Memory Day: Snapshots

This picture was taken 14 years ago, in April 2003 and provides a nice time capsule into my life as a music grad student in Tallahassee.

On the top shelf is my Marching Virginians 4-Year Mug, that I kept loose change in (to feed meters around town). To the right are all of the Windows installation disks that still only existed in 3.5" format, and farther right are two giant spindles of blank CDs for burning music from the Florida State music library (in order to pass the really awful PhD listening exam where you had to correctly identify 24 songs out of a pool of several hundred hours of music).

The second shelf contains empty CD cases to hold burned CDs. In the middle is my newly-defended Masters Thesis, Labyrinth, and on the far right is a sculpture of a polar bear at a waterfall. My apartment at the time was decorated wholly with recital posters and high school art projects.

On the bottom shelf is my Peter Spencer music theory textbook, an instruction manual for a Roland Sound Canvas that I used to record MIDI versions of my compositions, and the instruction manual for Cool Edit Pro (the go-to solution for audio recording before Adobe bought and shat on everything). Next are the first two books in the Janny Wurts Wars of Light and Shadow series, which is the only pleasure reading I brought along to Tallahassee from home. Since then 6 more have been published, and the next one comes out on October 1!

In the middle of the bottom shelf is Booty, probably eyeing some mouse toy that she just threw across the room. To the right is a box of envelopes for snail-mailing my undergraduate friends, a companion fiction book to the TV show, Alias (which was the best show on TV until it wasn't), and then two giant binders full of personal music CDs, heavy on Dave Matthews and Kansas.

Booty also hated this sightsinging textbook, as did everyone else in academia at the time: