thank you!

Thanks to all who wrote comments and sent me lovely emails after that last post. If you emailed me, I will respond eventually, but be patient. I don't always have a lot of computer time! I know you all realize I am not in dire straights here, just having an adjustment period to having two chilluns at home in the Wisconsin winter and no piano gigs in the near future. It feels like a long adjustment, but I know that come spring, the time will pass much more easily. (If spring ever gets here.) Still, your support means a lot.

By the way, I could be playing if I wanted to. I've had a few requests for accompanying - nothing real exciting - and I've turned them down. The main reason for this is that finding childcare for a toddler and a wee babe is almost more trouble than it's worth. I'm breastfeeding Anya, and while I'm fortunate that she takes a bottle (not all breastfed babies will accept drinking from a bottle, even if there's breastmilk in it), it's a huge pain to pump milk to have ready for a sitter, so I do the bare minimum. When Anya's eating solid food in a few months, having a sitter will be a lot easier. As it is, I have a sitter come for two hours on Thursday afternoon so I can teach piano lessons, and it feels like it takes almost that long to prepare for her to come over. You know, making sure there is plenty of milk for the baby and food for the Danimal and a change of clothes in case of diaper leakage and getting supper ready ahead of time for the rest of us...I love my piano students, so it's worth it, but I can't really handle it more than once a week. And accompanying means finding practice time and I really don't know when that would happen right now.

As for starting a music blog? I don't want to start another blog just for that because I don't have enough to write about, especially now that I'm on a bit of a break from active playing. However, I like writing about music and about my experiences as a musician, and I know that several musicians read this blog, so I would like to make a point of writing about music on a regular basis. Let's say I try to do a music post of some sort at least once a week. I think personal blogs are more interesting when they cover a variety of topics anyway. (I know I have a separate knitting blog, but that's because knitbloggers are a special breed of people who like to talk and write about things that would bore the store-bought socks off the general public. Of course, anyone's welcome to go read it, but I just figure if I'm going to go on and on about knitting, I should do it in somewhere other than here.) Also, I most enjoy trying to write about music in a way that's readable to a general audience. I would venture to say that even parts of my dissertation would be interesting to someone with only a casual musical education (Steph, you read it. Would you agree?)

I hear my daughter waking up and she sounds hungry (like always!), so let me just put this question out there quick: What do you want to hear about from me? Singers are an easy topic (or shall I say, target), but there's a whole host of things I could write about, from music education to teaching piano to accompanying to why I love the harpsichord to why I like music I like and why I hate music I hate...anything goes. Comments welcome! Fire away!