Welcome to another futile attempt of humor, otherwise known as The Contest Journal.

This week we decided to check out the F.J. Reitz Marching Festival and the Princeton Invitational.

The day started out kinda odd. I got up early and decided to fix breakfast. I didn’t have to be at the show until about 8:30am so I had time to cook something extra yummy. One of my favorite breakfast foods is cinnamon toast topped with powdered sugar.

Since it was pretty early (about 2:00am), I didn’t have my contact lenses in and I wasn’t wearing my glasses. That turned out to be a bad idea. The evening before, my wife was using some alum in the kitchen for something - I am not sure what. Anyway, she placed the container of alum in the cabinet where we keep our spices. You can probably tell where I am going with this. Since I can’t see anything more than six inches from my face without my contacts, I grabbed the container of alum and sprinkled it on my cinnamon toast.

For the next four hours, the only way I could eat or drink anything was through a straw. I could whistle really well, though!

After I got burned to a crisp attending the North Harrison and Mt. Vernon shows last week. I vowed to never let that happen again. I decided that the best way to keep my bald head from getting sunburned again was to put on a liberal amount of sunscreen.

Tim informed me later that we have spiffy new SI baseball caps to keep my head from getting scorched and I could use one of those if I wanted, so I opted for a hat.

As always we carefully selected the music to put us in the proper mood for the shows we were going to see. What music hypes us up and gets us ready for a long day of marching band competition? That's right! Härd Drive - Live at Red Rocks. Härd Drive was a little known heavy metal band headed by Microsoft CEO Bill Gates in the late 1980's. Hard core heavy metal fanatics like Tim and me know that Gates is a full-blown guitar virtuoso that once was one of the top studio musicians in Silicon Valley. In the early 1980s, "Wild" Bill Gates (as he liked to be called) and Steve Jobs (who eventually became the CEO of Apple Computers) formed a band called Ctrl - Alt - Delete that rivaled bands like Led Zeppelin and Kiss before splitting up over what their manager called "formatting and compatibility issues."

After taking a few years off to "get his head on straight," Gates reformed Härd Drive and launched his "Modem Madness" World Tour in 1995. The tour culminated in a hedonistic romp through metal land with a marathon 6-1/2 hour concert at the Red Rocks Amphitheater near Denver. Rolling Stone Magazine aptly declared the album a 'tour de force' and said that 'if you call yourself a metalhead, you MUST buy this album.' Needless to say, Tim and I were first in line at the record store when it went on sale.

Tim and I try to remain as hydrated as possible during contests, but one of the side effects of that is the necessity for frequent potty breaks. Here Tim examines the "restroom" to figure out where the lever is to flush it.

Despite a forecast of rain, the weather was really nice. Actually it got a little windy at the Princeton show, but the folks running the contest anticipated the situation and took steps to solve the problem before it happened. Here's the spot where they bolted the stadium to the ground.

Evidently the entire football team at Princeton is extraordinarily tall or Tim and I shrunk about foot or so during the drive from Evansville because we had to use a step ladder to climb up on the benches to sit down.

What a great day! We got to see a BUNCH of AWESOME bands, we got to talk to a couple of the seven loyal visitors to our web site, and to top it off I almost got knocked down by 3-4 band directors playing drum major on the sideline. Cool!!! I can't wait until next week.

See ya at the show!