Marching Contest and Other Miscellaneous Updates

Sheesh! I go for around a week without updating this thing and you people jump all over me! You know, sometimes I have to actually live my life before I can blog about it.

I'm just kidding, although this past week has been really busy. I don't think I've made it to the computer more than twice. Why, you may ask? Because this past Saturday was pre-UIL Marching Contest. This is the warm up to the main event next Monday for the actual UIL Marching Contest. In my opinion it's a good and a bad thing because you get one final run-through of all the things you need to work on with actual judges telling you where to start, but at the same time you work so hard and put so much in to just have to get yourself up and ready to go about a week later. The same principle applies to the UGA-FL game followed by the UGA-AUB game. You get yourself so hyped up for one that there is often a let-down for the other. I'm extra worried, though because we earned third place at the competition and our color guard earned the "Outstanding" award. I hope we can keep our kids focused for one more week.

I would say we've got one more game to fine tune our performance, but that's not entirely true, because it's time for one of the oldest traditions in HS football this week:

That's right! Homecoming. That means a week of trying to get our kids to stand in an arch or a heart or two columns or some other kind of sappy shape so that around 10 kids from the football team and the cheerleading squad can come down the field while we play freakin' "Beauty and the Beast" or "Can You Feel the Love Tonight" or some other kind of Disney crap ballad forty-thousand times until finally announce a winner and put the rest of the court out of their misery. Can you tell I'm ready for HS football season to be over? By the way, in case there are any of you out there who are unsure how I feel about marching season, let me be clear: I HATE MARCHING SEASON! I'm just glad I was able to get that off of my chest and can now go on with the remainder of the season which is only about another month long so long as the football team does their job of losing enough games to feel good that they accomplished some of their goals, but not enough that I have to go to anymore games!

On another, happier note:

I received Brisingr as a gift for allowing my wife to travel to Houston to help with her grandmother and mother and general clean up from the hurricane a few weeks back and finished it today. It is somewhere in the ballpark of 750 pages and I finished it in just over a week from when I got it. The worst part to me about getting new books that are a part of a series is that you are so excited to get the next chapter and then you breeze through it because of your eagerness and then you have to wait another three years for the next installment to come out. I remember reading the Left Behind books and wanting to tear my hair out because they kept continuing it. As a matter of fact, the joke in my family was that the rapture was actually going to occur before they finished the series. I did enjoy the book immensly, however and am always amazed that someone can write that much at such a young age, even if it is heavily influenced by other works of fantasy. Now I'm back to my annual reading of the LOTR trilogy until probably Christmas when I will receive another influx of books.

I think that about does it as far as updating for me for now. I had an in-service today, but I think I've said all I need to say about in-services in a previous post (http://nathan-musicalmusings.blogspot.com/2008/08/thank-lord-for-good-in-services.html). Hope everyone is well, and I'll let you know how HOMECOMING 2008 goes!