First Day of Walkabout

I have been out of town for the past couple of days, so I haven't been able to update. Now it's time to share the experiences of Thursday with you! My first day of Walkabout should have been Wednesday, but Julia called me and told me not to come in. So I made the trek downtown Thursday by myself in the snow.

Snow actually didn't concern me all that much. Instead, I tried to remember when I had last driven on a highway by myself. I had no idea. Normally, I just avoid highways and take other roads to wherever I need to go. I don't drive that often anyway, and much of the time there would be no reason to use a highway anyway. Suddenly, with Walkabout, this has changed. I need to drive downtown everyday, and that means taking 315 to 670. So I left at 10:20 and started driving. (My schedule at Promusica is 11:00-5:30 M,T,Th, F and 9:00-5:30 W. I'm going to band class M,T, Th, F, but did not on Thursday with school cancelled.) Then I turned around and went back to get my cell phone. At 10:26, I was really off, starting to wonder what the highways would be like with the familiar roads this snowy and icey. Generally, I'm a pretty confident snow driver. I think it's because I vowed when I was quite young never to complain about snow. This requires convincing myself that driving in snow isn't too bad.

The highways were more or less clean and normal and because it was so late traffic was relatively light. I arrived on time safely at ProMusica and was able to get to work. I was kind of proud of myself for finding my way and for not having problems on the highways, although I suppose in a week or two I won't think twice about either.

The first task I was given to do was address and stuff envelopes which is as it is. For what it's worth, Julia had asked me complete a spreadsheet with contacts yesterday and I used that to address the envelopes. I actually did not mind the task as I was able to think about whatever I pleased or just clear my mind. I went into a similar state as when I play simple computer games or the like, which is kind of relaxing and hopefully positive. As I was finishing that up, Julia asked me to copy some CD's from the archives. Whenever ProMusica plays a concert, it gets recorded and all the recordings are saved on the mainframe. Musicians recieve recordings of their performances so they can listen and find things to improve. In December, ProMusica played some concerts with the Lancaster Chorale. Apparantly, the CD's sent back to Lancaster did not play all the tracks, so I got to copy these recordings onto new CD's for the Lancaster Chorale and for a soloist who also needed a recording. It was funny, I've always thought that I'm equally adept at using Macs and PCs because for years I had to use Macs as school and at home I've always had a PC. However, I've never burned a CD at school, so I got to feel kind of dumb for a few minutes as Julia explained how to do it. (So clearly this should be a perfectly acceptable task at school so that in the real world when we need to do it on any kind of computer we don't need help. Anyone going to buy that you think?)

When burning CD's, I started working on this journal because I discovered that I really did not want to just sit and wait for the data to transfer. I'm not always like that though, I've spent long periods of time when I should be working on College Comp at home reading blogs and checking Facebook in the middle of the night. Then again, in those cases I'm still doing something, whereas at ProMusica I would never just surf the internet for no reason and just staring at a screen waiting for the little bar move to the other side is not exactly my idea of fun. So instead of the feeling that I out to be working, I was compelled to this task by the need to just do something.

The last thing I had to do was book rental cars for those musicians who fly in from out of town. I was kind of nervous at first because it felt more important—or at least easier to mess up significantly—than my other tasks. But after two computers fought me so hard I had to switch to a third that feeling had been completely replaced by familiar computer frustration. One of the computers I used was in Julia's office and she laughed at me when I was talking to it encouragingly. I like to try to encourage computers when they're loading slowly, as if they could hear me or something. It makes me feel better.