Breaking water
We are supposed to be driving up to Binghampton today, but our water heater is making strange sounds for the last few days, and today La Professor discovered a small puddle of water by it, so we are getting a specialist out here to take a look tomorrow.
I think the sound is coming from the condensate pump (it also sounds like a pump trying to run); the fact that there is water probably means something is clogged up. We can’t find a clog on the outlet line, but I don’t know how to take it apart to inspect. So having someone come by will be good.
But suddenly we had an extra day down here; we spent it watching Wicked (which was better than I’d expected) and doing last-minute shopping.
Hopefully the technician arrives on time tomorrow so we’ll have plenty of time to drive up.
- D
Party animals
We hosted our traditional holiday party last week instead of NYE. We were expecting up to 40 people in the house, but at the last minute, 10 people dropped out due to various ailments and emergencies. So we ended up with 26, which is still a lot, but we’d handled that amount before in our old, smaller place.
Having a larger place is an improvement - people can actually spread out and mingle. There were even some rooms that were completely empty.
The rabbit was an attraction. Now that he is confined to the basement, he is becoming like a zoo animal. There was a stream of people who would go downstairs to watch him.
The music was nice. My music friends overlap between jazz, broadway, and classical, but there is a group of friends from a band that is used to doing pop songs from the 60s and 70s (they also sometimes do a standard, that’s how I know them in the first place), and they are used to getting the stage before deciding what to play. This is polar opposite to my classically trained friends, who need some coaxing to perform anything. So once they start, they don’t tend to stop. Maria de Buenos Aires is childhood friends of one of the singers, and at one point stopped them to coax other people, like the ENT pianist, or my flautist friend from upstate to perform. I could tell though, that when people play classical stuff, the band is bored, and when the band played pop tunes, the classically-trained people were bored. I think next time I’ll have an official ‘set list’ to give everyone equal time - and to know when to focus on their food.
Because the attendance was less that we expected, the hosting was also much less hectic than we expected. So there is talk of another one in summer. Except that there will be a lot fewer people coming down with a cold at the last minute.
- N
Unmet expectations
Two weeks ago we had a recital for our amateur musician group. Marius had an idea to send out a reminder mass e-mail 2 days before the events (like evite does), in hopes of boosting performance. And it did. We had a full house.
I played the Yellow River Concerto arrangement. It went better than Poukeepsie but still could have been better. I’m not sure it has the same resonance as, say, Stars and Stripes Forever though.
I’ve been organising this for a year and a half now and not close to burning out yet. I think the automations has been helping. And there has been a new wave of new members, so that is nice to see. And even better, most (though not all) of them have been connecting with other members, so that makes me happy. Our treasurer couldn’t make it to the concert so La Professeure filled in at the box office. She said that there are a lot of new performers who think that because they are performing, they don’t need to make a donation. Maybe since we took the “amateur” word off of our title, some musicians may think they are doing us a favour by performing without pay? Though, as soon as they see how casual we are, they “get” that we’re as much a social club as a performance organisation. I would have been nice to make it apparent before they join though.
For this week off of work I had some grand plans for the automated sign up tool - I want to be able to automate garbage collection. Right now I am just manually going into the database to delete the relevant records, which is quite risky. I hope there’ll be enough time for me to get it working.
- S
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