"If you were French bread, I would eat you. All the time. Every day." - Christian

All right, we know, we know! We totally slacked off last week and didn't do our blog. It was my fault. It was my turn. I'm sorry! As penance, I (Brittany) will do the blog for this week AND last week.

Last week was finals week. The very first final either of us took was Christian's juries. He got an accompanist at the last minute (the pianist had less than a week to learn the piece and it was HARD!) and the accompanist played beautifully. Christian was AMAZING. I got to hear him and he sounded so fantastic! I was so proud of him. The judges barely had anything bad to say. The only bad thing they mentioned was that he played it too loud. He was just too zealous. He got two A's and an A-. Go Christian!!! :) Finals week also went well otherwise. I was happy with my performance on my exams, and so was Christian on his. We will get to see our grades sometime this next week, we think.

Last week we also went on a fun date. We went to a little Italian place in downtown Provo called La Dolce Vita. It reminded me of a smaller Olive Garden. The food was all right, but we think we like Olive Garden better. Christian judges Italian places by their bread, and he wasn't too impressed with the bread. Basically it was buttered white bread toast. Christian got a meat-stuffed calzone and I tried something called Ana's Spinach Tortellini or something like that. It was green spinach tortellini stuffed with artichoke and covered in cream sauce and sun dried tomatoes. It was pretty good, but not stunningly so. Christian says his calzone was “pretty good”. We might go back again sometime, but I'm not dying to go back.

Christian is again reconsidering his major(s). A few weeks ago he decided he wanted to double major in computer science and music performance (see last post). But what he didn't know was that it's really hard to get BYU to sign off on a double major. Apparently, when he visited the advisement center, they told him 50% of BYU students were seniors because so many freshmen come in with all these AP/Dual Credit credits so they start as sophomores technically. And the admissions committee wants to let in more freshmen, but they can only have so many students at a time. So basically their goal is to get students in and out of BYU in as little time as possible. So naturally, they frown upon changing your major to anything that would extend the date of your graduation, especially if you're almost a senior like Christian is. Christian's original plan was to double major and graduate in April 2014, which extended his graduation by one full year. Three people have to sign off on that: the Computer Science department, the Music Performance department, and the dean of the School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences (because he chose Computer Science as his “primary major”). The advisement center said it's almost impossible to get anyone to sign off on a graduation date that was a year longer than original, so he condensed things some more to graduate in December 2013 (1 less semester). Apparently, that still wasn't good enough for them, so he did some more squishing and got his graduation date down to August 2013 (which is only his original graduation date plus spring and summer terms – not even full semesters). He can't really condense it down to more than that. Everyone has signed it except the dean so far. The advisement center said if he can set his graduation date for August 2013 that would be his best chance to get the dean to sign off on it, because he wouldn't be entering another academic year. However, there is still a chance that the dean will still not accept it. If this is the case, Christian will be doing some more academic reconsidering as far as his major(s) go(es).

This Friday, since both Christian and I are done with finals and school starts again on Tuesday, we drove up to Idaho to visit Mary and Derek. We got there Friday night and just basically chatted and caught up, then went to bed. Saturday morning we woke up early and went to the Rexburg temple. That was a rather fun experience. The Rexburg temple is beautiful and I hadn't realized it before. When we came home from the temple, we went out to eat some burgers. Mary and Derek know a place where you can get a 1-pound-of-meat burger plus a bunch of fries and drinks and 2 waffle cones for quite a reasonable price. So Christian and I shared a burger, as did Mary and Derek. I wasn't even able to eat a quarter of our burger, so we took it home and put it in the fridge. After that, we went to the park and tossed around a Frisbee for an hour or so. I discovered I have horrible hand-eye coordination, and I definitely need some practice if I'm ever going to learn how to throw anything correctly. It was terribly windy, so that gave me excuses when my throws were horrible, but it was rather embarrassing. I also can't catch a Frisbee to save my life. We all cheered every time I caught the Frisbee. I can probably count on one hand the number of times I actually caught it (we played for more than an hour). And we cheered when my throws actually sent the Frisbee a good distance in the direction of a human being. At one point, I made a throw and it actually went to someone, so everyone cheered for me. Mary made a throw right afterwards that looked exactly like my throw, and she said, “Oh, haha! Sorry, guys, that was a horrible throw!” Oh well. I already know I'm terrible at sports. We went home after that and played an awesome game of Monopoly. There ended up being a lot of times where Mary would land on a spot and Derek would say “That'll be $26” and Mary would pay him, never realizing that she was the one that actually owned that property. There was also a lot of snatching/hiding of other people's money, properties, or playing pieces when they were looking the other way, which made the game quite a bit more exciting and funny than Monopoly usually is. After that, we watched Princess and the Frog (I didn't fall asleep in the middle this time!) and went to bed. This morning (Sunday) we went to church with Mary and Derek, came home and watched Tarzan, then Christian and I left for home. We had a really fun time. Thanks Mary and Derek!

Our recipe this week is Oven-Barbecued Chicken. Christian thinks it is the best barbecued chicken he's ever eaten. Personally, I didn't like so much onion in it, but Christian loves it. Here is the recipe (from our Taste of Home cookbook).

6 bone-in chicken breast halves (8 oz each)

1/3 cup chopped onion

¾ cup ketchup

½ cup water

1/3 cup white vinegar

3 Tbsp brown sugar

1 Tbsp Worcestershire sauce

1 tsp ground mustard

¼ tsp salt

1/8 tsp pepper

1) In a nonstick skillet coated with cooking spray, brown chicken over medium heat. Transfer to a 13x9 dish coated with cooking spray.

2) Remove skillet from stovetop and recoat with cooking spray; cook onion over medium heat until tender. Stir in the remaining ingredients. Bring to a boil. Reduce heat; simmer, uncovered, for 15 minutes. Pour over chicken. Bake, uncovered, at 350 degrees for 45-55 minutes or until chicken juices run clear and a meat thermometer reads 170 degrees.

Serves 6

Anyway, we love you all!

Brittany and Christian

Did a great jorb there homestree.

Todays quote is from Homestar Runner again. CLICK HERE to see the link if you want.

This week has been pretty crazy as we've wrapped up the semester. The last day of classes is Tuesday, which we're very excited about! Brittany has a concert that night, and then all that's left is finals. For me, it shouldn't be too hard. Technically finals go through until a week from Wednesday (the 21st), but I'll be done by Friday. I'm very excited for juries since I practiced with my accompanist yesterday and it sounded awesome. I was worried about it because I had procrastinated finding my accompanist until recently.

Speaking of all this, as many of yall know I recently changed my major from music ed to bioinformatics. However, after a lot more thought, and a lot of encouraging experiences through the last half of the semester, I've decided to try a double major. I still need to talk to the advisement center about feasibility, but I hope to be majoring in music performance and computer science. I thought through why I had decided to do music education, and I realized that it was because getting a bachelor's solely in music performance was very risky. In case I couldn't do well in performance I wanted to be able to do something without having to go back to school. I really do love performing, and so I've decided to go with horn performance. With this double major, I've basically signed on another year of schooling, but since any major as of now would take three years to complete, I think it would be worth it to not have to tear that part of my life out. I think that I would deeply regret essentially stopping my progress as a musician. The computer science degree is where I'm still a little undecided. I am still choosing whether I want to still do bioinformatics or just a computer science degree. I am hoping to do some kind of internship the summer before my last year, but if I did bioinformatics I'm not sure I would be able to do that without killing myself with classes. We'll see after I talk to advisement centers this week.

Tuesday, I had the final concert with the Symphony Orchestra. It was a fantastic concert - very exciting. It was a little long, though. My conductor really likes to team up with guest artists, which I don't mind. However, this concert we played a piano duet by Mendelssohn with some pianists from the U. This piece, by itself, was over 40 minutes long. That, along with a couple of movements from Slavic Dances by Dvorak made up the first half of the show. After intermission we played possibly the best piece ever - Fanfare for the Common Man by Copeland. If you haven't heard it HERE'S a link to the New York Phil's recording of it. Obviously we didn't sound this good, but it was SO fun to play it. Hopefully I'll get the recordings of it soon. (The names of the next pieces are links to youtube recordings.) We also played Samuel Barber's First Essay - a beautiful piece with lots of emotion. Debussy's L'après-midi d'un faune (Prelude to the afternoon of a faun). Liszt's Second Hungarian Rhapsody transcribed for orchestra. And a piece called Pops Hoedown, which was just a funny encore piece. I can't believe I actually got a recording for that, even though it's not all of it! lol. If you don't like Obama, just don't look at the video. The music is what's important. As you can tell from the links, there were lots of horn solos, most of which I rocked out loud if I do say so myself :).

Wednesday Brittany's friend that she met in Brazil, Vanessa, got married. We were invited to her reception in the Joseph Smith Memorial Building. It was a fun event, and Brittany enjoyed working on her Portuguese again. We were glad we could support Vanessa in a wonderful choice she made.

This semester Brittany has been working on two different psychological studies with groups from her classes. Thursday, one of her groups had their work presented at a conference held at BYU. The study they did was called LDS Doctrine and Perfectionism. They set out to see how the doctrine of the Church affected the level of perfectionism in them. It was pretty cool seeing all the stuff she did with it. She keeps saying that it's not a big deal, but I am so proud of all the hard work she has put in to this semester (even when some of her group members slacked off a lot), and I'm proud of how she's progressing in her major and the field in general.

The final compositions this semester were/are being performed Friday and tomorrow. My group performed Friday morning, and Brittany's will perform Monday. For this composition we could choose from several techniques of writing. First is minimalism (think of that tape in the jorb video at the beginning of the blog. That could be considered minimalism. A real piece of minimalism is called Einstein on the Beach. An excerpt can be found HERE. It can get really old really fast! lol The next is extended techniques. This can range from using mutes on brass, to putting things under the piano strings to create what's called "prepared piano." John Cage wrote a piece called Bacchanale for it. I promise that's a piano he's playing on. The other technique (which both Brittany and I used) is quotation. It's basically just using melodies and other things from other pieces and changing them around. I used the songs Bolero by Ravel and How Does She Know from Disney's Enchanted. It turned out quite nicely. Brittany has been working on a piece like this for a couple of years now. She just calls it "Her Medley." It's two minutes of songs ranging from Broken Road by Rascal Flatts to the theme from Zelda to theme from Superman. It sounds really good, and I think it will be a big hit with the class.

Anyway, I'm sure I've bored you long enough. We are very ready for the semester to be over, which is only in a couple days! We love you all and hope you're doing well.

Christian and Brittany

P.S. The recipe this week is one of my favorites from my childhood. It's my mom's homemade stroganoff. Delicious!

1 lb ground beef

1 diced onion

1 clove minced garlic

1 cu sour cream

2 Tbs Worcestershire Sauce

2 Tbs Ketchup

1 can Cream of Mushroom

1 3-oz can of mushrooms, drained

Brown the meat, onion and garlic together. Add the rest of the ingredients and heat it (don't boil it). Serve over rice or noodles (Noodles are my favorite). MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM STROGANOFF!

Happy Birthday/Easter/Conference weekend!

This week we saw How to Train Your Dragon. It was super cute. We might buy it when it comes out on DVD. I think I am beginning to get over my aversion to DreamWorks. Or at least, as long as the screenwriters stay clear of constant potty humor. Like they failed to do with Shrek. I really recommend seeing How to Train Your Dragon though. We even got the whole theater basically to ourselves. There were only two other people in the theater. I think we've found a great theater to frequent: the Scera Theater. Great big screens, comfortable seats, $6.50 a ticket. The only downside: the armrests don't go up, so you can't cuddle very close. Darn. Still worth it though, I think. :)

We also went to Target and Walmart to shop for my birthday presents, since I received gift cards to those places. A gift card to Target or Walmart is like a dream come true; it's basically permission to impulse buy to your heart's desire! Upon running around the store picking up whatever I wanted, I discovered that I have an unconscious urge to relive my childhood (I am suspicious that this desire may be attributed to jealousy of the first graders I work with every Tuesday and Thursday.) Among the things I ended up buying were:

**a tub of Peachie O's

**a couple cans of Chef Boyardee

**Ice Age the movie

**Madagascar the movie

**squirty cheese

**an Easter egg dyeing kit called "Mini Monsters!" where you can put stickers of assorted monster facial features on your dyed eggs to make them look like monsters!!!

**a box of Otter Pops

**a 24-pack of crayons

**a Disney Princess coloring book, complete with stickers!!!

In case you were curious, I have already colored a picture of each princess except Jasmine and Mulan (they left Snow White out of the coloring book. Mwahaha. She was ugly and annoying anyway). My favorite that I have colored so far is a picture of Ariel when she just got her new legs. I colored a remarkably beautiful sunset behind her, if I do say so myself. I will actually take a picture so you can see my artistic talent. Haha.

I also never realized that I had such a craving for Otter Pops. The first day I got them, I ate six. It was 39 degrees outside. I don't think they've ever been so tasty. And after dinner tonight we will dye and create our Mini Monster eggs. :D :D :D I've got a couple of monsters in mind. I think one of them will be Mike, from Monsters Inc.

Last night Christian and I and our friend Chris went to the Nickelcade. It's got all kinds of fun games you can play with nickels instead of quarters like you usually put in at other arcades. Which makes your spending about 1/5 the amount of money you'd spend at another arcade. Including a $2.50 admission, Christian and I spent $10 at most and had about 2 hours worth of solid fun. We didn't even spend like half the nickels we got, either. The place has got games that are fun for everyone; not just racing and shooting games, but they also had Skee Ball, air hockey, Guitar Hero, Chuck-E-Cheese type games where you try to get a token into a slot or whatever so you can get tickets printed out, and Dance Dance Revolution (DDR). They also had Laser Tag for $4 (great price for laser tag!). I usually don't sit at the arcade games and shoot or race, but we all sat down and raced this one game and I wasn't actually as bad as I thought I'd be. I even got a high score; a #1 time for my console! Christian won first place like every time. We played DDR like 4 times, and it got really sweaty but it was super fun!

Our friend Chris has some connections and so was able to swing things so that we each got a ticket to Sunday morning Conference, including Music and the Spoken Word. It was awesome. We woke up at 6 AM and left at 7 to allow for traffic. We were supposed to be in our seats by 9:00. We ended up getting there like... an hour early, because there was barely any traffic (hooray for the HOV lane)! Anyway, we sat up in the nosebleed section (there were actually two kids who ended up with nosebleeds from it, haha) and watched the MoTab rehearse while people trickled in. I think it's crazy how many Mormons there are. I mean, look at this picture.

This picture is looking at maybe 1/3 of the Conference center, which in total seats 21,000 people. So right here you're looking at about 7,000 people. There are 13.8 million members worldwide. So print out this picture 1,971 times and lay the pictures end to end, and you would see approximately all the members of the LDS Church today.

Holy crap. That is a LOT of people. And Joseph Smith started the church with what... like ten people, just 180 years ago, and it's grown to have 1,380,000 TIMES that many people since then, not even including all the ones who've died before now? Crazy.

Recipe for this week is Tuna Noodle Casserole. http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Tuna-Noodle-Casserole-IV/Detail.aspx Pretty good. Cheap and easy, at least. Not the best I've ever tasted, but then again we went with just the recipe that was listed, and didn't do any of the changes suggested by other reviewers.