the_rck

Cordelia turns 15 today. She and Scott and I will be trying to squeeze in a dinner out in the time between when Scott gets home (he went in early and expects to leave early) and when she has to be back at the school. Scott's parents will drive down early to miss the traffic, and we'll likely hang out at somewhere like Espresso Royale while we wait for Scott because waiting here would get in the cleaning lady's way.

Last night's concert was more pleasant, anxiety-wise, than I expected it to be. There were only about half as many people in the audience as there were last time, and I was able to make Scott let me sit on the aisle. The two evenings of concert are intended mostly to let each senior perform a solo song. I'm pretty sure that that performance constitutes their final exam for the class.

The seniors were all in 'formal wear' (which the choir director did not define in her emails) of varying types and varying formality. I'm not sure that the 'formal' part matters so much as the 'standing out when in the bigger groups so that the audience knows who the seniors are.' The choir program tries to be inclusive about gender identity and is very adamant about referring to voice parts by name rather than as 'male parts' and 'female parts,' but I wonder every time what the choir that's exclusively for altos and sopranos and has a dress as a uniform would do if someone joined who found wearing a floor length skirt dysphoria inducing or otherwise damaging along gender identity lines. I suspect that they'd just go with what those who don't wear dresses do in the other choirs-- Black trousers, black jacket with tails, white shirt. (All of these outfits are rented from the choir for the year.)

The competitive choir, Skyline Blues, has the same uniform for everyone. It's specifically designed to make it harder to see any performer's torso shape. I don't know if that's a thing they'll keep next year or not because it's apparently new this year and designed in supporting the theme of their competition set which is coming. I've seen the set three times now, and it still makes my eyes leak.

Some of the kids in Cordelia's choir had solos, just a line or two. Cordelia says that those were assigned Friday and that one of her friends who was sick that day got one and didn't know until Monday. The solos were announced with student name and the identifying number of the solo, but the kids didn't have any sort of master list or reference, so it didn't help the girl at all to know she had one because she had no way to find out what she ought to be practicing and so lost three days. They started dress rehearsal during class on Monday.

This is another one of those things that makes me feel that the choir director is good at certain aspects of her job but terrible, terrible, terrible at any sort of organized communication. She routinely reuses email templates for past years and forgets to change dates, times, etc. She pretty much never answers emails or calls.

I very much want to run the dishwasher in order to avoid having to hand wash a few things, but the dishwasher is only 3/4 full. Scott's coffeemaker setup pretty much guarantees that one part or the other will have to be hand washed because I need the brewing part clean before the storage containers are quite empty (we cold brew and then decant) and the storage containers need to be clean no more than 24 hours after I start brewing. I don't run the dishwasher often enough to make that work.

Obviously, the solution is to buy more storage containers so that I can swap, but it's not a solution that's likely to fly well right now. For the moment, I'm going to decant into something that I can fill but can't pour from (Scott and Cordelia should be able to. It's just that I can't). I won't need to pour anything until tomorrow morning, so there's time to run the dishwasher.