Posts from — September 2003

I’ve been wanting to write an entry here for three days now, but I’ve been too busy to take a break. Digging back a bit, on Saturday, unranked Lehigh beat No 9 (nationally 1-AA) Fordham in football. The band had a great performance in the light rain. We played so loud and so much that the Fordham coaches complained to the refs and had them tell us to stop playing during gameplay. We got a standing ovation from many of the fans after that, which really means a lot to me. Band is going better, I think.
I went to bloomsburg on Sunday to watch degree at the Zeta Alpha chapter (not colony)… it went well, but set me back a bit in my work.
I had a big project (20% of my grade) for my robotics class due on Tuesday. It was hard because it was my first experience with matlab. I stayed up until 5 or so Tuesday morning and finished it, and it worked pretty well for the most part.
I emailed the band alumni an update about the season.. just random stuff about band: where we were going on flames, how well the Fordham game went, Alumni Band Day stuff, etc. I got a ton of responses back, they really like to hear about what’s going on, so I’m going to make this a regular occurrence.
I’ve been scrambling over the last couple of days to push paper through the system to get dues paid for Kappa. I’m pretty sure we’ll have it in on time, but it makes me really nervous.
Next weekend I’m going to the Princeton game on Saturday and the Allentown Band Festival on Sunday, so it should be a good time. There will be some time for work, too, which is good. I keep thinking that ‘next week will be less busy’, but it’s just not working that way.
I have about 35 people signed up to play in the stands at UCONN, nearly 30 of which will be going in vans and staying in my house in CT, which promises to be completely insane. It’ll be like some sort of musical refugee camp. I get the feeling we’re going to be destroyed by UCONN, but if the team has a good showing, it can help us in the standings.

Well, it’s time for me to go to the chapter meeting, finish, test and submit my computer graphics program, and go to kickball.

I guess it’s time for an update..

Band seems to be going better, from my view, though I can’t say that everyone would agree with that. Now that the season has started, I think it will only improve. We have one official performance every weekend this month, so it should be pretty busy. With kky activities starting up, I have some very busy weeks ahead of me. It should be manageable though.
My sleep patterns have been very strange recently. I’ve been going to bed between 1:45 and 3:00 and waking up an hour before my alarm, often. And I don’t always feel very bad when I do it. Maybe I’m transitioning to a different sleep norm.
I want to spend so much time on the projects that I’ve been working on (tvguy, mconsole, gsg), but I simply don’t have that much to spare at this point. Finding a time to work on tvguy with tim has been a problem, and my schedule isn’t about to clear up :-/.
I bought the third season of Family Guy on DVD, so that should be arriving in the mail soon. Additionally, I bought Game Programming Gems to help with gsg.

‘Malaise’ is probably a good way to describe how I’ve been feeling about quite a few things recently. I’m not quite sure why.

Yesterday we had band after my long day of school and work. I enjoy practice and I think my rank is doing pretty well. I can’t quite tell how the rest of the band is doing with marching, but it seems OK to me. My rank is forming the G in LEHIGH, and I think we’re doing it quite well. I remember it took me about a year to figure out how to do marching LEHIGH.
As far as people in band, I’m really concerned. We don’t have many people this year, and nobody’s really sure what to do about it. Lack of psyche is something that seemed to start at band camp, and people being lazy and/or quitting never helps.
I went out for pizza with Steve, Karen, and Sanket after practice. I
I wrote up my first independent announcements for Saturday’s game. I really enjoyed writing them, and I spent a *ton* of time on it, laboring over every word. It ended up being too long, so I cut out a few jokes. Unfortunately, the least funny part of it is the nicknames part where I list this year’s execs (example: Matt “some nickname” Casey). This is the hardest part of the announcements because it’s very restrictive, but it’s a tradition and people expect to hear their names with jokes, so I managed to get it tolerably funny. I’ll be laughing, that’s what counts.