Sometimes we'll sigh, sometimes we'll cry, and we'll know why just you and I know true love ways.

Texas sure was an interesting experience.

That's stage in the recital hall to the right, there. See that organ? Dr. Ring got to hear it played, but Shannon and I missed out! He said it shook the floors. He sent Shannon and me the pictures he took while in Texas and that's one of them.

I still don't feel like it all really happened, except I'm a little sadder and sobered for having done all of it - that's really my only proof. That, and I have a new shirt.

The trip there was exhausting enough, arriving at the hotel at 1:00 in the morning. It was a nice hotel, though, to be sure: the AT&T Conference Center. Overpriced, mediocre pastries and too-friendly, laughable baristas were typified in the mornings, it seemed.

We had auditions the morning following our arrival, at 9:00 AM. I wouldn't have slept Tuesday night for how nervous I was, but I was so tired I couldn't help but just pass out the second my head hit the pillow. I think Shannon was feeling the same way, even though she didn't seem to get nervous about auditions until the next morning, but I could be wrong.

The audition process was brutal and brutally unorganized. Two kinds of brutal.
I sucked bigtime, but that's when you get when you don't practice. Even if I had, though, I'm pretty sure I would have been dead last in the auditions.

But I was there anyway. I remember thinking beforehand how that would be a nice, consoling thought. But, when you're actually confronted with being worse than everyone else around you, it mostly just hurts.

It's my own fault, I guess.

The first day of rehearsal was awful. I was having serious trouble keeping up.

That sort of thought process continued throughout the trip.

I'll talk more about that trip later, and all of the wonderful things I experienced there, instead of just complaining.

END.