Where in the World Have You Been?

Now that school is out for the Christmas holidays and my world has finally slowed down a bit, I began to reflect upon the past several months and sadly realized that I had not been blogging AT ALL!  I was frustrated that I had let another project fall by the wayside again, but thought that no one had actually noticed.  I was pleasantly surprised to find that I was wrong when a friend gently asked last week why I had stopped writing.  That became encouragement to get back at it and provide some explanation of what has occurred that hindered my writing.

In August, I was thrilled to hear of an adjunct position at Union University in Jackson, Tennessee as staff pianist.  I applied for the position and was honored to be hired.  What I imagined would be a slow start at a new job turned out to be a baptism by fire into the music department.  I'm loving it and wouldn't have it any other way.  Last semester, I played for 17 voice students each week while maintaining my own private piano students, my teaching at MSCC, and the church job.  Needless to say, my schedule became more hectic and I found myself having to let some things go.

One of the first things to hit the skids was my writing.  The addition of driving another 150 miles each week and needing to find more practice time simply meant that blogging was not an option.  I had to play catch up a bit -- learning new repertoire and figuring out how things were going to work at Union.  As the semester went on, I discovered that 2 of my private lessons each week were becoming a source of extreme stress.  These students were unable to come to the church where I am basing my studio teaching and opted to have me visit them in their home (for an additional charge, of course).  Suddenly I found myself at the mercy of their schedules as well as the challenge of getting to their house on time for a single lesson.  Since neither of the students were progressing as well as I had hoped, I determined that these students were not providing me with musical rewards and that the income from these lessons was not enough to justify the scheduling dilemma they presented.  With some sadness, I notified the students that I would no longer be able to teach them.  This was more difficult than I had imagined since they represented some of the first students I had taught in my piano studio.

Now you know where I've been and why my presence in the blogosphere has been missing.  I intend to begin writing again and sharing with anyone that wants to read it, but I don't anticipate as many posts as I have written in the past.  My plan is for one post a week on each of the blogs.  When time and inspiration allows, I'll do more.  I hope you are as excited to have me back in your world as I am to be back.

Kennith