Froggies Rock, Just So's You Know

I started the day cursing Wednesdays; the day I have to leave extra early and don’t even get to go to band. Because I go downtown with my dad, I get to the office a good fifteen minutes before I officially say I will, and Julia doesn’t arrive until later than that. Today when I went up to the office no one was there yet so I decided to go downstairs to the little café on the first floor and wait.

My day turned around when I bought myself hot chocolate. I’m going to stop complaining about Wednesdays. Simple things make all the difference I guess. When Arianne got there and opened the office I still didn’t really have much to do yet, but I worked some on Ashley’s restaurant list.
Most of my day was spent on the SAB silent auction, but on research. Fun research. When Katie and I originally compiled the list, it was kind of uncertain whether we were talking about a raffle or silent auction or door prizes, or what. Linworth’s rubber ducks at the international dinner came to mind (aren’t these some kind of tradition? I’d love to know how that came along.) and I suggested we come up with something “silly/cute/random/creative/cheap.” (I believe that’s how it got listed on the bottom of the spreadsheet under “vague, unspecific ideas) So I got to try to come up with something. I spent most of this time browsing orientaltrader.com, which has a fun selection but some eighty-seven things per page and, once again, I was shored up by slow computers. Yvette came in today, so I couldn’t steal the “good” computer either. I eventually came up with a few things, and Julia was really enthusiastic about these light-up squishy frogs. Apparently, there’s a history of frog-related… stuff… at ProMusica because of some musician, so the frogs were fitting as well as being cute and kind of cool. (I mean, they light up!) Julia thought that we should get three dozen, (Oriental Traders sells pretty much everything in dozens and for cheaps) have all the musicians sign one, and raffle them off. Problem was, Oriental Traders has ratings and reviews of their products on their website, and the “quality” rating for the light-up frogs was really low. I read some customer reviews and they said that only about half the frogs actually lit up. So I browsed the website again, this time on Julia’s laptop, searching for frogs. We decided to get these squirt frogs. They aren’t as cute as the light-up frogs, but they were cheaper—Julia’s just going to buy them—and had good customer ratings.

The only other thing I put much time into was “pencil research.” A few SAB members, Julia, and Ashley had a meeting last night about marketing the student gala. One of the suggestions made in regards to marketing at the SAB meeting two weeks ago was that we have pencils printed for the gala to advertise it. Apparently this came up last night and Ashley said it was a waste of time to look into. Julia disagreed, and I’m thinking it could actually be a really cool idea now. Music students have this way of showing up to class without a pencil, and music directors, in turn, tend to become very frustrated by this tendency. You see, if a change in the music, or a correction of style, is going to stay fixed, students really need to mark this in the music. WK’s wind ensemble has been blown up at a few times over this issue. So imagine, we give orchestra directors 100 pencils that they can give to their students to use in class to make the music better. The pencils advertise our student gala and bored cellists read them while the director is rehearsing a section with the violins. I think it’s a good idea. So, I explored the internet to see how much this would be likely to actually cost, going over Ashley’s head. I think that little amusing detail made the internet explorations all the more fun.

As far as “sit in front of a computer all day” days go, today was probably my favorite. Obviously, I’m happy not to have to make phone calls, although I did make a couple, but I was also happier than when I was compiling spreadsheets or whatever else I’ve done. It was just kind of amusing looking at all the toys and things I could buy online, and different from what I had been doing before. Tomorrow there will be more spreadsheets. The last thing I did was start compiling several lists of contacts into one for a mailing list for the student gala. I have a feeling that’s going to take a while.