Day 5

Date: May 19, 2011

Time: 11:57pm

Playing on iTunes: “Solsbury Hill" by Peter Gabriel

NO RAIN!! Today was the first clear and sunny day of spring training. It was a great start. We had to take all the instruments out of indoors and dry them down from the day before. Let me tell you something...Absorber drying clothes are the greatest thing invented. Shamwows work alright, but Absobers, I just can't even start to explain how well they dry everything. 

Today was Nate's birthday. Here is him with his birthday glasses on!

On another note, we were able to sleep in until 11a because the night before we were all up until 3a getting votes for the Chase Community Giving Campaign. We reached our goal of 1,000 from midnight to 3a. And right now we just finished ANOTHER 3 hour Facebook block trying to get more votes in order for YEA! (Youth Education in the Arts) to win $500,000 to give to high school music programs around the country. We reached our goal of 5,000. There are some random pet and animal abuse awareness organizations that are coming close to us but we just blew them out of the water. We have 3 more days of this round and if we continue to stay in first place we will receive the $500,000 prize. 

But actually, come to think about it, I didn't actually sleep til 11a. For some reason I woke up at 8:30 and couldn't go back to sleep so I decided to arrange some music for the Basketball pep band (Hoop Band) at UMass. Had a few cups of coffee between 8:30 and 11a though which really got me going for the day.

Not much different happened during rehearsal as far as learning music than previous days. Iain Moyer (pit instructor) did give us a little lesson on how to crash cymbals correctly (on the left). But today was a special day for the corps. They released to the public in a live feed about their new uniforms. It's the first time the uniforms have been changed as far as the look of them (mostly just the color). In the live feed, they revealed the new uniforms, played some of the show, and talked about the Chase Champaign with everyone. From what my dad said there were some technical difficulties at the beginning of the broadcast but it got better and finished off pretty well. This was very big and important news for drum corps. Today was also a very important day for myself because I found out that I passed all of my classes from spring semester and my wrist is getting much much better.

So let's pray for no rain tomorrow and for the rest of the summer (here's for hoping)!

Quote of the day: "Never give up, you never know what you can do until you try."