help! i'm in a nutshell!

I found this in the "archives" - a post I wrote but never "published". Here it is, a bit late!

On the bright side, the practice rooms at VanderCook are well-insulated for sound. We practice in a set of 8 Wenger rooms which are jammed into a larger room on the second floor. It is blissful to be able to close the door and then no longer hear the trumpet next door or the saxophone down the hall. It brings back memories of Hope, where my favorite practice rooms on the second floor were so poorly insulated that we might as well have all been standing in a room together.

On the not-so-bright side, let's just say that the practice rooms here are not exactly spacious. The rooms on the left are fairly comfortable in size, at least big enough to get in and out of without too much trouble. However, the rooms on the right are rather skinny, enough so that it is rather complicated to enter and exit in a somewhat graceful manner. Those rooms remind me of practicing in our first house in Flushing. My bedroom had a slightly lower ceiling than the other rooms in the house, and so when I would practice, my bow would actually hit the ceiling upon occasion. The small rooms here are narrow enough that if I'm not standing at just the right angle, I will bow into the wall or door as I play.

Anytime I want to watch my bowing, I turn to face the door, which is glass. The light is such that there is just enough of a reflection to serve as a mirror of sorts. As I stand in this tiny room, facing the narrow hall, I feel a bit like Han Solo, only the carbonite is clear this time around, and I don't see Chewbacca anywhere.

On a related note, the portable air conditioners they brought into room 100 - one of the big classrooms - are vaguely reminiscent of something out of Star Wars.

Hmm.... Perhaps I really have gone to the dark side.