Year of the Snake
I usually don’t take note of Chinese New Years, but Wednesday will begin year of the snake, and I am a Snake. That means my age is going to be a multiple of 12. This is the first time when I realistically have less time ahead of me than behind, so I take notice. I got married and moved twice in the last 12 years, so that was a lot of change. But I think there won’t be dramatic life changes ahead in the next 12 - it’ll be more than 12 years before we can retire, and so far, neither of us want to retire.
I did discover the Asian Chinese supermarket within walking distance to our new house is a Chinese one, so that was nice. I went there for lunch, and after one word of broken Mandarin out of my mouth, everyone spoke English to me. Then I realized the signs were in traditional font, and I probably could have just spoken Cantonese.
Next time perhaps.
- N
Audition season
We had a concert with my amateur group last Saturday. I had feared it would not be well-attended - it was held in the middle of a polar vortex, and in the middle of MLK day weekend - but the attendance was better than I’d thought, similar to a regular concert last year. In addition to hosting, I also accompanied the Japanese Mezzo, on a Barbar aria, Ralph Vaugh-Williams song, and a Japanese song. It went well.
The Carnegie Hall auditions will be in 2 weeks. The soprano who sang Lucia last time asked me to accompany her in Juliette’s arias. We had a rehearsal Wednesday and she was so happy, like she had never sung with an accompanist before… maybe her last accompanist wasn’t very good? Anyway it was nice to be appreciated. The concertmistress also asked me to perform a piece she wrote for cello and piano with the principal cellist in the orchestra, so I’m going to rehearse it tomorrow. When she asked, I had already said yes to Lucia, so if both my groups are picked, I won’t be performing her new piece at Carnegie Hall. She doesn’t seem to mind though. I guess the important part is to get picked.
There are already 40 entries for the audition, and there’s still one more week where people can sign up. I have a feeling we may end up needing two Carnegie Hall concerts - or offload some performers to fill out the orchestral concert again.
I do not envy the ENT pianist at this time of year.
- S
Fruition
The project I’m doing at work involves moving customers’ data between geographical locations without them knowing. We’d been working on it for 1.5 years (and actually re-used a lot of the ideas from the original data migration project from 6 years ago when I first joined the team).
We finally started moving data last week, and we have almost completed the first of three waves of moves. I was a little surprised by how little has gone wrong so far. Granted the first wave is the least risky, and some issues did pop up, but I’d have thought we would see more issues. So I’m pleasantly surprised.
Wave 2 won’t start until some more engineering is done that will address that wave’s needs, but I’m not working on that. I am however working to enable Wave 3 - and I’m the only one, since everyone else is focused on Wave 2. There are only a few hundred databases to move for wave 3, so I’m not too worried about it going sideways.
It is quite satisfying as an engineer to see my work actually being used.
- D
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