The World As It Is in Trichotomy

My tech-lead has been on vacation for a few weeks now and we are just taking over for him, and we have had fire-fighting excercises. It doesn’t help that the other senior member on my team doesn’t even want to try. He is good at pointing out the obvious, and sometimes not-so-obvious, and then leaving it for other people to investigate. That gets old after a while.

On the bright side, things seem to be settling down now. A new guy joined out team 3 weeks ago, and I am his mentor. He has a PhD too, and has worked as a post doc at Columbia, so I’m not sure what he’s doing here. So far he’s still ramping up, but I’m going to have to give him his first assignment by the time I leave for Myrtle Beach next month. I am looking forward to that very much.

Speaking of vacations, La Professeure and I are looking into our vacation plans for next year. I’m not sure what she’ll be up for, given that she’s starting her Assistant Dean position in the Fall and I don’t know how much of her time she can devote to the vacation. So it’s still up in the air.

In other exciting news, the Human Orchestra Experiment is officially ‘on hold’. Though I think it means he’s dumping that idea. I have said before that every time I listen to the rehearsal recording I cannot stop laughing because we sound so bad. I wasn’t the only one. After the third and fourth rehearsals - where half of the orchestra was no-show - the organizer decided that that was enough, and pulled the plug.

I’m still going to play at the Carnegie Hall concert, but I’ll do Erlkonig by myself instead. That’s fine by me - it means no more trekking into the city to rehearse on weekends. I don’t even mind having spent the time to learn the piano part of the Rachmaninov concerto - it’s conceivable that some day down the line I would pick it up again - but I do feel bad for the singers who actually took the time to learn their parts. Now they don’t get to perform at all, not because of their faults, but because the other singers on the choir didn’t pull their weights.

The organizer seems to be out of it these days. When I arrived at the last regular monthly concert (it was held on the same day as the last Human Orchestra rehearsal), me and other amateur group members found that the venue was closed, and he hadn’t found out about it. I’m not sure whether it’s the venue’s problem (them not notifying him) or his (him not realizing that he’d been notified), but it was not a nice experience - we have performers coming in all the way from Connecticut for nothing - and now they immediately turned back.

A few weeks ago I went to a piano showroom to play in the Treasurer’s voice teacher’s student recital. It was easily the most boring concert I’d ever gone to. In the first half there were kids performing twinkle twinkle little star, a Dozen a Day, etc. And in the second half there were teenagers singing N’Sync and Rihanna. I was bored out of my mind. The only upside was that it was held in big a piano showroom, so I got to play on many many different pianos before the concert started. But that was not enough to make up for the boring 1 1/2 hours.

The Treasurer was the only classical singer - and she sang Barbie Girl. But it’s bracketed by Gounod’s Ave Maria, and within Barbie Girl she did fragments of O Mio Babbino Caro, All That Jazz, Dancing Queen, yodeling, and Billy Joel. I pretty much made up the accompaniment part. I saw the video, and her singing was not all that great - but still she was one of the better performers. It was well received though.

We (me, her, and her actor friend who narrated Ken’s parts) are going to do this again in a nursing home with a art song group’s outreach concert, so at least I get to use this piece again. And I think it’ll be a much more enjoyable experience.

I don’t have much else to write. Suburban existence does not lend itself to colourful diary entries.

Last updated July 31, 2015