12 Days

until I leave for TN, the first part of my journey to Colorado.

I downloaded a program called Finale Notepad. It allows you to compose music with whatever instruments you select. Granted, I don’t play a real instrument, I don’t know how to read music, I don’t know what the notes are, and I’m mostly tone-deaf. But it’s fun to play with, even though my creations are often amusingly sad.

Disclaimer: I’m about to post links to my song. If you listen, any resulting mental pain, death-by-laughter/smirking, destroyed hearing, or any other such things rests on your own shoulders, and you’re not allowed to send me your hospital bill.

I should probably explain the names. I started over a bunch of times, so I got tired of naming them, and due to my inexperience with composing music, some interesting…ok, unoriginal…titles resulted.

The songs sounded a lot better on Finale. Now that they’re on Putfile, they sound worse, which means they sound terrible.

This is called “Clueless” and it sounds awful: http://media.putfile.com/Clueless-60

This is called “Wah” and I liked it better before I uploaded it:  http://media.putfile.com/Wah-25-49

This is called “Ain’t Got A Foggy Notion”: http://media.putfile.com/Aint-Got-a-Foggy-Notion

I took part of it and created this song, “A Mystery”: http://media.putfile.com/A-Mystery

Then I started naming them. Here’s “The Caravan” which starts out okay and gets worse: http://media.putfile.com/The-Caravan

Back to no name, this is my favorite, and it sounds terrible uploaded on Putfile! I’m rather disappointed. Oh well. This is called “I Don’t Even Care” (ha!): http://media.putfile.com/I-Dont-Even-Care-9

Have an amazing rest of your life and recover quickly from the horrible sounds.

- WM

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (Warning: Spoilers)

I saw it yesterday with my parents and younger sister. In a sentence, it’s weird.

Negative elements:

1. Mutt is Indiana’s son…yet Indy has never married (he does marry Mutt’s mother in this movie).

2. There are various referrals to “the gods”.

3. The interdimensional aliens with crystal skulls have weird mind powers. Their origin/identity is never fully explained.

4. Cate Blanchett’s character (Irina Somebody?) is into physcic stuff.

5. There’s some foul language.

6. There are some disgusting violent moments containing large, killer ants that swarm over (and into the bleeding mouths of) people.

7. Mutt’s swinging from vine to vine bordered on ridiculous

Positive elements:

1. Uh…hm…let’s see…I had to go back and check pluggedinonline.com’s review to find something positive. Knowledge is portrayed as more valuable than gold (a Biblical principle) and Indy cautions Mutt to treasure his mother.

 There really isn’t much to take away from this movie. Taken as solely entertainment, it’s entertaining. I don’t pretend to be a professional, but the technical side and the special effects and the camera shots seemed well done. I enjoyed the character Mutt (except for an occasional foul-mouthed utterance from him). But there may be more we should try /not/ to take away from it, and I’m not sure its good points make it worth watching, with the questionable plot elements it contains.

Have an amazing rest of your life!

- WM

I forgot

to mention that there is a scene in Prince Caspian where the hag, the werewolf, and Nikabrik try to summon the white witch, and the hag does some chanting, and it’s a little weird. But they get put in their place (thank you Edmund!).

Prince Caspian Review (Warning: Spoilers!)

I saw it today with my parents and younger sister (my older sister saw it Sunday and my brother isn’t interested enough).

Complaints:

Peter’s attitude. He was a little arrogant for most of the movie. It bothered me. It was not necessary and not the noble Peter from the book I love. But thankfully he came around by the end of the movie.

Caspian’s attitude: It wasn’t as bad as Peter’s and it was slightly more justifiable considering the way he grew up and all the change and confusion suddenly thrust upon him.

The kiss. Susan gave Caspian a brief kiss. Despite being morally wrong, it really didn’t flow at all with the rest of the movie, and I do not believe it was at all in the character of Lewis’s writing. And she told him, “It would never have worked out.” But their relationship before then wasn’t that strong, so there was nothing to have worked out or not anyway. There was a subtle attraction between them, but certainly nothing to warrant that.

Two lines. The one mentioned above, and this one: Caspian says something about thinking Narnians were extinct, and Nikabrik says, “Sorry to disappoint you.” That has to be one of the most overused lines ever. It’s like that saying…”First time’s funny, second time’s silly, third time’s a spanking.”

I have mixed feelings on the attack on Miraz’s castle. Peter leads it. It wasn’t in the book, and I think it was unnecessary violence. In one part, some of the Narnian’s are trapped behind a gate and we have to watch as Miraz’s soldiers kill them. Narnians wouldn’t have stood their clamoring to get out if they were trapped, they would have fought back. But the other side of this is it reinforces the theme: They were relying on themselves for this attack, and they failed. Later, they rely on Aslan, and only through His help do they win the battle.

Good points:

The above-mentioned theme, and the character displayed by the Pevensies and Prince Caspian (Peter and Prince Caspian have the chance to kill Miraz but show him mercy, for instance). The characters are flawed enough to be realistic (and Peter is /too/ flawed if you ask me), but they are also repentant.

Peter does get over himself, even if it takes a while.

All in all I enjoyed it, though it’s quite different from the book. Don’t go see it expecting an exact portrayal. As far as the overall movie itself, it could have stood some tightening up, but it’s pretty good.

By the way, Nimelen – Bacchus is not in the movie a’tall.

Have an amazing rest of your life!

- WM

The Park, Pizza, and Prince Caspian

Amy and I went to a mountain with trails and a park this morning. We played on the playground and did the exercise trail that leads through the woods and has various pieces of exercise equipment with intructions on what to do along the way (we usually don’t follow the instructions). We went to practice our parkour “skills” (*groan*). I vaulted over a piece of equipment, landed wrong, and twisted my ankle. I couldn’t walk for a bit but then the pain faded some. It’s still sore, so I walked the rest of the trail and tried to get callouses on my hands at some of the exercise things and waited while my sister did some other stuff on the equipment. At least I got a walk :p

That was a poorly written paragraph right there…

We got back, showered, and went to a pizza place with Mom, our older brother, and our younger sister. The pizza is very good. Then I sat in the car and read Prince Caspian while they went in the grocery store.

[rant] I’m SOOO annoyed. In a clip of the movie in a trailer for the Prince Caspian movie, Susan and Caspian kiss. That ruins the spirit of Narnia…it’s just wrong. *grumble grumble* It’s way worse than the tension the director created between Peter and Caspian. That, if the characters are developed properly, could be passed over as a minor irritation. But THIS! *grumble grumble*[/rant]

There are only 30 days left until the Clean Place Moot in Colorado! It’s excitingly, unnveringly close.

And I need to go do the dishes. Have an amazing rest of your life!

- WM

Mother’s Day

We had an interesting start to our Mother’s Day.

I was lying awake in bed early yesterday morning, only vaguely aware that the storm outside was what was keeping me up. My younger sister got up and came back in the room and said everyone was in the living room, so I decided to get up too. I could hear torrents of rain coming down outside my window and quite a bit of wind. My mom, my two sisters, and my older brother (you know the storm was really loud when it wakes /him/ up) were watching the weather channel. It was almost 5 AM.

Dad came in shortly after. There was a tornado warning in our area, but it never came to our house, thankfully. The wind did knock down the huge, old tree in our neighbor’s yard So that’s how we celebrated the first part of the day . We all went back to bed sometime before 6 I think, the storm much abated, and slept five more hours since we’d gotten home from church close to midnight.

I edited and printed one of my stories for Mom to read and made her a cake. My sisters made dinner for her and we made her a card. I wanted to do one shaped like a flower for a contest on a certain forum. We ended up putting two batches of chocolate frosting on the thing (plus a little bit of colored vanilla for decoration). It cracked me up that my two sisters sat there and watched me frost it part of the time. In the end I said it looked like a diseased, wilted sunflower. But my older sister said it looked like a healthy sunflower from another world, so we’ll go with her assessment. Mom said it was cute. And yes, here’s a picture:

The world really needs prayer right now. There were a lot of bad storms recently on the eastern US coast. In Myanmar, a cyclone killed thousands. They can’t burn or bury the bodies fast enough – there are too many of them. There are literally dead people and animals floating in the water. The water people are drinking. The people have to walk miles to find aid of any sort. In China, there was an earthquake they fear killed thousands. Please pray for these situations and for a drastic change in all this bad weather. Pray that if God is trying to get something through to us, we’ll grasp it very, very quickly. Pray that God will use this to bring millions to Him. What the enemy means for evil, God can use for good, every time, even though we struggle to see any good in this.

Thanks.

Have an amazing rest of your life.

- WM

The Renaissance Festival

I went on Thursday and finally got around to writing a blog entry about it.

I went with my friend Katie, her mother, my mother, and my two sisters, Amy and Laura. Katie, Laura and I dressed up (I wore the black Ren. shirt I made, a full, black cotton skirt, my boots, and my tan cloak). The high for that day was 80 degrees (F), it was sunny, and a light breeze blew off and on, to the relief of a certain person whose outfit wasn’t exactly a wise choice for an outdoor affair in Georgia on the first of May.

Actually, the heat didn’t bother me much at all, because I was having such a good time. We got there a moment before they opened the gates at 9 AM. One of the first people we saw upon entering was someone dressed as a Tolkien-ish elf, pointy ears and all, playing a flute. I wish I had taken a picture, but with no crowd to sort of “mask it” I felt a little too shy. We proceeded to the opposite side of the festival to see the blacksmith demonstration at 9:30. The blacksmith showed us how to make a nail. Katie took this picture of him. All mine were of his back, because it took me a bit to get over taking picture of strangers to their face, though I’m sure they’re quite used to it.

 

Then we went to the joust. I took over 200 pictures there. Here are three. I don’t think anyone reading my blog is not on Clean Place, Facebook, or MySpace, so you can see the others any of those places.

 The evil knight, Sir Matthew (in yellow and black) and the announcer, Sir Mordred (in red):

The noble knight, whose name I didn’t hear very well and don’t remember, unfortunately:

Jousting:

They started out with a ring joust, where the knights try to get circles held by the announcer/Master of Arms onto their lances. Then they tried to hit each with other lances in what you normally think of when you hear “joust”. Well, then Sir Matthew rode up to Sir Noble Knight and knocked him off his horse with a lance. They began to sword fight. Sir Matthew beat up on the noble knight quite a bit, but then the noble knight “ran him through” and won the tournament. I was getting ready to be rather upset with Sir Matthew if he won. I was standing (instead of sitting so I could get better pictures) on the side of the arena that was supposed to root for Sir Matthew, but I didn’t.

We went to the royal pavilion for classes in language and mannerisms, and knighthood and chivalry. We ate lunch during this. I had “spinach pie.” It tasted good, but it was made from white flour… Then we listened as the audience interviewed the king and queen, Henry VIII and Anne. Naturally, someone asked if he would always be loyal to Anne, and he promised he would. Here are pictures of the various shows, respectively:

Sir Mordred taught Knighthood and Chivalry since Sir Matthew died in the joust that morning. Here he is with his squire, who he apparently took from Sir M (along with Sir M.’s helm, which he showed us later):

The king, queen, and their entourage:

We started back across the festival for All the King’s Horses, the lipizzan stallion horse show. The lady introduced a Sir Alexander using a slightly altered version of one of Jeff’s intros from the movie “A Knight’s Tale.” And then Sir Alexander rode out on his steed Goliath and turned out to be an 8-year-old boy on a Shetland pony.

Then one of the stallion’s came out, did a fancy jump (called a capriole) and some trotting, and reared.

The lady of the Elven wood was next.

Her horse did the same minus the jump, and she got him to back up, and rode him around the ring. Honestly, it wasn’t very exciting, but the horses are gorgeous.

Later we watched and listened as someone talked about and played various Renaissance musical instruments:

We also looked at various shops. I would have stayed hours longer just wandering around, but the school day ended at 2:30. I hope to go back next year, perhaps dressed in blue and white, since the noble knights usually wear those colors.

Have an amazing rest of your life filled with the love and presence of God!
- WM