"Born is the King of Israel" (Matthew Prins, 2007): A+++++++

Last year, right in the middle of our half-cross-country move, I heard from a couple people that my just-released handbell arrangement "Born is the King of Israel" had gotten reviewed in Overtones, the pretty-much-only handbell magazine. Well, I had never had one of my pieces reviewed in print before, so I was very much looking forward to reading the review, but there was one tiny problem -- no one I knew kept that issue of the magazine. Fast-forward to this morning, when, looking for something else on the website of AGEHR (the pretty-much-only handbell organization), I realized they had a PDF of the Overtones issue that contained my review. Fast-forward to this very moment, when I post the review for your pleasure:

Strike!

I know this isn't appropriate for an under-three kid, but Benji loves to play with coins. He likes to line them up in neat rows and he likes to put them in things, including the piggy bank. But his favorite thing to do with coins is to put them in the video games. So about once every month and a half or so we head over to the arcade with Grandma and Grandpa where thankfully they have a good dinner deal that includes 80 tokens — more than Benji can go through in an evening!

His taste in games over there changes periodically. He's been very fond of Deal or No Deal for a while, although on our last visit he only wanted to play it once after begging to play it that one time. His favorite right now is probably the bowling game. The ball is just a bit bigger than a skee-ball so he can easily hurl it down the lane. It's so funny to watch him line up and actually try to aim. And he's pretty good at it. The next time the Iowa contingent visits, I highly recommend a visit to the arcade. Daddy gets to play poker, Mommy gets to sneak in a game of pinball, and Benji gets to bowl!


Tickets!!! Look at how many tickets Daddy won for Benji!

Libellés : Benji

Someone's great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great namesake

Apropos of nothing, I've been doing some deep, serious genealogical research recently (i.e. plugging names of people in our family tree into Google) and putting my results into Geni, which is sort of a genealogical wiki project. And between what I've found and some research Josh did a while back, we've made a fair amount of headway on building back our family tree, finding some lines that go back 15 generations from Benji and Ava. What we've found, in summary:

Our parents: 2 of 2 (um, I'd hope so)
Grandparents: 4 of 4 (um, see above)
Great-grandparents: 8 of 8
2nd-great- (i.e. great-great-) grandparents: 12 of 16
3rd-great-grandparents: 14 of 32
4th-great-grandparents: 18 of 64
5th-great-grandparents: 18 of 128
6th-great-grandparents: 16 of 256
7th-great-grandparents: 14 of 512
8th-great-grandparents: 8 of 1024
9th-great-grandparents: 6 of 2048
10th-great-grandparents: 8 of 4096
11th-great-grandparents: 6 of 8192
12th-great-grandparents: 4 of 16384

Most interesting fact I didn't know before all this: My 10th-great-grandpa John Whitney came over from England to America in 1635, making him one of the first 30,000 or 40,000 American settlers. And his final son, my 9th-great-grandpa, was born in America in 1643, making him (I would guess) one of the first 10,000 or so immigrant children born in New England. His name? Benjamin Whitney. We'll pretend it was intentional.

Tag?

So apparently today's version of a chain letter takes the form of "tagging" people on their blogs to write 10 random things about themselves. I've never been a fan of chain letters so I choose not to tag anyone else. But, Melissa's (Matthew's cousin) request to get to know me better was quite reasonable so I shall list:

1) We do not have cable. Never have. With as little as we watch TV, it seems a big waste of money. And now that we got a digital tuner we easily have 20+ stations with rabbit ears, so why bother with cable.

2) One could argue the cable thing also has to do with me being old fashioned. I still send hand-written thank you notes, barely use my cell phone, have never sent a text message, and have no idea how to use the graphing calculator gathering dust in my drawer. I've never been to myspace or facebook and don't understand why they're so popular. When I started college, the campus didn't have widely-accessible email and even when we did get it the next year it was on the mainframe.

3) On the old fashioned front, I love to quilt. I recently took a quilting class and I was the youngest in the room by a long shot. At least half the room was talking about their kids that were not much younger than I. It's not really a hobby that's popular with my generation, but it's my artistic outlet.

4) I also like to take classes for random other arts and crafts. I've done the first two Wilton cake decorating classes, taken stained class class, and tried out blown glass.

5) I am totally nostalgic and love mementos and old-fashioned scrapbooks. I do dabble in the pretty papers and stickers that are so popular today, but my favorite scrapbooks to make are ones that are full of, well, scraps. Ticket stubs, wrapping paper, postcards, photos, etc., along with some captions to capture the memories make the best scrapbooks to me.

6) As a result I am a total pack rat. I have shirt boxes full of brochures, tickets, etc., from various vacations. For the big trips, I have one shirt box per trip. I have no earthly idea when I'll get to organizing them and I couldn't bear to throw them out during the recent move. So, they just follow me. And I get totally sucked into memory lane when I open one up.

7) But this doesn't mean I'm not organized. Most of my boxes are labeled and I can find most items fairly quickly. I also have certain ways that I like certain things done. For example, like Melissa, the clothes in my closet have to face the same way and are clustered by season and roughly by color. I also do this in Benji's closet, which is proving to be advantageous now that he's into picking his own clothes. We just pick him up and stand in front of the section that's weather appropriate and let him pick from there.

8) My phobia is city interstate driving. Some people have fear of spiders; others have fear of heights. Me? I have fear of the beltway (and now the Tri-State). When we picked this house, we drew a circle around the office and figured out where we could live that required no interstate driving to get to work.

9) I don't remember the last time I cooked. Mind you, I do know how and cooked when I had my apartment in grad school. In fact, I would periodically see an interesting recipe and get quite ambitious on the weekend. But since getting married I've done almost no cooking. I haven't cooked in the new house at all. Christmas cookie baking, yes. Stovetop cooking, no.

10) I am not a pet person. I know many people love their cats and dogs as if they were their children, but I don't get it. My only pets have been goldfish. We still need to find a good place in the new house for the fish tank so we can get new fish. I know Benji will love having fish again, so I need to make that a priority.