No cardboard involved! well, maybe a little...

 Now. I said I'd write more about the other thing I'd been up to soooo....

With a LOT of Miles's help and both of our good ideas all put together, we've made what I consider masterpieces, which you'll see in a sec! Or now, since the page is pretty big. Oh well, less suspense.

The story behind this post is that I'm working on building my violin studio and needed some little practice violins for young beginners. I teach them to hold them correctly and use their bow, and THEN we begin to use the instrument, so they develop good technique before we start strumming/bowing away like crazy. :) Anyway, I had used a cardboard box "violin," like this, 

but I didn't love it--violins are NOT shaped like boxes! There are two options I've found online that a lot of teachers use-- the "foam-a-lin", and the "cherub box violin". Both of them have their plusses and minuses, but 10+ bucks for a cardboard violin!? I figured with Miles's and my mad skills combined, we could make something just as good for a lot cheaper, and make it look a little more like the real thing. 

After a quick trip to Lowe's and one to JoAnn, we were ready. Our front room became a construction zone, which lasted until I taught on Friday, when it moved to the bedroom until we got everything put together. The violins were pretty straightforward; cut, paint, seal, but the bows...here is where Miles's genius came out. I just knew that I wanted to use 3/8 inch wooden dowels and put a wooden frog (the little square part on the end of a bow) on them, and I thought maybe we could just drill out a half circle from each little rectangle frog piece. I guess I figured I'd just hold it real tight with one hand, and drill with the other? Luckily, Miles knows his tools better, and we ended up drilling a couple frogs at once, clamped between some other wood so that it was secure. (thanks for the clamps, Mom and Dad Nielson!) We had a 3/8 inch bit, so drilling straight through was the only tricky part, but once we got that down we were cruising!

Stage one. Bows are glued, and violins cut out. :) I toyed with the
idea of covering them in cardboard, but decided to paint them instead. 

And here is the finished product. TA-DAAAA! Well, except the dot on the frog.

Next to my full size violin. Since I'll be using these in my JumpStart class,
I looked up the measurements of smaller violins and made a scale model
(I put mine halfway between 1/10 and 1/16 size, violin-ers out there :))

 Anyway, there you go! I should also probably mention that while we were painting, cutting, and gluing we succeeded in watching the entire series of David Attenborough's BBC "Life of Birds" videos on pbs.org. . . yes, we are nerds, but I now am chock full of fun facts about birds all over the world (p.s. you really should look up the lyrebird. Just do it!), AND have a set of little practice violins and bows to use with my younger students. :)

Professionalcrastination

Definition: the skill of putting off the big, important, and possibly crucial things on your to-do list by thinking up every possible combination of little things that suddenly are super important to do. Like passionately organizing the drawer full of sheet music that no one sees instead of practicing the violin. Or making diligent lists of projects that need to be done, while putting off making a phone call to find out what kind of dental benefits are covered by your insurance. Just some examples.

Anyway, that's my excuse for not posting anything on here for a long time. :) I'm telling you, it's one of my best skills!

We're great here in LB, though, and loooooving walking around in short sleeves in the middle of December. Ok, in the morning you might need a jacket, but by the afternoon we're ready to pull out our bikes! Speaking of which...

Hmmm. I can't get the camera to load pictures right now, but next post will have some bike-fixing pictures. We brought home an old bike from Miles's parents' place, and it's getting all fixed up! The only thing we have left is making it pretty now! Well, pretty in the manly sense of the word, of course.

The other big update that I can think of right now is that I'm now focusing full-time on violin teaching. 

In case you weren't in on the last few months, while Miles has been at work I've been working as a nanny for two kids. They were hilarious! Plus, the kids went to their dad's house two weeks out of the month, so I could still keep things running smoothly at home and run errands and stuff on the weeks that I wasn't nanny-ing. The only downside? My hours changed to full time a month ago, which meant we had to get up at 5:30 to get Miles to work before I had to be at work at 7:15. I kept debating about if it was worth it, but I loved getting out of the house and playing with kids, so meh, two weeks each month wasn't so bad to wake up that early, right? I kept thinking about violin, though, and going back and forth about quitting the nanny job, because I wanted to do more with my violin studio. This was NOT going to happen while I was working full time, because I want to fill my days with violin and leave our fun after-work-do-whatever-we-want-time the way it is. This dilemma had been popping in and out of my thoughts for a couple of weeks, and I finally thought, "well, I'll see what happens with the mom's new work schedule, and make a final decision. For real this time!"

I finally got around to texting the mom about her new hours, and ...came to find out that in the two weeks I'd been off, she'd found a preschool for the 3-yr-old, and is going to put the 2-yr-old in daycare. 

Wahoo! Perfect timing, right?! I think on that one my meaning-to-really-ponder-and-pray-about-it-and-make-a-strong-decision got to the professionalcrastination stage, and Heavenly Father just took over and made some things happen. :) thanks, tender mercies!!

I'm so excited to start up my studio efforts again, and this time around I have awesome violin advice from BYU friends and a bunch of friends in the area to help me get a solid start. 

And of course I've made a to-do list...

The big news

After about a million years, or really just sixteen or so, I've finally learned how to type! And along with that, I also have some mad backspacing skills.

Okay, so somehow I made it through all those middle-school programs by memorizing what I had to type and looking at my fingers. The result: I could type about 40 wpm with three of my fingers but was lost in a dark room :)

So... this week I found a free typing teacher thing online, and now I'm up to about 30 wpm NOT looking at one little finger. Yay! No laughing, all you master typists out there...I don't think I could have even typed 10 wpm before without looking!

The other GREAT news is that after playing in church on Sunday, a couple moms came and asked about violin lessons! I totally forgot that that might be a side benefit of playing in church, and I'm glad, because I would have felt guilty if I felt like I was advertising. So now I'm in the process of setting that all up and emailing back and forth with the moms, and hopefully this will be the beginning of my little studio that I've been working on. I'm so excited!