.
So we’re going to be going the other way now.
Some of my piano people who come to the house might be taking the route past that guy’s house, too, so I think I will have to warn them about that encounter my husband had.
Some people are difficult to deal with and are best avoided, and, sadly, they can be anywhere.
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Ah, ok, so they wouldn’t practice wrong. Well, yeah, I guess I could see that; however, teaching students how to practice correctly is, for most of my colleagues and myself, part of our mission.
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6, I have quite a bit of piano, violin, and organ music. I am still trying to organize it all (no pun intended). Some of it, I am going to send away, as even if I do teach again some day, I do not think it will useful. I currently have a collection of all of Mozart’s piano sonatas, but I only play five of them – I have tried the others, but they just neither suit my playing style nor appeal to my ears. So, I have been buying premium editions of those five sonatas individually and will send away the book with the entire collection, and I have been doing the same with other collections of other composers. That way, it will be easier to carry with me the pieces that I actually do play wherever I go. I do have some book collections of children’s piano pieces that I will keep – my niece and nephew like to hear them sometimes – but generally, I would expect my students to do what my teachers expected my parents to do, buy the grade books themselves, and then, if needed, supplement by lending from my own music library. But a great tome of all a composer’s sonatas is not something a student would want to borrow anyway.
Speaking of organization, I am going to have a room in the basement. My father is in the middle of moving over for me. Due to space issues, it is a case of certain things having to happen before the next thing can happen, and so on. But it is actually happening, with the whole household working together, and in the process, as we sift through old things, of recalling memories made together. It is good for all of us, though my allergies are not happy with all the dust being stirred up.
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fifty seven
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Six, he teaches in the public school as well so his standards were from there. I watched the previous teacher when one of mine got in trouble for his behavior. It was horrible, what the students did to him.
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I ain’t runnin’ unless somebody is chasing me. I’ll walk as many miles as you like. Usually I do between 2 and 3.
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I’m doing a story on one of our orchestra conductors/film music composers in the area organizing music grants for one of the school districts (during this time when there will be no in-person classes this fall) so they can get instruments and some one-on-one, online time with musicians.
(His very popular, nonprofit community ‘pops’ orchestra, which focuses on music from the film industry, is now dead in the water, of course, with no performances scheduled for the foreseeable future — nice to see them venturing into something like this while everything is “on hold” otherwise.)
From his news release: “The Arts, and especially music, are a necessity to a well-rounded education. This is not only because music helps create better students and employees, but also because the human soul depends on emotional and artistic expression to balance its existence. Now is the time for dreamers, or ‘artistic types,’ to help with innovative ways to make our schools operate and provide the level of opportunity the students deserve.”
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I’m with Kim on walking. But these days, let’s make that, oh, half a block or so — or across the back and front yard. Honestly, this knee is a long-term project. Don’t every get this kind of injury if you can help it.
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Oh, wow, looks like this is 62, unless I get long-winded again and someone sneaks in before me.
Public school teaching can be brutal. I for one am glad to be out of that scene.
Roscuro, it’s amazing all the music one can accumulate over years of playing (and teaching), isn’t it? Especially being a multi-instrumentalist.
I’m not big on Mozart, either. None of my teachers ever had me study his music. I bought two volumes of his piano sonatas as an adult, but, like you, only find a few pleasurable to play.
On the other hand, I do truly enjoy playing most of Beethoven’s piano sonatas, and am glad my piano professor had me get the complete set in college. I have the Schnabel edition, which has extensive footnotes, thus the many pages in the set. Those books are really falling apart, though. I may invest in Henle editions of the sonatas sometime. It sounds like Murray Perahia is in the process of editing a new collection of Beethoven Piano Sonatas for Henle. I occasionally can get teacher VIP discounts through Hal Leonard Publishing, which is the U.S. supplier of Henle editions. Most of the Henle editions I’ve acquired have been at a 25% discount during one of HL’s sales promotions.
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Michelle, have you heard of the book The Gift of Music? It was written by authors who had spent time at L’Abri.
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Speaking of flying, and of music, and of dreams…
Have you heard Eric Whitacre’s Leonardo Dreams of His Flying Machine? The concert choir I accompanied last school year sang this one.
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We had a copy of ‘The Gift of Music’, which I read cover to cover in my youth.
6, I cannot physically play Beethoven. It is too hard on my hands, as I have a small handspan and too many consecutive octaves make my hands ache – for our Conservatory exams, we had a technical portion playing exercises, among them, octave scales, which I never got quite to speed. I really like the Mozart sonatas I play, but ultimately, any kind of high output, even from a genius, is going to have mostly dead wood with just a few good branches among them. Not all Shakespeare’s plays are good, not all Jane Ausren’s novels, not all Johnny Cash’s songs. In my continually transient state, I have learned to keep the best and let the rest fall by the wayside.
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. . . not all G. K. Chesterton’s books . . . (adding to Roscuro’s 6:45).
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Cheryl, I thought of adding that one, but I had to stop somewhere 🙂
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Not even all my (probably) thousands of news stories, either! I know, shocking.
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DJ, 😉
On the topic of music, I noticed the songwriters of ‘Do, a deer’ cheated. The line I quoted, ‘so, a needle pulling thread’, ‘so’ is actually ‘sol’ in the Solfeggio scale: do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, to, do. In other languages, the musical keys we call C, D, E, F, G, A, B, are named after the notes of the Solfeggio scale, so there is the keys of Do, Re, etc. The key of G is equivalent to Sol. Many of the music books I own have the music titled in the language of the composer who wrote it or in Italian, which is the language of music like Latin is the language of science. So, what would in English be labeled as Mozart’s ‘Sonata in G major’, might be titled ‘Sonate in Sol-Dur’.
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I asked my daughter’s piano teacher if they should be practicing more. She told me that as long as they could play what she asked them to learn, they were fine. They tended to sit down for a few minutes at a time in between other activities.
This teacher was also a big Lori Line fan. I have some of her CD’s and enjoy them. She used to play at the Dayton’s store in the Twin Cities area. I miss hearing my daughter’s playing the piano. Here is a Lori Line song I would hear when they were still home. I have no idea who this player is, however.
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That may be Lori Line. It was not the video I meant to share, but the song is right. :O
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Oops! Now I see it is playing several of the videos? Well, I guess that is what happens when you are not very computer literate. 😀
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seventy….
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five?
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Our elders are meeting tonight, would have liked to have gone but the meeting starts now which is about when I’m officially off the clock. Will check in with my elder later this week to see what was discussed, but I’m assuming it has something to do with the state orders and how we’re handling it or will handle it going forward.
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Praying for wisdom …
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Music- I LOVE Mozart, Bach and other baroque composers’ music. I realize it is hard to play but I only listen to it and admire anyone who can “Handl” baroque music. All those 16th and 32nd notes “Haydn” in the measures.
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More than 40 cases of COVID linked to a summer camp (it doesn’t sound as though, so far at least, anyone is seriously ill with it); https://www.mlive.com/coronavirus/2020/07/42-covid-cases-linked-to-christian-youth-camp-in-gladwin-county.html
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I don’t know if I ever dreamed I was flying, but I have occasionally had dreams where I was bouncing as though with a pogo stick (but without needing the pogo stick) and with each bounce I went higher and higher (after a while I’d be way above the houses) and couldn’t make it stop. Not a nightmare, but not fun, feeling out of control.
I used to have church dreams, usually involving being late to line up for the choir to process in, and I’d be running to the robing area and realize I didn’t have my music and how was I ever going to get to my proper place in time. Usually the church building was huge, sometimes with an immense balcony where the organ was. I grew up in a church with a fairly large building (at least compared to all the churches I have belonged to since then) – I think it sat at least 1000, though it never had that many except on Christmas and Easter, and then only when I was little. But the churches in my dreams were like huge concert halls, and I’d sometimes be running up and down staircases trying to find the right hallway to the proper entrance to the sanctuary.
I can’t remember the last time I dreamed either of those, though of course I might have last night and just not remembered it. All I remember from last night was a weird dream where I was driving a forklift (or something like one) down a street, then suddenly instead of a joystick kind of control, there was something like a computer mouse, but instead of being on the panel in front of me, it was sliding down a small wire track overhead, and I wondered what would happen if it fell off the track, and then the track suddenly started going up and down and circling around itself, and sure enough, the mouse-thingy fell off, and the whatever-I-was-riding stopped. Right in the middle of a narrow green room. I looked back through the window at the room behind me and tried to explain what had happened, but the driver(?) behind me couldn’t hear me. At that point my alarm went off, which was probably a good thing.
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Roscuro, one of the conference sessions is entitled Small Hands, Big Pieces: The Beethoven Sonatas Challenges. I watched that one, and the presenter’s suggestions included doing rolled chords, substituting one hand for the other in certain places, leaving out parts of a chord, using light pedal to sustain some inner voices that hold for a longer value than the outer voices… things like that.
My hands aren’t small, but I find some of his music fatiguing anyway. The outside of my left hand tends to cramp up with all the broken octaves in the first movement of the Pathetique Sonata, especially if I observe the long repeat of the first section. It goes too fast to be able to close one’s hand somewhat when playing the pinkie note or the thumb note.
Peter, I’m glad you pronounced “Haydn” correctly. 🙂
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This article describes my husband’s job to a T up until 2008 when he became a law enforcement specialist. http://thejasperlocal.com/the-last-generalist/?fbclid=IwAR3dVMWNhgww_8KeQwD1tvEseOO-R1z9Q0fzGzuMdEI4Fk7b-HH5mRPqOug
My husband worked with AL and we had many warden barbecues with him in Elk Island. I was standing about 15 feet away from him when he was gored by the bison. (They were handling the bison and it was in a squeeze and it managed to get him anyway)
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I am glad that incident with the strange person along the road my husband was driving on the way to work didn’t turn out worse. Turns out the guy took a picture of hubby’s car / license plate while he was simply driving past. I don’t know what that guy thought he was doing, snapping pictures of identifying information on the vehicle of law-abiding citizens driving past his home, but hubby wasn’t going to have anything like that, so he stopped the car, got out, and asked the guy what he was doing. That’s when the guy started ranting about the extra cars going by.
Hubby isn’t intimidated by much, but even he himself decided he’s not driving past that guy’s place again. Who knows how he plans to use those pictures. Kind of creepy, the more I think about it, but then that might be my overactive imagination at night making it seem worse than it is.
You never know with people. Will it be something other than a camera in his hand the next time?
Yikes.
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That’s quite the article, Kare. An enjoyable read.
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I am trying something different: my phone. I have never used it for anything but photos, texting, and a few phone calls. My chrome book is sputtering so I figured I needed to do something to stay connected to you folk. Hello? Does this thing work??
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Whooo, dogies!
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Kare, that is a really interesting article. I wouldn’t be interested in being a park ranger (especially the trickier aspects of that job), but portions of it definitely appeal to me, and I thought about applying to be a volunteer at one of our local state parks. (We have several within half an hour.) I’ve had enough on my plate without doing that, so I haven’t done so, but it seems like something I’d enjoy and could probably do well.
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