Stiff Peaks

We might've just had the strangest weather for a Texas winter. This morning was on the warmer side, potentially shorts and t-shirt weather for some, and now, merely 6:50pm, it is 30 degrees and dropping. After going out and running errands during the early afternoon hours, we came home and prepared to bunker down for the cold winter night it was going to be. Tomorrow's temperature around 7am is projected to be about 20 degrees with winds estimated at 17 mph. That means after the windchill, the "feels like" temperature will be drastically low. Now, that's my kind of weather. If you've known me at least 4 years, you will know that I walked on ice for six months of the year living in a city nicknamed the "Ice City."

After coming home, I decided to make meringue cookies. I've always liked meringue cookies but not in the same way as I like fried chicken, strawberries or dark chocolate. There's something mysteriously appealing about a meringue that comes more from its texture and less from the flavor. A well made meringue cookie is flaky on the outside, light and airy on the inside, and slowly dissolves in your mouth. I can't really describe the flavor to you besides its sweetness because it's simply egg whites and sugar. Egg whites really don't taste like much and sugar is just sugar.

As I followed the recipe and carefully watched my egg whites turn fluffy through the electric beater, I retold stories of China to Jonathan and how my teammates made meringue cookies for my birthday WITHOUT an electric beater. Unfortunately, I was not there to witness their delirious jokes or the tired arm muscles because they planned everything without my knowing, but I remember their dedication, love, and thoughtfulness in putting together my 22nd birthday.

I am very grateful that we have an electric beater as a gift from our wedding registry to bake meringue cookies. The recipe I followed was from Emeril Lagasse and can be found here. I liked this recipe because it added chocolate chips, which enhances the overall flavor of the cookie, because like I mentioned before, egg whites and sugar really don't taste like much. The difficulty is listed at intermediate, and considering my meringue turned out well (because there were two empty spaces before I managed to remember to take a picture), I think it's safe to say I qualify as an intermediate chef ;).

(I also made the mistake of dropping my meringues larger than the recipe had asked for, so I kind of made up some more baking rules using prior knowledge to get them to bake right, hence why there are 23 and not 40.)

Clearly I am not an engineer or mathematician or physicist. Somehow I managed to put
a prime number of cookies on this baking sheet in the most ambiguously random way possible.

Meringue also don't have to be in the prettiest of formations. The stiff
peaks give it more character than a perfectly piped shape.

With successful meringue cookies in the books, I will now bundle up, crawl into bed, and hide myself in a book for a while. :)

Dont Touch the Instrument

In my previous post, I started talking about hand positions and Phoebe's creative names. If you missed it, you can go back and catch up here.

The second half of the Friends reference involved Phoebe asking Joey not to touch the guitar until she said he was ready. Joey was very appalled at this technique, retorted with yellow pages of other music schools with children happily holding guitars, and walked off.

Phoebe might be surprised to learn that I heard about a piano pedagogy that does not involve touching a piano for the first 8-12 weeks of learning. This guest speaker was invited to speak and introduced us to this method of teaching that he uses.

First, for the first 8-12 weeks, he doesn't ask his students to play the piano at all. Instead, he takes the time to teach them fundamental basics to promote strong sight-reading skills and music theory. I won't go through the details of how he teaches it, but this is what is expected of his students to master in this "non-playing" stage of their learning, (written in teaching objective style sentences).

1. Students will develop finger muscles through exercises.
2. Students are expected to memorize the letter names of the keys on the piano by recognition.
3. Students are expected to memorize the notation for the 22 most common notes on the staff in both treble and bass clef.
4. Students are expected to understand musical rhythms in multiple time signatures.
5. Students will be able to create small "compositions" of their own using the notes and rhythms they've learned.
6. Students will be able to play notes on the piano in proper rhythms using blunt sticks or the eraser ends of pencils in order to produce the sounds for their compositions.

Objective 6 is basically as close as they get to touching a piano in their first 1-2 months of piano learning. In theory, and hypothetically, this is the perfect way to teach anyone how to learn music and master it quickly. Learn the basics and have a good foundation in music. And then you can pretty much learn and teach yourself any piece of music thereafter.

Obviously it's not completely all-encompassing.  There's sharps, flats, key signatures, accidentals, dynamics, musical styles, and a lot more things that need teaching. But once you nail the rhythms and the notes, it gets much simpler after that in terms of the learning curve.

I think all music majors (who of course, know 15 years in advance that they want to pursue music as their career and means of financial security), should start out this way. However, this technique doesn't work for most people. Why? Because the parents of the children learning to play who are paying the teacher want to see results fast. They want to see their child playing music from day 1 if possible. Most people simply want their children to have a grasp of what playing music means. They don't want to raise musicians.

I personally think this is a fabulous technique for learning the piano. However, I don't teach it. Also because I believe students these days need more than musical proficiency further down the road to motivate them. They want to be able to at any given moment, hop on a piano, play something, and impress someone in some capacity.

This teaching technique also involves a lot of parental involvement and discipline in asking the students to memorize the foundations of music. A lot of parents don't have this time or desire to do so. And young kids lose interest faster than ever nowadays.

There's merit somewhere in the proper context for Phoebe's instructions to Joey. And if you watched the entire clip or are familiar with Friends, you'll agree that Joey should not touch musical instruments. :)

Bear Claw

I've always remembered this episode of Friends where Phoebe teaches Joey how to play guitar. She tells Joey he can't touch a guitar until she says so and teaches him only hand positions with names she made up. I've included the Youtube clip which condenses the segments from the episode into one video.


 


Before, I'd watch it and think, "Yeah, Joey's right. He should go and learn the names of the chords. I have no idea what Phoebe is talking about in her methods." I would assume that most scholarly musicians would watch this and pretentiously turn the other way. However, aside from the comedy, I think Phoebe's musical technique has some validity in the correct context.

As I've been able to dedicate longer periods of time to practicing piano, (which I honestly should have as a child before when I actually had more time, relatively), I've discovered something I wish I knew before. There is a feeling of perfection that you can sense as you practice and learn pieces. Yes, the more familiar you are with a piece the smoother you can play it, but there's more. Once you are at the memorization stage, it's no longer about reading sheet music off the stand. It's about feeling the piece and the notes through your fingers, and simultaneously, your hand position.

I've been working on a piece I learned as a teenager of intermediate/advanced difficulty depending on who you ask. I know I learned it years ago at one point, but I honestly never remembered myself having the ability to play it or play it well. After learning it for a few months my teacher must've just passed me on it without my fully having mastered the piece. Having come back after so many years, I had to reteach myself most of the music from scratch. There were sections I remembered from earlier, but most of it I would say was like learning it again for the first time. After hours and months of practice, I began to feel a new sense of "knowing" that I'd never experienced before. The piece was so familiar to me after all the practice that I could feel the different positions my hands and fingers were in to reach all the notes and perform the musical passages.

I don't have names for all the different positions like Phoebe does, and it's not quite the same. With guitar chords, it's one position to play one chord. In piano, it's one hand position for a certain passage in a certain piece in order to keep the fluidity of the piece and musicality. In any given piece, there could be hundreds of different "hand positions."

I have yet to reach the point of being able to play a piece of significant difficulty flawlessly, but I also have to remember that professional concert pianists spend hours upon hours on one piece daily in their practice, for sometimes, years. In time, I can perhaps hope to reach that point.

Next time, I'll expound upon my thoughts on "Don't touch the guitar."

Resolution

It was Tomb-Sweeping holiday (ancestor worship in Asian countries) in 2013, early April. We had a few days of break from class and I went shopping with one of my teammates. We took the bus down a few stops and went to an underground shopping strip we had frequented that year. Having picked up a new hobby of cross-stitching during my time in China, I wanted to buy a more challenging one to continue working on. We stopped by one of the stands which sold them, and I sifted through the piles of packages. It was a difficult choice between buying one with an attractive image and trying to match the difficulty I was looking for - not too beginner, but not too advanced.

After being indecisive for quite a while, I finally settled on one that had a beautiful picture, but was probably much too difficult for my ability. I told myself I'd work on it and finish eventually. It would just take some time, right?

A few weeks after that, I was video-chatting with a friend back home in the states. He saw me cross-stitching and rolled his eyes. I asked him why he was so turned off by cross-stitching. He said, "I hate it when people start them, work on it halfway, and then never finish them." The thought occurred to me - if I didn't finish this cross-stitch, I would be one of those people he just referred to.

After moving back home from China, I made pretty steady progress on my cross-stitch that summer. However, in the fall, I got a full-time job, so my progress drastically slowed. I had a full-time job for two years after that as well so I definitely did not have a lot of time to work on it. In those two years, we also got married, bought a house, did renovation projects, traveled, and the list goes on.

Earlier this year when I took a spontaneous trip to visit friends out of the country, I brought my cross-stitch with me on the plane. On the first leg of my trip, I cross-stitched. The gentleman who sat beside me saw me cross-stitching and was very familiar with what I was doing. He knew how time-consuming it was and how detailed things were. He asked how long I had been working on it. I told him, "About three years."

He told me, "Keep working on it. When you finish, let me know." He smiled, and left me to work quietly the rest of the leg.

On November 16, 2016 at 3:27 PM, I stitched my last stitch into this cross-stitch. It is finished.

My 3.5 year masterpiece. Pre-washing.

For those of you who aren't too sure how cross-stitches work, they come two ways. The first way you can buy them is a completely blank piece of cross-stitch cloth and a template. These require counting the squares to the tee in order to complete. Extra intense. Not the kind I had, especially for this large of a scale.

The second way you can buy them is with the colors labeled for you. This entire piece of fabric had the colors pre-printed on it. The key on the right side of the fabric allows you to match the color that's printed to the color of thread you use. Don't be fooled - this still requires quite a bit of brainwork, especially when your cross-stitch has six different shades of green thread all mixed in next to one another, AND, the key used six very similar shades of green to mark these squares for you. So all six shades of green look exactly the same next to each other and you still have to consult the actual instruction manual that came with the cross-stitch which is nine pages long.



These two images give you a size reference for the span of this cross-stitch. It is 290 squares wide by 200 squares tall. If you do the math, that's 58,000 little squares. By looking at the design, you can approximate 85-90% of the fabric stitched and merely 10-15% of the fabric that's left unstitched in the top right corner. That's almost 50,000 squares that need to be stitched, not to mention stitched twice to make the X. So that's a total of nearly 100,000 stitch strokes that needed to be completed in order to finish this cross-stitch.

This was truly a labor of love, but I'll have to be honest with myself. If it weren't for that friend who made that comment while we were video-chatting, I would have been less resolute to finish it. I texted him this afternoon after I finished. He can't roll his eyes at me. :)

Unfortunately, I don't have contact with the gentleman on the plane. He was just a very nice neighbor for a two-hour flight who sympathized with my hard work.

So what am I going to do now? Well, I have more cross-stitches to work on. But, I'm going to take a nice long hiatus first.

Washing my cross-stitch to remove the instructions and grid lines.

Washed

One Special Veteran

I am not related to this man, but he is very special to me.

I met him just over two years ago. I worked at the front desk, and he would come twice in every morning to see me. The first time, I would hand him our pouch, and the second time, he would bring another pouch back to me. We got to know each other pretty well considering we saw each other for a total of maybe 2-3 minutes each day.

He was a veteran, lost sensation in his lower body later in life. He explained it to me as a "numbness." I was surprised he could still drive a car and live normally. But he told me, if he closed his eyes and stood in one place too long, he would fall over. Because that's what it felt like. He had been to the VA Hospital in Dallas numerous times to see physicians and neurologists, but none could fully diagnose his lack of sensation.

At the time I had met him, he shared with me about his wife and her accident and her progress as she healed. Some days, he told me he had to take care of her, so he wanted to know if he could come earlier/later to shift around his work schedule to be there for her doctor's appointments. Of course, it was never a problem at our office, especially with the advance notice.

I had the privilege of working with Dan for about a year. One day, Dan wasn't picking up our pouch anymore. Someone else came the day after, and another the day after that. The system also changed. We swapped pouches in one visit instead of two. The timing was not nearly as consistent. Shortly after, someone walked in, introduced himself, and told me he was going to be the new courier to pick up our pouch. I asked him if he knew anything about Dan. He said, "Dan had a stroke." Any details after that he didn't know.

I missed Dan every single day I went to work after that. The new courier and I didn't really have a relationship. It may have been that I was bias, but his personality was very different than Dan's. He was rushed, hurried, on his schedule. I asked him to wait once to make sure we were able to get everything in the pouch that day to go out, and his response seemed to have a tinge of annoyance in it. I couldn't tell if he was joking, but if he was, I didn't find it funny.

Dan was gracious, patient, and kind. I loved seeing him twice a day, even if it only totaled 2-3 minutes in all. It's been over a year since I last saw Dan, and I no longer work at the office. I don't even know if Dan is with us anymore. But I wanted to share his story through my eyes, and how even the simplest job as being an office courier can have a great impact. Thank you, Dan, for being a veteran, for being a courier, and for being someone so dear to me. I miss you.

Life Lessons from a Nine-Year-Old

I was at a party just making small talk with the people around me a while back. About halfway through, one of the guests finally made it with his son. There was a basketball game that night so they arrived late. As the boy walked over, I said hi and asked him, "Did you win your game?"

I actually don't remember whether he won the game or not, but I do remember what he tacked onto his response: "Why does everyone ask me that?"

Now that was a question which made me stop and think. Why was I asking him that? I realized my question was formulated out of a natural response to want to know the outcome of the game - did you win or did you lose? But it also made me realize that by asking this question first, I had inadvertently moved the focus onto the result of the game rather than other more important things: sportsmanship, fun, skill, etc. We all tend to do that, don't we? Caring more about the result than the journey.

His question is very legitimate. And it's true, I do not want to instill the wrong idea that winning is always the end goal of every competition, contest, or race. Instead, I should have asked him, "Did you have fun at your game?" "Did you play well/do your best?" "Did you enjoy playing with your friends/teammates?" Those are much more lasting impressions than simply winning a game in itself.

This nine-year-old reminded me of an important aspect of life that I (and perhaps we collectively as a whole) tend to forget. Rarely is it ever simply about winning the game.

Screen Time

It is officially the 1st of November, and having been a quite warm Halloween evening last night, I am ready for lower temperatures and no longer hearing my AC unit kick on. Now the screen time I'm referencing is not looking at a computer/Ipad/phone. We do have a little bit of that, but I'm talking about something else: our window screens!

This weekend, we decided to do another little DIY project. We actually attempted this project a little under two months ago and failed miserably because the Home Depot we went to was completely understocked and depleted of window screening materials. It was a big flop, although we did repair one of our existing screens by reusing what we already had.

The project we meant to attempt was creating two completely brand new screens for two windows which did not have screens when we bought the house. No idea how that happens, but with this house, we learned not to ask the "why" questions. In order to make new screens, we needed some materials and tools:

Window Screen, sold in rolls


Window Screen Frame


Window Screen Corner Frames


Window Screen Clips


Window Screen Pull Tabs


Window Spline


Spline Roller


Hacksaw


Utility Knife


Measuring tape and scissors. Of course we all know what measuring tape and scissors look like, so I don't think I need to identify that for anyone :) Safety glasses might be good to have, although nothing went violently flying for this project, but I don't want to say you don't need them because there is some cutting involved.

Needless to say, what we thought was an easy, beginner level DIY that we thought could be accomplished in an evening....took a little longer than we thought. The first screen we made ended up taking over 2 hours to finish. The second one, we finished in about 1 hour. I guess we should have known, however easy something is to do, the first time is always going to take longer. And a key note I should always remember: messing up is easier than doing it correctly.

If you want to learn how to make a window screen, you can check out this link here that has a nice video. A few things this video does not include instructions on : springs and pull tabs.

From the outside. You can see the wavy mesh material of our screen!
And if you can't...well, it blends in pretty well because it's the right size to fit :) 

Our newly screened window that can now be
opened to allow our living room to breathe a little :)

I'm excited for this fall and winter because it means I can now open two of the largest windows in our house to allow for some outdoor air to penetrate into our once extremely musty (now only slightly musty) house. We missed out big time last year, but now we have no excuse :)

Total Cost: $25
Total Time Spent: 3 hours
Total Experience Gained: Priceless