Last week’s Pan Pacific Convention in Auckland was a whirlwind of incredible performances, heartfelt joy on stage with @baden.st and sharing tags with new and old friends. Singing with my quartet Broken Record was the ultimate highlight; I love making music with these guys. Winning national medals together was beyond what I could’ve dreamed when we started rehearsing in April this year, and it means so much to me that we brought my song Follow My Love back to the contest stage. (That part still hasn’t fully hit me yet, but I’m at least aware that we made some friends in the audience cry. 😈)
Grateful for Stella, Matt, and Angus for being amazing, Jo Oosterhoff for invaluable quartet coaching, and everyone with a passion for cool harmonies who travelled to Auckland from near and far to make Pan Pacs so great.
NMC photo dump 2/2! Five Julias, a team of door-unlocking legends, a jazzy wind quintet, a summer sky, and the joys of AirDrop. What a week.
Image/video descriptions:
1. Five young women standing in a row and smiling with their arms around each other’s shoulders, fulfilling the tradition of getting all the Julias at camp together for a photo.
2. A selfie of the three residential coordinators for week 1, Chris, Julia and Meg. They’ve had a busy week but they’re all smiles.
3. A wind quintet at the tutor chamber music concert performing onstage at Elder Hall. A small section of the audience is shown, full of camp participants snapping their fingers.
4. A summery blue sky full of cirrus clouds at St Mark’s College. To the left there’s a leafy green treetop and to the lower right there’s the top of an ivy-draped dormitory building.
5. A screenshot of the week 1 ressies’ group chat. There’s a text reading “I just got pranked. Someone changed their phone’s name to “Colin cornish” and AirDropped me this” followed by a Spongebob meme.
NMC photo dump 1/2!
I had a great time being a residential coordinator this year. I even got a little bit of sleep!
Image descriptions:
1. A smiley selfie of Julia and Justin, interstate friends hanging out in person for the first time in 3 years. They’re in jazzy patterned shirts and Justin has cool sunglasses. It’s a beautiful sunny day.
2. A late-night photo of Julia’s tiles at the end of a game of Bananagrams, on the wooden tabletop of the residential coordinators’ makeshift sign-in desk. (Julia hasn’t played Bananagrams in years and is now going to buy it because it was so much fun.)
3. A selfie of Julia grinning in front of the sign for the legendary 24-hour bakery in North Adelaide. It’s late at night and she’s evidently very very happy to be back.
Merry Christmas! 🎄
This bunch of talented musicians spent the morning (and midnight) singing carols and smashing out descants at Christ Church Claremont, and I’m very happy to have sung among them this year. Time for a well-earned January break!
To 2021, I wanna say ‘thank you’ and ‘good riddance’ in equal measure.
My year was rewarding and difficult and strange, and I didn’t share much of it on social media; it’s a balance between “it feels good to connect with other people” and “I don’t owe the algorithm any part of my personal life”. That said, I do wanna take this opportunity to share some of my favourite things about 2021.
✨Hanging out with Ziggy the dog on the couch.
✨Teaching some very sweet, very silly Year 2 violin students.
✨Finally playing Breath of the Wild and immediately falling in love with it.
✨Co-directing a Christmas chamber choir and programming some of my favourite end-of-year rep.
✨Forming a mixed harmony quartet with my friends and winning a gold medal together.
✨Getting into Dropout and binge-watching Dimension 20, which brought solace and a whole lot of laughter into some of the hardest weeks of my life.
✨My pals in the Baden Street Singers sending me a gaggle of emojis every week in response to the weekly bulletin emails I write as their secretary.
✨Playing D&D, and designing countless mini figurines in Hero Forge that I’m never going to get printed. (Here’s one of my recent designs that I’m really happy with!)
✨Doing arts admin work with my mum for Wind Quintet Plus and getting to see the results of all her creativity and dedication.
✨Mental health stuff: building up new skills, letting myself reach out when I really needed support, and learning to allow the growth and change that my younger self resisted for so long.
✨Making music, listening to music, writing music. All of it, always.
✨ Caramilk Top Deck. Ten outta ten.
Above all, I’m really grateful for the people I got to spend this year with, in-person or otherwise. I hope you had a great 2021, and I hope the coming year brings you a lot of joy. In 2022 I’m looking forward to experiencing new things, finding ways to foster a sense of community, and hearing whatever bizarre mashup the internet comes up with next.
See you next year! 🌻
