Pictures of My Recital

Some of you already noticed these on facebook, so here they are for the rest of you!

 Cassie, Michelle, Grace and I. Grace kept petting my dress and asking if I would keep my hair and make-up for when we went to dinner. At her insistence I did just that.

 Lee and I in Performance Hall with the lovely flowers he gave me.

 Here I am singing something.

 That is me and Grace I think that back belongs to Becky and the people behind us are the Phillips.

 Lee brought me my flowers at the end of the recital when I had finished bowing and all that.

[Insert funny caption of what Mom and I are talking about here]

This picture is the best in my opinion, which is why I saved it for last. And seriously, if you can think of a funny caption for the picture of Mom and I, share it in the comments. I will...write a crappy song for the person who comes up with the best one.

Music from my Recital

The following lines are all links to the the music from my recital that you probably missed. You may download the tracks by right clicking on the link and selecting the option 'download linked file' or you can just click on it regular style and listen to it:

Songs of Perfect Propriety
La bonne cuisine
Berlin im Licht
Barbara Song
It Never Was You
Must the Winter Come So Soon?
A Slumber Song of the Madonna
A Nun Takes the Veil
Hermit Songs
Siete Canciones
Pueblito, mi pueblo
When I have Sung my Songs
Clouds
Let My Song Fill Your Heart (The Viennese Waltz)

For those of you who really want to stay on my good side, you should look at the following PDF files and presentations. In these you will find the program (so you will know what song is what) the translations (so you will know what each song is saying) as well as great information about the pieces, composers, and poets.

Recital Poster
Program [interior]
Program [exterior]
Translation Slides
Wondrous, exciting, intriguing, educational slides

Eventually I will post some photos of the event, but I wasn't the photographer, so who knows when that will happen.

Sorry if you checked my original link, I didn't realize that dropbox only allows the sharing of individual files, not whole folders. So here is the whole folder separated out into individual files.

Hollerdays

The holiday season has been a much needed reprieve from the intensity of last semester. We've spent our break filling up on the things we don't have time to do during school. Reading books, watching netflix, playing games, and cooking real meals.

I know nobody will read what I say, so I guess I'll include pictures so at least you'll scan through those.

Here we are after church by the tree. I am wearing my new scarf. For those of you who live in a warm climate, you may not realize that even a thin or decorative scarf makes the difference between alive and frozen to death in Logan Utah.












We go some fun winter hats as well. Here is Karen Phillips in her beautiful new mo-hawk hat!

 

Christmas morning we woke up bright and early to open presents. From left to right: Laura, Natalie, Jordan, Kody, Lee, and Claire.

 I got a rather fantastic raccoon hat, Lee is wearing Natalie's new hat. Mostly, I think Lee liked the little paw pockets.








We woke up around five in the morning and stayed up to go to church. By the end of the day, everyone was taking naps.

 Here are the Stockings all filled after Santa's visit.
 And here is the Christmas tree surrounded by gifts.

Lee, the hat thief, is borrowing his mom's hat for this picture. I think he was secretly jealous of my new raccoon...









Well, that is Christmas for ya!

For New Years Eve, we visited our friends, the Bruns' and had dinner dessert, played Hand a Foot (but quite differently than our family is used to) and watched a movie. It was a really fun night and now we have a couple to play games with.

Along with getting ready for the new semester, I've been getting ready for my Senior Recital, which is a week from Saturday. I'll try to get some video or at least audio and post them on this blog so those of you who live a plane ticket away can still enjoy the music.

What we are most excited about right now is for Lee to start his new job! He put in his notice at Convergys, and starting in two weeks he'll be working at the Space Dynamics lab! We are so excited, we busted out our last bottle of sparkling cider yesterday and drank all of it.

A final announcement: If you got an individual family picture taken at our wedding, they all turned out great, I want to get you a copy. If you want larger group photos, or just any wedding photos at all, E-MAIL ME! phillips.claire89@gmail.com and let me know. That way I have an up to date e-mail address to send the pictures to and you get a free, high quality family photo. Seriously, the pictures turned out so well!! Happy 2012!!

An End of the Semester Poem

Okay, I don't write poetry. Ever. But, as the semester is finally over, I have my graduation paper work all turned in, and my brains and legs feel like jelly, I had to give over to my creative inner child. (Yes, my finals made my legs feel like jelly. My second final today included a straight hour, on my feet singing.) I am so glad I only have a semester left to deal with all of this madness, in honor of this step forward, here is my whimsical poem.

Finals are over, the homework is done!

I wish I could say it had all been great fun,

But, if I'm honest, that just isn't so.

Here are some things about school you should know:

Class always starts early

The bus is always late.

When e'er you e-mail professors

Forever you must wait.

Their responses are brief

 And never quite meet

The basic expectations

Of a students quandary.

You spend all of your money

On a textbook you despise

Then miserably sell it back

At a quarter of the price.

You jump through hoop

And loop-de-loop

Your brains they scoop

You feel like poop.

They rob you of your will to live

Then make you pay the bill

Go ahead schmoes, go back to school

I swear I never will!

Finding my Place

I always felt kind of short changed because I didn't grow up in the 1980's. All my siblings were there, it seemed like it was some kind of magical era of crazy that I just managed to miss out on. I felt lost, undefined as an individual. It wasn't until recent years that I discovered that my childhood experiences are shared by millions like me. We are the 90's Kids, and this is all the awesome stuff we had:

 We had some awesome cartoons. Doug, Recess, Hey! Arnold, Rug rats, The Animaniacs, and Johnny Bravo.  Most importantly, the best generations of Batman, Spider-man, and X-Men cartoons in the history of awesome.





I make no apologies for the music of the 1990's. Grunge happened, rap happened, boy bands happened, Britney Spears happened, the Spice Girls happened, and they were all awesome.

Squeal with girlish delight if you had a notebook that looked like this back in the 1-5 grade. Lisa Frank defined beauty for me for a good portion of my life.






Classic Skating. Yeah, I know, it was around before my time too. But the last generation to truly enjoy an in line skating rink was my generation. They became either abandoned, ghetto-fied, or dance-floored after 1999.

 oh our sweet, sweet styles. No sweat pants too bright, no windbreaker to...windbreaker-ish. No plaid shirt was too baggie, no plaid mini-skirt was too school girl. The world was our very fashionable oyster. I suppose that is why we wore the big flower hats?

I know Beanie Babies will never be worth money (as was promised us) but I would never sell mine anyway. I love their little plushy faces, and their cliche names, and their arbitrary birthdays too much to hand them over to someone else. I would, however, sell my skip-it in a heartbeat.

 Perhaps the greatest claim my generation can make is the claim on Will Smith's awesomeness. We watched him rise from being a Fresh Prince, to being an Alien slayer. I think this says it best:

          "Long before he was spending his days foisting his mediocre children on us, Will Smith was actually the perfect human specimen. He also undoubtedly holds some world record for saving the world the most times while simultaneously delivering flawless catchphrases and giving cool guy nods to the camera. The Men In Black rap song, at the time, was created and received by the public without the slightest trace of irony. Really. He was that good."


This Blog post was inspired by the following article. The above is a direct quotation from said article:
10 Things 90s Kids Will Have to Explain to Their Children

Zombie Movies: Putting the "fi" in "Sci-fi"

At the recommendation of a trusted friend, I started watching a TV show called The Walking Dead. It's your usual zombie apocalypse, survival-adventure story with a lot of shot guns, complex rescue operations, RVs, and cliff hanger endings.

Watching the first episode, I was terrified. I wanted to crawl under a blanket in a bomb shelter with a stash of grenades. But, I began to analyze the the premise, as I do with all media that frightens me, and I found enough holes in the explanation to leave my bomb shelter and grenades behind me (not the blanket, it's cold) and continue watching with minimal anxiety. 

I thought it might be helpful to share my de-terrifying techniques with anyone else who is increda-scared of zombie movies, more specifically The Walking Dead.

1) What brings about the Zombie-ism? In this case, it's a fever that kills you, then brings you back as a mindless eating machine that is also rotting.

Question: If you come back to life, why are you rotting?

'Nother question: If you aren't alive that explains the decomposition, but how are you walking around eating things?

Fact: When vital organs cease to function (i.e. heart, lungs, liver) even mindless eating machines will cease to function and fall down dead. Brains NEED oxygen and blood to move a body, tell a body to eat, or anything else.

2) As demonstrated by a scientist our heroes find at the CDC (which is all but abandoned) the aforementioned fever brings back partial brain function. Specifically, only the brain stem is active.

Question: When only the brain stem is active, don't people need respirators to breathe?

More questions: A lot of predatory animals will eat the smaller of their species, even their own offspring. What stops the zombies from eating each other? How did the dietary needs of the human body change as a result of zombie-ism? They appear to be carnivores, even though the human body needs the vitamins and minerals provided by an omnivorous or even vegetarian diet. If these zombies are so "instinct driven" that they just attack stuff, why aren't their instincts telling them to eat fruits and vegetables?

3) In a few instances, The Walking Dead has demonstrated that zombies will eat deer, or rabbits in the absence of human prey.

Obvious question: How did a slow, clumsy, rotting corpse catch a deer or a rabbit or any other woodland creature? These animals are skittish and fast. They are able to escape apex predators like wolves, coyotes, bob-cats, and mountain lions. How was the deer unable to escape one zombie when a human with a limp or a hundred pound bag can outrun a whole hoard of them? I'm seriously bothered by this plot point.

I am not even going to examine this from a theological stand point; that would be overkill (pun intended). Suffice it to say there is no impending zombie apocalypse. If film makers weren't so desperate for a scientific explanation these days, they could always fall back on black magic and voodoo for how reanimated corpses suddenly crave human flesh. As long as you are going to utilize vague, implausible scenarios, go all out and at least make it less easy to pick apart. Ya can't fight voodoo with logic.

Halloween Party

 I am on a roll! Two blogs WITH photos in as many days! wOOt! Seeing as Lee and I were in a play which consumed our Friday evening, Saturday evening/night and Monday evening/night/early Tuesday morning, we had to celebrate Halloween on Sunday. I decided to throw a party that consisted of food and games, stuff I might do on Sunday anyway. The Halloween themed decor and costumes were an added bonus.

Here are the pumpkins we carved. Lee made Jack the Pumpkin King, I made an HvZ Zombie. You can't see that his brains are oozing out the top, but they are.

They also look fantastic all lit up!


Lots of people brought additional goodies, but here are all the treats I provided. I know, it looks amazing. It WAS amazing. We still have a lot of leftovers that may last until Thanksgiving when I have a new excuse to pie and brownies.

Lee and I were Hansel and Gretel. You can vaguely see the backs of Greg and Danie who were Finn from Adventure Time and The Marvelous Mad Madame Mim, respectively.

Lee borrowed the Liederhosen from our friend Jon, the Dirndl I am wearing was Grandmary's.







Here are friends Chelsie and Shalysse. Chelsie was a card board box, and she remained dedicated to her costume. She didn't get out of her costume to sit down, eat drink, or even to watch a movie. Yeah, she sat through the whole movie as a box. Shalysse is the heroine from Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds." Kudos for originality!

Rachel thought it was so funny to jump into this picture with us that she couldn't stop laughing. This was the least blurry version.

Here I am with former roommate Jess who is dressed up like Liz Lemon from 30 Rock. This was snapped right before I swooped in and set the new record for bobbing for apples. I got my apple in 2 seconds flat. No one dared to challenge me after that. I did, however, manage to bit my lip in the process and now I have a large and rather painful sore on my bottom lip. Was it worth it? Yes.

That pretty much sums it up! I don't know if we got trick-or-treaters, we weren't home. I left a bucket of candy on the porch, but based on how much is left I am going to assume we didn't get any.