*Squeek*

Every summer of my life a terrible thing happens; what ever it was that I was doing musically for the rest of the school year, be it theater, youth symphony, choir, whatever, it stops. In a way this is a relief. Whatever I do, I always end up leaving out and neglecting part of my musical interests. Some years I did a lot of violin and not singing, sometimes it's all musical theater and no Church music to be heard. So when summer starts I dust off whatever it was that got left out and play around with it on my own for a few weeks of summer. It's nice to have time for variety. So this year, and for the last few years, actually, my poor violin had been sadly attention starved.

When we had our floors refinished all our bigger instruments, the guitars mostly, got hauled down to my parents room and we never bothered to bring them back up. My fiddle was down there with them and the other day mom cleaned her room and brought them all up and left them in the living room for us to deal with. So I was innocently typing on the computer (okay, I'll admit it, I was probably on Facebook) when I heard my violin calling me. It was calling for help cause my six year old sister had it and was... I don't know what she was trying to do with it but it sounded desperate. I ended up clipping my finger nails and spending about an hours quality time with my old four stringed friend. Boy, three years of not practicing sure don't do anything for your tone. It doesn't help your memory either. I couldn't even remember my favorite Suzuki standards. I knew that would happen. But it was still sad. So here I am complaining about my own failure to practice.

So that's why there has been all that violin music playing here. I'm going through withdrawal. I get opera arias stuck in my head and get chills when someone sings really well and I'm sure there is nothing quite as beautiful as my favorite motets by Byrd. Then I find myself at a symphony concert featuring Sarah Chang and I'm totally hypnotized, hardly breathing. *sigh* Someday I'll have time to be a singer and a violinist. I feel like Sam; always torn in two.