Rain, Rain, Go Away

Actually, up until a month ago this was one of the driest winters on record in NorCal. All kinds of people were crying drought. But with a little patience and faith, we are now looking at one of the wetter winters. Which brings me to my point. I did my Spring Concert last night with the school bands. The set up and take down for this event has become dramatically easier with the obtaining of the trailer you see below (okay, mostly you see the Jeep, but I'm coming to that).

As nice as the trailer is, it's not covered. And that's the way I want it - except when it rains hard on a concert night. So I had to leave all the equipment and instruments at Andros Karperos School where we do our concerts (the old K-8 schools where I teach both have very tiny MP rooms that are not big enough to hold the huge crowds, 600+, that come to our concerts), and hope the rain stopped by this morning. As you can see, it did.

The kids really played well at the concert. My Inter. Band played a piece called Slide and the Family Bones (yes, it's a reference to Sly Stone and his relatives who had a very good Funk/Rock/Jazz fusion group in the early 70's) which is a trombone solo number. We had all the trombones from every group play it with them. The Adv. Band did some great music. I was especially pleased with their performance of a new number called "Moscow, 1941" which is meant to describe through music the Red Army's defeat of the Germans outside of Moscow during WWII. And they knocked people's socks off with a version of "Amparito Roca" (a Spanish march) which is very technical, and very fast, and very exciting.

Of course, all this music talk brings me back to the Jeep. I had hoped to get a vehicle that had an mp3 port so that I could use my iPod to listen to music and talks. But when I got this rig home I discovered that it actually has a 24GB hard drive I can use for such things. I've loaded much of my music and talks onto it, and I do use it.