Again, I have fallen into the pattern of only updating my blog about once a month. I will do so now, as my CD of Vivaldi double concerti finishes.

I'll have two concerts in February, one for symphony and one for chamber. The symphony concert will be all opera pieces, and the chamber will be Beethoven, Mozart, Handel, and Ibert. I'm excited for that one, but even more so for the opera concert. I have a feeling, though, that my fingers may fall off between now and then. ;-) Rehearsals do go by rather quickly, however, with the amount of music we currently have.

I had a chance to read several books between the end of fall semester and now. The Grand Inquisition by James LaRue was a great book on intellectual freedom. I had first heard about it in my intro class in my library program which I took early this past summer. I finally got around to reading it for myself, and now it's got me thinking about all the censorship issues that libraries have to deal with.

The Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff was one of the more thought-provoking books I've read in a while. It brought to my attention many of the things I do that end up stressing me out (whether or not I realize it at the time) so I've been thinking about the way that I handle things lately. Maybe it'll help me learn to chill out sometimes...;-)

I also read a book on Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra, which I played last spring. I saw the book at the library while I was looking for a different title, and decided to check it out. There was a lot of information on Bartok's life, compositions, and musical research as well as on the concerto, and I'm glad I read something on a composer that I previously knew pretty much nothing about. I may try and track down some of the pieces he wrote that were based on Hungarian and Romanian folk music.

Class started last night. I began with managment, and will have a class on public libraries starting this coming Monday. This is the one semester (hopefully the only one), where I will have three classes. The third is an Internet fundamentals course. It meets one Saturday all day, and the rest is online. I may go a little crazy, but it's just one semester. Shouldn't be too bad.

And randomly--I've recently visited the French Market in Ogilvie Station as well as a German market up in Lincoln Square. I LOVE THESE LITTLE PLACES!! They have so many interesting things and make me wonder why I don't go to them more often. (Oh wait...the suburbs are boring and have far fewer such things...) There's a certain charm in them, a sort of aura that makes me feel, if for only a short period of time, that I'm strolling through a market in Europe.