Happy Halloween from Nebraska!

My presentation went very well - much better than my rehearsal in the hotel room last night, and really better than I had even hoped for. I felt like I was articulate and in control. (We'll see what I think about it when I watch the video!) And believe it or not, eleven people showed up for my 8 AM lecture even though it was a five minute outdoor walk from the building where most of our events are taking place. I felt honored by that. And a few others have approached me since then lamenting that they weren't able to come because they were judging auditions at that time. So, it would seem that I picked a topic of some interest to my colleagues.

The rest of the day has been relatively low-energy for me. I don't think I slept especially well last night, even without my husband's snoring and cats waking me up wanting to be fed. And things moved much slower this year than last so that we seemed to be idle more than we were busy. Busy-ness would have kept me more alert. Still, it has been a good day.

Also, I have been brainstorming ways to tighten up the tabulation process we use in our local chapter for student auditions, and I came up with a plan today, inspired by the regional protocol, that I think will cut the tabulating time back substantially while also eliminating a source of error. I will need to run it by the membership, but that can be done electronically in the next few weeks, and I don't anticipate a lot of opposition (though there will certainly be some). Our chapter president supports the change, which is helpful, especially since he is my predecessor in the role of District Auditions Chair.

And for anyone who was wondering, yes, I did find that geocache last night, officially adding Nebraska to our geocaching map. :-) We also passed a major milestone on October 19th when we found our 200th cache. Passing this milestone means that we are now ranked among Colorado Geocachers. Presently we are 589th in the state of Colorado. Unfortunately, the weather and an increasingly busy schedule have severely limited the amount of caching we've been able to do since then.

Welcome to Kearney

I am presently in Kearney, NE for the West-Central Region's annual NATS conference. I am delivering a presentation first thing in the morning. I'm not sure how many people are going to show up for an 8 AM presentation that wasn't announced in the packets they received in advance, but one of the teachers who helped us get settled in the tabulation room this afternoon said he was looking forward to it. They all have to be there by 7:30 AM for the judges meeting anyway, so those not judging at 8 AM might come. Then I am assisting in tabulation for the rest of the two days for the competition portion of the conference. I am hoping to get to see my church choir director, whom I ran into again in Nashville after 20 years. She is a featured master class teacher at our conference. Unfortunately, I don't know that I will be able to get out of tabulation long enough to attend her class, but hopefully I will still get to say hello.

I have this evening to myself, as MM is in meetings until late. To my satisfaction, there appears to be a geocache within a few hundred feet of our hotel, so I might get to add Nebraska to my geocaching map, after all!

Violin in the core curriculum?!

Wow... this is interesting! http://newsinfo.iu.edu/web/page/normal/8987.html

It starts... "Starting in late September, all 46 first-graders at Bloomington's Fairview Elementary School added a new subject to their regular class schedules: violin."

And then there's me...

The Aurora Music Teachers Association (AMTA) hosts a high school coffeehouse "open mic" night at Border Bookstore every month. AMTA members' students can sing or play an instrument for their peers in the coffeehouse at our local bookstore. It's a really awesome opportunity for kids to enjoy making music together and for one another.

I enjoy attending these events. Tonight one of my students was there, and she had a great time because it turned out some of her friends study with some of my colleagues, so she knew people there already.

I found myself in sort of a strange position, though, I guess. There's all these students... all teenagers... and all these other teachers... all in their forties, fifties and sixties... and then there's me... 30. It was just weeeeird.

Never thought I'd see the day

New Kids on the Block... remember them? Well, they're back together and on tour! I absolutely adored them when they were popular, and abandoned them when they fell from glory. I didn't stop liking their music, per se, but I moved on to other things and never really looked back. So, they have a myspace page, and it has all their old music on it, so I listened to some of the tracks that I remembered as having been my favorites... it's amazing how you can not hear a song for 16 years or more and still remember every word and inflection. It's rather nostalgic, isn't it? But I have a lot of good memories associated with the NKOTB music, namely my surprise 13th birthday party and bonding with my cousin, Shelly, who was a few years older than me and fanatical about them, which made them really cool to little cousin Ellie.

I had a very similar experience recently when I bought a Gatlin Brothers album that we used to listen to all the time when our family drove to/from Sanibel Island, FL for our summer vacations, and listening to it reminds me what it felt like to be a little kid on vacation. It's funny - some of those songs refer to very adult activities, but they don't come right out and say "sex" and "drinking" so even though I had every word memorized, I never had any idea what I was singing about... and never knew the difference until I heard the songs again this summer.

I used to have a cassette tape with a compilation of songs my parents had put together from their LPs. I listened to it all the time and always sang along to it. I remember singing along in the backseat one day and overhearing my parents snickering in the front seat... apparently, the record had skipped and left out a whole section, and I had never noticed. I just sang along like that's how it was supposed to be. Now, when I hear that song, it doesn't sound right to me without the skip I was used to hearing!

...which is just another reminder to my students to take care not to learn their music wrong, because it'll never sound right when they do it the right way!

Support my choir... a good idea!

I always like good ideas. Goodsearch is one of the recent good ideas I've come to like. Goodsearch is a search engine like Google or Yahoo (in fact, it is powered by Yahoo), but unlike ordinary search engines, this one gives money to charity every time you use it. More specifically, it gives money to the charity of your choice every time you use it. My choir, the Musicians of Saint Clare, is registered as one of the charities, so every time I do a websearch through Goodsearch, my choir gets a kickback.

At first, I thought it was inconvenient - after all, I could Google so easily from my Google toolbar. But Goodsearch has a toolbar, too. (I LOVE those things. Saves time!)

So, if you'd like to help my choir out, start searching the web with Goodsearch. In the "select a charity" window, enter "Musicians of Saint Clare". (Note the spelling of "Clare".) If you're not interested, ignore this posting completely, and I'll never know the difference...! ;-)

For more information about my choir, visit our website: http://www.mscchoir.org.