After Downtime...

Blogger downtime is really not a cool thing... I've been trying to get a new post up for a while (ie since the day after the last one!) rather unsuccessfully, as "Blogger is unavailable at the moment". Not that I'm complaining, I'm all for a temporary downtime if it means addressing major compatibility issues site-wide. Anyway, this is what I've been up to over the weekend:

SCHOOL

Firstly, the usual full days on Thursday and Friday. Rush around, rush around... practice our piece for the prelims with Guy. That actually caused me a lot of stress. We played "Swing Life Away" by Rise Against, me on guitar and Guy singing. I learnt the guitar part while on holiday in Botswana on a friend's acoustic, and kept it going sporadically on Andy's electric back at home, but note the important detail that I don't have a guitar of my own. So, I know what I'm doing. True, right? No, actually.

Guy, on the other hand, is in this event unwittingly, and I only told him about it two weeks ago. In fact, last Tuesday, he didn't even know the song that well (as in 3 months ago I'd shown it to him, saying "Guy, wouldn't this be cool to do as a band or something?"). Anyway, I sent him the song, he spend the next 24 hours of his life listening to it until he knew it backwards. He's in the choir, so it wasn't too difficult re perfect pitching etc.

So we had our first and last practice together 4 hours before the prelim itself. Perfect. Well, nearly perfect, but then again, it is a difficult song. So we go and play in front of the resident guitar teacher, Mr Hoole, the resident awesome teacher, Mr Wrensch, and the resident OD-cum-epic-music-person, Matt Dennis. It went really well and we could tell the panel was if not blown away at the very least moderately chuffed. Hoole asked me who my guitar teacher was, so I told him I didn't have one, and officially I couldn't play guitar. Then Matt asked me whether I had a steel-string guitar at home, so I said "No, I don't have any guitar whatsoever!". They were seriously impressed at this point, so YEAH!

Rest of school was pretty ordinary, everyone busy preparing for exams and we're almost at a stage of doing no work in class but just revising. Yay!

FENCING

This weekend was the third WC ranking competition. Story I tell you, I was going to do just the sabre on Saturday, because it "clashed" with cadet epee. Come Saturday morning (8:30am), there are four entries for sabre, and this means this will take half an hour and so cannot clash with cadet epee. Okay, one hour left. We are in Ottery, the Bishops Armoury isn't that far away. Drive down, get a security guard to open the hall for us, grab every single epee we have (ie six of which 20% work), drive back in time for roll-call (9:30am), do weapons check, get changed, fence.

Long story short, it went well, I came second in cadet epee and third in senior sabre, which is a good result. Then, rush off to a maths competition at UCT at 2pm, finish at 4:30, go to a Scout awards ceremony until 7:00, back to Bishops for an Astronomy society outing to the observatory for a talk about simulating the universe. Get back home at 9:30, practice quick study piece for Monday's music exam until 10:30. Go to bed. And people still say I have more free time than they do...

Sunday comes along, and this time I'm fencing the whole day. Came second to Rob in the cadet foil, and then upset the entire Senior competition by beating Michael Erasmus (currently ranked 3rd nationally). Came fourth in junior foil, and somewhere around 7th in senior. Not a bad haul, I can tell I'm getting better.

LOOKING FORWARD

When going to Poland after exams, I'll definitely buy some more fencing gear. I think I'll be one of those epic people who does all three weapons, but I'm definitely more focused on sabre in my opinion. It's a ctually a really cool fighting style, coming from a background of foil techniques and tactics.

Also, I need to get my rear in gear with exams looming up. Not actual studying, though, I'm worried about writing notes which I can sell. This is where my Warhammer is funded from, plus, writing out notes is good studying practice. Watch this space if you're a potential buyer and reading this.

I just want to let you faithful readers know I'm still here, and it's not my fault that there was about a week of downtime, and I was just as bleak as you are for general lack of posts! Talking of posting, I'll put up a battle report of my test-run of the new Terminators on my other blog, but give me a while to post it up!

Oh yeah. and Joe has unfortunately taken down his (still young) blog. He told me it's because he doesn't want to publicly post some opinions about him being leftist and anti-religion. I said, "But that's what I'm doing!", and he replied, "Yeah, but you don't care what people think!" Maybe he's right, but either way, my blog is still up, and his unfortunately isn't.

Must tell him to at least free up the domain address ;)