I'm BA-ACK! :) Competition itself went very well, the rest of weekend...well...that's a long story. My chorus improved 28 points from last year and were 2 points away from the 3rd place small chorus, and only 6 points away from the 2nd place small chorus. We've never ever gotten that close to placing before. It's very exciting. We might actually place next year (in the small chorus scoring, not the overall contest). And I didn't go to the Show of Champions again this year. I'm not all that upset about missing it (I'm upset about why I missed it, but that's the other story). The whole experience made me realize that perhaps I don't want to go hog-wild with this hobby and become a director and sing in a quartet and run for management team. Maybe I just want to sing. Who knows? Maybe that will change once I'm a full-time writer (I've stopped saying "if" in regards to this). But I'm still going to sing with my chorus and get what I can out of it.

The other story is that I will never again stay at another Sheraton hotel. And you shouldn't either. My roomie brought her dog into the room for the weekend. I was under the impression everything was on the up and up with that. After dinner on Saturday, I try to get into my room, but my card didn't work. Turns out they had cancelled our cards so we would have to go to the front desk. I wouldn't have minded except for the fact that I had to get all the heat from the pissed off manager about my roomie's dog (which apparently wasn't allowed in the room). He said that he'd had complaints of barking and that he had sent security to investigate. Even after I told him it wasn't my dog, this manager was still reading me the riot act. So I went back to my room, only to discover that someone had eaten pizza on my bed. Toppings and crumbs and grease stains all over my turned-down sheets. My roomie hadn't done it (and I know because she wasn't in the room alone with pizza during the time it happened). So I called the front desk and talked to the same manager. He obviously didn't believe me and thought I was making up some bogus claim in retaliation, but he sent security down anyway. The security guy put a card reader in the slot and determined that only guests had been in the room (even though the reader indicated times that my roomie and myself were physically nowhere near the room). The manager then calls me back to tell me that, as far as he was concerned, the room was secure because only my roomie, me, and himself had been in the room. Himself? He had told me security was sent to the room, not that he went to the room. The manager offerred me nothing - not even to get the sheets changed. I was pissed. After fuming, I went down to the front desk and asked for a new room. He said they were booked and he couldn't give me a new room. So I checked out (and had to pay for two nights, too, bastards). Meanwhile we find out that the manager had NOT used an employee card to access the room, but rather a card that came up as a guest card. Also, their precious security reader computer was twenty minutes behind on its clock. And to top it all off, on the one night I did sleep in the room, two spiders decided to feast on me (OK, two distinct bitemarks isn't a feast, but it's still gross). So, tomorrow I will write scathing letters to the hotel and the women in charge of booking hotels for competition. Why not today? I still have ten hours to write 2500 words to complete the March dare. And I've already wasted too much time today getting caught up.