Coming back after Spring Break, we have several soft deadlines to hit before the final day. Next week, we’ll be showing the final(ish) website to WBENA so that we can make edits before the presentation. The backend structure is officially set up –  we’ll still need to add the new recordings once we receive them from WBENA and some new sheet music, but the csv structure is stable. One of my two big priorities at this point is getting a dummy site set up so that we can generate a QR code for our beautiful brochure (thanks Lini and Alex!). Over Spring Break I showed Lini how to update the song CSV and generate pages in Wax and added a sample recording to our repository so we can mock up its inclusion. We also finalized our Mission Statement, finalized the brochure design, and broke out our mini research sections for the History of Women in Bandura page. We have agreed to set our expectations for this page in accordance with our time. This research is my second big priority this week.

I’m happy to be deploying the dummy site early – hopefully we can catch any bugs now and have a smoother final deployment. Wild how soon everything is coming to an end, but the pieces for this MVP are all in place – we’ve just got to sew the seams and remind ourselves to pump the brakes on adding more detail than we can handle.

Spring break brought me a little relief! I’m curious if others are feeling this, but just one little thing off of my plate opens up SO much room.

This week I played catch up.

I caught my breath, I looked at what’s ahead and I made a plan. And I was reminded that sometimes, that is enough — even if we are behind, and even if we wanted to have accomplished or completed more by now.

I’m behind on front-end development. I know this is true. I also feel confident in my ability to get our project to a good place by the finish line. I was reminded of this when I sat down to record a question to send to Tasha about the way that Wax handles page routing. In the process of explaining the thing I was trying to figure out, I talked myself in to a fuller understanding of the way Wax works. In programming, we call this “rubber ducking,” the idea being that even if you talk things out to an inanimate object, like a rubber duck, you will understand the problem in a new way.

It was a helpful reminder that solutions are often simple and, inevitably, “the work is done by doing” (which is something I read online once cited as being an Afghan proverb, a fact I’ve not yet been able to corroborate, and despite all that a mantra of mine that I often return to). The work is done by doing… even if that work happens at a slower pace or different timeline than we think it should.

I’m in awe of my teammates who have been able to be consistent in their own work and gracious with me when I have fallen short this semester. I’m not used to being the one falling short, and their empathy has been an invitation to try to return to and meet my own standards.

I’m learning a lot from this work, even if it hasn’t always felt good.

Some exciting things happened last week. I received our promotional bookmarks and also our stipend!  In regards to other items on my to do’s it wasn’t  as productive as I was hoping for. I have been adjusting my timeline to post on social media. Although according to analytics 73% of our views are from non followers.

I confirmed that one of the carousel I planned to visit doesn’t open until May 3rd, so I may have to miss one, hopefully  I can find a way to squeeze it in.  I was hoping to complete my blog but found it challenging, primarily due to me getting sick towards the end of the week. Thankfully I recovered enough to visit another carousel and watch my little one do their Easter egg hunt.

My goal for this week is to focus more time on social media, I want to post 1-2 times per week until May 13.  I need to complete My blog, and upload my data from the Conservation Carousel.

I cannot believe how quickly the end of this semester is approaching. Over spring break I finished my half of the transcription of Nadia Tarnawsky’s interview and launched our social media sites (now linked in the class notes doc). It was fun to revisit the interview with Nadia even if the manual transcription was a little tedious. We couldn’t decide how to handle the use of AI and transcription and for this interview decided we didn’t want to run the interview through AI. We are trying to schedule one more interview with either Irene (WBENA President) or Teryn (our WBENA liaison and the Concert Mistress of the ensemble) in order to round out our history portion of the website and I am not sure what we will decide to do, but time constraints may push us towards accepting AI assistance.

While I am now posting on our social media sites I am still figuring out who to connect with and how to get the word out about our project. I have had more luck with Bluesky and getting some interaction with out content through the CUNY community, mostly because I shared the project intro post on my personal page. My personal Facebook is kind of a hotbed of political discourse, so I don’t necessarily want that mixing with this project in a way that could negatively impact WBENA. For that reason I haven’t and probably won’t share the project via Facebook on my personal page, but will try to lean into WBENAs network and connections.

Spring Break is almost over, and it’s about time to get back to work on this project. I hope everyone had a rejuvenating hiatus. Basically, I worked from home, got a new Les Paul guitar, played video games, saw some old-school AJW (All Japan Women’s Pro-Wrestling) matches on YouTube, and am currently going to watch the final night of Wrestlemania. All in all, I say it was a great Spring Break for my mental health. 

Which was the reason I didn’t schedule anything for our group during the break, and that’s because we all need time to decompress by any means we see fit. I feel ready to go and coming in hot to make this final push. Shout out to all my GDPW gold members.