Icy Hiking Trip in PA

Here are some pictures I took from our first wedding anniversary trip to the "Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania" this past weekend.

feeling creative

So I've had a great weekend... we didn't have anything planned and the time got filled with last minute meetings with lots of different friends whom we hadn't seen in ages... it was so nice! On my free time outside of seeing friends, in the kitchen I made bean-walnut dip that turned out very yummy, a yummy casserole, and even broke out the ice cream maker from my mixer and made raspberry ice cream... way too much sugar, it turns out, for my taste, but it was a fun endeavor anyway, and hey I honestly like getting the sugar rush. I took some time yesterday to finally put together a collage of sorts that I've been meaning to do for ages... of some of my favorite post cards and greeting cards I've gotten over the years and cover a corkboard with them. I've always had these up in my office in some capacity.. at the credit card company they were pinned to my cubicle walls, and then in my various home offices they've been taped to the wall... so in this new house I finally decided to be a little more 'grown up' about it and pin them to a corkboard so as not to damage the walls (here's a pic I took super fast with my cell phone). Today I heard amazing Irish music at Longwood Gardens (for St. Patty's day!) and then had fun planting a bunch of seeds in my basement... I hope they grow! they're mostly herbs and flowers... with one little batch of tomatoes. They're hooked up with fluorescent bulbs and little plastic covers to maintain humidity... will keep you updated. To top it all off, when I get a chance, which has been pretty often more or less, I've been working on memorizing another Chopin nocturne. It's coming along pretty well, so hopefully soon I'll be able to enjoy playing it and be working on performing it...

rock on!

Over the past week or two I've ended up with a lot of classic rock in my surroundings... first of all, my hubby likes to put cds in the cd alarm clock, so lately we've had The Doors, Led Zeppelin, and I can't remember who else off the top of my head to wake up to in the morning.  It's definitely very cool to have "inherited" his cd collection through marriage!  Well, one of my students loves classic rock too, but all of the books he had were either piano/vocal/guitar arrangements where the piano part really was just accompaniment and didn't work very well for someone not singing along, or they were just way too complicated for his level.  So last weekend I spent a long time online searching for classic rock sheet music arranged for solo piano, and I found some good arrangements of 'house of the rising sun', 'magic carpet ride', 'roundabout' and a few others... got me having fun jamming on them on my piano before I passed them along!

Also last week, there was a posting on TAXI for covers of rock songs arranged into lullabies... the posting didn't say, but the way it was worded, I assume it was for the line of Rockabye Baby cds...  I was familiar with them because I had ordered several for our library in my reference librarian role.  It sounded like a lot of fun to try my hand at a couple, so I went out to the library and checked out 7 of the cds to get a feel for their line, and then I spent a solid couple of days with my keyboard hooked up to the computer, trying my hand at garageband and playing with all the cool synthesizer sounds on the keyboard... this was the first time I'd had the chance to really sit down and play with it... I had sooooo much fun!  I did some covers of the Police and Lenny Kravitz for my submission... who knows if it will pass muster for what they're looking for, but once again it was a deadline that got me moving and actually working on a cool project.   And, to top it all off, the next day Jody and I played at the Fuelhouse and because I had had all of these rock songs in my head and had been jamming on them... I'd say at least a third of our performance was dedicated to jamming on a '60s rock guitar' book... with perhaps the highlight being our avant-garde jazz rendition of "Inna-Gada-Davida"... LOL... it was just a little too much fun, so I'm thinking maybe that will show up again this weekend at our show at Beans...

on another note, the bulbs in my yard are about 3-4 inches high!!  spring is in the air!!!  :-)