The Winter Woods have come down!

A quick photo just before our "Christmas in Narnia" party this past December.

 I painted this mural of the winter woods near Cair Paravel (from "The Lion , the Witch and the Wardrobe" story...in case you're wondering) at the request of a group of children a few years ago.  It's a big installation process to hang so it stays for all the Christmas parties once it's up.

  This year one of the mom's asked if I would sell it to her for their family weekend ski home.  I declined...we all love it so here at Musicalia...as you can see below...

Angel puppets and small children playing in the winter woods.

  

Yesterday was a New Year's clean-up day...the ladder's out...it's coming down...

View from top o'the ladder...14 foot ceilings are really high up!

I'll fold up my beautiful Narnian mural and save it for a future Narnian celebration.

Happy Birthday Musicalia!

Today Musicalia is officially 19 years old!

Happy 19th Birthday, Musicalia!

I wrote my first Happy Birthday post last year 

and then continued with about 120 posts since then. 
There are really 2 major things I did this year.

-1st thing-
2011 was my year for learning about 

creative computer-related things; 

how to use Garageband,
how to upload my garageband creations to Bandcamp (thank you, Rachel Rambach), 
how to use Skype (thank you my dear husband, Nigel),
how to work my new iPhone (I love my ocarina app!),
how to use iPhoto and iMovie, 
how to use Facebook 

...including creating a dedicated page (maybe you'd like to "LIKE" me???)
how to use a video camera and create videos,
uploading to YouTube,
how to work with web designers, 
learning to create with Wishlist Member,
how to make a PDF (yes, I didn't even know how to do this),
how to use dropbox,
how to upload photos to Flickr, 

how to use picnik (thank you, Rachel Rambach!),

gave up on my Bamboo tablet...oh well...

signed up for Twitter but I still don't really know how to use it...oh well...

how to add an accent on my computer to my 
French student's names (this was my most satisfying skill-bit this year!),
learning how to use Aweber to create a newsletter (thank you to Kimberly Sena Moore for her encouragment with this),

creating advertizing to post on Rachel Rambach's Listen & Learn site,
became a member of Rachel's Listen & Learn Plus Premium site for members (so great!)
Rachel was amazing, helpful and oh so techie-savvy:) she helped me many times 
(Thank you, Rachel!)

You know...I really just tried everything I could think of!  

I was daunted but quietly determined so in the end I really have many more skills than I ever could have imagined I would ever have.



I took Kat Fulton's Online Zen course and learned how to build a wordpress site and I'm in the process of building Musicalia a new wordpress site right now!  I actually had a new site built by a web developer this past year but the site is not behaving the way I'd hoped so I'm just going to build a new one myself (Thank you, Kat!).




-2nd thing-
And then there was Salzburg!

I was fortunate to spend most of July in Salzburg, Austria studying Orff at the Internationl Orff Conference and the International Summer Course at the Orff Institute and the Mozarteum.  This trip was surreal for me (a dream more than 2 decades old) but oh so great! 

Overall, I have learned that I'm still 

a bit of a techie-idiot... 

...sad but true...
...and what's more even though I was super excited every time I learned one new thing in the techie world, it was very, very hard and not really the most fun I've ever had.  I felt pretty dumb most of the time.  Of all the techie things I did it was Kat's course that was the most nurturing and gave me the most confidence in myself. I am so grateful to her for creating that course.

I have decided that 2012, the 19th year of Musicalia,
will be dedicated to spending much more of my time 
creating in the old-fashioned way. 

I'm getting back to my art; painting, sketching, drawing.

AND

I'm going to write paper notes, postcards and letters to my friends.  I do love the immediacy of email...but I miss the warmth of handwriting and sending and receiving "real" mail.

One more thing I'm doing this year...

 I am already thinking ahead to next January 1, 2013 and the big 20 year celebrations I hope to have for Musicalia!  I don't know what we'll do yet and maybe all that will happen is I will have some t-shirts printed.   

Right now I'm in the midst of re-negotiating my lease and it's challenging (my payments appear to be going up by more than 30%! ...gulp...)  I hope Musicalia will survive this negotiaton process.

Thank you for your interest in my blog!
Thank you for your comments!




Happy New Year and Happy Birthday!