Practice Does Not Make Perfect... Only Perfect Practice Makes Perfect

We're sitting on the bus, waiting to go to our first competition.  It's raining.  Ugh, I've never performed in the rain before.

The rehearsal actually wasn't too bad.  I was complimented on my marching style in the third part moving to the diagonal.  My shoulders were terrible, and people told me so, but no one can go through a rehearsal on competition day without being yelled at.  We were told during warm up to think of one thing we were going to focus on, and I chose to focus on shoulders.

I've had a couple of competition day jitters.  I forgot to take my Dinkles out of my uniform bag like we were supposed to.  Also, I freaked out since I thought I forgot my gloves.

Apparently, we're the first band to perform in our division.  I think we'll do okay, like in the middle.  My drum line friend feels uber confident, but the drum line needs to listen to each other.

I feel really bad for a clarinet in my grade.  She hurt her knee or ankle recently, and our directors made her march in practice

Afterwords:
We're done performing, and know we're watching another band.  Overall, the performance was pretty good. I was fighting exhaustion.  My calves hurt.  I didn't make any errors too large, mostly not quite dressing perfectly.  Apparently, something weird happened with the ballad beginning.  Something like we didn't know the counts between the opener and the ballad, and we were losing steam as the show went on.  My marching band mentor, now drum major, said she thought it was good.  One judge, at the big moment, said that it was very good.  Maybe it was the acoustics, but it sounded like we fell apart at some places.

After Awards:
We got second place out of fifth.  Percentage wise, we did better last year.  There were only five bands in our division, and last year there were eleven.  We were kind of upset.

We had a cheering war with the band next to us.  They were the band that beat us.  It was a lot of fun.

When we got to the football game, which was changed to Saturday and frustrated us, we were told by one of our drum majors and out band director that some of the football players were excited that we showed up.  I want to know if they were serious or sarcastic.  Probably sarcastic, although there are probably some football players that actually enjoy having the band there.  It seems like many of the players a cocky.

So that was my really busy Saturday, and now I'm tired.