(no subject)
So I guess I haven’t blogged in a while. Every time I open LJ to look at my friends page, I remember this, and yet I still haven’t managed to update my own.
A lot has happened since June though...
Will moved back to West Virginia (see previous post). He was a good friend and neighbor; I was sad to see him go rather suddenly.
I spent most of the summer playing Rock Band with my “band,” “Tonal Fyngyss” (read it out loud and you’ll get the joke haha). We played so often we started referring to it as “band practice.” Always a good time.
Through Rock Band and the occasional dinner, I got pretty close to my friend Dennis (again, see previous post) and we started dating in July-ish. He’s a composer and a lot of fun. We went to Niagara Falls in October. ^_^
I finished my thesis, “Images of Japonisme: The Portrayal of Japan in Select Musical Works” in July. Here's a link to it online: http://etd.ohiolink.edu/view.cgi?acc_num=bgsu1249250727. It's relatively short for a Master's thesis, only 75 pages with appendices. I'm fairly proud of it, now that it's actually online. It took the grad college until... October? November? I forget exactly, to put it up. They had somehow mislaid my ETD form, which is required for them to put it on the internet. It's basically the permission to publish, albeit in PDF form. Because I missed the summer deadline for graduation (which was in the middle of June), I had to wait until December. Thus I am graduating tomorrow, December 18. I'm pretty excited to head back to the town I called home for two years, even just overnight.
In August I moved back to Pennsylvania and began hunting for jobs. This was after the intense final band practice, at which we cooked and ate everything remaining in my freezer and finished off the alcohol my roommates left behind. In the job hunt, I haven't had much luck on the full time with benefits front, but I did land a position at Sonney's Photography assisting with school pictures for a few months. It was fun and relatively easy, but required me to be awake at 5:00 am a few days a week. Those of you who know me well will realize that's a stretch for me. Really, really a stretch. I get the feeling many of my coworkers thought I was kinda rude because they only ever saw me at that time on very little sleep. >_<
Over Labor Day, my mom and I drove to Binghamton, NY to visit my Uncle Gary and Aunt Dawnie and their family on our way further east into New York to visit my Uncle Duane. It was a really great trip! We took the train into the city, saw Mary Poppins on Broadway, took the subway out to Coney Island on Labor Day and took lots of pictures, many of which are viewable on facebook: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2059688&id=65900289&l=8ec8728780. It was really great to see family and I enjoyed our trip.
Toward the middle of October, I was hired as seasonal help at Michael's Arts and Crafts store, where they like to screw up my schedule as much as possible. Aside from that, the job isn't too difficult. I'm a cashier, pretty much like I had been doing for Cinemark for five years, except instead of tickets and popcorn, I get to sell scrapbooking, yarn, fake flowers and 2130948723051623489576 things that are covered in glitter, this time of year. Serious, I come out of work covered in that stuff every day. What is it with people and glitter this time of year??
Around the same time Michael's hired me, I was in talks with Kelly Armor of the Erie Art Museum about museum jobs and the arts, which ended in me accepting a few months of internship with the museum. I am typing using their borrowed internet at this moment. I've done a lot of interesting things so far, but none I was expecting! I've been working on a list of international restaurants in Erie (and I still can't manage to spell "restaurants" correctly without spell check, keep trying to reverse the a and u and spelling it "restuarants" instead), some artist biographies, proofreading, and other projects, but so far my most interesting project has been video production. I took about an hour of footage from last year's Spring Show and cut it down to about five minutes, using Windows Movie Maker. I also removed the audio track to export it to Audacity to try and clean up some of the noise and boost the volume of certain points. I'm really enjoying my time as video editor, it's not something I've ever explored before. Soon I'll have videos of the Eiffel Tower from Z and I's trip to Europe a few summers ago to add here or facebook, as I have finally learned how to edit them to something actually viewable. ^_^
In November, I took at trip to Philadelphia for the AMS Annual Conference. It was a great time, I got to stay with a friend from Edinboro and bummed rides back and forth from BG friends. Saw the Philadelphia Orchestra play Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony for $8 (less than I would pay for a ticket to the Erie Philharmonic). Saw the Liberty Bell, briefly, though they pretty much strip search you to have permission to see that thing. Apparently, some nutjob hit it with a hammer a few years ago, so now they've tightened security significantly as a result. My favorite paper from the conference was one given by Ralph Locke on musical exoticism. He wrote one of the books I read part of for my thesis last summer. Philadelphia is scarier than Pittsburgh or Cleveland, but still less scary than Detroit.
In the last couple months I've gotten several phone calls and emails from students at Edinboro asking me to play because their accompanist has bailed on them. I don't know what's wrong with the pianists in our area right now, but I've been able to bail a few kids out so far. I'm thinking of putting up a poster, "Has your accompanist bailed on you? Are you in a bind? Call Amanda Steadman, she'll help you out, for a reasonable fee!" I played a fairly successful bass recital in November for Leah Miller's little brother. After essentially not playing for a year, and not accompanying for over two, I feel like I've really gotten back on the horse. I just got a call yesterday asking if I would play for Seneca's spring musical "Cinderella" in a few months. I think I'm going to do it!
So if you didn't feel like reading all of this, let me boil it down for you: Rock Band, Dennis, thesis done, Erie, photographing small children, New York, glitter, art museum, Philadelphia, piano.
Fin.
A lot has happened since June though...
Will moved back to West Virginia (see previous post). He was a good friend and neighbor; I was sad to see him go rather suddenly.
I spent most of the summer playing Rock Band with my “band,” “Tonal Fyngyss” (read it out loud and you’ll get the joke haha). We played so often we started referring to it as “band practice.” Always a good time.
Through Rock Band and the occasional dinner, I got pretty close to my friend Dennis (again, see previous post) and we started dating in July-ish. He’s a composer and a lot of fun. We went to Niagara Falls in October. ^_^
I finished my thesis, “Images of Japonisme: The Portrayal of Japan in Select Musical Works” in July. Here's a link to it online: http://etd.ohiolink.edu/view.cgi?acc_num=bgsu1249250727. It's relatively short for a Master's thesis, only 75 pages with appendices. I'm fairly proud of it, now that it's actually online. It took the grad college until... October? November? I forget exactly, to put it up. They had somehow mislaid my ETD form, which is required for them to put it on the internet. It's basically the permission to publish, albeit in PDF form. Because I missed the summer deadline for graduation (which was in the middle of June), I had to wait until December. Thus I am graduating tomorrow, December 18. I'm pretty excited to head back to the town I called home for two years, even just overnight.
In August I moved back to Pennsylvania and began hunting for jobs. This was after the intense final band practice, at which we cooked and ate everything remaining in my freezer and finished off the alcohol my roommates left behind. In the job hunt, I haven't had much luck on the full time with benefits front, but I did land a position at Sonney's Photography assisting with school pictures for a few months. It was fun and relatively easy, but required me to be awake at 5:00 am a few days a week. Those of you who know me well will realize that's a stretch for me. Really, really a stretch. I get the feeling many of my coworkers thought I was kinda rude because they only ever saw me at that time on very little sleep. >_<
Over Labor Day, my mom and I drove to Binghamton, NY to visit my Uncle Gary and Aunt Dawnie and their family on our way further east into New York to visit my Uncle Duane. It was a really great trip! We took the train into the city, saw Mary Poppins on Broadway, took the subway out to Coney Island on Labor Day and took lots of pictures, many of which are viewable on facebook: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2059688&id=65900289&l=8ec8728780. It was really great to see family and I enjoyed our trip.
Toward the middle of October, I was hired as seasonal help at Michael's Arts and Crafts store, where they like to screw up my schedule as much as possible. Aside from that, the job isn't too difficult. I'm a cashier, pretty much like I had been doing for Cinemark for five years, except instead of tickets and popcorn, I get to sell scrapbooking, yarn, fake flowers and 2130948723051623489576 things that are covered in glitter, this time of year. Serious, I come out of work covered in that stuff every day. What is it with people and glitter this time of year??
Around the same time Michael's hired me, I was in talks with Kelly Armor of the Erie Art Museum about museum jobs and the arts, which ended in me accepting a few months of internship with the museum. I am typing using their borrowed internet at this moment. I've done a lot of interesting things so far, but none I was expecting! I've been working on a list of international restaurants in Erie (and I still can't manage to spell "restaurants" correctly without spell check, keep trying to reverse the a and u and spelling it "restuarants" instead), some artist biographies, proofreading, and other projects, but so far my most interesting project has been video production. I took about an hour of footage from last year's Spring Show and cut it down to about five minutes, using Windows Movie Maker. I also removed the audio track to export it to Audacity to try and clean up some of the noise and boost the volume of certain points. I'm really enjoying my time as video editor, it's not something I've ever explored before. Soon I'll have videos of the Eiffel Tower from Z and I's trip to Europe a few summers ago to add here or facebook, as I have finally learned how to edit them to something actually viewable. ^_^
In November, I took at trip to Philadelphia for the AMS Annual Conference. It was a great time, I got to stay with a friend from Edinboro and bummed rides back and forth from BG friends. Saw the Philadelphia Orchestra play Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony for $8 (less than I would pay for a ticket to the Erie Philharmonic). Saw the Liberty Bell, briefly, though they pretty much strip search you to have permission to see that thing. Apparently, some nutjob hit it with a hammer a few years ago, so now they've tightened security significantly as a result. My favorite paper from the conference was one given by Ralph Locke on musical exoticism. He wrote one of the books I read part of for my thesis last summer. Philadelphia is scarier than Pittsburgh or Cleveland, but still less scary than Detroit.
In the last couple months I've gotten several phone calls and emails from students at Edinboro asking me to play because their accompanist has bailed on them. I don't know what's wrong with the pianists in our area right now, but I've been able to bail a few kids out so far. I'm thinking of putting up a poster, "Has your accompanist bailed on you? Are you in a bind? Call Amanda Steadman, she'll help you out, for a reasonable fee!" I played a fairly successful bass recital in November for Leah Miller's little brother. After essentially not playing for a year, and not accompanying for over two, I feel like I've really gotten back on the horse. I just got a call yesterday asking if I would play for Seneca's spring musical "Cinderella" in a few months. I think I'm going to do it!
So if you didn't feel like reading all of this, let me boil it down for you: Rock Band, Dennis, thesis done, Erie, photographing small children, New York, glitter, art museum, Philadelphia, piano.
Fin.