Continuing to be personally and, um, emotionally? productive. Work’s going well, I’m in the process of wrapping up a first-quarter project. We’re big on quarters at PLI. I didn’t finish the training I’d slated to do for first quarter, but I don’t think my boss cares and I could possibly wrap that up this weekend.

I took my bike to the Bike Stop in Astoria for a tune-up. (insert obligatory snicker here for anyone familiar with the Bike Stop in Philadelphia, which is a completely different sort of establishment) I’ll pick it up this weekend. Of course, I managed to pull a muscle in my back on that short bike ride, but whatever. Bike actually rode quite nicely, although I didn’t have it tuned up last year.

Taxes are done and sent in. I got some work done on blog stuff (made a backup copy of the 17 years of blog posts over on LJ – now Russian-owned – here on WordPress) and want to continue to do so. I’m going to start applying the 3-2-1 process to home projects that I did to the Bach inventions, this has worked really well. You pick 3 things to work on (A, B, C), but you cycle time on them as A,A,B,A,B,C. A gets three times as much time as C. All things being equal, A would get done first, but not always. Whatever gets done first (and for the inventions, it means it’s solid enough for me to make a video of) drops off the list and everything else moves up and the cycle starts over again. So rather than spending an hour on the blog stuff last weekend and not getting around to it again for months, I’ll pick it back up this weekend.

Speaking of piano stuff, I finally, after 10 months of woodshedding, managed to do consistent decent runthroughs of the first movement of the Haydn sonata. Yay!

So I can put that aside for now – although now that the whole sonata is under my fingers, I might try to do a FB live runthrough of the whole thing for the world to enjoy in a few months. That will be terrifying fun.

So again with the 3-2-1, “A” is now the Minute Waltz, “B” is the First Arabesque and “C” will be a Joplin rag, probably “Easy Winners”. I’ve worked on First Arabesque before, I’m hoping that will come together quickly, but there’s no rush. Others plotted for the future, “The Harmonious Blacksmith”, the Pathetique, the Mozart F major, maybe Rhapsody in Blue?

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Sad news -although the G&S festival, which was cancelled last year due to COVID, is going up in some form this summer (good), it’s not including any amateur shows (sad) and the Savoynet “Grand Duke” has been postponed again (aaaaugh). I’m not (yet) involved in this production, but my dear friends who are it have been stuck in limbo on this for three years now. It also pushes back my own timeline – I usually go to the festival every three years, and given the normalcy we were denied, this might have been my year again. But the earliest I’m going to get conduct something there would be five years after the last one, and that assumes that the 2023 show is one I want to conduct, and that I get the job. One thing that easily could happen is me just going to the festival anyway, not as conductor. I could go next year as chorus for GD if a spot opens up, or just go over for a week and see the show and perform in cabarets and sightsee and stuff. Probably not this year, but if we’re on track, definitely next year.

Also pondering possibilities for home – there are shows here I can put in to MD – not sure if I should, but possibilities. And horn stuff. Oh, and I’m starting skating lessons again (I think) end of April. That will get me out of the house.

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Media consumption: we watched One Night in Miami… and Farmageddon this weekend. ONIM is excellent, although as it’s a film version of a play, it’s not particularly cinematic. The performances are across-the-board good – not sure why Leslie Odom was singled out for his Oscar nomination, they were all good, although Jim Brown had the least to do. Farmageddon was cute, but it wasn’t nearly as enjoyable as the first Shaun the Sheep movie.

We watched all of Behind Her Eyes, which is excellently acted, but batshit crazy, and finished Schitt’s Creek, which was lovely. I still don’t know how a man as centered and sensible as Patrick would be at all attracted to David, but whatevs. So we’ve started Collateral, which has a great cast, including the amazing Nicola Walker, and Wandavision, knowing that WV might not be at all what we like. But C was like “oh, they’re in the Petrie’s living room” and “Oh, this is Bewitched”, so he was right there. Let’s see we buy into the premise once we get more information.