Mood Ring
akoenig
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Posts by akoenig
We Did It.
Nov 11th
“We may not win state this year, or two or four years from now, but we will win state one day because of what you guys did on that field tonight.” -Lancaster
I don’t think I will ever understand the magnitude of what our band did yesterday. When we marched out of finals, everyone started crying because we knew how amazing we just performed. Never had our show reached that level of greatness. We huddled together and Lancaster gave us the pep talk that I quoted. We did something amazing Tuesday. All those tears listening to Lancaster foreshadowed more tears of joy to come. I haven’t stopped crying yet, and its been almost a full day since we heard who won. I can honestly say that yesterday was the happiest day of my 16 years of life.
I am so proud of every band kid. This year made us even more great. I can’t fathom what two years from now will be like if we improve at the same speed as we have been. I really don’t know what to say…Winning state is just a far away dream. It hasn’t sunk in. My brain can’t comprehend what happened last night. I think about all those hours put in and all the stress that went along with band. I know now that is was entirely worth the brutal season. It never really mattered how we turned out in finals. What made last night amazing was that we did the best show we have ever done in the history of Dripping Springs. And that is good enough for me.
We did it.
You know what goes well with Taiko drums?
Oct 7th
Frito pie!
Yesterday Dripping Springs had it’s very own percussion contest. With half the band signed up to volunteer, it would have been difficult to not have a good time.
I think everyone discovered one of Mr. Larson’s talents that day. If Mr. L wasn’t a band director, he could take over Billy Mays’ advertising job in an instant. Listening to Mr. Larson advertising the concession stand was one of my favorite parts of the day.
Being at this context made me realize how ready I am for next Saturday. Finally we will have our first contest! Spending a whole Saturday at a school related event us only fun when your in the band at a contest. The freshmen will be able to see why we work as hard as we do. I can’t even express how excited I am! Ahh, it will be great. This weeks starts off real marching band. And I can not wait 
What Will I Do On Friday Night???
Sep 12th
It is week 3 of school and the stress is already setting in for everyone. I have a killer schedule this year, so finding time to do homework is difficult if i want to maintain my 6 1/2 hours of sleep a night. I’ve had 3 quizzes/tests this week… Hopefully we will be able to continue our rehearsals in a way that it seems like we never have anything else to do and that we get 12 hours a night. Wow, that would be amazing…
Anyways, as difficult as our classes may be, we are settling in to having school and band at the same time. And this week’s game is on Thursday! Our first away game! Woooo! This week couldn’t get any shorter. I wish we had 4 day weeks all the time What will I do on friday night? I asked myself the same question a year ago when the hurricane came and they rescheduled the football game to Thursday. It felt so unnatural to go home on a friday. I felt too normal. Something was off. I’m sure all of us are going to feel out of place when friday rolls around.
I’ll catch yall later! All of you that may be reading this should definitely be at the football game tomorrow!
Yay For Band
Aug 18th
Hmm… This is my first post in year 2009. Intense. I have sort of been a delinquent and kept procrastinating on blogging. But I am here now! For all of you who may not know me, I’m Allie Koenig. I am a junior (wow, that sounds old) and I play the flute. Oh, and I’m one the the flute section leaders. My marching flute is named Mick St. John and my concert flute is named Josef Kostan. In case I say those names later on, you will know what I am referring to Okay, Allie background information is done, so lets move on to exciting story of the day.
I’m excited Michelle hasn’t said anything about our dance at band camp, so I’ll fill yall in on that fun event! Band camp was a week ago, but this is worth mentioning. The last night at band camp we were allowed to stay out a little later to socialize our parents and when they left, just all of the band kids. I was hanging out with my flutes and Lizzie taught us all a cheerleader dance that they use for several songs. Let’s see… There was Lizzie, Michelle, Erin, Sarah, Alyssa, and me all trying to learn this dance. We thought it would be a great idea to perform it for Emily Hill (a flute player as well as a cheerleader) and for the band at our last morning rehearsal. We ended up practicing the routine the whole entire night. Even Michelle and I, who were roommates, practiced in our room before we went to bed to get it perfect. Morning comes too early and it is finally our last day eating Schreiner food. Thank goodness. After the run during morning rehearsal we all lined up in a pyramid form and performed our dance for the band. It was awesome. I think it was my favorite part of band camp. For a bunch of flute players, it was pretty darn good. I’m sure everyone else found it entertaining to watch us do a cheerleader dance. It is exactly what everyone needed to get pumped up for our last rehearsal. Or they just needed a good laugh after sleeping for 5 hours
Well, not too much went down the week after band camp. We got to set 32 (or is it 35 or 36?) which is the beginning of the ballad. That was pretty intense. Everyone is working hard and hopefully we will be able to maintain that mindset when all the craziness of school starts happening. I’m a little worried myself… my classes are pretty hard core this year. I’m super pumped for the season ahead of us though. I’m ready to start performing already! Enough of these silly rehearsals, lets go to a contest or football game! I have a feeling this year will be pretty sweet
I’m going to have to figure out how to turn all of this text purple before the year is over… Now that would be cool.
Contest #1
Sep 30th
Luckily for the band, we got to sleep in as late as we wanted after our fifth win on Friday night. Good thing too, since my voice was shot the first quarter with the middle schoolers there. I got tiger of the week too, which was pretty sweet. I was able to be introduced to the other band as well as introduce Kyle, the trombone player from the other band. Kyle is a junior, his favorite color is blue, he plays baseball, he is taken, and his favorite flavor of ice cream is chocolate. After the game we marched our half time show and all the football player stayed to watch, which was really nice of them. Anyways, back to Saturday… Rehearsals at 2 were really, really ridiculously hot but thankfully it was really short too. Otherwise I may have passed out from heat exhaustion. Once we got inside and were done with inspection and such, Mrs. Hughes and the directors lectured us on PDA (Public Display of Affection) and soon we were on the road.
Every time we have a contest one of my favorite parts is to see all the other bands. And for all you parents that didn’t attend, some bands played one heck of a show. My favorite was Hendrickson, since they are always able to do such awesome stuff. Unfortunately, we didn’t get to see many others, but it was still a great experience for everybody to see what others are accomplishing. We managed to take home second in class and best color guard, which is really super sweet. Unfortunately, there were no finals at this contest, but I’m sure just about everybody had a fun time. Hopefully we will be able to dominate at Cap City next week and be better than we were yesterday.
All Hail Larson!
Sep 7th
Upon Mr. Larson’s orders, I have come to blog again. It takes a lot of reminding for me to get back on the blogs. So luckily with Mr. L’s reminder email I decided to post!
So two days ago we had our second game against the Wimberly Texans, as you all probably know. That game had to have been the loudest and craziest game I have ever been to. By the end of the 4th quarter I was half deaf and my voice was shot. I’ll start in chronological order with my view of the game/halftime/everything else. The whole first half of the game was nothing exciting, we were losing at that point so I’m skipping that part. Half time for our second game was…interesting. We had this weird timing lag or something between the drum majors and the pit/drumline and everybody else. Thursday we just bumped the opener up to 160 bpm and we were doing pretty well during rehearsals, but its hard to sustain that tempo in such a short period of time. I personally thought I did okay, except for my set of doom. That would be the same one since summer rehearsals. We go into the asterisk formation and I’m closest to the pics so I travel the farthest… Not fun 
.
Anyways we watched the Wimberly band march and it was kind of odd since the first half of the show they stood there… I don’t know whether they just haven’t learned that drill or that’s part of it. After we started heading back to play in front of the stands Michelle and I both betted that we would lose the game since we were already down around 13ish points. We eventually filed into the stands and in the third quarter Kevin (another flute player) remind Me and Michelle that we haven’t heard his joke yet. We have been asking for this joke since band camp and he wouldn’t ever tell us because it takes like 10 minutes to tell. So kevin came and sat next to us and told us the joke in between songs. That was bad time to tell a joke. Because in the 4th quarter things started really picking up in the game so we had to play the fight song every five seconds. Literally Kevin said one or maybe even two sentences before he was cut off by the roll off. Thankfully he eventually finished the joke by the end of the game and we won! Then we all went home… the end I’ll hopefully remember to blog about our first home game next week!
Meet the Tiger… So Does the Tiger Have Name?
Aug 24th
Last night was meet the tiger night. I really couldn’t care less about meet the tiger night. If it never existed, i would still sleep well at night. Despite my negativity, it wasn’t that bad this year. The scrimmage went on about 15-20 minutes after we were supposed to come on. Although its nice to be on time, it was also nice to clean drill. I was most definitely lost in some of the sets near the end of the show but now its not foggy at all. The only difficulty with cleaning drill last night was that it was dark, as it usually is at night. I could barely make put the dots on the concrete, which is a problem. Next time we have night rehearsals we will be on the field with the bright lights. Sweet. Anyways, once the scrimmage was over all the fall sports were announced to the parents in the stands. The band must have taken about 45 seconds to announce all 138 of us because Mr. Larson was going so fast. It was awesome to have my name and everybody else’s name announced correctly though, since the other activities were no where near being announced correctly. Meet the tiger night came to a close quickly after that and we were finally free to go.
I don’t know about yall, but I am still in denial about the s word… school. Gross. I have to finish my summer reading project today, so I hope everybody else has a fun last 2 1/2 days of summer!
Domination of Drill
Aug 16th
I was calculating today during a long wait at registration that we have learned 7 sets since band camp. Just today we put on 5 sets. Personally, i think that is a ton. At the rate we’re going we are going to get the opener and ballad in drill before the second football game, at least. The drill is also extra sweet this year because it seems to be more involved with what the music sounds like, where sometimes in the drill last year it didn’t always make a ton of sense.
The only thing I’m worried about this year so far, is set #19. Set 19 is a set from…below. I have one of the hardest jobs making my set since I go almost to the center of the field from the very front by the pit. I have to do this in a seemingly long 14 counts. If I had been marching forward, it would be a different story since I could jazz run if need be. Marching backwards while trying to go a ton back is a bit intimidating. The good thing about this is a) We don’t have to play, b) It makes an awesome asterisk picture, and c) The crowd will go crazy here (hopefully).
I can tell that this year we are going to have very complex drill, so hopefully our show will dominate an be worth our efforts. Which I’m sure it will
The Last Day at Last
Aug 8th
Last day of band camp started off with a bang, literally. All the seniors went around at 5:30 to wake the whole camp up. Their senior stay up night was apparently very packed. From vandelizing Mr. Lancaster’s car to a slip n slide to waking us up in the early hours of the morning, they have got to be exhausted. It shows too, they are either falling asleep on the field or going crazy in their extreme grumpiness. Hardcore. The busride home is going to be very quiet… All the seniors will be passed out, except maybe Kate Thrower. We might be learning two sets today so I better get moving before im too terribly confused. Bye!
It’s true, Mr. Briskey Does Listen to Hannah Montana
Aug 7th
Now we now for a fact, not just a suspicious rumor, that Mr. Briskey owns at least 2 Hannah Montana songs. Wednesday morning we took the Fitness Gram commonly referred to as the Fat Test. While we were stretching it out before our pacer run, Mr. B decides we could get pumped up with his music. That was interesting. After we finished most of our Fitness gram we did marching basics with adjusted step. Nothing out of the ordinary happened the rest of the day except for night rehearsal and the activity. We learned all the way through set 6 or 7 last night, which is a huge accomplishment for Wednesday. The march to breakfast had been canceled because of the rain, so the weather was super amazing. It was cool and drizzled which was perfect. Wednesday night we had our annual pool drill down. it was pretty sweet except for the fact that it was lightning outside. Once they got down to about 12 people we had to call the activity off. It would be pretty bad if all the parents came on Thursday to find that 140 band kids had been electrocuted in the pool.
Today when I woke up my whole bottom half was still throbbing. Breakfast march was not so fun. The flutes were the third to last section to be allowed to breakfast so my arms were shaking by the time we got to get in line. Michelle is coming to kick me off Mr. Briskey’s laptop, so Bye!