Today we were allowed to sleep in a bit, as first formation was not held until 0800. Unfortunately the chow hall has different Saturday hours and doesn't open until 0800, so many of the students had not eaten any breakfast. (I had stocked my fridge & freezer; the more I hear about the food at the chow hall the more I'm glad that I'm not eating there.) Training was delayed by one hour to allow for chow.
Since it was raining, we set up our "outdoor" ceremony in the large rehearsal room. Just as we were getting started with the run-throughs, our instructor came in to let us know they had reserved part of the gymnasium. So we packed things back up and moved over to the recreation center. For about two hours we ran and re-ran the ceremony, with a video camera rolling on the bandmaster. About half of us (myself not included) were able to practice in front of the band.
We returned to the classroom and discovered that the chow hall was scheduled to close in 5 minutes. Again, not a big deal to me but I'm sure many of the students weren't so happy about having to eat at McD's. I needed to go to the tailor shop to have my uniform re-fitted and altered, so my lunch plan was to go down two granola bars while driving to the shop.
The fitting went OK, except the jacket can't be taken in enough from the back. So she'll take in those seams AND move the buttons. The pants will be taken in quite severely (I hope the seam in the front of each pant leg doesn't move.) Plus she noticed that the rank was too small; they were meant for a female jacket. All these things are supposed to be comleted by next Wednesday, and the damages will be $79 - ouch!
After lunch we were given time to rehearse our small groups. We finally went through our script and music without stopping, and our 9-minute performance timed out at 14 minutes. Some time would be saved if we could read off photocopies of the music, as the little German books wouldn't stay open on their own. Since the building is so sparsely manned on the weekends we had to hunt down someone with keys to the library and copy machine.
About that time we got word of a final formation to excuse the students. Next week's student leadership did an informal "hand-off" of the information and instructions, and we rehearsed the inspection sequence so we'll be better-prepared for next week's formations. After all that our group got together and actually got some rehearsal time on some of our pieces. Should be pretty fun.
Even though I'm "remote" I still needed to prepare meeting agendas and the Sunday bulletin, so I had a few phone calls to make and files to prepare and email out. I was able to watch Utah and Utah State win their conference tournament championships and then fell asleep almost immediately. (I'm writing this Sunday morning.) I'm pretty sure it was the large, stiff pillows that were keeping me up at night and have formed this crink in my neck ... the past few nights I've been sleeping on a folded towel and have slept MUCH better.
Back to work / rehearsal / practice / writing today, so the report will probably be pretty short.
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