Check *this* fancy site out, eh? No more cheesy pre-packaged, broken templates, no more basic WordPress template with the header changed from blue to green!

John redesigned Prepoceros as my Christmas gift this year, and I love it! The rhino is a 1515 woodcut by Albrecht Durer, one of the first European depictions of a rhinoceros ever. Isn’t it neat? Heart heart.

As the rest of my gift, he’s also cleaning up the design of the Kaminari Taiko website (and I’m redoing some of the content). The new site isn’t live yet, but it will be as soon as I get the passwords. Do I have an awesome boyfriend or what? I thought so.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Okay, it’s time to do this. I need to get a few things out of my head and into this little box. Not important things, mind you, just day to day stuff that I’ve been meaning to blog about. This might be a long one.

Thing One: A couple weeks ago my taiko group played at a local community college’s Japan Festival. It was a teeny tiny thing, probably just the school’s Japanese Club and a few community groups they had connections with. The college didn’t advertise it at all—I couldn’t find it mentioned on the internet anywhere, and even the school’s event calendar listed nothing for that day—so our entire audience was pretty much made up of other festival participants, maybe 50 or 60 people.

We were in the “Commons,” a cafeteria-type room with a twenty-foot ceiling. The audience sat on the floor ten feet in front of us. Halfway through the first song, the audience all seemed to react to something at once. A second later, I heard a crash behind me and felt bits of something spray up against the backs of my legs. What? Did someone throw something at us? There wasn’t anything behind us except some chairs and a bunch of our equipment. I looked down and saw broken glass all around my feet.

(more…)

It is 11:00 PM on December 7th, and at this very moment it is 71 degrees outside. I shit you not.

It’s supposed to get about thirty-five degrees colder over the next two days, but right now I love Houston so much I can hardly stand it.

I have other things to talk about, really I do, but I also have finals to study for. Finals that count for, oh, one hundred percent of my grade. In every class. My last one is on the 19th.