Emily loses a neighbour

This used to be the house next to Emily's:
This is all there was left by the time Simon took Frederick to Emily's on Saturday morning around 10. Emily reported that she was awoken to the sounds of destruction at 8 am. It takes about 2 hours to tear down a house over 100 years old.

Snowman!

The snow was about as bad as it could be for snowmen - dry and powdery so that it wouldn't even hold together in a snowball. But we did our best:
Although not the traditional shape, Frederick was very pleased with it and checked on it through the window often throughout the rest of the day. He later told me that building the snowman was the best part of the day. Apparently we're due a huge snow on Tuesday, so maybe we can make one that's more than 2 feet tall next time...(Simon was not pleased to see that Frederick picked out his favorite summer hat for the snowman but, really, sometimes sacrifices have to be made.)

Big Drums

Here is a secret, backstage view of Thomas hard at work on the timpani.

Eventually this will turn into a performance piece.

More bassooning: Ammerland

This was the second song in the concert. Here Thomas plays out the low end notes.

According to the conductor, this song was inspired by the flower-filled fields and valleys of southern Germany in summertime. Despite his dramatic description (a lot of arm waving), the students were unimpressed and this was their least favorite piece (though it is one of the conductor's favorites--or so he said every evening when he insisted that they practice despite their groans and complaints). Perhaps he gave them a hard stare before the start of the piece this night as they played better here than they ever did in practice.

One of Thomas's Christmas Concert Songs

A LONG time ago, December 11, Thomas had both the Christmas concert for Philharmonia and Wind Ensemble on the same day. The Philharmonia dress rehearsal started at 3 and we had to leave about 2 to get to some hideous modern high school in the middle of some cow town about 20 miles south of Flint. It was about 10 degrees out with gale forces. The concert started at 4:00 and lasted about an hour. We then sat around twiddling our thumbs for about an hour. [Insert a trip to a bathroom for a costume change as Philharmonia wears "black on bottom, white on top" whereas wind ensemble requires tuxedo (!) with bow tie and cummerbund (sp?)--you can, I am sure, easily imagine Thomas and I arguing back and forth with me standing outside the men's bathroom door and him inside with me trying to explain how to work a bow tie that I can't see, and him trying to work a bow tie that is getting knotted up in his hair that he can't see--all very ridiculous.] Then wind ensemble had a dress rehearsal at 6 and then had their performance at 7:30. The concert didn't end until about 8:30 and we didn't get home until well after 9:00 It was a long and exhausting day. This is the first piece of the wind ensemble, which does not include Thomas's solo. That song, which ended the concert is almost 5 minutes long and we are having a hell of a time uploading that onto blogspot. But we will persist. Anyway, here is the start of the show and you get a small sight of Thomas playing (you can see his fingers dancing about on his bassoon), though this song is really to show off the brass not the winds.

Although it may be obvious by looking at the others in the ensemble, I'll say it explicitly, Thomas is by far the youngest in wind ensemble. He is only 12 and everyone else is 15 or older, with most of the kids 17 and some even in college. The conducter, Jamal Duncan, has a day job as a wind ensemble instructor at MSU.

Yoshi's holiday videos...continued

Our loyal readers will remember that this film was taken the same day that Frederick got a splitting headache and Big Yoshi fell onto that horrible woman's toe. Nonetheless, Thomas managed to put together a jolly film.

Eunice refuses to act her age

For-Mar in the snow

All our energies are devoted to various crises at work, so nothing much of interest to the world at large to report, so here are some pretty pictures wot I took:





(The ones that look small and flat are actually HUGE panoramas, as you can discover by clicking on them.)

Thomas's New Business Venture

Thomas was uncharacteristically quiet for long stretches this weekend, and this was, it emerged, because he had a get-rich-quick scheme. It entailed collecting various puzzles from various sources and hand-writing them on to little scraps of paper, folded over, with "10 cent puzzles!" written on the outside. When we pointed out that it took about 30 minutes to produce each and that, even on the assumption these became a hot item, he would be earning well below minimum wage, he went back and altered all the 1s to 5s. Here are all the resulting 50 cent puzzles. (I scanned them so we would have a record, but he chickened out of taking them to school [today being the first day thereof], we might get to keep the originals.) If you wish to test your puzzling skills, click on the images a few times and they should enlarge to full size:

Yoshi's Holiday Videos

If you skip back to August you can remind yourselves of the trip Thomas, Frederick and I took to Munising in the very northern reaches of Michigan. One way to amuse ourselves was to take a glass bottom boat tour. There were very strict instructions on the boat that we could not take flash photos of the ships that we were looking at through the plexiglass as the glare would ruin the view for everyone so, because it was so dark in the gut of the boat, I didn't take any photos. But, because Thomas's had his Flip camera with him, he took films of the shipwrecks. But, because the Flip has PAIN-IN-THE-ASS software, it has taken us this long to figure out how to upload the Flip film bits connected with the moviemaker transitions and audio soundtracks that Thomas had assembled onto YouTube. Of course, doing that was precisely what the Flip promised it did EASILY, but it doesn't... Anyway, here is Thomas's film of that boat trip.

Thomas promises a "Part 2" which all of us here in Flint are anxious to see (some how the God-awful heat of last August seems much less offensive now that January has started) but he then reminded us that he has "a lot to do" so may be a while before he gets around to it.