Birthday

For my Birthday this year we went and rode a steam engine in Chehalis.  It was a nice 1.5 hour train ride with lots of soot, water spray and family.  It was a great day of train rides.

Sandip

Today I had a guest artist come in and give a concert for 30 of my middle and high school kids. It was way cool. The artists name is Sandip Burman, he is from India and plays the Sitar and tabla drums. I didn't get any video but I have a few pictures from the visit.

I also got to play his Sitar. The strings are a lot sharper than guitar strings and there were 20 of them in two layers. My finger still hurts after 10 hours of resting. I'll have to get the pictures of me playing the sitar from our librarian who was there taking some pictures later.

Overall, fantastic experience and my kids loved it too.

Pictures from day 1 in hospital

More hospital pictures! Kelly is up and moving now. Benjamin has night and day mixed up. And I have the kids. They are so excited to have a new baby in the house. We have some really cute pictures of them holding the kids except the pictures are on the camera still.

Meet Benjamin Ravel Cornwall

So at 4:30 this morning Kelly and I went to the hospital for her 7:30 C-section. At 8:14 am Benjamin was born. He is 9lbs. 4.8oz and is 21" long. Hey maybe our next one will be under 9lbs. :)

So here are some pictures

Adam Cornwall and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very BAD Day

Did you ever have one of the days when you go to work and work really hard, but you feel like you accomplished nothing. I did. Maybe I'll move to Australia.

Today, my sixth graders couldn't play eighth notes to save their life. What happened to the last 2 months of working on eighth notes? Do you think people in Australia can play eighth notes?

My seventh and eighth grade band drummers wouldn't listen, my flutes were flat, and I have a broken saxophone. My bass clarinetist always has to tell me who is misbehaving and I had a trumpet player throw up. I need to move to Australia.

My music appreciation kids are bored and three of them say it's the sixth grades fault (I have 6th-8th grade in this class) what's not exciting about podcasting. Maybe if it was in Australia.

When I came, I wanted to finish arranging a piece for my high school band. The file wasn't on my flash drive. I think I saved it in Australia.

I wanted to cry, but my children wanted to play. I guess I will have to cry another day.

Kelly says some days are just no good... even in Australia.

Band Camp

Last week I had a short little band camp for my small band. I was pretty proud of the work the kids put in when they showed up to rehearsal. We learned 10 songs and then had a performance on Saturday. Our performance was for Rainier's little festival they have every year called Rainier Round-up Days. Not the most exciting festival, but it was a great opportunity for the kids to play at a community event and be seen as not just a band that plays for sporting events. We played for a car show section of the festival and only played for about 15 minutes, but we had a crowd of about 75 people just standing around listening to us play. I think we sounded pretty good and I think we will do it again next year.

House

If you didn't know Kelly and I have now bought a house. We painted the majority of the inside Thursday, Friday, and Saturday while Grandpa Acheson worked on the plumbing in the bathroom. We are kind of scrambling right now because school starts up very soon and we were actually supposed to close on the house July 17. Unfortunately for us the USDA was about a month behind in processing their rural development loans. That only cost us $2000 in per diam. On the other hand, we have a great house that we bought for $20,000 less than it is worth. Yeah instant equity!!!

I don't think the reality of the whole thing has hit us yet. I think it will when we are actually in the house and not painting it.

The really great thing about this house is Mackenzie already went next door and made friends with a girl named Taylor. Taylor is the same age as Mackenzie and they get along really well.

I can't wait for Mom and Dad to get home so Dad and I can work on projects together.

Tomorrow's project: Go under the house and assess the damage while I hook up our dryer vent that fell off.