In the news

If you've read much of my blog, you may have noticed that unlike most blogs, I don't write much about current events or politics. This is mostly because I have very little interest in them. It's so hard to get the straight facts about what politicians are really doing or what they really believe, partly because the media is rather (rather?) selective in what is published, and partly because politicians are named so because they are political--meaning, they say pretty much what people want them to say, regardless of what they may really believe (if they've given it much thought anyway). Also, I'm not interested in my blog becoming a sound-off for the usual political discussions (hence the comment approval setting). 

However, as I was researching the Sermon on the Mount for Sabbath school study this week, I did a little googling to get some viewpoints, and found this extremely informative article here. I guess I haven't studied enough to really get the fine theological ramifications of Jesus' famous teaching. Better get to work. 

Speaking of news, my dad sent me a link to this article. Either it's a sick joke or the world really is getting grosser and grosser every day. Eww.

Flickr

I've been working on my Flickr photostream. Flickr is a site where you can download your pictures. That's about it. However, there are some really great photographers on there; not just everyone's vacation photos and snapshots of their friends (although there's plenty of that, too). I just dream that someday I'll be that good. I've gotten into photography a little more since I inherited my dad's Canon Rebel when he upgraded to the newer version. (People always ask me if I've also inherited his artistic talent. No, not for painting. Photography is as close as you're going to get.) I'm always seeking to improve my skills, so it's a constant work in progress. But if you'd like to see some of my pictures, click here.  (Leave me nice friendly comments.)

Jim Brown's Violin Shop and Pet Store

Today I took my bow to be rehaired at my favorite violin shop, Jim Brown in Claremont. It's not my favorite because they have the biggest or best selection (pretty decent for student instruments, but I wouldn't be able to find much for myself there), but because it is closer than LA, I enjoy window-shopping at the boutiques in the Claremont Village when I'm there anyway, there is a nice bakery/deli across the street for lunch, and most of all, because I enjoy chatting with Jim and his wife--they are the sweetest people. They have two grey-and-white cats that prowl around the shop, and lately they have acquired a cocker spaniel named Pepper as well. So here you are, in this violin shop, discussing rehairs and the latest technology in strings, with one cat on your lap, another one rubbing on your ankles, and a dog sprawled out upside down for you to pet.

I thought I'd try out a couple of bows and half size violins for a student while I was there, and just as I started playing, I heard the oddest sound. I have never heard a violin sound this terrible--like two different pitches, one terribly shrieky and out of tune. It stopped as soon as I stopped playing. Very quickly I realized that Pepper was singing along. Yes, the dog has the habit of howling (shrieking is a better word) along with the sound of violins. As a matter of fact, the second time I started playing, Pepper came right over to me, sat on my foot and leaned against my leg, raised his head high like a wolf, and sang blissfully away. We had a lovely duet going until Jim's wife finally took Pepper for a walk (he would go to the door and ring the bell that was hanging on the doorknob when he wanted out). I wished I had a video camera with me; that would have made the perfect YouTube moment. 

Hard things

I don't know why I'm suddenly inspired to write about hard things.

Maybe I'm trying to keep up with my weighty blog title (not that it's visible anymore because of the poppies; maybe I should put that on my list--how to make the title visible over the poppies?) Anyway, I don't feel like writing an essay, and I'll spare my readers from a poem ("Like a mushroom/floating over lime cataracts/on the brink of cowcatchers laden with pomegranates...")--I think I'll just write a list. 

Hard things (in no particular order)

1. Remembering a 3-digit number more than 10 minutes. (Those who say music helps math skills are crazy.)

2. Keeping cat hair off black pants.

3. Dealing with students' parents who yell when you can't give them the exact lesson time they want.

4. Keeping sugar from crystalizing when making caramel.

5. Realizing that he just plain doesn't care about you anymore.

6. Fingered octaves. (If you are not a violinist and don't know what this means, consider yourself lucky.)

7. Praying about certain things when you just don't want to.

8. Trying to keep from praying about certain things when you really, really want to.

9. Paganini caprices and Bach unaccompanied sonatas and partitas.

10. Living in this dark, lonely world when you would much rather be with Christ. 

What are the hard things in your life?

The Right Arm of the Gospel

Found in an SDA church bulletin (I am not making this up):

Yoga, anyone?

Progress

Work is progressing fairly smoothly on programming for Restoration. Besides a few details to clean up, pretty much all of the music and other parts of the service are set. Among the musical treats you can look forward to will be a string quartet and a vocal ensemble from LLU, an orchestra for Sabbath, and a couple of small instrumental ensembles from Loma Linda Academy (ok, including yours truly; couldn't resist). The theme song will be "Come Holy Spirit" (#269), a nice two-liner to the tune of "Jesus The Very Thought of Thee." I chose it partly because of the words in the first verse:

Kindle a flame of sacred love

In these cold hearts of ours.

Thought it went pretty well with the theme, "Ignite." 

One thing I was worried about was obtaining the powerpoint slides for the words of the hymns. Writing slides for 4 or 5 songs for each of the 14 services seemed like a huge task, so I asked around to see if anyone had them already, and racked my brain trying to come up with some good options. Then my boss Adrian, displaying the excellent resourcefulness and leadership that makes him such a great director, suggested, "Why don't you search for them online?" I honestly had not thought of that. So I googled "sda hymns powerpoint" and came up with this. I will try to restrain myself from extolling the virtues of this resource until it's actually been tested in the meetings, but it sure looks like a good deal. It took one click and a minute or two to download the words from entire SDA hymnal on presentation-ready powerpoint, easy to use, for free. Somebody ought to give that guy a donation.

So, I'm hoping the Restoration meetings will go well and will be a blessing to the university and the community. I listened to a tiny bit of one of Matt Parra's sermons  and although I didn't get too far into it before I had to do something else, I will say that I do like his voice a lot. I have a suspicion we'll get a good turnout of young people this year. We'll have to take note of the gender demographic. 

Grading time

This week I've been writing grades for my students. Yes, you might think, why is a private violin teacher making grades for her students? It's not a school class, just an extracurricular activity, and any grades I make for them don't count for a thing, neither on their report cards nor transcripts nor anything. I've certainly never received grades from any of my violin teachers, nor have I really even heard of anyone else doing that exactly, although many music teachers use various incentives to motivate their students to practice.

I grade my students solely on how much time they spend practicing per week. Here's my reasoning behind it. I have quite a few students who are getting into middle school age, and they comprehend grades. (I don't grade my 5-year-olds, although I might give a sticker for practicing every day.) I think many of them could invest more in their work on the violin. Giving them a "report card" at the end of the quarter makes them feel like it's a class that they have to take seriously, just like math or reading. I like for my students to know what kind of standards I hold for practice. I don't make it very hard on them--I realize that violin lessons are more optional than math or reading, and that there are times when they have a lot of homework that has to get priority. I grade them according to how many minutes they practiced per week, so if they skip a day or two they can make up for it on another day. I calculate grades for the quarter by averaging out all the weeks in the quarter, so if they have a busy week they can make up for it in another week. I also let them include lesson time, group class (45 minutes every week), and whatever else they might do with their violins (play for church, impromptu recital for Grandma, etc.) as practice time. What this works out to is about 180 minutes a week for Book 1 level (about 30 minutes a day for 6 days), 225 minutes for Book 2, 300 minutes for Book 3, etc., to get an A+. I also grade myself at the Book 6+ level, just to be fair. 

Here are some observations I've made from the experiment so far: 

1. Most of my students get A's. Many of them get A+'s. They enjoy seeing A+ on their report cards, and so do their parents. 

2. Those who are progressing more quickly through the repertoire are the ones getting good grades. Those getting C's are not learning as many pieces as quickly. Hmm. 

3. I can usually predict who will get what grade. 

4. I can usually detect a pretty good correlation between how much practice time they report to me for the week and how prepared they are for that lesson. Also, hmm. 

5. Hopefully, some of these students and parents will understand better why I say the things I do in the lesson, and also why they are not progressing very quickly through the repertoire, when they see their grades at the end of the quarter. It helps keep them from being discouraged, thinking that they are not talented, but rather realize that it's mostly a matter of time invested. 

6. I feel as though I am less arbitrary when I understand what is going on with my students' practice at home. If I see that a student is struggling with practice, I can talk with them about how to manage their time wisely, how to organize practice, and so on. It also helps me decide if I should assign each student more or less work.

7. Considering the average grades my students have received, I feel as though my grading scale is fair (maybe even on the soft side). Parents seem to like it, and nobody has complained about it yet. 

8. Grading myself definitely helps motivate me to practice! I feel like I'm accountable to my students, as well as they are to me. I've gotten more done the last few months than I have for years!

Lynn Harrell lecture

Today my friend and coworker Theresa took me to a free lecture by the world-renowned cellist Lynn Harrell at the AFM building in Hollywood. It was a fun experience in many ways. First of all, Theresa and I commented that many of our friends from other states get excited when we tell them that we live in Southern California, and immediately say something like, "So you can go visit HOLLYWOOD!" Well, I can tell you that Hollywood itself is nothing glamorous. It's mostly graffiti-painted pawn shops with bars on all the windows and riff-raff hanging around outside, and places like that. Theresa and I wanted to take a picture of ourselves in front of Pete's Lube & Tune to say, "Look, we went out on the town, to Hollywood!"

The musicians' union building is no better. It's an excellent example of dilapidated midcentury boring architecture. The lecture was held in a large room, not even a recital hall. Theresa and I arrived early because we didn't know what the parking situation would be like (it turned out that the area was un-glamorously deserted on a Sunday afternoon, so we were able to park right in front of the building), so we got a seat on one of the front rows. Harrell strolled in about 20 minutes before the program was about to start, in khakis and a pullover sweater, and proceeded to warm up right there on the stage while the audience came in.  He spent the next two hours lecturing about how bow hold and left hand positions affect tone quality, and showed close-up pictures of many different hand positions on slides to go with it. Some interesting points he brought up were that you can actually play louder and stronger with the bow without making a crunching sound if you add more vibrato, and that left fingertip placement (whether on the bony tip or the fleshy side of the finger) influences sound a great deal. He also equated string instrument sound with vocal styles; for example, when he's playing French music he plays with narrower, faster vibrato to imitate the slightly "nasal" tone that the French language has. I was expecting him to play more, but it was mostly just a lecture. It was very interesting to us, though, and even though it was mostly cello-oriented there were some interesting points I'm excited to try out on the violin.

After the program Theresa took me to her favorite vegetarian Vietnamese restaurant in Rosemead or San Gabriel or something, where the wait staff didn't speak English. As usual, she ordered far too much food for us. We had very yummy noodle soup and curry soup and spring rolls; and also as usual, she jumped to pay the check and threw in some special Chinese New Year rice wraps for me to take home. I'm so blessed to have such a generous friend like Theresa. 

Observation

Today's observation: cats.

Why is it that it only took one time for my cat to associate the sound of pulling dental floss out of the container with a chance to play with string, yet after many, many repeated events he still does not associate climbing the screen door with the unpleasant effect of being squirted with the water bottle?

A daunting task

The race has officially begun. Now that the venue and dates are settled, I have 24 days to find people who will do special music, lead song service, play piano, lead prayer and read scripture, and otherwise help with assorted stagehand tasks for three entire weeks of Restoration meetings. Pray for me. No, don't just pray. Sign up. 

Blue cards

Over Christmas vacation, I had the opportunity to play a solo at the church where I grew up. Things always seem to change when you've been gone for a while (like the old saying, "you can't go home again")--most of my old academy buddies have long since moved away, the church has mostly new pastoral staff, and, as many larger SDA churches, the spiritual focus seems to have shifted too, away from the old-fashioned Biblical focus towards following the current worldly marketing trends. 

No matter how the trends in society change over time however, there will always be plenty of people in each church who have retained the spirit of simple, Christlike thoughtfulness. I received an envelope full of encouragement in the mail this week in the form of the good ol' "blue cards" I grew up with--made available in all of the pews and sent out by the church to other members and friends for encouragement. These are the kind of notes I always used to get whenever I played in church, starting from when I was about 13 years old. I collected a very large pile over the years; I think I still have most of them. They are among the inspirations that made me continue as a violinist. I thought that if the church members were blessed by my music, maybe there was a ministry for me in it. I was so excited to see that some of the very same people who sent me cards in the past were still sending them (I received about 8 of them this week). 

New Year's Resolution Blog

Happy new year to all! I have returned to sunny (not really) southern California after a lovely vacation to visit my parents in Ohio. It was such a wonderful break, to be able to relax and enjoy time with my family. (To my dad, who checks my blog regularly: hi dad! Thanks for the nice Christmas!) Highlights of my vacation included going to a very nice restaurant overlooking the Cincinnati skyline for my mother's birthday; visiting some old friends and their new babies as well as seeing my old colleagues in the Dayton Philharmonic Orchestra at the New Year's Eve concert; not being able to find a single parking space at the mall the day after Christmas and giving up and going to Jungle Jim's instead (as close to an amusement park as a grocery store can be--actually well worth the trip if you are ever in the Dayton/Cincinnati area); getting a chance to play at my home church again after many years, and generally curling up by the fireplace with a soft blanket, a good book, and a Somali cat (couldn't resist adding the link). And of course, a delightful Christmas, as always.  When I returned, the weather tradition has continued: This is the sixth year I have gone back to Ohio for Christmas, and even before I moved here I have taken several trips with my family to visit southern California in late December-early January, and every single time the airplane lands in CA at this time of year, the weather is always the exact same in southern California as it was when I left it in Ohio. About 50 degrees and raining.

So, back to normal life, work (programming Restoration--please volunteer to do something!!!), a new year in Southern California, and the topic of my post. After a prayerful mental review of last year and previous years, here are the resolutions I wish to make for the new year:

1. Not to think about (dwell on) any tough times in the past few years.

2. Not to feel sorry for myself for any difficulties that may be going on in my life currently.

3. Not to worry about the future, but leave it in God's hands.

4. Oh yeah, and exercise more.

I hope that my friends with hold me accountable for my New Year's resolutions!

2007: My Year In Review

Nothing happened this year.

Age

A few months ago I wrote about my crush on a celebrity--a baby polar bear named Knut. Knut is now one year old.



Ah, how time wears on us all.


Speaking of crushes, as of this weekend I have a new boy friend! Details to come....

Gods incarnate

File this under "what if your god answers your prayers."

This morning, a 2-year-old girl had an extensive operation performed to remove the additional 4 limbs she was born with, due to an extremely rare condition known as isciopagus, basically a conjoined-twin type condition where one twin was never fully formed and remained attached to the sibling upside-down from the pelvis, leaving her, in this case, with an unusually symmetrical-looking set of 8 limbs.

This happened, in all places--in India.

For centuries, Hindus have worshiped various gods and goddesses of various things, and the characteristic trait of many of them, as commonly seen in beautiful Hindu art, is their multiple arms. As would be expected, most of the villagers from the girl's region worshiped her as a goddess incarnate.

The girl, named Lakshmi after the Hindu goddess of wealth, who is represented as having four arms, was not expected to live into adolescence. She had been plagued with various internal ailments from birth. The surgery took 27 hours and was done by a team of surgeons taking 8-hour shifts to not only remove the extra limbs but reconstruct her body, including transferring a kidney from her dead twin's body into hers, and completely reshaping her pelvis. The cost was $200,000, thankfully paid for by the hospital's foundation, since Lakshmi's parents are poor villagers from rural India and could not afford medical care.

As well as the obvious difficulties her parents faced in their daughter's many health issues (she had not seen a doctor until this) and simply caring for her, the family had to keep her away from people who wanted to buy her for a circus.

Satan is in the business of twisting all things beautifully designed by God and trying to make us not only believe that they are desirable but to make us worship them. But when the reality is revealed, these "gods" are shown to be as unhealthy, undesirable, dangerous, and--dare we say it--freakish as the one who mutilated them.

Take a look at your gods. If you were to really analyze their nature, what would they be? When the God of Abraham, the Creator of all things beautiful and perfect, was incarnated, what was His character?

Fortunately the girl Lakshmi is doing well after the surgery. I hope that she will be able to live a normal life from now on, learning to walk, play, grow up, and love.

And I hope that the testimony of a girl who was once a "goddess" will live to tell us what these unnatural gods are like when the cloak of mysticism is taken away.

The Refiner's Fire

I've had the privilege of leading the Sabbath school lesson discussion group twice so far this quarter--I say privilege because whenever I teach, I learn so much. (If there's a topic you'd like to study in further detail, I'd strongly recommend you teach it, or at least work up a study as if you were going to teach it.) This quarter's topic is "The Refiner's Fire." Surely, the question of "if God is so good, why do humans have to suffer so much?" is the classic first objection to Christianity. The studies have been presenting this question in the context of the great controversy between Good and Evil, God and Satan--that God is like a Refiner, who subjects his work to extreme heat and fire in order to purge it from impurities. A beautiful illustration, and certainly one that clearly shows not only how bad sin is and how much is necessary to make us holy and fit for Heaven, but also the great lengths to which God will go to make His people holy and fit for Heaven.

The good news for us is "God [is] faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear [it]." (1 Cor. 10:13) What a privilege to know that we have help from God Himself!

But there are still a lot of unanswered questions on our end. Certainly God's character and His ways are enough to study for the rest of our lives. We can't possibly think that we have all the answers to the questions, and as we attempt to answer some, more questions arise. This is part of the test, I think. Here's a good example, a story (which in all likelihood may have been true at some point):

A certain Brother X went to prayer meeting. During prayer and testimony time, Brother X stood up to share.

"Praise God! He has truly answered my prayer! Here is my testimony of praise. For three months now I have been searching for a good job which pays well with good benefits. I interviewed at Helen's Department Store downtown for the position of manager. The outlook looked almost impossible, as they had told me that the position had been filled for a long time now, but they said they'd see what they could do. I prayed and prayed, but I hadn't heard from them for weeks, until this past Monday, when they called and said that I got the job! Praise God!"

When all the Amens and Hallelujas died down, Brother Y stood up to speak.

"I have a prayer request for myself and my family. As you know, our little Tommy was diagnosed with diabetes last month--I thank all of you for your constant prayers and support during this difficult time. Fortunately, I have had a good job with excellent medical benefits which were able to cover all of our entire family's medical costs, including Tommy's supplies and medication. I was the manager of Helen's Department Store downtown for 15 years, but you see, on Monday I lost my job...."

Important announcement

I have not seen any moths or flies in my kitchen for several weeks now. Praise God!

(For those of you who may have been afraid to come to my place for potluck this Sabbath for fear of insects, do not be afraid.)

Introducing VideoVerse

One of my favorite websites, AudioVerse, now has a sister site of videotaped sermons, appropriately called VideoVerse. Check it out--more and more videos will be added from various sources, I'm sure (such as Southwest Youth Conference, Restoration, etc.)

O Let Me Walk With Thee

O let me walk with Thee, my God,
As Enoch walked in days of old;
Place Thou my trembling hand in Thine,
And sweet communion with me hold;
E'en though the path I may not see,
Yet, Jesus, let me walk with Thee.

I cannot, dare not, walk alone;
The tempest rages in the sky,
A thousand snares beset my feet,
A thousand foes are lurking nigh.
Still Thou the raging of the sea,
O Master! let me walk with Thee.

If I may rest my hand in Thine,
I'll count the joys of earth but loss,
And firmly, bravely journey on;
I'll bear the banner of the cross
Till Zion's glorious gates I see;
Yet, Savior, let me walk with Thee.

L.D. Avery Stuttle

"Sealed canisters"

Update on the current moth situation in the kitchen: After I took every item out of my cupboard, inspected, cleaned, and put it away (the un-infested ones, that is), I am still battling large numbers of moths every day. I thought the problem had been taken care of because of this--One of the very last things I took out to inspect was a container of whole wheat flour in a "sealed" canister. You may recognize the model of this container. If you do, do not assume that it is safe from bugs!