Maybe you've noticed...

Maybe you've noticed I haven't been posting here.

Or maybe not. Whatever.

Over the summer it became clear to me that I just don't like this blog anymore. I don't like the way it looks, I don't like the title, I don't like how cluttered it is and on and on and on... I thought it better to simply start fresh.

I've started a new blog that I like much better than this old one. I'll be posting there after the excitement of the holidays die down. So come visit me there! Add it to your sidebar links, follow me, whatever! :)

Pretty Kettle of Fish

By the Sea

We spent the day at the beach today. "The Beach," whatever beach it may be, will always be one of my favorite places in the world. It never fails to send me into a variety of moods. For a few minutes, it will make me feel like a little girl, and I'll splash through the waves and run across the sand to find a quiet spot to read or write (I had an obsession with quiet spots and hidey-holes when I was younger... I still do). Then watching the sea from afar will put me in a meditative, somber mood, which is good for journaling and writing poetry.

And then when I'm standing on the shoreline, watching a wave approaching, my mind begins to take a more morbid path. "It's coming to take me," I always think, as the wave gets closer.

It doesn't help at all that in one of my favorite murder mysteries, Have His Carcase by Dorothy L. Sayers, a body is discovered at the seaside. (I highly recommend the book, by the way. And the miniseries with Harriet Walter and Edward Petherbridge.) Something about the cry of a sea gull will always be linked in my mind with death.

Highlights of this week...

#4: Playing music from Pride & Prejudice. I get so lost in that music. I start to play, and if everything is quiet and no one disturbs me, I go into a little world of my own. The notes and melodies take on separate personalities, and sort of... talk to each other in my head. Does that sound crazy? Don't answer that.

#3: Watching series two of The Roman Mysteries tv show. It may even warrant a whole blog post of its own.

#2: Catching up with my first ever best friend. I hadn't talked to her in years, because she moved to South Carolina and didn't get any of my emails and lost my phone number (because I also moved). She moved back to CA, and I found her on Facebook last week. It has been so wonderful to talk to her again!

#1: An impromptu concert at an out-of-tune piano. After a music rehearsal for Twelfth Night (at the house of Mrs. V - I've talked about the V's on here before), I sat down at the piano and started playing All I Ask of You, from The Phantom of the Opera. Decently. Little V the Elder came up and began to sing along. This girl is 10 years old and has a VERY strong soprano. She's learning an aria from The Magic Flute in her voice lessons. I absolutely love her, by the way. :D So she was singing, and I kept playing... badly. I get really nervous when people stand over my shoulder while I'm playing. And then this guy, who is, as of that night, our guitarist for Twelfth Night, came up behind me and started singing with Little V. Even worse for my performance at a piano than a sister or friend standing over me, is a perfect stranger. But I decided I didn't care how badly I was playing - as they say, the show must go on. :) Pretty soon even I was singing to my horrible accompaniment, and I was trying not to giggle. There we were: a ten-year-old opera star-to-be, a home-schooled theatre junkie, and a high school guy in a metal band, singing Andrew Lloyd Weber, just... because. Because spontaneity is so lovely.

There was also some rather awful parts of this week, but I won't go into those here. It feels like winter today. I'm even drinking hot cocoa and wearing a sweater... in June...in California!

A Very Merry Unbirthday

I just wanted to wish a very merry unbirthday to the following people:

Lady Rose
Elenatintil
Vicki and
Serendipity

Graphics: North & South, East of Eden, Sense & Sensibility

Anyone may use these. If you want to use them, try to credit me (and don't claim them as your own. That's really not cool ;) ).






EDIT - And of course Blogger would mess up my formatting. Alas.

The Most Beautiful Picture I Have Ever Seen

I seem to choose a new candidate for this title every few weeks. I usually find beautiful photos on photography blogs such as this on (the colors! SQUEE!) and this one (by a fellow Chesterton fan, as a bonus). But the other day I stumbled across this photo on Google images, and thought it was simply breathtaking.



I don't know why I love it so much... perhaps because of how quiet it is in its beauty... or perhaps because the girl's hair looks a bit like mine (only prettier).

I haven't felt much like blogging lately, hence the long break. It's been so long that I hardly know what to say now! Just a few quick notes on what's been going on in my life:

- Singing lessons are going well. My teacher has set up an advanced class, so my sisters and I are doing that now. He said to us at our last lesson, "I'm going to make you girls killer singers." :)

- Call me crazy, but I had my sister put my (very) curly hair into roller-curlers last night. I wanted my hair shorter, but I didn't want to cut it. However, my hair is very long and heavy, so I don't know how well this will work. Desirae will be taking out the curlers in a few hours, so I guess we'll see then.

- Rehearsals for Twelfth Night have STARTED! Oh-my-goodness-gracious-heavens-to-Betsy, I am so excited about this play. One of the things I noticed at our read-through a few nights ago is that the story just plays out in a really different way than Comedy of Errors (for those of you who don't know this, I was in that last year). Comedy of Errors was crazy and fast-paced, and all the scenes took place in the same day. Twelfth Night is more stretched out, with quiet scenes and scenes of - almost suspense, but not quite. And another thing I'm excited about: MUSIC! There's going to be a lot of music in the play.

One last thing: Lately I've fallen in love with the music from the musical The Scarlet Pimpernel. Here is one of my favorite songs, The Riddle, with a scene before it with Sir Percy and his friends. WARNING: Some language when Marguerite is talking to Chauvelin. The actual song begins at about 5:56.