Saturday, August 9, 2008

Clearly I am not very good at this whole blogging regularly thing - I get busy or distracted and fail to write anything. I'll try to improve.

For the past week my mother has been visiting. We hit up several tourist-y things that I hadn't done yet, including taking the gondola up and down Sulphur Mountain and walking out to the Cosmic Ray Station once we were up there. (When I first heard about the Cosmic Ray Station, I thought it was a joke name. Turns out, they really used to measure cosmic rays up there.) We also ate a lot of food, made perogies, and went to many concerts.

We saw both operas, Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream and Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, which were both very good. It is really impressive how much work goes into such productions as they each only get two performances. We also attended the end of program brass concert, which was loud and long but very good, and a chamber orchestra concert that included Haydn's trumpet concerto and John Adams' Shaker Loops, which is so cool to actually see performed.

I took the Thursday while my mother was here off work, in lieu of Canada Day, so I had my first three day weekend. Unfortunately she left on Friday around 1, so I have been rather bored since, especially since the internet is broken at home. I have been continuing to use my former roommate's wireless connection, as I am now living directly above my former apartment, but the wireless device is broken. I was able to get on an unsecured network for a few days but now that one has gone secure, so I am currently sitting in a cafe at the Centre because there is free wireless up here.

I have been mostly working on orders and cleaning up authority files at work. Both are interesting and tedious at the same time - there is a lot of copying and pasting involved in entering orders and a lot of inserting date subfields and commas into improperly-formatted authority records. However, I do get to spend thousands of dollars on awesome stuff when doing orders and I end up reading a lot of Wikipedia and New Grove entries to determine if people are dead for the authority files, so it evens out. I am really looking forward to when some of the stuff I ordered last month starts coming in - it won't be all string and piano music, at last!