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.