I'm fighting with my reeds. Almost physically throwing punches at this point. I didn't play for two and a half months over the summer because of drum corps (actually probably more because of my laziness) so I don't really have the chops of steel that I had before summer during my senior recital time.

I'm playing on the bassoon professors reeds at my university, and that is a totally normal thing to do... but they're SUPER hard! I can't practice for more than 30 minutes without getting tired. I get it tho, part of it is my fault... oops. But I still have some blanks from last spring, precisely two that are still usable. So I am using one, its perfectly in tune, I can play for two to three hours at a time (if I actually practice) but it's super long and sounds windy. It sounds a bit muffled but airy as well as if the tone isn't quite exactly clear.

Back to my real life; I'm sorry I haven't blogged in awhile, I've been a good student studying for midterms, which I took today! I feel like it went well, or this means I totally bombed it and failed the class... Fingers crossed for the first option.

I sat down in my lesson on Tuesday and wrote out a practice schedule with my instructor, OH MY GOSH!!! THIS IS THE BEST THING IN THE WORLD! I found times in the day that I didn't know existed, granted my social life is pretty much gone, but I don't care if I get to play bassoon for the rest of my life and make a living off of it.

So I've obviously been practicing a lot more this week. And as I started my practice session this afternoon I got to thinking how the practice room is like a small cage. It has a small window at the top so you can tell if it is daylight or not but you can't really see anything out of it other than the ceiling. You can hear all of the extremely loud people in the lobby of the practice room, which isn't too cool peeps. Sidenote; If you go to music college please be quiet when you are near the practice rooms, sometimes people aren't having a good time in there. And sometimes you just want to get out of the practice room and escape but your time isn't up yet so you can't. Fortunately you can leave when you are done but I still say it's like a cage...

Total practice time today: 1hr 30min

Oh and I'm going to see book of mormon tonight after my swim!

Don't practice too hard,

Emily