Thursday, December 25, 2008

Merry Christmas to All and to All a Short Night! Florida For the Holidays:


Merry Christmas!
You were beginning to think I had forgotten you, weren't you!
Come on!
There's no need to pretend!
Okay, so I've been a little busy... but it's all GOOD busy.  For one thing we started recording a new CD!  Psyched?  I knew you would be!  Also, we spent another day filming for the reality pilot!  Keep your fingers crossed! If everything goes according to plan we should start really filming in February! Can you believe it?!  And as if that wasn't enough of a Christmas present this year, we also got to spend time with our family here in Florida.  We decked the halls (a.k.a. Grandma and Grandpa's house),  made homemade Norwegian cookies that have been in our family for generations (my Grandmother's Norwegian.  If you can snag one for a grandparent you are lucky! ...or maybe it's just my Grandma...)  The cookies are made from a Top Secret ancient family recipe that uses butter, sugar, almond, eggs, and flour!  ...ooops!  There goes that family secret!
We sang Christmas carols accompanied by bagpipes (a cacophonous combo) to any innocent bystanders who didn't run away.  We even got my dad to wear a Christmas hat, and from a distance the pipes almost looked like a sack of toys... unfortunately no one was fooled.
My blog has become sort of infamous around our family and my Aunts and Uncles have taken to saying things like...
"Don't put that in the Blog now!"
and
"You're not going to write about me are you?"
With their best interest at heart I have therefore decided to leave their names out entirely.
So you will not hear me mention my Uncle Tom or my Uncle Leo and Aunt Jeannie (also musicians, you can find out more about them at: http://www.sleepindogz.com/ )
Consider them never mentioned ;)
We still wake up insanely early every Christmas morning.  We still jump on mom and dad's bed and drag them to where the presents wait.  We still spend every second before they come jumping in our seats until they roll into the living room and give us the go ahead.  Some things never change :)
Merry Christmas everyone!

Thursday, December 11, 2008

Some New Changes!

Check out the Slideshow for some pictures of our tour in Ireland!

An intro to our 2008 season of the Turkey: Being Thankful

It's that time of year again, when we go out into the streets in our autumn regalia, raid the grocery stores and invite family members we only vaguely remember we had into our homes.  

Our family skipped out on most of the Thanksgiving festivities this year.  It's not because we have anything against Thanksgiving or being thankful in general.  In fact my family loves Thanksgiving.  We look forward to this holiday every year, an entire day that is devoted to family, being thankful and the opportunity to eat copious amounts of food to prove a point!  No, we missed some of the on-the-day Thanksgiving activities because we were doing a 2 1/2-minute spot on ABC for the Philadelphia Thanksgiving Day Parade.  That's right, I'm talking the Philadelphia Thanksgiving Day Parade.  Macy's move aside because ShaeLaurel is going to rock your socks.  Sure the Philly Parade may not have as many floats or attractions, but they have us!  If you don't believe me, check out the video of our performance on youtube:



The Parade was awesome and we met so many amazing people!  I had the opportunity to show exactly how little I know about modern pop culture by asking Mario (the solo R&B artist, actor and recently the dancer on 'Dancing With the Stars') what group he was backing up.  Ouch!

We also got to meet the descendants of the Von Trapp family.  They are so close to our carbon copies that it was almost scary.  We shared stories and talked for as long as time would allow.  We are all roughly the same age, we have all been performing for the same amount of time (7 years) and are all homeschooled.  We also both did tours in Europe and Asia.  How strange is that?

We celebrated a little in Philly with our good friends/family from Boston, then drove down south into the warmer weather where my Aunt and Uncle had postponed their own Thanksgiving celebrations to wait for us.

There was turkey and stuffing, and mashed potatoes and gravy, and even this really cool pear dish whose name escapes me.  It was a blast.  I even learned how to cook a turkey....

Surprisingly, as the only vegetarian in our family, I have very few problems with the Thanksgiving holiday.  Besides the fact that this is another in a long line of holidays centered around a fictitious event whose primary purpose is to slaughter an animal that was almost our National Emblem, I'm down with the whole turkey thing.  (Although I'm more of a mashed potato person myself.)

Back to Thanksgiving, we played Bananagrams (see The Games We Play) until our eyes hurt and the levels of our amazing word creations made our heads explode.  We even had time to do some family projects....More about that later :)

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) is over! Does this mean that I'm back mentally....? Ummmm...Can you repeat the question?

I did it, I made it out alive!  If you missed the last few posts here's a brief recap.  My sister Kathryn and I joined 120,000 novelists with the crazy intention of writing 50,000 words in one month.  We completed our goal: Kathryn's novel The Immortal Forest, weighing in at 54,250 words and my novel, Another Place to Fall, weighing in at 108,000 words.  (Apparently, I have a lot to say.  Who knew?)

All right, so that's the recap.  Now here's what you missed: