Chickens and Unschooling

Squeeeee!

A link to a happy making video. It's only 36 seconds. It makes me smile.

H and I went to see Clint Black play last night. The opening band was Firefly, a sister group (with their little brother on drums - mostly this really cool box thing he sat on) with a really nice sound, but the mix on vocals vs guitar was enough off that is was hard to hear the lyrics on most of their songs. I picked up their CD during the break - yay lyrics sheets. It was only two thirds of the sisters (one is on mission in Florida), the older was introduced as the driving force behind them actually being a band. The younger, however, was the one who impressed me the most. She was able to use her mike better than the older one, so I could understand most of the lyrics she sang. Also, she has a gorgeous voice, and can play mandolin, cello, piano, and guitar.

I really liked this song:



Also, for tear jerker, emotional, hopeful, etc:



I knew the problem hearing wasn't just my aging ears when Clint Black started his concert. The first several songs were just him and his guitar. Gorgeous, crystal clear, and by far my favorite part of the concert. Then he brought out the band. They had a good sound, but the extra noise they generated made it harder to understand the singing. Still, I was able to hear all right, and enjoyed the music. Then they brought out the electric guitars. I found it was much nicer to listen to them in the stairwell after that (plus that had the added benefit of no longer having a very enthusiastic fan sitting behind my right ear - her whooping and cheering did more damage to my ears than the loud songs did).

My second favorite part of Clint Black's concert was the encore. I stood against the wall near the stairwell entrance (perfect view of the stage, so I was very happy there) and he played two of my favorite songs of his (the third I didn't recognize and retreated back to the stairwell). When I told M later how pleased I was the band played one of my favorite Clint Black songs, he said I'd told him I didn't know any Clint Black songs. Well yeah, I really like the song, but if you had asked me two days ago who sang it, I'd have been clueless as to the answer.



I think the live rendition was actually better than this recording, and it was really pleasant to hear it after the previous few - way too loud for me - songs. As H pointed out about one of the songs - if you have an electric guitar solo in the middle of the song, it doesn't count as Country anymore.

Some friends introduced me to Men Without Hats in my first or second semester of college. These same guys liked punk and metal, but this band had more staying power with me. I can't believe it's been so bloody long since I thought much about listening to them. After finding, on YouTube, just about every album of 10,000 Maniacs I could think of (though the one in my previous post is the only one that really brought back the happy fuzzy feelings of something long forgotten that I used to love), I decided to branch out to other bands from long ago.



I've been pretty much a country and filk only gal since my eldest was born, so my exploration of old rock bands may be giving her a little bit of cognitive dissonance. After listening to one of the aforementioned 10,000 Maniacs songs, H gave me a funny look and said she didn't think that was the kind of music I liked.

Okay, this music video is made of awesome - pay attention to the news words running across the bottom and the other written info - it adds to the awesome.



Hat tip to Free Range Kids

We recorded a new Wii game for publishing on Youtube. C and I did eventually complete the level, but there will be several death and failure videos before the triumphant end. This is the first.

It turns out the multiplayer minecraft server (Remypas) C and I play on gets rebooted about twice a year. That means all our builds will be wiped out. It came as quite a shock when I first heard, but I think I've gotten used to the idea. I do have two builds I'm particularly fond of in the survival world, and I realized yesterday that since C and I have done our screencasts in Remypas, I have videos to remind me of the builds if I can't download the world to my computer after they change over (something mentioned that should definitely be possible with their creative world, but I'm not sure they'll do the same for survival).

One of the builds is my treehouse out near the old edge of survival, the first video we made was a tour of it.

C learns most of what he knows about minecraft from watching YouTube videos. Last night he asked to play on a multiplayer server designed around mini games.

Eventually we located the Hide n Seek game (the trick was going into the Arcade area first).



C had just finished a video and the person mentioned he had put the link to this super fun site in the description. C often has me check descriptions for links, especially to the next video in a series he wants to watch.

I've been putting links in our Youtube video descriptions, but I think without the audio prompt in the actual video, a lot of people don't bother to look at the description. Though, when I mentioned this idea to H, she told me she loves looking at the descriptions, and especially the comments below the description. I suppose if we had enough viewers to actually get comments, then my descriptions might garner more attention.

C decided to screencast a round, thus the embedded video above.

All ducklings, all the time!

Erm, or something like that.





Three days old and bath time.

ETA: The video is not working for some reason. Photobucket seems to have lost it in their big site remodel, so I'll leave it up for the cute starting picture, but don't bother clicking the link.