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Rodger's activity schedule continues to expand. He just earned his purple belt in Karate and continues to improve his skills every week.
His piano studies have been progressing as well. He performed two recital pieces this year; a sonatina (Click for the video) and "Crazy Man's Blues (video below). He also had the opportunity to play a beautifully restored antique Blüthner during a class field trip to the Washington State Capitol. (Click for the video.) Next year he will be playing three recital pieces, including Für Elise, of which he played the first theme at his spontaneous recital in Olympia.
Rounding out his artistic ambitions, he played the lead role in the winter play at his school, "The Tortoise vs. The Hare." (Click for more photos.)
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It's hard to find a starting point to describe Rachael's busy year, so I broke it into groups...
Rachael's first play with the Auburn Mountainview Theatre Company last winter was "Final Vinyl" (boogie photo) in which she played multiple roles, including an aspiring musician (what a stretch for her), a "Rockin' Bot," a "Death-Minion Dancer" (her favorite) and "Boogie," a beat-poet / philosopher / hallucination. MORE PHOTOS
You've heard; "The show must go on!" Rachael takes that seriously, as opening night was less than 24-hours after having reconstructive surgery for a broken hand. This is nothing new, as she performed in her first-grade talent show within hours of surgery to pin a broken finger.
School:
Is it natural for a teenager to love her school? She tells me she does when I take her there as the sun is just rising above the cascades, illuminating Mount Rainier differently each morning. During the fall, she left the house at 6:40am for Jazz Band practice before school. On days with play rehearsals (Immediately after school) and Marching Band practice or games, she didn't get home until 9:30pm, then again the next day. Her favorite classes seem to be Japanese and US History, where she is constantly tweaking her website for this "paperless" class (NOTE: Her website is not exactly politically correct. I have no idea where she gets that).Music:
With the complely packed schedule at school, guitar lessons are getting a break. But on the odd day when there is not a practice or she must wait at school for the next activity, she brings her guitar and jams with friends.
Being in four bands at school provides plenty of music to supply her fix. For Pep Band at basketball and football games, she plays alto sax, which is also her instrument for jazz band. She says she hates the sax, but she wanted to be in jazz band, and her middle-school band director had no place for flutes. So, she taught herself a new instrument. For marching band this season, she volunteered to play sax because there were lots of flutes, and very few saxes at all. In Wind Ensemble, she continues on flute, but having her hand in a cast created many obvious challenges. Her alternatives were spending every day in the school library studying music-theory, or dropping her band classes. She refused to accept either, and engineered a popsicle-stick solution attached to her flute, and continued to participate in Marching Band, carrying the school banner in parades and holding her position (with virtual instrument) during field-show competition.
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Teresa has stepped-up her quilting with a new machine and ambitious projects, already completing two huge bedspreads, plus several smaller projects with Dorothy (Mom/Gma).
She was also approached by her former employer to perform software testing in her area of expertise; home lending. She is able to do this from home on her own schedule, a few hours at a time, interfacing with the programmers via email and telephone. This makes it easier to get the kids (and Mom) to their activities and appointments, and eliminates the stresses of a commute to Seattle. It also provides a sense of contribution beyond self and family that helps to move focus away from the reasons she retired over a year ago.
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Although the job is with the same company and supporting similar technology, this is a different area of medical imaging than Don has serviced for so long (cardiac and angiography), so he must be trained on all equipment in this modality (radiography and fluoroscopy) before being able to effectively support it. He feels like a trainee again, since he is spending more time in North Carolina and Germany than at home. Usually it is 2-3 weeks away, then 1-3 weeks at home. Between May and December of this year, he has logged nearly 1000 hours directly related to training. This condensed schedule was anticipated for the first year of the new job, but it still is hard to be away from the family so much and leave all of the home responsibilites solely up to Teresa without additional support. One nice part of his last trip to Germany is discovering Bamberg. It is a 1000 year-old city just north of Nuremburg and Erlangen that was untouched during WWII, and after so many trips in the past 20 years, this was Don's first visit to this nearby gem. (Click for more photos)
Don's recording studio is coming along. It has to! The videos he made for Rachael's marching band and work he did during Rodger's recitals has generated much interest and several new projects. All of the time spent in hotels over weekends gives him plenty of time to edit, mix and produce tracks recorded on some new audio and video hardware. A small subsidiary of Silent Knight Productions has also began website development. It started as a way to showcase the video work, but now has developed and hosted several new sites for external clients, some much more elaborate than a simple webpage. Click HERE to find samples of audio, video and websites.---
Dorothy (Gma) had many adventures this year. Last winter, she visited her cousins and childhood friends Barbara (in Stanwood WA) and Betty (in Seattle). Springtime was a Pacific Northwest tour, with stops to visit family all over Washington, Oregon and Idaho. Her early summer trip around Eastern Washington didn't turn out as well as she had hoped, ending up in the hospital for a week for some sudden medical issues.
Better fun included a shopping trip to the Seattle waterfront and Pike Place Market, and a visit to Northwest Trek wildlife park.
Her house in Idaho finally sold, and she is once again a full-time resident of Washington State.
Dorothy celebrated her 82nd birthday at the top of the Space Needle, which was her first time.
Another first for Gma was flying! She is visiting daughter Delynda and her family for several weeks during the holidays. She says she enjoyed flying, especially how quick it was to get from Seattle to Spokane, and plans to do all of her travelling by airplane from now on.
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That was 2012. This message was composed before December 21, so if you are reading this after that date, then it appears the Mayans were wrong! So let's all thank The Lord for another year together and ask Him to bless the one in front of us.
Merry Christmas everyone!