The past few weeks have been a well-deserved rest from just about everything. I've been visiting family in Canada, and I've made the most of the opportunity to really have a good rest. It's been wonderful in many ways. I did some playing in church on Christmas Eve but haven't really picked up my horn since, which is maybe not so good.

The few weeks before that were extremely busy and stressful, with moving house and lots of rehearsals happening at the same time. I do still need to deal with some of the aftermath of that when I return home. Among other things, I got a new horn stick support, which is working better for me than the old one was.

I've made good progress on my Arrangement assignment, I think I'm about a third of the way done now. Two or three more good, solid afternoons of work before classes start should see it in pretty good shape.

Once I'm back in London I'm going to challenge myself to update this blog every day until the first of March. The idea is that as it's a music blog I'm not going to want to update it if I haven't practised or made some progress on musical projects, so by forcing myself to update every day I'll also encourage myself to stay focused on the things I need to do to improve my musicianship and succeed in my studies.

I think the most difficult day to deal with will be Sundays; I usually teach piano all day on Sunday and don't practise horn at all. I think I probably need to do more mouthpiece work on Sundays and make sure I take some written work with me to look over on the train. Another option would be to spend some time on Sundays getting my website up and running.