And the winner is... in Trichotomy

Slow Progress

It will have been 2 years of lockdown by next week. The two years passed by like a blink, since every day is so monotonous and there is nothing to really mark the passage of time.

We’ve been saying we should take time away, but even though case numbers are dropping now, they have not come back to last summer’s level yet, so we have still not made any travel/vacation plans. We did spend last weekend (President’s day weekend) in the city to have a whole day of doing touristy stuff. My amateur musician group had a recital, so we went in to go to the concert, then had dinner with Wise Young Friend and family, then went to a hotel in the financial district. Hotel was cheap! The next day La Professeure had a virtual work event (she only found out after we booked the hotel) and worked from the hotel, so I went into the office to pick up some stuff - two years since I visited the office. Then we went to the immersive Van Gogh exhibit near Winter Garden (highly recommended if you have a chance to see it) and then visited the new World Trade Center tower, and had dinner at the restaurant up top. It was a fun thing to do.

We have our twice-postponed cruise between Berlin and Prague in September, so hopefully we can actually do that this year, but I am hoping to have another vacation before then.

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And the winners are...

The amateur musician group’s Organiser finally shared the board’s rankings for Carnegie Hall auditions. I had ranked myself just below the 50% percentile of all performers, but the rest of the board ranked me 2nd. I suppose you are definitely your own worst critic, and so it makes sense that board members should not rank themselves.

So both my solo and the Concert Mistress composition were ranked 2nd in their respective categories, so I would have been performing in both. But apparently the rule that a pianist can only play in one group is still in place, so the Concert Mistress has to find a new pianist for her ensemble. We should update the audition guidelines to make that rule explicit though - I didn’t find it. Luckily I”m the only one affected this time.

The Organiser is making an executive decision to kick off a Coloratura soprano who had performed at Carnegie Hall before, to make room for someone else. Nothing against the singer, but she had performed multiple times already and she was on the margin of being cut, so it makes sense that he’d make that decision. Both the potential replacements are long-time members who had never performed solo at Carnegie Hall before.

The concert date is not finalized yet - tentatively late November, just before Thanksgiving, so I have something to prepare for now.

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Ship Jump

There is a position opening in New Hip Company’s education department, so I’m applying for it. Not sure if I’ll get it; it’s mainly java coding, which I haven’t done for almost ten years. The work on my current group is going well, but I don’t have a lot of faith in the upper management of my group, and the work is not particularly inspiring - basically we’re playing catch up to other Cloud computing providers - so I can see myself burning out in a year or so. In any case, I’ve been in my current division for 3 3/4 year now, which is a hefty chunk of time.

The new team’s manager has access to my performance review history already, so it’s just a waiting game now. I hope I can get an interview;

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