March.

Hello, all. :)

I can't believe we're into March already. The weather is beginning to show it....the past couple days I have worn soccer shorts and been happy as a clam. What a change from wool coats and boots just a couple weeks ago! In school, however, March means the big push before Spring Break, so things have been a little crazy, which makes for some stress.

I had my audition for Britt last Sunday. It went alright...not wonderfully, not badly. My playing just lacked....sparkle, or something. Honestly, I've been struggling with my playing lately. In my solo repetoire at least, nothing sounds quite how I'd like it to...some days it just feels really hard to play. My viola has felt.....uncomfortable, and I often notice pain when I finish a rehearsal or a practice. It's just more technique things to iron out....but it's still frustrating. I have a concerto competition coming up next Saturday, so I'm hoping that things will go a little better this week.

Bekah and I decided to break in my pots and pans and make a Polish dish that Bekah loves called pierogi. They're basically little pockets of dough that have filling in them. They can have all sorts of fillings, but ours had Polish sausage and farmer's cheese. It was an adventure, for sure! Here are some pictures of our undertaking:

Here Bekah's closing up the stuffed pierogi:

And now she's flamboyantly cleaning a bowl....hahahahaha......I love her:

Men fight for dominance in other areas, but women fight for dominance in the kitchen. ;) Hahahaha, okay, not really. At least not me. I don't know enough yet. :) :

While we were cooking, a friend randomly walked up and gave us some flowers. Hence, picture:

Last SLSYO rehearsal we got to rehearse side-by-side with the SLSO! It was very exciting, and actually rather encouraging. I sat next to a woman named Shannon, who has been a member of the Symphony for a few years now. We played through the Tchaikovsky 5, and to my surprise, I kept up pretty well. Many of the larger aspects of our playing were the same. The differences were mostly in the smaller details, which is where the real artistry is, but all the same, it was encouraging to see that the difference between my playing and a professional's playing is less than I thought it would be.

On Thursday, we had our first UMSL orchestra concert of the semester, which went so much better than I thought it was going to! Our first piece, one of the Brandenburg Concertos, went pretty decently. We played the next piece, the Dvorak Cello Concerto, with Natalie, the winner of the concerto competition from last semester. She knocked it out of the park, and the orchestra played it better than we ever had. After intermission, we played our last piece, Beethoven 5. Other than the part at the beginning when the 2nd violins forgot to come in after the fermata, it went quite well, and I had a lot of fun performing it.

That's mostly what I've been up to....please keep me in your prayers. I'm getting sick, and I'm feeling more exhausted than I should. I've also felt exhausted emotionally and spiritually, and am losing focus and motivation. I'm not sure exactly what's wrong, but it's getting really hard.

I just finished reading large exerpts of Dostoevsky's Notes From the Underground, which was rather emotionally exhausting. His protagonist breaks my heart. Anyway, it's time to go write a response to it for class on Monday.

Please have a wonderful week, and hold on to the One who holds on to us.

Love always,

Maren