Pictures of Australians I paid to take pictures with me...

The guy above, Matt, is one of 6 people in my program. He's a damn good percussionist and we're playing a piece together by Tania Leon (a Cuban-American composer).

This is me and Ross, a clarinetist in the program. He's also really good.

This is Pat, a bassist (electric, not acoustic) and Chris, a violinist. They're also awesome. Interestingly enough, we recently discovered that 4 out of 6 of us have birthdays within a week of each other: Chris-March 28, Me-March 29, Naomi (not pictured)-March 30 and Pat-April 2.

All of the above pictures are from our weekly, "Tuesday-after-class-go-get-a-beer" outing. It was the first Tuesday outing actually, where 1 beer turned into many, many beers. Halfway through the night, we drunk-dialed Cory (it was 5:30 am in Madison) and I ended up walking 5 kilometers home. I'm going to read this paragraph several times before I decide to sent it to my poor mother.


These are my lovely roommates, Angela and Marco,

and my birthday present from them, including a homemade card, awww. Angela, from Melbourne, is a fabulous artist and dancer, and is currently in a masters program studying art therapy. Marco is from Brazil and finishing a doctorate in computer science.

These pictures are from my birthday when we drank a bottle of champagne, and then went and ate lots of tapas, and then came back and drank another bottle of champagne. If you didn't already know this, graduate school=drinking. We could probably make it go full circle.

graduate school=drinking
graduate school=wondering if it would be better to just get 9-5 job
9-5 job=drinking
9-5 job=wondering if it would be better to just go back to school
graduate school=drinking

I think that sums up 95% of the people reading these blog updates.