Windy and Music

So, the weather here turned cold again and then warmer yesterday and today is rather cold, cloudy, and windy (but the grass is still green!). I am sorry to talk about the weather so much, but I honestly find it fascinating here. Having never lived in the Midwest before, I have no idea what to expect.

In my last post I said I had not posted for a while because I was busy, so I thought I should explain why. I had taken a job playing the piano for recitals at the high school here. So every morning I went to the high school for a couple hours and practiced along with the students, and I also spent a lot of time practicing at home. Since I was paid based on how many hours I was at the school, and I have not yet obtained full-time employment, I was greedy and asked for many hours, not realizing that I would then have three weeks to learn twenty songs of varying degrees of difficulty.

I did not realize until I started trying to learn these songs how much of sight-reading and learning a piece is (at least for me) based on intuition, muscle memory, and sound. Some of the songs were very old Italian or German songs, and the chord progressions and melodies were unlike anything I had ever heard before. This made sight-reading very difficult because what my ear would want to hear next and my fingers want to play would not be what the notes said to do. And, because a lot of playing for me is muscle memory, it was hard to train my fingers into twenty new songs with their own patterns in just three weeks.

So I had to spend a lot more time practicing than I had expected. But the recitals seemed to go well, and now I have a binder-full of new music that I am capable of playing. This is exciting, even though I am sure that I will never play some of the songs outside of a high school music recital.

Magic

Hello everyone,

Sorry it's taken me so long to post. I was actually kind of busy the last week in February and the first two weeks in March, and then I was just so out of the habit that I didn't post anything for a while. Plus, nothing terribly exciting has happened, so I wasn't sure what to write about.

But now I have a story to tell you all...

I remember spring days in Reno, when the weather would finally become consistently warm enough that people with lawns would decide that it was time to make them green again. So you'd go out and water, or turn on your sprinkler system, and maybe do some fertilizing or aeration. And you would carefully and consistently work at it until, hopefully, your lawn was revived. If you didn't care you might not put quite as much work into it; however, the bottom line was that if you wanted to make your lawn look nice, you had to make the decision and put in effort.

Well, I have discovered that here in Iowa, lawns turn green on their own. It's like magic!

The weather has been warming up quite a lot. It's been a few weeks since our high was below fifty for more than a day, and many days it has been in the sixties or even as high as the low seventies. And, in the midst of all this warmth, I noticed that the lawns (including my own, to which neither Ian nor I have done anything) were slowly starting to change color. Then, the other night, we had an amazing thunderstorm and heavy rain for a few hours, and the next morning the lawns were noticeably greener.

They look so healthy and happy and alive, and all this without any effort from anyone! I realize that if you are from Iowa this might not be quite so thrilling, but I spent a lot of my life in deserts. When you live in the desert, you have to work to make things grow.