It's Spring!

...well, okay, maybe not technically. But considering that we've had a collective week of days above 70 in the past 3 weeks, I'm gonna say that we're a heck of a lot closer than we were before. :) Besides, a lot of cool stuff comes in spring. Like a lot of my friends birthdays. And Easter. And my birthday. And Easter.

Oh yeah.... then there's this little thing called Spring Break.

I'm just going to come right out and say it- I love that I get a week in the spring to kind of relax and chill. The later part of last week was beyond stressful for me, because this semester all of my professors, it seems, decided to give midterms. Let it be known that I, Rachel, HATE midterms. One of my midterms (the english one) counted for 25% of my total grade. Talk about pressure, eh? It sort of helped that my music for children professor abruptly moved our "midterm" (and I do use the term loosely) up to Tuesday rather than on Thursday, meaning that I got all of Thursday morning to devote to studying for the massive Music Lit test that I had at 12:30. My brain was hurting by Wednesday night. I read over a 100 pages in my text over the course of two evenings, and that's not even counting the number of times I had to go over the pages of handwritten notes that I had taken. My head was so full of Bach and Beethoven, Handel and Haydn that I thought I would explode by the time I walked into my test. Of course, it didn't help that there seemed to be a thousand and one distractions for me that morning that I had to fight through in order to get my last minute cramming done.

Of course, after that test was done, I felt compelled to immediately bring out my English textbook. I'm not going to lie: as nerdy as it is, I really have come to enjoy English grammar. There's so many nuances and little things to know about it, it's like breaking some complex code. When you get it, it's like you're joining an elite bunch of people who know the rules of grammar and how to dispel any ambiguity (a key word, don't ya know?). Of course, that's not to say that I didn't almost rip out all my hair when I couldn't seem to remember how the heck I was supposed to diagram an adjective or which type of clause was an adverbial and which was an adjectival. (Just so you know, relative means adjectival, subordinate is adverbial.) Then the diagrams of said things were insane. Grr... suffice to say I went a wee bit bananas with that.

There's a happy ending, though: a 99 on my English midterm! YAY!! I was so excited when I saw that, I nearly started dancing for joy. I still don't know how I did on the Music Lit test, since the listening portion was more than a little sketchy for me, but that will come in time.

Beyond that, my band director is once again being difficult in regards to family obligations. My brother's Confirmation (one of the seven sacraments of the Roman Catholic church) is on the same weekend as our last (albeit very INFORMAL) concert in May. It really pisses me off that these little conflicts never cease to crop up. Anyway, in explaining this to my band director, he still was floundering and saying that while he wouldn't just say 'no', he also wasn't going to say yes. I understand that it's a big deal to miss a concert, but this is a pretty legit excuse: it's my brother's Confirmation, for the love! Yet for my school, a religious commitment doesn't really seem to carry much weight. Now I'm (once again) going to have to enter into negotiations so that I can at least enjoy my grandparents' company for a couple of days before I have to whisk myself off to school for Dead Week and finals. It kinda stinks that I'm going to have to stay up there clear until Thursday to finish up with my last finals, but I'll get over it, I know. If nothing else, it's more time to pack. Seeing all the stuff I have in my apartment, it's going to take from when I get back from Easter to when I go home for summer to get all that stuff somehow packed away into a semblance of order.

Anyway, I think this post is long enough for now. Until later!
~r