New(ish) endeavors
Somehow we always find a way to make Sundays busy. This week, we had to stay after our ward worship service broadcast so I could do some recording. The people in charge want the Primary children to sing a lot of songs for the Christmas program, and the idea is that they'll all record themselves (or rather, have their family record them) and send in the videos, then the ward recording expert will mash all the videos together, like in all those school choir videos that have been going around since the lockdowns started. But to get that to work, they need to have a base track to sing to, so ideally it will match. The logical choice for that is to have the base track be the accompaniment, so we recorded me playing a bunch of songs on the piano. Those videos will be distributed to the singers, and by Christmas, we should have some nice music videos.
After that, Athena has found a new translation project! I may have mentioned that we've been listening to the French Percy Jackson audiobooks (actually we haven't recently, because we've been playing KH:MoM, and it's hard enough to concentrate on a foreign language when you're not also trying to play a rhythm game). Those books gave us the idea to see if there were any other books with the same narrator, and there are! ...And of course they're all in French, and only the Percy Jackson ones have English versions. But Athena was reading the summaries and one of them, "De Sacha a Macha (From Sacha to Macha)," had a very intriguing premise. Apparently this guy named Sacha was all emo and stuff, and decided to send out emails to random addresses, and this girl Macha decides to reply, and the whole book is like their email exchanges. One review said it was a very moving story.
So! we bought the book last night (the ebook, anyway), and so we can both read it, Athena spent some time translating it into English while I spent some time experimenting on the piano. We have grand schemes of actually playing musical duets, but we don't know where to find sheet music for (for example) pennywhistle and piano. My experimentation was designed to arrange a song for two instruments. And I think I may have succeeded in getting an arrangement of one verse of The First Noel! ...Of course, that leads us to the problem of how is Athena supposed to translate this French book if she's practicing the pennywhistle? Well, I'm sure we'll figure it all out.
Then we finished book two of In Search of the Castaways, and that was kind of a downer. But we're optimistic about it, because there's a whole other book left.
Today I'm thankful for the recording session going pretty well, making progress on our musical endeavors, getting to read a neat book from France, getting to read neat books from 19th century France, and helpful apps.
After that, Athena has found a new translation project! I may have mentioned that we've been listening to the French Percy Jackson audiobooks (actually we haven't recently, because we've been playing KH:MoM, and it's hard enough to concentrate on a foreign language when you're not also trying to play a rhythm game). Those books gave us the idea to see if there were any other books with the same narrator, and there are! ...And of course they're all in French, and only the Percy Jackson ones have English versions. But Athena was reading the summaries and one of them, "De Sacha a Macha (From Sacha to Macha)," had a very intriguing premise. Apparently this guy named Sacha was all emo and stuff, and decided to send out emails to random addresses, and this girl Macha decides to reply, and the whole book is like their email exchanges. One review said it was a very moving story.
So! we bought the book last night (the ebook, anyway), and so we can both read it, Athena spent some time translating it into English while I spent some time experimenting on the piano. We have grand schemes of actually playing musical duets, but we don't know where to find sheet music for (for example) pennywhistle and piano. My experimentation was designed to arrange a song for two instruments. And I think I may have succeeded in getting an arrangement of one verse of The First Noel! ...Of course, that leads us to the problem of how is Athena supposed to translate this French book if she's practicing the pennywhistle? Well, I'm sure we'll figure it all out.
Then we finished book two of In Search of the Castaways, and that was kind of a downer. But we're optimistic about it, because there's a whole other book left.
Today I'm thankful for the recording session going pretty well, making progress on our musical endeavors, getting to read a neat book from France, getting to read neat books from 19th century France, and helpful apps.