Concert!!

On Thursday night, my dad and I went to a Jon Schmidt concert near our hometown.  It was amazing!  The guy is crazy good, and it made me want to practice my piano like a madman.  He played upside down (like above), and with his head, elbows, and toes, too.  It was an amazing experience, and he was hilarious, too.  

His dad (a 85ish German guy who was drafted into Hitler's army) got up during the middle and told jokes.  They were great.  All of the songs were amazing, too.  I don't get how he is able to make them all up in his head.  

My favorite song that he performed was "Love Story Meets Viva La Vida" which he can't play anywhere else due to permission complications, but played at the concert anyway.  

Another cool one of his songs was called "Heart of a Child" and can be listened to if you click the link, then click the "listen" button.  If you ever get to go to a Jon Schmidt concert- go!  It was amazing and he is an incredible piano player with awesome music!

Spring Break: Day 2 (Or Jack the Plucker)

Okay, so I'm a tad late posting about the rest of spring break.  Oh well.  I will continue, undaunted.
The second day started off overcast and horrendous.  We slept in even later than the day before, then stayed inside and read for about an hour (going to the library payed off) :).

Once we felt the inclination to get up, we decided to have a wonderful French Breakfast, and pretend we were there on vacation.  It was glorious.

A buttered croissant, toasted in the oven. . . 

Wonderful, fresh, thick hot chocolate with lots of cream. . .

And Quaker Oats.  So it wasn't 100% French.  Who cares?

They all combined nicely into a beautiful breakfast.  We all felt like we were being served in  Paris :)

Simple pleasures, I guess.

After breakfast we settled down for a long bit of rest and relaxation with our library books as the wind and sleet howled outside.  Then, we decided to head off shopping, since Saturday is Corn Nut's 8th birthday.  Big day!  

We went to Walmart.  And ended up buying shirts and pants for Chestnut and I instead.  Then we went to DownEast, and from there to Toys R Us, where we got Corn Nut more well-beloved and obsessed over Star Wars Legos.  It was good.

Things weren't so good after that, when we got home.  You see, as we pulled into the driveway, we saw Jack in the front yard with a chicken in between his paws.  He was happily guarding it and chewing on it and we were shocked and horrified and sure it was dead.  It was horrible!  We got Jack away from the chicken and locked him up in the kennel, then came back through the sleet (now snow) for further inspection.  The chieken's entire back was bare of feather's and it's skin was open near it's neck.  It was a grim sight.  It sat there, huddled on the ground, twitching every so often, completely motionless and unresponsive.  We were then sure that it's back was broken.

We sent Chestnut to go get the gun,  but when he came back, the chicken was gone.  It had moved six or so feet across the yard.  Obviously, it wasn't paralyzed, but it continued to twitch.  Deciding to give it a chance, we moved it to one side of the chicken coop, shut it off from the other chickens, sprayed it with wound spray, and left it alone, sure it was going to die any minute.

Jack had become Public Enemy Number One for the day.  We just couldn't believe that he had actually attacked a chicken.  Things looked grim.  

Later that night, we found that the chicken wasn't twitching any more and that it was moving around, so we celebrated by getting a blizzard at Dairy Queen, then coming back to watch a "Foyle's War," a british police drama.  It was great!

A good, but dramatic day!

On a Walk

The sun gets lower in the sky as me and Mom turn the corner up the snowy hill. We breathe in the fresh, cold air and gape in awe at the golden sunlight as we walk.

I turn to look back and see the trail breaking off from the road. Civilization wanes as we continue our trek up the hill.

The dry sagebrush, yellow grass, white snow, and rolling hills seem never-ending. This is freedom.
Jack adventures ahead of us as we continue on.
He explores and sniffs, following tracks in the snow.
The sun casts shadows in it's last magnificent burst of light before disappearing into the distance.

Mom is pretty.

Jack is happy.

The landscape is breath-taking.

And the road is long.

On the 6th Day of Christmas, My True Love Came to Me. . .

I am THRILLED. Today my Dad, Pistachio, Cashew, and Corn Nut went to the auction and brought back a little surprise. . .

I saw this as I was walking down the lane after being dropped off by the bus.

Introducing. . . .

Jack.

The new love of my life.

I don't know if I'll ever be able to go to school again. It would be traitorous to leave him like that. So I won't.

I'll just stay with him forever. Because, I believe it's worth it. I don't think anything but a tiny, australian shepherd/ border collie/ mutt could be cuter than him. The thing is that he is a tiny australian shepherd/ border collie/ mutt. So nothing could be cuter.

Enchanted and under a very powerful spell,

Pumpkin Carving

Who knew that so many years could pass between the rare pumpkin carvings at our house?

Luckily, this is one of the good and fruitful years when it comes to the way of pumpkin art.

The night before Halloween, we brought in our pumpkins and were ready to begin. . .

Needed: 1 pumpkin,

1 sharp knife,

1 permanent marker,

1 spoon,

1 dose of creativity

Luckily, we were ready in all departments and started drawing faces on our chosen vegetables.

This was grandpa's.

This was Chestnut's

And this was mine. Sort of a dracula with not much going on upstairs.

Scoop out the slimy interior, scraping the edges with a slotted spoon, then carve in and hollow out your chosen face.

Here are our results:

Chestnut's masterpiece creation.

Grandpa's Goofy Man,

And last but not least, mine.

Pretty good, huh?

Sabotage!

It was a dark and stormy night on the west coast of Scotland. . . .

But this is irrelevant to our present story, which takes place nowhere near the west coast of Scotland.

But it was a dark and stormy night a few weeks ago. . .

When an armed and dangerous baseball bat-carrier snuck up on the one thing that we love most in the world, but never use.

Our poor, ever suffering mailbox.

~Requiem~

Our Mailbox

2009-2009

It will be dearly missed.

Entering the Mist

So yeah. . . .

My mom already has done a post on this topic and I'm realizing that I've slightly ignored it since my first post on the trip.   

But actually- I'm mostly just happy that she's actually posting something!

We drove into San Francisco on the opposite side of the Golden Gate at around 10 the morning after we arrived. 

 Everything was shrouded in mist, making for this sad picture out of the windshield.  Oh well.  

After waiting for everyone in the extended family to arrive, we got out 

and started exploring the sight of some "cannons" that used to be posted at the edge of the bay .  

We had a blast.  As you can see, I even got a picture of my mom taking pictures!  (A rare sight) :)   

We all had a fun time exploring the old quarters of the base and peeking over the bluff at the Golden Gate (it occasionally made a rare appearance, peeking out of the mist.)

 

Then Grandpa gave us a lesson on weather in San Francisco and the history of the fort.

You can see the rapt listeners.

And we moved on into San Francisco.  

More Later.

Zap

Tada!  It was a skunk again.

Do all of you remember when

One killed the banties, every one?

Back then the war had just begun.

Curious to how we know?

I wasn't very long ago. . .

15 birds lay dead on the ground.

And with our senses so profound

We promptly guessed it was a fox

Who'd broken into our Fort Knox.

The story changed a night ago,

Helping our small confidence grow.

We all stopped to sniff the air

And caught a whiff from Skunk's darriare.

We figure he returned for a feast

And got a zap from the fence, that beast!

Wordfull Wednesday- Memorable Family Vacation

I was so excited.  Chestnut had kept up his math grades through the end of the year- and it meant a lot more than just that to me.   At the time my grandparents were living in England for my grandpa's job- and they had promised Chestnut and I a trip over there if he did his Algebra well.  

Sometime in June we set off as unaccompanied minors on a plane to England.  Because of this, we sat with flight attendants in a dumb little room in the airport for our six hour layovers, doing nothing.  That part was a nightmare.  Except for on the plane to the London Heathr

ow Airport.  There we got free ice cream sundaes just because we were unaccompanied, and got to ride in business class for the last hour of the trip.  

But when we got there was when the fun really started.  We arrived very very late at night and just zonked out at the lovely little English cottage that our grandparents lived in.

The next day we went on a walk through the beautiful wheat fields and poppies, the lush green forests, and the wooden fences of England.

It seemed like you couldn't keep things from growing over there, while here in Idaho you have to nearly force things to grow.  It was beautiful.

On a misty-moisty morning we set off on a Harry Potter-esque train for London.  

Once there, we rode a double-decker bus to go see "Wicked" at the London Broadway.

We also visited a bunch of museums- but I didn't take any pictures.  I thought they were a bit boring compared to all of the other spectacular things there were to do in London.

Just as it started to rain, we got aboard the London Eye, a HUGE ferris wheel on the Thames river.  There were about 42 glass capsules, going extremely slowly so that you could get on and off without stopping.  I took a bunch of pictures of Big Ben and the house of parliament, along with London on the Thames. (Sorry for the droplets of water on the glass- it was raining)

This is my favorite picture.  It just shows London in all of it's glory (with London weather!)  

On a Sunday we set off to see the cliffs of Dover.  They were GORGEOUS!

It was misty and rainy again, so we couldn't quite see the french coast, but we had a blast walking along the cliffs, watching the sea and the ferries taking off for France.

We also visited castles while we were there.  Bodiam was my favorite.  It was the essence of what a Medieval Castle should be, ancient, unfurnished, sitting threateningly above a beautiful moat.

There I also learned the treachery of Medieval tower staircases.  Don't ever believe it when the movies show people fencing up and down these- here, if you fell, you were basically dead.

We also visited Leeds, "The Ladies Castle" because it was primarily owned by the queens of England throughout the middle ages.  It wasn't as excitingly MEDIEVAL as Bodiam, because it was furnished nicely, but it was absolutely gorgeous nonetheless.

We also visited Windsor, the home of the queen today.  The rulers of England have been living here for thousands of years.  It definitely gave me a shock of awe.

And last but not least we visited Oxford.  Personally I was a bit disappointed.  The highlight of the entire thing was a disappointment in the English people themselves- Rooting for Obama. . .Pah!

Altogether England was a fascinating and wonderful adventure for me.  I hope to be able to go back someday.