Excitement and Fridays

TGIF! That was a cool thing to say back in the day and it expresses my feelings exactly even though it is no longer cool. It's been a busy week and I need an evening to stay home, drink wine (or maybe I'll try that new beer Kathy told me about - the Michelob Ultra with lime) and read. I read 2 newspapers, several blogs, whatever book I'm devouring and Internet junk daily. Plus I try to make time for at least 3 minutes of viola practice daily. I read on another site that if you commit to 3 minutes daily you will make steady improvement. For whatever reason, this really works for me and I've even gotten out of bed to do my 3 minutes -which always turns into at least 30. I do like to practice - wish I could transition the commitment to exercise.

Now for the excitement part! I am going viola bow shopping tomorrow! I found a cool violin shop in Duluth with the best website. They have so much information posted and bows are their speciality. They have a free tuning class on Saturday mornings, so I called to register and I am the only one coming. The teacher said to come on and we would have a great lesson on how to tune a stringed instrument. I've never been able to tune either my violin or my viola without an electronic tuner, so this is a good thing for me to do. When we tune at orchestra, I just fake it and pretend like I am doing something with my pegs so that I won't look like a fool just sitting there. In reality, I've tuned with my tuner right before rehearsal. That works sometimes, but you never know. Temperature, humidity, and other stuff really affect intonation, so sometimes I am way off. When that happens, I just hand my instrument to Carl and he does it for me. I'll post tomorrow and let you know how it goes.