I’m back baby! Lets do a practice challenge!

Oh hello.  I’m back.  No, I did not drop off the face of the earth for two years, but I did get insanely busy and I kind of forgot that I had this blog.  In fact, I let my domain expire, and someone else picked it up for a year…weird.  Well it ended up being available again so I snapped it back up and decided to resume my blog posts.  So what has happened between now and 2017 (which was my last post)?  Well, a lot.  My family and I left Hawaii and moved back to Virginia (insert crying emoji here), and now I’m back at Fleet Forces Band.  Circle of navy band life?  Maybe.

We moved back to Virginia initially because I was accepted into the Unit Leader Course at the Naval School of Music.  Starting in January 2019, it was 8 months of cramming as much music theory, ear training, conducting, rehearsal technique, drum majoring, arranging, and leadership training as humanly possible.  Seriously, I think the curriculum was by far the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and that’s saying a lot considering I have a MM in performance from Eastman!  I won’t go into too much detail, but I spent the last 8 months getting up at 4 am and working 10-15 hour days 5 days a week.  Mostly because I felt like I was terrible at everything and I had to devote at least some time each day to all the above subjects.  Needless to say, I’m glad it’s done.

Luckily, it just worked out that instead of picking up and moving again, the Navy sent me back to Fleet Forces Band in Norfolk.  Cool.  It’s boring for me, but really good for the family right now.  I know it sounds crazy, but uprooting and moving an entire household sucks.

After all that, I took three weeks of leave, went home to Colorado (sans instrument), and I didn’t even crack my clarinet case for almost a month.  You could say that I was out of shape!  I’ve seen a few people on social media do a 100 day practice challenge, and I figured, why not?  So here we are!

Its been 23 days since I decided to undergo the 100 day practice challenge.  But I haven’t posted anything about it since the first day…

Yeah, that first day sucked.  The following twenty-something days were mostly filled with improving my endurance and sound.  I haven’t posted anything because, well frankly I didn’t want you all to hear how terrible I sounded, haha.  But, I think I’m ready to start recording videos now, to start helping me be accountable.  I’ll probably only post them on here via YouTube, just because I don’t really want to overload my Instagram with clarinet practice videos.

I’ve started preparing for a D.C. Navy Band audition in November that I may or may not be able to take…so we’ll see where that leads me!  See you tomorrow for day 24!