Time for me to take a moment to sum up my year before I forget everything!
Lots of milestones for my youngest. She graduated high school in the spring, and started college a this fall.
The graduation was notable, because it's the only one we've gotten to experience in our house. Aden's senior year was interrupted by the pandemic, and she was simply handed a cap and gown through a car window. We took pictures of her wearing them in the yard and that was that. Mona graduated from her school as the pandemic was ending, but she graduated early, and the mid-year ceremony offered for students from all over the district did not appeal to her. For Mona we didn't even have a cap and gown.
So Quinn with her cap and gown and tassels and mantle (that she forgot to wear to the arena), graduating from a school she liked with friends she'd be saying goodbye to was not as routine as you might expect the ceremony to feel for the youngest of three. It was a first. Her grandmother came, we cheered as she crossed the stage, we made a special dinner that we ate on our deck, we celebrated with cake when we got home.
It's the kind of event that seems like too much from the kids' point of view. I remember feeling that way. My high school graduation felt like forced sentiment, both dull and hokey. But it's one of the things you learn with time that aren't for the kid. Like a first birthday party that a child will never remember, it's really celebrating the accomplishment of the parents of surviving that first year. I didn't realize how much I needed that moment of closure, seeing one of my kids graduate and reach the end of that chapter of their life.
Other milestones for my youngest included voting in her first election in the spring, and her last piano lesson (thanks for your patience all these years, Stefanie).
In the spring, we took a trip up to UW Stout for Aden's SGX (Stout Gaming Expo). The game she pitched and then developed with a team won a prize for best game play. Her game is called Tubular, and she's hoping to offer it on Steam at some point in the future. It was exciting to see her in her school element, as well as enjoy other senior show events at the school. She's a really good game designer and I'm proud of how much she's managed to do at college.
Stout has been a good experience overall. Aden's scheduled to graduate in spring of the coming year.
This year we got to the cottage during more seasons than usual. Unfortunately when we opened it up at the beginning of July, we discovered someone had been staying there. We still don't know how they got in, but my best guess is the cleaning person we hired to do some work maybe didn't scramble the code on the key box after her last trip, and someone was able to retrieve the key and gain access to the house. (She insists everything was locked, so if that's true I don't have another explanation since nothing anywhere was forced or broken. We've since replaced the locks and abandoned the key box.)
The intrusion was mostly weird. They covered the windows in the bedroom with blankets and slept in the bed. I don't think they figured out how to get the electricity on because there were candles out, but they didn't look used.
They sifted through many personal items, which was creepy. They went through our family time capsule and its letters. They went through our photos and pinned a sketch to the photo cork board in the hall. They knocked over some books, took a VHS tape out of its box (possibly confused by what it was). They went through all the drawers in the bedroom.
Nothing was taken as far as we can tell. Nothing was destroyed, just rifled through.
It's unpleasant to feel violated in that way, but as far as such intrusions go, it was mild. It's possible it was some young person's adventure, or a refuge for a night or two. On the upside, they unearthed this list my dad made of possible names for the cottage that was fun to read again.
Once we got past the strangeness of the break-in issues, the cottage was lovely as usual. We got to go with the whole family over summer. Ian and I returned for a few days just the two of us (and the dog) in the fall after dropping Quinn off at college.
In the fall I also got to enjoy a writing retreat with a friend that was excellent. The cottage is a perfect place to work with few distractions. I was up there with just a friend, a dog, a fire, and snacks. Don't really need much more than that to get some writing done.
Our whole family met my mom at the cottage for Thanksgiving. It's the first time we've tried that, and it was really great, so we may do it again. The orange jello held its shape almost too well this year.
Various cottage adventures this year included the discovery of a limited edition Bumpy Cake revival that I got to share with my kids. (My dad did love a Bumpy Cake, and I remember stopping at the Sanders in Royal Oak to buy one upon occasion.) We tackled a very hard puzzle of marbles from the 70s that was missing four pieces.
I also fixed three large holes in the wall of our bedroom after plumbers in the summer had to cut through to the pipes. I feel good about how my patch job came out.
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| highest of three holes |
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| patches |
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| Done! |
We attended protests this year. I don't know if they help, but they make me hopeful. It's nice not to feel alone when every day the news becomes more horrifying and disheartening and taking this country further from everything I want it to be.
We got more active in our Mold-A-Rama collecting again (which I've already posted about). Ian and I are also diving back into our own machine to try and get it running reliably. We found a local hydraulics guy who is intrigued enough to want to tackle parts of it for us. The dream is still to have it make little violins, and Aden has been doing mock-ups with the 3-D printer that are a good step toward that goal.
I don't know if I posted about getting a figure from Third Man Records in Detroit yet. We have Jack White's guitar figure from the Third Man in Nashville, but it's crazy that we only recently managed to get to the location in downtown Detroit to pick the truck they have there. Quinn and I met up with a friend of mine when we were in town for Mom's surgery and had fun checking out that whole area around Third Man.
I've made a few trips to Detroit this year, which is always nice. The one at the end of June wasn't for the most fun reason, but my mom needed heart surgery, and Quinn and I came out together to try and be of help. My mom's couple of nights in the hospital downtown went well (valve repair, followed by a pacemaker that became necessary afterward), and it was overall a really nice visit. The hospital did include these signs that amused me:
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It's the first time she's gotten to use her passport. I wish we could have made opportunities to travel outside of the country with our kids, but it's hard with five people. I think we did a good job of showing them several parts of the U.S., but seeing how happy being in Canada made Quinn, I wish we'd attempted more of an international travel effort earlier.
On a followup trip to Detroit I got to spend a day with my friend, Alit, and we toured the newly renovated former train station, which is gorgeous. Detroit in general is looking amazing. Anyone who hasn't visited in the past few years has a sorely outdated image of what's there. It's really turning around. To the point that if I weren't so firmly rooted in Milwaukee now, I would consider moving back.
I got to play several interesting concerts this year. Events with the Milwaukee Mandolin Orchestra included joint concerts with a visiting German group in the spring, the Italian festival in the summer, and ending the year with 125th anniversary celebrations of the orchestra.
With Festival City Symphony this fall we did a performance incorporating the Violins of Hope tour. There was only one viola in that collection of Holocaust related instruments, so it got passed around the section for different pieces on the program.
My last performance of the year was the annual December concert in memory of missing and departed children with the Black Diaspora Symphony Orchestra where I was introduced to the lovely Montgomery Variations by Margaret Bonds.
This was my favorite annoying notation in any music this year:
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| Maybe Copeland didn't like violists? |
In terms of house stuff we've had done, the year began with finally replacing our front door and the windows in the front room. The whole front door structure with windows was coming loose and shifting when you came and went. The windows were nailed and painted shut and filthy inside.
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| blinds helped hide cracked panes |
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| This storm door has been trying to kill us for years |
I love the new easy to close door! I love windows I can open and see through! The new storm door even has a built in screen you can roll down. I think our contractor did a great job of preserving the original look of our 1923 Craftsman style home while providing better insulation and function.
The front entry room has always been our music space, but now it's one of my favorite places to be in the house. Domino hangs out on the loveseat with me as I practice, I can see the birds at the feeder on the front porch, and I can open the windows for a breeze on nice days. I love it so much.
We also had some more landscaping work done. I've decided enough with the grass on slopes. We'll still need to mow the berm by the street, but yard grass for us is useless, so our guy tore it all out and has been adding all kinds of plants that will make pretty ground cover, and flowers that can manage themselves. I'm looking forward to sharing future pictures of what comes! This summer was already a better view from our windows with succulents, asters, and lilacs.
We got to see my cousin Chris Tishler perform at Chill on the Hill this summer, which was very cool. I love living so close to Humboldt Park.
Quinn and I got on quite a puzzle kick for a while. It was part of the very different vibe of only having one child home. We also played a lot of Boggle. We still play Boggle, but now I text a picture of the letter board, and she calls me when she's ready to compare lists. I love it, because I don't feel like I'm intruding on her college time, but she has an excuse to call home at any point, even if she doesn't have news to share that would warrant a call.
We did Peeps again this year, but I've already posted about that. (Still proud of Mona for winning.)
Work has gone well. I finished the violin for Quinn finally, so building an instrument for each of my children is off my bucket list. There was an enormous amount to do for schools this summer, and luckily my assistant returned to help with the workload. I started two new violins which I'm excited about.
I was also featured in a piece in Milwaukee Magazine which was fun! (I was glad they chose the photo from the shoot that included Domino in my lap.)
The biggest change at work was moving my building shop there. The small apartment behind the violin store has served as a teaching studio for about a decade, but there has been less teaching activity in recent years, and we needed to move my home shop out of the first floor of our house in preparation for a large renovation project coming up in the new year. Originally I had planned to move it to the second floor, but those plans had to shift for various reasons, and we decided to use the teaching space at the store instead.
Disassembling the old home shop was a big project.
The new space is working out very well. Being able to build instruments at home was important to me when my kids were all there, but as empty nest people now, I don't need that. I love my new space! I have room to spread things out in a way that I don't lose track of what I have. There is a whole varnish room with supplies organized in a way I can see them. Each drawer of my desk is dedicated to a single category of tools, like planes, files, small clamps.... It's amazing. I even have room for a sharpening station. I find it a hard space to leave at night because I just want to keep working.
The storage space for the rental instruments moved to a different room that we were able to assemble appropriate shelves for. We got shelves for the spare cases and shop cases as well, which has been overdue. It was a problem of growth, because a small pile in the corner of two or three extra cases isn't a big deal, but then more and more appeared, and next thing we knew we had a large ungainly pile that was simply stupid. Now there are organized shelves and it's great.
The chair was something we dug out of our basement. A very kind man bequeathed it to us from his basement before we had kids. It was a mess of exploded vinyl on the seat back but he insisted it was a really good chair and he wanted us to have it for some reason. It moved with us from one house to another, gathering dust in our own basements. Then when our last kid left for college in the fall, Ian and I were inspired to start clearing out our house of unnecessary things, starting with whatever was in the basement, and we rediscovered the chair. I decided to finally splurge on getting it reupholstered, and the local shop that worked on it did a bang up job. I picked a fun piece of fabric they had on hand when I dropped the chair off, and I think it's beautiful. The chair is comfortable, and I've declared it my shop chair. It makes me happy every time I go in there to work.
Another thing that's been funny about cleaning out our house is that as part of giving stuff away on our local "buy nothing" site, I now have a million pictures of things we didn't want and no longer own. I need to go through and delete them from my photo library at some point, but until I have time it's like an anti-nostalgia collection. Although some of the pictures of stuff we gave away use the dog for scale, so those are cute.
We made a few trips to museums this year. I spent a day at the Milwaukee museum with a friend, and again recently with two of my kids. It's a beautiful place and I need to find more time to go.
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| Me and Autumn in the spheres! |
I went to the Art Institute in Chicago two times for the Gustave Caillebotte show, once with the kids and again with Ian and my mom. It was a beautiful show that I certainly did not mind seeing twice. The floor scrapers is one of my favorite things, and I've now seen it in New York, Paris, and Chicago.
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| Detail with floor scrapings |
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| sketch for Paris Street: Rainy Day |
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| Example of a piece that shouldn't work but does |
I also got to visit a painting I love by the Swiss artist Vallotton that I always admire when I'm in the museum in Chicago. The Red Room, Etretat--1899 is the piece I would take home if they offered to let me keep something.
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| I find this completely charming and surprising. |
And we are all now fans of this painting called "The Artist Looks at Nature" by Charles Sheeler that is really funny. It's in the same room as the Night Hawks, so I don't know if anyone notices it, but it's great.
The second trip I also got to see the Elizabeth Catlett show which I thought was really powerful.
My brother, Barrett, traveled far and wide to do lectures and promote his book, The Insect Epiphany, and I got to see him do book signings in Milwaukee and in Michigan, as well as a local TV segment, and a bug walk at the nature center. (I was surprised that the cameras moved by remote control.) If you haven't seen his book, go find it!
We made a final visit to the Milwaukee County Zoo's Small Mammal building which is shutting down. That was our favorite, so we're sad about it. I feel like also taking this moment to mention the New Fish. There is an amazing aquarium in the fish and reptile building that contains some huge, bulbous fish, and because those fish get all the attention, I forget about some of the other fish in that space. For many years I used to see these sliver Flagtail Fish and ask if they were "new fish" and my kids would assure me they had always been there. Now we just call them New Fish. In general in our house, if someone remarks about something that they simply forgot was always that way, we refer to it as a New Fish.
One of the truly random things from this year is Quinn's and my investigation into these cherries which were the same price, weight, and had the same label information except for "Extra." We counted, and there were indeed about a third more cherries in the Extra.
We also came across this which we had questions about but didn't buy.
Aden made us a pretty cube mosaic design for summer.
I broke my favorite mug and tried to glue it back together, but had to pitch it anyway. It was a souvenir from our college days when Ian and I went to the Drexel North movie theater for a 24 hour Sci-Fi movie marathon. I really liked that mug.
My most overdue and oddball project this year was finally figuring out a decorative element for the hole in the top of the banister at the base of the stairs. It's a globe with solar powered fairy lights inside that when they are charged enough turn on in the evening. It's something I've thought about every time I've used the stairs since we moved in almost seventeen years ago, and now it's done! I like it.
This is the photo I took this year that most looks like it should be a painting.
This was also the year I finally took my mom to the restaurant inside of the Cudahy Towers. She has been intrigued and delighted by this building next to the museum and the lakefront since she was a child, and has always wanted to have a meal there. Aden and Quinn joined us for a fancy dinner and we loved it. It's funny to me how when we moved to Milwaukee in 1996, there was no museum addition yet, and the Cudahy Towers still had a prominent place in the skyline. There have been so many taller additions in that area of downtown that it's dwarfed there now. It's still the most charming building there, though.
We've also decided to be more outgoing about doing more of what's available in our city. Mona and Quinn joined us to see Penn and Teller, which was great fun.
There's more. But that's enough for me to look back in ten years and get a sense of what 2025 was like. It was magic and heartbreak and growth and goodbyes and rediscovery. I think the hardest part of this year has been the juxtaposition of the wider world feeling cruel and hopeless, while events and people within my immediate reach were doing fine. It's disconcerting. We're deeply fortunate to continue to do what we enjoy and to watch our kids explore more independent lives. I get to make music and help others do the same. At the same time the ever rising crescendo of chaos and depravity in the news disgusts and frightens me, and I have to stop and pull my gaze closer to home in order to not give up hope.
My wish is for 2026 to look for more people like 2025 looked for us. (Or whatever version of that means contentment and love and security to others.)
