Revive the Thing

Okay.

I did not abandon my blog. Really, no. It could take care of itself for a little while, don't you think? But at last its wailing has brought me back around (perhaps a wee bit late?) and I'm going to try and breath some life back into it.

The past couple of months have been cram-packed with stuff. Good, wholesome stuff that took precedence over ole' bloggy here. I participated in two solo and ensembles, one for voice and one for violin; I worked at a health fair run by the hospital; I performed in two concerts; and in general my days were filled with much practicing and schoolwork. I calculated it out that if I keep on the way I am, I can finish 11th grade by the beginning of May. And then I shall start 12th grade immediately (well, somewhere within a couple months of that), and try to graduate this year. Yes, as in, be done with grade school forever. Aha!

For solo and ensemble (for those of you who don't know what that is, it's when you perform for a judge and that judge rates your performance on a scale of 5-1, 5 being the worst. Those who get 1's get to go to States) I got a 1 for voice, and a 2 for violin, so I'm going to go to States in a couple of weeks to perform again. Orchestra and choir are each performing at Festival, which is basically the same thing as solo and ensemble, except that the whole group performs. Exciting, eh?

So, yes; there is still much coming up in my life. At this very moment, my father and two of my brothers are collecting sap from my grandfather's sugar maple trees. Yesterday they gathered 400 gallons of the stuff, and hopefully they'll get just as much today. It takes about 40 gallons of sap to make 1 gallon of maple syrup, so really, it doesn't amount to much when you consider how many families we have to split this between.

Recently I've started helping with one of the younger choral groups in the Homeschool Music association. Now, my job is really to help the little noisemakers to sing their parts (it's a two-part chorus, so they're not all singing the same thing) and help them stay with the conductor and such. I'm not sure how much singing we actually get done, though, because all of these children are anywhere from six to eleven, and what they like to do best is chatter. For instance, one of the youngest boys told me, during practice, that he could put a whole banana in his mouth. Whether or not he really could, it wasn't relevant to the song that we were singing! The conductor's two youngsters are also in the room with us during class, and they seem to keep themselves occupied by ramming each other into chairs with the stroller.

I've also written a couple of poems in the past couple of months, which I shall put up shortly. One is an amusing ballad that involves a dragon and stubbed shins, and the other has to do with orchestra.

Waving from beyond the Edge of the Universe,

Yaya

(Oh, and did I mentioned that I am a published poet? Yes, indeed; I entered Awaken Life in a contest and got it published in an anthology.)