Playing A Little Catch-up

Hello Blogger world (aka people at work and my sister)! I know it's been a while. The truth is...not much happens in my life that is noteworthy. I know. Lame. But there have been a couple TOTALLY EPIC moments in the last couple of months that we'll review. Hang onto your hats peeps!

In July, we held the annual celebration of my birth. I went to good ol' Roosevelt to see my family and have my totally bodacious party. I love having traditional birthday parties with party hats and bright colors and birthday cakes with toys on them and such. Actually, I hate my birthday, but these things make it a little better. This year we didn't have a toy cake. We had a "death by chocolate" cake, which is an acceptable substitute. And we did not have cone-like party hats, we wore old fashioned hats. Which is also acceptable and what you can expect at my bridal shower (NO, I'm not getting married yet! Don't rub it in. I'm a planner remember?) Anywho, we also had a flower fight, played "Ninja," "the screaming game," dodgeball, and...I don't remember what else. I don't think I have pictures of us after the flour fight, but you can see it in the ninja pictures. Good times.

Twenty-six year old Carrie. That's right, I said 26! Not too much different than twenty five really.

Niiiiiiin-JA!!!! That's how you say it. In the game, I mean.

I had a video of this, but I didn't put it on because it wasn't very good. I'm still photo/cinematograpy handicapped. I'm working on it.

In August, I participated in a singer/songwriter workshop sponsored by Jenny Phillips and Tyler Castleton. If you don't know who they are then you don't listen to church music enough :) Hillary Weeks and Mindy Gledhill were also there. If you don't know who they are then...all I can say is I'm sad for you. I'll explain the workshop in one word: AWESOME. But if you let me choose other words I would choose informative, encouraging, fun, scary, overwhelming, and exciting. Tyler Castleton is an incredible songwriter and arranger. He does a lot of the EFY music. He just might be my LDS idol. (Hey, that's a good idea for a contest in Utah...probably already is....) I enjoy so much of (note I did not say ALL of) Hillary and Mindy's music. They write and sing their own stuff, which is what I'm trying to do. PLUS, be mom's at the same time!!! (I am not trying to do that, at this time.) Anyway, it was a very good investment. I learned a lot about the LDS music industry and I was inspired to get writing, writing, writing! I met some nice girls. One of whom I later recognized on a website as a swim-suit model. Interesting. And certainly not one of my options as a back-up career. You go girl!

There was also a song writing competition. I was planning on entering a song to be critiqued by Tyler Castleton and I had my melody and some chords, but that was about it. As time passed, I just kind of neglected it. A week before the deadline I got an email reminding me that it was due in a week. I was like "shoot, I better get on that!" then I thought "nah, it's too late." Well, I happened to have two or three days off in a row during that week and so I decided to give it a shot and see what I could accomplish in that time. Basically, I finished writing and recording it in 16 hours. The recording was horrid. Number one, I recorded it using a digital recorder placed at the side of my piano. Which means crappy, crappy quality. But they said it didn't have to be good quality so I wasn't worried about that part. Number two, I had JUST BARELY finished writing it so I didn't even know how to play it well! Let alone sing along. I am not great at singing and playing at the same time. Depends on the song, I guess. Anyway, I gave a little disclaimer at the beginning warning him it would be a little "choppy" and slower than it is meant to be. Needless to say, I didn't win. HOWEVER, I received a CD with Tyler's critique recorded on it. It was so awesome!!! And so encouraging! He really liked it, though he acknowledged it was a little difficult to get the true feel because it was so broken up. He only gave me a few suggestions of how to fix it and otherwise thought it was a great song!! YAY ME!!!!

THEN, I participated in the singing competition. Tyler and Jenny wrote a song that is going to be featured on her upcoming album. Long story short, I went to the recording studio and met up with Tyler and their sound guy, Scott. It was SO INCREDIBLE to be in an actual recording studio. I felt so cool, like a real live singer or something!!! I was in the little sound booth singing into that microphone with the round thing in front of it and wearing the headphones with only one side on (just like the professionals. Actually that's how you're supposed to do it.) I sang it through a couple times and then they burned a CD for me so I can have a copy of me singing. Tyler was so encouraging! He asked me what my goals were and I told him I just wanted to write music in my spare time as a full time mom and put an album together whenever I had a collection of good songs and he said he totally thought I'd be able to do that. This is after we had talked about my voice and my song that I had submitted. He remembered it and again told me what a great song he thought it was. He couldn't believe I wrote it in such a short amount of time, or that it was my first song every with lyrics! He said that if I just fixed the things he suggested I fix that he thought it'd be good enough to pitch-meaning get it recorded! YAY! So I was totally excited and encouraged and inspired. But then I didn't win. I didn't even make top twenty! So then I got disappointed, and angry, and accused Tyler of being a liar-face (just kidding...kind of. only in my head. And maybe to one person) I'm still working through it, but I don't really think they would have been so encouraging if they didn't think I had SOME talent. One of the big emphasis' at the workshop was that it's okay to be told "no" and you just have to keep working at it. So that's what I'm going to try to do. I tried to post the song to this blog so you could hear it, but I haven't found a way to do so. So just imagine the most awesome thing you've ever heard and that's what it sounds like :)

So this has been a really long post so I'll post the other TOTALLY EPIC events in another post! PEACE!!!!