Hopefully the last time I am the first to make a post of Victoria

Well I am finally (hopefully) done with Victoria. If I ever go back there, may it be for some purpose other than playing music. I also do not intend to return soon as within the past 6 years, I have been there 6 times. That being said, it was considerably more fun this time due to minor things such as the fact we could go in bars (spoiler alert: I did not get "hella crunk"). Before I get there though, I'm going to go through the week, which was good because Orion was back in town.

Monday:
I completed my last band rehearsal at SCC. I'm going to have my last band rehearsal tonight and then tomorrow is the last concert. Soon, I shall move on to bigger and better bands (provided SU or UW accepts me...). I might come back next year for the Jazz Band as a shared student, but I don't think I will come back to the concert band. I just didn't like the once a week and at night thing.

Tuesday:
Nobody noticed that I had set my hair on fire the day before, so I must be good at concealing it. We had a good day in improv that mostly involved retooling how our set was going to be arranged. After school, I finished up my French project and all other homework except one test in biology that had not been posted.

Wednesday:
I had my presentation in French. I was supposed to go third of four people, but the lady ahead of me had a presentation that lasted 30 minutes (was supposed to be no more than 10). I had to squeeze mine in in just under 10 minutes, which was doable. It went well, I was impressed that 8 months ago, I could hardly speak French and now here I was giving a 10 minute presentation in all French. After classes, I went to Costco for lunch with Grandpa. I did some errands with him and was going to toss a disc with Orion and Steven, but it got really rainy, then really windy, then really rainy again. I took the test from biology, then I did some Ace Combat 6 since the beta was supposedly going to get reset soon.

Thursday:
Orion had gone up to the UW to talk and eat, so I played some more Ace Combat, but eventually wound up playing some beta with Steven I think.

Friday:
I met up with Orion and Steven after school and we went to the UW and only spent a couple hours there. I always forget how boring it is there. Orion left to go hang out with Lisa and Steven and I decided to ditch so we could go home and play the now-patched beta. After 3 hours of playing, I noticed Orion had texted me wanting to do something with Steven and I, so we tried to find a three player co-op game, but to no avail. We watched Revenge of the Nerds while playing Mario Party 4, but got bored when the movie ended. We stopped playing and watched (rewatched for me) District 9. By the time the movie ended, it was 2am and I had not begun to pack for Victoria and I had to get up in about 3.5 hours, so I went home and packed.

Saturday:
I wound up getting to bed at 3am, so only 2.5 hours of sleep for me. I got to the clipper on time with Erik, but he forgot his passport so his dad had to hurry back and get it. In the meantime, Joel and I got seats on the clipper. Before I go any further, I will give you some names that will come up repeatedly:
Erik: You guys should know him from high school.
Joel: Lead alto for the jazz band. He graduated in '09, but he's old in his grade, so he's only really 4 months younger than Erik and I. He's really cool and we hung out most of the time.
Stephen: A cool drummer in concert band. He looks like a rapist (he showed us his driver's license and his school id, they were very funny), but he's actually the exact opposite of a rapist. His build is a little like mine, but maybe 25% larger than me.

Ok so back to the weekend. Joel and I got some seats and Erik came along eventually. Erik for some reason had a few YuGiOh decks, including one pretty bomb-ass deck that was really solid so he taught me how to play and we played a few games until I got a bit seasick on the, which was strange because I never get seasick and I rarely get carsick. It was not a problem for long as I was able to fall asleep very quickly.

Upon arriving in Victoria, we all checked into our rooms, then the four of us set off to go find a place to eat. We realized that since we were 19, we could go into bars! It was very nice and a great way to avoid the throngs of high schoolers that would clog up restaurants. We went to that big pub near Smitty's (which was out of business :O (I know, shocking!)) and went inside for my first time ever after walking by it so many times. The waitresses were very cute and it was a sports bar, so there was soccer being watched. We stayed there for about 90 minutes before leaving. Erik and Joel had drinks, but Stephen and I didn't. I wanted to, but I can't remember the exact wording of my bet with myself (whether its before I turn 21 or before it's legal) plus drinks were way expensive, so I avoided drinking altogether. I don't know why Stephen didn't, but it was always nice to have someone else not doing it.

After we left, Erik went to track down his girlfriend as well as his other two friends that were coming along. Joel, Stephen, and I went to Lyle's Place, my favorite music store, to check out the selection. After that, we all met back up at the hotel to get ready for the concert and we headed off to the docks to play. It went fairly well. It was a good warmup performance. I also found out that one of the ladies in the band has a hot daugther. Joel and I were baffled at how she could have been so attractive given her parents (not trying to be rude, she was just really good looking). After the performance, Erik's girlfriend managed to track down his other two friends and they joined our group of wandering around-ness. Stephen mysteriously left to go back to the room to get some sleep before that though. He decided to prank Joel by locking the deadbolt so that Joel would come back and it would be funny that he couldn't get in. That kind of worked too well when Joel took too long to come back and Stephen wound up falling asleep, leaving Joel locked out of his room for the next 6 hours. The three of us and Erik's three friends wandered around until they led us into a crappy comic book store after leading us towards a games workshop. Joel and I had no interest in continued hanging out, so we decided to go on an epic journey for the mega kit-kat bar we saw in a commercial (a regular kit kat bar, except it's about an inch wide at the base and about an inch tall). I suggested we try at the convenience store where my Dutch chips are at, so we went across town to go there. Sure enough, we found both the chips and the kit kats at the store. We tried the kit kats on the way back to the hotel. They were amazingly good, but they pretty much destroyed us after we ate them. We both had to go to the bathroom pretty bad after trying those out.

After winding up at the hotel, Erik texted Joel saying he and his friends were back at the bar. Joel wanted to go get his drink on, so I told him to go ahead and I was going to stay behind. I busted out my laptop and would have watched the OSL finals, but forgot they were on and wound up playing some custom SC games. Eventually, the rest of them came back with a fifth (not sure how much that is, but they referred to it as a fifth) of rum and a buttload of coke. Erik's friend (I think his name was Casey) was a total douche and had to repeatedly try to assert how much he was better at SC than I was. After repeated failed attempts, he seemed to give up and he left me alone (like he literally gave up pestering me about how I was playing after I repeatedly pwned and criticized his "genius" strategies by referencing proleague and using real build names (I'm sorry, but sunken rushing in a ZvZ is not pure genius and when you tech straight to goliaths and firebats, it is NOT a rush)). Eventually, Stephen woke up and joined us. He and Joel and I spent a lot of time talking about Starcraft and the new beta. I also showed the two of them the really cool Artosis vs Voidwars replay with the good use of forcefield. While that was going on, the other four (Erik and his girlfriend and Casey(?) and his girlfriend decided to play some card game that involved a loss of clothing. I thought and kind of hoped they would kick me out of the room when they were going to play and I wasn't (because the girls were not much to look at and, well, the other two were guys). Sadly, that did not happen, so I was just thankful that my laptop screen was very large and wide...

Eventually, the four of them left to go get drunk elsewhere after making somewhat of a mess of the room. I guess Stephen creeped out the girls. I owe him one for getting them to leave. He and Joel left to get some sleep and I was left alone. Erik did not come back that night, so I had the whole room to myself. It was very nice. I took 10 hours of sleep to make up for the night before.

Sunday:
Oh boy, sorry about all this writing. I hope it's at least interesting. Sunday is shorter, I promise.
Erik returned shortly after I got myself out of bed. I was going to head to Lyle's Place to grab some CDs, but they didn't open for a couple hours, so I came straight back and got ready for the concert. We played on the Parliament Steps. Charlie and Janice showed up, which was nice of them. They said they liked it even though I thought we could have done better. They did say it was nice to not hear marching band music for a change and I will give them that point, especially after what I saw last year (20 bands playing 5 different songs pretty much).

After the performance, Stephen disappeared (even though it turned out he was only 20 feet away from us when we left and none of us realized it). Erik and co. disappeared as well, leaving Joel and I alone, which was pretty cool. We walked around and hung out for a bit, getting the chance to meet and talk briefly with the Darth Vader violin player (I got a picture with him too!). We got some CDs and then spent a lot of time wandering around until we decided to just watch some sports at that pub to kill the last hour and a half.

The clipper ride back was late to start, but we got in early. It was nice to get home to my bed. I woke up in the morning remembering that I forgot to pick my horn up from the truck the night before and figured it would be fine since they said they were dropping everything off in the band room.

Today:
When I got in today, I couldn't find my horn. I was distracted all day until the afternoon when I got some emails back confirming it had not been stolen, the trombone player driving the truck just took it home for the night for me. That was really nice of him to do, I let him give me a hard time during the rehearsal tonight. I tossed the disc around with Steven today, that was pretty cool. Unfortunately, Orion couldn't join us, but I'm going to stop by to say goodbye tomorrow when I go to pick up my cd and borrow his flute so I can try to learn how to play this summer.

That's all for now. It is very late and I am going to try to get to bed early again. I am sure looking forward to this three day weekend coming up. I took pictures in Victoria and I'll probably post them tomorrow or Wednesday, depending on what I feel like doing, so until then, peace out.