recent past and recent future.
mardi gras is now officially over for me. and boy was that last parade memorable. not in a good way exactly because it was pretty much 35 degrees and raining the entire time - i haven't felt that sort of miserable cold in a long long time. but in a good way because my drums (and the whole band) did an awesome job. when i first started here, the band in general treated mardi gras a bit more like a chore, the thing that they had to do. now, the band has made mardi gras into their own and they bring great energy to the parades no matter how shitty the conditions might be. it's incredibly inspiring.
my own parade-spectating this year was pretty non-existent, partially because of my back issues, but partially because this year has just felt much more exhausting in general. i suppose it didn't help that on friday night after Hermes i went and played cards from 01:00-06:30 and then had to get up about two and a half hours later to help host a crawfish boil, so most of the times when i would have gone to parades in the evening i was napping.
in any case, now that that's all over, i need to hit the ground running for all of the next things. my concert is three weeks away and i need to do a lot of practicing and a few remaining organizational logistics. that will occupy a good deal of my spare time leading to concert weekend. once that's done, i have two pieces of music that i need to write by the beginning of 2015 which i've done preliminary conceptual work on, but need to start putting real time into them - especially since one of them is a surround sound audio only piece, so there'll be a learning curve there.
on top of that, i have a lot of stuff to take care of at tulane to keep pushing the drumline and also how the administration runs. there are a lot of percussionists in the group that don't have concert band obligations and i need to formalize the spring plan for drumming and technique building for all sections of the group, sit down with a calendar and sort out exactly how and when i'm going to deal with certain skills. we're heavy into recruiting season and i have a lot of people on the percussion list, so lots of emails are getting sent out and exchanged trying to get a feel for what the prospects are all about. we're going to try to up our social media game, i need to clean up a few of the databases and spreadsheets that we use, i need to do some research into what we need to buy for inventory next year, do some equipment maintenance, all of that.
and of course there's balancing that with a good social life. i do a pretty good job of that, so not worried about it.
time to drink a lot of water, watch the latest epsiode of Archer, and then maybe draw up some plans. mardi gras is over; it's time to get to work.