All the whirlwindishness of the first couple of days days is slowly fading to comfortable routine. I ran a bunch of errands yesterday. First, I stopped by the SymSys office and ran into the director of the program, who was on his way out but gave me a list of office hours. I dealt with a flat tire. After that, I sat in a tree and wrote a letter, then headed in to lunch at Branner. Branner food's just barely edible, but there are much better options. People mostly eat there because it's close and it's never crowded. After lunch, I went to sign up for a practice room, bought some books, met with my advisors, then went back to the SymSys office. Two advising fellows—upperclass majors were there, and what they said got me really excited about the program. Yay! Just one downer: they recommended a linguistics class called Intro to Syntax, taught by the director of the program and another really (well, seemingly) good prof. Unfortunately it's only taught fall quarter and conflicts with my IHUM course. I'd readily drop any other course, but this IHUM seems to be really awesome—on top of which, I have to take it freshman year. I guess I can take Linguistics 120 next fall.

This morning, I auditioned for the University Singers. It's a 50- or 60- member choir; the chamber group is about 24. Oddly, I wasn't nervous at all for the audition. Well, I was a little bit, but not the panicky kind that shoots my breath control to bits and pieces. The audition was with Stephen Sano, who conducts the chamber chorale and conducted the U Singers until last year, when Robert Huw Morgan took over. I'm name dropping, but I don't know much about either of them. Except that Sano was very friendly during the audition and actually talked to his auditionees, which made it so much more comfortable than the blind auditions for regions or all-state. Anyway, I felt like I did decently on my personal scale of things, but have no clue what the standard of U Singers members, individually, is. Whew, sorry about the grammatical nightmare!

I can't really write about specific people here yet; I've only known them for 5 days and I'm certain that most of the opinions and impressions I have now will come back to bite me in the ass. Since that mandates a relatively short update, I decided to write about the audition. Then, after I wrote it, the uncertainty of my performance hit me and I planned to only post that last part about the audition if I made it. Then, finally, I realized that it was a wimpy thing to do. Guess I'll just find out Thursday morning, 9 am. I think I'm heading over to check out the ultimate team soon. Definitely won't make the A-team, which has won a bunch of national championships, but am thinking about B-team (which is still intimidatingly great) or intramurals.