And we begin again
We visited the ENT pianist a month ago. He just moved to a mansion - and it was a proper mansion, with a two-story two-bedroom guest house, a heated pool with jacuzzi and a pool house, 6 bathrooms, vaulted living room, family room, 3 story main building, tennis court, even a zip line.
He bought it early in the summer, moved in, and then his wife left him and their two children. She has been nice to us, but it’s hard not to be judgemental about her. She had left to be with some PR person who works for high-profile clients. It made me wonder whether she was a gold-digger. This is his third divorce now; he does not do very well on his own - it took him all of 3 months after his last divorce to get engaged and 6 before he remarried. La Professeure and I were sympathetic but also cautioned against him rushing into the next relationship.
A side effect is that he hasn’t paid much attention to the amateur music group. I’ve been running the recital series single-handed, but the board voted to impose membership fee requirements (apparently I am the only dissenting vote). It’s supposed to start next January, but we have no plans to enforce it, and I don’t have the bandwidth to, so I’m just going to pretend it doesn’t exist.
He is bringing a date to the next concert, so at least we get to meet her.
- N
Back in the Game
I have been asked to perform at several concerts this winter, but I am losing track of how many engagements I have.
The treasurer asked me to play in an 8-hand piano piece at the cemetery’s for their Christmas concert this year. That was innocuous enough, then she asked if I’d play a short rag using a… rag. That was fine. Then she asked La Professeure and I to dance to Skater’s Waltz, so we are choreographing it now. So when she asked for volunteers to accompany some singers, I said no. Especially since there are three other pianists.
In the amateur musician group’s December concert, the Ukrainian soprano asked me to accompany her singing Solvieg’s song, which was easy enough. Then the French coloratura asked me and our flautist friend based in Poughkeepsie if we wanted to perform something there (her gig in Israel got cancelled because of the war with Iran), so we are going to do twinkle twinkle little star from Le toréador. My part is easy enough, but both of theirs will be challenging, so I’m only half sure we will do it. And I still am on the books to play both Juliette’s arias for her next April at Carnegie Hall.
The Japanese pianist had planned to throw a house concert at the end of October and we would play Richard Rodney Bennet’s Four Piece Suite there. Of all my engagements this is the one I most look forward to - I haven’t played or really heard it since college - but she got busy and had to postpone it. I was a bit relieved. We’re setting the new date for next January, but it’ll be here before we know it.
I knew I would do more chamber music stuff when we moved, but I didn’t realize I would have no time for solo repertoire within a year.
- S
Project pinball
A new quarter started and I got moved to a new project again. We were done with high-priority urgent data migration project back in the summer (I’m still planning to write a paper about that), then I got moved to design and build a data recovery tool, but then got pre-empted to take care of feature requests from the Shopping team, but then that got preempted again to write new tests to convince upper management that we are safe from multi-regional outage because some other teams caused an outage. I then went back to Shopping team’s request, which is now done hopefully - Shopping team seems satisfied, but I don’t know if that’ll last. I thought I would go back to the recovery tool, but there’s a new project for data integrity that is suddenly high priority.
It tells me management style is very reactive - they do make long term plans, but 80% or so of work is done in response to some crisis. We still make good progress on improving the health of our database though - my team lead has acquired a skill of advancing long-term work by hiding them inside responses to urgent crises.
Kind of sad that he has to learn that skill.
- D
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