bluebacon

What went well? I aced everything I possibly could, but mostly because I have a supportive environment in every aspect that I do. Who needs to be acknowledged? Everyone. It's a team effort. People and relationships are important. I should never forget that I am never alone at anything I do or achieve. How did I grow this past year? I grew up in a way I didn't expect. I have always defined progress as synonymous to acquiring knowledge, experience, awards, commendation, achievements, gold stars, brownie points, etc. I didn't expect that my maturity from this year would come from recognizing the need to step back and re-evaluate my values and priorities and realize that more isn't necessarily merrier. And doing something different doesn't also mean doing less. My perspective changed and grew wider in lens. What were the stand-out peak moments and why? Losing it and then understanding why I was losing it and then doing something about it. A work in progr...

This is hardly a surprise but -- I sang -- Christmas songs. For choir. For our concert. A concert entitled A Sentimental Christmas. This is my something new for the month of December. I've never sang Christmas songs before. I mean, don't count Messiah, obviously. What I meant was, I had never sang Christmas carols before. I suppose at some point in my life as a kid I probably did, but I don't know if a lot of people know this, but I secretly boycotted Christmas for about 20 years. It's  a long boohoo story of why I hated Christmas so much for so long, and for clarification, it wasn't the holiday I disliked -- it was Christmas Day. And I've spent the last 8 years trying to correct this and for the most part, I'm almost 100% cured. Well I thought I was cured until we started rehearsing this Christmas program for choir and all would come out of me was sarcasm. So yeah, clearly along my disgust for Christmas Day came the tuning out of Christmas carols, to ...

Ok, true to what I promised myself, I've gone back to reading. One book a month. The first book I decided to tackle was The Giver. Eduardo borrowed the movie from the library and I thought it would be another one of those depressing futuristic modern post-apocalyptic movies but made for teenagers, which I hate watching by the way, but somehow it drew my attention until I actually finished the movie feeling fascinated. What made me want to ready the book was because the movie ended as a cliffhanger and I knew right then that it must be a book that's a part of a series. And it was. I read the book but it had the same ending as the movie so I still don't know what the heck is inside the damn house at the end of the movie. I have my speculations. Maybe the little wintry picturesque cottage with people singing inside is actually full of singing cannibals and ate the boy and the baby after all their trouble of getting there? I did read the synopsis of the second and third...

I think it's absolutely amazing that there are 5 boys from South Park that were accepted into the boys' choir for POV's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream . Raine included. To celebrate this achievement, these 5 boys were asked to sing during the school assembly last week. I wasn't able to attend but one of the parents took a video and I have to say, I never thought the day would come where I'd be so choked up about something my kids did. First of all, the song was lovely. Their music teacher did a fantastic job teaching them this song. Musically, they were in tune, they sang with heart, and in a gym that has horrible acoustics, they projected their voice well even though there were just five of them. Secondly, these are FIVE boys who can sing and not at all shy about performing in front of a whole school! It's very rare nowadays to find boys of any age who would want to do that or can genuinely sing, and has enough interest to audition for an op...