sickening post from todd.

quotables from much ado about nothing, last night's movie:

Silence is the perfectest herald of joy; I were but little happy, if I could say how much. Claudio's response to his engagement to Hero, act ii, scene i

I may chance have some odd quirks and remnants of wit broken on me, because I have railed so long against marriage; but doth not the appetite alter? A man loves the meat in his youth that he cannot endure in his age. Shall quips and sentences and these paper bullets of the brain awe a man from the career of his humour? No; the world must be peopled. When I said I would die a bachelor, I did not think I should live till I were married. [kenneth branagh was really what made this soliloquoy work. the man is the most talented shakespearean actor i have ever seen in my life. go watch the movie. after you read the play.] Benedick re-evaluating marriage, act ii, scene iii

i won't go into the nasty teacher business. suffice to say that if i receive anything less than an a- in el comp (also known as hell comp and el crap), i will contest the grade and hopefully trade in the whole course for private composition lessons with dr. hijleh. (because, though my fantastic academic advisor failed to mention it, performance majors can fulfill their composition requirement with applied composition, instead of elementary composition. grrrrr...) the woman cannot teach and it's driving me up a wall.

but hey! today was the last class! hurrah!

so i needed to blow off a little steam this afternoon. *cough* went biking with brian after dinner, in the snow and rain and 35F temperatures. *grin grin* was much fun, except for the legs cramping up every time i went up a hill. "hi, i'm Out O. Shape!" was pretty ridiculous, i ended up stopping and stretching for five minutes. after i screamed and almost fell off the bike. *sigh* ah well, must start somewhere. and it was a great ride. my second of the season. i'd never ridden in snow before, was quite the experience. leaves you perpetually breathless. a thousand thanks again to the wonderful human being who once bought me silk long underwear for christmas.

*happy sigh* endorphins, sense of accomplishment...

you know, i guess i really shouldn't say i went biking "with" brian. see, he's got a gorgeous cannondale r800 roadie, weighs about a tenth of my trek 820 mountain bike. nevermind that i'm nowhere close to being in shape. so while we started at the same time, once we got off the flat i pretty much didn't see him until we both migrated back to the building. (though he did come back to make sure i wasn't dead when my calves mutinied.)

MY TEACHER IS A MORON!!!!!

AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

forgot to upload some nice shots i got the other day. field of what i call the milkyway flowers. (for all you perfectionists out there, the blurry stuff is supposed to be blurry. it's not a mistake. that's called, gemma thinks she's artistic.)

and while i'm uploading images, here are the new thunderbird application icons. very pretty.

this week is astronomy week! go look at stars!

also just found a christian hacker and mozilla-er. the site was linked from asa, who's linked from me (over on the right there). *grin grin* i get such a kick out of finding christian geeks around the websphere.

three days left of class. that's monday, tuesday, wednesday. [it took me three tries to type that sentence: i wanted to type "wednesday" after monday and "thursday" after tuesday. see, college even messes up your perception of time...] wow.

i don't think i can communicate to you, dear reader, how very i excited i am.

heheheheeeeeee

in other news, whoever thought up the brilliant plan of having four rehearsals, two concerts, and three recording sessions in the ten days before finals/juries needs to be professionally analyzed for something not healthy.

noteworthy, particularly for you gents dating/engaged to/married to female geeks. *grin grin* from a magazine circa 1996 (long time ago, i'm getting old...). it dates itself slightly with the usenet reference, but the rest is still completely valid.

for those not basking under the light of geekination: yes, we really do have dreams like that; yes, we really do lie awake at night thinking about that; yes, we really do get a kick out of the lined-up laptops thing; and yes, we really do spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about computers.

i think i'm going to print out that article and put it on my practice room door...

noticed this article over at slashdot yesterday. it seems tokyo scientists have created baby mice from the eggs of two female mice. they can only create female offspring, for obvious reasons.

anyone else find this a tad alarming?

now, i know, i'm jumping the gun a bit here (ok, a lot, hush and let me finish), but can you imagine if this applied to humans as well as mice? all of a sudden, men are not essential to the propogation of the species. can you imagine the feminist response? hoorah, women can take over the world! we always knew men were second-class citizens anyway! lesbian response? hooray, we can have (quasi) natural children together! heh, check them implications, yo...

in other news, i got a gmail account. (google's new email service, 1GB space, still in beta.) because i'm special and blogger loves me.

o that reminds me, i have a bunch of buttons to upload. i found the source of those great little pixelated buttons that seem to be all the rage (i have a few, they're small and gray). there are over 2000. nifty, yo.

i just got a composition back from my fantastic comp professor with a b+ on it. now, i was two days late handing it in, which is a perfectly valid reason for marking down a piece. but she didn't mark it down just because it was late. she marked it down because it would be really hard to perform. the piano doesn't support the voices! there are minor seconds!

I WROTE A SERIAL PIECE FOR VOCAL QUARTET AND PIANO

it's serial! there is no support between parts (unless you're alban berg, which i'm not)! that's the whole nature of the idiom! it's chromatic and atonal, very hard to play and particularly to sing! it doesn't lie well in the ear, you can't guess where the next note is going to be from the harmony! it's about destroying harmony! IT'S TWELVE-TONE! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

if she has criteria that she expects us to fill (for example, a more conventional piano accompaniment), then she needs to TELL US WHAT THEY ARE. because otherwise, we're not going to write conventionally. jeez. this is not rocket science. it's not about dictating what instrument does what and when, it's about giving us some sort of framework in which to work, some kind of musical and stylistic context. don't say, "write a three-minute piece for voices and piano," say, "write a three-minute piece for voices and piano that uses at least one standard jazz progression, four different accompaniment styles, and a vocal canon." it's impossible to judge the quality of a composition without its context! mozart wrote absolutely rotten twelve-tone music, schoenberg's music is a dreadful example of 16th-century counterpoint, short ride in a fast machine would have gotten john cage killed in 18th-century vienna. give us a standard! then you'll have something you can grade! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

thank the good lord this semester is almost over, i've just about had it.

i think i have never been so glad to see the spring.

i wonder if climate has anything to do with the differences--or perceived differences, at any rate--between northern and southern cultures. you know, northerners with their overcoats and hunched shoulders, scurrying along dripping streets to their board meetings, vs. southerns swinging on their porches sipping lemonade, watching the clouds. heh, i suppose if we were created under open sky, it makes sense that we would be happiest under open sky...

in other news, houghton has extended a job offer to the first violin professorial candidate, who has verbally accepted. so it seems we'll have a new violin prof in the fall. i'm still hoping i won't have to switch, but regardless it'll be great to have a competent studio and sectional leader. very exciting.

what a day. actually went to church this morning, that was exciting. it was a little awkward there--i hadn't been in such a long time, everyone assumed there was "something" going on. there really wasn't, i was just sleep-deprived (no, i really was) and not able to wake up. so yeah, was nice to be back. couldn't enjoy the food, though, for a couple reasons.

the first was my need to get back to houghton as soon as possible, so i could meet my ride for the southern tier symphony rehearsal this afternoon. was much fun, we're playing copland, gershwin, barber, debussy, etc. so wonderful to be playing with a good orchestra again. and i get to sit on the inside--i had a revelation the other day. in the orchestra concert last saturday, i sat in the first violins on the outside for the entire concert, except john williams' et. i had so much more fun sitting on the inside. not just because the music is the stuff i've been dreaming of playing since i saw star wars, either. i was inside the sound, i was immersed in it, instead of being...i don't know, marginalized. pardon the pun. i can always remember this one moment during an orchestra rehearsal at tanglewood. it was during a rehearsal of tchaik 1 (tchaikovsky's symphony no. 1, winter dreams or daydreams or something), when david hoose was conducting. the brass were at full strength and the strings were singing their hearts out and it was like running with a whirlwind. exciting and terrifying and...supernatural. that was the moment i knew what i wanted to do for the rest of my life. anyway. tanglewood was really the last time i had that experience--it was back to the youth orchestra of the southern fingerlakes for my senior year, and then to the houghton philharmonia for the past three years. *cough* don't get me wrong, i like my orchestras, we're not that bad, but we're not tanglewood by any stretch of the imagination. so, ALL THAT TO SAY, i have more fun playing in an orchestra when i sit on the inside. i feel like i'm a part of the music.

also found out that next year, symphony players are getting a 20% pay raise and we're playing real music (including beethoven's eroica symphony and dvorak's new world symphony--the latter is the one i missed playing when i was in london two years ago) instead of arrangements of gershwin...*cough* so yeah, i'm psyched about that one. i've played a lot of concert vignettes this semester, it'll be good to get back into the major symphonies again.

after the rehearsal, the houghton caravan headed back to our booming metropolis for one of brian's famous spaghetti parties (which was the second reason i skipped out on the feast at wellsville presbyterian). jenn and i were in the lead, followed by alyssa and her passengers. after we were maybe twenty minutes from houghton, jenn looked in the mirror and noticed alyssa wasn't there. we turned around to find her on the side of the road, hood up, on the cell phone. looked a bit strained. she'd heard clunking noises and there was smoke floating from behind the right front tire. lots of goodness. turned out she had a slow oil leak (in addition to her gas leak and bad breaks) that became a fast oil leak, and the engine was none too pleased with the whole situation. so jenn and i waited with her for a couple hours, keeping a weather eye (i got that from pirates of the caribbean, ain't it nifty?) for a aaa flatbed and politely refusing offers of help from the kind souls in tinted-window ghetto sports cars. was much fun--warm and sunny outside, good company, what more could you want? besides a steaming plate of spaghetti with homemade meatballs and twenty-dollar cheese? it was nice to get outside--heh, it usually does take something catastrophic to coax music majors out of the building and into the great outdoors. didna mind atall, to be quite honest.

the party was running on fumes by the time we got there, but there was still plenty of food (i amazed alyssa with the quantity of spaghetti i consumed), and enough people to make watching cheaper by the dozen a jolly occasion. was much fun. hysterical movie, incidentally, go see it. (don't come out with "it wasn't like the book!" syndrome either, have a little imagination.) steve martin, you can just see how much he's enjoying himself in that role. and don't miss the outtakes.

just to whet your appetite, dear reader, here's a little picture of what's coming. everything except the title and the gray text box are fixed in position--they don't move when you scroll up and down. displays properly at 800x600 on up. let it be known, no images or frames were used in the construction of this layout. *grin grin* it's all the wonders of css. o and a note to internet explorer users: it's considerably less interesting for you all, because ie is not standards-compliant and doesn't support fixed positioning. so it's just a green background, instead of the color boxes. and everything scrolls. go get a real browser, for pete's sake. (if you knew what web developers go through to make their pages display properly ie....)

i'm thinking i'll have options, in the final version, to change all the colors around...

my blogger code is wrong. (down on the right, you probably didn't even notice. jerk.) don't look at it. i'll fix it tomorrow.

movable type is allowed on surpass servers after all! hoorah! i won't have to design my own blogging script! (which i was actually kind of looking forward to, really, but now i can spend more time get paid for my scripting. and i can still play with my stylesheets as much as i want.) hoorah!

the sun is still shining, by the way. it's funny, as i was walking to dinner from the music building i noticed the blue in the sky. i think long winters make you forget what blue is. such a wonderful color.

i'd like to take this moment to thank the good lord for spring days in spring. streaming sun, blue sky, dew sparklage, etc. etc. was such a treat to walk up to campus this morning--heh, was such a treat to wake up this morning. the difference in my mentality is extraordinary--can't remember if i've said this before, but i always feel lighter (i.e., less weighty, fewer pounds)

in other news, ms. ingalls has reached new levels of *cough* educational professionalism: she has picked the ensemble for my final project, told me which instruments will have which function, and instructed me what style/texture/etc. i may not write for each instrument.

"but ms. ingalls! that's not in the syllabus!" this isn't elementary composition, this is '"this is how i write music so this is how you'll write music." (amanda's comment: "or, 'everyone's wrong except me.'") i think i'd almost prefer stan, man...

so blogger has not been kind to me recently. here's my (slightly incomplete) backup of the post that somehow got destroyed today...

meet the bug that made me jump the other night. pleasant little critter, no?

i took lots of artsy shots while i was home. here are a few from my house. even more shots of me mum's ferocious german shepherd.

and as the grand finale, a parting shot of me and my wine. *grin grin*

[and i just lost a couple paragraphs. stupid. i'll see if i can reconstruct it.]

so. sunday. was glorious outside. anible and i spent a few hours traipsing through tree and dirt and river and waterfall...ah, was so nice. was so refreshing to be outside, in sun and wind and earth (especially considering this bit of sun and wind and earth belongs to six mile creek.), instead of vegging inside with movie after endless movie, studiously avoiding the dripping gray on the other side of the window. here's to winters in the south. anyway. had to do the camera thing for a bit, so shot some fungi and new bush growth. we didn't have terribly long, so we took the short route on the low side of the creek--the popular one, lots of dog-person couples. (anible's running joke is that when we happen upon a dog and its human, he greets the human and i greet the dog. *grin grin*) let's see...we skipped stones for a bit, and saw a somewhat nondescript hill from a new angle, and met a tree with great metaphorical potential. also got obligatory waterfall pictures.

i love six mile creek, i miss it when i'm away. houghton doesn't have much in the way of gorge cliffs.

(as usual, these are only what i consider the best pictures, sized small to save me money. if you want more, jes' let me know.)

nifty places i've been in the past few days:

• fifty word fiction: neat concept, write compelling fiction in fifty words. some good stuff.
• the geek code: quantify and qualify your geek aura. (mine's in the works, baby...)
• geek inheritance: why the popularization of geekiness is a bad thing.
• part one and part two: windows-to-linux migration tutorial. open sourceage, joyfulness.
• visibility: fantastic web standards resource. just found this one today.

eventually, when i make my own blogging system and redo my makeup, all this stuff'll be organized somewhere. for now, just enjoy it as it comes, yo.

[update]
clarinet boy has a blog! wonder of wonders!

vote for this bug! i seem to be the only one who thinks it's even remotely irritating! it renders blogger completely unusable! (which, granted won't be a big deal when i make my own blog management system, but for the moment, it's keeping me from upgrading my firefox build.) i'm still on the 0.8 milestone! so go vote! please!

!!, even!

the little things.

yes, believe it, i've moved again. this will be the last, thanks to my new domain name and server. life is. so. http://www.ramblinations.com/blog, please update your bookmarks. (i also put a redirect on ramblinations.com, if you're lazy.)

wow, long weekend. had a fantastic lesson on friday, with my teacher fresh back from arizona. ah, was so great. at the end, she said, "i really can't believe the improvement in your pitch over the past few weeks." that was a little exciting. *cough* my mother had said after my junior recital that she thought i played better in highschool--she heard me playing a few days ago and changed her mind. encouraging, savez? see what a mere two months of good teaching will do? so i'm sure i gained something from the 2+ years i spent with not-so-good teaching, it just wasn't related to my instrument. (i really am getting over my bitterness, i swear i am...) ah, i left that lesson in the best of moods, let me tell you.

went straight from my lesson to marlboro (i called it the "ciggy school" at the beginning...), to surprise anible for his birthday (april 10). *grin grin grin* [i'm listening to a jazz remix of i could have danced all night.] his reaction was worth the entire 10-hour (round trip) drive four times over. he wasn't there when i arrived (he was watching some chinese documentary), so i parked myself in his room, where holly was having a phone conversation. [this remix is getting really repetitive...] she cut it off for a couple minutes to welcome me back, chat for a lil' bit, etc.--was much fun--and then maggie came in to join the party. i got the bright idea to put my backpack out in the hallway so anible'd see it when he came, which he did, and was very happy to find that it was, in fact, mine. anyway, yes, he arrived, and was very happy, and holly and maggie vacated the premises in short order, and i'll spare you the gory details. *grin grin grin* i'll have pictures up from his birthday party later, i was stupid and left my memory stick reader in vermont.

saturday was lovely, spent all day with anible. it was a summer preview...ahhh, i am looking forward to summer. no school, good job, same city as anible for an extended period of time, warm sun, lakes, gorge trails, six mile creek...lovely. canna wait, as they say. of course, that'll all be after the family takes off to hatteras for a week. i've been to hatteras, my grandparents live there, but the exciting part is this time, we're renting a beach house. for the week. full. week. oceanfront. beach. sunrise. and actually, sunset too, considering it's only a few hundred feet to the other side of the island. imagine...

i have more to write, but i want those pictures up, so i'll close for now. this is parking-break wonder-girl, signing off.

ooo, all kinds of goodness happened today, yo.

[a very large, slow bug just buzzed next to my ear and settled on my desk. beetle. it's just sitting there. i put a piece of tissue paper over it in the hopes that it will just fall asleep. or die, that'd be even better.]

[have i mentioned that i really don't like bugs?]

so yeah, goodness happenage. mum and i went to kmart to get dad some razor stuff, and spent a good hour or so picking out sunglasses. we look pretty fly, man. (shoulda got a picture, o well.) mom also picked up a pot of easter flowers, got some pictures of those. anyway, on the way home, we stopped at pete's wine and liquor store, and i made my first alcoholic purchase. very exciting! i got a red wine from bully hill, and when we went home mom and i drank it (not all, just some) and ate crackers while looking at land's end catalogues. was much fun. a night in with mom.

in other goodness, my domain resolved this afternoon. please notice, http://www.ramblinations.com actually goes somewhere. there's stuff there. it's just a blank page, but still! it's MY blank page! also my mysql databases, my unused subdomains, my un-setup email accounts! i'll start moving stuff over tomorrow, i think. i feel like a valid member of the internet community now. *cough* or something...

[winampage: henry mancini, something with a really annoying bass groove]

...the little animated video from fifteen years ago that had a small person singing, "there's noooo place liiiiiike hooooome"? keeps coming back to me. so nice to be home. so nice to see my family, and the family dog, and my room, and the house, and the city, and the lake...ahh, the lake. expect pictures in the near future, i intend to have lots of fun with my amateurism. *grin grin*

dr. king caught me as i was leaving campus this afternoon. found out that i will have to switch to the new violin professor, once one is hired. *beats head against wall* not a whole lot i can do about it--more accurately, jack squat i can do about it--but it is a bit ridiculous. you'd think seniors would be allowed to stay with their current teacher, whoever it might be. she won't be thrilled, i think--at least i can study with her over the summer. anyway. next candidate comes next tuesday, the day classes start again after easter. exciting stuff, yo...

[winampage: billie holiday, it's a sin to tell a lie]

new goodies for you all:

• the dullest blog in the world: the funny part is, he's been doing this since may 2003...
• scripty goddess: hoorah for geeky females.
• the girlie matters: i am g33k, hear me roar. (check the 'tips and tricks' link on the side.)
• the march for web standards: don't worry, posted april first. (but seriously, listen up, mr. gates...)
• webstandards.org: user-driven resource page for standards-compliance.
• a list apart: more web design shtuff. nifty place, yo

and now, for the final and most important linkiness: mac bashing. pg-13 for minimal language.

a doctoral candidate from eastman visited today, a candidate for hartman's position. chinese, only been in the states for six years.

recital: paganini and ysaye. do i really need to say more? he's a fantastic player. his sound is on the raspy side--there were definitely a few chord crunches in the paganini, but they could be written off to interpretation, and there was no trace of them in the ysaye--but his musicality and technique are so solid that it's not a big deal. his tone control is amazing--the only difference between forte and piano is volume. EVERYTHING else is still there. it's like he just turned the knob down a little. very impressive.

lunch with the studio: he's a fun guy! maybe late twenties, early thirties. we all peppered him with questions until a slight lull in the conversation, when he had a few for us. for example (and this one i might send to the campus paper for their quote section), "so...where are all the boys?" (he's not married, and the entire studio is female. and the last unmarried male post-doc who came to teach at houghton is currently engaged to a former student.) pretty funny. anyway. he knew christopher wu, my chamber music coach from tanglewood and a member of the aspen faculty. i mentioned that i was interested in eastman for my graduate study, and he offered to hook me up with anybody--he knows the whole school. (he's in zvi zeitlin's studio.) o, he also knows my current teacher (played in her orchestra for a while). all around nice guy, man. very personable, great sense of humor, lots of music connections. good qualities to have in a college studio instructor.

open lesson: the man knows his stuff. i played the d minor ciaconna for him (even though it was extremely raw), and he brought out aspects of the lines and voices that i had not considered, for some reason. i mean, it's obvious when i'm playing chords that there are several different voices going at once, but he pointed out that the multiple lines don't disappear when it goes into relatively melodic 16th-note runs. they just start trading off. they still need to be articulated distinctly. anyway, so that was really good. also worked for a while on the opening statement of the theme--i tend to play in truncated phrases, and i really shouldn't. all that to say, it was a good lesson, and i think he definitely demonstrated his competence.

sectional: good lord, we actually got something done. it was funny, after the lesson, alyssa heard him say that he was going to go study the score for rehearsal that night. contrast that to hartman, who never studied the score, never came with a score (just the first violin part), never had a metronome with him, never had any idea what he wanted to do....*cough* i'm not griping. anyway. this guy was great. he knew exactly what he wanted to cover, how he wanted to structure the rehearsal, what the problems were likely to be...ah, it was great. we sounded better by the end. rare occurance, you know.

so, to summarize, i like this guy. not enough to change from my current teacher, but definitely enough to want him at houghton as a string prof. brian said he did a great job teaching aural skills, too. there are a few more candidates coming in the weeks before break, be interesting to see how they stack up.

in other news, let it be known that my non-art-major housemate won the juried student art exhibition, beating every art major in the department. kudos, clyde.

in even more other news, i'm thinking seriously about purchasing a domain name and hosting. because i'm sick of not having php and mysql, and i'm sick of banners and ads etc. etc. i've found some (read: 44) 3inexpensive possibilities. so. i'm psyched.

went up with brian (and blaine and his sister, whom we met up there) to see the american opera susannah, based on the apocryphal book of susannah--though i don't know how closely the opera follows the book. it takes place in the deep south, pure bible belt. susannah is young girl who, thanks to her pretty face and general good nature, has incurred the disfavor of the hyprocritical church elders and their moralistic wives. definitely a tragedy, the whole situation is a downward spiral right from the beginnging. susannah ends up getting raped by the revival preacher, and her spirit and innocence are thoroughly crushed. her brother kills the preacher. very depressing--sobering, rather. behold, hypocrisy, prejudice, moralism, and lack of compassion have destroyed two human beings.

eastman did a good job with it. i definitely liked our susannah better, and another one of the main characters, but beyond that, they were great. the pit orchestra was fantastic--blaine was going nuts, he's the one who had to reorchestrate the score for our miniscule pit. 3cool to hear the full ensemble. also cool to hear how the vocalists and instrumentalists were comfortable with each other. the combination can be really powerful, savez?

it snowed on the way home. *grumble grumble*

as a tribute to the first of april and long years of sophisticated pranking, i've added a little something to the quick shtuff bar. my father would enjoy this more than anyone else, i think. have at it. go here for more of this year's foolishness.

i think new york mourned when we all returned from philly. it's been precipitating since we got back from letchworth. god pulled a little april fool's prank on us, in the form of 1.5-inch snowflakes falling from the heavens, all yesterday afternoon. was *cough* amusing, we got a slush blanket for a day. almost frightened the flowers away

so i've been to latin two days in a row, now. notable occurrence, very exciting. o, and i got a's on all that shtuff i did on my birthday. it was actually a fun birthday, despite the morning cram session. dr. hijleh conducted an orchestral version of 'happy birthday in multikeys' during rehearsal, and amanda put up a 'happy birthday' sign on my practice room, and michelle wrote me a 3sweet birthday card and baked me chocolate chip cookies. *collective awww* love that girl. haven't been drinking yet, might save it for easter break--hard to get liquor in a dry township, you know. *cough* but seriously, i'm thinking about taking the parents for an evening dessert and buy drinks all around. heheheeee...

thought for the week: romans 7:15-24. a chapel speaker read this the other day, and it's been on my mind ever since. have no idea what he was saying, just remember that he read this. struck me in a new way, you might say. anyway:

i do not understand my own actions. for i do not do what i want, but i do the very thing i hate. now if i do what i do not want, i agree with the law, that it is good. so now it is no longer i who do it, but sin that dwells within me. for i know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. for i have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. for i do not do the good i want, but the evil i do not want is what i keep on doing. now if i do what i do not want, it is no longer i who do it, but sin that dwells within me. so i find it to be a law that when i want to do right, evil lies close at hand. for i delight in the law of god, in my inner being, but i see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. wretched man that i am! who will deliver me from this body of death?

"i see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind." *shakes head* it blows my mind how much scripture holds.

happy belated april fool's, by the way.

ahh, it's been a while. first things first: brian and i have installed a wireless router into a third floor network jack. so i'm writing to you live and wireless, baby, o yeah. (interestingly enough, i can transfer files off this computer through over wireless, but not through wired ethernet. go figure. needless to say, the third floor lounge is my new home.)

last weekend was incredible! it was so much fun! we (jenn, alyssa, brian, blaine, and i) left jenn's apartment at around 9, arrived in philly around 3-ish. i've never had such a good time during a six-hour drive, man. it was awesome. brian drove, i took pictures. we stayed at jenn's friend's apartment, across the street from the ghetto. (was actually pretty funny that night, after the concert, when we got a little turned around and parked in the ghetto, then walked through it for a few blocks. midnight, you know. good times. *grin grin*) had dinner at brian's grandma's house, in jersey. full italian dinner: lasagna, homemade meatballs the size of grapefruits, homemade spaghetti sauce still in the measuring cups, salad, hard white rolls, more sauce, more rolls, corn, more salad...ahhh, was so nice. anyway.

drove from grandma's to the electric factory in downtown philly. took about three times as long as it should have, because driver extraordinaire got lost, completely. but we made it in the end. they did patdowns to make sure people weren't bringing cameras, so i left mine in the car. *cough* (there have been times when i put it in my pocket and they ask, "do you have a camera in your bag?" and i can say "no" without perjuring myself. *cough*) mindy smith was the opener, acoustic folk rock. christian, which was really nice. i liked her, she's quite the musician. little spacy, but musical. ;p about my age. anyway. she only played for 45 minutes, which was nice considering the last opener i saw did an hour and fifteen.

nickel creek was fantastic. as always. they are so freaking tight, it's frightening. top notch old-time fiddle, mandolin, and guitar. bassist was good too, particularly when he busted out tap-dancing *grin grin*.... they played for a good two and a half hours, solid. we were all in heaven, it was so great. it was a little slow at times, when they did a few ballads in a row (come on, it was ten o'clock at night and we'd all been standing for two hours), but they'd always throw in tom bombadil or the fox to wake everyone up. ahhh, i loved it. if i could play that way, i'd freelance for the rest of my life. sarah watkins, the fiddle, has amazing technique. she uses about half a centimeter of bow, sound fills up the whole stage. it's so neat to watch. and then there's chris, the mandonlin nutcase, looks like he's in pain or constipated when he plays. stage presence like you wouldn't believe. the guitarist is fairly platonic, except for his face, which twitches when he's concentrating.

we visited "the boys downstairs" when we got back to the apartment. they had a massage chair, must be worth several hundred dollars. we all took turns for about an hour and a half. little strange, getting a massage from a machine...

drive back was more dubdued than the drive down. we were all falling asleep. and none of us wanted to go back. aigh, we really didn't want to go back. the weather was gorgeous all weekend, we got to walk around in sunny sidewalks and green trees and bright colors, we went to a freaking NICKEL CREEK concert, we stayed in a cool college apartment with a lowered kitchen and bikes in the hall...school just doesn't hold a candle. there is no comparison. ah well...we stopped at a mountain bread store (i can't remember the actual name, it was something with mountains) and got free samples and really cheap cinnamon bread. (delicious stuff, i've been eating it for breakfast. very slowly.) was pretty funny when we finally pulled into schoolville; we just couldn't go back. poor blaine had a band rehearsal, so he had to go, but the rest of us took off for letchworth, the nearest state park with waterfalls. lots of waterfalls. beautiful. and i took lots of pictures. (i left my camera in brian's glovebox, which is why i didn't get any of philly.) so yeah, we had fun with a melting fountain, and waterfalls, and rainbows, and grass, and closed trails. there was also a sign for a swing set, that we completely ignored. i also took a few arty shots. so that was fun. finally went back to houghton in time for the recital.

so that's my weekend post, overdue. in retrospect, it was worth every minute of the rotten studying/composing i had to do on my birthday.

*happy sigh*

[i have more pictures, and better resolutions. let me know if you're interested.]