On a totally personal note (a rarity for my blog, for better or for worse):

I am the soloist for the Glazunov violin concerto with the Montgomery Philharmonic, on Sunday, December 15th. (7 pm, Gaithersburg Presbyterian Church, in suburban Washington DC. Free concert, no tickets required, kids welcome.)

It’s an enormously rare opportunity to be able to play a concerto with orchestra, and I’m immensely pleased to have been asked to do so. It’s also an incredibly large investment of time to do the preparation for a performance, and thus, it would be lovely to have a larger audience. So, if you’re in the DC area, I invite you to come — it’s an all-Russian program (the other works are Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Russian Easter” Overture, and Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker suite).

For me, this is a kind of mark of reclaiming my life outside of work. I used to play semi-professionally when I lived in the Bay Area, and a brief hiatus when I moved cross-country turned into a decade-long break, the last few years of which I have pretty much done nothing but work. During 2013, I’ve tried to find a more reasonable balance between working and other things; if you’re a client of mine, you know that I’ve been much stricter about the way I schedule travel, and pushing more things to my colleagues rather than allowing myself to be as heavily over committed.

My personality doesn’t really ever allow me to just veg out, and so the other things that I do, I tend to do pretty intensively, whether it’s the violin, building Lego sets, or cycling through various games (at the moment, I’m trying to dominate my PvP bracket in Marvel Puzzle Quest). So if you’d like to see me do something in a totally different context, please do come and hear the performance!