Sunday, June 25, 2006

Wondering where I am?

Probably not, but just in case you were: I'm off backpacking through the wonderful (or not so-) wild. Yep this week I'll be traipsing about in the mountains with my bro, Chandler, my dad and his along with this other guy from our church. Wish me luck (I'm gonna need it!). Hopefully it's slightly more enjoyable than torture. I'm hoping for better, but expecting the worst.
Anyway, I'll try to post a blog on how it went as soon as I can. That'll be after I recover from the trauma (or get rescued early).

Till next post.
Your faithful typer,
Yokanchi

~
"People are unreliable, rely on technology where all is a matter of action-consequence. The only other unchanging thing in this world is our God who we rely on."
~

Thursday, June 22, 2006

Church Camping

Yup, Church camping. That's where I was last weekend.
It was really fun. There was a fire ban so there was only moderate fun involved, but we went swimming, played volleyball, putt putt golf, and went fishing. I bought a one day fishing lisence for a whoppipng 9 bucks. I caught two fish, and sergey caught 6! Altogether we got 13 fish and had fish soup and fried fish. Me and Max reasoned that each fish was worth at least 5$ so that makes 10$ and so technically (if we're even right about that) I came out saving money which was good. Even though there was a fire ban me and Max managed to go make several tiny fires in holes late at night the last day. That was really fun.
The most interesting part was when me and Benjamin went to the wash house that same night and we heard something breaking branches off a nearby tree. We went over and shined the flashlight up in the tree till we could see what it was. We saw a really cute little racoon eating something. I wanted one. It was funny because it kept eating even though we were shining a light right on it.
I also noticed that the lid to the trashcan next to the tree was off.
The night before we heard a racoon knocking over trash cans and heard a guy say he saw a racoon that was about 15lbs. That was fun.
Those were pretty mucht the highlights of our weekend. This week I've been doing things for college, a little work on the side, resting, and packing for the 5 (or so) day backpacking trip I'm going to take with Chandler, his dad, my dad, Benjamin, and Mr. Powell. It'll be something interesting for sure.

I'll try to blog about that later. But yeah, generally when I need to post something and I haven't been blogging I've been real busy doing things to blog about! So be patient people!
I can't remember anything else that I was going to blog about, but I found a really cool website http://www.pianothemes.com they have a ton of sweet sheet music there.

go see!
and donnie darko music!!!!
W00T!!

Till next post.
Your faithful typer,
Yokanchi

~
"What is beautiful is not always good, but what is good is not always beautiful."

- Unknown
~

(What a beautiful quote)

Thursday, June 15, 2006

My Music Evaluation Standards

Ok so I actually didn't think of this myself, but I've talked about it before with Chandler and he just posted it on his blog, so I thought to myself; "hey! that's a good idea for a blog" Anyhoo here's how I rate music.

There’s a few different categories that I use when I listen to music that all contribute to the final rating.

First there's the lyrics.
When I listen to music the lyrics are not the most important part of a song. Although a huge part of how the song sounds when I listen to a song if the lyrics aren't the best it's not so bad for me. That is on two conditions, one that the music can make up for it, and two that the lyrics aren't totally unbearable.

Now, this brings me to another category; the singer. That's a big part of how the lyrics sound. Simple rule, you gotta be able to sing. Some people can some people can't. Now this isn't an all-important part of the music. Like the lyrics, you might have a bad singer but a good song still. Usually you'll have to have good lyrics to make a bad singer sound good, but sometimes you can cover it up with real good music.

Thirdly and possibly most importantly is the music. The music, has got to sound good! If it doesn't, I'm not liking it right away. Now you can have a good singer and good lyrics to make up for not so good music, but that can only put the song up to a 5 out of 10 in my opinion.
What are ways to make a song sound good. Well, unlike Chandler, I do like a good solid beat, unfortunately that doesn't make up a good song in itself, that's just one good part. Alternately a song doesn't necissarily have to have a good beat. I do like songs that use the guitar mainly to make a good rythm/beat. Ingenuity is another good way to make a good song, like the Supertones using a trombone (however you spell that ) sounds really great and is totally suprising. At the same time you have to master your instrument, whatever it might be. You might have alot of instruments but without skill it just sounds bad. When it comes right down to it, the deciding factor in whether I like the music category of a song is usually whether the artist is skilled enough. That's a big reason why I like many many types of music. Yes, including rap. However This brings me to one more point that is a 100% deciding point for me.

The words.
I don't mean the lyrics as in how they sound and if they flow, but the words. Sometimes you can hear them sometimes you can't that doesn't bother me as much as what the meaning of them is. If a song is dirty I don't like it. Occasionally I can accept a song with a little bit of something that is questionable, but generally I don't like anything with dirty language or anything of the sort. For this reason I only listen to christian Rap, because, as you probably already know secular rap is filthy. This also applies to every other kind of music I listen to, nearly everything I listen to is christian. And again any cds I buy are 90% of the time christian.
Taking each of these factors into account is how I rate a song or a particular band or artist, and that's pretty much it.

Till next post.
Your faithful typer,
Yokanchi

~
In the beginning there was nothing. God said, 'Let there be light!' And there was light. There was still nothing, but you could see it a whole lot better.
- Ellen DeGeneres
~

Wednesday, June 14, 2006

Events lately

Well, the graduation went well. It was pretty fun. I was the first one going up and doing everything first, since my last name starts with A. I was sad no one came besides my grandparents and my family. It would have been fun to see more people there. But there were still alot of people I knew simply from our school.
Then we had the Graduation Party. That was pretty fun. We were playing frisbee with this giant frisbee and got it stuck in a tree. We spent like 15 minutes trying to get it down. Someone walking by suggested we throw a shoe at it. For a second I thought, nah that would be dumb, i'd just get my shoe stuck in the tree, but then I thought to my self "nah, how in the world could something that heavy get stuck way out on this branch. So I threw it.....
and it got stuck. Then some nearby people gave us a water bottle to throw at it so we filled it and then got all our stuff down. We also played some volleyball and stuff. The Jarrets came even though they had to go to a wedding so they only stayed a few minutes. It was nice that they stopped by anyway.

The week following all that I spent most of my time doing work, moving cabinets and delivering stuff to make money.
I've been hoping to get a small desk for my room. So far I've been using my mom's card table, which I don't like using because it doesn't have a place to hold cds and movies, but also because my mom needs to use it periodically so I have to unload everything off of it. It also doesn't look that nice. Unfortunately with me going to college in about two months, that would be a bit wasteful to buy a whole new one. If anyone has a desk they want to get rid of be sure to let me know!

Well this last weekend was really really fun. Chandler came over and we were planning on having a prank day, where we'd go to some public place and prank unsuspecting citizenry. Unfortunately we couldn't think of all the things we were planning on doing before, and we didn't feel like doing it. So we just hung around, took turns playing the Halo 2 Campeign on "Heroic" difficulty setting, and went to a park and the mall to eat. We went to the park to get some new scenes for a music video we're making to a certain Weird Al song. So far it's probably one of the most entertaining movies we've ever made yet. Mostly because it has good music to go with it probably, but we've also been working on it for over a year. Well I shouldn't say working on it since we don't work on it that much, but we started it a while ago. Anyway, sorry to get anyone's hopes up, but I don't anticipate very many people actually ever seeing it.
That's all we did mostly this weekend, though it did wear me out (Probably has something to do with all the energy drinks I've been having, they're not good for one's sleep).

That's about all that's been going on lately. This weekend we're going on a church campout, that should be fun, if I can make it through the week. It's been in the 90's all week and I've been delivering these cds for a phone company .

Well, I can't think of anything else to write about.
We also watched Donnie Darko and it was awesome, almost bought it when we went to Wal-Mart. Oh! Today, I went to the Doctor's and had to get a TB test :P yukky. Had to get it for the college. The poked me make this nasty bubble on my skin, it's so sicko. I hate needles!!

well,
Till next post.
Your faithful typer,
Yokanchi

~
"Lazy money stealer!"
-Chandler
~

Thursday, June 01, 2006

I don't have a title, I'm just bored and ready to blog.

Well, I'm sitting here at the piano studio with nothing good to do, so I'm posting. I finished all the stuff I really needed to do today, so there's really nothing I have to do right now. Piano lessons were kind of fun today. Even though I haven't touched a piano in quite a few days, and haven't practiced in a while longer, I found a neato song that I hadn't seen in my Narnia book. It's called "Winter Light", it's on the soundtrack which I have. It's also one of my favorites so I was excited to play it. Turns out it was one of the coolest songs in the book. Coolest sounding on the piano I mean.
Well I don't really have anything else to post about. Oh yeah! Graduation is tomorrow, and party after that. We have purple graduation gowns (yeah I know, don't say anything, it's our school colors.). We went to graduation practice yesterday and stayed there like all afternoon, leaving early to get to piano so I could come teach ONE STUDENT!! Luckily I got to do some other work and sub for one of my teacher's students so I actually made more money than I usually would have.

Till next post.
Your faithful typer,
Yokanchi

~
"All good one liners are one character too lon"
~