tucker's 6th birthday...

so today we had a family birthday party for my nephew tucker. he turned 6 on january 6. whoa i just realized he had his golden birthday!! wow! anyways here's ali and coral and me playing with legos first off:



then we ate...and tucker's mom made him this awesome magic treehouse cake...



i don't know how she did it cuz it looks super hard to create. coral ended up with a really chocolatey mouth:



tucker got a stomp rocket toy so we were all playing in the backyard with that for like an hour. that was the funnest part. here's tuck about to try it out:



and here's coral with her quiver:



tucker and me:



and now i shall show you a couple videos of me and tuck teaming up on the stomp rocket:

#1:


and #2:

christmas break current events...

wow i haven't blogged in so long! for over a month! hopefully i'll have a chance to update this thing a little over christmas break. so um...ok here are some current events:

1-got through christmas concerts, gigs, my violin jury, and finals...
2-got home for christmas break yesterday morning after being stuck in seattle airport for awhile due to weather...my dad came to rescue us cuz our flight to kelowna was canceled...we got a flight arranged to vancouver for friday morning, but instead my dad drove 6 hours to seattle to pick us up, got there in the middle of the night, turned around and we headed home...
3-one of my suitcases got lost on the flight from minneapolis/st. paul to seattle...so i'm waiting for it to get here, and in the meantime i have no shoes cuz they're all in that suitcase (i was wearing some of ali's shoes on the trip home), so anyways, for now i have to rely on ali's shoes till my suitcase finds me...
4-kelowna is very cold and snowy! yay! right now it's around -20 degrees, but fluctuating up and down between -10 and -30...
5-i have an organ now! our church got a new organ, and one of the organists at our church got the old church organ, and so she gave me her old organ! i've been playing it tons since i got home...very extremely fun!...
6-i got a viola loaned to me from the music department at southern since i'm playing viola in a quintet next semester, so i brought it home and am trying to learn my part for the trout quintet...
7-i'm freezing constantly cuz my room downstairs does NOT really seem to get warm no matter if the heat is on or not...
8-ty moved to the room downstairs across from my room (he used to be upstairs)...so now we're just across the hall from me...it's pretty awesome having him down here...
9-it's hard not having my own car here and having to plan things out all the time since ali's, tyler's, and my cars are all at southern and we just have my mum's car and my dad's truck here...to split between 5 people...
10-i still have basically all my chrismas shopping left to do...so i have just a few days left to get everything!...

well merry christmas to you! have a great holiday season...

oh and here's a picture of tyler piggy-backing me to my room last night when i was too tired to walk down by myself, haha...you can tell from my eyes being basically shut that i was sleeping before this...i fell asleep upstairs and woke up enough to get down to my room...

remembrance day and poppies...

this video was created for remembrance day in memory of the veterans who served in the war...by honoring them with 2 minutes of silence, as is practiced at 11:00 am on november 11 (remembrance day) in canada...



this is another remembrance day video that reminds us to wear our poppies (a canadian tradition) because of the poppies in flanders fields...

an example of how to unsuccessfully chop wood...

this is me trying to chop wood at tim's brother's place during midterm break...as you can see, it didn't produce the desired results...

the art of art...

im at work right now, and mildly wishing i was somewhere slightly more interesting. so i thought to myself, why not share something from psych class with you all?
these are drawings from the dutch graphic artist escher. he is known for his often mathematically inspired woodcuts, lithographs (a method for printing using a plate or stone with a completely smooth surface) and mezzotints (a printmaking process, technically a drypoint method). these feature impossible constructions, explorations of infinity, architecture and tessellations (to quote from wikipedia, haha). so anyways, his drawings are very strange, and like mentioned above, impossible to real life. so i'll share some with you and you can see if you can find the impossibilities of them...

#1



#2



#3



#4



#5



#6



-now, if you look at #1, you will see that the water leading to the waterfall is going uphill instead of downhill...
-in #2, you don't know if you're looking upwards, downwards, or straight ahead in the picture, and also, the cones hanging in the open spaces are hanging from all different directions...
-looking closely at #4, you will see that the pillars are all mixed up, from where they are connecting from the top to the bottom...
-#6 is a still a mystery today...did escher draw himself holding the ball and being reflected off of it, or is he drawn from inside the ball looking out? his left hand is holding the ball, but in the picture in the ball, his right hand is the one that is outstretched...

of course, there are probably many more things to notice and realize when you study the pictures more closely, but these are some of the ones we discussed in class...

if you want to look at more of escher's art, go to http://www.mcescher.com/...

a blog post about something...

i need to post again...but i don't know what to post about!!!!!!!!!! this is a real dilemma. i had an idea and i completely forgot about it...and now i can't think of anything else. what would interest all of you blog-readers? i don't know how many ppl actually read this, but i'll just pretend that it's so popular that i have a million viewers on a daily basis! pretending can be fun sometimes. so anyways, now that i'm pretending i have a million viewers, i have to make sure to catch all of your interests! now how can i do that? that's a tough one. let me think for a minute, or two or five or so.....................................................................
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........................ok, maybe i'll tell you a little about my musical life this semester. first of all, i'm learning the barber violin concerto, which is amazing! if you want to listen to it, here are the links:

-1st movement: http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=t2ifFuF3FoQ&feature=related
-2nd movement: http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=uql9IV5M_j8&feature=related
-3rd movement: http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=p_cbnyWG4Fo&feature=related

currently i'm learning the 1st movement, and man i love it!

so besides that, i'm also working on a bach gigue and it's going pretty good. i like bach, but i'm continually liking him even more and more all the time, especially throughout college. both on piano and violin. so anyways, i'm sure some other pieces will come along soon, but those are the two main ones for now.

speaking of piano...my piano teacher has a bunch of new piano majors to teach this year and wasn't able to fit some of the non-piano majors into his teaching schedule. and the other piano teachers aren't exactly the type of options that i'm looking for, since they tend to teach students that are more at a beginning-learning level. so we'll see if i can take piano from my teacher again next semester, and if not, then next year. in the meantime, this semester i'm taking organ lessons instead! i had my first lesson this past thursday, and it was really cool. the lessons are on the really big and awesome pipe organ in the college church. it was really cool to play using the pedals, and i was kinda getting the hang of it by the end of the lesson. so i'm doing some exercises to get used to the articulation you need to play the organ with, and to get used to the pedals. then i'm also starting two preludes. one of them has a pedal solo, which is gonna be so fun to learn! so i'm pretty excited about it. the main thing that i'm sad about is stopping my streak of taking piano lessons from when i started when i was 6 until i graduated from college, since i can't take lessons this semester. at least i'll have my streak of taking violin lessons from when i started when i was 3 till i graduate from college. plus i'll be getting some organ-playing learning and experience, which will be good and also hopefully beneficial. oh and i'm also sad cuz i learned the 2nd and 3rd movements of beethoven's pathetique piano sonata last year, and i love the 1st movement so much and started learning it on my own this summer, and i was ready to work on it in piano lessons this year so that i could know the whole sonata. but now i'll just have to keep working on it on my own until i take piano again.

so here are the links for the pathetique:

-1st movement: http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=lq4G3KRAuXc
-2nd movement: http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=n2nG1bt7IBM&feature=related
-3rd movement: http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=qRkr7WgQ_Y4&feature=related

i call the 1st movement the alex macarthur song...because i always heard this guy alex macarthur playing this song in his piano lessons or practicing it when i was at the music school where i used to take violin lessons at home before college. so ali and i dubbed it the alex macarthur song. the main alex macarthur part that we remember him playing is the fast part after the descending chromatic scale. i love that part so so sooooo much! when i play it, i get thrilled to the bone. i played that section constantly throughout the summer, haha.
anyways, i call the 2nd movement the milo and otis song...doesn't it sound like the milo and otis movie music?

now for symphony...we're playing the hary janos suite by kodaly, which is really cool. especially the 5th and 6th movements. so here's a link:

-5th movement: http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=zSv5CvhOEsA&feature=related

i can only find a good one of the 5th movement...too bad cuz the 6th is really cool too.

we're also working on beethoven's 7th symphony. here we go with the links again:

-1st movement: http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=s1qAWcd4rr0
-2nd movement: http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=bqtPVEuAbzM&feature=related
-3rd movement: http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=Td3mRRne39I&feature=related
-4th movement: http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=VLkZvsp62iU&feature=related

alright well maybe that's enough music for now. i hope you enjoyed at least one of them! bye...

cheek puffs...

so this summer i had a dream...i don't remember much from the dream other than that it had one aspect very similar to anne of green gables. remember thomas, rachel lynde's husband? well, my siblings and i always used to laugh whenever we saw him on the movies, (which sadly, was very seldom). so the reason why we laughed at him is because of this, if you'll take a look at this picture of him:



he had cheek puffs!!!

well, getting back to my dream...in my dream, i had cheek puffs too! although mine weren't white and fluffy like his...they were long and silky and sleek! like this:



haha...well they didn't look exactly like this since i have basically no drawing talent...but hopefully you get the idea. so anyways, i remember thinking in my dream how hopeless the situation was because even if i shaved them all off, i would still have stubble on my face...and then they would keep on growing back. when i woke up, i frantically rubbed my cheeks to make sure there were no puffs there, and when i realized none were there, naturally i was relieved. so there's the story of my cheek puffs dream...as much of it as i can remember...