I'm been so bogged down with school and other activities that I've had no time to log on here. Now that everything's settling down I figured I'd check in...

I spent the last 5 weekends (from Thanksgiving to Christmas) playing with the Metrolink Toy Train band. Each Friday, Saturday, and Sunday we rode the train to 3-5 different train stations throughout Southern California and played for hundreds (sometimes thousands) of people. The songs we played were pretty generic, but fun nevertheless. I was the trumpet soloist on one piece. There's a recording of us on a video hosting site, but the sound quality is pretty bad. If you want to check it out, just Google "2009 Holiday Toy Express Montebello" and you'll find us.

And... Bionicle's ending. I think it's a good time for Lego to end it. I had lost interest in the storyline and the Stars sets are a nice way to cap the whole thing off. My sister got me the Gresh Star set for Christmas. I also got 2 jazz CDs, a sweater, and the book "Hidato." It's a book of number puzzles similar to sudoku. I've been playing a ton of Japanese math puzzles recently. They're pretty addicting. I've also been doing Nonograms.

Over Christmas break, I brought an old trombone home from my high school. I spent a day washing it out, cleaning it up, buying the cheapest trombone mouthpiece I could find, and now I'm learning trombone. I bought the mouthpiece for $18 at a local music store. It was one of those Asian rip-off mouthpieces with no brand name. I love Bach mouthpieces for my trumpet, but trombone Bach mouthpieces cost around $80, which was way out of my range. So I ended up buying a "Trombon/Euphomum Mouthpiece." Yes, they misspelled "trombone" AND "euphonium." Still, it works fine and is perfect for me as a beginning player.

My marching band didn't do a Christmas concert this year because we had to train a lot of new freshmen how to march, which took longer than normal, and by the time we had finished our marching season, we only had one week of school left and that wasn't enough time to learn Christmas music. So I got together a small ensemble of 7 other instrumentalists and 3 percussionists and we played "Sleigh Ride" at the choir's Christmas concert. It's an overplayed song, but it's fun. Hopefully I can get a recording of us posted on Facebook or some other site.

The other Christmas concert I did was the jazz band Christmas concert. It was probably the best concert I've given at my high school... there was so much energy in the room. At one point a bunch of people got up and just started dancing in the aisles. It was great.

And... there's a lot of other interesting stuff that I've been doing, and there are several funny stories relating to these concerts but I'm too lazy to type it all out now.