My biggest gripe, besides the fact that this piece frustrated the heck out of me, is that my bowing technique sucks.  I'm all over the fingerboard with the bow and the bouncing is atrocious.  There's a reason, which I'm not going to get into detail about at this time, but suffice it to say that I'm not happy with my performance in this piece.

I'm going to take a couple of weeks before beginning Book 2.  I'm just too frustrated at the moment and I'm afraid that will carry over.  Which wouldn't be good for me.

I did manage to find the name and number of a local violin instructor.  I'm going to call and see if we can arrange to chat.  Hopefully that works out and that it leads to me solving some of my issues.

stringy said
Its good that you are not happy with it, if you were you would never improve.

Bowing, as you now know, is very difficult, like everything else on violin, everyone goes through the same things. I remember saying to my missus when I was in a blind temper that if I could just manage to not hit all the other strings I would be happy.

Drawing a straight bow just takes practice, but even then if you are not careful it can go everywhere, as it does with me, remember above all else though that it is supposed to be enjoyment, and as I told other people, just getting any kind of sound is a major success.

Good luck with the teacher, I myself actually had one lesson when I started, it was quite good, but then the virus struck, and it was also too expensive for me anyway.

  

Like everything, there's good and bad.  In this case, in order to get good tone out of the violin I had to move my soundpost by quite a bit.  (Half it's diameter in 2 directions, N and E, when looking from above.  It was way, way, way out of position.)  I'd been unknowingly fighting that since the beginning which, when coupled with all the other issues like the tuner that went sour on me, held me back a lot in the learning department.

Once the soundpost got moved, the violin woke up from the half sleep it was in.  That and the other "obvious after the fact" realizations I posted about when it comes to intonation (like; you have to put your fingerTIPS, on EXACTLY the right spot, with ONLY the lightest possible pressure to stop the string, in order to get it) led to a lot of improvement.  I still have other hurdles I have to get over which I will post about later.  However, I will eventually get that "liquid singing sound" instead of the "hee haw" that I have now.  It'll take time, but I'll get it.  I know it.

AndrewH said
One unusual thing about the Suzuki method is that, especially in the early books, it seems to put a "big challenge" piece at the end of each book that really stretches the ability of students at that level. It's not you, it's that the piece is a big jump in difficulty from everything before it. The beginning of the next book tends to be somewhat easier. I think it's because the method was designed with children and their school schedules in mind. It was originally designed so that most students would go through one book per year, and Suzuki probably assumed that most students would not practice much during summer vacation, so it picks up at a somewhat easier level in the next book.

So if the last piece in a Suzuki book is really frustrating, it might be helpful to put it aside and come back to it when you're about one-third of the way through the next book.

  

For me, it wasn't so much that it's difficult but that it's LOOOOOOONNNNNNG.

Even the changes in bowing weren't that problematic because I've been practicing both legato and stacato all along.  The bowing changes were just a matter of following the notations.  The fact that I just stink at playing is where things went bad.

Funny story:  While taking a break from Suzuki, I went back to play A Time For Us again and realized that I've been playing it wrong because I wasn't paying attention to the notations in the score.  Strangely, the score as written is more complicated, but it's easier to physically play that way than the way I was playing it.  That's kind of weird to me but it did make me realize how much my musical knowledge and ability have expanded since a few months ago.

I'm actually looking forward to Suzuki Book 2 now.