amylicious! : orchestra

Diggin' it.

amyh — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 04:34:00 GMT

Hahahahaha I lied. It's technically Sunday. BUT AT LEAST IT'S NOT NEXT WEEK. Right? Right!

But now I have more to blog about! Right? Right!

So let's see.

Mr. Juniata. Ohhhh Mr. Juniata. Beauty pageant but for guys, to put it simply. My CWS lab leader, Blake, and another classmate from my CWS, Kyle, were both participants, so a few of my classmates and I sat together to form a cheering section. Blake won Mr. Juniata — we were very proud, to say the least! He was really into the opening group dance (like, crazy into it, haha — so amusing, so wonderful), and his talent was breaking out the piano and performing Billy Joel's "Uptown Girl." Absolutely amazing. He definitely deserved the win! I'd go into more details, but my mind is kind of drained right now. Sorry folks! Ha!

Today, I pretty much hung out with my roommate Brittany, and our friends Mollee and Lyndsey. I wrote out some notes for an essay I have to write (plan on holing up in the library for a while tomorrow!) in an effort to be productive, but mostly we just sent a lot of flair to each other (Pieces of Flair on Facebook? Oh my goodness, I'm addicted!) and joked around a lot. We watched Pride & Prejudice, got food, laughed maniacally (and Lyndsey always seems to make me crack up when I'm eating — I swear, that girl is going to kill me someday). Lyndsey also began educating Brittany and I on the Pittsburgh Penguins. We're kind of impressionable, and she's absolutely obsessed. But it should be fun, having bonding time over sports, haha.

Tomorrow I have the history picnic to attend — I'm hoping it's fun! These are people I'd like to get along with for the next four years. After all, I'll be having a ton of classes with them!

This past week has actually been really lovely. On Monday night, I was freaking out about my Sixties class on Tuesday, because that class has managed to freak me out a lot lately. A lot of it is dependent on participation, and of course I freeze up and freak out and have such issues speaking up, so I've been a little bit anxiety-ridden. But after my classes on Tuesday, I met with my advisor (again: coolest guy on the planet) and he gave me some advice on speaking up, participating, etc. After that, I felt pretty good, because not only did I actually speak up to someone about anxieties, but I took the advice that he gave me to heart, really thinking about it and making myself work towards certain goals and such — and, okay, also because my advisor is just too cool to not cheer me up.

Wednesday, I was worried about violin and orchestra — but they both went surprisingly well, too. Oh, and I got my first Astronomy exam back that day — A-, yes! And on Thursday, I spoke up in class, which was invigorating. I was really pleased with myself afterwards. Then, in CWS lab that night, we got our last journal entries back and I had gotten a check-plus-plus on mine. It made me happy :)

All in all? I'm really digging it here. Sure, I'm now worried about this next week — I have to write an essay about public opinion in 1964 and then present it to the class on Tuesday, ack ack ack! — but I'm also finding that situations never turn out as horrible as I fear them to be. It's that fear I have to work through, not the situations themselves. (Here I am, echoing the journal entry that got me that extra plus. Zing!) And it's pretty much just this essay and presentation that are freaking me out (and, oh crap, just remembered another essay rough draft I have due on Thursday! Drat!). I plan on getting the first draft of this 1964 essay written tomorrow, though, so that I can drop into my professor's office on Monday and chat with him about it. Hopefully it'll go smoothly.

Also: fall break next week! October 4th through 7th! I'm not sure exactly what I'll be doing over break, as I'll be stuck up here while many of my friends go back home. But Brittany will be stuck with me, so we'll be stuck together. Thank goodness we get along so well! :)

I am off, now, to venture into dreamland. I'm not even going to try to promise any future blogging dates. Just, you know. Trust that I'll get back around here eventually. Yeah? Yeah.

This time, my blogging break is due to having an actual life!

amyh — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 02:09:00 GMT

So I've been gone, I know. I haven't posted in a while.

Well. Last week I was in Disney World with my school's orchestra. We did a fantastic workshop in which we got to record Beauty and the Beast, which was then put to the actual scene in the movie! Oh man, fabulous. The next day, we played a concert here in Magic Kingdom:

That's my friend Cara with me. We took a bunch of fantastic pictures with Disney characters. I love Cara so much, haha.

And, of course, we romped around the parks. It was magical, beautiful, wonderful. There's no place like Disney World.

The day after returning, Michelle and I played our first wizard rock show at the library downtown.

Yeah, I wore my Mickey pirate ears. I was (and still am) on a Disney-high. But oh man. It was amazing. Some people actually knew the words to one of our songs! And afterwards, people wanted pictures with us! And we got to sign someone's guitar! And we sold CDs! Add to my Disney-high a Wizard Rock-high and, man. I was just going crazy with love.

We played with a very lovely band called Tom Riddle And Friends.

And by lovely, I mean hot hot hot.

How about one more, yes?

*heartflutter* After they were done, they came and chatted with Michelle and me and we hugged them and all that was going through my mind was, "IS THIS REALLY HAPPENING." I am such a hormonal teenage girl.

After TRAF was Gred & Forge. He is so hilarious. And at the merch table afterwards, he gave me a copy of his CD for FREE. How cool is that?!

Unfortunately, most of my pictures of him totally sucked, so only one :(

But after him was The Remus Lupins, one of the more well-known Wizard Rock artists. Alex Carpenter is so amazing.

(And okay, attractive. I had to say it.)

This wizard rock show? The best I've ever been to. Yes, because I was in it. But, I mean. To be on the other side of the curtain, to be one of the bands instead of just one of the fangirls (well, in my case, both now)? dkjsfdmk. So happy-making.

On Wednesday, our orchestra attended festival (straight Distinguished scores! ROCK!) and then had our concert on Thursday.

My last high school festival. Next-to-last high school orchestra concert. It's starting to dawn on me that this is my last semester of high school. I'm so going to miss this orchestra when I leave for college. hfjiksjf. Stopping with the sadness right now.

Friday was Pi Day. We had a party in orchestra for the end of festival and for Disney World and stuff, in which I ate a small piece of cake, a brownie, a few cookies. It was bad. Then it got worse, because in Calculus, we had pie. I had two small pieces of pie. dfjikf. So much eating.

Then at home, my sister and I made pizza (it's a type of pie!) and strawberry pie.

We just used this Chef Boyardee box mix stuff, where you make your own dough and then it has some crappy cheese and pizza sauce. Yeah, we put on better cheese and some pepperonis. Delicious.

Working on the strawberry pie, our first (store-bought, of course) crust kind of... failed. Epically.

So we had to go out and buy another crust. Graham cracker crust probably isn't the best for strawberry pie, but we dealt.

It looks kind of messy (and a little too sharpened in this picture, sorry — it was blurry!), but it was delicious nonetheless.

It kind of fell apart on the plate, haha.

And, all right. Yamapi had to make an appearance on Pi Day. Yamapi. Pi Day. IT WORKS, ALL RIGHT? So I made this image of Yamapi's head on a strawberry pie (cough, fueling my need for strawberry pie) and then printed it out and put it in a pin. Which now is on my backpack. dfhkjsd. You love me, don't lie.

So now I'm at Saskia's house, where we've been chilling, making cookies, chilling, watching a video on volcanoes, chilling, listening to music, chilling. Tomorrow, we're going for brunch at Alfalfa's and then I'm going to the Apple Store in Louisville (the hard drive on our family computer has crapped out, and so what better time to finally visit the Apple Store?! Which, by the way, could most definitely be renamed Heaven).

Now, I'm going to go chill and listen to more music and finish crafting an e-mail to Harry and the Potters and think about how to write my music critique on Serge Gainsbourg's Ballade de Melody Nelson. Hopefully, I'll start posting more frequently again soon :)

Enough with the snow days already!

amyh — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 14:04:00 GMT

Seriously, we have another snow day today. A one- or two-hour delay, I might have been okay with. But a snow day?! It doesn't look like the roads are even that bad! And as far as I know, all we got was snow — not our usual ice. Ugh! At this rate, I'm not going to graduate before June (and definitely not before the country fair), and it's looking like graduation will be held on the football field, not in Rupp Arena. What the crap. Whyyy? Why do they suddenly get so snow day-happy my senior year?! It was nice the first two or so, but now it's just annoying. Bleh!

You know how, at least in public school (and maybe in private school, I don't really know), they're required to have monthly fire drills, which tend to be really annoying because you never know when to expect them and chances are it's going to be raining or something?

I can now say that in all my years of public schooling, I actually experienced a real fire, meaning a real fire alarm at school.

Yeah, yesterday, second hour, Mr. Strohmeier runs in, "We need your fire extinguisher!" Mrs. Minor gets it for him and he's halfway across the room when the fire alarm goes off. There's a very distinct groan as we know it's too late, we actually have to go outside — and Nick informs us that it's raining (as he's just walked in late — and apparently he saw the smoke in the bathroom down the hall as he walked to class). Yes, because some idiot decided to light something on fire in the bathroom, the entire school was forced out of the building into the rain, where we stood for, oh, maybe thirty minutes or so. Then, we were ushered into the gym (which is in another building) and had to sit for around fifteenish minutes before we were allowed to go back to second hour, where we stayed until the bell for fourth hour rang. Yeah, we skipped third hour completely.

As amusing as it was at first ("Wow! An actual fire!" — we're really not all that fazed by these things, I guess), it simply turned into annoying once we realized we'd be outside for a while.

What a year to load up on AP classes, right? Five or six snow days and a fire! Wow! What luck. Um.

Mrs. Minor made light of it, though: "Those private school kids don't get stories like these! You go to college and they'll all be wanting the dirt on public school!"

Yesterday, after orchestra rehearsal, Michelle and I took the bus (I used LexTran for the first time ever, haha) downtown and then walked to Third Street Stuff, where we consumed delicious food items and wrote a song called "Ollivander and Me." Honestly, it's the cutest song we've written so far, haha. The only thing we need now is a xylophone, because the chorus will not be complete without a cutesy xylophone transition. We're so stoked for our March 10th show (with the Remus Lupins, what!). We just need to get cracking on putting together songs and a set list, because for the few days before the 10th, we'll be in Disney World with our orchestra class, so we'll have no time to put together songs (unless Michelle finds a way to bring her guitar to Disney, haha). Well, we'll get it together. Eventually.

We had to write a poem recently about something ugly. Of course, I wrote yet another stupid thing involving the internet (an ongoing theme in my english class for me, I guess). I'm not sure if it really qualifies as ugly, but I wrote about Wikipedia's murder of the fanpage (inspired by this post). Maybe you'll enjoy it, haha.

abandonment:
Skeet Ulrich, circa 1998,
not even a trace of frames anymore,
cast across the floor
alongside Calvin & Hobbes,
X-eyes and frayed seams

starshine backgrounds replaced
with the most horrific of phrases:
"Bandwidth Exceeded"

taken down with the Wiki sword:
Enchanted Forest, its magic no more
Television City unplugged and sparkless
Hollywood set ablaze by its own starburst effects

no more independence
only flocking to one place
the Mecca of fandom
Wikipedia, the death of individuality
GeoCities, your pages no more

And he shall purify.

amyh — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 03:25:00 GMT

Tonight was the first out of two orchestra winter concerts. We're performing selections from Handel's Messiah with the chorus.

You know how, during the Hallelujah chorus, the audience is supposed to stand? Tradition because of the King and such? Well, all of us orchestra folksies told our parents to stand — in keeping to said tradition — but we all really said it jokingly, assuming that our parents wouldn't actually stand.

First two measures with the small ensemble start up and suddenly, we hear creaking and movement in the audience — parents are standing, WHAT! And when the rest of us come in with the ensemble, the whole audience is standing, too! I almost didn't enter on time because I thought it was so hilarious — and I almost stopped, it was so hard to keep from laughing.

Oh man. So cool.

(Not only that, but we played better than we thought we would! Sure, I screwed up in some parts, but I also rocked the house downnnnnn in others. Yessss.)

Mm, but the one unfun thing is that it lasted a very long time. Ended around 9:50. Ick. Luckily, I don't have to stay the entire time tomorrow night.

But gross! Homework time!

Doing my civic duty.

amyh — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 15:15:00 GMT

I can't vote yet. Not old enough — though I will be for the presidential primaries come May. I wish I could vote, though, as we've got some pretty important elections in my state today.

But I am doing my civic duty! Both for the voters and for my orchestra, haha. See, the orchestra's going to Disney World next semester, and so we're doing tons of fundraisers to raise money. At a few schools today, we're doing bake sales — selling lovely baked goods to the lovely voters, hehe.

May is going to be so cool. It's funny, I never really cared that much about getting my license, about driving — what's supposed to be a rite-of-passage for a teenager! I've still only got my permit, and I've driven once (yes, only once, and I've had my permit for a year and a half, haha). I really didn't like it. (Note to self: when grown up, live in a city where you don't need a car, only public transportation). But voting! That's really something I've been looking forward to my whole life. And since it's finally approaching, I'm actually paying attention to the candidates, deciding who I think would be the best for the job, etc. (I'm definitely going to be voting John Edwards. Yeah!)

But man, would I still love to vote today.