Update!

So if you get this before I post the video linking to it, congratulations, you dedicated blogospheric Limonshirian! And if you get this from my video... well... I suppose it's time to get to the bulk of the substance in this post.

According to the "my videos" page, the last time I posted a video was November 8, 2010. Holy smokes, that was a long time ago. Curiously enough, that video was on improper use of the word "random" and has inspired several people to let me know every time they adjust their syntax to incorporate a more accurate synonym for "random." It made me feel both that I knew what I was talking about and that people actually agree with me. That was pretty uplifting and humbling!

Anyway, this video was posted just two days before I took (and passed) my hearing for my senior recital. Essentially, this entailed my playing through specific, indicative portions of my senior recital for a panel of faculty members who decide whether or not they want to allow me to represent the school by performing my recital on stage. For those of you who don't know, every music undergraduate at my university has to give a senior recital of about 40 or 50 minutes, and performance majors have to give a junior recital as well. It's basically the biggest rite of passage for any music student, equivalent to a senior thesis or other such project.

Following this recital hearing, I had to turn in a 15-page music history research paper on the topic of my choosing (mine being a cultural analysis of a lute textbook from 1610.) On the same day, I had to turn in a music education take-home final, which also ended up being about 15 pages long for me. This final involved things like writing a handout explaining to high school students how to practice, writing a playing test for every instrument in the band on a specific piece of music (including a rubric for a performance assessment and a written test on theory, history, etc.), and writing out how I would go about teaching intermediate players how to improve their rhythm.

After this, I gave my senior recital, of which there IS video and audio which I am trying to prepare to upload on YouTube, but technology is not working with me! In any case, it was largely a success, though there was a sort of meager audience showing due to it being the weekend before Thanksgiving break.

Clearly, then, it would follow that I went on Thanksgiving break, where I was in a party house with my Dad's side of the family, including his seven siblings, their spouses and families, and of course the family matriarch. The spread for Thanksgivingdinner, according to my aunt's facebook status, was "4 kinds of brie, cowboy caviar, TWO turkeys, stuffing & gravy, sweet potato casserole, mashed potato casserole, creamed onions, mandarin green beans ... salad, frozen cranberry yum, apple bread, baguette flatbreads, and FIVE pies." Yes. It was tasty.

While walking on the beach, we saw a great deal of erosion which had caused several former beach-front houses to become beach-behind houses; most of them were only 25 or so years old. It was pretty dismal to be walking down this already-empty beach with the overcast skies and run into that many condemned houses. It was also incredibly tempting to break into them and have general shenanigans... but I was able to contain myself.

In any case, it was exactly the break I needed from what had turned out to be a VERY stressful few weeks. Now, last week was where things got a little hard to explain; I had few classes and not a lot of work, but somehow my time disappeared! I wasn't even being lazy for the most part. I just found ways to occupy myself with things I should have been doing other than making videos. There was one day when there was just too much background noise in my house to record a proper video, so I couldn't do it, but that was only Friday. Saturday and Sunday I was at work all day--Saturday, in fact, I went straight from noon to 10PM with no breaks. So at least I made bank in time for Christmas.

So that brings us up to today, when I did upload a video. Or at least I'm hoping so. As I write this, it's encoding on my computer and I plan on uploading it as soon as it's done, provided when I watch it I don't find any editing mistakes. Of which there were many. Something about the audio didn't record at the same rate as the video (I've taken to re-dubbing the audio with my good studio microphone) and so that took a lot of effort... so please don't get too upset if the video and audio aren't always perfectly aligned! But that's neither here nor there. Hopefully, at least for a while, there will not be as large of a gap between videos. See you soon!

-Steve