Only 3 weeks to go until graduation and I get to see my guys again!! Today was a pretty good day. We started the day off with 2 hours of MIDI. We’re done with all our homework assignments and so we were able to work on our projects. Well, I only had about 10-15 minutes worth of stuff to finish up on mine, so I spent the rest of the time working on my Rock Report on The Beach Boys. I got it about 3/4 done, so that’s a good thing. After that was 2 hours of Rock, but it was split and we had an hour of Ops in the middle. I don’t know why it was scheduled that way, but I’m sure they had their reasons. We had homework due for Rock today, too, but it wasn’t a graded assignment. We had to put together a set list of 8 tunes for our “Large Pop Music Ensemble” and our target audience being the 20-25 year old soldier. Well, I don’t listen to Rock music, and despite our web resources we were given, I couldn’t put anything together yesterday when I was working on this. I didn’t just want to take the names of 8 songs that I’ve never heard of before, so I went a different route and put together 8 songs from years past – things like La Bamba, Born to be Wild, Brown-Eyed Girl, My Girl, etc. Then we also had to come up with a roadmap for one of the pieces, as if we were going to teach it to our ensemble. I did mine on Brown-Eyed Girl. SFC Cooke (our Rock instructor) was impressed with what I put together.
After lunch I had my weekly lesson, and we sightread duets the whole hour. It was a lot of fun, and a nice break from my solo. Then we had a presentation on a new music technology thing where music is in a computer thing and then that becomes your music stand. It’s pretty neat, but REALLY expensive, and not completely practical yet (in my opinion). I can see where it would be nice, but I think I’ll just stick with paper music for now. Then we had a little bit of small group time, and our group sightread through my MIDI project – Fun, Fun, Fun by The Beach Boys. It sounded really neat with flute, clarinet, bassoon, trombone, and marimba. The trombone is the lead vocal, flute & clarinet are the backup vocals and also take on the guitar solo in the middle, and the bassoon and marimba are the rhythm. I only had one note issue (had a flat where a natural should have been) and I had a request from the bassoon player for some cue notes and courtesy accidentals. That was an easy fix once we got back up to the classroom, and I did that after our safety briefing.
A group of us went out to dinner, including the family of one of our classmates. We went to Chili’s and had good food and great company. These evenings out are a nice change of pace from my usual microwaved dinners. Once I got home, I called Ryan and talked to him and Robbie (he was up late) for a little while, and then settled into my stitching and TV.
Off to bed now to get some sleep before my day off tomorrow – 4 day weekend for President’s Day. I’ll be heading to my stitching friend Robin’s house for the weekend, so I’ll be back to report on Monday.
Overnight low: 44
Today’s high: 69
armytbonegirl 