Progressing

Well, its 13 days to Hawaii trip. And yes, this year, our school band is eligible to participate in the Pacific Basin Music Festival. This is a competition involving bands from many various parts of the globe. I have to agree, this event has gotten me excited and anxious, it seems like so much fun! However, we havent completed learning all the music pieces we are supposed to perform.

This made many of us in the band really stressful. Not only do we have 4 practises per week, we also have very minimal breaks. It's not that we do not enjoy playing music, but its just that it is very difficult for us to cope with our work, especially during the test period.
I also feel very hard to balance band and work. And unfortunately, I had kind of injured myself the last band practice. This is how it happened:

Yup, this is a picture of the mouthpiece of my clarinet (I know its ugly but hey, I drew it :D) When I was playing the last band practise, my mouth nearly died out of exhaustion, so in order to keep on practising, I placed my lower lip in a different position. Then, the reed which is quite rough, "frictioned" too much on somewhere around my lower lip. This resulted in the swelling of my skin just below my lower lip... I wonder if I can still play my clarinet as usual...

Anyway, the rest of the band have been improving tremendously compared to the start of the year. This is mostly thanks to the seniors' continuous encouragement. I hope that we will continue to improve in the following band practises and I hope that we will be able to clinch commendable results. Even if we don't, I still strongly feel that in any journey to any destination, the journey would be of the most significance♪♫