K. just reminded me about Tumbleweed Houses. I haven't looked at the site for a while, and the houses have definitely gotten cuter since I last looked. Can't beat the price, the portability, or the environmental [non-]impact.

On Monday my last violin lesson ended at 4:40. At 5 p.m. my lights were out and I was fast asleep until waking at my usual 5:45 a.m. on November 1st. Halloween grump? Nope.

No, I was just recovering from my big Tango weekend down in Boston/Cambridge. After a Sunday full of shopping with E., rehearsing with the orchestra, going to dinner with my parents (who came to Boston to visit with some family friends at a hotel downtown), dancing for 2 hours at the milonga, playing a set with the orchestra at 11 p.m., dropping off S. and J. at South Station at 12:30, and then getting on the road to Maine, I finally fell into bed at 3:15 a.m. to sleep for a couple of hours before getting up to teach school. Yikes. Hence my reluctant Halloween boycott.

During the weekend I learned how to make some really awful noises (on purpose!) with my violin. Scratchy, percussive stuff for Tango. Most of the people in the orchestra were totally chill and fun to play with, so it was a good time, and Hector is an absolutely amazing musician.

The only thing I regret was that I was antagonistic towards the first violinist, who was very good. Things got off to a rough start when she breezed into the first rehearsal and picked up my violin to look at it without asking. My heart was in my throat; I saved money for my violin for 10 years and bought it instead of buying a car and it is my baby and only people I know and trust are allowed to handle it. At that point I didn't even know she was a violinist, but even so it's rude (in my opinion) to pick up anyone's instrument without asking, particularly if you don't know them. Also, during rehearsals she was a diva and that attitude always makes me grouchy...but still I am kind of mad at myself that I didn't do a better job of letting it slide and abasing myself at her feet so I could learn all of her Tango violin secrets. I always expect people who make beautiful music to also have beautiful souls and to be intelligent and patient teachers...and that's just not the way life is. Somehow this always surprises me. You'd think I'd learn. Sigh.

It was still a good weekend. Now I have a ton of stuff to work on once Nutcracker is over and that is totally cool. I had some nice dances with J., who has developed a nice feel since I last danced with him in May. And I would have danced with M. for hours had I not needed to go on stage with the orchestra. M. is such a lovely dancer, and he listens to the music, and he now lives in Portland. Woohoo!

Two different people remarked on my centered-ness while dancing, so I think my Tango has improved. In fact, I think it's far better than it was pre-MS. It hardly seems possible, but there it is.

Now knocking madly on every wooden thing in sight. :-)

On Friday I erased my whiteboard, which was covered with a combination of my notes and students' scribblings. The following are some things that I've learned so far this year.

#1: It's very difficult to teach programming to students who have trouble with English. I need to get better at teaching English vocabulary while I'm teaching Java/HTML programming and language concepts.

#2: Forget naming conventions. Many students didn't understand what ".content" in a CSS rule would look like as an HTML tag until I renamed it ".george". My Java students read about naming conventions and immediately started thinking that they could tell whether something is an instance variable (vs. a local variable) by the way it is named. Yikes! One of my students has to name all of his variables things like "fif" or "ghlkj" just to remind himself that they are variables and not real values.

#3: I think my students are having fun. "public class Jon extends HisParents", indeed. :-)

What a treat to see Lori and Austen this weekend! Bonita was glad to see them at first, but was quickly saturated with Toddler Terror and spent Saturday and Sunday in her "scary cat" mode, creeping around growling and hissing when she wasn't sitting between the shower curtains on the tub rim.

Now she's recovered and is snoozing in my lap, making it very difficult to get up and practice Nutcracker, which is what I should be doing. ;-)

We had a beautiful day on Saturday and hit some Portland-area highlights: Mackworth Island, Portland Head Light, and Silly's, where Austen consulted the Magic 8-ball.

Austen gave us a glorious example of the highs and lows of a day in the life of raising a toddler. He is still wicked cute, though. The moments of Extreme Cuteness ("extreme cuteness alert! beep beep beep...") such as this are making my mom want a grandchild, I bet. ;-P

Lori and Austen got on the road with some homemade applesauce and my last jar of blueberry jam. I miss them already!

I seriously considered homicide (studenticide?) today, but managed to keep my cool. At the end of my afternoon class I was telling my gaggle of ADHD kids that when they're in the real world, employers will not care whether they have ADHD or not. The mystery of ADHD was solved by one of my students with this gem:

"You don't understand that having ADD means that we can't focus in school, but we can as soon as we get a job and are earning money."

Oh, really. Funny, I wouldn't consider that behavior a medical condition, but what do I know?

Oops, I forget sarcasm doesn't work on the Internet.

Last winter I would come across a ladybug every once in a while, often in the bathroom (making me wonder what kind of food there was in the bathroom that would sustain ladybugs). It always made me feel happy that my apartment was supporting these bright little creatures.

Yesterday I saw my first winter ladybug, crawling along my [year-round] Christmas lights in the living room. Winter is coming!

I had to laugh when I passed this display at the Farmers' Union today (on the way to the cat food and the agricultural lime):

For those of you who didn't grow up in the country, you feed a heavy magnet to a cow so that when the cow eats nails, staples, etc. (and it will), they'll stick to the magnet in the cow's first stomach instead of tearing up the intestine. Mmmmmmm. Cow magnets. The ones pictured are plastic-coated, which seemed kind of yucky until I figured that if a cow is eating nails, a little bit of plastic doesn't sound so bad after all.

Veterans' Day! I taught violin lessons today in the afternoon and evening, but the rest of the day was all mine. I began by getting up at 6:45 instead of 5:45 (despite attempts by Bonita to get me to play with her, starting with Torture by Licking at 4 a.m.), cooking breakfast, and then going out back to finish digging my ditch and filling it up with brush. I'm making a sort of cross between a swale (a ditch on contour for water catchment) and a hugelkultur (a way of preparing a mound of branches, compost, and soil for planting). Pictures to come as I continue the project.

At 11:30 I started out on a walk/hike on trails in my neighborhood. The trail I took starts in back of the Unitarian church. Pictured here are the church canoes on their rack, ready for winter. It's a very Green [Party] church. This is the church I probably should be attending if I felt like going to church on purpose and if I weren't already committed to going to First Lutheran to play and sing.

After about 20 minutes I reached Oat Nuts Park, where the major trail starts. I discovered the tiny entrance to this huge preserve last year, soon after I had moved into my new house, when I was out exploring the neighborhood on foot. Portland Trails maintains miles of trails in and around Portland, and Oat Nuts Park abuts the Presumpscot River Preserve, which is where I walked today.

If I hadn't already been fortified with 2 deviled eggs (I am such a deviled egg addict), this sign would have made me hungry. :-)

The weather was beautiful and the trails were mostly deserted, and though I was sad that I didn't get my Fall Leaf Walk (almost all leaves are down now), it was still relaxing to walk along the river and through the forest. The whole trip took about 2 hours, giving me enough time to get cleaned up before my lessons and to placate Clingy Cat for a while.

I spent the first year in my house getting to know the seasons and how they affect my house and yard. I had planned to sheet-mulch a section of the yard this summer for a garden, but just hadn't gotten around to it. Too much biking, sailing, and sunbathing during the weekends. :-)

Today I rolled out of bed while the frost was still on the ground and staked out my 8-foot circle. This circle will eventually be a "keyhole bed", a permaculture term describing a circular garden with a path leading into the center. (This gives you the maximum amount of accessible garden for the minimum amount of path).

Dad had offered to bring over the rototiller to prepare the ground, but I decided to try it without. I did aerate the area first, using my weight to sink the tines of a manure fork deep into the ground and then using my body weight to rock it back and forth. It was a beautiful morning and the whole procedure became a kind of dance that left me free to gaze at the trees, the sky, the frost on the ground, and reflect on a glorious Fall day while completing my task. I think pre-MS I would have just muscled my way through it; now I am better at using my body wisely to accomplish physical things with less effort.

Once I had finished, I hosed down the whole area (forgot to do it the night before), and then headed over to South Portland to meet Mom for a trip to the dump -- oops, I mean "transfer station". The Portland facility doesn't have any kind of mulch, but in South Portland it's free for the taking, all composted. Since we were going over there anyway, we took a couple of big old doors that Dad just replaced and I had to snap a picture of the past: a piece of plywood with an area for "notes for Mom". At the transfer station, we chatted up the Usually-Cantankerous Guy Who Overcharges You and I snapped a photo of the 24-foot-wide lawn mower.

Mom has spent the summer mulching a large amount of her lawn, and has it down to a science: scope out the pile for a large vertical "cliff" area, back the trailer right up against it, then climb up on top of the pile and use the fork to shear away huge amounts that are easily hoed into the trailer. With both of us working, we had a trailerful in about 30 minutes and then drove it over to my place.

My original 8-foot circle looked pretty small when I got back home, so I extended it to 10 feet. Then we laid down the cardboard, with Mom on hose duty while I went to the back of the garage to get last year's partially decomposed leaves. These went on top of the cardboard, and were also hosed down. I then applied some special "homemade" high-nitrogen liquid fertilizer that I had been harvesting for the past 24 hours. If you're thinking about human byproduct, you'rein the right ballpark. :-) I did this because the dried leaves are so high in carbon that I wanted some nitrogen mixed in.

Finally, we put on the top layer of the composted mulchy stuff from the dump, and voila! Instant garden bed. This will rot over the winter, and in the spring I'll plant some soil-building plants. Lots of deep-rooted ones like daikon radish and sugar beet, since I have a lot of clay that needs to be broken up, plus alfalfa and some others.

Before I went inside to collapse, I took some pictures of my swale/hugelkultur project out back. Last month I screwed together an A-frame level from scrap wood so I could dig the ditch on contour (the rope had a wrench hanging from it for the weight, taking the place of the beer bottle traditionally used in permaculture circles ;-P ). Once the ditch was dug, I filled it with brush, and will now fill it with grass & leaves, and then hoe the dug-out dirt back over it. Today I threw in a few leaves and old (super slimy) grass clippings; I'll probably get it finished just before the snow comes.

I've been running low on sleep this week and last night I was so tired I couldn't sleep. Finally got 4 hours. In view of this, I'd like to thank whomever is responsible for making almost all of my students productive and well-behaved today. It was a gift and I appreciate it.

Suzuki believed that talent is developed, not inborn. This was in my mind when I saw A. at Nutcracker rehearsal and she quizzed me on which of her students I teach privately. She commented as I listed students: "he's a troublemaker", "did you know she's really smart?", and "personally, I don't think he has much talent." The last one surprised me, because the student she was commenting on is one who is making a huge amount of progress in my studio. At that moment I gave silent thanks that I have this student, one who loves the violin and practices. A. may disagree, but I know this student will be a talented violinist.

This morning I really felt awkward. Fingers/arms were not moving well, meaning that all hell was breaking loose playing the violin, and 2 Nutcracker performances to play! I needed to whip myself into shape pronto. Fortunately I didn't panic and did 5 minutes of my "magic" exercises I give to some of my violin students. Worked like a charm. The afternoon performance went fine, with me constantly adjusting my body to be in perfect alignment.

Today was a grand test, because K. had suggested going out to dinner between shows. Last year I had to go home in between and nap so I could play the evening show, but I decided to experiment and see how my energy level was affected. I was a little low after dinner (food coma) but again used my exercises to get myself "in the zone". (Actually, I think I hyperoxygenated a bit too much, because I got kind of wired). I played even better in the evening.

It was sometime during the end of the Waltz of the Flowers tonight that I had my epiphany. Little did the audience know that they were witnessing a revelation (not a revolution, though it sometimes seems that way...) in the first violin section: I realized that I play best when I'm in this super-calm, aligned, relaxed yet totally focused state. I already knew that, so that wasn't the revelation, but I suddenly connected it to the same exact state I'm in when I'm dancing Tango really beautifully or kissing really...intently. Weird.

This whole thought took only 4 measures or so to complete itself and then we were on to the Pas de Deux. But on the drive home I thought, when I'm having a bad day I'll have to tell myself "play violin the way you dance Tango" or "dance the way you play violin" or "kiss the way you Tango" or... ooooooh, my life is soooooooooo cosmic. ;-P

The day before Thanksgiving dawned cold and snowy. I love waking up to snowflakes (but not so many snowflakes that I have to go outside and start up the snowblower). Now I really have to get serious about looking for some warm winter boots. No frostbite allowed on my toes this year!

These are paperwhites from Lori's baby shower last October. I planted them this past Spring, then forgot about them on the deck, where they dried out. I figured I had killed them and left them out for squirrel food. Come Fall, with its ample rainfall, they decided to come up. Oops! Just in time to be killed by winter. Maybe I'll let them be and see if they can figure out how to get back on the right season again.

Being single in my own apartment means that I can hang my underwear in the shower and store my eggshells in the oven. Life is good.

Portland Public Schools sold its administrative building on Veranda Street and moved everyone into PATHS (my building) two weeks ago. Now Mom works just down the hall. She came in to class one day to do a "photo shoot" for her Christmas newsletter. The next thing I knew, the principal of PATHS had a copy of one of Mom's photos and had posted it on the bulliten board in the faculty lounge. This is the problem with having a mom who works in school administration.

(I should note here that although this photo looks like a teacher and a student experiencing the joy of teaching and learning, in reality we were trying to "act natural" but instead ended up doing a lot of giggling).

Later in the week I posted this photo in the faculty lounge, with the caption "We take screen glare seriously in Computer Tech." I heart my class.