The first game of the Highland Games season is Saturday. This coming Saturday.
Normally they start in December, but a new city wanted to take part and they decided that October was brilliant. No idea why.
This should be fun, but also interesting. We tend to be ready for the Games in November. But November comes *after* October. We may be in slight trouble. Then again, this is probably why most of the bands in Florida aren't coming. Extra time to prepare is such a lovely thing.
And then Sunday, not today, but right after the games, we have another concert. I'm not sure whomever planned that was thinking straight. "Oh hey! We have our first games the day before, everyone will be exhausted, let's do this!" Don't get me wrong. I love performing. That's why I'm a swing tenor, lol. People buy CDs to hear pipes, they go places to see the swing tenors. But we're going to be zombies. Unless something miraculous happens and we're all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, the pipers will be hitting bad notes, the tenors will be hitting themselves... I think the scheduling was a little mis-direrected.
I still have decent hopes for us on Saturday, though. We've been working on it, all of us. And yeah, there are a few spots that are still off. There's a portion of the second tune that the pipers can't space out right, there's a segment in our fourth flourish that I can't get quite right. I know exactly what I'm doing. I'm flicking my wrist wrong when I transition just before that. The issue is that the wrist-flick is normally the *right* thing to do, so it's a habit of three years. We're just going from one flourish into another, so it's the wrong thing to do here.
We'll manage it. We'll be shiny in time for the Games. And then we have two months to work on being shiny for other Games too. :D