January 14, 2014
Sorry I’m a couple of days late with this update. I had the pleasure of flying to Seattle for an SCA event over the weekend and spent the subsequent Sunday evening and Monday frantically playing catchup, as one does.
Crunching the numbers from my work week from Sunday Jan. 6 to Saturday Jan. 12, I am actually a little shocked at the result.
The vast majority of my working hours for the week fall into two categories: teaching and SCA bardic. I am not even entirely sure whether to include SCA bardic as work. For me, my duties as Bardic Champion of An Tir are equal parts volunteer work, promotion of myself as an artist, and geektacular hobby. I certainly put a lot more hours into it than I would in a typical week, since I was preparing for the events of the weekend. Activities for which I was responsible included a workshop on medieval and Renaissance holiday music and a presentation of representatives of the bardic community to our new King and Queen. So the week included a lot of research, practicing, creating handouts, writing verse introductions for my bardic colleagues, and general organizing or “cat herding”. My bardic hours, or “bard-hours”, break down as follows, rounded to the nearest minute:
50 min. researching and learning a new song to share at the bardic circle
210 min. at choir practice, which included pressing my unsuspecting choirmates into service as Guinea pigs for my workshop material
367 min. in miscellaneous tasks (as described above) to prepare for the weekend
TOTAL: 627 min., or 10.45 bard-hours.
Significantly, this does NOT include packing, travel, or time spent at the event itself. I recorded 86 minutes of packing, left at 6:00 on Friday morning and got home at about 9:00 on Sunday night. Anyone who saw me at the event can testify that pretty much every waking minute was accounted for. Of course, the week in question ends on Saturday night at midnight, so if I deduct 8 hours of sleep on Friday night it brings the total to a whopping
45.88 BARD-HOURS.
Of course, this is science most inexact. Nevertheless, I would like credit for coining the term “bard-hours”, which will inevitably enter the vernacular in its time.
Of course, my bard-hours are not billable, and one has to pay the bills somehow. Here is what my teaching week looked like:
12.5 h actually teaching (billable)
1 h practicing piano, which I do to improve myself as a piano teacher
1 h spent in non-billable duties related to teaching (rescheduling and creating materials)
TOTAL: 14.5 h
A very strange week, in which no time was put into my recording projects at all (sad), but in which much bardic awesomeness was enjoyed (happy!).
This has been the second instalment in One Month in the Life of One Canadian Indie Musician. Tune in next Sunday for a different week altogether.
