Good News, Bad News

Well, the marching band did fantastic yesterday at Carthage in their 'class', taking best hornline, best auxiliary, and 'best in class'. The best in class automatically make it to the finals. But that also means the best in class of the other ones make it also, which includes the larger bands. But even with all 4 of the largest bands making it, I thought we still had a pretty good chance of placing in the top 5.

Well, for some reason, we got 7th place out of 8th in finals. I guess the Judges saw things we didn't see; I really thought we had at least 5th or 6th place nabbed. And the weather couldn't have been nicer.....light rain....winds of around 15MPH...temp around 55....then the rain stopped...the wind increased to around 25MPH...and the temp dropped to around 45. This was all by 6PM!!! At one point during a performance a big gust of wind came through and I thought the tubas were going to fall over. Then I thought I saw Toto flying by. Oh well...that's the ups and downs of marching band competition!!

This week we play at the football game on Friday, then head to Rolla for the Route 66 Band Festival. The only bad thing about this one is that there are no 'pre-lims'; you play once and they pick the winners from that one performance only. You are separated into 'classes', and we are in a class with the big schools like Ozark, Nixa, Willard, etc. And we don't play until 6:45 pm, with the awards not until 9:45 p.m. The neat thing is we get to see the Univ of Missouri/Rolla's band perform as well. So it will make for another LOOONNGG day!! Let's just hope that the weather stays nice for THIS one and perhaps we won't freeze as bad either. Last year...it was like it was yesterday...so maybe this year will be flipped-flopped.

We get our new coffee machine at work tomorrow....most exciting thing that's happened around there since we started ordering stir-sticks.