07.09.05 - Life update and Review of WOTW

Life continues. With less than a week to go before the big day, Cher and I a working hard to iron out the last minute details. The good news is that everything up to the wedding day is pretty much taken care of thanks to our dear friends Paul and Jen. We’ll be cementing our wedding vows and music this weekend and printing the programs early in the week. It looks like about 45 people, including kids, will be attending so it’ll be bigger than the 20-25 we talked about originally but not too huge. We’ll also be getting the house ship-shape and finishing the cake for the wedding this week.

It’s amusing and interesting to see who does and who does not elect to attend weddings. We sent out about 60 invites and assumed roughly 30 families would actually attend. In the end it was more like 20. Apparently, second (and third) weddings are less interesting than first weddings – who knew. I was once again reminded of the political ramifications of inviting some people while excluding others – something I never would have dreamed of for my first wedding. In the end, I really didn’t do much of that this time around either. If we didn’t want to see them or if there was no possibility they would attend, we didn’t invite them – simple enough. Of course that means that some people I wouldn’t mind seeing got left out so that those I definitely didn’t want to see would be left out of the loop. Family is so very complicated some times…

My music theory class started on July 6th and I am now officially buried in course work. Thankfully, general biology is not giving me the fits that it was in the beginning. I think I can pull out a “B” which is good enough. I should end up with an “A” in the lab and all three sections of the theory class. Technically that should leave me with 4 “A”s and a “B” which is good, all things considered. The theory class is a lot of fun and, given my background, a breeze. I’m sure it will be ever so much more entertaining than some boring “Music Appreciation” class. One disturbing thing is that I know more, at this point, than 95% of the music majors in the same class – I have a gift that I’m not using very much and that feels somehow wrong.

As such, I started teaching the kids music theory today. Some of them took to it better than others and I didn’t push it. We spent an hour going over the basics – the C Major scale, time signatures, measure, note, staff, clef, and rest notation. I think I’ll review that next time and then start on intervals and after that, move into modes. I’ll probably teach the intervals based on songs they know using songs like “My Bonnie” to illustrate the Major 6th and so on. After that we’ll work out the other Major scales and go from there. Hopefully, I can get a piano of some kind by that point so they can begin to hear how it plays out. For the time being, I’m using the guitar as I have several of them handy.

 

War of the Worlds

We went out with friends to see this film on Wednesday night and I sort of wish I hadn’t. What I mean is that the action was incredible and the scenes with the alien craft and LGMs were flawless. To bad the plot and the acting left something to be desired. Tell ‘em you heard it from me first, Tom Cruise is done folks. His performance in this movie was simply odd. In fairness, I was never really able to forget the goofy stuff he’s been pulling lately and it colored my perception of the film. Add to that a shallow plot, under developed characters, and a ceaselessly uncomfortable storyline and you begin to understand my confusion. It had every promise of being great and then POOF! – straight into the toilet.

RCS