I am the Champion!

The kids have finally found a video game I actually don't mind playing:  Just Dance!

You hold the Wii U controller in your hand and follow the moves of the dancers on the screen as they dance to current popular songs.

Kinda like aerobics videos, but with better outfits and soundtracks.

And you don't feel like you're exercising.

It's fun.

We even get karaoke credit for singing along!

And I win, most of the time.

My secret?  Just worry about the hand with the controller, not all the fancy footwork--the computer can't see your feet, just the controller.

The only downside:  this is a game I will only play with my kids with no one but Mama watching.  Ever.

As Sis says, "It makes you feel a little bit self-conscious."

So only the kids will ever see my Nikki Minaj moves!

Music Mystery

My piano lessons are going swimmingly.  I'm playing several fun ditties--"Cuckoo Clock," "Beautiful Brown Eyes," and "Alpine" something-or-other, from my Adult All-in-One Piano book.  And I've added several Christmas carols to the mix--"Jingle Bells," "Joy to the World," "Jolly Old St Nicholas," "O Christmas Tree," and "Deck the Halls."

But occasionally my mind wanders back to music I played 20+ years ago the first time I took piano lessons, for two or so months, after college (I think it was.)   They weren't great lessons; he was a young and unchallenging teacher, not really stressing that I learn to count or keep time.  But we rushed through all the major keys and I photocopied lots of songs I liked.  There were a few that stuck with me--"Musette" by Bach, a piece called "The Knight and the Lady," and this other piece, which sheet music I had lost (which I swore had a picture of a castle on it.)  I could sort of remember the tune, but not enough to play it, mainly because I don't play that well and I don't easily parse music into notes.

I looked in our books and online and finally realized that the book the music was in was John Thompson Modern Piano Course, which also had the aforementioned "The Knight and Lady.".  And when I showed Mama the cover on Amazon, she said she had  used that book as a child!  Which of course meant she still had it; I found it in a minute, down with the other piano books in the basement bookcase.  I flipped through it hurriedly, passing "The Knight and the Lady" but not finding the piece with the castle I remembered (there was a castle drawing, on another song.  See I'm more visual than auditory.)

I remembered that it might have been in one of the old costume dramas that I love, something based on Jane Austen . . . was it perhaps a minuet?  Did Margaret Dashwood play it?  Did Lizzie Bennet, only tolerably?  No searches yielded much help.  (But I liked this.)

So I went to the piano and began to fiddle with it.  Amazingly, I seemed to catch the cadence and soon had an idea of how it went, maybe even remembering playing it.  Mama wrote the notes down as I called them out, really simply:  e f e g g,  d e d f f, c c d d e, g f e d.  It sounded real, better than I could have made up in my head for sure, but she didn't recognize it.  And so I let it slide.

Until we came upstairs and I googled, "how to search for sheet music by notes" and came up with Musicpedia, which has a "Name that Tune" search.  I typed in my song with the notes Mama wrote down and kept trying to search.  And odd songs were coming up in the search results.  But I had all half notes.  And that isn't really what they are.  So I tried to guess when they were quarters and half and such, to make it sound like a melody--amazingly, the website let's you play what you come up with so I could tweak it.  But it took a long time to make it sound as close as I could recall.
 
And about an hour into this effort of tweaking and adjusting, it came up with this:

Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus: piano sonata No. 11 in A K331, 1st movement
 

I was off two notes and in the wrong key, but it looked promising.  But my computer wouldn't play the melody from Musicpedia, so I found Mozart's sonata on YouTube:

That's THE SONG!!!!!

And guess what?  It is in the Thompson book!  Called "Air by Mozart," only there's not a picture of a castle.  (I guess my visual memory failed me where my auditory one didn't.)

But it is on the page opposite "The Knight and the Lady."

Talk about an earworm.

But I'm just absolutely astonished that a.) I could figure out the tune well enough to search for it (yay for my piano lessons!) and b.) that the computer could make sense of what I typed.  Isn't the internet amazing??

Summer Fun: Tech Break

With the beginning of summer comes the start of my tech break.  I'll be (mostly) putting away the phone and computer, which for me probably means checking in at the beginning and end of the day.  No telling how long it will last, but it's definitely worth a try.

Silent Night

What do you get when two mommies get laryngitis?

Yep.  This post.

Having no voice left at all after social yesterday and a long conversation this morning with my--what shall we call her?  The woman who also can't sit whom I'm getting to know--Non-sitting Buddy about doctors and diagnoses, but especially medications (since she's been to the ER twice for the same reaction to different drugs!!!!  Maybe Long-Lost Twin is more like it!), I haven't really spoken to the children since they got home.

I have no voice.  Which, for those of you who know me, means it is unusually quiet over here (and sorta frustrating). Especially because it seems that if I'm not talking, the kids aren't talking as much.  Dinner was very quiet.

And then I tried some sign language on them.  Remember how they knew some sign language by about 10-months-old, signing for "more" and "done" before they could talk?  At the height of our (okay, my) obsession with Alex and Leah of "Signing Times," they probably knew 50+ signs--for animals, colors, actions, places, people.  I loved refreshing my own skills and sharing it with them.  But it never stuck.  And now they don't even recall Alex and Leah (Babysitter does though; she can still sing all the words to the theme song!) Though, somehow, the alphabet did stick and they know it!  Anyway, tonight over dinner, I signed a bit with Mama, who can follow me most of the time (she watched "Signing Times" too!).  And the kids were flabbergasted.  How do I do that?  What were we talking about?  Maybe they'll be interested to learn some again.  But because that didn't help tonight, we managed to get them to bed with a combo of pointing and ritual, having to give up our nightly read for "Phineas and Ferb" because neither one of us can handle Harry Potter.

And now Mama and I are chatting on Gmail with each other, sitting here in the same bed.  Neither of us knows enough sign language to have an in-depth conversation and we're not ready to go to bed quite yet.  In fact, it's odd not to have talked today--we usually chat at some point, sharing snippets of our day during her commute  or between baths.  Thank heavens for computers (and that we have two of them so we can each use one).  It is, by the way, how we got started, you know, years ago chatting over the university intranet after work at the library that summer almost 18 years ago!  So, I'm actually enjoying this little electronic trip down memory lane, an unplanned date night.

Silence is golden, you know.

Addendum:  As I finished this, Mama initiated text-to-speech software (get this, Lambeth, she's using a British voice!)  Things have certainly changed!  And I don't miss that orange "pine" prompt at all.  Her iPad is cooler than my notebook.  She's charging the kids' iPad so I can be British too.

Family Addiction, Including the Cats

I like my 'droid and whatever computer I can blog on.

The kids love to play DS and now they play a few games on Mama's iPad.

Yep, Mama has an iPad and she loves it, even if it's Mac-ness isn't quite intuitive for her yet.

And the cats love it too. Yep, the cats. Mama has a game for them which involves little mice running around on the screen. The cats even get points for pawing it! Hermione loves it but just watches, only occasionally tapping it--she doesn't care much about her score. Albus looks under the iPad for the mouse. No points for him.

Unplugged Failure

No surprise: I didn't make it 24 hours without technology (which I define here as email and blogging, since text/phone and tv/movies, or even social networking, are not much of a challenge for me--I haven't done any of those in 24 hours). In fact, I only made it the 12 or so hours that I was settling down, heading to bed, asleep, and getting up in the morning. Though, to my (not very great) credit, I did only check email on my schedule, in other words, not like Pavlov's dog when the little chime alerted me to mail (I turned it off!).

And I learned a few things:

• because of my various volunteer activities--Daisy Scout leader, church volunteer, docent/volunteer at two historic houses, library volunteer, and reading volunteer--I coordinate and keep track of many things via email, which I always recommend above the phone for reaching me. And since today was cookie pick up, I had a few things I needed to address via email. Perhaps if I had known about the day earlier, I could've better prepared; and on other days, it isn't quite so pressing.
• I connect with many friends and family via email and blogging; to go unplugged means keeping them out of our loop or being out of their loop; perhaps 24 hours shouldn't matter, though.
• Blogging for me and researching topics online for both Mama and me are recreational and relaxing; it's also something we share and discuss, much like reading or movies.
• I also coordinate with Mama via email, timing things or checking in when we are separated (or updating our extremely useful calendar and grocery list apps); today it was kung fu and cookie pick up.
• I do, however, turn to email and the web when I am bored or reluctant to do something else; this is the danger for me because then I become absorbed online to the exclusion of opportunities around me (even things I like, such as crocheting or reading or such), which I might explore or engage in if not, well, otherwise engaged. And yes, gulp, that means I have been known to ignore my family to "just let me finish this post" or "answer this email."

So, I think I might keep the chime turned off my 'droid so that checking email is not reactive but proactive. And I might try to cluster my online activities instead of sprinkling them across the hour, so that I don't step away from my other activities too much (and then I can just say, "I've played Star Wars for an hour, I need to get on the computer and coordinate the PTA cookbook for a bit.")--it's about being present in my family's presence while also not shirking my other (yes, lesser) responsibilities. While technology is here to stay and I am not a luddite meaning to change it, this attempt at being unplugged (much like my earlier off-line Thursdays) reminds me to use it more consciously and conscientiously.

National Day of Unplugging

I only learned about this 24-hour technology Sabbath today, but I'm on board and won't be online until tomorrow night. Hopefully. (Because suddenly 24 hours without my 'droid sounds like a really, really long time.)

Until then, check out the organization behind it here, and the 10 principles here:

1. Avoid technology.
2. Connect with loved ones.
3. Nurture your health.
4. Get outside.
5. Avoid commerce.
6. Light candles.
7. Drink wine.
8. Eat bread.
9. Find silence.
10. Give back.

I'll see you on Sunday, then, and tell you how it goes.

Crisis in Faith

Not that faith. Not real faith. In fact, if I'd embraced my UUism and lessons from Buddhism, it wouldn't have been much of a crisis.

But last night, when we realized that Yahoo had erased, obliterated, annihilated, deactivated one of my email accounts--the one that included all of my professional work from all my museum jobs, an account I obviously don't check often because I haven't needed them--I too felt erased in a way. That professional identity--with all my contacts, my documents, my work history--gone in a flash. And I had wanted them more than I had in the last 6 years because I'm starting a new volunteer position as an educator at an historic house museum and am writing curricula and other materials. So I tried to log into my old account. But Yahoo's new policy is to deactivate email accounts, erasing everything, if you haven't used it in four months. And they never told me.

I cried myself to sleep, in the glow of the computer light.

Because Mama was convinced that somewhere, somehow there was a backup, that she had been careful, conscientious, and cautious six years ago.

And she had.

Only not with the email account, because it's not possible to download Yahoo, but with my work files, which were carefully labeled on a CD which she'd backed up to an external hard drive, way back when. So, even though the emails and contacts and such are gone, I have anything that I wrote and stored on my own computer.

Bless Mama, who stayed up very late to retrieve the documents. (And she is now double-backing up and/or printing out all manner of things--a decade worth of pictures, 500 pages of a cookbook, the entire text of this blog, our address book.)

Though, I tried hard to convince myself it hadn't mattered in that 12 hours I thought it was all lost. Telling myself that I needn't be attached to those files because I could make new ones, or even more importantly, be attached to that old professional identity, which had little to do with my life today. If/when I ever go back full time in museum education, here in a new state, my contacts will have moved on, my documents will need to be updated, everything will have changed. The security blanket of data that I have held on to--the one that offers the protective cover of tools should I ever need or want to go back to that work, proof that I'm capable and employable--really holds little safety or protection, I realized. But it had held, very tangibly, who I used to be. And that is what I mourned last night.

Looking through the documents this morning--pre- and post-visit activities, tour confirmations, docent training manuals, public program announcements, class syllabi, lecture texts, conference presentations, grant proposals--brought back all sorts of memories from about a decade of work. It was both bittersweet, remembering all that I used to do, but also confidence-building, here as I begin a new journey.

Beyond learning to have faith in myself (and in Mama!) and in the way things unfold, I was reminded not to put too much stock in perceptions (or ideas/beliefs about myself, career, past) or in things.

Especially computers.

(Yes, some of you will note that, in the end, a computer did save the documents. True enough. But I think it's more the symbolism of it. I could've had printouts of everything, too. Might, even, in the basement somewhere. It's the faith in the belief that I needed these things, truly needed, not just wanted because I'm attached to them--that I couldn't be happy or survive without the documents, or my recipes or blog or even pictures--that was false (even if we're still gonna back it all up, because there's more than one lesson we're working on here.) That, and Yahoo sucks.)