Chill

Finally one busy and horrible week nearly over. I just finished the second orchestra performance of Last Night at the Proms. The first half was full of slow music and being sleep-deprived I really felt like falling asleep while playing. Not helping was my starvation and dry lips! We got to play Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance No. 4 which is one of my favourite tunes.

There was also a pipe band playing some modern music with the brass and percussion section of the orchestra. It really made me feel proud to be part Scottish *sniff sniff*. I just found out yesterday that I'm part Danish and part French from my dad's side as well!

I haven't been feeling the best lately with a sore throat, runny nose and cough. Yeah it's really horrible especially in places where you can't sniff. You end up dripping and then have to go into the toilet and blow your nose and...anyway I wish our house had better insulated walls! I don't even think we've got Pink batts in them, so its freezing cold in the morning and at night. I think I caught my cold one night when I stayed up late working on the website and I was only wearing a t-shirt. Now I'm wearing 5 layers of clothing :D

I stuffed a tissue in my mouth on Friday during stats class so that when I breathed out through my mouth I wouldn't pass anything on to anyone else and the teacher asked what I was doing...Fortunately the orchestra was loud enough at the performance for me to sniff in the middle of playing. I think it's starting to go away...I hope...I want it to be gone by the ball at least!

Near Sleepless Nights

I've been busy outside school hours all week, not being able to sleep till 2 am on most days, which has made me really sleepy! I don't even have any time to have extra sleep in the weekends, or even post on this blog!
In the last week I've been at rehearsals for the Auckland Symphony Orchestra, our school's musical trio and the Studio Show performance.

The rehearsals for Auckland Symphony Orchestra have been towards two Last Night at the Proms concerts this weekend at the Bruce Mason Theatre which are part of North Shore's British Festival. Yesterday (Saturday) I spent nearly the whole day over in Takapuna (after music teaching), as first we had a 2 hour technical rehearsal. Aonghas and I then walked to Wendy's to have dinner, and then at 7.30 till 10.30pm it was the actual performance. Today we have another performance at 2pm

I performed at the Studio Show on Friday night which was cool and slightly different to previous years because of the venue change. There wasn't much to do while waiting in the music room so I just practised my solo for most of the night (I was third to last). Fortunately I didn't stuff up like I did when I first played the piece in front of Mrs Klaassen (performing arts teacher) when I lost my right hand on the keyboard and couldn't recover!

I've also had to work on this rutherfordstudents.com website trying to get it up and running by Friday. Because I only got home at about 9pm each night there wasn't much time and I ended up staying up till 2am each night adding stuff to the website. It's up now, but there's still more content to be added...

Friday was also mufti day at school. I hate mufti days! I feel so poor compared to all those other people wearing fancy clothes with their labels. Do people deliberately wear nice clothes to school on mufti days or do they just buy new clothes so regularly that it all looks good? I think I've only got about 5 t-shirts, 3 jumpers, 3 shorts and 2 trousers in my whole wardrobe that I just pick to wear each day (in varying combinations). I'm sure some people have seen me in the same clothes more than twice! I've also been wearing some of the same clothes for the past three years too! (Yeah shows I haven't grown much aye) I noticed there were a lot of people dressed up in black...guess they may be emos...but then again there's nothing wrong with black clothing and any ordinary person could wear black if they wanted to!

Yeah anyway it's 2am now so I'm off to bed. Ready for church and another performance!

Haywire

The last day of accordion competitions on Sunday saw my brother come third in his South Pacific accordion championship class, which was unexpected as the other accordionists made more mistakes than him and played easier pieces than him but still managed to get a higher mark than him! We suspect it's probably due to the 'North Shore' group - most of the accordionists are from North Shore and know each other well. Us Andersons are like the outsiders from the West.

Anyway today this morning I woke up late at about 8 in the morning, because I stayed up till 3am this morning working on the student website. I was originally hoping my mum would let me sleep in for the first two periods (my free periods today), but she said if I did I'd have to walk to school, so there wasn't any real point in doing that because it takes about an hour to walk to school from my house! . We came to school slightly late and Aonghas was all worried because he had maths first period. He ran off, forgetting his folder. I took it and went to the office, assuming he'd be waiting there to collect his late detention. He wasn't there, but I came across the principal and deputy principal who asked me if I was supposed to be somewhere. I gave them a blank look till Mr Edmeades reminded me I was supposed to be speaking at staff assembly! Fortunately Mr Coughlan the associate principal was understanding about me sleeping in and had spoken to them on behalf of me!

back at school I've had people asking me who I'm going to the ball with, and that I should ask someone and do it soon and raaadyraaadyraaa. There just doesn't seem to be anyone to ask!

Statistics class was interesting today. A certain someone sat to another, which I think must have been a dream come true for him! During the weekend my friend (a concerned individual) and I warned our friend against asking this girl to the ball just in case he got hurt because she may not be interested in any guys at the moment. Fortunately he took it pretty well!

Competition Flop

I competed at the NZ accordion champs yesterday, where I competed in three classes - the open solo championship, the open duet with Aonghas and the open trio with Aonghas and Hamish.

 

I had to play three pieces for the solo championship - 3rd Mvt of Italian Concerto by Bach, Figaro from Barber of Saville by Rossini and Russian Dance by Shenderyov (I kept forgetting that guy's name..first started out as Shernikov, then Shendikov, till I read the music and found out it was Shenderyov a few minutes before my performance!) Anyway my first piece the Italian Concerto was my weakest and of course I didn't really play it too well. Anyway I ended up coming second, three points behind the guy who came first.

 

The duet didn't go too badly. I translated it wrongly when I filled in the entry form though, so it appeared in the programme as Gong Nan Hao instead of Jiang Nan Hao. We came first for the duet. We played Eine Kleine Nachtmusik - Allegro for the trio, and I kinda played a wrong note and laughed about it loud enough for my mum to have heard it! We luckily came first in the trio as well.

 

My accordion teacher was a little disappointed with me losing the solo though, saying I didn't practise enough, but I'm adament I'll try to do more from now on!

 

Today was an interesting day. I had asked Mrs Taylor (my dean) if she could help get a list of all the student names and their enrolment numbers for me so I could use it for our student website. When I came into history class after lunch, a girl told me that Mrs Taylor was looking for me and wanted to give me something 'I really want'. Hmmm....well the class took that the wrong way and started joking about my dean wanting to do...something...with me... My history teacher joked about getting satisfaction out of it :S I came back afterwards and one of the guys told me that I didn't take too long!

 

At assembly Heather and I had to call up the Junior Council members so that the principal could award badges to them. I introduced the members with positions, but there was a little problem with Ben who was the secretary of the group, because I had no idea which word to use since secretary is kinda a feminine word (well that's what people think anyway!), so I called him the 'administrator'.

 

I've got accordion championships this weekend but fortunately all my performances are on Saturday so I can relax on Sunday!