No really. It is. NABBA Night.
I’m willing to bet that you all have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about, so I’ll explain. NABBA is the North American Brass Band Association; and the GBB (Georgia Brass Band), of which I am a member, is a member in NABBA. As such, the band will compete in the NABBA Championships next April; performing, among other selections, a rather dull and stupidly-difficult piece entitled, “The King of Elfland’s Daughter.”
Why it wasn’t called “Elfland’s Princess,” I do not know. But it wasn’t.
In any case, the GBB has completed its Fall concert schedule, and so tonight is the first night that we’ll look at the Elfland piece and begin preparing for the competition. Instead of practicing for two hours or so each week, our rehearsal schedule will probably swell to at least twice a week and closer to three hours each time. Sectionals will be in order. Personal practice time will be expected. And until April, we’ll be focusing on that insidiously boring song.
Oh joy.
I should mention that the band actually WON the competition last year (without me, damn them) in their innaugural entry. Well, they won their “section” anyway. The competition is broken into 5 different levels: Explorer, Youth, Challenge, Honors, and Championship. The GBB, having no idea how good they were last year, opted to enter the “Challenge” section, two flights below the big boys of brass banding.
They were the last of 8 bands to compete in that section, and they so completely humiliated the other 7 (winning by nearly 30 points), that they were told that they could only enter this year’s competition in the Honors or Championship sections.
Honors it is. The main competition will probably be the New England Brass Band, which won the honors section last year.
By the way, you can read all about NABBA and the competition at www.nabba.org
On to other things. I bought a satellite radio today. I hated to do it – paying for radio just seems wrong, somehow – but I finally got so sick and tired of commercials that I decided it was worth it. I just kept thinking to myself, “You’re driving to Vermont and back in a couple of weeks, you go to Canada every year….hell, you’ve put nearly 120,000 miles on the car in three years. Get the damned satellite.”
So I did. 170 commercial-free stations, about 30-40 of which I think I’ll enjoy. Finally I can get the CBC in Atlanta. That’s worth the price of admission right there.
On the social front – there’s not one. I have, however, been spending a lot of time with a friend (a male friend) who likes to play pinball as much as I do. And we’ve discovered that we both REALLY like playing this thing called, “Big Buck Hunter,” which is a video game that lets you kill animals for points. Not a completely sick concept – I mean, some people kill real animals for trophies. We kill fake animals for nothing.
There is one facet of the game that I don’t really understand. It seems that you can kill a fully-grown bull moose with a single shotgun blast to the head – but that same gun must shoot a frog FOUR TIMES before it dies. Does that seem just a tad illogical to you (assuming you can get your head around the idea that you’re moose hunting with a pump-action shotgun, that is)?
Don’t know if I’ve mentioned previously that I’m now running Windows Vista on my laptop. Seems to be a really nice OS – an improvement over XP Pro, which I didn’t think was possible. I have found a couple of quirks and there are some hardware drivers that need to be updated, but overall I give it an A-.
That ought to have everyone all caught up. I’ll probably be a year older before I update this again (unless something really cool happens at Christmas), so everyone have happy holidays and hoist a pint to me on New Year’s Eve.