A New Year, a New Life

Wow. So much has changed in the last two months since the last time I posted. I've recently been promoted from part-time scout shop clerk to Senior Store Manager. I went from being paid 8 bucks an hour to getting a salary of $42,200 a year plus benefits. In a few months, I'm getting a $4000 a year raise. I consider myself very lucky to be put in this position, but now I'm determined not to fuck it up. As a result, I'm overworking myself. I have two full-time employees who work for me. Pearlie's brother just died, so she took a few days of bereavement leave. Tracy, a woman who's a little bitter because she's been working there for 8 years now and wasn't even considered for the promotion, has been acting like a little girl. We had a snow storm a few days ago. She gets freaked out with the littlest amount of snow or ice on the roads and refuses to come to work for two days in a row. This leaves me and my boss trying to run the scout shop by ourselves when we both of other work to get done. I'm just glad my boss was available that day to work in Seattle, otherwise I would have gotten no work done whatsoever. Other than that, work has been going pretty well. I'm getting the hang of things rather quickly and my territory manager seems to be pretty happy with my progress.

The holiday season was great. Among my favorite gifts were Final Fantasy XII, a paint set to paint miniatures, World of Warcraft the Boardgame, the new R.A. Salvatore book, and Guitar Hero. I'm also planning on purchasing a Nintendo Wii as soon as one becomes available. I have high hopes for next weekend. Costco and Target are both getting shipments in. Loki is huge now. He weighs thirteen pound and is only eight months old. His growing has definitely slowed down though. He's a sweet cat, but he likes to sleep on my head at night. That's about it in my life right now. Happy New Year everybody!

Whatever

If there's one word to describe myself from this past week, it's irritable. I believe work to be the biggest culprit. Work itself has been really slow. I'm bored when I'm there and I just wish there was more important work to be done there. To top it all off, the commute is taking between an hour and a half and two hours! I work only 35 miles from home. It's starting to drive me insane. It fills like we have no money. We just had to replace the alternator in the Saturn we I really need to take the Taurus in for a tune-up and oil change, but we just don't have the money. We had to borrow money from even just so we could pay rent. Plus, I'm seriously thinking about selling my tuba. I just don't play enough anymore to justify keeping it. I think I need to start looking for a job closer to Tacoma, but I have no idea what to look for. I wish I could think of anything more to say. Whatever.

Catching up

Well, this is the post I've been promising. Me and Rena are living in Tacoma now with her brother, Evan. It's a nice, small house that costs us $850 a month, which is pretty cheap. I'm working at the Scout Shop in Seattle currently. A full time position with benefits is opening up in a month or few, so I'm hoping I get that. If not, I'll look for work elsewhere.

The summer went really well. Two days before camp started, we still didn't have a Business Manager, so I became it. Andrew, who was going to be my assistant, became the Program Director and he did a pretty good job. No one got fired this summer, which is always great. My Trading Post Manager quit on the very last day. What a dick. Oh well, with my closing evaluation on him, he will not get a job at camp again... Hopefully.

Me and Rena got a kitten a few months ago. His name is Loki and he's obviously not a kitten anymore. And pretty soon he won't be a man anymore; once we get more money. He is mostly black with tan tiger stripes on his sides and leopard spots on his belly. Other than that, we're mostly just getting settled into our lives in Tacoma. And now it's time to cook dinner.

Greek Easter

I just got back from California today because of Greek Easter. My parents, me, and Rena went down for a week. Actually, I was two days traveling, three days with family, and then two more days of traveling. Long road trip but good times were to be had. On the way down, we visited my sister and brother-in-law. We played this card game called Munchkin that was awesome. (And that I ordered online today for myself). It was good seeing a lot of my family even if I didn't really know most of them. For you guys who don't know, my family is incredibly large and crazy. Watch My Big Fat Greek Wedding and you'll get the picture I'm trying to paint. We stayed in Novato which is just north of the Bay Area. (San Francisco for my peeps in Kentucky). Tomorrow, Rena and I are gonna visit her family and we will be going back up to camp on Friday. Cub Day is this weekend and I will be wanting to hang out with some of the other staff members. That's about out. Bye.

I'm finally done

Well, I've finally graduated from college. I now have a BA in Music and am ready to move on with my life. For those who are interested here are my grades from this quarter:

Tuba Lessons: A
Senior Recital: A
Symphonic Band/Concert Band: A
Survey of Opera: B
Survey of 20th Century Music: A
Ballroom/Swing Dance: A

Not too shabby. I'm always happy to pull off a 3.8 in a quarter. Here are the grades I give my teachers:

Tuba Lessons/Senior Recital: A-. Although Curtis is great, I wish he was more experienced.
Symphonic Band/ Concert Band: B-. He made the tubas play in both band and consistently let us out late.
Survey of Opera: B+. Although I hated the subject, she did a pretty good job at making it bearable. I think the tests were a bit too hard for the few of us in there that didn't have any opera experience.
Survey of 20th Century Music: A. Great teacher, okay subject, true Sinfonian. 'nough said.
Ballroom/ Swing Dance: F+. Horrible teacher. Had no lesson plans that I could notice. Unorganized. Waste of time. She consistently started late and let out early and she only spent a class and a half on swing while spending nine classes on foxtrot and waltz. Stupid Dumb Bitch.

But at least I'm done. Rena and I are moving up to camp in a week. There is not internet there so I'll be posting about as much as I usually do. I hope everyone had a great spring break.

Towards the end...

I had my senior recital a couple of weeks ago. My program was the following:

Tuba Concerto by Edward Gregson
Adagio from "The Limpid Stream" by Dmitri Shostakovich
The Wonderland Duets by Raymond Luedeke
When We Were Giants by Jonathan Green
From the Shores of the Mighty Pacific by Herbert L. Clarke

The whole recital took just about an hour, which was perfect. I was very pleased with my performance, and I was very happy to have been able to play the Wonderland Duets. I got the music to it nine days before my performance. Me and Chris Mills had to scramble to get our music rehearsed adequately by that time.

So my friends from the west side came over for the weekend which meant lots and lots of Dungeons and Dragons. Rena played with us too and she had a great time. Afterwards, she purchased both of us a D&D t-shirt off the internet. I now have I shirt that says, "Carpe DM: Seize the Dungeon Master." I love it.

The quarter is coming to an end and with it the end of my college career. Just three more days of classes and two finals left. Wow. I have a four-page paper that I have to start today because it is due tomorrow morning at 8:30. Eek! But that's my last assignment and I'll be happy to be done with it.

Rena and I are moving out of Ellensburg the first week of April and moving up to camp. Steve is letting us live in the Big Brown House (a large cabin) for a great price of $50 a month for rent. We are ecstatic about that. The only thing I'm not excited about moving is the actual moving. We're going to rent a storage unit in Monroe to store of our crap for the summer. That's about all; I still can't believe I'll be graduated in a week and a half. I'll post again after that.

Tuba symposium

I went to the Northwest Tuba/Euphonium symposium on Saturday. It was pretty awesome. However, I did not get much sleep this weekend because of it. I woke up at 5 am and we left at 5:30. The symposium was at Eastern which is in Cheney. This means it is in the butt-fuck of nowhere. We showed up at about 9:00. There were players from Central, Eastern, UW, WSU, Oregon, and Idaho there. The coolest part was me getting a free half hour lesson with Chris Olka. He's not only the principle tubist of the Seattle Symphony, but also a Sinfonian. Really good guy and a great tuba player. All of the faculty members gave a recital at the end of the day. It was bitchen. It was a long drive home. I got back at my apartment at about 1:15 in the morning. And then I had to wake up for work seven hours later. But that's another post...