Sunday, November 24, 2024

St. George’s College (Week #88) – Day #407

Date for Entry: (Sunday 24 November 2024)

Actual Date of Online Entry: (Saturday 30 November 2024)

[T1, W:12 – WD:56, (Td:X)*].

Dear Diary,

    This morning I went to work in the library instead of going to the service. I did not have a steelband performance today. I decided to work on practical questions for the textbook. My time there was done until 9:30 as usual. Ria didn't come and I had forgotten to call her that night. We had steelband practice starting with my arrangement from 2022 of "Away in a Manger".

    The problem was smooth rolling from the tenors. He went into an exercise that was quavers for 4 bears and then semiquavers for 1 beat. Then he moved on to his "Carol of the Bells", which was the last song. The problem with this one was staying on time with everyone. The session was long and very tiring. I was hungry when I got back home.

    Decided to stay like that for the whole day. Daddy ended up misplacing the keys. I packed up some work to do. The dark clouds were already packed in the sky and he was wondering if they would cancel the practice today. I texted Miss and she was in church still. Mr Marcelle was going to be slightly late.

    I decided to go and if no one was there I would still do my. Work on the laptop at school. We had a short wait for a short shower and were then out to Curepe. I went onto a bus that was waiting.* The road was very scary just yesterday with an empty road and because of this, the arrival to Sixth Avenue was quick. I almost got hit by a car on the road.

    Entering the compound, a dog started to bark at me. The guard was wondering why they were doing that and after our chat, we were wondering if it was their mating season too with their behaviour. I went to collect my laptop and then moved down to the music room. She said that everyone here for practice was already down in the music room.

    Only four section leaders were in the room with Mr Marcelle. He was checking and making inserts. I stood with them keeping the pulse with the toc-toc. We found that 1 PM reached up on us quickly. Slowly the rest of the attendees were coming in. They worked on the section just before the verse for a long.

    At some point, Mr Marcelle sent me to the next room before the drill practice commenced to make sure they had everything alright and then to help teach three of the tenors the first portion of the verse. The new part was not added with the rest of the band.

    Maybe Sir had ideas to take the music in a new direction. There was difficulty with reading the syncopation written in cut-time. I had to transcribe the bar into crotchet beats and then use the closed-gate style of writing to understand what to tell the children. It was written in shorthand-like notation from Roberts and also opened-gate.

    Toward the last part of the practice, he had put me in charge of drilling the band while he went to speak to the persons assisting with the concert outside. The same thing was run three times and then from Da Capo. It was recorded in the regular slow tempo and made it to 6 minutes. But I was concerned about the 'a tempo'. I would admit that I did not get time to listen to the original song on YouTube as yet. It was nice of Sir to send me the updated score.

    When practice was over a lot of the children were already on their way home. The sky was worse than yesterday and the quadrangle was filled scarily. I had never seen the school as a temple of water before. Me, Jess, Mr Marcelle and Mel were kept back waiting for the rain to over along with four students. At 5:55 the rain had calmed and two boys and I walked up to the bus route. They left before me but we took the same maxi.

    Seems like the rain moved up Curepe. I was soaking wet after running for shelter under the terminal, or maybe I should say the smokers' hub of all nasty kinds. That night, I finished the painting that took me three nights to do ().

    I got three more done before going to the computer to work for the night. Jess was asking me to copy and paste something into a letter but I realised she had given me some ingredients for the letter and wanted me to write it. I messaged back admitting that I didn't know how to do it. We planned for her to do the letter tomorrow and I work the Form 4s tomorrow while they do an ABRSM Grade 3 past paper.

    I worked on journal entries too. I ended up bringing the laptop home with me to get what I had typed out last week Friday. Sadly, the entry for the Monday of that week was not saved. I will have to type it back over tomorrow. I took note of the entries to work on tomorrow. Before I ended the night, painted two more images on Facebook. I couldn't make it anymore and had to fight to make it to the bed again. Where did the weekend go?

 

Daryl Zion M. Ali

(11:40 am – 5:55 pm)

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