I worked from home yesterday, but that doesn’t have much to do with anything. There’s a lot going on in my job right now (unusual) and I’m finding that I’m getting wildly different projects mixed up with each other, which is not helpful.
Since I’m leaving at the end of the year, I’m doing knowledge transfer with a particular teammate, and we’re doing a pretty good job of mapping out what that looks like, what to cover, and including him without overloading him, especially since he may not end up with my role. But a different teammate reached out to me to do KT particularly on testing. This was odd because (a) I’m already doing KT with the first guy, and (b) I’m not the person who does testing on my product. I used to, and taught our current QA person how to do it (years ago now) but don’t do it now unless I need to fill in. But she was insistent that I do it, not QA person, and that it be one-on-one with me, even though I needed to do the same thing with KT guy. *sigh* So I’d met with QA person to see if much has changed since I used to do it (no, not really), and scheduled two KT sessions for two people, one each, on the same subject. What-evah.
So that was a big thing to get ready for yesterday, and I had another meeting about another thing first. Ten minutes before my other meeting, my project lead’s boss (who is invited to the meeting) reaches out to me and is like, “what is this about?”. Dude, you should know this already. And then he starts spouting some top-of-the-head opinions to me about it over Slack and I’m like, “that’s a good thing to share in the meeting which is happening in eight minutes”. WTF.
So my KT session with the insistent person is at 2:00 and now it’s about noonish and a different co-worker schedules a meeting about a totally different issue at 1:30. That’s really not something we do here, the surprise meeting. And that of course cut into the prep time for the KT session. *sigh*
And so I’m like OK I’ll do this and the KT session and then have a late lunch at 3:00 so I don’t need dinner before the orchestra rehearsal I have. And start the Teams meeting at 2:00 and insistent person doesn’t show up. OMG. Like I put quite a bit of effort to set this up for something that I’m still not sure why I’m charged with, and she doesn’t show. So after messaging her (she’s not responding), I reschedule her for Monday but offer to add her to the other KT session I’d schedule for Friday and then I go to effing lunch. (and I’m waiting on my order and she finally responds and she thought it was at 300 and she had to pick up her kid and and and… no harm, no foul, and it all got resolved.) But still!
So anyway today I’ll go over the testing with both of them at the same time. And that will be that for that.
My buddy Lynn the horn player, who seems to be the person who knows all the horns in the city and winds up being the unofficial contractor for every horn section, often reaches out to me to sub for her or someone else in various random rehearsals. And if I’m not in hornistic shape (which I usually am not, if I have no gig coming up), I abstain. Courteously. But I’d actually been missing playing recently, and she asked nicely about a Litha rehearsal this week and she’d just played for my BB66 orchestra, and the rep for the rehearsal was Copland Third Symphony, which I very much enjoyed playing ten or so years ago, so I said “yes”. So over the past week, I’d been getting my chops up in a desultory way, and also realizing that it still wouldn’t be ‘enough’ to nail the part, because those parts are tough and even the fourth horn part has a high C in it. Oh well, I’ll do my best.
I’d planned to cover the whole rehearsal, and horn 4 is tacet for movement 3, and Lynn told me they’d be doing that movement last, so I’d get to leave a little early. But then Lynn said she might be able to finish her other gig and come in halfway, and we sort of both waffled about that over text. Like, “I’ll play the whole rehearsal like I said I would, but honestly, if you show up, I’ll go home without a backward glance.”
I showed up in plenty of time, same church as where QUO rehearses. Oddly enough, Litha’s conductor (and founder) is Eric H, who is also a hornist and who’d played Copland 3 with me ten years ago! (he was 1st, I was 2nd) Hadn’t seen him in quite a while, so interrupted his score study just to say hi for two minutes. Said hi to some other musicians who I’ve played with at Utopia Opera, and also to Kyle, who was playing 3rd horn and had been my other BB66 hornist.
Oddly enough, Horn 1 and Horn 2 were people I’d never met, and determinedly-friendly me kept looking over to them so I could introduce myself, but they were having none of it. Like, they were either both super-focused or just had no interest in meeting a new player. Hmmph.
And we started rehearsing movement 4, luckily skipping the “Fanfare for the Common Man” part, because that would have been beyond me in my current lack-of-shape. And I did just fine, although sometimes I took stuff an octave down just so I didn’t lunge and crack, which wouldn’t have been helpful for anyone.
And then, not as planned, Eric rolled into Movement 3, the movement I was tacet for, and told us tacet folks to chill out for 20 minutes. Grrr. But Lynn was texting me and I said, “well, weirdly, he’s doing 3 now, so if you come over, we’ll have a good opportunity to swap out”. And that’s what we did, gave her a quick hug and I got out of there before they started on the next movement.
Nice to play again, and yeah, I think it’s worth my time to start again with maintaining a minimum level of choppitude so I can easily do that sort of one-off subbing without embarrassing myself (heh, typed ’embrassing’, which would also work here). Although if all goes to plan, I might be quite booked with other stuff for the fall. Stay tuned!
Anyway, weird discombobulating day, which also included tracking via social media show day for Savoynet’s Sorcerer. Apparently, it went great, I’ll be watching it streaming this afternoon after my Friday half-day ends.
The Toast Point Page 