Category: MMTA (Page 1 of 2)

Sorry I didn’t get a chance to post yesterday and today’s post will be brief… everyone got sick over the weekend.  Josiah was throwing up one night, then Chloe got a fever that hung on for 3 days, Maddie developed a nasty cough and mucus gunk, and then Tim caught what Josiah had.   Somehow I’ve managed to steer clear of everything (knock on wood!) so far.  I REALLY, really, really, really, don’t want to get sick over my contest weekend.  I guess time will tell!

I’ve been working on time change requests and cancellations for students today.  Every change I need to make has to be updated in 7 spots.  And I made 18 changes today.  So that means I made… let’s see… 18 times 7… um… well, A LOT of changes!  (Math was never my strong suit).  The good news is that they can only request time change until Thursday night and then I close the books and say “NO MORE!”  So that means only two more days of chaos!  Yippie!

Well, I picked the worst day to plan to drive to the U of M to test all the pianos for contest.  Not only did I need to get there by 8:30, which puts me smack dab in the middle of rush hour traffic… but it was AWFUL driving weather.  The snow and slush and heavy traffic made me have to literally peel my fingers loose from my steering wheel when I finally got there.  I heard there were some terrible accidents this morning and I am so incredibly grateful that I was able to get there and back safely.  Driving downtown stresses me out.   Yuck!

Yup.  We’re officially less than 2 weeks out from contest now.  Things are coming together slowly but surely.  I had my first volunteer days held here at my house yesterday to get the results mailing ready to go after contest.  I have one more next Sunday where we clean out all the old folders from last year and get all the little details prepped for contest weekend.  I’m amazed that it used to take us FOUR volunteer days to do what I can now get done in just TWO.  And it feels so amazing to have all the details put in place and organized again.  The longer I do this the better I am at putting things away in a way that makes them super simple to set up for the next year.  I also make lists of what I’ll need to order and do differently next year as I wrap up this year.  All those little details makes my life WAY less stressful around contest season than it has been in years past.

Oh!  And I’m super excited because daylight saving does NOT fall on contest weekend this year!  Yippie!  That makes my life sooooooo much better.  🙂

The only real worry I have for this year is simply my exhaustion and fatigue now that I’m getting more pregnant.   I was on my feet for 5 hours yesterday stuffing envelopes and my lower back really hurts this morning.  So, I’ll just have to be careful with making sure I sit once in a while on contest weekend.  And I’ll need to remember to wear comfortable shoes!

I realized in all my chaos I forgot to tell you all how my students did.

I had 26 start in preliminaries.

12 passed to finals:

•   4 are non-winners
•   4 are alternates (so they could be called if a spot opens)
•   4 are winners!

For someone who likes even numbers and order this bodes well with me.  🙂

I’m still putting out fires today from teachers getting the wrong results and disgruntled parents not happy with the results, etc.  But I figure by tomorrow things will finally be settled down.  At least everyone I’ve talked with today has been very pleasant.

In other news–it’s quite beautiful outside today.  Which is nice since it’s officially the first day of Spring!  Whooo hooo!  Tim isn’t clinging to the hope that he’ll be able to start on April 1st like normal though… at this point there is still quite a bit of snow to get melted and then the ground has to thaw.  But it’s nice to be able to walk to the mailbox without needing boots and mittens and a hat!  😉

The contest judging days are officially over, but now we move onto the tedious task of “grading” all the students.  That means we have to stamp all the critiques that are winners and tabulate the results and record/assign the duet parts for the Honor’s concert in June… and most importantly put all the right critiques in all of the teachers envelopes to be mailed.  We’ll be spending all day at the MMTA office working on that today.

I’m exhausted.  I left when it was dark yesterday and got home when it was dark.

Almost done!

Yup, it’s that one day that’s a command again!  March 4th.  🙂

And today I feel like I need to power through with contest stuff… this year has been eerily quiet as I’ve been getting geared up, which has been really nice.  I know part of the reason is because the longer I do this the easier it gets.  I know what steps I can start earlier, and shortcuts, and who my dependable people are, etc.

But this year is also the first year we’ve switched to doing the whole finals schedule via computer system scheduling.  And for the MOST PART it’s worked like a charm.  Except for this really annoying glitch that we’ve discovered that accidentally schedules a non winning student into the final and somehow takes out a winning student.  It’s the strangest thing… and I know it’s a computer glitch because it’s too specific and random to be human entered.  Either way, it’s making my life a nightmare right now. For every accidental entry I have to go through my six piles of separate folders/paper and eliminate that student and then I have to figure out a way to add in the student that should have been there the whole time… again back into the six piles of folders/papers.  So for every phone call like that I end up making 12 tedious corrections.  Every time the phone rings or I get a new email I silently cringe…

Ah, well.  It goes with the job, right?  🙂