Heather Anne

Hiya! For those of you who may not know me, you're out of the loop and can refer to me as HeatherAnne's cousin (HAC if you will). For those of you who do know me, Cousin is sufficient.

I’ve been staying with HA since it’s just closer to where I’m working this week. No other reason, I don’t actually like her – I’m all about convenience, ease, and efficiency. I did a nice little Google Map search last night. You see, I’ve been to HA’s and also to work, but never work from HA’s. So, the directions were as follows:
- Turn left on to drive.
- Turn left on to R road.
- Turn left on to # road.

Now I'll just stop there. That’s not where Google said my destination was, but Google did expect me to be able to complete step 2 to step 3. However, I made the left on to R road, and was ready to travel the 0.3 miles (1 min) when the road ended. Cul-de-sac. One house. One entrance to pool. Crap. Hmmm. Conundrum!!

[2 side notes -> the plural of cul-de-sac is not cul-de-sacs. Oh no dear Internets, it’s culs-de-sac. Don’t believe me? Ask Rory Gilmore. Also -> Conundrum is my favorite word]

So I turn around and start over, this time making a right on to R road (just to see what happens). That doesn’t work. I go straight, just for kicks. No dice. Crap.

I call HA. No answer. Serious Crap. So I look at the map that I had printed off and decided to just leave current neighborhood, get back to # road, take it til it meets up with needed#road and go from there. So I did that and still made it to work 10 minutes early.

I teach a highschool colorguard in the summer. It’s a good time – I mean why would I not want to spend my summers home from college hangin’ out with a large group of highschool girls and band geeks. No seriously? Why wouldn’t I wanna do that? I did it for 4 years in highschool, this is my 4th year out of highschool and I’m still goin’ strong. Anyway, so I get there and the band director informs me that they are going to take care of uniform stuff, then I'll lead the stretch, she’ll work on the flag stuff while I work with the rifles, we’ll re-group and I'll do dance/body work, then we’ll do tosses outside and then we’ll go home. Really? I was under the impression we only had 4 hours today.

She thinks the uniform stuff will take 30 minutes. And my Dad’s new mantra (from remodeling our house) is that everything takes twice as long as you think it will. True statement. She finishes up the uniform stuff at 10:02am. Fine by me, I’m getting paid, however I really would have preferred to sleep another hour. So at 10, I do some stretching and of course the girls sound like I’m killing them, torturing them, etc. I mean you’re on colorguard, is it really that much for me to ask you to be able to touch your toes?! They all complain that they’ll be sore tomorrow. Good, I know I’ve done my job.

Oh wait – I totally forgot to tell you. The uniforms are new this year. In the past they’ve been these hideous black lycra tents of sorts. Hideous. So I was pumped to hear they had new ones. Til I learned they were white. Til I learned they were 2 pieces. And especially until I learned that one of the pieces was a crop top. Now I think that bears repeating – crop top. Half of a top. Oh good Lord she had gone mad. White uniforms?? Hello – football field, sweat, bright lights. I just can’t imagine a good outcome. Okay fine, against all odds, maybe the white uniforms wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe the crop tops won’t be that bad either. Oh wait – there are two girls that wear an XL and five that wear a Large. hmmm. I’m not sure someone thought this through well enough. Okay, fine – maybe they’ll have nude body suits underneath to hold everything in. I’m sorry, what? All they’ll have on under this is a white sports bra and white boy short undies? Yea, someone may have forgotten to take their anti-delusional pills here recently.

Okay – sorry – so where were we? Oh yes, we just stretched. Boy that was rough. So I take the rifles away. I’m used to having 10 rifles or so, but this year I’ve got 5. No biggie – I like smaller groups, easier to clean and make sharp. What’s that you say? One girl is getting her senior photo taken and one will be in Mexico until July 16th? Oh well that’s good. Fine whatever, I'll just work on conditioning first, and then we’ll spin. I like the rifle girls because they always let me make them sore – I can tell them to do 100 crunches and push ups with me and they do it, no questions, comments, or complaints. I love that about them.

After we condition, we spin a bit, then we take a short water break, and it’s back on stage for the whole group. It’s time for across the floor stuff. So we’ll just do a recap of what you all did at auditions, right? Pardon me? You never did any dance work for auditions? *sigh* Okay then, the basics it is! It never ceases to amaze me the level of un-coordination that some people have. I mean I’m beating these drumsticks together and plainly and as hard as I can, and you still can’t even walk with the beat?! How do you sing with the radio? How do you jump-rope? And how in the world do you expect to dance?!

I worked for over an hour, yelling left right left right, 1 2 3 4 and everything else I could think of and some people are just not in sync with the rest of the world.

Please check back for a post from your regularly scheduled blogger with details of the lady dragon and mr-sock-red-butt-monkey.