There and back again. . . the start of a girl's tale about Sound Foundations

As you may have noticed, I haven't written very much lately. Um, I'm not
about to go into some long explanation why, the fact is I seem to have
lost my "blogging drive," but I want to write some stuff about what's
gone on lately in my life before I forget it.

Depending on how well you know me and how much contact you keep with me
and my family, you may or may not be aware that I had the opportunity to
go to Indianapolis to take Sound Foundations. "Eh? Sound Foundations?"
you might be saying. "What on earth is that?" Um, well, I'm going to be
talking about it so I guess you're about to find out--so hold on to your
hair! But to put it briefly, it's a three week music course that involves
a variety of basic musical training in various areas to provide a
foundation for what you might want to pursue in the future. Craig went
through it eleven years ago, and look where he is now!

So four weeks ago, Klara, who decided to attend SF with me, and I got up
in the wee hours of a Friday morning and flew to Indianapolis together.
Thus began our adventure. And no, it wasn't one big dramatic and
hilarious adventure from start to finish, but it was a great experience
for both of us and it was so new that it was very much like an adventure.

The first couple days were pretty laid-back. We took naps, read our books
(they asked us not to bring secular reading material to SF so I devoured
Agatha Christie before I could never touch it for a long time), and I
helped Klara get familiar to our new 13 story home. On Saturday we went
to the Equip graduation, and in the evening Kendra took us to the State
Fair. That was pretty sweet. We strolled around taking in a variety of
spectacles: a giant cheese sculpture, giant pumpkin sculpting, plant
displays, butterflies, snazzy cars (I got to GET IN a sweet convertible
and had my pic taken--sadly I've forgotten what kind it was, to the
dismay of Stephen and Daniel when I told them about it:), art, a fun
mirror, bees, photography (my absolute favorite), llamas, horses, goats,
the world's largest boar, and lastly, though not leastly, we watched some
Hispanic dancers in native costume whirling and clacking around the dance
floor to loud yet cheery Spanish music. T'was fun indeed!

The long-awaited day arrived: the first morning of Sound Foundations. Our
alarm went off at 6:15 a.m., and at seven-thirty Klara and I had left our
room (we were roommates by ourselves, which was fortunate for us, since
some people had three or as many as four in a room) on the ninth floor
and arrived in the breakfast line. We were finally to meet our team
mates! Or did we not meet them until lunch? I don't remember, but
essentially it doesn't matter. In all there were eight teams at SF, with
five girl teams and three guy teams, lettered A-H (eight girls per team
and six or seven guys per team, numbering 59 SF students in all). We had
finally discovered that we were to be on team B, and now we were to meet
the people that we would be spending every day with for three weeks.
Naturally we were curious and a little uneasy. We sat down, and
introductions were made. I mentioned that my sister worked at ITC, and
someone asked her name. Once I told them, the girl next to me (her name
is Kitty) got very interested.

"Oh, really? Is she related to our team leader?" My mind worked quickly.
I had been asked a few days beforehand if I would be willing to be the
team leader, so the team leader was none other than myself, so I
answered:

"Uh yeah, she is." I laughed. It came out shortly thereafter that I was
the team leader, and Kitty was duly embarrassed, but I wasn't offended. I
thought it was highly amusing, and I didn't blame her for not thinking I
"looked" like a team leader. Most of the time team leaders in my
experience are at least a few years older and they seem very mature and a
little distant, so why should normal little me be mistaken for a team
leader? Besides, Kitty was my age, and three of the girls on my team are
a year older than me. And I'm even pretty sure that I was the youngest
team leader. They just asked me to be a team leader for some reason--no
real clue why, except Kendra said they probably figured that I would keep
the rules.

And what about my team? I had one of the best teams ever!!! Laughter was
plentiful at our table, which probably made us one of the loudest teams.
First, as I mentioned, there was Kitty. She's blonde, plays the oboe
(very well), and is from Oregon--she helped keep conversation lively with
stories such as when she sat on a fork and the various ways she had
thought of how she wanted to die tragically. For, as she explained to us,
you only die once so you may as well make the most of it when you do go!
Most of her ideas had to do with dying when she was just about to get
married or something--maybe by drowning or getting struck by lightning.

"I guess you don't really love the guy you're going to marry or you would
care about how he felt when you die," I commented to her (this was not
the first day, by the way).

"Well," she said (and you must understand that she was joking), "at least
you don't have to worry about picking the right one, because it really
won't matter if you're going to die anyway, right?"

I told her I was going to keep her away from my brothers. But I added
that they were probably too old for her anyway.

My team. . . who else? I had Lydia from Texas, Kristin and Nicole from
Tampa (which I was so cooled out by, especially when they said they were
from Brandon--I told them right off that I loved the Good Will there,
which is my chief reason for loving Brandon so much:), and my dear Lauren
and Mikaela who are identical twin sisters from Washington (and they said
that they "know" Kristi too!). Yeah, I was thrown off by the identical
twin thing for the first couple days. They even make an effort to dress
differently and do their hair differently from day to day, but on the
second day they had switched from one having her hair up to the other
having her hair up, so I started calling them by the wrong names in our
team meeting until they corrected me a couple times. But by the end of
the SF I could tell them apart with ease, though I would often glance at
their name tag (we were all asked to wear one) just to be sure.

And the seventh girl was a beautiful blue eyed damsel with long
strawberry blond hair. She lives in New York, out in the middle of no
where (as I like to tell people). She was also my room mate, and her name
is Klara. A very lovely and familiar Klara. And I was the eighth person,
the "great" team leader. Basically all it involved was leading our
devotional team meeting every day, collecting the mail, going to team
leader meetings, and keeping my eyes and ears open to see that people
were following the rules (curfew, dress code, guy-girl friendships,
etc.). Other than that, I just tried to be a friend. And that is me and
my wonderful, lively team.

Of course I made other friends besides those on my team, but it would be
dull for me to name them all off to you, even though I did eventually get
to know each of the 39 other girls by name. But perhaps some of my better
friends included Sarah, Charissa, Anna, Emily, Nathania, Courtney, Jenny,
Rebecca. . . the list actually could go on. The point is, I made lots of
great friends! I only regret I didn't get to know many of them better so
we could have gotten to be better than just friendly acquaintances. The
last girl I mentioned, however, is one I'm hoping to visit some day, for,
small worlds of small worlds, she is taking some classes with Clyde at
LBC this semester!!! Wow. Did I already say it's a small world? Yep, I
did. And it's true.

You may have noticed that I didn't mention any guys in my list of
friends. There's a reason. Since we were there to study music and not
make great friends with people of the opposite gender, they asked us to
keep conversation fairly limited with guys. Some followed this rule to
the letter. Others, I'm afraid, ignored it. Actually, this request
resulted in minorly awkward situations in which Klara and I joked about
pulling out our "rusty skills" of how you talk to a guy. ha. For
instance, Klara was in the stairwell and she asked a guy if he knew what
time it was. He gave her a startled look, as if he didn't know what to do
now that she had dared to speak to him! He stammered the time to her, and
we thought it was very funny. It doesn't mean that we never got to know
the guys in a fashion--in fact, by the end of the time I knew most if not
all their names; we just rarely talked to each other directly, and even
when we asked a guy to play the piano for our orchestration, Klara and I
couldn't help but feeling a little guilty, even though we asked him in
our most reserved yet polite tones. We were pretty conscientious.:)

Our schedule? Our teachers? Our funny moments? I hope a recap of those
will be coming soon, time and procrastination (or is it a lack
thereof?)allowing!
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