My First Blog Post EVER

Hey guys. So I'm so new to this blog thing (don't worry, I at least knew what a blog was) that I had to go to the "Help" page to figure out how to even post to the damn thing. But here I am posting! Finally. :)

I'm sitting here listening to Beethoven's sonata for violin and piano, Op. 47 (the Kreutzer sonata). It's pretty much the most awesome piece ever, and I really hope to play it. Andrew and I are planning on learning a piece separately and putting it together next year, so maybe we could do this one. It's really an amazing piece, so it would be really fun to play, even on my own without a violinist.

So I left on Friday morning. I lugged my bags onto the Marguerite, where I saw a girl with about twice as much luggage as I had. She asked me if we were going to "make it in time." I told her I was taking SamTrans, so if she was taking Caltrain I had no idea whether she'd be on time. She asked what SamTrans was, and I told her, and she decided to join me since it's so much cheaper and because she probably actually would have been hardpressed to make her flight with the Caltrain times being what they were. She followed me to the SamTrans stop, taking two trips to bring all her stuff. She then sat at the stop trying to consolidate it all (she had two giant suitcases and several bags, two of them paper). She had a bunch of food in one that she felt bad about throwing away, so she gave me some of it. I got two energy bars, a bag of jelly beans (which I am finishing right now, haha), some weird gluten-free crackers (which turned out to taste really effing weird), a banana, a Propel, and a thing of yogurt. I ate the yogurt right away, not having had breakfast. She was grateful to me for helping her get rid of some stuff, and I was grateful to her for the opportunity to eat something. We lugged our stuff onto the SamTrans when it arrived; luckily, there was this guy on the bus who helped us move our heaviest things. He looked like an ex-convict, at least when you saw the sketchy tattoos (oh man, sorry about that unintentional, and terrible, pun) on his arms, but he was actually very gentlemanly.

The girl (whose name, I found out on the bus, was Georgia) and I parted ways at the airport at check-in. I lugged myself and my bags to the plane and flew to Minneapolis. I sat next to this guy who was very quiet the entire time, either reading or looking out the window. When the plane landed, though, he started doing something really strange. It totally sounded like he was making fart noises with his mouth. I couldn't believe it, and I actually was staring at his mouth for quite some time trying to figure it out until I realized it was the four-year-old kid in the seat in front of him who was making the sound. I had a good inner laugh at myself.

Then I caught my plane to La Crosse (in WI, but only 30 miles from my house). Everybody on the plane had a wonderful midwestern accent, which made me quite happy. (I believe I even texted Alex Trytko about it, since he always makes fun of my accent/talks about Fargo with me.)

My mom picked me up and drove me home, where I said hello to my dad and my little brother Kai. My sister, Amelia, was asleep, since she was taking the ACT early the next morning. My dad and my brother were arguing about whether he could eat Frosted Flakes for supper (backstory: they had gone to a Mexican restaurant after Kai's baseball game, but Kai had refused to order anything, so now he was hungry. My mom was going to let him have Frosted Flakes, since she had eaten granola for supper, she said. My dad said it was fine if he ate granola, but not if he ate Frosted Flakes. My brother was questioning this logic. [This is a prototype argument at my house]). I found myself actually smiling listening to the argument, which I figured proved how happy I was to be home. :P

I've been busy the past couple days working for my dad, who rebuilds Steinway grand pianos in a shop at our house. I was leveling a keyboard. To explain briefly, the keys pivot on pins that you can't see because they're back behind the fallboard (you can only see the first 1/3 or so of the keys; the rest is hidden inside the piano). To make sure they're level, I had to put all these paper punchings of various thicknesses around the pins for the keys to rest on. It takes several rounds of doing this to have everything exact.

Well, I think I might go sightread a Beethoven sonata! Looking forward to reading the next few posts!