More than Bargained for in Trichotomy

‘Tis the season for performing

I’m upstate now at the in-laws with La Professeure for Thanksgiving. It’s been a busy month because of the Carnegie Hall concert, and also because of the Christmas concerts I’ve agreed to play in.

The concert was last Saturday and it went fine. Little boo-boo was in a school play, Much Ado About Nothing, in the afternoon, so we went to Fiorello’s for lunch, and then walked to Collegiate for the performance, and then I walked to Carnegie Hall for sound check, while La Professeure went off to meet with her friend who is coming to the concert.

It’s nice to see people making their Carnegie Hall debut; some of them didn’t sleep the night before, which reminded me of myself in my Carnegie Hall debut. I played in the first half in the Concert Mistress’s piano quartet and a solo at the end of the program, with Godowsky’s The Stars-Spangled Banner and Horowitz’s The Star and Stripes Forever arrangements. The quartet had been rehearsing once a week for a couple of months before the concert, but the violist was very insecure, and insisted on running it through before my sound check. So while they were setting up and discussing, I was loosening up in the practice room at the same time. It couldn’t have been comfortable. I was not at all nervous about the quartet - but I was about my solos! It all went fine in the end though. We had a coach who told me that I had to play out more so the string players could hear me, but when I listened to the concert recording, I felt I was too loud. But the ENT pianist, who was helping us with sound check, said the balance was fine. So I choose to believe him, and that the recording was faulty.

After sound check, I went with the ENT doctor to a deli nearby and got a ham and cheese sandwich and banana pudding for dinner. It was not too heavy but still got me enough energy for the evening.

Since I played in both halves and had to be back stage the whole time, I didn’t get a ticket for myself, but I had 10 people coming: La Professeure’s friend and her new husband, La Professeure’s drama teacher co-worker and her husband, Wise Young Friend and her husband, my prodigy from work, and La Professeure. Schnookie and Little Boo-boo were going to come but ended up not. We all went out to Carnegie Diner afterwards, but missed our train coming back, so we waited for an extra hour and ended up at home at 2am.

Because of Carnegie, I’d been neglecting practicing other pieces. I’m accompanying a bunch of people at the Treasurer’s community concert in the cemetery in Queens, which is next weekend, and then after that I’m playing for the French Coloratura at a regular amateur group concert. So I have a lot of music to catch up on during the break.

I think I have had my fill of playing solo at Carnegie Hall now. As nervous I was, seeing other debutantes’s excitement made me realize how accustomed I am to performing there. And I’ve lost the appetite for learning/playing virtuosic stuff lately.

We’ll see how long that lasts.

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Territorial expansion

We got additional fencing for the rabbit, so now we are able to fence off half of the living room for the rabbit to stay in. However, that is not enough for him. In the mornings especially, he would demand to be left out of this pen, and hop around the living room, as well as upstairs to the landing. So on days when I work from home, I would come downstairs (that is after La Professeure has left for work), I would open the cage to let him out, and he would go upstairs to do his rounds. After an hour or so, he would come back down to his pen and fall asleep. Then I’d close him in.

But lately, he has been coming downstairs to get my attention during free roam time. And when I went to meet him, he would lead me upstairs. I realized that he has recently been let into the upstairs bathroom, as well as the guest bedroom’s closet. So, he was trying to get me to let him into his new territories. La Professeure keeps her shoes in the closet, so I would only allow him go into the bathroom unsupervised - there’s nothing in it that he could get to that can harm him. And that seems to have satisfied him - for now.

The upside to this territorial expansion is that he is much less interested in destroying the sofa now. That used to be his main activity, but now he’s lost interest in it.

We’ll see how long that lasts.

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Fire, fire everywhere.

My ex-coworker who was working for Twitter said that the way he knew he was laid off was that one day he lost access to its corporate network. And now with Facebook and Amazon firing people, people are getting nervous. We had an actual fire last week: basically one of the data centers in our office building had a battery fire, and we were told to shelter in place while the fire department came into suppress it. We were then later told not to use the floor where the data center was.

I’m not too worried about my group having to cut back. We just released a private preview of a feature that would bring in 10s of millions of revenue in the first year (though, as I was making calculations in my head, it may have costed just as much just to develop), so I’m hoping it means we are safe for now. It’s a good thing my move to a different department got blocked.

We’ll see how long that lasts.

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Last updated November 25, 2022