Serenade

Kaitlin getting sung to.

We started our week with Kaitlin being serenaded at our doorstep by a group of boys. Ben was singing and playing the guitar, inviting Kaitlin to prom. Kaitlin was excited.  Later in the week she said "yes" by decorating Ben's room with snowflakes.

Over the weekend, Kaitlin went to Snow College to attend a program they have for prospective students called Snow Blast.  She had a good time overall, but was a disappointed by the music and atmosphere at the dance they put on.  I was proud that I raised a daughter that has such high standards.

We've been working on Kaitlin's prom dress for awhile. For months she's been saying that she wants a Disney princess dress and she decided on the one from Tangled.  I found an old wedding dress at the thrift store for $6 that I dyed purple. This week we started work on the bodice for that dress. Kaitlin is doing as much of the sewing as I will let her.


Stake Conference

Always a great view from the choir seats

Twice a year our congregation meets together with other congregations in the area for one big meeting.  This year we were lucky enough to have L. Tom Perry, a member of the Twelve Apostles, that leads the whole LDS church, come and visit with us. We had a great couple of meetings with him and I was able to sing in the choir.  Our Stake (that's our group of congregations) was divided into two, since this area has grown so large.  The meetings were so well attended that many people were left sitting in the hallways or standing at the back, that was even with the meeting being broadcast to three other buildings.

Can We Fix It?

Chuck has been busy with projects lately. Last weekend our washing machine stopped turning. While I took eight loads to the laundromat, Chuck diagnosed the problem and ordered the part.  By the end of the week the part came, and after a few hours of work Chuck got the washer working again!  He also took his motorcycle's front tire in to get it fixed.  I took this picture to show you how he works on his motorcycle.

Solo and Ensemble

I mentioned last week that Kaitlin had been working hard preparing a solo for judging. She was nervous going in.  The scoring is 1-5, 1 being the best. Kaitlin said if she came out with a 3 she would be happy.   She must have done better than that because she got a 1-, which qualifies her to go on to regional competition.  Her ensemble got a 2+.

Sweethearts Dance

Sweethearts is a girls choice dance, and Kaitlin and her friend Susan hosted the date and dinner here at our house.  In the afternoon the couples went to the Frozen Sing-Along.  Ruth and I have wanted to go to that too, so we went as well, but sat on a different row from them.  You would think that Kaitlin would hate her mom going to the same movie as her date, but she didn't. In face she and Ben ran over to get into this selfie I was taking with Ruth.   In the evening the couples ate pancakes at our house before going to the dance. They seemed to have a nice time.

Kaitlin and Ben

Taft, Susan, Kaitlin and Ben

Honk Jr.

Ruth approached her auditions for the school musical a little bit different this year.  Instead of going for the lead part she actually wanted, she decided to go all out for a smaller part, one that she would be happy with, if she got.  When call backs came, there were seven girls called back for the lead part, but only two called back for the smaller part Ruth was going for. While we'll never know if Ruth would have gotten the lead, Ruth did get the smaller part, which offers a duet with a boy, 10 lines of dialogue and a death scene. She started rehearsals last week.  The show will be the April 9-11.


Singing

Evacuated into the cold.

Kaitlin's choir performed a concert this past week.  They tried some new things with lights and special effects.  The fog filling the stage was really cool looking until the fire alarms went off and we were all forced to evacuate into the freezing night.  The poor choir kids were all without jackets, so they stood and shivered. Luckily it wasn't that long until we were let back in to continue the concert.

Kaitlin has also been practicing Solo and Ensemble next week. She'll be singing a solo in front of some judges and then they will give her scores and feedback. She's pretty nervous about it.


School Stuff

Jared is back at school now, and started this term by dressing up like a fur trapper and giving an oral report. We got final word that Jared will be moving to a new elementary school that they are building not far from our house.  It will be his first and last year at the new school.

We registered Ruth for high school this week. It's the first time she's really had to make decisions about what direction she wants her future to take.  She's decided to move into the honors program and signed up for her first AP class. She also decided to take Spanish as her foreign language.   She and I sat down with her school counselor this week where they told us that Ruth had earned the highest score in the school, tying with another boy, on an ACT pre-test.  There are over 400 kids in her grade.  That really shocked us.  We knew that Ruth was smart, but we didn't ever think of her as being super smart like that.



Changes

At church I've stepped down as a Cub Scout leader.  Jared is done in Cub Scouts, and so am I.  I will still be working at the district level for the next few months, but I've given notice there as well.  I still have my job as the church choir director and I'll focus on that for now, until they give me something more to do.

Chuck's gone through a little re-organization at work that has changed his job responsibilities and shifted his desk a few feet.  He's leaving project management behind and will now be doing more research. His new group is called "Insights" where he'll be looking at trends and tracking progress in the company. He is mostly happy with the changes.

Visiting the Badgers

Ruth, Kaitlin and I headed out on an adventure last Friday, to the thriving metropolis of Ephraim. It's a couple hour drive past cow pastures, little towns that time forgot, and turkey farms.  The city itself is small and when school is in session the population literally doubles.  Snow College boasts 4500 students, 90% live right there in town.  My first impressions of the school were (and in this order): Wow, there is so much parking and no traffic. Is school even in session?; (upon opening the car door) Whew, what is that smell? Is that turkeys or cows?;  This campus is really cute, and much nicer looking than I expected.    We attended an orientation and took a tour with several other prospective students, and the people were very nice.  Not just the people giving the tour but the people everywhere we went.  Kaitlin mused that it was a college full of Hufflepuffs, and from the big signs in the commons advertizing a country swing dance and nerf gun fight registration, I had to agree with her. After the tour, they gave us all t-shirts and waterbottles and then one of our tour guides took us to her apartment and let us rummage through her closets and sock drawers (not literally) while she told us how much she loved living there.  Kaitlin loved it.  Every bit of it.  And following her heart seems to have paid off for Kaitlin again.  


Canning Beans

Once or twice a year I donate some time at our church sponsored cannery.  The cannery (and the farms and everything) is manned by volunteers and then the food is given to the poor or used for disaster relief.  This time I got to help can black beans. For four hours I mixed big vats of brine, that was used to fill the cans.  It was a lot of sitting and watching the vats empty, so I ran guitar scales in my mind to pass the time between fillings.  Overall a good time, and nice to know I'm helping out my brother in need.

This is a stock photo of the cannery. Those vats in the back left is where I was working.  I canned corn last year. Corn is much messier than beans!

Poetry Out Loud

Kaitlin competed in her high school's Poetry Out Loud competition on Wednesday. It is a scholarship competition, where you memorize two poems and recite them for judges and an audience. The winner moves up levels all the way to a national competition.   Kaitlin memorized "Bright Star" by Keats and "I Carry Your Heart with Me" by e.e. cummings.  Kaitlin worked hard on inflection and meaning and did a great job in the competition, taking second place overall.  Unfortunately, only the first place winner goes on to regions, so she was pretty disappointed about that. But there is something to be said about working at something, doing your best, and feeling proud of how you did.

Kaitlin is very forward thinking right now.  It's the last half of her Senior year and she is anxious to get on with her life, go out an explore the world and all that.  We are headed over to Snow College this week to do a campus visit and get the low down on housing and such.



A Month of No School

Jared is back to school tomorrow.  He has been a month out of school, first with Christmas break and then he was off-track.  He has filled that time mostly with playing minecraft and watching minecraft videos.  He also participated in a Boy Scout Pow Wow. The last three Saturdays he went and took classes.  He finished one merit badge and got a good start on the other three.  He also passed off his scout rank and is almost done with Tenderfoot.

Ruth's Reflections 

A week before Christmas Ruth was called down to the office and given a flier giving her info about the Council Reflections Awards Ceremony.  She got no other information, but we took from that that maybe one of her four Reflections entries had won at the school and gone on to the council level.  So on Monday we drove across town to see if we could figure it out.  They had an open-house where all the entries were on display in the cafeteria so we went on a treasure hunt to see if we could find any of Ruth's entries. In the end we located three entries for Ruth: film, photography and art.  There was a lot of competition so we didn't expect much going into the awards ceremony, but surprise, surprise, Ruth won for her film and got honorable mention in both photography and art.

The whole reason Ruth does Reflections is to get prizes, and so far she's gotten one movie gift card and three subway gift cards.

Happy New Year

Nala, the cat, liked Chuck's lap the best at the New Years party.

We spent our New Years eve with friends and neighbors, while Kaitlin also had some friends over to our house to watch movies and play games.  It was a fun evening full of food and laughter, and since they legalized aerial fireworks, people can't seem to pass by an opportunity to shoot them off, so we had a lot of those going off in our neighborhood.

We spent most of our post-Christmas week just hanging out at home.  We slept in, wore pajamas, ate lots of snacks, went to some movies, and were generally lazy.

Can you guess how many new scouts I'll get in 2014?

Chuck did go back to work but came home early several days because they didn't have a lot for him to do.  I also worked on getting my cub scouts re-set and up and going for a new year.  I screened all of my scout shirts for the year as well. 

Cyber Happenings

I mentioned a few weeks ago that Ruth has been doing some drawing and animation and posting it online.  As of today, she had 248 subscribers to her YouTube channel and hundreds of views on her videos. You can watch the first episode of her "Darkside" video here.  Everything she does is hand drawn - she doesn't use any special software to animate things.

Jared, Ruth and I have also been making Minecraft videos. It's fun to make them together, but no one really watches them but us. 

Ruth's My Little Pony videos are getting quite a following.

I hit 400 Pinterest followers over Christmas.  I don't really spend a lot of time on Pinterest. I post Cub Scout things I'm working on, and I also have a board of things that make me laugh.

I loved the music in the movie Frozen, so I spent an afternoon writing out the guitar chords for one of the songs by ear. It's not unusual for me to tab out a song for a student or myself, but I've never taken the time to post one online for anyone else.  As of today, my tab for "Let It Go" has had 33,940 views and is currently #46 at the biggest tab site online.