March Madness of a Different Sort

Has it seriously been a month? Actually, I can believe that it has been. March for piano teachers/music students is always crammed. For my piano students, it is the month we always have Festival -- the solo event where students must memorize two pieces of similar difficulty to play for two or three judges who are piano teachers in our area. All of us piano teachers who put students in to participate get to take a turn judging, so it's busy for us too.  After several months of getting my students ready we all participated the first two weekends in March. I was so proud of how my students did. This is such a scary thing for the younger students who are doing it for the first or second time. 

It is also a busy month for violin students. I did another Saturday of accompanying beginning Suzuki students as they performed for some teacher/judges too. 

And this coming week I will be judging concertos for another piano teacher colleague and friend of mine in her studio. 

And that's just the music stuff!

Here was a cool activity my youngest got participate in ... a living wax museum in which each child in the class chose a historical figure to learn about and then have a "recorded" blurb to recite for each visitor. Can you guess who Liam is?

If you guessed Neil Armstrong you would be right! We couldn't find a biography of him in the school library or the local library (that ought to be changed!), so we had to rely on internet research to piece together Liam's blurb. 

Liam also got to participate in RADKids, which is an awesome self-defense program for children. This was "graduation" in which the kids had to face a police officer decked out in protective gear and use their skills to get out of several different stranger scenarios. Liam was certainly enthusiastic!

Here is my nose-thumbing at winter. Above, I started some seeds using several different starting methods. There are tomatoes, broccoli, rosemary, bee balm, and peppers going. To the right, I transplanted each broccoli start into its own paper pot and am watering them with hot water from the bottom. The tomatoes have done pretty well, the peppers not so well. The rosemary hasn't done anything. I'm also trying celery, with a variety specially bred in Utah. There are also some cheddar pinks coming up that I had saved seed from in my yard last year. I didn't know if they would even come up. I think I'll start more of those. I have to confess, though, that all of these pots get a little complicated around dinner time because these seedlings all sit on my kitchen table! 

I've been driving past the gutted Provo Tabernacle on University Avenue for several months now. All I could see was the concrete-reinforced shell and the six turrets set along the north side of the property, wrapped in plastic. I wondered when they were going to get busy on actually doing something. Imagine my surprise when I took my niece, Camille, to the little post office to turn in her passport papers and caught sight of what HAS been going on with the building from a different angle. The level of the temple has not perceptibly changed, but now it is entirely on tall stilts. Construction crews have excavated down another level for quite a large space around the bottom now. It's an engineering marvel to me.

Beautiful Camille. She is working on her mission papers.

 Aside from the engineering marvel and my awesome green fleece jacket, there's another reason to look closely at the picture above as you compare it to the picture below. Besides an awful lot of dirt missing, there is an awful lot of hair missing. Yup. I went to my favorite stylist (who teases me about coming in for my yearly haircut) and got many, many inches removed. Aaaaahhhhhh. Hopefully the Locks of Love people won't mind the grey strands throughout the beautiful brown. I will miss this color when I go grey. Actually, I don't think I'll mind the grey. It's the half-way there phase that I'm not looking forward to.