Category: BlahBlahBabble

I went to a school full of strange but wonderful traditions, and I am alway proud to admit that I am an Aggie. One of the many wonderful traditions at A&M is the Aggie Band. It was a nice treat to come across the website tonight and look through all of the information there – and I was thrilled to see that you can order an Aggie Band CD! Just looking at the photographs, I can hear the band in my mind – the opening notes of the halftime performance at the football games, the amazing moves of their routines, going with girlfriends down to the band field to watch them practice my freshman year, attending games with friends in the band my sophomore year – the only way to get a 50 yard-line seat in the student section!

My sophmore year in college was the first time a female was a senior in the Aggie Band – in 1989! Hey, I said it was a school of strange traditions. So it was neat to see in the photographs that they have so many females in the band now. When I was a freshman, there were very few – and life for them was hell. (Hazing wasn’t “allowed” but it was still happening throughout the Corps at the time.) A lot has changed since I left A&M back in 1989.

Key facts and figures about the Aggie Band:
:: With approximately 400 men and women musicians, it is the largest military marching band in the country.

:: The musicians all are members of Texas A&M’s Corps of Cadets. Band members live, eat and are housed together as a unit of the corps.

:: The infantry and artillery bands, which form the combined band, are the two largest units in the Corps of Cadets.

:: The band is led by members of its senior class, who wear distinctive senior boots.

:: There are no music majors among the band’s members because Texas A&M doesn’t offer such a major.

:: Band members pursue studies in all of the university’s undergraduates colleges.

:: Twelve senior cadets march on the band’s front row as the “bugle rank.”

:: The group prepares its drills with seven to 10 hours of actual practice time per week. Members say that’s possible only because of the discipline inherent in their military lifestyle.

:: Some of the band’s maneuvers are so complex that a computer says they can’t be done because they require two people to be in the same place at the same time.

Gig ‘Em, Aggies! WHOOOOOP!

Oh – did you want more? The last part of this post is dedicated to Robyn & Todd…

Commmerative $2001 George Bush bills.

Wrong. Very wrong. I think I am going to be sick. [via Solonor, but I won’t hold it against him.]

Remember The Mess from Sunday? It had to all be moved again yesterday. My Mom was wonderful and offered to come over and steam clean my carpets for me. Only thing is, you can’t clean it if you can’t get to it. So after some fast moving, I cleared everything back out of the dining room – even the chairs themselves were moved.

I will take more photos later tonight. It definitely looks a lot nicer then it did Sunday night. However, now there is a lot of stuff crammed in to my bedroom, since I had to move things fast. Ahhhhh, the joy of rearranging things. At least they are moving out the door. No more stuff! No more stuff! Clutter free!

I realized the other day that I never posted the haircolor photos after I made my hair dark ash brown.

Click on the photos for a larger version. Photo 1: Outside before I went to the hair salon for a trim. Photo 2: Inside the salon, right before Troy cut my hair. Photo 3: After the haircut.

Some people rearrange their furniture all of the time. I am not one of those people. But I decided I had had enough – I was tired of my TV blocking my built-in bookcase. My hutch that holds my TV had been placed in the dining room when I moved in here because their was no room in the living room. That is – until today. I emptied out the hutch (where am I going to put all of this stuff now?), rearranged the furniture so that the couch is in front of the window, and moved my TV back in to the hutch where it belongs. No small task, considering I had to move the Tivo, the cable box, the DVD player and the receiver – plus the TV itself – and get everything hooked back up.

I haven’t moved the VCR yet, and I’m afraid I don’t remember how to hook it back in to the system! Oops! I had bought new cords to hook it in to the receiver before, and I have to hook it back in to the Tivo so I can record things off of it. And there is some way that I can hook it in so that I can play a video while the Tivo records something else. Hmmm… That may not be too important – I think I’ve watched two video tapes in the past year!