Day 1.2

My TD/D counterparts Halfling and Dingus have been blogging a lot about their first few days of school, and now it's my turn, somewhat. Even though I've been teaching public school for a few weeks, this was my first day of college teaching, and it was the usual zoo (you can tell things are busy when Halfling is out-blogging me so far this week *grin*), but the semester's off to a good start. I didn't have the parking problems that Dingus had up at school, and I actually got to a copy machine in time to run off my syllabi before class (sometimes, this can be a worse logjam than the parking).

Combo Too will be pretty decent this semester; I'm happy so far. We have a new bass player who's really pretty amazing (would have been in Jaztet but for a schedule conflict), and nobody was afraid to solo the first day. The presence of more serious musicians in there seems to be keeping the nonsense of some previous semesters to a minimum, which is always a good thing. There were times last semester when that group really taxed my patience, but today I left rehearsal with a smile on my face.

After "Tator Tot Time," it was on to big band, which is definitely playing some cool tunes this semester. I'm really looking forward to that, though I already miss having Halfling in the section. It was a little scary at first when we didn't have any trumpets to start off rehearsal, but most of them trickled in eventually.

After band, I took a pass on burrito night (yeah, you read that here) to go to Denton and see Halfling. Today was lab band results day, and while he got in a reading band instead of a lab band, I reminded him that an audition like that is not a defining moment--it's only a snapshot of where you are at a certain point in time. Fortunately, he took this advice to heart and was feeling reasonably ok about things by the time I got there (I'd promised him months ago that I'd be there tonight, whether for celebration or consolation). We ate at the great little hole-in-the-wall Mexican place known as Mazatlan, which I hadn't been to since my first meet-up with J-Guar (who made the 6:00, by the way--very cool) and just hung out on campus for a bit. I'll be sleepy tomorrow, but it's all for a great cause.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: "Oh no, I left my ligament at home."--A sixth-grade student of mine, who actually meant that he left his ligature at home (which is much less painful). Being the creative sort, I made him a duct-tape version of one so he could get through the class.