The night I was a rockstar

About a month ago I was discussing the Middle School handbell classes I started teaching this spring with Suzanne, the head of the music department, when she had a brilliant idea. Why not get a group of teachers together and perform a handbell piece for the annual BFA talent show? Not “Carol of the Bells,” though–a piece that would seem completely incongruous with handbells, something hardcore and rocked-out. It would be ironic and entertaining. We could dress up crazy. The kids would love it.

4 rehearsals later, I walking up to the front of the BFA auditorium dressed all in black–black jeans, black sequined top, black leather jacket, black boots with the tongues sticking out at odd angles. Thanks to my amazing roommate Natalie, my hair had more volume that it has ever had or probably will ever have again, and the black theme was carried through to my dramatic eye make-up.

My roommate Natalie and I showing off our rockstar outfits.

Pretty sure this is the most hardcore I've ever looked.

Watch our performance here…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0i-s0ecABk&feature=youtu.be

When we finished playing, the kids went absolutely wild. We were the only group of the evening to get a standing ovation! My plan was to be very intense and tough while we played, but when I heard all the yelling and cheering, and then when I could pick out my small group girls yelling my name in the crowd, I totally lost my rocker-cool and couldn’t keep myself from smiling from ear to ear in a decidedly un-intimidating way. Not a bad problem to have, I guess!

Lörrach Castle & January Prayer Letter

Happy New Year! Apparently I seem to jinx myself every time I declare publicly that I plan on blogging regularly, so maybe I should keep that particular new year resolution a secret. In any case, your favorite Negligent Blogger is back for a fresh start.

At least my blog hasn’t fallen into quite as derelict a state as the castle ruin my roommates and I visited last Saturday afternoon! To fight our jet lag, we decided needed a diversion to keep us awake during the day and exercise to help us fall asleep at night. Burg Rötteln seemed to meet both requirements quite nicely.

Rötteln Castle is on a hill overlooking Lörrach, the larger town about 20 minutes from my house where we sometimes go to find things Kandern stores don't sell.

The main part of the castle.

That little black speck at the base of the wall is me.

The castle was built at different times, starting as early as the 1100's. This part was labeled 1614.

I allowed myself to be a tourist and get a picture with the castle.

I can't quite get used to finding rosebuds in January.

The castle from around the back. I don't envy those Medieval soldiers.

Despite cold wind and grey skies, we had quite a lovely afternoon. It was a nice last punctuation mark to my Christmas break before jumping back into a school schedule.

P.S. I promise I don’t spend all my time hiking to castles. They’re just more photogenic than my studio. You can find a summary of what I’ve been up to at work in my January Prayer Letter.

Sunset and Starlight

Once upon a time, there was a girl named Marit who started a blog with the best intentions of keeping it updated regularly…

Sorry, everyone. I’m still very much alive and well. I promise I’ll fill you in on the happenings of the last few weeks soon. The internet and phone service at my apartment went out over a week ago and won’t be up and running again until the beginning of November, so that’s added a challenge to keeping up with communication.

To start off, here are some pictures from one of the most pleasant afternoons of my time in Germany to date:

Last Friday I went on a 8 kilometer hike with some friends to celebrate Kristi’s birthday. We left Kandern in the late afternoon sun…

…hiked up through, Sitzenkirch, where the middle school campus of BFA is located…

The lovely villiage church in Sitzenkirch

…and kept going up…

…until we reached Schloß Bürgeln, an beautiful old mansion built in the 1700′s with lovely grounds and a spectacular view.

The tower you see on the left is where these same girls and I went camping earlier this fall.

We chose this spot for our picnic, and enjoyed a veritable feast while we watched the sun set and the evening mist roll in over the hills…

apples, bread, cheese...there was chocolate, too, of course.

The pictures really don't do the glorious sunset justice.

…then, as it began to get dusky…

…we started back. The stars came out as we hiked down the mountain to Kandern. We finished the evening wrapped up in blankets on the sofas in Kristi, Emily & Anna’s apartment, eating homemade apple pie and drinking tea. It was delightful in every way. I’m so glad Kristi had a birthday!

Horton, Whoville, and the Jungle of Nool

This fall BFA will be putting on Seussical the Musical! The cast and chorus have been rehearsing for weeks, but the instrumental parts only arrived last Thursday–over a month late! So Jill and I have had our work cut out for us getting the pit orchestra rehearsals started.

Jill is conducting, but she put me in charge of the strings, so over the past week and a half I’ve been quite busy learning the music, figuring out fingerings and bowings, editing the parts, making copies, and coming up with practice strategies to help the students tackle some of the trickiest passages. I’m enjoying the process, but it has also been taxing and a bit stressful.

The first two rehearsals last week were pretty rough, as some of the music is in difficult keys (G-flat major!) and has lots of jazzy syncopation involving rhythmic figures the students are not used to reading. But Jill and I conferred afterwards and came up with a plan of attack: divide and conquer. So, this afternoon I’m leading a 45 minute string sectional! I’m somewhat terrified. One thing I’ve learned since arriving at BFA, however, is that I can do a lot of things that I didn’t know I knew how to do. I guess sectional-leading is another one!

Wish me luck!

P.S. Click to hear the music we’ll be working on…I hope we can sound this good!

 

 

Adelboden

So I almost made my post-per-day goal! There were two reasons why I missed the last entries:

#1: Seussical the Musical! (more on that tomorrow)

#2: Last weekend was the BFA staff retreat in Adelboden, Switzerland. I was also far to busy gazing in open-mouthed awe at the gorgeous Alps surrounding me to think about blogging–sorry:)

The weekend was wonderful. I really enjoyed the chance to get to know more of the BFA staff and to continue building friendships through meals, discussions, Bananagrams, hikes, and whatnot. Besides that, just being in such a spectacularly beautiful place was endlessly marvelous to me. The view from my bedroom window on the 3rd floor of the chalet we stayed in was enough to catch me and keep me enthralled for extended amounts of time whenever I walked by.

I took this picture from my bedroom window. As soon as I saw that waterfall I wanted to hike to the top...

The retreat was designed to be a time of introspection, of learning more about ourselves so we could become healthier as individuals and as colleagues. We spent time in some of our sessions working through the Myers Briggs personality indicator, and in some reading and discussing a book. Since I’ve always been intrigued by understanding personality and it’s effect on relationships, I found what we covered quite interesting.

My favorite part of the weekend was the free time we had on Saturday afternoon. I drove with 5 or 6 others across the valley to go on a hike up one of the mountains that had a massive waterfall gushing down it–the one in the picture above! I think it was called Engstligen Falls. The climb was rather steep–we gained about 600 meters–but incredibly beautiful. The terrain varied as the path went through the different areas of the mountainside, which made it very engaging. It was a cool, overcast day, and when we were about halfway up it started raining, but I was having so much fun I didn’t mind. Besides, I was wearing the rain jacket my awesome brother helped me find, so I stayed quite quite dry–thanks, Erik! As I climbed to the top of a spur that jutted up off the mountain, I was reminded of a storybook my Mom used to read to me when I was little, where a young girl named Sophie goes on a hike with her parents up to Purple Cloud Rock. I wanted to call out in exhilaration, like her, “I’m on top of the world!”

I was hiking alone at this point, so a self-portrait is the best I could do.

The view from the top.

More pictures of Switzerland will be up soon; for now, here is the album with pictures of the rest of my life in the month I’ve been here so far, for those of you who didn’t see it already on Facebook.

P. S. I updated my About tab–check it out! I will try to keep it current from now on…

An evening at Storch

In the past few weeks, there have been several moments where I have given myself a proud pat on the back because I’ve actually managed to remember some numbers. My phone number, for example. Also, that 350 degrees fahrenheit equal 180 degrees celsius, which is important because it’s temperature the Storch girls’ favorite cookies bake at.

For the Rezlife staff, weekends bring the busiest time instead of a break. Their 14-20 kids are home all day, they have to make all three meals, drive to sports practices, make sure homework gets done and that no one dies and all that. So they take a different day of the week off instead: RAs are off on Mondays, dorm parents on Thursdays. Because on those days the remaining staff have double the work to do, other BFA staff volunteer to come help out. We call it dorm subbing.

I was really excited when I heard about this, as I was really hoping to find a way to get to know more students better and become involved in the dorms. And since Storchenblick (affectionately known as Storch) is about 100 meters from my apartment, it was the obvious choice. Several other people also sub there on various Mondays and Thursdays, including my roommate Natalie.

So every Thursday evening I go over to Storch after school and eat dinner with the girls and their two wonderful RAs, Anne and Laura. And then I bake! Tonight my friend Kristi was subbing too, and together we made a quadruple recipe of chocolate chip oatmeal cookies and a double recipe of banana bread–with chocolate chips, of course. Interestingly, though good chocolate is bountiful here, there are no chocolate chips. So before we started baking tonight we chopped up 8 chocolate bars into little chunks…yum. The cookies are for the girls to take in their lunches, and given the quantity that are needed it’s a lot of work for RAs to keep them supplied. So it’s a win-win situation: I get to bake, which I love, with ingredients I didn’t buy, and it helps the RAs out! And obviously, I have to test whatever I make to be sure it isn’t poisonous…

It’s also been great to be around the dorms for an extended period of time, talking and laughing with the girls, learning all their names and whether they like chewy or crispy cookies better. I’ve also loved getting to know Anne and Laura better; they are delightful. And though I don’t see them much on Thursdays, the dorm parents at Storch, Steve and Stacy, are wonderful people too. They have adopted my roommates and I as their 20th, 21st, and 23rd daughters and taken very good care of us. I feel truly blessed to have the chance to be a part of the lives of all these wonderful people!

Since Anne and Rachel, one of their girls, were running the 7k race along with Natalie, Steve and Stacy took the whole crew of Storch girls into Basel on Sunday to see the runners. Here's the group on a bridge over the Rhine.

Cupcakes and transportable tea: small group

The advice I heard from veteran BFA staff after I arrived was, “Though you will be asked to volunteer in endless ways, don’t over-commit: limit yourself to 2 extra-curricular things to be involved with.” The areas I chose are leading a small group and subbing at Storch, the dorm I live near (more on that tomorrow).

Small groups meet from 7:30-9:00 on Wednesday nights. I have a group of 6 delightful sophomore girls. At BFA the kids can request to be in a small group with certain people, so many of them are built around pre-existing friendships. However, I felt drawn to my group because most of the girls are new here, so they don’t know each other or the school yet. I’m really excited to be a part of creating community for them, and I’m praying that God would show me how to make our time together a joyful and encouraging part of these girls’ weeks.

Our first meeting was last week in a classroom on campus, though from now on we’ll meet at my apartment. I wanted our first evening together to be a fun, cozy, low-key time of getting to know each other and thinking about the year ahead. Since my recipe for a successful event always includes tea and chocolate, that afternoon I baked cupcakes and carefully packed 7 mugs and a hotpot into my backpack, and brought it all to school.

We learned each others’ names, had a good laugh playing the “guess the name on your forehead” game, and the girls filled out questionnaires I’d written for them recording their current favorites and their hopes, dreams, and predictions for the year. Tonight we’ll take pictures of ourselves and decorate a container to seal everything in as a time capsule which we’ll open at our last meeting in the spring. (I stole the idea from another small group leader.) Then we sat around with chocolate cupcakes and tea and talked about what we wanted to study that year. I certainly had a lovely time, and I think the girls did too.

My girls seem really sweet; they were excited to get to know me and each other, ready for fun but also ready to be serious as we went over ideas for books to study together. I am so thankful for this opportunity to be intentionally involved in their lives, and can’t wait to get to know them better. Be praying with me that God would bless our second meeting tonight!

No, this is not my small group. I'll post pictures of them tomorrow. This is Holzen, where I live. If you go a little further up the hill I took this picture from, you can see the Swiss Alps.