Ok, so just posting one word for the first post in an eon isn't quite fair. sorry.
At the pleading behest of my sister, I am venturing back into the great unknown of xanga (cue adventurous music). I will now proceed to tell you everything about my life that happens to run through my mind (or at least that I think will be interesting).
Item 1:
SNOWDAY!!!!!!!!!!!!
This was quite exciting. Despite (or maybe to bolster) Minnesota's reputation, today was only my second snowday in nine years. We got somewhere around 10 inches of snow, which was quite exciting considering that the few days before we had no snow on the ground and temperatures were in the 40's ( a big deal for MN in March).
Item 2:
Oboe, and lots of it.
I think to encapsulate all of my busy music life we need to start in late January. This was when I started practicing in earnest for an oboe recital at which I was playing a piece. This recital was part of a scholarship program I had entered - more on the competition part of it later.
The recital was February 5th. It was a lot of fun, and I also got to hear Martina, the first flute in our high school band, play as well. After the recital I started practicing band music in preparation for our band's concert at the Minnesota Music Educator's Association Mid-Winter Convention (quite a mouthful, ain't it?). That was February 17. A little over two weeks after that, on March 4th, I had the competition section of the scholarship program. This didn't go quite as well as I had hoped, but it was a very good experience nonetheless.
Currently, I am practicing for my All-State Band audition this Saturday. After that, I have three weeks before the solo/ensemble contest for my high school. After that, I can slow down a bit (I think.  ).
Item 3:
Knowledge Bowl
Our school is currently in the midst of Knowledge bowl playoffs. We had our sub-regional meet February 28 and our regional meet March 2. My team had an automatic bid to regional's, and then we had another team in sub-regionals which barely missed making it to regionals. The top 6 teams in the sub-regionals advance, and our second team got 7th place and were behind sixth place by only three points. My team got third in regionals, meaning that we will get to go to the state meet April 25-26.
Item 4:
College Visits
I have been on a total of three college visits this past month. The first two occurred in mid February, when I visited Union and Covenant. The plan was to fly down on Saturday into Atlanta, rent a car, and drive to Jackson. We would spend Sat. eve. and Sunday in Jackson hanging out with my sister, visit Union on Monday, then drive across TN to Covenant on Tuesday, then fly home from Atlanta on Wednesday.
The plan didn't quite work out.
It all started on Saturday morning. We got to the airport running short on time, and the lines to check in were horrible. We rushed to the gate and fortunately made it on time. Unfortunately, it didn't matter because the plane was broken and the flight ended up being canceled. We then decided to Fly into Nashville instead, and rent a car and drive there. We would end up arriving in Jackson at roughly the same time, so we thought It was a pretty good idea.
Unfortunately, Nashville was getting hit with an ice storm and had to close the airport.
We switched to Plan C, and ended up flying into St. Louis and driving the rest of the way.
Unfortunately, our luggage did not "meet us in St. Louis" (cue early 20th century music). Instead, half of it decided it would rather go to Atlanta and the other half went to Nashville.
So we ended up going three days without our luggage, finally getting it on the penultimate day of our trip.
Despite all this, though, The actual college visits were quite nice. I enjoyed meeting many of my sister's friends and seeing some that I had met again.
Item 5:
Uganda!
I have been uber-excited lately because I am going on a missions trip to Uganda this summer! There are either 12 or 13 people going - five high-schoolers, two or three young adults, two couples, the wife of one being from Uganda, and then one of our youth pastors. We're going for three weeks in July. We are going to work a lot with kids and AIDS orphans, and then to debrief we are going on a safari in Kenya.
So there you have it, folks. The life of James Benhardus (excepts for those boring parts - aka Eating, sleeping, and going to school.) | 
