Anyways, today was what I'd classify as a productive, wasted day by all accounts. Eating the leftover salmon tortellini stuffing spread on toast 2 nights ago for a late dinner came back to bite me starting yesterday evening and I still went to Whiskey 101 at Stellas (a Whiskey tasting "course" every Tuesday night at my favorite local haunt on College Ave). I then followed that up by eating a big dinner with a slice of deep dish pizza with artichoke hearts, feta cheese and spinach and a less delicious 4th topping of broccoli (it just didn't mesh with the textures and flavors of the rest) with about 1/3rd of a pitcher of Cascazilla beer.
Probably not the best decisions, but it was all in support of local business for what it was worth. The Whiskey 101 tasting this week was hosted by Brian McKenzie of the Finger Lakes Distilling Company, an up-and-coming local distillery about 30 minutes from Ithaca on the east-end of Seneca Lake. He brought an unfinished 1-year-old whiskey which had potential, followed by an off-the-market wheat whiskey, a rye and a bourbon. The McKenzie Rye was by far my favorite, but that's not surprising. The sweet spicy mixture of a good rye, I often liken to a good curry or a sweet chili sauce, depending on the rye. The experience was pretty positive on the whole and my friend Ryan and I make a soft resolution to visit and taste at the distillery at some point. The bar manager Greg, who I've become friends with through these tastings, was also quite pleased. As a grad student in the Plant Sciences department, he seems to have a good rapport with the lab-types who often frequent the bar.
Regardless, it left me exhausted and still suffering from what was probably mild food poisoning when I woke up this morning. Instead of forcing myself to work, since my car was up on the Hill, I stayed in bed since it was a balmy -5 when I woke up at 6:45am. The result was that I tried to force myself back to to sleep until I woke up at 10:00am and saw my research professor's email about a 10:00am meeting to discuss the usage of our fresh off the sequencers genomic data for some D. melanogaster lines that I have been managing. Since I was still feeling ill, I didn't bother even trying to shower and race to campus (showing up late to the meeting might have just been awkward) so I just gave up and made it up in time to meet with my sister for lunch at 12pm where we discussed her interview for her two interviews this week - at Goldman Sachs and CitiGroup. After that I met with my housemate April to go over her speech for VP of the Cornell Chorus, which just inspired me to get back into Glee Club work.
First I started by remembering my desire to commission a "Chariot" song for the Glee Club. A Chariot song is a song sung at Glee Club "Chariot Nights" on Wednesday nights after 7:30-9:30pm rehearsals. The name Chariot is a reference to a bar called the Chariot that used to allow the Glee Club to occupy the space every Wednesday, located at the T-intersection of Eddy Street and Dryden Road. The events are a quintessential part of the Glee Club experience, in my opinion, and different iterations of the weekly tradition have gone back decades in CUGC history. At the event, we usually sing classic Glee Club songs, traditional Cornell songs, but also 3 "Chariot Songs" which are affectionately called "Itsy Bitsy Spider," "The Freshmen Up at Yale" and "Fireman." The former two make fun of the other Ivies, while the latter is a drawn out innuendo to make fun of a Glee Clubber who has a sister. For a few years that has been me (on and off) since my sister has been at Cornell for the past 2.5 years including a semester in the Chorus. While these songs usually cross a line in vulgarity, the spirit of them is a raucous college spirit that I'd love to capture in a new song. My thought is that it is definitely time for such an event, so I contacted the current Assistant Director of the Glee Club, Jesse Jones - a graduate student in music composition at Cornell University to see if he'd be interested. I'm waiting to hear on that ...
But that was just the beginning. I then drew out a long e-mail with my plans for the use of the photos and musical recordings of the Glee Club to put on the website and make available to our alumni. I've started getting some positive responses from the several alumni I emailed about the topic, so hopefully that will get going. For now I've got to make a proper photo album for the tour.
I then took care of some Hangovers tour things - I've still got to send out an $11,000 check to American Airlines for our flights and then pay for a few things in the UK, but things are shaping up well.
I contacted my old HS, New Trier to ask about a concert there for the Glee Club next January and also discovered something cool - my old newspaper sponsor, Tim Dohrer, had become Principal, which I suppose could help our cause for bringing the CUGC to New Trier - one of my many unrealized goals for the CUGC so far.
I also sent a long e-mail about Glee Club tour to John Nicolls, a particularly stern power-alumnus who I've had an up-and-down relationship with, depending on the context (Glee Club vs. Hangovers). I expressed a pretty strong interest in helping with the Midwestern Tour next year and cited my outreach to New Trier, as well as my outreach to the CSO (Chicago Symphony Orchestra) with the hopes of getting a rental rate. The rate itself was too high and the 2000+ seats too large, but the idea of going for a high-profile venue was made clear and I also apologized again on behalf for the Hangovers - something I had little to do with, but was being roped into by affiliation. Despite the significant improvement, the negative sides of being the Hangovers have been made clear to me again (then again I've enjoyed many of the benefits, so I can't complain too much).
After that, I finally was contacted by the *new* Outreach Coordinator for the IHA who contacted me back about organizing fundraising for their organization, after the old outreach coordinator Betsye had been somewhat difficult to meet with. And we may have now just set a meeting time.
All in all, a productive day out of a wasted one, but I should be careful with old fish, even old fish I've made ... even if it was part of a delicious Salmon Tortellini with a Wild Mushroom Sauce, served with mixed, spiced vegetables. I'll put up a recipe for that at some point ...
[And look at that, not such a short post after all]
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