I'll post soon!  I've missed chatting with you both.

Also, just in case any confusion arises, there appears to be a new chatterboxer going by Peregrine Falcon.  I am only Peregrine.

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An embarassingly late post is in the works!

Wow, I have no idea where to start.  You both have done so many things since I dissolved to ghosting status.  I’m really sorry for being so absent.

Lupine, I love your book art.  I have been popping in to check out the book picturing thread you started because I find it so fun to see your art.  It’s neat you can print stickers from your own home.  I am intrigued enough to want to try it myself.  
I tried making my own stickers once by covering a small picture I drew in Mod Podge, then slathering the back in glue stick and letting it dry.  If you dampened the back once it dried the glue became sticky again, but it was very weak and my stickers had a tendency to fall off.
Your performance with the philharmonic sounds amazing.  I am so glad you had fun.  Having people who know what they are doing around you definitely helps.  Also having a great conductor makes the experience so much more fun.

Bobcat, I hope your Bach is going well and that you are reaching your tempo goals.  I’m glad you found a way of practicing that helps the parts you mentioned.  It is so frustrating to be pounding away at a problem and not improving.  I also hope you restrung your viola.  Rusting strings!  They must be pretty old.  I left a set on for too long and it literally unraveled in my hands while I was practicing, shedding little curls of wire everywhere.
I get you on the stress of wanting to be a professional musician.  Yes, you improve but you feel as if you are never good enough and that you never will be and you end up beating yourself up and stressing and worrying and comparing your playing to the Menuhin Competition winners…And the cycle continues even when you try to stop it.  I’m sorry, I don’t think there is much comfort in this paragraph.  I think it is an “I hear you” rambling, not a “don’t worry” one.
As for having solo performance opportunities; look in unlikely places.  Busk at a fair or famers market (this is nice because what you play can be a little rough, and the experience can help you polish it), play for residents of an old folks’ home (they love that, and the home’s staff generally do too), have a private concert for your family (the scariest because you know each other so well).  I don’t know how this has been effected by COVID but in the past you could volunteer to play in the lobby.  Also if your library has a community room you could give a recital there too.

What have I been doing?  See if you can guess.  If you guessed “violin” you were correct. :)  My teacher had a studio recital and I was really busy preparing for that.  I waited until last minute to rehearse with the pianist and regretted it greatly.  There were a couple rhythm issues I had been doing for a year and I only had a few days to fix them so I played them right in the recital.  It was stressful.  The performance was fine, though I have no idea if I played rhythms right.  Now my teacher has announced another recital!  I haven’t done recitals in so long that I have let many of my pieces fall in to the unplayed category (a mistake and I know it).  Here comes preparation again!

This post has become very long, so I will rant in a different post about the quality of YA fiction.  I am so disgusted by the quality that I have given up reading them and have been sticking to books below my reading level, and pushing through classics.

I hope you both are doing well!  

Thank you so much for reading this, Admin.

Ahhhh Peregrine!!! I miss seeing you around. I'll probably post more later but I just want to respond to a few things :D And orchestra is tomorrow and I completely forgot to practice the music (I was doing the other orchestra's music). So I'll be focusing on that.

That's an interesting way to make stickers. I have a roll of sticker-making paper/thing. It's really fun to make them.

Yeah, the whole "professional violinist" thing is hard. And my teacher is having me do the Accolay concerto, which is fun but pretty easy. It's mostly for working on using more vibrato/playing in a more romantic style. I'm working on the Bach on the side, but I'm kind of swamped with my two orchestras XD I really want something harder on violin. On viola I'm doing the JC Bach viola concerto, and its third movement is really fun. 

And YA, yeah... I just recently tried to go into the YA section to get some sci fi books because MG doesn't have much sci fi. I personally really love MG, but I really wish there was a "lower YA" like there's upper and lower MG, so you don't have to go straight to the the overly dark stuff. I don't necessarily think that the quality is worse, just that it focuses on things I don't like, such as gratuitous darkness/grimdark and romance. Also, in spec fic at least, all the characters are like 18 or 19 and like... 14/15 just gets skipped (in MG and YA) XD But why do they have to make all the covers so unpleasant? MG has all this beautiful, colorful cover art, and YA has blood... Anyway I look forward to what you have to say.

Hey y'all! It's nice to hear from you, Peregrine! What piece did you play for your recital? I remember you giving me a suggestion for a recital piece in the past which I ended up doing and it turned out to be one of my favorite things that I've played (Meditation from Thais).

Ahh, I can't wait for the YA fiction rant. Like Bobcat, I'm going to take the liberty of jumping ahead on that xD I've actually read quite a few good YA books lately, including Hani and Ishu's Guide to Fake Dating and The Hate U Give; but I've also started a bunch of YA books, gotten really into them, and then reached the climax which decided to go in a very violent and dark direction when it completely didn't need to, finished the book, and then felt very dissatisfied. Blackfooted Bobcat, I totally relate to your dislike of horrr/dark stuff, and for me romance has to be very well done and slow and both people have to have logical reasons to fall in love for me to enjoy it. And you're totally right, 14/15 year olds get completely skipped! It makes me very sad.

I actually have seen a lot of cool YA covers though. There's a whole new genre of Asian-inspired-YA-fantasy that seems to be evolving right now, and there are a lot of gorgeous covers for those books (though I haven't actually gotten to reading any of them because I am wary of YA as a rule). The Girl Who Fell Beneath the Sea and A Magic Steeped in Poison are very pretty. 

I just got back from my orchestra's trip to Washington, D.C.! I was a bit nervous for it,  but it ended up being amazing. We got to tour all kinds of landmarks (the MLK memorial was so cool), and go on a boat down the river, and eat very good food ^_^. As for the actual performance, everyone says we did really well, including the other orchestra members (and our orchestra tends to be very self-deprecating so I think that means we actually did well). The concert hall has this gigantic organ, which was very impressive because we were playing the Organ Symphony xD The symphony is really loud and almost aggressive, which was actually very helpful because it's hard to be nervous on stage while everyone is playing fortissimo.

This is probably going to sound very cheesy, but maybe you can relate: whenever I'm at an orchestra event, even though I'm only actually close to one friend there, I always feel very at home and connected to the people around me. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but I think it's because of (here comes the cheesy part) the power of music to connect people even when they don't know each other. Anyway, just a thought.

Since we got back from the trip, though, I've been feeling kind of sad :( the problem with having a very busy, fun weekend is that you then realize how boring the rest of your life is.

This has gotten embarrassingly long so I'm going to end here to preserve the admins' sanity :) Looking forward to hearing from y'all again!