That's great news - can't hurt to be "in demand"! And if the HR lady from the last place was so awful, did you really want to work there?

The woman who is being ridiculous in work stepped it up a notch today - she described me as "having a bit of a tinge".....a TINGE?!
I felt like saying: I'm sorry, are you referring to my Korean ancestry?
I think I'll be taking a little trip to see the manager tomorrow.

A TINGE?!!!!!!

FYI - I consider myself white but regardless of where my parents are from.....you just can't say that!

Thats disgraceful Aurora.

Agreed!

I was pretty shocked to be honest...!

Agreed!

I was pretty shocked to be honest...!

Edit - sorry didn't mean to post twice....err but I guess it shows my shock!

I could really do without tonsillitis just now. Hopefully the doctor will give me antibiotics...

I chased up one of the other companies I applied to yesterday and got a call back (which fortunately I missed, all things considered). Apparently they are considering offering me a position....

... in Spain!!!

If I'd taken the call, they'd have got the full blast of my total disbelief. Germany I could understand, but Spain? I haven't spoken any Spanish in 5 years, and can barely string a sentence together. Would be awesomely exciting though.

Still, will wait and see what gets confirmed down the line.

I have spent all day writing a justification for the music teaching I do and explaining to parents that it is all going to pot in the reorganisation that the powers that be have decided to impose. I have emailed all my parents and now the replies are coming back to say some can't open the document which I wrote in Word 2010. Can anyone help? Otherwise there is going to be an explosive aaaaaggghh any minute!!!

On Word 2007 there is a "Save as Word 2003-2007" document function for those who can't open the new Word version. Is there something similar on Word 2010?

Can you save it with a different end on it. I know that if someone sends me something that ends .doc I can't open it because I have works not word. I think (don't know anything about computers) you can save as a pdf ??? Or there is another end that I can open, but I can't remember what it is, but it is something more general.

I do not have Word 2010, but you should be able to do one of the following:

1. Save as RTF (rich text format) where you might lose some of your formatting, but if it's just a letter, this shouldn't affect you too much.

2. Print to file (unfortunately I do not have Word so cannot tell you the exact dialogue - but if you select Print there should be an option to print it to PDF)

hope either of these help...

As others have said, what is the ending? I can't open word documents that end with an x. If it has an x, try changing it just to .doc

Even safer is to convert it to PDF. The last option is to copy the whole thing and paste it into the e-mail itself.

A customer who overheard got to the manager before I did... consequences = one fuming manager, one shamefaced (but still horrible, in my eyes) lady and one mortified Aurora who is currently looking for a new job!




Oh, and to top it all off... horrible lady's snide comments to the boy have totally wrecked our friendship.

I could actually cry right now.

Yes there is the option of save as previous version.....just don't include any equations.....grumbles off into another rant!

Thank you everyone for your replies about Word. I will try them out to see if I can get something to work.

Really sorry for you, Aurora. In the end it's the people who make or break a job. I'm quite unhappy in my own job at the moment, for all sorts of reasons, but the main reason I'm trying to leave is because of those I have to work alongside.

Good luck with finding somewhere new - life's too short to stay where you are made to feel uncomfortable.

Fingers crossed for you Aquarelle ! I dislike it intensely when admin + hassle get in the way of the real job.

Oh maggiemay, how true. All the time I intended to spend on preparing lesoons etc this holiday has been used up on trying just ot find ways of keeping the music school open.

On the bright side the parents have now all received and read my 6 page document and I have had several supportive replies and some have come up with interesting information.

On the aaaggghhh side the battle continues and I think it is inevitable that some children will lose out. Please continue to keep your fingers crossed!!

I'll keep my fingers crossed for you here, Aquarelle (except for when I'm playing the piano!). It sounds like you're doing sterling work, so bon courage!

Aaaaaaaaaaaaagh. My copy of the latest Pianist magazine seems to have been accidentally thrown out with the newspapers. Pity because I wanted a bash at 'Cordoba' and 'Au Lac de Wallendstat'

I can send you mine if you want, I'll have to try to find it, though!

Aaaaaaargh exams. Kick me next time I think of being so stupid.

My Tuesday has been rubbish yet again. Hm.

Don't do Tuesday next week then......

8 weeks and 1 day to go....




(Yes, I'm at the stage of counting down until I finish my degree for good. I was totally mad when I signed up for 5 years of this torture! )

Yeah I'm starting to feel like that a bit Tamsin - in my case that's twice now I've started degrees with good intentions and it's likely both of them will just have been stepping stones to the next level rather than useful in their own right.

Mind you I suspect I'm probably just feeling like this because of the staff issues I've had with my current placement - even though these have been sorted it's kind of soured me against the whole thing. That's my aaargh - I've had a good few days at home for half term, so much so that when faced with a choice between staying here or going 150+ miles back to that ^, I know which I'd rather do

I can't fault my degree for getting me a job, and setting me up for the next stage in life. I guess that's half the problem, I want to get on with it!

Doing these last few projects just feels like such a slog. Really struggling to motivate myself to sit down and churn out another few pages of 'stuff' each day. In some ways its a good thing its all group work: At least we all feel we owe it to each other to keep going.

(Only 8 weeks to go now! )

Aw 8 weeks will fly by tamsin then you won't know where its gone!

Can't even cope with 5 major and 5 minor scales....... Feel like a total fraud.

Yeah, but you're not a total fraud, are you?

Any more of that talk, and I'll go and find Nicki's pointy stick...

Aww sbhoa dont feel like that. I could never get scales at all, it always took me ages to learn them. You'll get there

The stupid thing is I DO get them....... just have this annoying block when I put the clarinet near my mouth.

You'll get there i just think my brain didnt like them (still doesnt haha) which is why it took me so much longer haha

Yes, it's taken me ages too. Some of them I "get" but theyre on autopilot so under any stress they vanish.

Then when I get the notes my staccato is very messy.

Oh well, about 6 weeks to go.........

Bags of time then......
Have you found your music?

No, not found it yet.

Latest plan is to do air clarinet scales instead of counting sheep.......

Will you sleep if you do that?...

Do you have a better idea?

For scales, or sleeping?...

Both......Not too good at either.

Not sure I can do the sleeping (I can sleep for Britain...), but the scales...er...air clarinet scales may bed things in a little more!!!

Failing that, you don't need the theory, your theory knowledge is beyond mine, but perhaps breaking scales into little bits may help...

When I first started playing scales on the oboe, I used to have to mentally visualise the piano keyboard first so I couldn't play scales "instantly". With the exception of G# melodic minor, for which I still have a mental block (but I think that is partly because I play it as 12th and not 2 octaves), my fingers now know what to do directly on the oboe without the need to see a piano.

I think you just have to be patient and do lots of repetition. In the end, I stopped trying to work on a number of scales at the same time and spent a whole week on one scale. I spent about 15 minutes a day just on one scale (playing it with lots of different articulations, different rhythms, playing up down, as well as down up, playing each note twice, three times etc. And eventually the fingering stuck. (Although you possibly don't have the time to do this if you have an exam entry coming up).

Also, I initially played C major and C minor together (because that was what my piano teacher had taught me to do) but my teacher said that for woodwind players it is better to do the relative minors because it is easier to remember the fingering that way . (I actually ignored this bit of advice - the keynote habit was too well ingrained- but you may find it useful).

Didn't find the piano keyboard thing helpful.

I built them up fairly slowly, one or 2 at a time and began with related pairs up to 5 sharps and flats.
Cut down in the last month or so to just the exam requirements for the grade.
Done rhythms, articulation, down/up and up/down. Tried starting/turning round in different places, invented different patterns but still don't have the consistency.
Trouble is I think it's sort of getting to be a habit for them not to work......

Is this a pointy stick that I own or a pointy stick you poke me with?

The latter

How do you play scales on the piano? When I was visualising the keyboard I was also seeing what my fingers were doing (quite bizarre really because in the days when I played piano scales regularly I never looked at my hands). I think the trick is in convincing your brain that the clarinet is really a piano in disguise

Have you tried playing the scale as if each note is a grace note to the next (one really fast note and one held note and the held note then becomes the grace note for the next one, so C/D, D/E, E/F etc. You can also do this without the clarinet (just moving the fingers as Barry-Clari suggests). It is supposed to imprint muscle memory on the fingers.

On piano I think the short answer is too fluently to be able to make my fingers keep up on clarinet. I usually have my eyes on one hand.

That's a new variation. I've been doing CDE DEF EFG etc (reversing on the way down) as on variation. Also where I can identify particular trouble spots I'll loop those few notes.

The problem with doing what you describe here is that your finger doesn't actually know which way it is going next. Take E, once it goes back down to D, once it goes up to F. Your brain/finger don't quite know if you're going up or down. Doing just two notes going the same way helps fix the precise order of raising and lowering fingers.

That way was an attempt to make myself more aware of where I am in the scale at any time which is what my teacher suggests should be the case. going up a bit/down a bit means that I need to be aware of the key all the time to go to the right notes.
Will give the 2 note thing a try too thanks.

I'll get there, it's not like I don't have a clue at all.

The main thing, of course, is that you find something that works for you and that solves the immediate problem of playing them in the exam.

I do use the three note pattern that you have given but only really started using it once I moved from playing scales from tonic to tonic (or 12th) to playing them over the whole range of the instruments when I need to be aware of the key all the time rather than just going onto automatic pilot. I also have a couple of other variants which include coming back down before you go back up. I find these particularly tricky for melodic minors where you are playing different notes on the way up and down.