Welcome to 2012!

Wow - has it really been Halloween since I last posted? I need to do better about updating here! It's really easy to get out of the habit, and the next thing you know it's months later and you haven'tput a thing on the blog. Oops!

Life has actually been fairly busy over here. Karate continues apace. All three of our white belts have passed their yellow belt tests within the last month, so congratulations to all of them! It's very nice to look at the class and see all that color. Now I just want to see a little less color again - a few new white belts, and our brown making the leap to black would make the winter just perfect.

I, personally, appear to be on a serious learning binge. Given that I'm always learning something (hence the name of the blog) this translates into a serious amount of new stuff coming down the pike. In karate, I'm plugging away at Urashi Bo, the longest of our kata, and my second-to-last 1-person kata to learn. I seem to be about a third of the way through right now, which means about the length of one of our normal kata. In karate-related, I'm plugging away at learning Japanese. This is seriously fascinating, and the more I learn, the more interesting it gets. It's very, very different from English, and it's probably going to take a while to achieve any fluency. Right now I can form and parse simple sentences. I can (for example) Ask how much something is, where something is, order food, introduce people, or discuss the weather (and have some prayer of understanding answers). We'll see how all this holds up the next time it gets put to use (2013 at the next World Tournament at the earliest).

In addition, somewhat inspired by the Japanese, I've been brushing up on my French, at which I used to be fairly fluent, but which I let lapse after never really having a real-life use for it. I may never speak French real-time, real-life to a French person, but at least I can read my Tintin and Asterx le Gaul books in the original (OMG there are soo many puns in the Asterix in French. It's awesome!)

We have a new choir director at church now, and he's exercising me pretty thoroughly too. Whereas the previous choir director seemed to be a little reluctant to have me sing, and would often only decide to have me do something reluctantly and at the last moment, the new guy seems to be more than eager to have me do solo work. Unfortunately the first thintg he's pulled out for me is gospel. I love good gospel, but I have never trained or sung gospel (unless you count two songs sung as part of my HS choir), and my usual style of presentation runs to the formal and somewhat stiff. I'm very afraid that me attempting gospel may be more pathetic than inspiring. Or possibly inspiring of laughter! I'll give it my best, but we'll have to see how it goes down. I'm very hopeful, though, that once he runs me through my paces on a couple of his choices, he might let me choose to sing something of my choosing, which would be really awesome. (Also something that's never happened at this church. I tend to do solo work when it's down to "We want to do this piece, and Cindy's the only one who can (hit the high B, handle that run, learn it that fast, etc.) which means I do a decent amount of solo work, but almost never stuff I love.)

In a complete aside, I did not, despite pre-planning for almost an entire year, get to do a duet of "Oh, Holy Night" at Christmas. For some reason I did not quite fathom, the Music Committee decided that the ladies who did the piece three years ago should repeat this year - and then those ladies decided, when it got to be the week before Christmas and they were still having serious performing problems, that they would bow out and not sing. At which point it was too late for Cindy and Cindy to get back in. So bummer, I still didn't get my shot, but at least we broke the standing tradition of "It's not Christmas until somebody mangles "Oh, Holy Night"! Seriously, if after this much effort I had had to listen to a bad rendition, I think I would have burst into tears.

And the last bit of new learning for the new year, and my favorite of all? The flute! My wonderful sons, with their father's collaboration, got me a flute of my very own for Christmas. (My precioussssss!) Despite various family medical emergencies (now over, thank goodness), I have practiced every single day since. I'm up to about an octave-and-a-half of range, though I still have some problems with flipping registers unintentionally. Recognizable (if breathy) music can be heard! I've wanted to play the flute since middle school, and it would never have occurred to me to ask for one for Christmas, but I really, really love it it pieces.

Merry Christmas!

I hope all have had wonderful Christmases! All three grandparents are here now, with my Mom & Dad arriving last night about fifteen minutes before we headed off for midnight mass.

I was polite this year. I asked permission from the choir director to sing descants to the congregation hymns, which she very graciously gave. Unfortunately "The First Noel" was not part of the line-up, which is my best hymn for singing descant. However, we led off with "Oh Come, All Ye Faithful" which has a lovely descant, and finished with "Silent Night" for which I do a descant that's all my own (and it came out pretty nice to, if I do say so myself).

The church choir is a decent choir, but I think (and Rob agrees) that I should not join. They're about a dozen people, mostly older, with mostly decent senses of pitch, and pretty good voices. They get a little wobbly when they're unsure, but straighten out nicely when they get to things they know well. They can do four part harmony credibly, if without much flair. In short, for a church choir at a small church, they're pretty darned good.

Unfortunately, if I joined them, it would be "Cindy and the Choir". My voice does not blend well with "average decent voice". I'd sound like the flute in the middle of the clarinet section - and my voice doesn't do clarinet - so I would either have to sing barely above a whisper at all times, or actually make the choir sound worse. I had rather suspected this - long experience tells me that I need to either be in a choir of more than forty people, or I need to be with people with a similar vocal quality to mine - but I didn't know for certain until I actually heard the entire choir.

Which leaves me with a little bit of a dilemma, because the choir is all but stalking me. The choir director and at least six other people are actively trying to recruit me every time I hold still long enough. They hear me sing, and nice voice = should be in the choir. I'm a bit at a loss as to how to decline without making it sound like I think they suck (they very much don't), or like I'm completely stuck on myself. "I'll overpower your entire choir, even if I'm trying not to" is not exactly a modest statement - but it's true nonetheless. Sigh.

At least I didn't have to listen to "Oh, Holy Night" being mangled this year. The choir director sang, and did a very respectable job of it. I was still champing the bit a little, because she's an alto and sensibly chose to avoid the high notes, but it certainly wasn't painful to listen to. (For those playing along, my particular Christmas doom appears to be being forced to listen to "Oh, Holy Night" be mangled over and over again, while I'm absolutely dying to sing it for somebody, sometime, and never get the chance.)

Christmas morning got a late start, due to our peculiar children, who view Christmas morning as a great chance to sleep in. Once we got going though, things went very well. The boys are delighted with their various presents (Wii games, science kits, Bakugan starter set, dinosaur stuff for Aaron, books for Robbie, clothes for both), and have been very hard to pry away from the Wii so far today. Rob's main present is the car (which he still adores), but he also a digital camara, a couple of books, some new kitchen knives, and Guitar Hero: World Tour. My main present is the laptop I've had since the beginning of Nano (and still adore), but I got my piano books (Cristofori's Dream is coming along nicely), some scented shower gel, a reed diffuser, and a couple of books. The grandparents got various and sundry goods - books, videos, a TomTom, clothing, etc.. Everyone seems quite happy with their gifts. Rob fed us prime rib and the adults settled in for a good evening of chit-chat, while the kids played Super Smash Bros.. A good day, and a very merry Christmas all around.

On a slightly different note - I have a website I have got to pass on. For the role-playing fans in your life who have trouble with housework, I present Chore Wars. Go on adventures! Make the bed while fighting off the fearsome bedbugs! Anoint the kitchen floors with holy cleaning fluid, to ward off the dust bunnies and earth elementals! Essentially, you create role-playing characters. Your dungeon master creates adventures (chores), which earn you experience and gold pieces. Various monsters can show up when you claim your chore at the website, and you try to defeat them. As you go up in experience, you get stronger and can defeat bigger monsters. (I'm not looking forward to the first day the red dragon shows up while I'm cooking dinner.) Is it cheesy? Sure! But anything that makes Robbie run off saying "I get to make the bed! Woohoo!" on Christmas, is worth a little cheese. And it wasn't even his bed, it was his brother's. Go, Chore Wars!

Happy Stanislav Petrov Day!

Look out your windows at your lovely, non-nuclear-winterized world, and lift a glass for Stanislav Petrov, a man who made the right call under immensely difficult circumstances. And as is customary, was punished for it.

No karate tonight as nobody but me would be there. I am amused to discover that Robbie's fifth grade friends have decided I'm the coolest Mom ever for intervening in the fight the other day. If only I'd known when I was that age that the fastest way to gain the admiration of pre-teen boys is to make them think you can wipe the floor with them!