This is one time of the year (the other is after Christmas) when parents start calling to ask about violin or viola lessons for their kids. For the past year and a half I've been in the nice position of having enough students that I can be more selective about which new students I take.

There's no "audition". I can teach anyone to play the violin well. What I can't do is teach someone to love the violin, nor do the practicing for a student. So I look for that when a student comes for a trial lesson.

I used to be nervous about first lessons, until I realized that the student is already nervous about seeing a new teacher (often their first private violin/viola teacher ever). Now I just have fun and try to put a new student (and parent) at ease. Also, I am by nature a complete goofball when I'm teaching, and that helps. :-) Plus, how can you be nervous when you're talking about bouncy knees?

This Summer and Fall will be exciting because I'm going to have a crop of viola students, all girls. And they will be good. And local youth symphonies will be very happy. So will my only viola student, since she will suddenly have a little gaggle (herd?) of violists to play with in our next recital.

Oh yeah, the first recital! This past Sunday. I was nervous about that too! But of course it was fine, and everyone did a nice job, and everyone laughed and had fun. Next year we will do a recital and a ViOlympics. Kids are already talking about violin 4 hands and figuring out whether they can play the violin while hanging upside down. Heh.

Oh, if only I had been able to videotape Bonita as she stalked the elusive apron that I had tossed over the rocking chair when I stuck the cake in the oven and ran out to vote before the polls closed. Never mind that the apron wasn't actually going anywhere...that's the beauty of visual impairment! Stationary objects are twice as fun!

She approached it slowly, took a few swipes at the dangling tie, then reared back on her hind legs, paws curled at chin level like a boxer (I think that is my favorite Bonita pose). Then, a pounce, and another rearing, boxer-crossed-with-Lipizzan moment, then a furtive sneaking up on it from underneath the rocking chair and batting at it through the chair rungs. Finally, back into the open, going in with both paws and yes! getting a tie firmly between the teeth. The apron never knew what hit it. The fearless huntress, teeth clenching the apron tie, dragged the hapless thing off the rocking chair...and onto the floor, where she proceeded to lie on it. Whew. I'm exhausted just thinking about it.

I just realized that the apron has cats all over it, which just makes the whole thing even funnier. I'm sure she has no idea. Because, you know, she basically has no idea about anything...

I've seen three new students this week. One will start taking lessons next week and two will start in the Fall. I'm thinking a lot about the one who will start next week because she will be a challenge.

She will be a challenge because she's quiet and timid and awkward (and going into 8th grade, which doesn't help on the awkward front). And I'm asking her to do weird things ("bouncy knees!"), and I can tell that she's not convinced that they will work.

This is tough. I am very good at handling the sassy ones, the rebellious ones, the tired and sullen ones. But I struggle with the timid ones who, when I say, "OK, take a big sniff through your nose" breathe in a tiny bit. How do I get myself on her wavelength? I know she really wants to play and I have to take her from ground zero and get her into shape by the end of August. I can do it...but only if I can get her on board. I think tonight when I practice I will try pretending to be her for a while, put myself in her posture, imagine what it would be like to be that shy and tentative. And then figure out how I speak that language.

Last week I had a little bit of a showdown with one student. He had come to the dress rehearsal for the recital (the weekend before) and had obviously not practiced. I couldn't let him play his piece, so I asked him to play Perpetual Motion instead, a Book 1 piece that he uses for warmup. His technique looks wonderful when he plays it, and I wanted a beginning student who is just about to play Perpetual Motion to see it played really well in recital.

Well, we didn't get to hear Perpetual Motion because he didn't come to the recital. When I returned home after the recital, I listened to a message from his mother on the answering machine, saying that they weren't going to come to the recital because it would be "embarrassing for him and for us to play that piece. We'll talk." So much for teaching valuable lessons. And how is it OK to blame the teacher in a case like that?

Fortunately, by the time I saw him for his lesson, things had calmed down somewhat. "There's nothing embarrassing about playing a piece with excellent technique," I said to him and his father. And as I said it, I understood why I've had so much trouble improving this student's technique: he doesn't practice it because he doesn't value it. And then he improves sooooo slowly, and has to play the same piece all year because he's not practicing it. We talked about it. "Yeah, my last teacher didn't really do technique," he said. So then a perfectly good violinist is sent up through the Suzuki books without learning technique, learning the pieces more and more slowly, until he gets to a piece where he needs a lot of technique to be able to play it but isn't used to valuing technique, so he can't play it, and he stops practicing. Thinking about it now, I'm sure this happens a lot (but it shouldn't...how can there be violin teachers who don't teach technique! Yikes!)

So now I'm trying to figure out whether I'm nuts, because this is what I proposed: we will take a break from the Suzuki repertoire for the summer. I will pack him full of technique using songs that he knows. At the end of the summer, we'll return to the Suzuki repertoire and assess progress. This requires a lot of work on my part (which is why I think I'm nuts), but it also could be really fun and cool and might help other students too (which is why I think I'm not nuts).

Anyhoo, this is how I come to find myself online, researching Wolfmother for my metal-loving violin student. Yessah.

The Murphy Bed isn't completely done yet, because I haven't painted it and there's no mattress yet. But today I mostly finished the trimming and am now ready to start the painting. Here's what I've learned:

• my jigsaw sucks. The guide in no way resembles where the blade will actually go.


• Irwin quick-release clamps are my friends. 2 or 4 of those are like having a person helping you who never gets tired, never drops anything, and never points out that you just sawed the wrong end off of that board.


• building goes much more slowly when you're building something so cool that you have to keep stopping and admiring it. :-)


• well-meaning men at Home Depot should not be listened to, because every time I do, I end up realizing that my way was better and I should have stuck to my guns.


• wearing a dust mask and safety goggles makes the goggles fog up. Argh.


• I still can't saw in a straight line with the circular saw. Howevah, I can now drill pretty straight holes.


• Building things is so much easier with plans! I think this is my first carpentry project where I was [mostly] following directions!

Painting next, then mattress. Then attach the pistons! Then something to fill in the wall between the back of the bed and the bathroom (I didn't see anything I liked at Home Despot, so maybe I'll try the ReStore). Pictures soon.

When I was 8, my family moved from our subsistence farm in Wilton to the big city of South Portland. I had never seen so many cars--the day we moved in, Ryan and I spent every possible moment counting the cars that went by the house. In the backyard were several large trees, but the quirkiest and most accessible (i.e., easy to climb with lots of places to sit and build platforms) was one that one of us named "Apple Tree Avenue".

A few weeks ago my mom told me that Apple Tree Avenue was finally dead enough to be a hazard and had to be cut down. When Dad cut through it, the whole middle was rotten. My ears pricked right up: rotten wood? Can I come get some? Not only was there a bunch of nice, punky, crumbly wood, but loads of decomposed soil from the middle of the tree. So now I have a nice hugelkultur in my yard, courtesy of Apple Tree Avenue and grass clippings from my hayfield...er, yard. I threw down some weeds and clippings, then the smaller pieces of rotten wood, then heaps of grass clippings, and topped it off with the soil that I had dug out of the trunk of the tree. Add some squash seedlings from Mom (I'm not sure whether she planted those or whether they just came up in the compost, and have no idea what kind of squash...surprise!), add some bricks for thermal mass, and viola! [sic] Instant squash mountain.

Thinking about Apple Tree Avenue's rebirth in my yard reminds me how much I didn't like the children's book "The Giving Tree" by Shel Silverstein. Maybe if I went back and read it now I would have a different reaction, but as a kid, the book just made me so sad. I think what made me saddest was that the tree had been cut down. The old man sitting on it, and the fact that the tree could still give him that...that didn't seem very important or sweet or uplifting to me. Because the man never gave the tree anything. I think that's what bothered me the most.

Tonight Tango Mucha Labia played at the North Star Cafe on Munjoy Hill. Yay. Great space, great place to dance, easy for non-dancing diners to eat and watch the dancers without having to be in the dance space, and...a miracle! Three different kinds of gluten-free baked goods! Woohoo! They also have a gluten-free bread for sandwiches. This is good stuff. Tonight I needed FOOD before playing, after a last day at school moving around file cabinets, followed by teaching 5 violin lessons, followed by hoofing it over to the cafe. I chose some kind of oatmeal chocolate chip cookie with flecks of fresh mint leaves. Yum!

The other bonus is that the sound system there is decent, which means that we (well, really Mike since he owns the stuff) don't have to schlep a ton of sound equipment. And there's not a whole lot of setup/teardown. These are good things. These are things that make all four of us want to play there more often.

Whew. Now I will crash so I can get up and shovel mulch with Mom tomorrow. She is "taking the day off" which somehow means shoveling trailerfuls of mulch? I see where I got the go-til-you-drop genes.

I love teaching at PATHS for many reasons: great teachers, near-total control over my curriculum, nice building, doing cool stuff with kids who want to be there...these are good. And at PATHS we all just get stuff done. Need a snowblower or lawnmower fixed? Need someone to look at your car? Have questions about insulation? This is the place. Today I was down in the Machine Shop / Welding area and got talking to the Welding instructor (a fabulous artist in metal) about a project I was thinking about involving a trellis. Before long we were talking about how it would go together and he was saying, "take some measurements", and then he was telling me to get Monday and Wednesday nights off, 6-9 p.m., so I could take his Adult Ed class and learn to bend the metal myself. Hmmmm. I'll think about it (Monday is a big lesson night, so it might not be possible). $50 for the class for PPS employees? Good grief. That's a steal. I love my school. Everyone is a teacher and a learner here.

I ate my lunch outside near the greenhouse, next to the huge globe the Welding class just finished, and thought about how cool PATHS is. Then I went inside and moved furniture around.

Sometimes I tell my violin students to think of their fingers as "little legs" and we do leg movements first before trying a technique on the violin. Several weeks ago I was at an empty tango practica, practicing boleos, and I realized what I needed to do to clean up my boleos is to contract my hamstring at a certain point. It's easier with the right leg, since my left hamstring was one of the later muscles to come back to life.

Anyway, a few days ago I was practicing trills on the violin, something that's still tough and kind of hit-or-miss since MS, and I realized that the motion I need to perfect for trills is the same kind of motion I need to perfect for boleos, just with finger muscles instead of leg muscles. This is weird and cool and cosmic all at once.

While visiting E. in Alabama, we've been spending some time with E.'s mother, who is in an assisted living facility nearby. After about 10 minutes there I am totally absorbed into the climate. It's easy to chat with residents: "yes, I haven't seen you for quite a while. Let's catch up later," and I find myself thinking, who knows, maybe these people are not demented, maybe they're just passing into a different place where we really do/did know each other. It's sort of weird, and it makes me think that I should never, ever work in a place like that if I can help it, because I'm too darn adaptable. How would I keep track of what is real? Do actors have this same experience? Is that why so many actors I know are completely screwy?