Well, hello out there all. It has certainly been some time since I last blogged on here. A huge variety of things have happened.

First off, I survived my Junior year of High school and am now officially a Senior. Yay!

I auditioned for the Drum Major position in my school's marching  band and I made it. This year's marching band will be playing "A dedication to NewEngland." The music is really good but, this means for my Drum Major Costume I may have to wear an old fashioned dress and one of those dumb bonnets. I don't think I'll mind the dress but I loath bonnets.

In other news, For fencing I competed in the first annual ECC Competition in my area and acheived 5th place. I was both excited and upset about it. Excited because its 5th place out of 60 some-od girls, Sad because I was one place away from being and all-ECC Fencer.
Next week my parents are sending me off to fencing camp. I am really happy because I wanted all the help I can get so that I do really well at fencing for my senior year. But, I'm nervous because one of the coaches at the camp is also the fencing coach for a college I want to go to.


In terms of my education last year, things went rather well. My final report card consisted of all A's which was nice. More exciting was that I was inducted into the National Honor Society.

Well, I guess thats it for now... Hope those who actually read this enjoyed their breif rundown of major things going on with me.

So, today was my first day as a High school Junior.

I apologize for the lack of photos at the moment but, the ones my mother took with my digital camera didn't come out good so I have to wait untill she develops the film from her camera.

Things went really well and I enjoyed it. I can already tell from today that I will have a lot of work to do and I will have to make sure that I keep my butt in gear and not allow myself to get distracted before I finish all of my homework.

I have my official schedule now .
It goes as follows:

First period I will have either Marching Band or Concert Band. In Marching band I will be playing trombone and in concert band I'll play clarinet.

Second Period I have honors Chemistry which will be really easy and fun because we will be doing alot of hands on stuff and the teacher is extremely nice.

Third period I have AP American History. Which will basically will be a class full of lectures and note taking... oh joy... but hey that isn't too hard for me. It will just be a huge amount of work.

And finally fourth period I will have AP English. Normally I am really excited about English class but I have some apprehensions because the teacher has a high squeaky voice and she made the class agenda sound really boring.

Each period will last 85 minutes.

For the first time ever in my experience at school did the classroom stay deathly quiet in the room while we did work. This was in my Honors Chemistry class. It was so weird. Also, in all my classes I had homework. Which didn't surprise me really.

On September 4, 2007 I will be going back to school. That means I will be officially starting my Junior year. I can't believe I only have three days left of summer!. It all went so fast. I don't think I was even able to get everything done that I wanted to.

School coming up so quickly definitely has it's pros and cons. The good things about school starting up again is that I will be able to meet more people and I will get to learn more.

The bad things are that I haven't quite finished all of the summer assignments I had to finish before the first day of school. Luckily I only have three assignments left to finish so I don't have too much to worry about but, I still need to buckle down and get it all done. Another bad thing about school starting is that the term "free time" will completely disappear from my vocabulary. So, I won't be able to come onto XIHA Life as often or even any of the other sites I wander around online. Hopefully I will be able to come on at least twice a week but, I can't really tell until school actually does start.

I am taking a few higher level classes. Two of them are AP (Advanced Placement) and those are the ones that if I pass a certain test I will get college credit. Here is basically what my schedule should be:

First Semester:

AP American History
AP English
Marching Band (every other day)
Concert Band(every other day)
Communication Design

Second Semester:

AP American History (every other day)
AP English (every other day)
French 3
Honors Pre-Calculus
Honors Chemistry

On top of all those classes which are all about two hours long each I will be in Marching band, Karate, and working at my job!! Then in second semester I'll be on the Varsity fencing team. For fencing we have two hour practices five days a week and then Saturdays we have meets/ competitions.

But, that is okay... I like being busy. It keeps me active so I don't just waste away sitting in my room.

Well, this year's band camp is over for me and boy was it busy. For two weeks strait I had to be at school by 8:00am and wouldn't stop until about 5:30pm. Our schedule for each day consisted or stretching, marching and playing our instruments.

My Director arranged us some really fun music to play this year! The music is from "The Wiz" which was an award winning Broadway show a number of years back. There was also a very bad movie made of it but, most of the music for our marching show comes from the Broadway version.


Okay, I am normally a clarinet player and a pretty fair one at that. I've played clarinet for about 7 or eight years now. But, I have only marched as a clarinet in marching band for one year, my freshman year. This  is because I learned to play the trombone as a favor to my band director and the rest of the band.  Here is a photo of me from my freshman year when I played the clarinet:

So, this was my second year marching as a trombone. It was fun but, as always there are drawbacks to not playing your normal instrument.
For me that is the fact the in order for me to play the trombone I have to try and read bass clef music and I only know how to read treble clef. I am getting the hang of it though and am slowly learning more about what I need to know about playing and reading bass clef.


Since I am a trombone player for the marching band I am part of the low brass section. Our low brass section consists of one Tuba player, one berry sax, one baritone player and four trombones (me included). Pretty small low brass section huh?
Well, here are a couple photos of our lovely low brass players...




One Time at band camp...
Anyway, When one goes to marching band there are always going to be interesting things that are bound to happen. So, let the band camp stories begin.

Here is a photo of something that happened. One of the band parents was wearing a hard hat. He sat down and one of our snare drummers, kyle, decided to practice a bit... well, we all told him to do it.