~PousazPower

Tomorrow, I am going to school at 4:30 am in order to meet fellow band geeks and dorchestrans for our glorious trip to the glorious city of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. We leave at five o'clock for a long and sleepy bus ride up to the border, and then we'll take a ferry to Vancouver Island. There, we'll go to various places on our own and the orchestra will have two sit-down concerts, while the band marches on Monday in the Victoria Day Parade, while the orchestra catches candy.

We might very well go to the Royal London Wax Museum, with its demented gnomes and hall of torture.
We might go to the Awesome Royal British Columbia Museum, which is extremely Epic.

Anyway, while there, the orchestra is going to play:
Edward Scissorhands
Schindler's List
Hoe Down (Aaron Copland. w00t!! Solo for moi!)
Serenade for Strings in C major (Tchaikovsky)
Pirates of the Caribbean
An Irish Party in Third Class

On a somewhat unrelated note, I saw my first pseudoscorpions today! I had only seen these small arachnids in books and in documentaries, and I had always envisioned them as brownish white indoor and leaf litter creatures, but these were found on a railing while we were eating outside in the SUN (!), and they were black with an orange cross on their backs. These small arthropods, unlike true scorpions, lack a tail and instead deliver venom with their claws. The ones I saw were about 2mm long [link]

UPDATE:
That trip was awesome! Sitting on buses and ferries for several hours, playing outdoors for random people, and going to weird museums that depicted ancient torture devices, such as the Algerian Hook.

On our first day, we got to school at 4:30 and left a at 5:30 because SOMEBODY was late . After several hours of sleeping on a bus, we got off and onto the ferry from Anacortes, WA to Sydney, BC. Once in Victoria, we had lunch in a mall where cashiers rolled their eyes when you gave them American money, and then left for our hotel. After settling down, we went outside to the truck that had carried our instruments to rehearse. The band then left to go rehearse somewhere else, while the orchestra, composed of only 15 people, climbed onto the bus and played the above songs, which was extremely awesome. We then had the entire rest of the day (4:30 pm-10:00 pm)to go wandering and foodfinding. The next day, we had two outdoor performances; one in Beacon Hill Park with the band, in which I started Hoedown a measure early; and another in the Market Square with just the orchestra, in which someone else played the entire first measure of Hoedown early. On Monday, we watched the Victoria Day Parade in the rain, and followed the band onto the bus while screaming [cheering] at them rather loudly. Next year, we should build a float and put the orchestra on it while the band marches in front.