The open house 2012

Last weekend my mum had an Open House to show her artwork. It was part of an Art and Music Trail called AP and Beyond and it was organised by Everyone's Climbing Tree.


Our upstairs neighbour and friend had an Open House as well. It was really annoying because loads of people rung on our doorbell asking for her, because they thought it was her house. We had to keep telling them that our house wasn't our neighbour's, but they were welcome to come in anyway, to see my mum's art. Some people were really rude. Well, they didn't actually say anything rude, but they didn't even try to pretend to be interested in her art. It wasn't because my mum's art was boring at all; it was just that a lot of the people who came were the type of people who didn't like abstract art. There were still quite a few who did, though. One guy looked an art video that my mum had made, for quite a while. He was the only one who looked at the video that first day.


On the second day of the Open House my sister and I were invited to a birthday party of our friend Matthew's so we missed the exhibition. My parents said lots of people came but it was lucky I was not home because it was so busy and there were lots of small children I would have found potentially annoying!


The weeks hard work because we were in the middle of painting our flat and decided to concentrate only on the part front part. But because we were part of a mini-trail called Alice in Recycle-Land it was exciting too. We were responsible for Tweedledum and Tweedledee and were going to do a grafitti of them on the front of our house but it had been raining and we did not want the chalk and chalk pastels to run so we found an old door and drew each tweedle on top of one another. I am quite proud of it.


Someone we knew bought one of Mum's paintings soon afterwards. I quite enjoyed the open house, but I don't know whether I'd like to be there next time if my mum does it.

Exhibition visitors.

More visitors.

Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee

One of the paintings.

The gala

I got into the swimming gala. When I heard the news, I wasn't sure whether to be happy or not, because I knew it would be stressful if I got in. Anyway, I got to be in two races. Race 1 was a length of backstroke. My competitors all had nice smiles, but, I came second to last. We got handed these tiny laminated pieces of card with the numbers that we came in written on them. We had to take them to this table that had grumpy-looking people sitting behind them. The jobs of the grumpy looking people were to record what order everyone came in, and what schools they were from. There was a ton of waiting around to do before the gala began, and also before it was time for me to do my second race. The second race that I was in was a two person relay, back-stroke. I didn't win that one either, but I didn't get told what number I came. 


Our school didn't win the gala, but no-one came last in any of the races.


When we got back to school, I thought everyone would want to know the results. Only one or two people asked me, and they didn't seem happy or sad about the results.


Within a few days, everyone forgot about the gala. 

Everyone's Climbing Tree drumming workshop

Last Friday I went to a drumming workshop at Everyone's climbing tree. I already do drums, but I do the the drumkit kind, so I thought it would be quite fun to try out African drums, which is what the Everyone's climbing tree drumming is all about. 

The drum instructor was really nice, and quite relaxed, so it didn't feel like a school lesson. At the beginning of the workshop, I found it hard because I couldn't see the instructor, but I went to the front later on, and found it much easier. We played a few different rhythms. Sometimes I felt really lost, but I always managed to pick up the rhythm again.

I loved doing the drumming. I'd say it was easily one of my favourite things that I did last week. When we went drumming, we took a two people we knew with us. They said that they liked the drumming too and that they wanted to go again.

The drums we used were quite big, but not so big that it was hard to use them. We had to hold them at a slight angle away from us so that we wouldn't hurt our wrists, or something like that. There were two ways to sound the drum. One was hitting the side, and one was hitting the middle. They made different sounds, and there are hundreds of ways to combine them for different rhythms.

My hands hurt a little while I was playing the drum, but I'd still go again to the workshop because I like music, and enjoyed the chilled atmosphere created by Alex, who ran the drumming.

Exciting News about the Henrietta Branford writing competition

Around six weeks ago, my dad took me for a quick visit to the library. I saw a poster advertising a writing competition, and breezed through the writing on it. I wasn't sure whether it was open to children or to adults, but I thought I might have seen something saying that it was open to people under nineteen. Soon after I read the poster, I made a mental note to ask my dad to come see the poster and tell me whether I was able to enter. I didn't feel like checking for my self, because I wanted to focus on choosing books. My dad had dropped me off at the library, so I couldn't ask him about it straight away. When my dad did come back, I forgot to ask him to look up the competition. I only remembered later on, I quickly asked my mum to take me to the library to find out more about the competition. The reason I quickly asked her was because I'd also remembered that the poster had said the closing date was very soon, so if I wanted to enter, I would have to find out everything very soon so that I could start writing as soon as possible.

My mum took me to the library, and we found out that the competition was open to people of my age group. We took a few pictures of the poster with her phone so that we wouldn't have to remember everything.

Soon after that, I got started writing. When we went onto the website, it said that the competition entry deadline was being postponed, so I had more time to write.  On the website, I also read the stories of the past winners. In my opinion, those stories were really good, so I thought that I didn't have a very high chance of winning. Despite that, I decided to carry on writing, because I don't think that competitions are all about winning; it's nice just to participate. 

After a while, I'd finished my story, so I just had type it up. Now the editing needed to be done. There was a serious lot of editing to do, because my story had gone extremely far past the maximum number of words that the competition allowed. I thought that it wouldn't be possible to get my story finished in time because we had to go to someone's house. Also, there were only a few hours left to submit it. My mum let me take a computer with, though, and the people we visited helped me so much with the editing and choosing a title. I'm really glad they helped, because I don't think I would've been able to send in my story in time if they hadn't.

I submitted my story just before midnight.

The next time I went onto my email, I saw that I'd got an email from the competition people thanking me for sending my story in.

A few days later, we visited the people who helped me narrow down the words for my story. They asked me how it went, and I told them that I didn't think I'd won because I hadn't got an email or letter saying saying so, but that I'd sent my story in successfully.

Soon later, I got an email saying that I was one of the six competition winners. I'm very happy because the person sending the email said that the standards of the hundreds of competition entries were quite high.

In a few weeks I'll be going to collect the six books that I won, and I'll also be meeting a few authors including Jaqueline Wilson.

 

Sea-monkey babies

Until recently, the sea-monkeys hadn't been doing very well; most of them died, and the algae wasn't growing. The sea-monkey population just kept shrinking, and I wasn't allowed to buy them the the special sea-monkey medicine because it was too expensive. I didn't know what to do.

Then, I had an idea. I decided to put the tank near a sunny window, and aerate the water. I fed the sea-monkeys, and left them for a while. When I looked at the tank a few weeks later, there was algae and there were babies. There have been baby sea-monkeys before, but they all died. These ones have survived so far. I hope they'll stay living for very long, and grow to the size of the adults. They've actually grown a little already.

Writing about sea-monkeys has reminded me that a some months ago I did a project about them. We were told to do a non-chronological report about an animal of our choice, and I did one about sea-monkeys. Other people chose ordinary animals like tigers, so I got a star for choosing an animal that not many people had heard about.

I've left the tank in the sunlight, and I'm going to check on the sea-monkeys soon, and see whether they've grown bigger.

Tomato plants

Because halloumi cheese is one of my favourite foods, I decided to make myself a special halloumi breakfast a few weeks ago. Obviously, a piece of halloumi wouldn't be as tasty on its own as with tomatoes, so I cut open a tomato to have with it. Inside the tomato, the seeds were already sprouting! I guessed that this was because the tomato had been sitting in the sun for ages, and while it had been sitting there, it had been ripening.

I scooped out the seeds, and put them in a glass, intending to plant them later. After  a few hours, I had another look at the seeds. They had grown some more. I decided that I should plant them as soon as possible, otherwise I would never get round to planting them, and they would die.

Nearly as soon as I planted them, they grew some more. Now there are baby tomato plants growing near the window in our kitchen. I can't wait to be able to harvest the fruit!

Kuih Chara

Lately I've been making a delicious Malaysian dish a lot. It's called kuih chara and it's a bit like an egg shaped pancake with coconut instead of milk. The batter is made with flour, coconut milk, water, pandan leaf essence and egg, and is poured into a pan with lots of half-egg shaped holes. The  holes are arranged in a circle, with one in the middle. This is so that you can pour the batter into the holes in a clockwise order, and then take them out in that order as well, so that they're all cooked for the same amount of time. The dish wouldn't seem very special if I left the explanation there, so I'm going to talk about one of the things that makes the dessert special: the sugar. Just before the batter hardens, a little sugar is added to each half-egg shape. The sugar then sinks to the middle, where the heat melts it. When it sinks to the bottom, the batter covers it up again and hardens around it. A lid is then put onto the pan until the kuih chara cooks through. When the kuih chara is ready, someone sticks the half egg shapes together so that they look like full eggs.


When you bite into one of the kuih charas, the sugar squirts into your mouth. Simply delicious!