Here is some stuff I've been up to lately.

Jobs and Such

Reading Corps

I am about to start my fifth week working in a PreK classroom for the Minnesota Readng Corps. I've really been enjoying it so far, and I hope to write more about it soon.

Other Employment

I've quit working at Macy's, I still haven't gotten the money that the coffeeshop Jerabeck's owes me, and I'm done finishing up painting a house my brothers did most of over the summer.

Writing

A friend asked me to coauthor an article with her on pornography for the Macalester Weekly, so I did.

Arts

BareBones

I recently sang in the choir for the mass-volunteer production Barebones Halloween show Metamorphosoup. This show has been a lot of fun, and the music was pretty good, too. I got to meet some new and interesting people in the choir, and also sing with a couple of old friends. I even spent much of last night (Saturday after the last show) loading and unloading hay bales. All in all, highly recommended. NPR also did a little snippet about the show.

One of the songs in the show was sung as a call and response, and it's been rattling around my head all today so I thought I'd make a small recording.

Other Stuff

I had my first rehearsal with The Gregorian Singers last week. I think it went well, but it's difficult to say. I am on probation with the group; that is, the director is basically giving me an extended trial to see how I do. More on that when a decision is made.

Auditions for this years [GSVLOC] production are next weekend! I'm not sure yet if I will audition, but I did enjoy the production last year, and this year they are doing HMS Pinafore. Should be good.

Computery Things

I finally decided to get an Amazon Web Services account, which includes a free year of a small amount of VPS services. I've used that free machine to set up an Owncloud instance to which I sync my phone for calendar and contacts.

Speaking of my phone, for the past three weeks or so I haven't had my phone synced to Google services. I've been trying to use only open source software on the phone, with a few exceptions. I still use GMail for now, and I haven't worked out how to set up an email server properly yet.

As I write this I am updating my desktop from OpenSUSE 13.1 to 13.2, which requires the changing of 2721 packages on the system. I hope everything installs properly. I really should be making backups right now.