Day 47

Date: June 30, 2011

Time: 11:09pm (PST)

Playing on iTunes: "Birdland" by Weather Report

Location: Hillsboro, OR

Recent Trip: 281 miles

There is just something weird about pulling into a school when it’s light out and having the admins say we can go to sleep for two hours. Well, that’s besides the point. We arrived at Sherwood High School around 5a and got two hours of floor time. Today was going to be our first real rehearsal day since we left Texas. Two 4-hour sectional blocks and then a normal ensemble block. Going to be a long day. But I was mentally prepared to get through it. Here we go!

So our speaker carts from last year are in pretty bad shape for what our needs are. The wheels holding up the cart keep getting bent and messed up which makes us go through multiple tires per month...not cheap. These past few days, Rebecca Conover’s(marimba player) dad came to volunteer with the corps. He’s been working with the kitchen staff, maintenance, etc. Mr. Conover has been fixing our wheels every day we’ve been here. He’ll fix one wheel and then the next day another wheel breaks. We found out that it’s actually a combination of the design of the wheel and the weight that is put on the wheels. Anyways, we’ll be getting new carts in a couple weeks so we need to make these ones last. Thank you Mr. Conover for all your help!!

Tonight the corps was asked to clean out the equipment truck. Time consuming and a little bit of a meticulous task but very necessary. We found lots of extra “stuff” that we rearranged to create extra space that we could use for useful “stuff”. Extra mics, cables, drum heads, all organized to make the truck look clean and more organized. The more organized the truck is, the less insane the corps members will go, especially the pit.

Another great event tonight was getting the drum shorts!! Just the same as the drum necklace that we received on day one, the drumline (battery, pit, and drum staff) gets drum shorts that we wear everyday and they are specifically for anyone who is in the drumline. It’s another sort of “right of passage” through the percussion section. A little history about the drum shorts is that they have been around since 1993 where they started as pit shorts. The same lady by the name of Barba has been making them every year. She sows them one by one and then ships them out to the Cadets wherever they may be (Oregon in this case). Every year they are two colors. No two colors schemes have been repeated. As you can see in the picture, each pant leg is a different color, and then the pocket on the back is also the opposite color. Then on the front left leg it says “Cadets (year) Percussion”. The section leaders of the percussion section pick the colors every year. This year the colors are sky blue and orange.

One more day in Hillsboro!

Thought of the Day: “Why do we make mistakes? Because what we do isn’t important enough to us. If something is important to us we don’t make mistakes. Make everything you do just as important as anything else you do in your life.”