Letters are cool

Today I got a card from Jeff and Bekka and a letter from Mikey! Fabulous. And also today I had an amazing practice session. Everything just kind of clicked in my voice. That it is very rare experience for voice majors. Today was also very long though so I am going to shower and then sleep. And it will be grand. At least it better be because I have been looking forward to sleeping all day. OK byieeeeee

My best friends are the SPK

Thats short for sour patch kids. I love those things. They are a gift. A beautiful invention. But also my demise. I spend all my monies on them. Mom said I can only eat them after I accomplish something. However I decided that me staying sane is an accomplishment so I should get to eat them all the time right? Righto. Moving on. Cool news. On either Friday or Saturday some lady went to the Barbershop festival and really enjoyed my quartet. She contacted Brother Kempton (one of our vocal staff) because supposedly he is in her ward. Anyway she asked if our group would provide 15 to 20 minutes of entertainment at their ward Cub Scout banquet on Feb. 18. Of course we said yes. That means we have to brush up on Mr. Sandman from last year and have that ready to go. Because we don't have that much music prepared we asked one of our fellow barbershoppers to get his quartet and come along with us. I think it should be grand. Hmmmmmm what else. This week has had gnarly weather. Today was -30 with the wind chill and -22 without. Thats Rexburg for ya. And it has been snowing non-stop all day. Pitiful. Every school is shut in the district except ours obviously. Today I learned why...and I will share. Below -18 the diesel fuel in the buses congeals so the buses won't start and they can't get the kiddies to school. Interesante. I vote that instead of walking all college students must ride buses. OH! I got a letter from my friend Dano yesterday. He's on his mission in Sierra Leone Africa. Neat. He wrote it on 12/21 and I just now got it. Thats real snail mail. Truely. I bet in Africa they have snails as big as some peoples heads and they strap mail to their shells and send them across the barren desert landscape. Forging a slimey trail. I totally feel like time is working against me. I have to go now and do more stinking work. Before I forget though I will put up a link to our other video. It is the same night just a different angle. When Laurel puts up hers I will link those too. cool Namaste.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYNC8fX5Z9A

Uncooked Noodles....

I can't stop eating them. It's awful. Well no it is rather satisfying, but I eat them like a crazy person. At the moment Nyssa is reading Harry Potter 7 and she is acting like she has never read it before. I shall give an example. *ahem* this is Nyssa reading......"hahahahaha i love ron" silent reading "giggle giggle I don't know why i am laughing" silent reading "Crap! They figured out it was hermione" silent reading "Ron Tonks died :(" silent reading "OH no" silent reading "i'm at this part with the horcrux and the sorry I'm interrupting chuckle chuckle." .......That is what has been going on for the past two hours.

Today was a good Sunday. I slept in until 11. I haven't done that in ages. I haven't been able to do that in ages. Brilliant. Then we had church. And and and I got to wear my rain boots to church because Rexburg is basically a giant mound of dirty slush. Then I came home ate ramen for dinner and did all my religion homework. Boooooo tomorrow is Monday. That means school. Lame lame. Well as I promised I will put up videos. In fact I'll put up two. The are both the same performance but at different angles. When I get the video of Friday's performance from laurel I'll put that one up too. ......ok forget putting up two tonight. This takes forever to load. I'll do the other one and then after that i'll just put up links to youtube.

We're All SING-LE!

Thats the name of our barbershop group. I'm exhausted and I just got home........don't hate I know it is past curfew. But I was doing worthwhile things. :( Barbershop is officially over. Sad. It is always so much fun. The performance tonight was pretty good. We sang better but the audience was a little dead. And either the mic was hot or I sang too loud. I guess it should also be considered that I am in fact closest to the mic because I'm the same height as it. Continuing. I 'll put up a video tomorrow because I'm too tired to figure out how to upload it tonight. I will put up pictures though. Now I just have to hit it. Night all. I'll post good stuff tomorrow tomorrow i love ya tomorrow.

It is Actually Friday

Truely though? I can't believe I survived this week. I shouldn't say that though because it isn't technically over, but I can't believe I still have the capability of breathing after this school week. First off I officially started tutoring my students at the reading center. So far so good. I am now a certified Woodcock Test administrator so this week I did that with all my kids. Next week I will actually have lesson plans to teach. Enough with boring work.
Yesterday was crazy crazy. I didn't get home from school until 11:59 on the dot. On minute from curfew. When I say I got home from school at 11:59 I mean it literally. No hanging out with friends or food breaks. Straight up work from 7:30 until then. And I only went home once and it was for an hour to do clean checks. I'm not looking for pity p.s. However now I know the semester has officially begun. I've already re-adjusted to spending 15 hours a day at school. It's normal for the average music major, at least up here. Good news though. Last night at 9:30 we had our Broadway Revue audition and my group made it! The performance is next week Friday at 7:30 in the Kirkham auditorium. Also, today we had auditions at 4-4:30 for the Barbershop competition. I'll explain this because it's a little weird the way it is organized. Okay so.....the second week of school (this is the end of the third today) people form barbershop quartets and pick music. Then everybody registers their quartets in the music office and sign up for a clinician session. The sessions were in 15 min long blocks on Tuesday this week. 15 minutes isn't enough time to do squat and we only had two weeks tops to learn our music perfectly so we definitely needed more than 15 minutes. Moving on. Today and tomorrow is the actual festival and this afternoon the quartets auditioned in front of the clinicians, our vocal jazz teacher, the dean of the music department, and most importantly (and the most intimidating) the actual invited world renowned, international gold medalists, barbershop quartet "Storm Front." Holy crap. They are ridiculous. Every quartet has a set time to audition between 3 and 5. Then the list of who is singing and at which performance (there are three. 2 tonight and 1 tomorrow) is posted at 5:15. The first concert begins at 6. Crazy! It's so intense because you practice like a mad person for two weeks straight everyday for this one audition and you don't even know whether you'll be performing or not. Messes with peoples minds I tell you. Anyway so last year there were only about 5 quartets so we all got to sing. This year there were 18. Needless to say not everybody got selected to perform. Now, don't think I am getting a big head because I am not, and I am not bragging either. But, my quartet was the only group selected to perform two shows....and they are both the sold out ones! Exciting right? We were stoked. And we feel really blessed, because we didn't feel prepared enough. Our act made up for some of our singing, because I'll admit we are pretty funny. So we performed tonight at 6 and we go tomorrow at 7:30. Cool beans dude.
Now another story. The picture of me wearing those glasses....well those were the glasses I was going to wear for the show, but they didn't look dorky enough. I knew I had a pair of big ugly sunglasses somewhere under my bed and luckily I found them. Popped the lenses out of those suckers.....and then I realized that the only part of the glasses intact was the actual glasses part. The two side ear things had both broken off. Time to get creative. I found a side of another pair of glasses and a handle from some kitchen utensil and electrical taped them to the glasses. Perfection really. And quite resourceful.
Alright something other than barbershop. We had our first opera scenes singing rehearsal and it was smashing. Kris, the lady in charge, was very impressed with me and Rachel for being prepared. I would hope she would be though. We worked our tushies off to get ready. AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH the Lost season premiere. WHAT?! It was brilliant. Loved it. Wow. I had to watch it on my computer the next day due to me being at school at horrible hours.
I was supposed to have a vocal lesson today but poor Norman couldn't come because of the snow. The roads were pretty sketch. Slush everywhere. Speaking of slush. In Rexburg they don't use salt on the roads. oh no no no they don't. Here they use red rocks. Little evil, red evil pebbles that stain everything they touch. So this morning I am walking from work to class at 9 AM. The rock man is driving behind me. They drive these things that look like the result of a zambonie and a driving lawn mower having a baby. The back of the blasted machine literally shoots out rocks. Really fast too. Like a tennis/baseball ball pitching machine. Dumb kid is going to burn. He drove right next to me.......honest about a foot away....and he didn't turn off the machine so I get pelted with rocks. A lot of red rocks. Flying at my shins 100 miles per hour at close range. I have bruises now. Stupid. I'm going to go eat cereal now. Peace and Salaam. OH and I will post pictures and hopefully a video tomorrow.

Booooooo

Today was and the longest day of my life, at least until tomorrow, because tomorrow will be even longer. I'm tired. I'm cranky. I missed the Lost season premiere because I was at school until 10:30. So now I am showering and going to bed. Friday will probably be the next time I really write things down. Sorry. Time is sparse. Namaste.

Holy Free McNuggets!

What a day! It was busy busy busy. I had class from 7:45 to 4:15. Then Erin and I ran over to this ghetto Mexican restaurant and ate some chips and salsa. Usually at this restaurant the chips and salsa are free, like that heaven sent bread form outback. But, since the chips and salsa were all we wanted they made us pay 3.17. Blasted food industry. Anyway, we ate then came back to school to have Ear Training practice. Then my barbershop quartet practiced until 6:30, when it was time to go meet with our clinician. We lucked out big time. Our aid was the same as last year. This lady (insert whatever name you want because frankly I don't know her's) conducts her own barbershop choir in Salt Lake and last winter she paid special attention to our quartet and helped us out a ton. When we walked in the room and she saw us she gave us all big hugs;it was precious really. Just brilliant. After rehearsal the four of us went to DI to get costumes for the performance this Friday. The sweaters we found are freaking intense. I'll put pictures up later. Hah, actually Kimber's sweater was super static and her scarf started doing crazy stuff. It was so charged that it was moving all over the place on its own and in the excitement of it all I told Laurel to pull out her phone and start recording the whole ordeal for our future posterity when the manager came over and said, "Do you want to put away your camera? We don't allow pictures in here." What!? Crotchity people. We were having innocent scarf fun. Well we left that place and went to McDonalds. This is where the night gets really good. Turns out McDonalds has a text list. Whoever is on the list gets random text messages every once in awhile that say stuff like if you show this text at the counter you'll get a Big Mac for free if you buy another burger. So on and so forth. Well, today Laurel tells us she is on the list and she got a message today that said show this message an you'll get a FREE 6 PIECE McNUGGETS!!!!!!!!!! Fetch! Oh my heck we were all over that. She forwarded the message to all of us and we all got free nuggets. i personally ordered the 99cent ice cream sundae and they puts lots of fudge on it. Finally we ended our night at the dollar store where we all purchased glasses to complete our look for the Barbershop festival. All in all it has been a very good day. I have the best friends ever really. (Those are the new specs. Super high quality eh Daisey. Look familiar?)

MLK...looks like milk. which spelled backwards is klim.

Monday Monday. So good to me.....I think those are the words. Correct me if I am wrong mom. So this morning I woke up at a decent hour and walked myself over to the Snow building and practiced for two hours. It felt amazingly good. Plus all the practice rooms were locked for the holiday so I had to practice in a lecture hall. The acoustics were tight to say the least.
Nyss and I went to IF this afternoon because we both needed new pants. I ended up buying cold stone. Not exactly what I intended. Also tonight we had our first real FHE of the semester. Our activity was that physchiatrist game. It's so much fun. The whole time I was thinking "I read dirty books" *Love you Grandma* After FHE I headed back over to the Snow to practice with my Broadway Revue group and then with my Barbershop Quartet. I got home like 15 minutes ago and it is already 11:30. No complaining though. This is what my days are usually like, but I was enjoying having things easy for a bit. Oh well. Crud! I was supposed to call Dad and I didn't. Mom tell Dad I will call him tomorrow k? Alrighty I better go to bed.
p.s. I did make time to watch an episode of NCIS today. It was nice. Ok Namaste and Salaam

Ahh Sunday

The beautiful thing about Sunday is that you can sleep. The awful thing about Sunday is that you CAN sleep in but are never ABLE to do so. I woke up at around 9 I think, maybe earlier, and once again ate too much food. I was productive though....my entire voice journal is now organized and ready for the semester. The next step is to get all the new repetoire copied and put in the binder, but thats the easy part. On the whole I am satisfied with my accomplishment. Church doesn't start until 1:30 so there was major time to kill before leaving. lame. fastforwarding --> At church I got sustained as Relief Society B visiting teaching supervisor. Joy. No, actually I am really excited to have a calling that doesn't relate to music. It should be a nice change. After church Sarah, Nyss, and I had dinner together then went to meet our new FHE family. They seem normal enough I suppose. My friends Laurel and Rachel invited me over to their house for a potluck. That was fabulous. We played this German card game (one of the boys there went on his mission to Germany, thus the German game) and my team "The Mighty Ducks" lost horribly. When the game ended everybody decided that they wanted Rachel, Laurel and me to sing, so we performed a rousing rendition of the Turkey Song in which I played the role of Turkey. Since coming to college my gobbling abilities have grown tremendously. Later a bunch of us went to Stadium Singing. Oh oh oh! And there is this magnificent igloo that some people built in the stadium. I'm talking like real igloo. After singing we went to go check it out and we fit 9 people in there standing up. Nobody was close to touching and nobody came close to hitting their heads. This thing was legit. Anyway I'm home now and it is very much past my bedtime. But guess what? NO SCHOOL TOMORROW!!!!!!!!!!! Glorious really. Okay I will bid adieu. peace and recycle.
-Emiline Caprice Tucker

The First Week is Over!!!!!!

Well...I'm sitting at the counter with Nyssa and I decide, well, I'll make a blog. I've wanted to for a while now so voila. I just ate literally eleven servings of applesauce...moving my body has become difficult. Seriously I'm looking at the bottle from which the applesauce used to reside and it says 2 lbs 15 ounces of straight up applesauce. Sick. I bought the thing yesterday. I was supposed to go to my friend Erin's house at eight to watch K3G (a fabulous bollywood movie) but due to my inability to relocate caused by a ridiculous amount of fruit sauce, I am staying home tonight with Nyss. Moving on...

It's hard to believe this week is actually over. I though it might go on forever and ever. Classes aren't awful. In fact I think they might be somewhat exciting. I won't go through my schedule but I am taking Music Lit, Tonal Harmony IV (music theory), Old Testament, Womens Choir, Ear Training III, ummmm oh Opera Scenes (in which I have been cast as Zerlina, the poor peasant girl who when attempting to get married is lured away by the nobleman Don Giovanni who then continues to try and seduce her...fickle girl). What else? Ah yes. Voice lessons with Norman Bailey are thrown in there as well as master class. I haven't had any huge assignments yet just little ones here and there but, they're coming I know it.

Next week BYU-I is having our annual Barbershop Festival. My quartet is coming back again and we're singing Shine on Harvest Moon. Our video of us singing Mr. Sandman last year has over 10, 500 views on youtube. Whaaaa!? Crazy. Basically what I'm trying to say is we're bomb and we're going to put up our next performance on youtube as well. Baahaha and the name of our group is "We're All Single!" Fantastic. Also next week I have auditions for Broadway Revue. My friend Clint and I are going to sing "Suddenly Seymour" from Little Shop of Horrors. Cool beans.

Before I sign off I have to tell about last night. It was probably around 5:30-6ish when Nyss and Sarah and I decided we wanted to play the Office DVD game. So, we did and I lost badly. After said game we continued to sit on the couch; me in the middle. Sarah and Nyssa played games on the internet and I ate ramen noodles. Mind you they were uncooked. Then my roomate Shea (she's black.....remember that. It is important to the story) walked in the room and looked at my noodles and said thats ghhhetto. Giggle Giggle. It was very funny. Later that night we realized we were being very lazy and antisocial on a perfectly normal Rexburg Friday night. The decision was made that Nyssa and I would go to the stadium and build a snowman. Too bad the dang ground was frozen. We ended up coming home and watching Narnia. And so ends our eventful Friday night. Be jealous.



And yes there is a pot on my head.