Update #3

I am now in the final week of my time in Lexington, SC... I arrived back "home" last night after a wonderful, long weekend in North Carolina. I drove to Chapel Hill to visit Matt and Rebekah Carlson, former students and good friends. They had a baby just before Christmas and I was blessed to meet little Ingrid. I have never held a 4-week baby before..she is so adorable and already has a great variety of facial expressions!! We spent lots of time talking and had some amazing food! (Chapel Hill has some wonderful places to eat!!). On Sunday afternoon I made the short drive to Cary and spent time with the Tom, Elly and Jennifer Streeter. We had a great time as well and I had a wonderful and much-needed massage with Jennifer. It was a refreshing weekend!

I made good progress with my writing last week..The big picture, as well as little details, continue to come to me and I completed what I consider to be one of my most challenging chapters. My primary goal for my time here is to complete the chapters that will have a video component to them so I can construct the script and organize the recording, which is scheduled for mid-March. On that front, I am almost done, with just one more chapter to write this week, so I am thankful for what I have been able to finish. It was interesting to me that even while I was driving home last evening, little ideas came to me - things that I need to include in the book, so I imagine these ideas will continue to emerge as I continue to get away from it and come back to it...This has been an interesting process and one that I have enjoyed. I am so grateful for the time to do this!!

I will update again before I leave here and head to Hilton Head for a week with some friends for a little R&R. I hope you have a good week!

At the End of Week Two..

For having no "normal" agenda, it is amazing how full a week can be!! I am just slightly over halfway finished with my time in this lovely place, focused on my writing...

So this week, I had some struggles with losing my focus and being blocked in my writing. In those moments, I was able to focus on reading, which allowed me some productivity, as it was reading I needed to do. I read some fascinating material on how we learn musical skills, thanks to a former Illinois professor, Daniel Kohut. I found a good deal of resonance with many of his ideas. And then I read Shinichi Suzuki's Nurtured By Love, which is the story of how the Suzuki method of teaching was developed. It was quite a moving book, and helpful for me, since all I really knew about the Suzuki method was the endless repetitions of "Twinkle, Twinkle..." :-)

I did make some progress on writing, but it was Friday, where some really important things really came together. I was pretty frustrated and finally, I was walking around this place, and I started praying out loud, reminding the Lord that He had called me to this project and I needed his help because I was really stuck (some of you know the story how this whole book project came out of a sense of the Lord's guidance at the beginning of this whole process). Anyway, it was maybe 20 minutes later that I was writing the section about 2-mallets and all of a sudden the whole organization of my material became quite clear and because of that I was able to make sense of the organization of what I was writing at the time. I started furiously writing and after about an hour, I stopped and realized that a whole lot had come into place.. I know this sounds ridiculously vague, but the details would bore you and the bottom line was that I was ecstatic, because there was a whole lot of material that I couldn't figure out how to organize and it all just came together! After dinner, I continued to write until about 10pm and put it away with a great deal of satisfaction and thankfulness!!

Along with that wonderful experience, the weekend was fabulous. On Saturday morning I headed north to Hickory, North Carolina to visit a good friend who teaches at Lenoir-Rhyne College. He has been going through some really tough times, so it was good to sit and talk with him and enjoy the beautiful day - and eat some local barbeque!! Mmmmm..

Then today, I visited the Church of the Apostles in downtown Columbia where Chip Edgar is the rector. I first met Chip in my music appreciation class and he was quite the character (which is why I remembered him). Later, he became a priest in the Episcopal Church, and ministered in Wheaton for a time. They left for South Carolina 7 years ago and it was the friend I had lunch with two weeks ago who reminded me he was here - even though she couldn't remember his name! So I found him online and went this morning! The service was very uplifting and lunch with the family was so fun...I really appreciated being with Chip and Beth and their kids - it was a good time.

The day finished with a visit to one of my first percussion majors (who graduated in the mid-70's). He and his family are in Augusta, GA - less than an hour away from where I am staying. He teaches percussion at UGA and marching band at a big high school outside of Augusta. We had a wonderful conversation over dinner, catching up on 35 years of life! It was a fabulous way to end the weekend! I continue to be thankful for these moments which have allowed me to connect with friends in the midst of the very solitary work I am doing during the week. I am blessed!!

Since tomorrow is a holiday and since I was given a free pass to see the Biltmore House in Asheville, NC, I'm going to drive north and take my extended weekend. I really, really like this idea of just working during the week and having the weekend off!

Thanks for reading! I hope you have a great week!

At the End of the first Week

I have had a wonderful and productive week here in Lexington, SC. Never having written a book before, I wondered how I would respond to the daunting task of actually sitting down and writing a book, but I started by making a file for all of the chapters I already had a sense of (which was added to during the week as my mind became completely focused on marimba pedagogy). I managed to write two chapters completely from scratch and I edited another chapter based on something I had written to a former student on how to wrap marimba mallets several years ago and I also made good progress editing an article I wrote for the Journal of Percussion Pedagogy in 2008. So it has been an amazing week - and I have enjoyed it a great deal. There were several days when I didn't even go outside because I was so into what I was doing, but by the end of the week, I started to relax a bit and give myself some down time.

I drove to Charleston, SC - a two-hour drive - on Saturday and spent a lovely day there. I had never been there and it was fun to walk along the water in the older part of the town. The weather was gorgeous - around 70 degrees and completely sunny. I walked quite a ways and took lots of great pictures - unfortunately I didn't bring the cable that will get my pictures from my camera to this blog, so that will have to come later. It was neat to see the style of Charleston - different kinds of homes, in a variety of colors on quite narrow streets - some of them cobblestone. I walked past a French Hugenot Church and heard the guide (who was leading a small group of people in a carriage pulled by a horse) that this particular church was the last French Hugenot congregation in the country. It was a beautiful church and just down the road from an old Episcopal Church that had several cemetaries, where there were graves from the 1700's!! I found the section of Church Street that was the inspiration for "Catfish Row" in the Dubose Heyward story "Porgy" (this story later became the basis for George Gershwin's opera "Porgy and Bess"). I also wandered through the market place but didn't find anything I had to buy. A quick stop at Whole Foods and Trader Joes on the way out of town (all TJ's and Whole Foods are at least 100 miles away from where I am staying!) made a perfect end to a wonderful day.

After attending a non-denominational church this morning, I decided to take advantage of another beautiful day and walked a couple miles on the dam. There is an almost 2-mile dam on Lake Murray - a very large area lake (I was told it has almost 500 miles of shoreline with all the inlets and fingers on the lake), and there is a nice wide path for the "dam walkers," people who walk or run this stretch along the lake. I went halfway - one mile - and then turned around. It was a great time!

Then I came home, did some cleaning and a load of laundry, and then some baking and cooking during the Denver-Eagles game. After that I realized that I had a completely non-work weekend - a Sabbath - that I rarely get during the school year!! So my goal is to continue to work diligently during the week and explore on the weekends! What a novel idea!!

School starts tomorrow and there is a part of me that is going to miss my students and my teaching, but the other part is delighted to have this wonderful opportunity!

On sabbatical..

Well, I usually write on my blog when I am traveling somewhere and this is no exception. But the difference is that I am currently in South Carolina - in Lexington - staying in a friend's condo and I will be here for about a month, writing a book on marimba pedagogy....essentially a book on how to teach marimba to everyone from a beginner to a college student! It will cover a wide variety of topics beyond the obvious mallet technique and will reflect what I have learned from my many years of teaching! I am excited to do this!!

I came south for a couple reasons - to get away from the distractions that home, friends and the familiar provide and it doesn't hurt that it is warmer down here - though winter has not really been nasty up north yet. It was 63 here today and it will get cooler one of these days, but for now I am enjoying the change of scenery and warm weather. I arrived yesterday and my hosts left today. I spent the afternoon driving around and becoming more familiar with the area (after my hosts drove me around last evening). I learn the lay of the land faster when I drive myself and try to find those places that I saw as a passenger.

Tonight (New Years Eve) I am "home," listening to Prairie Home Companion as I write this blog. I am now fully aware that while I have done my grocery shopping and put things away that I am indeed here by myself! My good-ole introverted self will adjust to this and my intent is to start my work on Monday. Its interesting because I often spend my New Years Eve alone - praying and thinking about the past year and will likely do so later tonight. I have a great deal to be thankful for!

I'll sign off for now and will try to post a couple times a week...I think I can do this since it will be a very different kind of writing.

To all who read this, I hope you have a blessed 2012!

Sunset on the Indian Ocean from a favorite restaurant!

Notice the dhou - an old style ship - off to the right as it crosses the path of the sun in the following pictures.

Economics and Eating

Perhaps the first shock upon arriving in Zanzibar was the money: the Tanzanian shilling is the currency and there are about 1400 of them to a US dollar!! So a bottle of coke or a 1.5 liter of water (which we bought everyday) was 1,500 to 2,000 shillings; an hour of internet 2,500 shillings; a typical dinner 10,000 to 20,000 shillings...it took a little while to get used to this!! The tour guide for our spice tour, who is in his mid-30's, told us that when he was a boy, the rate of exchange was 5 Tanzanian shillings to the dollar and now it is 1,400! Quite a devaluation... So while the numbers are huge, when you stop to figure it out, most things are pretty inexpensive comparatively.

As for the food, the first day we arrived we had a traditional Swahili meal – mostly rice and curry dishes (Zanzibari curry is a little different than Indian curry-not quite as spicy). Each morning for breakfast, there was fruit juice – the most intriguing and one of my favorites was an avocado/passion fruit combination which was really tasty and very unique; we had slices of papaya and other fresh fruit as well.

Because of the many influences on the island (Indian, Arabic and Swahili), the food is quite varied. The most common foods are “chips,” also known as french fries...it is difficult to get through a day without them because they are served with so many dishes. Rice is also used a lot; I ate vegetable curry for the majority of my lunches – mostly to get more vegetables in my diet and to avoid the fries, which were delicious, but not something I wanted to eat every day.

One evening part of our group had a meal in a home; it was a traditional meal that would be served during Ramadan, after an entire day of fasting (it was not Ramadan when we were there, but the food was what one would eat for the special meals of the year – much like our Thanksgiving feasts). We ate really well – everything was eaten with the right hand (no utensils), sitting on the floor. We had a delicious grilled kingfish, chicken with a curry sauce, naan and another type of bread, a potato filled with beef that was really tasty, several banana-type dishes and a couple other things unlike anything I have ever eaten. It was incredible!

Stone Town and the Indian Ocean seen from above