Lincoln Logs Anyone? Other kids stuff up for grabs.

Taking down this post b/c most of you probably got a chance to see it. If you are interested in having dibbs on anything, just comment here or if I take it down altogether, just email me, because I promised Slade I will spend about an hour a day specifically on getting rid of stuff, and we have a lot of various things for all ages and genders so who knows.

Reconstructing Harry

Took Harry to the vet today because it turns out he had some 'kennel conditions.' Things where his breeder/previous owner (either Rhonda at luv-a-bulldog.com or luvabulldog.com or someone named Jared Babb, but they won't tell me who actually owned him before me it is very confusing)whatever probably wasn't willing to invest in taking care of properly. In fact when I mailed her about them she said oh no, don't waste money on a vet, etc. But I did, and good thing because the issues I was concerned about were multiple infections (fungal, bacterial) that were really bothering the poor soul.

But the kids think it is hilarious that because I am always running after him with various cremes and grooming procedures and now he hides from me. So after 20 years of daydreaming about having a bulldog again I have one that hates me. Typical of my life.

Not exactly true, I point out that my kids usually resist this kind of upkeep and they know I am the only one that cares about them enough to do it. And when he can tell I don't have any of the evil objects in my hands he usually convulses with joy to see me. The famous bulldog body wag in absence of a tail and presence of extreme uncontrolable happiness.

I am adding to my interesting historical knowledge of the breed but will probably post separately about it. The one fact that stood out was that bullbaiting, the activity that shaped the breed, was originally NOT a sport. Meat was not considered tender enough to eat unless it was tenderized or basically bothered by a bunch of dogs running around yipping at it. Butchers that sold meat unbaited were subject to fines. The power of government activism at work!

Meet the newest and laziest Morgan yet!!! (AKA: The spirit of Christmas naps)

GETTING HARRY

We found a new member of the Morgan clan this year for a very special Christmas present to the kids, who adore him almost as much as the parents. Always thinking larger than life, I had big plans to do all those things I never can do when we are travelling like baking, caroling, family pictures, but getting our dog, which the kids have been begging for a while now was pretty much the extent of it. A good dose of holiday guilt provided sufficient motivation for me to eventually make it happen, and it has been a good thing because he has been special enough to be almost worth the sacrifice of much more festive experiences on the road.

We were planning to go whole route of visiting etc., but we are still reeling from how bad I did healthwise on recent trips, even small ones. We are getting realistic about how seriously travel disrupts my sleeping.

So I was understandably concerned about how having a dog was going to impact things, so I decided to try to mitigate the risk it would be more than I could handel by getting an older dog that was housetrained. It kind of breaks my hart because there is nothing in this WORLD cuter than a bulldog pup. Human ones need a bit getting used to.

But at least I don't go to many places anymore anyway, so having a dog to tie us to the homestead won't be a big change. Kind of sad with how much I used to love to go places, but we do what we have to do I guess, I don't want to risk going back to the way things were.

We named him Harry. Most people assume that his name is some sort of unkind pun on his heavily furred self (he is a brindle and he kind of looks like he is that Ghostbuster dog wearing brown footie pajamas) but that is just an accident. I have a tremendous amount of respect for his breed, and can't abide giving a gorgeous specimen like this one of those typical dog-type names. He was named 'Nitro' before but that's no name for an English Bulldog - traditions change but this one not for the better, bulldogs are getting some funky names lately, many of them what I would call a ten year old boy name. (So many dogs sound like they were named by a kid, so I went with a classic) and English Bulls need classic English names, preferably Royal. Most early ones were named Harry, Will, Bess, etc. It was probably a joke to do this because of how far down the social ladder their owners were from these names, but such was the tradition.

FIRST FEW DAYS of HARRY COMING 'HOME'

So far things have been fairly predictable thing based on what we knew about the breed, so there have been few surprises. He is very compatible with our lifestyle and mostly ends up being our floor buddy. He doesn't bother to try to get us to go run around or throw him balls. Bulldogs show their intelligence by refusing to do such silly things. That ends up knocking them in various dog-to-dog rankings, but that is because DOG-Q is measured partly by how well breeds fetch and do all the stuff that other dogs like, an arbitrary measurement not at all related to any real intelligence, obviously. When you ask a Bulldog to fetch, they look at you like, 'Why would I do that?' Which is how most smart humans would also respond.

And I am willing to deal with downsides of the breed, because right now I am less able to handle dogs that are in any way irritating behaviorally. I figure that I can't have a perfectly clean house right now anyway, so it doesn't matter WHAT ruins it. And luckily Harry is typical of EBD's in that he is VERY mellow and doesn't jump around or bark. Like bark EVER (Seriously we fist thought of sneaking him home on Christmas eve but scrubbed that because we thought he would wake the kids up by barking. Turns out nope, we would have been totally safe).

And that is perfect for me because I can't even stand dogs barking in the neighborhood. And Archer and Slade have been tough nuts to crack about dogs in theory, traumatized as they have been in the past by experiences with dogs real and imagined. But Harry's gentle nature is making steady progress against their intolerance. Slade is VERY amused by his interesting and a-typical (of dogs) personality. Some dogs don't interact much directly with the people in their environment they are so busy running and jumping, and cats are even more indifferent, I can't imagine a cat actually responding to anything spoken to them since they are always like 'be quiet I am looking at that string on your shirt' or whatever. Of course cats have their advantages. There are cat people then there are cat people and never the twain shall meet.

But Harry (when he's not audibly snoozing at our feet) is usually following the conversation and other human action in the room back and forth like he's at a tennis match, a total people dog. The breed got that way because unlike dogs bred with acreage, EBD's were the pets of lower classes that lived with them in close proximity. As fierce as they needed to be for sport they needed to be sweet to their owners to survive. This is the only animal large or small I would trust unsupervised with young children. And Harry is sweet enough even for Slade, who had to admit it fairly early on.

I think the main thing that Slade has found--of course which I told him all along--is how entertaining he is even when he doesn't really do anything. He is so magnificent looking that we all are pretty much happy just sitting around looking at him. Of course others would not appreciate this as much in a pet, but it suits us because we are not going to be having him jump hurdles or anything like it. But it is sweet to see Drake blossoming into responsibility in dog ownership, too. I will post better pics of him, he is quite a beauty and needs photographing, certainly, but right now we will have to settle for something Sadie took on her new digi camera.

We have a few concerns about him but right now things have been pretty happy. The kids have been saying things like 'this is the best Christmas ever' and 'this is the best thing that has ever happened to this family, so we will ride that happiness until the next typical Morgan family disaster.

Result of my first public original music performance

I think I mentioned earlier that I was planning to have my ward perform a four part instrumental ensemble that I arranged for 'What Child is this?' A mixed result, at best. It was good to get over several hurdles which would be inevitable in any first actual arrangement that I wrote for someone else to play. Writing only for me over the years has allowed me to take too many shortcuts, such as keeping most of it in my head and not getting any music composition software learned. This flexibility has caused me to often say to myself things like, well if I chicken out I will go back to the easy version, so no need to write all this down, etc.

And it is always educational to work with others with their own opinions and creativity, especially at church. I often see this conflict in church-oriented activities: something seems important enough quality-wise to necessitate many many people spending many many hours working on it, but ultimately various other things turn out to be more important than quality. For instance, at church, people coming first will often have an impact. And of course I agree with that value, totally. In fact if the director hadn't believed in it he would have probably never let me do this!

In this case, to get a variety of musicians to participate, the director thought of having two people on each part, with one player quite a bit better than another to bolster the less advanced player and give them the experience. Again, I agree with encouraging less confident and involved musicians, but this particular way of doing it had some difficulties, at least in this case where it was my first official arrangement for others. I had to write the multi-part arrangement with parts on the one hand interesting and stimulating enough for the advanced player and simple and basic enough for a beginner. The goal to have two players per part also results, even in the best of circumstances, in big potential for shall we say, dissonance. I suggest that it would be more appropriate to give the less advanced players less complicated parts of their own, and that way if they totally blew them or didn't show up (as happened in various degrees) it wouldn't affect the rest of the ensemble too much.

So this quibble was very minor and only affected me because I was not too experienced. The director is a great guy, super talented (actually MEGA talented, he has a GORGEOUS voice among many things), and most of all to his credit here, he was absolutely fearless in working with me. Most people would have stayed far away from me altogether in this circumstance and not have shown the amount of confidence he did in having me write FOUR PARTS when I hadn't even done ONE before! In fact in most cases I would be grumbling about the exact opposite case, that someone hadn't given me a chance at all. But he totally did, and hid his likely nervousness pretty well. He probably would have gotten a more polished product had he done it himself but he rightly believed in delegation where possible, and it is probably related to his value in involving people of all levels of experience.

As a compromise we retained one set of unison players. It was not too bad, but it did have one effect I was worried about, in addition to messing with balance. It was good that not every part had dissonance problems but the fact that ONE of them was written for two players made it so that their part was much too loud (he was always telling them to scale back when they really should have been playing their own parts). And inevitably they were never exactly sounding like they were playing the right note. I actually went so far as to think I needed to change a C to a C sharp, when it turns out that I just couldn't exactly tell, after having them play it over and over for me, which of the two notes one of them was playing. Too bad because it made it so that the main part, written for the strongest player, instead had the most problems.

But I should be clear, I think that whatever frustrations I had with anyone else, ultimately my inexperience was to blame. My lack of it obviously showed, causing many small and medium issues that even if this was one major problem, kept it from being an obvious point of focus. It was my first time writing something for anyone but myself, as I said, and so was dealing with figuring out a program, printing (which is always a problem in our house) teaching people something that I wrote, and multiple other points for weakness. I certainly wasn't in a position to make everything happen the way I wanted it, and the director, an extremely great and talented guy, was just dealing with me the best way he could, I am sure.

But overall, it went ok, for a ward sacrament number anyway. The rest of the numbers were kind of your basic choir numbers with the piano, which IMO leave the audience wondering 'hey, why aren't we singing this too?' Definitely it went well enough for its purpose, threw in some interest and variety, and at least gave some great instruments to look at, including an awesome string bass. The bass player I was very lucky to get to be involved in my humble and confused affair.

And I actually stayed to play myself. From the beginning I couldn't tell whether my original flute player was going to be involved by the end of it. She was probably nervous playing something written by someone she knows can't write music! At first said she said she would definitely do it. Then a bit later she said she MIGHT(depending on a number of factors including whether she ended up being too busy...) Yikes! IMO, leaving others in somewhat of a lurch for their Christmas Sacrament Meeting music is something I would only do if I were having serious problems. But on the other hand, this is not really a person that HAS serious problems (she's very together, unlike me) and maybe this is one of the ways she avoids having them! A bit later on she reported that she was having some problems with the music but that she was getting a handle on it. Hearing that I nearly insisted that we schedule a practice at whatever time convenient to her, and we all planned around it. She was the only one not there, but she said that she was getting a handle on her part. The day before the performance, though, she let me know she couldn't play it.

Oops. Good thing I had decided to stay in town, because the ensemble would have been pretty light and left in the director's lap had I not. But we both really wanted her involved, again we shared the goal of including as many instrumentalists on various levels in the ward as possible, and I felt guilt that again my inexperience could have been having the consequence of making her not sure of her confidence level with the music and not adequately supervising her progress. So I asked her to play the melody, to which she agreed. But that meant that neither she nor I had played through our parts much at all before the performance. I worked to the last minute having to fancy my part up at the last minute to something appropriate for my skill level. The part I spent two months on for another flutist (an interesting experiment that I have yet to see through to its conclusion), I ended up playing myself WITHOUT EVEN practicing it or hearing how it was supposed to sound! Ironically, this is very much like things I have written for myself! I was still scribbling on a staff from after the sacrament right up to our number. (I remember doing the same thing when I wrote a part for myself to play at Slade's mission farewell)!

Sigh. Of course my vanity makes me wonder whether in the opinion of those in the audience the performance reflected on my abilities as a still embryonic arranger of music, and hope that even so, I get more chances to improve on the process. Slade said it was clear that there was a problem 'somewhere in the strings' and that while he had heard how it was supposed to sound and loved it, I am sure not everyone would give me that credit. (The problem in the strings was NOT (and I just corrected this because my first version had a typo making it not clear ENOUGH) you, Dr. A, and I am FAIRLY sure would be the ONLY one reading this of any of the participants, particularly those who are WAY to busy to read my blog!.)

Just in case anyone else sees this, I want to make it clear that the very most central issue I have taken away from the entire event is my disappointment that I wasn't able to do a better job for everyone I worked with. I was clearly a beginner, not even with beginner's luck, and with the obvious issues that will always be there any time a group of people do anything, in addition to the minorly unique aspects of the situation that I mention here. It was my job to better account for all those circumstances. But in spite of everything, I am very glad that everyone gave me a chance and took a risk with my lack of experience. I think that if I had had more experience OR talent, or whatever, I could have worked it out so there weren't any problems or conflicts with artistic vision, schedule, skill level, or ANY of it. I take full credit for not being able to make it work better.

I guess in the end, it was good for me to deal with my beginner's issues in a forum that didn't have serious consequences of any problems, and in theory tends to be forgiving with people's obvious amateur status. We are all by definition amateurs any time we do anything in sacrament meeting. I learned a lot, and do hope that I can have those things I learned pay off for everyone, including those musicians that if they had more experienced people than me leading them would indeed, as the director hoped, build on their abilities and go on to bigger and better things than ward sacrament meeting numbers written by amateurish members!

Almost chess season

The beginning of the year brings for our family the coming of chess tourneys.

Another thing we do, just not extremely well. Drake has a few limitations, even though his 2nd and 3rd places in the state tournaments the last few years are nothing to sneeze at. He has quickly discovered that the kids that are 'into' chess enough to win consistently are not his ideal role models for various reasons. I think his dad went through that around the time he quit competative chess.

Sadie of course has the obvious fact of being a girl, that for whatever reason is the most limiting. But she did really well this year in her first torney when she was only five. I was actually worried that she wouldn't even stick with it the whole day and finish all of her games, but she was a trouper. They even gave her a sportsmanship trophy, which she is very proud of.

The cutest thing was her brothers helping her out and showing her the ropes, which I have pictured to the left. Precious.

Also to the right is Sadie accepting her trophy. If you look closely on one of her leg is her cast, which she had received a few weeks prior during our ski trip. Another story...

Kids' music interests

I posted about Drake composing, but I realized also that maybe some of you aren't up to date on what the kids are doing in general in their music. It does tend to change a bit.

Drake played saxophone for two years in upper elementary school but wasn't really happy with it. And I swear I am not one of those parents that thinks my kids need to be classified as advanced or are obvious musical prodigies (that is one of the reasons that I accepted his one teacher's word for not classifying him in fourth grade. It seemed a bit strange since it wasn't consistent with his history, but I took her word for it fairly easily. Turns out I shouldn't have, and I posted about it on my other blog).

And in the case of Drake and music, I was interested to see whether any of my interest in music would reflect in my kids, and for a while I thought it wasn't. I could tell by his singing that he had a pretty good ear, but it just seemed that in band he wasn't taking off. And that was fine with me at least if it was fine with him.

But turns out I should have known that the circumstances were not exactly letting him shine. In about a month after he switched to trumpet this year he had surpassed what he had learned on the saxophone, and is motivated enough to even practice, which might have been the problem.

Archer and Chase have shown music interest a bit earlier. It was hilarious when at about three they had memorized the libretta to Les Mis. So of course I am encouraging their singing, which surely ends up more profitable for boys than girls--so many fewer of them want to sing than girls. They both auditioned for and got solos in their choir last year. And in this case (fourth grade being the oldest) they are ALL sopranos, so they WERE competing head to head with all the girls! Things will be even easier for them when they can be lower parts. They might be waiting a long time, but...

Archer, consistent with his devil-may-care confidence level, has chosen flute as his instrument in band. I told him that it tends to be a girly instrument and that there are often tons of them, making it hard to be first chair or anything. But he was unfazed. I should maybe consider it a compliment that he wanted to play flute because I do. And Archer may have his gender to advantage even in fluting. I remember that though there were rows and rows of girls playing the flute in band when I was a kid, it was usually a boy that was first chair in the state. Anything physiological gives the edge to men, I am afraid. Even if in the case of playing the flute men only enjoy perhaps finger dexterity/strength and breathing capacity--it does give an edge.

Chase has switched to viola and is continuing to make slow steady progress, consistent with his personality (and like his dad). The other two boys tend to follow bursts of their inspiration to accomplish things (like their mom), but Chase is slow and steady. And because that is what usually wins the race, it is probably fine.

Sadie was the only first grader that was invited to be in her school choir this year, so though girls' competition for singing opportunities are quite cutthroat, there is always room at the top, and Sadie might just wind up there, who knows. She tends to be so dang lovable that people want to let her do things that the rest of us have to scratch and claw our way into.

Overall, the kids like music. We are working on some songs to post on youtube so that all of you can enjoy with us the fun that can come from just enjoying it as a family.

Drake is a budding composer

Drake composed his first original tune last night. It isn't bad!

It is interesting to me that I have just discovered that I have this skill but didn't ever know it, and I have no idea whether the reason I didn't know it was that I assumed I couldn't. I assumed that that was something 'other people do,' so I never tried.

The only thing that gave me a partial clue was that my brother is good at it. I am not as good as he is but I am much better than I ever suspected in my wildest dreams. My ward is doing one of my pieces in the Christmas Sacrament Meeting this year, so that will be exciting.

Hopefully encouraging my kids from a young age will help them develop the ability if they indeed got it from me, but the older I get the more I suspect that that child prodigy assumption--that either someone is good at something from a very young age or they don't have a chance at all--is not as true as we think. My parents did encourage my music very enthusiastically so it is possible that I did have relevant early training and it is still evolving, but the point is that whatever component that judging from my own abilities and those of my immediate family IS somewhat genetic are actually still evolving. The fact that I never thought of actually composing in my childhood or teens is maybe somewhat limiting but not definitive.

I have been impressed that Stephanie, for instance, has taught herself piano so she could teach it to her kids. No reason why not, and I think it makes a lot of sense to do that. Actually now that I think of it I am not exactly sure if she knew how or not but I know she has been polishing her skills and she wasn't too sure of her ability of a music teacher. I was actually inspired from her example. I had tons of music training and have lots of current skill but I didn't think I could teach my own kids. Because she has done it I tried and it is going fine. They are probably learning almost as much as they would from an experienced piano teacher, and my guess is they are learning about as much as they will eventually retain.

However she said the other night that she thinks her skills are more in line with art/drawing, and that she was sorry she hadn't been trained as a child. I think obviously she should go for it! IMO the whole child training assumption limits what skills adults think they can pick up, so maybe that compounds the evidence that we think we then see for the necessity of childhood exposure.

Post on Grandma for her B-day belongs here.

Because I am directing family traffic through this blog I should post a few of the previous links. Not many, but a few!

http://thevonmorganstones.blogspot.com/2007/12/december-8grandma-hicks-day.html

Progress on the house--for your consideration

The above (granted that I have figured out how to do it) is a digi altered pic of our house by Slade.

He wants to make some form or fashion of a tower on the right side of the house. One practical problem is that on the lower story he wants to make a pantry, and a pantry doesn't really have big picture windows.

His solution is visible on the pic above, it is to make small windows along the top.

My opinion: This looks weird.

I think it needs one average looking window from a curb appeal perspective. What do you all think?