Back To the Drawing Board
So, yeah, it's been a busy few weeks. Here goes:
First off, spring break. Which was spent in my room in front of a computer. Project Number 1 was work on music for the next contemporary service. It's pretty involved since it's the last one of the year and I'm actually trying this time. Also, the ensemble has expanded somewhat. Which should work well, just before everyone graduates. I got everything but the prelude done, which was really pretty impressive. Project Number 2 was an attempt to create a spreadsheet that lists which tunes are which hymns in which hymnal. I am well aware that this transcends every form of nerd-dom previously known to exist, and I really don't care. Interesting omissions from the new ELCA hymnal include "Onward, Christian Soldiers," "Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus," and the one I did this service's postlude on. I realize we're trying to drop the whole militant imagery (LCMS has a whole section for it, thank you very much), but come on... those would have been fun to arrange. Remarkably little time was actually spent on either in comparison to the amount of time spent staring at the internet or otherwise doing nothing.
Anyway, once I got back to town here, the crap really hit the fan. The past week, DBF has been scrambling to get Plane 1 put together. I was in the shop until 3 this morning, and lo and behold, when I showed up again at 8 for first flight, out came a plane. Workmanship was questionable in many places, but there it was. Anyway, as is usually the case, first flight was an utter disaster. Apparently it takes off okay, but it tends to be severely tailheavy (which was more or less corrected with ballast) and the tail turned out to be severely undersized, ergo crash. We could probably rebuild it if we had to, but why bother? We've got parts for a second plane coming in today, and there's a bunch of other stuff that has to be fixed, too. Interestingly, unlike last year, the landing gear survived and remained attached to the plane. This is the new motto: Always fix last year's problem, even at the expense of everything else. I'm reasonably sure we can get another one or two built and flown by competition.
The other big catastrophe surrounded that organ piece of mine that has been hovering over me for about a year now. I had asked to play it on the spring concert about a month ago and heard nothing about it, so I naturally tabled the practice effort. Anyway, on Wednesday, one of the organizers stopped me in the hall and mentioned that I'm still on. So, the thing's in three weeks. One practice session confirmed that there is no way in hell that thing is getting learned in three weeks, so I'm bailing. This is massive crap-outage on my part, but whatever. I'll still have to play it eventually.
Beyond that, there are a whole crap-load of projects that need to get done in the next three weeks, any respectable grade in AE 419 is probably a lost cause prior to curving, and the current composition project involves Matlab coding. Don't ask.
Get back to work.
First off, spring break. Which was spent in my room in front of a computer. Project Number 1 was work on music for the next contemporary service. It's pretty involved since it's the last one of the year and I'm actually trying this time. Also, the ensemble has expanded somewhat. Which should work well, just before everyone graduates. I got everything but the prelude done, which was really pretty impressive. Project Number 2 was an attempt to create a spreadsheet that lists which tunes are which hymns in which hymnal. I am well aware that this transcends every form of nerd-dom previously known to exist, and I really don't care. Interesting omissions from the new ELCA hymnal include "Onward, Christian Soldiers," "Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus," and the one I did this service's postlude on. I realize we're trying to drop the whole militant imagery (LCMS has a whole section for it, thank you very much), but come on... those would have been fun to arrange. Remarkably little time was actually spent on either in comparison to the amount of time spent staring at the internet or otherwise doing nothing.
Anyway, once I got back to town here, the crap really hit the fan. The past week, DBF has been scrambling to get Plane 1 put together. I was in the shop until 3 this morning, and lo and behold, when I showed up again at 8 for first flight, out came a plane. Workmanship was questionable in many places, but there it was. Anyway, as is usually the case, first flight was an utter disaster. Apparently it takes off okay, but it tends to be severely tailheavy (which was more or less corrected with ballast) and the tail turned out to be severely undersized, ergo crash. We could probably rebuild it if we had to, but why bother? We've got parts for a second plane coming in today, and there's a bunch of other stuff that has to be fixed, too. Interestingly, unlike last year, the landing gear survived and remained attached to the plane. This is the new motto: Always fix last year's problem, even at the expense of everything else. I'm reasonably sure we can get another one or two built and flown by competition.
The other big catastrophe surrounded that organ piece of mine that has been hovering over me for about a year now. I had asked to play it on the spring concert about a month ago and heard nothing about it, so I naturally tabled the practice effort. Anyway, on Wednesday, one of the organizers stopped me in the hall and mentioned that I'm still on. So, the thing's in three weeks. One practice session confirmed that there is no way in hell that thing is getting learned in three weeks, so I'm bailing. This is massive crap-outage on my part, but whatever. I'll still have to play it eventually.
Beyond that, there are a whole crap-load of projects that need to get done in the next three weeks, any respectable grade in AE 419 is probably a lost cause prior to curving, and the current composition project involves Matlab coding. Don't ask.
Get back to work.
posted by Kevin H | 2:41 PM
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