My Hectic Week

I know this might not technically be "very soon" according to regular time, but in Kate time I think I'm doing pretty good. Last Tuesday was the WYSE Sectionals at EIU. EIU's about an hour and fifteen minutes away, so we had to catch the bus before school at like 7:30. Not too bad, that's usually when I leave my house in the morning. We did terrible, everyone kind of expected that though. My friend Caleb finished 3rd in computer graphics, so he'll go to the state competition at the U of I. One plus was the guy sitting to my left. He was very good looking. (Maybe that's why I didn't do so good? I try to give myself more credit than that, it was hard. But still. I'm only human. Plus the guy on my right was annoying. He'd get done super early and just stare at us. I don't care if you're a genius, that's no excuse to be rude.)

We got done with testing around lunch time. So we went to the food court in the student union for lunch. I saw my cousin Kelsi there (she goes to college at EIU). I didn't get to talk to her for long, unfortunately, because the band members had to get on the bus to go back to the college in our town for the band festival. Which, I have to admit, sucked. We played last so, of course, everyone had left. My grandparents came, though, and my mom, too, since she works there.

Mass band

On Thursday we had the all county mass band. Basically what it is is 7 bands from the same county all get together at one of the high schools. In the morning the honor band (about 50 students) rehearses with the guest director. We eat lunch and then the rest of the bands come (about 250 including those from the morning) and rehearse all afternoon. We eat dinner, get changed into dress clothes, and have a concert at 7. The way our band director does it is he takes volunteers to do honor band. Except this year there weren't enough to picked people. I was picked. Yaaaay, not. Because of this I played for pretty much 12 hours straight. This is extremely tiring, more than you would think. The guest conductor was kind of a jerk. He kept throwing mini-tantrums. Of course, you know how they are, so at the actual concert he was Mr. Personality. The good thing was that the girl sitting next to me in honor band was hilarious. She was so sarcastic, we bonded over the fact that neither of us wanted to be there.

Now we get to the good part of my week. The St. Patrick's Day Parade! As you may or may not know St. Patty's day is March 17. Well our town, like most, has the celebration the Saturday before. My family is of Irish heritage and takes extreme pride in it. (We're not like recently descendant, our family's been here since the Civil War. But hey, we're still Irish!) My dad also belongs to the local KC Hall (he's one degree from being one of the head honchos) and so about 10 years ago they approached him about organizing the parade. And, of course, he jumped at the chance. My dad looooves St. Patty's Day. So the month before we spend our time contacting groups and sending out messages to papers about finding people to be in the parade. This year we had 55 groups enter (well over 900 people) and since the weather was so nice (it can get iffy) a lot more showed up unannounced.

A company downtown has a massive parking lot so they let us use that to organize all the people. We break it up into 6 sections. A bunch of my aunts, uncles, spouses, cousin, my brother, mom, and I all volunteer to help organize. The KC Hall pays for us to have breakfast, so we all have breakfast at the Downtown Cafe at 7:45 and get ready. It gets so chaotic when people start showing up. My mom and her friend Sue guard the entrance and tell people where to go. And then the various family members are split up between the sections and tell the people in what order they go. A local Verizon store loans us walkie-talkies and the park district loans us 4 golf cart. It's chaotic, but fun.

Bagpipers at the KC Hall

The fire engines and police cars always lead the parade. Well one of the firemen asked my dad if he had anyone who wanted to ride. That way we could tell them to slow down if there was too much of a gap. My dad told my aunt Mary and me that we could do it. (Originally he asked my cousin Michael and me, but Michael, Conor, and my cousin Aaron were taking a golf cart in the parade and throwing candy.) It was so much fun! We waved and I even got to make the siren go. Basically all my childhood dreams came true. (I sat up front with the driver, who was middle aged. My aunt sat in the back with others. The other young, hot firemen. Not fair Aunt Mary. Not fair.) Then when it was over we went down to the KC Hall for the big celebration. We ate lunch, there were carriage rides, and of course anyone over 21 got drunk. Typical St. Patrick's Day, but it's my dad's favorite day of the year.

Well that was nice and long. I promise the next one will be short, and soon. Soon in normal time, not Kate time. Have a good week!

This is not a post. This is my Trig homework.

Or not. I'm trying to multitask by catching up on my YouTube subscriptions and doing my Trigonometry homework at the same time. As you can I've become distracted. I don't know why I always try to do my homework this way. I almost always end up here or on Facebook. (Usually Facebook, it's too addicting!)

This post is mainly going to be me complaining about one of my frenemies at school. So if you don't like complaining or ragging on people, I'm sorry. But it's just one of those things you can't get over! She just bugs me so much. I'm thinking that maybe if I write it down I can put it out of my mind. I guess we'll see if it works.

Well, in my class at school there's four of us who have maintained a 4.0 all throughout high school. So we're all in the running for valedictorian. (I say in the running because one of my former friends was too, but she got a B last semester so she's not any more.) It's me, two other girls, and a guy (one of my friends). One of the girls, we'll call her Jeannine, is what I consider to be a frenemy. We actually used to be pretty tight, she took me to a Green Day concert our sophomore year. But we kind of have that underlying tension thing where we always one to do better. Okay, I didn't really feel that way until I could tell she did. And I, having a naturally competitive nature, joined in the madness. Except instead of saying things to get under her skin, her tactic, I just ignore whatever she says about her grades. I can tell that gets under her skin. She loves to brag and have people talk about it.

We're both in band together. Luckily we don't play the same instrument so there really isn't a possibly of competition there. But we are in WYSE together. I don't know if you know what WYSE is, so I'll quickly explain. It's basically competitive test taking (nerd alert!) and there's six different categories. We're both in the English category. She got first at Regionals (our whole team did actually) and of course bragged. (Regionals were last week when I was sick so I couldn't go.) Well Sectionals are in a few weeks. And they just happen to be on the same day as an all day band festival at the university in town.

There's four of us who are in both band and WYSE, and at first we were just going to skip the band festival. But the problem is that our band is so small and we're all first chairs, so if we leave our band director thinks we shouldn't go at all. Which is, apparently, a problem. So he and our WYSE coach worked it out so we take our tests in the morning and the bus takes us to the university in the afternoon to play. The problem there is we'd miss the awards ceremony at WYSE, which is in the afternoon. So everyone threw a fit, and it was this huge deal.

Jeannine's dad wrote this kind of ass hole-ish email to our band director basically saying that she wasn't going to go to the band festival. The email ended with 'That you so much for your cooperation, as always." We-e-ell, looks like someone won't be getting the MVP senior award in band (the band director loves me, I'm a shoe-in, anyways). So then the band director threw a fit and told everyone they were going no matter what. And the WYSE coach told us all that we had to go to the festival, she wasn't going to let us stay.

Honestly, I really have no problem with this. I like band. I mean I signed up for it because I wanted to. I knew when I signed up that there were probably going to be conflicts. I mean we've all been in band since the fifth grade, we all know this by now. But ever since this was decided on Tuesday little miss perfection has been complaining. "It's just band, it doesn't even matter!" "This is so dumb, academics are more important!" Okay, not to some people. And how is academic to sit around for an hour waiting to get find out if you even placed?! She always says things that offend people, and she doesn't even realize it. Grrrr! She just pisses me off so much. If you don't like it then quit. That's my advice. And don't get all offended and huffy with me when I don't agree with you. Your opinion isn't necessarily always right. If it was some basketball or track thing you wouldn't be complaining at all. In fact, you'd be super pissed if they didn't work it out for you. So get off your high horse, the world doesn't revolve around you.

Okay. I've vented. I feel slightly better. I just hope she never finds this. I take that back, I really don't care either way. Oh, and tomorrow we're supposed to take our pinatas home. We still haven't decided who gets to take it home so things could get interesting...

Have a happy Friday tomorrow!