I’ve worked on some projects this summer (furniture, writing, parenthood), and I’ve been trying to stay away from social media, with varying results. So here’s a brain dump of things from this summer.
I finally refinished the last of the six mission-style chairs I bought from the University of Oklahoma in the mid-2010s. And then I refinished another that apparently hadn’t been glued properly. And then I reupholstered them all with new foam because dorm chairs from the 90s don’t have the best support.
I finished an orchestra piece I intended to finish in March. I’m very pleased with the result, but I can think of a half-dozen better ways I could have written it more efficiently. (The opening tempo isn’t “TEMPO,” I’m just scrolling through my camera roll and this is the pic I have).
The Uncertainty of Joy premieres this fall by the NDSU University Symphony Orchestra
I migrated the entire NDSU Performing Arts website to WordPress, for the second time in three years. When I abandoned the project a few years ago, I apparently saved nothing. We’re going to migrate it again later this year to Drupal (for reasons), but having the website in a content management system is a significant improvement. It also allowed me to learn Fedora Linux (we were initially going to host it at NDSU, and they only support Red Hat, which Fedora is related to. Letting programmers name things was a mistake. Hats.). Here’s how we update websites now, versus how we used to:
I taught at one of my favorite places, the International Music Camp, for half a week in July. I wasn’t comfortable being away the whole week, and OU colleague extraordinaire Steven Eiler taught the other half of Audio Technology. Here’s me and some of the class, up to no good.
I completely rewrote the instrument/equipment/locker checkout system in Liszt, which was one of the most complicated programming things I’ve done. Formerly, there were individual checkouts for lockers and instruments, and some people checked out lockers, and some people checked out instruments, and you put instruments in lockers, so it got complicated. Now checking out a locker checks out the instrument inside it, and vice versa. It also means you can check out every single NDSU piccolo instantly.
We (me, Cassie, Erin, Bartleby, and Lorraine) took a trip to Montana. Lorraine loves car rides!
On the way back we saw some NDSU fans.
Here’s one up close
Bonanzaville repaired the foundation to the Hunter Times building, so I spent a little time getting type cases put back in order. Working with the equipment at Bonanzaville helps to prevent me from buying a printing press and putting it in my basement.
Speaking of printing, I wrote and published a book for my Music Skills for Academic Success class. It’s definitely a work in progress. (This whole ordeal deserves a writeup of its own).
One of the other projects from this summer was organizing and preparing a high school composition competition called Score Wars. We did some publicity for that, including a radio interview on Prairie Public (to be aired at a later date) and an eeeeaaaarrrlllyyy morning spot on one of Fargo’s local TV stations.
Of course, school started at the end of August, and I started teaching the freshmen important things about Music. And, as it turns out, typefaces.
Cassie and I also spent the entire summer navigating becoming parents, which is a whole other story arc entirely.
But now, school has started, and we’re off to new and exciting projects–some of which I’ll write about later.
