My dad’s military buddy’s youngest daughter Jenny has been in the ‘States visiting her boyfriend Kevin (getting his second masters in some sort of engineering at USC) for the past couple of weeks, so Mr. W and I have been busy entertaining them on weekends and some off-times. We took them to Balboa Island to ride the ferry and admire all the rich peoples’ extravagant holiday decorations (electronic bears and Santa doing acrobatics and walking tightropes between house and private pier, animated penguins watching people in a front yard transformed into Antartica…), introduced them to our favorite coffee and tea parlor there, took them shopping at the huge designer storefronts in Fashion Island and South Coast Plaza, and they’d wanted to see the Irvine version of famed 85DegreeC bakery cafe from Taiwan, so we lined up for fresh-baked pastries and their best-selling sea salt foam iced coffee. Mid-week I scored discount tickets to SeaWorld so we took them there to see the animal shows, carefully avoiding the water rides and “Soak Zones” where killer whale Shamu cupped his tail to bring a little of his world to the audience. Then Sunday, Mr. W and I drove down to my parents’ house for lunch to hang out with Jenny and Kevin for the last time since they both leave to go back to Taiwan today (although Kevin’s coming back once winter break is over). We brought my parents their Christmas gifts, a wooden basket carved out of a tree trunk cuz my dad loves stuff like that (and altho Mr. W insists it’s a bowl, I say it’s a basket because it has a handle) and a D-Link internet photo frame that Mike discovered and told me about. The gifts were a huge hit, and we set up the photo frame right away. Now I can manage what appears on their frame remotely through the internet, and any friends of theirs who want to send photos to appear on their frame can do so simply by emailing the photos (or sending a text pic thru their cell phone) to a designated email address. I told my mom that if I’m mad at her, she’ll know because she’ll find herself staring at photos of me making angry faces and shaking my fist at her. Hopefully, the ability to load any pictures online and have it appear on their frame immediately will alleviate her nagging at me for photos or access to my image hosting site.

While we were there yesterday, I picked up all my childhood piano lesson, recital and theory books, and came home to give Mr. W his very first piano lesson. He’d been playing a keyboard game the past few days, in which the computer (he bought a separate monitor for the piano) depicts a rainforest scene with bugs scrolling through and landing on a key, and you have to press that key at the time the bug lands to hit the note at the right times and play a song. It’s something like the old typing games meets Guitar Hero/Rock Band. He’s familiar with hitting notes now, but doesn’t use the right fingers and isn’t really reading music, and I feel the theory and technique is missing, so I asked if he’d like to learn things the classical way, too. He said he would. We spent an hour last night identifying the different types of notes, meter, proper fingering/posture, playing some simple tunes without use of the staff yet, terminology (forte, piano, measure, bar, etc). He picked up the tunes pretty fast and didn’t lose his temper or get impatient. It was actually a really good lesson and he was very receptive. He’d get all happy when he’d get the tune right after a few practices and I scoot him over so I can play the duet accompaniment part as he plays the tune. He used the “record” function on the digital piano and delighted in listening to playback of our duet. I should figure out how to get that saved as a midi so I can put in online.