Call me pathetic but for the first time in a while these holidays I hung out with some friends! Usually conversations happen like this:

"Hey Calum are you going to xxxxx?"

"Xxxxx is happening? I never knew that!"

This time I was actually invited to my friend Alex's little birthday gathering on Saturday at his house and so I asked my friend instead if she was invited...of course she was! I ended up going and caught up with a few old high school friends there. Alex had some of his Air Force buddies there too. Our side formed sorta the sober side while the Air Force guys did the drinking for us. It was pretty cool catching up with the guys though as I hadn't seen anyone since uni finished!

Just last night while watching War of the Worlds on TV I got a text from my sometimes-neighbour Zippo asking if I wanted to come over and play some board games and stuff, so since we had seen War of the Worlds how many times, we went over and played a few games with her while catching up with her after all this time. It's been ages since I last talked to her!

And finally Boxing Day sales...I went to West City on Boxing Day and it was packed! I don't think I had ever seen it that full before! I'm glad I wasn't Aonghas who had to work at Cotton On during that day. They have no air conditioning and when you have heaps of people in a confined space it gets a bit hot and smelly!

We finally bought ourselves an DSLR camera, getting the Canon 450D. It's sorta the only one that we could afford (that was a Canon of course!). We've started taking random photos around the house but we're going to see how it fares when we take photos of the fireworks tonight when it hits New Years!

We started our Christmas celebrations on Christmas Eve with a concert in the evening in which my brothers, Jenny and Jireh from our youth group and I performed as a string group. We performed five pieces - Jesu Joy of Our Desiring, Deck the Halls, Hark! The Herald Angels Sing, Hallelujah Chorus and We Wish You a Merry Christmas. We were somewherei in the middle of the concert so we prepared in the library and sat there and mucked around until it was our turn to sing with the carolling group and then perform as the string group.

Our string group performance went not too badly! We didn't screw up and we got through without a hitch! Too bad the little kids were running around making noises and crying though!

We also got our Secret Santa presents. I ended up getting this Rubix Cube game thing, while Aonghas got a High School Musical 3 soundtrack (there's a story behind it - Aonghas came up with the High School Musical theme for our youth group's board) and Hamish got this calendar thing.

Prior to that concert we had rushed around dropping off presents to family friends and went over to farewell Chen who was leaving for Australia early the next morning. Aonghas and I turned up at the door in our black uniform and Chen's mum asked if we were going partying!

Earlier that morning of Christmas Eve it was finally the day we decided to replace our TV! We've been living off a 21" TV for the past year after our 29" blew on us. We went all the way to Manukau City to buy this LCD TV and got this salesperson who was pushing us to buy another brand which was at a higher price. The only thing was I only had enough for the one we had in mind so we stuck to our guns and got the one we came for!

We got home, bought ourselves a Freeview box and went about connecting everything together. I have to say HD is amazing! You notice the camera movement so much more and the picture is extremely clear! I'm a little concerned at how some tickers (especially TVNZ News) is occasionally blurry though. For some reason BBC News' news ticker isn't too blurry though.

With Freeview we seem to be watching TVNZ7 quite a lot, especially its news every hour and some of the interesting documentaries they have on. Admittedly some of the news headlines on their news ticker are useless/pointless and a lot of the news is repeated but with no other TV news alternative it'll have to do for now. On the other hand I haven't come across anything too interesting on TVNZ6 (the other Freeview-exclusive channel). I did come across Bumble and remembered reading that Jason Gunn does Bumble's voice. Now that just puts you off Bumble doesn't it!

On the night of Christmas Eve I was busy writing Christmas emails and watching Christmas movies when Christmas Day came along.

The next morning we had our Christmas church service. We woke up late and rushed to church a few minutes before it started! It was a combined service with the other churches so it was a lot more packed than usual. Our string gruop was due to perform at the beginning and the end of the service. We managed to perform without a hitch and then left the hall for the backroom.

Once we got to the backroom after our performance we didn't really have much to do while waiting for the service to end but to play cards! We had a few rounds of various card games before going outside and watching the guys play around with the tractor. We went back inside to build card towers...yes that's how we spent our Christmas morning!

The service lasted over two hours thanks to all the baptisms going on as well. Finally we performed right at the end of the service. Everyone remained seated to hear us play Hallelujah, which we nearly stuffed up when Hamish got ahead of time! Fortunately we all regained our places and finished together. We began We Wish You A Merry Christmas and that's when everyone just upped and left! The service must've been too long for them to sit any longer!

For the rest of Christmas Day we were sitting at home finding something to watch on ad-free TV. Sadly this year Christmas TV was really poor! I decided to use my time sending the remaining Christmas emails/texts. We ended up playing with my Rubix cube and watching The Simpsons Movie while starving (since our mum forgot to go shopping for food the night before!). Our parents had gone over to the neighbours to give them a present. We watched Home Alone 2: Lost in New York which was our first time watching something in HD! It was cool watching the movie for the first time in a while. You notice things you didn't when you watched it as a little kid.

The other television highlight of the night was Love Actually, one of my (and TV One Breakfast's Paul Henry's) favourite Christmas movies! Once again it didn't fail to disappoint! I really enjoyed the soundtrack music too! Sadly I didn't watch Notting Hill the night before, which is apparently better than Love Actually!

So that was pretty much our Christmas, spending half the day at church playing cards and then the other half of the day watching TV!

Christmas is upon us - the decorations are up, the carols are playing, the people are shopping, yay for the festive season!

On Saturday a few of the fellowship groups from our church including our youth group went to Waitakere Hospital to do some carolling. It was a bit random and felt a bit weird because it was like a group of Asians stopping at various places such as beside nurses' stations, in empty lounges and along some corridors singing carols in English to what seemed to be an invisible audience! I guess the people in the wards probably would've been able to hear us even if they couldn't see us. There was one time when we heard clapping about ten metres down the corridor after we finished singing! We also had one elderly patient in a wheelchair who told us she'd be offended if we didn't sing Silent Night! So we happily obliged! However there was one guy sitting in the lounge before we arrived. I saw him fiddling with the remote control so I'm sure he must've been trying to watch TV before we invaded his territory! Apparently he sang along with us once we got going though so that wasn't too bad then.

Our next round of carolling will be outside the Tofu Shop near Warehouse Stationery. Oh dear goodness.....

Our church is also having a Christmas Eve concert at church and I was asked to get some music performance prepared for it. Originally I thought we would play an accordion trio as well as maybe get some of the others from our youth group to join us to form a string group. The others were keen to get the string group going and with the help of one of the church members who is really good at music, we've been practising lately. It'll be the first time I've performed the cello since 2006!

As for the accordion trio, I've been trying my hardest to find suitable music to play. After attempting to arrange some big-band/orchestral music for three accordions before giving up, I decided to juts look for quartet music on the net. I managed to find Once in Royal David's City which sounded really cool and a jazzy version of God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen. We went through them the night before the day the lady chasing me up wanted to hear them when I discovered the latter didn't sound too great. I ended up spending all night looking for other Christmas songs and listening to them with no success. Unfortunately I suffered from Christmas carol haunting throughout the night :S

Anyway the lady who has been chasing me up on the music performance has been (I think) a little worried, thinking that nothing has been prepared for the concert which is only a week and a half away as she isn't aware of the string group's existence. She wanted to hear our accordion trio yesterday at church. Just before she did though the guy helping run our string group talked to her and she realised there was a bit of a miscommunication and decided they would probably just go for the string group and not the accordion trio. I ended up wasting the first few weeks of my holiday on nothing!

We went Christmas shopping (and buying a new lightbulb for our newish fridge!) and one of the funniest things I found was this - soft toys that are part of a 'Fruit Salad' series, such as Tracy Tangerine and Pamela Pineapple with tags that say

'NOT FOR CONSUMPTION'

It turns out there was an actual reason for why our fridge/freezer hasn't been working lately! It hasn't been all that cold inside either our fridge or our freezer, which is joined together. The motor also turns on periodically, which we originally thought was normal.

Well, the repair guy came over the other day and it turns out there was a gas leak in our fridge and so the motor has been working over-time to make up for the extra work. In the end it has resulted in our fridge not working. We could get it repaired but it would cost just as much as a new fridge.

It was just fortunate that when we mentioned it to our aunty and uncle who came to visit the other night (and we managed to tidy the lounge in an hour! Probably because we chucked everything into other rooms and shut the doors!) as they had a spare fridge that they said we could have!

This morning we got up early and had to empty our fridge and then try shift it out of the house which turned out to be quite a difficult task. Our dad put two planks of wood on the steps and we used it as a ramp to push the fridge down.

We then went over to our aunty and uncle's and they put the fridge in their car which made it resemble a hearse, only with a fridge in it rather than a coffin! We took it home, brought it inside and got it going.

We now have a fridge that actually works!

Pharmacy interviews began this week and because I had nothing to do, I decided to help out! I originally put down my name for all three days, both morning and afternoon sessions. A week before though I thought that maybe two days will be enough so I pulled out of the last day.

I wasn't sure what to expect, except that this might be a good chance to meet some new people. At least that part was right. There were quite a few interesting people from as far as Rotorua, Wellington and Christchurch! My job was to chat to the students waiting in the foyer for their interviews, to calm them down, relax them, and then take them to their right interview room! The helpers I was with were mostly first years, fortunately people I knew which was cool!

We started off assigning one interview room to each person - we would take students to that particular interview room. As the day wore on though I ended up spending more and more time just hanging in the foyer chatting up the girls...and guys...

Most of the students who had interviews on the first day were students who had just completed their first year at uni. Sadly most of them were biomed students, and even sadder was the fact that many of them had medicine interviews and were just treating the pharmacy interview as practice! How dare them!!

There were one or two school leavers on the first day who we thought must've had a special reason for having their interview so early (as usually school leavers have their interviews in January!). One of those people was Grammy, this girl who used to learn the violin with us till she found another teacher and has become heaps better!

The afternoon session on the second day though was full of school leavers so they must've run out of students to interview for alternative admissions! The second day wasn't as bright and fun as the first day wihch could be attributed to several possible reasons - different helpers, the weather was miserable on the second day, or the school leavers were a lot more tense and not as talkative!

There were quite a few familiar faces who came by too. Chen for one had his interview in the morning of the second day. Not too long after my intermediate school friend Lance rang me asking me to help him get to the Pharmacy School for his interview! Later in the day this girl asked me if I was Szelin's neighbour, and then told me she was her friend from St Doms! This other girl also asked me if I was Aonghas's brother, as she went to this science camp with him eariler this year and I looked like him!

The most memorable moment must've been on Monday, the first day, when we were waiting for this person to arrive for his/her interview at about 10.50am. This guy came in at about 11am and we assumed he was that person and told him he was a little late and sent him to the interview room. A little while later he was sent out and we were told there was a bit of a mix-up! He was supposed to have his interview at about 11.30am. He had a very similar name to the 10.50am girl! He told us his interview started off along the lines of

"So you play badminton?"

"Noo........"

So that guy was lucky and got an interview and a half!

Another memorable moment was when I took this girl to her interview room and she asked me if I used to Rutherford College as she just finished school there! Rutherford represent!!!!

So my pharmacy pride started to shine and grow thanks to those past two days. That's the REAL reason why I wanted to help out of course...oh and also because of the really nice morning tea, lunch and afternoon tea we were provided! Niiiiiiiiiice.....

My brothers and I performed with the Auckland Symphony Orchestra in their carols concert at the Auckland Town Hall on Friday night which was really fun! I sat with Hamish right at the back of the viola section and right next to the drums which was deafening at times! Aonghas was filling in for the second violins so he was on the other side of the stage to us.

Prior to the performance we had to look all over the place for black dress shirts as it is the Auckland Symphony Orchestra uniform. I can't believe how much black shirts cost! Some places like Hallensteins cost over $100! The cheapest we could find was at Farmers for $30! Even then there was only one left of each of our sizes!

The programme was fairly similar to previous years' Christmas concerts except for the solo performances by various choirs that formed the combined choir which performed along with us. The solo performances were mostly own compositions by the respective choirs' church music directors and they were really catchy and moving songs! Our section leader (our violin/viola teacher) gave us all reindeer antlers to wear just before we played Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. I brought along my mini-santa hat as well but when I tried putting on both of them they fell off not once but twice! Hopefully nobody saw that! Then again I was at the back so probably not!

After the show we got a photo with the conductor Gary Daverne who asked us when we were going to join permanently, so we might have to think about that over the holidays!

--

Yesterday morning was the end-of-year concert at the music school where I teach recorder. I was a little worried as I wasn't too sure how ready my students were and this concert is usually my best chance to prove myself as a teacher. I guess the students sorta reflect how well I teach!

Fortunately recorder was in the middle of the concert so I was able to go through a few pieces with my students in one of the back rooms before they had to perform. My students were a little unfocused though and after one student discovered that poking me in the side with her recorder gives me an 'electric shock', they all started doing it! Unfortunately there was this girl from my church who learns flute there who was warming up in the same room and started dissing me and the recorder! I'm going to have to get her back next time I see her at church!

Anyway my students went up on stage. My two youngest students who were only about 5 years old and had never played together till the performance performed Jingle Bells. I made a little booboo when I introduced them to the audience - I got them mixed up! My older Korean first year students each performed a duet with me by memory which was sooo impressive, before they peformed a duet together on their own! The recorder section of the concert concluded with my two more advanced students performing on treble recorders.

My students did so well! I was so proud of them! I gave them their reports and some lollies afterwards and I got a present from two of my students, the most I ever have in one year since I started teaching two years ago! I wanted to take a photo with my students but I didn't have a camera so one of my students' parents took one but just before I managed to get their email address I had to rush back on stage to perform violin!

After all the prizes were awarded and the concert finished, I had a chat with my boss about next year. I've been a little worried about how many students I'll be getting next year since quite a few of my students are going to learn other instruments like violin and flute next year. It turns out that next year there will be a policy that if you are under seven years old and want to learn violin you must do one year of recorder before you can,  so they'll just give me all the younger students who know nothing! I've also asked if they can advertise that I can teach music theory too, so hopefully I'll be able to get some students to sit some music theory exams!

Us three brothers were about to leave when our violin teacher invited us to coffee at a nearby cafe which was nice. I tried a spirilina, which apparently has seaweed and some other stuff to give it a green colour. It tasted a lot better than it looked though!

To continue with the music, we had to off to church afterwards for a meeting about the upcoming children's summer camp we're helping out with at camp and also our first string group rehearsal! Let's just say we've got a bit of practice to do before the Christmas Eve concert...

FREE FAMILY CONCERTS

SING-ALONG CAROLS
and
POPULAR CHRISTMAS MUSIC
CONCERT

with the
AUCKLAND SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
CONDUCTOR: Gary Daverne O.N.Z.M.

Featuring
The combined Church Choirs of
Church of Jesus Christ Latter Day Saints
Greyfriars Presbyterian Church
Manurewa E.F.K.S. Choir
Tangaroa College Choir

Great Hall - Auckland Town Hall - THE EDGE®
FRIDAY 5 December 2008 at 7.30 p.m.
(Duration about 80 minutes, no interval, tickets not required)

Song Sheets provided

FREE ADMISSION - ALL WELCOME

The Auckland Symphony Orchestra
acknowledges the support of the Auckland and North Shore City Councils and Creative NZ

Saturday night was the first time our Sunday School class ever socialised outside of church. We had a barbeque at the house of one of the girls. Jennifer and her mum who helps out our class kindly hosted the occasion at their house!

We were a bit rushed as we were coming from accordion lessons over in North Shore and we decided to take a detour before coming home to meet our mum! We heard about some car audio sale at this shop and so decided to check it out. One of the girls offered to have a look at the speakers in our car and when she saw the wiring, she commented

"This is hori wiring!"

So to the barbeque...Their house is massive! Most people were there by the time we got there but at least we got there before anyone had started eating! We arrived at the same time as their neighbour, who turned out to be a pretty cool guy!

Most of the night we just spent talking to each other, making conversation, and of course eating! This time I didn't eat any mussels for fear of getting sick! After dinner we all sat around and shared our favourite Bible verse, what it meant and why it was our favourite. I hadn't thought about it much and so I just came up with a random one!

We finished the night off by hanging out in the lounge and talking for a while longer before all going our separate ways.

The next day at Sunday School there was even talk of another get-together! One can only hope..

Angie turned up to Sunday School for the first time in aaages! It was good catching up with her! I felt a little bad because I didn't tell her about the Sunday School barbeque! Hopefully the next get-together will be enough to encourage her to come more regularly!