Saturday, November 28, 2009

Putting up the Christmas Tree

 


Yesterday, we put up our Christmas tree as well as the outside lights. At first, I was a bit skeptical about how fun this would be, but once we got into the lights and ornaments, I had a great time. In fact, I worked on ornaments longer than ever before--about 2 hours. I also was the most careful person in the family. Here's the ornament destruction count: Mommy 2, Daddy 1, Aidan 0.

My least favorite ornament is one of an evil clown that Mommy's grandfather gave her. I wanted him off the tree, but Mommy put him on anyway. Fortunately, I don't know where he is.

The tree looks totally beautiful. It's the nicest tree ever I think.

Click here for a more extensive set of putting up the tree pictures.

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Rediscovering Geotrax

 


As Mommy was cleaning out my very full and messy closet, I rediscovered my many Geotrax train things. Mommy and I set up a big arrangement in the living room and have been having a lot of fun with it since. Yesterday, the Geotrax were invaded by "giant stuffies." The trains were a bit frightened but the stuffies meant no harm. In the afternoon, the Bennetts came over and Patrick and Elizabeth played with the trains. They seemed to love them. A key highlight was when a Roman soldier took a ride on one of the trains. Unfortunately, there are a number of low clearance areas on the track and the Roman suffered smoe nasty blows to the head. We all thought that was very funny! (7 year olds love black humor.)

Hooray for geotrax!
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Thursday, November 26, 2009

Happy Turkey Day

 


Happy Thanksgiving!

Above is a photo of a turkey I made at home. I made it all by myself from constuction paper, cardboard, and Sharpie pens. I especially like how I decorated the legs. This year I'm thankful for my friend Christopher. He came over of a playdate last night and then invited me to his house for my very first sleepover. It was very cool plus it makes my longest playdate yet--more than 24 hours! Mom and Dad are coming over to Chris's house for Thanksgiving dinner. Hooray!
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Monday, November 23, 2009

Turn the Beat Around

One of my favorite things to do at night is "dance party." Check out this dance I made up to "Turn the Beat Around." Shot with Daddy's new iPod Nano. Amazing that a device about as big as a pack of gum (and thinner too) can do this.

Saturday, November 21, 2009

The Many Faces of Aidan

From Aidan's Weblog

Not really anything to report. Just a quick collage of my many faces over the last few months. You can find the many faces of Aidan and other recent shots of me at my Shutterfly site.

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Math is Fun!

From Aidan's Weblog


While most of my homework is pretty boring, I really like math facts. I'm very quick at adding together even very large numbers. Last night, I stayed up late doing "bonus homework" with Dad. My real homework involved adding together "doubles" like 2+2 or 4+4.

For the bonus, Daddy decided to have me keep doubling the doubles. So I added 2+2, 4+4, 8+8, 16+16, 32+32, etc. We finally quit after I added together 2048+2048 (= 4096 by the way). Dad said that this sequence of numbers had a special name, 2^n, or the geometric sequence. It apparently gets big fast. Here is a crazy fact that Daddy told me: n^2/2^n = 0 as n gets arbitrarily large. How can two tings that both become infinite end up being zero?

Above is the picture of my whiteboard with many calculations.

I really like doing calculations. I know a bunch of tricks to add and subtract numbers. Some of my tricks are incomprehensible to Mom and Dad, but somehow still manage to produce the right answers. Daddy says that I do math intuitively, whatever that means.

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Wine Country


On Saturday, we went to wine country, but with a very cool twist--my friend Chris and his Mom came along with us. It was very fun. We went to Trefethen and saw Shannon. She's super nice and gave me a hug. She also had a basket full of toys for us to play with and even take home. We also wandered around the vines and a lovely fall day. Finally, we went to Mumm where I gathered up a huge number of cool acorns. While we were in the car, we sang goofy songs which made us laugh and laugh but eventually annoyed our parents.

Here is a list of the top 5 annoying things we did:

1. Pretended to be sirens while Daddy was driving.
2. Repeatedly referred to the "man zone" regardless of topic of conversation.
3. Sang songs about babies falling to their death.
4. Whined
5. Said "wiener dog, wiener dog" over and over.

Actually the annoying things made the trip even more fun!

Only in California

Fresh lemon
Guess what I did on Sunday? I ran a lemonade stand on the corner of the street. It was a nice sunny day but not especially hot. Both Mommy and Daddy were skeptical about how much business I'd do selling lemonade. But business was brisk thanks to my terrific product and my enthusiastic selling technique. Here's what I would do: Any time a car or person went by, I held up my big orange sign advertising "Fresh Squeezed Lemonade 25 cents" and began my patter (modeled after Billy Mays):

Aidan Morgan here with fresh lemonade, only 25 cents. Get your fresh lemonade here. It's only 25 cents!


When bicyclists would come by, I tried a different tack:

You get awfully thirsty riding that bike. What you need is some fresh lemonade. Only 25 cents!


I ended up selling two pitchers of lemonade and made about 20 bucks (tips really help when selling for only 25 cents each.) I really love selling stuff. Maybe that's what I'll be when I grow up--a salesman.

Silver Medal

 
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I went down to Iron Horse School last night to see my art on display. When I first arrived, I was super excited since I saw that I had a big gold sticker labeled "award of merit" next to my piece. I thought this meant that I would be moving on to the state championships. Unfortunately, there is another sticker on some of the pieces, "Award of Excellence", it turns out that these were the ones that were moving on. The award of merit is like a silver trophy--good, but not good enough. This got me very depressed. I really wanted to move on. I thought my piece was the best one there. I don't want to win the silver medal, I want to win the GOLD medal.

The upshot is that I'm going to shoot more photos this coming year, so I'll have a good selection to try to win gold next year.

In related news, we've been talking a lot about seeing the cloud versus seeing the silver lining in things. Daddy thinks Mommy is too often a "cloud person." Both Mommy and Daddy said that my disappointment about the silver medal is an example of cloud thinking. I'm supposed to be proud to have gotten the silver and determined to get the gold next time. The problem is that I'm not really proud of the silver.

Monday, November 02, 2009

Bowser Defeated...Finally!


Well, at long last it happened. I made it to the center of the universe for a final showdown with Bowser in Super Mario Galaxy. It took some doing, but I defeated him and won the entire game. Princess Peach is rescued, and the universe is once more safe. I'm very proud of myself for having pushed through to ultimate victory!

Friday, October 30, 2009

Happy Halloween

 

Halloween is the coolest holiday. I get to dress up. I get to go in parades. There are lots of parties. There is a LOT of candy. I love it. My second favorite holiday after Christmas.
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Thursday, October 29, 2009

Victory!

Donegal

I entered an art contest in my school recently. I put in 3 photos, the one above, "Bear in the Air" (a photo of polar bear on the London Eye), and a photo of butterflies in Arizona. My picture of the paper boat Donegal won the contest. I made this boat when I was in Cambridge during a visit from my neighbor Kathleen. She was from Northern Ireland and wanted a boat with the Irish flag. We floated this one in a canal near our house that feeds into the River Cam. It was near the shore in the morning when I shot this photo.

I'll be moving on to the district wide contest in the coming week. It's cool to win for my photos.

Sunday, October 18, 2009

Some Pictures


Here are some pictures of me. One is of the first Cub Scout meeting this year. The others are when I was building with Kapla blocks. Find them here:

http://aidanspictures.shutterfly.com/1262

Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Moving day

As some of you know, goofy Geocities decided to end their free site hosting and boot all the legacy sites at the end of the month. So my website has now moved. You can find it here: http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/rjmorgan/Aidan You will notice, sadly, that the guestbook did not (cannot) migrate. But the rest of the site was ported over more or less exactly as it was. All my links are now updated to point to the right place. If, however, you still visit the old site location, you will be autoforwarded to the new one until the end of October. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Weekend in Utah

We're just back from our long weekend in Utah. It was sort of interesting...and sort of boring. Here's how I summed it up on the ride home from Snowbird ski resort:

It's better than sitting at home and staring at a wall.


Dad and especially Mom got a kick out of that assessment.

We did see a bunch of stuff while we were there. We saw Temple Square with the big church and the Mormon Tabernacle. Apparently, everyone in Utah was getting married on the Saturday we visited. We saw 7 weddings while we were there.


We saw the Great Salt Lake. Not sure why it's so great, but it is big. It's also a bird cemetery. As you walk along the dry parts of the lake bed, you encounter many bird skeletons.

We visited Snowbird ski resort. Even though it's hot in Salt Lake City, it's cold on the mountain.

Finally, we visited the aquarium, which had lots of cool creatures like this frog.

Daddy made us visit the International Peace Garden. I thought this was SOOOOO boring. Mom didn't like it either. She fell asleep on a bench.

Arizona is a lot more interesting than Utah. But Utah is better than school.

Friday, September 18, 2009

Off to Utah

 
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We're off for a long weekend in Utah. After rejecting the possibility of visiting lots of fun stuff like a zoo, an aviary, and a giant church, Daddy declared me an old man. He said I'll be waiting after school outside the front window for kids from school to wander onto the front lawn. Then I'll charge out the door and yell,

You kids get off of my lawn.


He doesn't want me to be that guy---especially at age 7. Still, Utah = 1 day off from school, so it will be good, I think.

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Water Balloon

 


Today Mom and I made a cool water balloon. She filled it with water while I made the face and hair. Isn't it cool. It would be a "shame" if it broke...on Mommy!
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Saturday, September 12, 2009

Carpet Baseball

 

After a long hiatus, we played a game of carpet baseball. I've gained a lot of power since last we played so we had to rebuild the fences to make the game more sensible. We used books to erect a big, high wall in the outfield. As usual, I player the 2006-2007 A's versus the "All Stars", which consist of all the non-A's baseball card I have. The A's triumphed in a 14-9 slugfest. Danny Haren picked up the win for the A's. Bronson Arroyo was tagged for the loss for the All-Stars. Interestingly, Aidan Morgan played for the All-Stars as first baseman and pitcher. He doubled twice and flied out twice as well.
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Thursday, September 10, 2009

Pick 'Em

It's the start of football season. Daddy and I have started College Pick Em and this week is the first week of NFL Pick Em. If you want to join our pick em league, leave a comment.

BTW, for week 1 in college, I beat Daddy 16-14.

Weekly Update

My New Old Pocket Watch
Photo credit: Gideon van der Stelt

Books: Henry and Mudge, Harold andf the Purple Crayon (being read by myself)
Videos: None
Wii: Super Mario Galaxy, Mario and Sonic Olympics
Toys: Kapla blocks, Little People, army men.
Games: None.
Outdoors: Hiking, paddle boating.

Wednesday, September 09, 2009

Accents

Here's a little something I picked up from Daddy---the ability to (sort of) do accents. Often times when I do dialogs with little people or army men, I give them various accents. My main one is my "foreign" accent, where the people swallow their r's and speak more slowly than I normally do. It's kind of fun being someone else.

Decisions, decisions


Tomorrow is the first day of football season. And I have a hard choice to make with my fantasy team. My best QB is Big Ben Roethlisberger. But he's playing the Tennessee Titans, an excellent defense. My backup is Brett Favre, who is playing the Cleveland on Sunday. Do I take Favre with the easier matchup or Big Ben? Oh, what to do? I'm leaning Favre.

Late---almost

Today started as a goofy day. Daddy normally goes off to Yahoo at dawn (5:55am to be precise) and Mom wakes me up for school. But none of that happened today. Daddy didn't go to Yahoo. He worked at home with appointments stretching from dawn to dusk instead (7am to 7pm to be precise) while Mommy didn't get up at all. Good thing I got up at 745.

Now normally 745 would be a fine time to wake up since school is at 920. But not on Wednesday. Weds is my early day, the day EVERYONE goes into school at 830. So we had to hurry up. I got dressed, gobbled down breakfast, and then was lucky enough that Daddy had a break in his schedule to take me to school.

But here's another problem. Daddy hates waiting in the long line of cars. He prefers to park about 7 minutes walk from outside of school and walk the rest of the way, avoiding the lines of traffic. I can understand this. I don't like being stuck in traffic either.

Fortunately, we made it with 3 minutes to spare.

Another wacky Wednesday.

Tuesday, September 08, 2009

Victory in the Galaxy

I've made great progress in Super Mario Galaxy. This weekend I defeated Bowser and liberated Luigi from a jail controlled by ghosts. I rock at Wii!

Labor Day

 


Traditionally, we celebrate Labor Day with a barbecue in our backyard. The only problem is that these cookouts are no fun. There are always lots of old, crazy yellowjackets, tons of work hauling stuff outside, and lots of meats cooked on the grill, none of which I like. So we decided to make a change--we went mobile. Instead of a cookout, we had a sunset picnic on Sugarloaf open space. Lovely 360* views, nice cheeses, a nice Chardonnay for Mommy and Daddy.

From 2009 09 07



A vast improvement I'd say.
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Monday, September 07, 2009

Weekend Reading



This weekend, we started a new book--more like a really long poem--Beowulf. It's super exciting as Beowulf takes on Grendel and Grendel's Mom. I like the Dungeons & Dragons like mixture of ultra-violence followed by praise of God. Beowulf is a tough fighter. We're reading the Seamuus Heaney translation. Very cool!

Pirates v Army Men

Here is a slide show of the battle between the pirates and the army men. I'll add to it as the story evolves.

Sunday, September 06, 2009

Ahoy there!

 


This morning, there's danger on the high seas of our living room. Little People pirates have come into the port of the army men. The army men have many, many ships docked in port. Unfortunately, their ships are made from dominos and Kapla blocks, so they're not very sturdy.

From 2009 09 05


The Little People, on the other hand, have a stout bark that is much larger than the ships of the army men. Who will prevail? Will numbers plus high powered weapons manage to overcome the pirates led by Captain Mommy?

From 2009 09 05


Making matters worse for the army men, the Captain of "Ship Hotel USA" has no head for battle. (View the picture in large size to see the visual pun.)

From 2009 09 05


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Saturday, September 05, 2009

Another Adventure

 


Daddy's latest kick is "adventures" on the weekend. Mostly these consist of going to various outdoor places and walking around to see pretty things. Naturally, I'm against all this since life is so much simpler if we just stay in the house and play Wii or watch Road Runner episodes. Nonetheless, he persuaded Mommy to go on an adventure today, so I had no choice but to come along.

Today's adventure was to Lafayette Reservoir--a big lake in Lafayette. There's a nice trail around the edge and, more importantly, paddle boats for going out into the lake. Initially, the adventure looked terrible. I was going to ride my scooter along the path, but the rules are that scooters are only allowed Tuesdays and Thursdays. Then, when we got out of the car, it was windy, really windy, so windy that I was cold enough to need my fleece jacket.

From 2009 09 05


But things got better after that. I saw a lot of cool stuff and really liked the paddle boats. Somehow, these adventures turn out a lot better than I think they will.
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Friday, September 04, 2009

Road Runner



We're back to watching my favorite cartoon of all time--Road Runner. I find myself asking why about lots of things happening in this cartoon. Daddy offers a stock reply,

Cartoons are filled with nonsense. There is no why.


Must be true. But I cannot help asking a fundamental question---given how hard it is for the coyote to catch this particular road runner, why doesn't he go after a different one?

In other news, we saw a coyote roaming the streets of Alamo a couple of nights ago driving back from the club. It didn't look much like the cartoon coyote. Wonder if it was after road runners?

Thursday, September 03, 2009

Stuff I'm Doing

Time II

Thought you might like a snapshot of what I'm currently doing:

Books: Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator
Videos: Thomas the Tank Engine
Wii: Super Mario Galazy
Toys: Hot Wheels orange track, army men, Thomas the Tank Engine (press the cab series)
Games: Chess, Uno, Sorry
Outdoors: Swimming

I'll be offering weekly updates so you can track my changing tastes.

Wednesday, September 02, 2009

King of the Galaxy

From Drop Box


I'm back to trying to tame Super Mario Galaxy. I've made it pretty far, but it's getting very tough. Fortunately, Mom and I are a good team. It would be nice to win this game.

Under the stars

Lately, we're doing something new and fun after dinner--going to the club. For the last several days, we hit the hot tub and the lap pool for a little swimming action under the stars. I love how the sky looks at night. There are also a bunch of trees at the club decorated with lights. They look very pretty. Evenings are great.

Tuesday, September 01, 2009

Weekend update


Composition: King x Knight, originally uploaded by John-Morgan.

Another busy weekend of playing. I really try to jam stuff into every available minute on weekends once school has started. The highlight of the weekend was a Sunday filled with chess. We played a standard game. Then a "coach" game, where Daddy coached me on what to look for in moving. Then we played some variants. In one version, we each had only one of the major pieces (i.e. 1 knight, bishop, rook) instead of the usual two. The other variant I came up with was a pawns game. Here, the board consisted only of the king and the 8 pawns. This second variant was quite interesting.

We did some other stuff too. Went to the club for some swimming during the day and then, even better, swimming and hot tubbing at night. The hot tub is only available to me at night since the club has a rule that you have to be >13 to be in the tub. This rule is not enforced after the life guards go home. Also did some kickboarding. In fact, I'm making progress on actually having some swimming skills.

All in all, a great weekend.

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Reading

I've discovered that there are some very good books out there. Who would have guessed. Daddy introduced me to Captain Underpants--what great literature. I thought for sure that nothing could compare to these stories.

And indeed nothing does. But Roald Dahl comes close. We first read James and the Giant Peach. While I had some misgicings, it was nice to see the peach crush Aunt Spiker and Aunt Sponge. Then we went Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. This took all Dad's voice talents. In the story there are 4 kinds of English people, plus Germans, Southerners, New Yorkers, and a bunch of other regions. Daddy seemed to like the challenge. Now we're reading Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator. Roald Dahl is pretty cool.

Weekend before school

I'm not looking forward to school. I'm really not. But this weekend was fun. Daddy apparently didn't look forward to school either so he thought we should have maximum fun for the last weekend before the start of the school year.

Saturday was an amazing day. We went on an adventure where we climbed a big mountain. Then we hit some golf balls. At night, we played Wii baseball. Then, to top it all off, we had a backyard campout.

Sunday was equally cool. After church, we went kite flying. I set a new record with the height of my kite. It was so high I ran completely out of string. More baseball and then a campout with Mom.

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Pretty Leaves


Here are some pretty leaves I found in the driveway. I like how they're yellow and green--my favorite colors.

Captain Underpants

From underpants


As you know, I generally don't like to read. While I can do it, I'd rather not. Mostly because nothing interesting has ever been written. Fortunately, I finally ran across a series of books worth reading---The Adventures of Captain Underpants.


These are the first books that are so exciting, so insightful, so amazing, that I'm happy to pick them up and read them myself.

From underpants


Pretty weird, huh?

Sunday, August 09, 2009

Striped Shirts Stink

This morning before church, Mom and I had our usual fight about what I should wear. She wanted me to wear a striped golf shirt. I did not. Here's a short photo essay about my feelings.

Friday, August 07, 2009

Sleepover

 


Summer is great. Play dates, sleepovers, fun! Tonight, my friend Chris is sleeping over. Of course, not much sleep is occurring, but I'm still having a great time. I introduced Chris to my two favorite things at the moment--Super Mario Galaxy and Dungeons and Dragons. Our D&D friend, Cynwyd, unfortunately died by being squashed under a rock trap. But we managed to defeat some Morlocks thanks to the sleep spell of Chris's character, Jones. He's a wizard. My character is a priest named Lightning. I had some close calls with the Morlocks but have so far been unharmed.
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Wednesday, August 05, 2009

My Least Interesting Photo


wine2, originally uploaded by John-Morgan.

My Daddy has uploaded many, many photos to Flickr over the years. Some were better than others, but the one above is, according to Flickr, the least interesting photo he's uploaded. It's more uninteresting than this photo:

IMG_0596

which is a sign for bubonic plague in Lake Tahoe.

It's vastly less interesting than this photo:

IMG_7116

A houseplant.

Weird.

Friday, July 10, 2009

Backyard Campout

I'm looking forward to this weekend's excitement---a backyard campout. Only here's the twist, it's not in my backyard; it's in the Cubmaster's backyard. A bunch of my friends will be there too. Should be fun!

Thursday, July 09, 2009

D&D...

Can be pretty scary. Last night our party ran into a wererat. He seemed like a nice enough guy, but I knew something was up when he grew a tale. We defeated him and his rat friends. Tonight challenge was ghosts. Mom picked up some haunted goblets and ghosts attacked us as we headed for the exit. Apparently, they don't like their goblets disturbed. Ghosts are really scary.

Yahoo is Mean

My website, which has been hosted at Geocities since I was born, is now to be deleted by my Daddy's friends at Yahoo. Here's the announcement:

GeoCities is closing on October 26, 2009.
On October 26, 2009, your GeoCities site will no longer appear on the Web, and you will no longer be able to access your GeoCities account and files.

If you'd like to move your site, or save the images and other files you've posted online, please act now by downloading your files or upgrading to AT&T Yahoo! Web Hosting. See details in the help center or upgrade to Web Hosting now for only $4.99 a month.


Now you would think that they would at least make it easy for you to pull your content off their server and send it somewhere else for hosting. Sadly, they don't. Here's their solution:

The simplest way to download your published pages and images is to visit your GeoCities web site:

Right-click on any page and choose Save Page As... from the menu that appears. (If you're using a Mac, hold down the Ctrl key and click the page.)
Choose a location on your computer to save your files.
Click OK or Save to save the code and images associated with your page to your computer.
Repeat these steps on each page of your site.


But this is completely obnoxious since, during the save you end up saving the AD CONTENT displayed on the page as well. So if you want to move your site, you then have to strip out all the windowing and ad hosting code Yahoo inserted.

This is really not a nice way to treat longtime users. Yahoo is mean.

Courses




I like to design courses for people to compete on. Last evening, I designed a series of ring toss courses for Daddy and I to compete doing. A lot of my courses had the goal posts located in the garden and at other tricky spots in the yard. It's great fun when someone manages to put a ring on one of the goals in my course. I also like to see how the difficulty changes as I move things around the course.

Tuesday, June 02, 2009

Dungeons & Dragons

I've fallen in love with a new/old game--Dungeons & Dragons. I cannot remember how this game came up in conversation, but when I heard about it, I thought it would be super fun to play. So far, it has been. My characters are based in the town of Seaend, which is menaced by a terrible dragon in the hills. My characters have gone up an attempted to plunge into the many caves in the hills, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. We recently completed a big adventure where we defeated the king of the Bugbears and his horde of hobgoblins.

At times I find the game scary, exciting, and even sad. When my character Superman died recently while battling the Bugbear, I was definitely sad about it. There's a kindly priest in town where I take my characters who died to be buried. But I'm not too sentimental. No character gets buried with armor and weapons since these are useful in other adventures.

Maybe the most successful character is Bob the Priest. (He's level 2). He managed to kill the bugbear and acquired a bunch of treasure including a magic pearl of spells. The weird thing about Bob is that, being a priest, he's determined to give all his loot to God. MY other characters have tried to discourage this sort of thing, so now Bob is only giving half his stuff to God.

My Daddy was telling me about the most successful D&D characters he ever worked with (he's dungeon master). Their names were Duke, Scaggament, and Moritor under the control of Uncle Dave. He mentioned that they founded their own giant church (Church of Zeus) and had armies of guys. I want my guys to be as successful.

Monday, June 01, 2009

Concert

We had a big concert in church yesterday. I had a performance with the chimes and sang two songs with the choir. The second song was an extravaganza where all the choirs, even the adults, sang together.

It was a great event. I'm especially proud of my chime playing. I was in charge of the melody since I rarely screw up when playing chimes. It sounded terrific. Best of all, no dreaded chime injuries. The last time I played, I accidentally hit myself in the head with a chime during the performance. However, being the professional that I am, I played through the pain and completed the song without incident.

You can check out a few photos here.

Get Well Greeting

My favorite team, the Oakland A's, is having a ton of problems with injuries. Here's how bad it is: Last night, the starting pitcher got injured when he cut himself reaching into the A's medical kit to get a band aid. I thought I'd try to cheer the players up by sending them a get well card. I made a picture of the A's logo on the front and wrote something like:

"Dear A's,

My name is Aidan. I am 7 years old. The A's are my favorite team. I hope your hurt players get better soon.

Love,

Aidan"

We sent the card off to the A's stadium this morning. I hope this helps the players to feel better.