Gracie’s Life Experiment

Was humming The Cure’s ”Friday I’m in Love”.  Unfortunately it’s only Monday today.  So to the same song, I’ve renamed it “Monday in Disguise” (OK the new lyrics are pretty crap, but I think it almost works).

Monday feels like Friday new
Tuesday, Wednesday probably too
Thursday - brain is almost goo
It’s Monday in disguise!

Saturday? when?
Sunday follows quickly then,
But Monday I’m tired again…

Perhaps it was just wishful thinking, or perhaps it’s because I did work all weekend, but my brain tells me it’s tired enough to be Friday today. 

Summary of the day:  Work, work, students, work

I’m quite partial to going to see musicals.  Love them and remember lots of fun evenings round the piano as a kid singing from the various songbooks.  Tonight we went to Loughborough Town Hall to watch Little Shop of Horrors.  It was fab and very funny.  Nice that they had the original ending.  FEED ME!! So this Thursday’s 10 things are the last 10 musicals I’ve been to see (as far as I can remember).

1. Little Shop of Horrors
2. Spamalot
3. Blood Brothers
4. Jesus Christ Superstar
5. Miss Saigon
6. Blues Brothers
7. Les Miserables
8. Rocky Horror Show
9. Grease
10. Phantom of the Opera

Summary of the day: Went to work, Had student meetings, Had more student meetings all afternoon, Went to Wetherspoons for dinner, Saw Little Shop of Horrors, Had a nightcap, Hung a curtain

I love playing the piano.  I’ve been playing for about 23 years (wow that makes me feel old now!!).  It’s been a long slog and I remember not really enjoying playing that much until I was about 15.  I guess for a lot of people who were pushed into music lessons and maybe didn’t have the “natural talent” they’d relate to the first few years of frustration and technical drilling and the wanting to give up (especially if you were still a child and other things were so much more interesting).  What changed for me was having a new piano teacher.  Enid Quiney was an inspiration to all her students.  Not only was she a fabulous teacher but she was also an accomplished concert harpist too.  I will always remember that one lesson where she told me that I my rendition of Debussy’s Clair de Lune was the best of all her students (which considering she had an extremely successful clientele, gave me the confidence to realise that I was doing something right)!   She taught both the technical side, but also a sense of musicality and how to express yourself through the music(randomly taught me how to play the castanets too).  Sadly Miss Quiney passed away on my 18th birthday, which I guess is almost a decade ago now.  I always remember her fondly and I’m sure all of the many students she had would too.  It was a shame I never got to tell her how much I appreciated the lessons, the wonderful gift of music that she endowed on me and how privileged I was to have her as a teacher.

After having had lots of people ask me to teach them to play piano I decided to bite the bullet this summer and get 2 guinea pig students.  It’s something I think I could do and also later in life might be another option for me.  So thought I would try teaching for a bit with these two students and gain a little experience and then look into a possible music teaching diploma (after the PhD is done).

Summary of the day: Played piano in church, Destroyed the dining room, Ate a whole packet of chocolate fingers, Packed up the crystal-ware

Have spent the last few evenings trying to work out the best thing to use with my music and iPod.  Luckily most of the music was already ripped off the CDs and stored on our shared drive at home (thankfully didn’t have to do it all over again) so I didn’t have to fuss with that.  Previously I just used iTunes, but with a totally new laptop I thought I would try and actually sort out/organise all the different formats of music files we have (some were M4A, some mp3, some wmas, etc).  So now I have the built in Windows Media Player, iTunes and Songbird.  Question is now, which should I use?

A few stats…
# of media players : 3
# of mp3 players : 1 (80GB iPod Video Black)
# of songs : 2446
# of artists : 383
# of albums : 129
# of GB : 6.32

Summary of the day: Went to work, programmed all day long (wow a tutorial that actually teaches you something), played with music files

Went down to London to see Spamalot today.  Was absolutely brilliant.  Hilarious and lots of fun.  If you’ve seen Monty Python and the Holy Grail it’s sort of based on that.  The woman who played the Lady of the Lake was fabulous.  It’s the most un-PC thing I think I’ve ever seen, but I guess we’ve got acclimatised to the peculiarity of Python.  Almost bought a “Fetchez la vache” T shirt (the one with cows flying on it) but thought better of it.

Summary of the day: Went to London, Met parents for lunch at Caffe Uno, Laughed and laughed and laughed some more at Spamalot, Made amends with the grumpy dog by feeding her a sausage.

So… putting my iPod on random shuffle these are the first 10 songs.

1. Superheroes - Daft Punk
2. Sister Moonshine - Supertramp
3. Snake Drive - Eric Clapton
4. Michael Caine - Madness
5. I Want You - Savage Garden
6. Tits of the Radio - Scissor Sisters
7. Set the Night to Music - Roberta Flack
8. Red Red Wine - UB40
9. Dead in the Water - David Gray
10. Another One Bites the Dust - Queen

Bit of a strange mix there. There’s quite a lot of oldies (but goodies). You could almost make a sentence/story out of them.  I’m going to have to spend the next weekend I have free putting all my CDs back into iTunes again (after my HD died).

Summary of the day: Woke up 30 mins after my doctor’s appt (d’oh), went to work

Got the Monday blues again.  There was hardly anybody in the office, and everyone who was had lots of deadlines.  Somehow I managed to spend the whole day doing nothing particularly productive, yet still doing work (how does that happen?).  Our medicals are tomorrow, so I’m anxious about the blood tests (they always end up puncturing both arms in numerous places and my veins eventually get thrombosed).

Summary of the day: Went to work, played lots of piano, played Scrabulous on Facebook (only beat John by 101 pts this time, he’s gaining on me)

Do you ever think that sometimes there is a soundtrack playing in the background to your life (like it does in the movies)?  Today I am Feeeeeling Good, da dum, da dum, da dum!!  For some reason I am inextricably feeling rather happy indeed.  Ear’s still a bit sore, but at least the tinitus has stopped.   The sun came out to play today.

Summary of the day: Went to work, ate lunch by the lake in the sunshine, got 3 things ticked off on my work to-do list, played piano, shot 546 (yes a new PB, 25 Golds - w00t), started reading a new book

Inspired by BBC News’ 10 Things lists, I thought I would try and make Thursdays my own variation of 10 things.  So the first one will be 10 things I like…

1. Family
2. Playing piano
3. Archery
4. Exploring
5. Moose (Taboo and Coke)
6. Lasagne
7. Having friends over
8. Playing scrabble
9. Wandering round museums
10. Painting

Summary of the day: Went to “work” (didn’t really get much done though), ate yesterday’s lunch, shot a 526 in the garden.