The Big Benford Show

Here we are on a Sunday again and I have another to do list. But today’s is a little more simple because today will be my day to get myself ready to go to TMEA. I’m more excited this year than before because I have an All Stater (he’s THE Jazz Guitarist in the All State Jazz Ensemble). I’m a little worried for him because he had some amp problems at the Hill Country Jazz Festival yesterday - and by amp problems, I mean his amp started smoking - so hopefully he can get that all worked out before we leave on Wednesday.

I’m also excited because my friend Ron McCurdy will be conducting the All State Jazz Ensemble and he’s flying into Austin on Tuesday evening and will be driving into San Antonio with me on Wednesday. He lives in LA so we talk in short bursts on the phone but I haven’t seen him since the last time he was in Texas which was a few years ago, I think.

I’ve also been invited to the Westin La Cantera for a spa treatment and some wining/dining by a group courting both TJEA and JEN to use their services for event & hotel planning. I’m excited to see what their services offer as well as time in the spa. From the website, you can see that it’s a beautiful place. I maybe looking forward to this most of all!

So, today includes laundry, putting away laundry, packing and just general house cleaning so I can come home to a semi-clean house. I want to get a “hot little pair of black heels”, as I’ve been saying for 3 weeks now, as well today so hopefully a shoe shopping trip will be made *ahem - Mrs. Klenzendorf*. I’m going to my Bollywood dance class with the girls tonight, too so I guess I better get moving. Happy Sunday!

Heard tonight on the Grammy’s by their President:

Let’s all pledge that 10 years from now, when we look back, we can say that this was the decade when every child received the benefit of music and the arts education in our public schools.

I might just say that every night before I got to bed. AMEN!!

Well, we’re in October and I’m not sure how much cooking I’ll be doing. Life gets pretty busy and even on Sundays, there isn’t a whole lotta time to cook. :/ I did find a good website for healthier cooking called Eat Better America and made the Chicken Pot Pie recipe from there last night. No pictures but goodness, it was YUMMY!!

Back to marching band - I have our contest times to post. Hopefully, you can make it to the UIL Region Marching Contest on October 17 and support the SPHS Tiger Band. We perform 3rd - warm up is at 4:20, with the performance at 5:00 pm. This contest will be at the RRISD Athletics Complex (The Palace). Hopefully, the rest of the marching schedule will be on the UIL Region 26 website soon. We just got the schedule in our emails yesterday….

Our final marching contest for the season will be the Sam Houston State University Marching Festival in Huntsville. We decided to go because there will be some great bands there and its format is much like UIL Area (prelims/finals). We are really trying to change the mindset of our band that it’s not over at UIL Region so on our “off years”, we’ll be participating on contests post-Region like this one. If you’re in the Huntsville area and can come support us (we’ll probably have a very small following with the distance from home being as it is), we’ll be performing in prelims on Saturday, October 24 at 5:15 (warm up at 4:30).

We did host and perform the CenTex Marching Showcase last weekend. It went well again and we got lots of positive feedback from the participants about the showcase. Had fun hanging out with the judges as well. Our rating was Superior and our percussion won a Outstanding Percussion award. Because we host the contest much like a UIL Region Marching Contest, we are able to perform as a full participant, not just exhibition. Good times!

I’m kinda glad the piccolo soli isn’t there done by Beaker. Thanks to Chester Phillips for sharing this video!

Oh my goodness, what a helluva week we had. When I started this week, the Stony Point Band had had two very productive weeks of Summer Band already. In week 1, we focused on marching and playing fundamentals as well as learning the wonderful music of our opener and in week 2, we applied the marching fundamentals to learning the opener of our wonderful drill. This week (3), we put music to our drill and performed it on Friday night at Dragon Stadium (I guess since we only play 2 games there, I’m not gonna call it Tiger/Dragon Stadium anymore. We’re in The Tiger Palace, baby!). My reaction to our performance? Awesome. For only having had a week of learning and a little cleaning, pretty darn good, I must say. I did video tape it but I haven’t had a chance to even get the camera out the bag…much less get it on the computer or online. I’ll get it done today, hopefully.

This week, we also had staff development as well. The speaker we had on Monday, Mychal Winn or something, was, well, alright - if you like being yelled at for motivation. What I learned from him? If you tell the students you teach that they’re going to college, they WILL!!! So all this week, I’ve been telling them that they’re “GOING TO COLLEGE!!!”. Let’s see how well that works. The rest of the week of staff development stuff hasn’t been too bad. Our principals seem to be quite efficient with their presentations (maybe someone practiced what they were gonna say) and we actually got done with many of the presentations several HOURS early! Woo hoo!!! And I got a few things done in my office this week, too. Quite exciting stuff.

Saturday was our annual Car Wash Extravaganza. My team and I were at the Firestone on Old Settlers and we washed a surprising 113 cars. There was never a moment we weren’t washing a car in the 4 hours we were there. When we were done, we even turned away 2 cars because we had to close at noon. Well, there were about 5 cars in line at noon so we went ahead and washed them - they were in line already! Thanks to some of my friends and Facebook fans (fans - LOL) who came out to get their cars washed. With the 8 sites we had going between the band and orchestra, I’m sure we washed over 600 cars. I mean, we made it rain for a few minutes, even! Unfortunately, we made it put more lightening in the sky than rain from it so we had to cancel our End of Summer Pool Party Saturday night. I stayed home and relaxed from an exhausting week so not all was lost.

Today is chore day. I’ve got a load of laundry in the wash, several more ready to go and the dishwasher is as filled as I can get it right now. I’m going to do some vaccuuming and hopefully, get the kitchen floor cleaned up a bit. Has anyone tried one of those Shark Steam Mops? I really think that might help get the grime out of my floor that I can’t seem to get up with anything else. But I’m not really willing to drop the cash on one (even with one of the many Bed Bath & Beyond coupons I have) unless I know it’s really gonna do the job.

School starts on Tuesday so my schedule should actually get a little easier starting this week. I’m convinced that UIL enforces the 8 hour rule more for the adults than the kids. I can only do so much! Okay, back to cleaning this joint!

Love you, mean it!
~C

It seems as though there are more people out there reading my blog than I realized. I was told last week that I need to blog more because they enjoy reading my blogs. Thanks so much…now leave a comment so I get MY immediate gratification! LOL

First, I’d like to start by welcoming my friend Daniel Montoya, Jr. back to Austin! He’s been doing the grad school thing for two years and I thought it was feel like FOREVER for him to get back. And in some aspects it does and I guess since we chat via conventions and Facebook, it doesn’t. Either way, welcome back to the great ATX, DMJ! ~CB700

Speaking of conventions, I just got back from TBA. I was concerned before hand that I wasn’t going to get a lot out of it because there were so very few clinics that seemed at all appealing. Turned out, I went to more clinics at this year’s TBA than I had in the last few TMEAs or TBAs! The Michael Haithcock series as well as the “Big Ten Has Beens” series were very informative. TJEA had a good turn out at our meeting and lots of exciting things were announced. Don’t worry, once I get the minutes back from Brent, the secretary, and the guys at TMEA help get the new website finished and live, I’ll post them to the new TJEA website. I also got to hang out with friends I don’t normally get to hang out with…as well as meet new friends. Jose (trumpet) and Chris (horn) from the Boston Brass were a complete HOOT to hang with! It was fun being Jose’s tour manager for about 15 minutes. That’s about all I could put up with before I “fired” him from my services. Hah Hah!

Being back from TBA means band stuff starts up again. We’ve had our Band Leadership Camp the last few days and full band camp starts on Monday. We have 3 weeks then school starts up. I can’t believe it’s already time. Where did the summer go? Oh yeah - band stuff all through June! Oh well. Nature of this lifestyle (it’s not just a job, ya know?).

I am glad to say that I’ve been keeping up with my swimming and hitting the gym as often as I can. I think it’ll be hard to get work out time at the gym in in August but I mainly joined to swim so that’s okay. As long as I can get in the water, I’m good.

Well, that’s it for now. I’ll add a few pictures once I get home and can get them from my camera onto “the internet”. I’ve been doing a lot of playing on Facebook this summer but I think now that school is starting back up and there’s no access from campus, I’ll be blogging again more. I have picked up using Twitter a little but mostly, I Twitter for the band. I hope all everyone has a nice rest of the weekend and a great next week.

Love you, mean it!
~C