Saturday, December 12, 2009

Christmas Coloring

Doug got Kate some wooden ornaments and a puzzle at Michaels. These would work with paint or markers (or even crayons, I suppose). Markers were the medium of choice.






She had me do some of the stripes on the snowman's scarf, and all the stripes on his hat. She did everything else. (I offered to get out some white paint, but she just wanted to use the gray marker.) She also wrote her name by herself.



Here's what she drew on the back. She says this is, "A Triceratops walking up a hill, and a cloud monster eating a gingerbread cookie cloud." (Doug drew the flower.)






I was impressed with the penguin! (I think she ran out of patience on the others.)

We still don't have a tree. We tend to leave it till Doug's out of school. I guess we'd better get on that soon.

Friday, December 11, 2009

Andy at 47 weeks

Taken November 21



We had to go to the library, so I thought I'd try taking Andy's pictures there. It seemed like a good idea at the time. In execution, not so easy.






There are lots of fun things to play with at the library. (And they even have books there, too!)



This alligator (?) was the subject of much contention between Kate and another little boy who was there. Oh, the drama.






Speaking of the library, we have a copy of Days with Frog and Toad that's overdue and I can't find it. Could use some good book-finding thoughts!

Thursday, December 10, 2009

Today is not your day.

It turns out I can only only focus on one or two things at a time. (Well, one, really, but whatever else I'm doing I have to take care of the kids too, so that ends up being two things.) So if I'm scrapping, I don't blog. If I'm blogging, I don't do any designing. And if I suddenly decide to download Windows Live Photo Gallery and organize and tag my digi stuff, nothing else gets done. I was reminded of a sign I saw that said, "I can only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow's not looking good either."

Hence the neglect of the blog. I have this scrapping project that I'm working on (it's a surprise--a present, so obviously I'd like to finish it soon), and then in the middle of that I decided to put together a Christmas card, and then I read about Windows Live Photo Gallery (and watched Hummie's tutorials) and thought, "Hmmm, my scrapping would probably go better if I get my stash organized so I can actually find what I want." So I've been playing with that for a couple of days. (Sorting! Wheee!) But I guess it's time to get back to work. Time marches on.

On top of everything else, NDISB changed servers (after some major problems) and now we have to re-upload everything to the store and redo descriptions and stuff. I haven't even started on that.

So for now, here's another dino pancake, courtesy of Doug.

Monday, December 07, 2009

Andy at 46 weeks

Taken November 14.



One last try with the baby seat!






Wiggly Boy can't stay in the frame.



Chomp!

He's got one tooth on top now (I don't think you can see it yet in these pictures) which makes him look amusingly lopsided.

Sunday, December 06, 2009

low notes



For some time now I've been trying to figure out if we could make some lower notes to go with my pipe chimes. It's fun to be able to include harmony, so I figured more harmony would be even more fun. Our ward Christmas party is coming up, and I said I would get some people together to play a song.

We found this file which gives the lengths for the octave below middle C, in 3/4" pipe. (These directions have the pipes suspended with rubber bands rather than drilled and hung, but the measurements are the same.)

Problem: the list is missing a few notes (C sharp, A flat, E flat). We found a formula here but I didn't think I was up to the challenge of actually using it to figure anything out. Fortunately I just happen to know someone who is both mathematical and musical. I dashed off an email to Helen Chick explaining the problem. We met Helen when she was attending our (church) branch in St. John's, Newfoundland, while on sabbatical at Memorial University there. She's from Tasmania and is a professor of mathematics. (She's currently on sabbatical at Oxford and blogging about it. Hi Helen!) Well, she not only filled in the missing notes, she made me a spread sheet where I could enter the length for the lowest note, and it would calculate a full three octaves above that, as well as calculating the node--22.4% from the end--the ideal place to drill for the best sound. Amazing.

Tim Beecher helped us with the cutting and drilling. I say "helped," but he did all the actual cutting and drilling. I wasn't sure what tools would be needed but it wasn't quite as complicated as I'd thought, just time-consuming. We ended up going over to the Beechers' and using up good chunks of their evenings on two different occasions.



I got some copper pipe first. I had read that copper produced a mellower sound. What we discovered was that "mellow" apparently means "not clear," and with the muddiness and all the overtones, we found it very difficult to tell if the pipe was actually making the right note. We cut about six pipes but I wasn't really happy with them.

So next I got some of the other stuff (galvanized?)--which is a lot cheaper, anyway, should have just started with that--and it worked great. In the interests of time, though, I decided that instead of creating the entire bass clef I would pick a song and concentrate on getting those notes first. That was a tough choice. I decided to go with "Silent Night," but I find myself afflicted with something like buyer's remorse and keep wishing I'd picked something else instead. (Next year!)



The two pipes on the right are the highest and lowest notes from the set Helen Vernon made for me. My #1 is a B flat below middle C, but the set my mom got (from pipechimes.com) goes down to A, which is #0. So now I have an A, too. You can see how huge the new ones are. They're louder, too. This may present a difficulty if they just completely overpower the melody.



Andy thinks the pipes are pretty cool!

We practiced last night. I sent out an email and got just barely enough people. Jeanette, Amanda, and Jill were all in the group that got together last year, and then we didn't get to play because there was a big storm and our Christmas party was canceled. Tim Beecher and son Jesse came, and also Alixandria, who's twelve. We went through "Silent Night" till we all felt comfortable with it, and then played some of the other songs that I had written out, just for fun. I think everyone enjoyed it. I'd like to be able to do this more often, and not just at Christmas.

This has been quite the group effort, and definitely a learning experience for me! Now I have to figure out what to do with these copper pipes that I'm not using. Anyone want to make some really big wind chimes?

Wednesday, December 02, 2009

Andy at 45 weeks

Taken November 7.



In the continuing quest to find good places to take pictures inside, we tried the crib. I love these.










Yes, I took him out right after this! Awww.

skinning the mission blog

I served as a missionary in Korea in 92-93, pre-digital era. We didn't have cellphones or digital cameras. A lot of things have changed since then.

There's now a Korea Daejeon Mission blog, kept by the current mission president's wife (Sister Perriton), where she posts pictures from conferences and comings and goings, and other events.

(The country switched to a different Romanization system, which means that the Taejon mission is now the Daejeon mission. I'm still not really used to this.)

I was looking at the blog recently and saw that she was using a background from The Cutest Blog on the Block. Nice, but pretty generic. So I wrote and asked if I could make a custom background and banner. I spent a day or so fiddling around and came up with something that seemed to me both appropriately Korean and mission-y. I sent it to Sister Perriton with instructions, and she was able to get everything installed properly. (I had to look up some information about working with the widget layout, which is what led to me redoing my own blog with widgets.)

Here's the full view. What you actually see will vary depending on your screen size and resolution.



Sister Perriton posted about her new background, and even dug up an old picture of me from the mission files. Whoa.

The words down the sides are from Doctrine & Covenants 4:6: "Remember faith, virtue, knowledge, temperance, patience, brotherly kindness, godliness, charity, humility, diligence." We used to recite all of section 4 at zone conferences. It's different now.

In 2005 they changed the name of the church in Korean. I, being rather out of the loop, did not find out about this till some time later. Just a few months ago I heard that they had re-translated the Book of Mormon. So when I was working on this I double-checked and discovered that yes, they re-translated the D&C too.

Talk about things changing.

Looking at the pictures of the missionaries on the blog makes me feel a bit nostalgic and homesick. I hope they're appreciating every minute. It goes by faster than you think.

Tuesday, December 01, 2009

Things that go bump

Andy is working on walking. He'll let go, stagger a step or two, and then fall down. Yesterday he tipped over backwards and hit his head on the wooden castle. Ow. My mom says that I started walking at ten months, and gave myself a black eye on the corner of the coffee table.

Andy is very busy. He's always climbing on things, and opening cupboards and drawers, and stretching way up to see what he can reach. The other day he pulled a colander of broccoli off the kitchen table.

Every time the phone rings, Andy hurries over to see if he can have a chance at grabbing the phone cord (normally it's up out of reach). He's also very intrigued by the dishwasher and the refrigerator.

We don't think we can have a regular Christmas tree this year, since there's no way Andy would leave it alone. We don't have enough room to put it in a playpen, or otherwise block it off. We may get a little one and keep it up on the table. When Kate was this age we went to Utah for Christmas (when Barb and Kyle got married) and we didn't have a tree at home that year. We'll see what we can come up with.

When we mentioned to Kate yesterday that it was the first day of December, she said, "But it's not snowing!" She's been learning about months and seasons, but has a rather generalized understanding as yet.

Andy at 44 weeks

Taken October 31.



With pumpkin props!





There's something about this one that just makes me go "Awwwww!" That sweet little baby face.



Yep, this is his current sidebar pic.




I think I have pictures of Kate making this face. Ha!

My goal now is to get caught up on Andy before his birthday. Narrowing the gap!

My child doesn't watch television. Technically.

We do have a TV. It only gets used to watch movies. We got really lousy reception at our last two places, so when we moved here we just never bothered to hook up the antenna.

This is actually no great virtuous thing, because, while we may not have cable TV, we do have cable internet.

So Kate is in no danger of being deprived of any childhood icon, with sites like:

NickJr.com
PBSkids.org
Playhouse Disney

(There was a Noggin.com too, but they just recently merged with NickJr.)

Who needs TV?

A couple of months ago Kate sat down and drew (horror of horrors) the characters from Yo Gabba Gabba.






On a slightly more cultural note, she also drew this sequence from Disney's The Whale Who Wanted to Sing at the Met.




That's Willie the Whale as Mephistopheles, with the horns and flames. I was impressed with this one. She picked out some good details. And she's just recently started using color more.

One advantage to not watching actual TV is that we don't get subjected to quite as many commercials. Although that doesn't always work, either--Kate recently watched a bunch of toy commercials on youtube. Oh boy.