Techy Goodness

Got a pair of 14 year olds coming to visit tomorrow through the weekend, and I'm sooooo excited! I got some treats that I won't reveal because they just might read this. Ok, one thing - we're borrowing a Playstation2, and I got a game for it: Beatmania. It's like Dance Dance Revolution or Guitar Hero, only it has a 7-note keyboard and a scratching wheel. And MAN, it is hard.

Really it's a sight-reading exercise - just need to play the notes it shows you, and sometimes it's a melody, sometimes it's drums, and sometimes it triggers samples... but it forces you to just push the buttons and focus on the rhythms and timing. And as anyone knows, I'm a TERRIBLE keyboardist - I can program, but I can't play, and part of it is that when I get stuck I just STOP. You can't do that in this game, and I can't help but wonder if it might MIGHT help me be a better musician - forcing me to keep my head in the game?

Getting ready for the kids is a multiday affair, with shopping, cleaning, rearranging, and I always get to do the techy bits, as noted above. Tonight, Bella was VERY excited to be helping with the cleaning. She had a dusting rag and was like a dervish. It was actually pretty hard to pull her out of it. Tonight she was COMPETING with me: She wanted to race me everywhere, and when we read some nursery rhymes that were also songs, she asked me to sing them, then wanted to sing them BACK to me... "only better".

Finally, Japanese lessons are going VERY well. I'm finding that with this being the third new language in a 1 year span, I'm getting these strange cross-relations between the languages building in my head - I'm seeing matrices: Which languages rely on between-word modifiers for meaning (like at, to, from, ownership, location, etc), and which ones rely on word-addons (suffixes, previxes, cases)... just interesting how the languages are all saying the same things, but taking different routes there....

More soon!