Day 70

July 3rd

Ok, So the march up to the hill was great today. I was playing lots and thinking wow, I've never done so well on parade before! Colonel Bogey and other marches that have pretty good euph parts, it was a good march up (no face smashing lol) Then we started 10 Provinces which we play every morning as we step onto the hill. At least most ppl like the piece, it has enough key changes and the instrumentation is pretty clever for a march. Well, I realized that I forgot to add that piece to my stack in the morning, so I tried to play as much as I could off my heart. I think I have about 20-25% of it memorized which is pretty good for me because I suck at memorizing and never actually tried to memorize it anyways. We did our counter march and stood at attention for the guards to do their thing. After a few minutes of standing, I was starting to feel nauseous like I did the first time I wore my forge cap for an inspection. I kept breathing deep, wiggled my toes and did all the things I could think of to make the feeling of vomiting go away. We played our first inspection tune and I was still doing pretty good, but the pipe tune was when things took a turn for the worse. We played it through 1.5 times and I played it all the first time and then had to stop because I was getting dizzy. On the D.S. I just stood there and breathed. I felt better and thought I was good to go again and started playing....baaaaaad idea! Then I got really dizzy and tipped back/left but caught myself. However I did not catch myself on the tip forwards and I went down :[ The two most common reasons for going down are: hung over/still drunk or "bear bite". I had bear bite and learned that you can actually adjust your bear while on parade if you really have to. Too bad I learned that the hard way (after going down) I was so mad when they took me off the hill because after I had my bear off for about 10 minutes, I felt so much better. I was a little shaky, but that's all. I took the bus home with the rest of the band and thought I'd get made fun of, but they were really helpful and gave me all kinds of tips on how to not get bear bite. Then they complained that we are never told how to not get bear bite or not faint due to circulation loss. Oh well, I had to go to MIR when I got back to Carleton just to get a clean bill of health. Then i had lunch and we had a short rehearsal for tomorrow's gig. I tried to record the Amazing Grace with pipes on m phone, but the piper was not very good :S Hopefully things go better tomorrow! We got off early and relaxed in our rooms before heading off to the beach for a few hours! Then we rushed back for supper and I decided to go off rollerblading on an adventure. I took the canal downtown as usual and decided to go West this time. I eventually found a path near the war museum and realized that it was the path that I saw while getting kitted out on BMQ. It's called the Ottawa River Pathway. So I kept going and found some ppl who were feeding bread to a flock of Canada Geese. The Geese got so tame that they let us touch them! It was soo cool, babies are very soft and the big ones are a bit scary but they let me touch them anyways! So I continued down the path until the Champlain Bridge and went up to take a look. (see picture and try to find Parliament!) When I got back to Carleton I checked and my trip there and back was 25.6km! Not too shabby :) I polished my boots which sucked because when you go down, you really scuff them up on the stretcher and everything. Then I made some of the "Organic Earl Grey Tea" that I bought from the tea shop and watched Hells Kitchen online, it was awesome.