Hesty made this for Ruby Starfire because there was extra Pumpkin Puree lying around but not enough to make more Pumpkin Bread. While it's not something he would normally drink, Ruby does find it a wonderful autumn drink, finely paired with Pumpkin Bread, and a terrific way to use up any remaining pumpkin.

Another nice little recipe from CookingWithApril (video down below) and a very good way to deal with extra pumpkin. Unlike most pumpkin bars Hesty has tried, these are not greasy and despite the amount of sugar in them, they don't taste sweet at all. My dear sister Hesty says to try these with whipped cream or plain yogurt for a yummy morning breakfast.

This is a fajita recipe with a slightly Asian twist, but it's to die for. The recipe and video aren't Hesty's, they're from the site she found it on.

As part of her work within the Youth Peace Ambassadors Network at the Council of Europe, Karen Pong organised and hosted, in partnership with The American University of Paris, the Youth Against Human Trafficking: How Students Can Get Involved in Prevention Conference on 11 April 2013. The aim of this conference is to promote on-campus awareness-raising as an effective and powerful tool for young people in human trafficking prevention and to inspire all university students and youth to become motivated and committed advocates and activists of human trafficking prevention.

The Youth Against Human Trafficking: How Students Can Get Involved in Prevention Conference was prepared for university students, both undergraduate and graduate, in order to educate, inspire, and inform about the major issues that are part of trafficking as a human rights abuse. The project is meant to engage students about a human rights issue, which affects an inordinate number of women, men, and children around the world today. American University of Paris students and alumnus, in partnership with the MA in Law department, have brought together an event on how youth can be involved in prevention, education, and potential career opportunities in human trafficking prevention. We are proud to be a part of this special event.

I snuck into my sister Haley's library to borrow this video. She took this video a long time ago when she was learning how to play with pewter. She calls it "Melting the Queen"

Things like this are why I find my sister Haley a little scary, and so fascinating. When she's bored, she melts little figure, in this video a chess queen. She likes the smell of the metal and the sound of the figure hitting the melting pot. 

There's something fascinating about this video, but I can't put my finger on it. The sounds the queen makes as she moves. The way her solid body melds into the liquid metal. The way her face melts at the last moment before she falls in. How she slides into the silver liquid beneath the black carbon. The regal majesty returning to whence she came. 

I guess sister Haley spends her time exploring physical poetry instead of spoken.

Here is my first in a series of Christmas songs! Have to do them now because nobody likes Christmas songs after Christmas, go figure. 

I found the sheet music on 8notes and sang all five versus. If you want to hear words muddying up my beautiful voice, you can sing them yourself ;) 

It's difficult to sing off of Western sheetmusic. The notes are written differently and everything is upside down. My higher notes are towards the bottom, but the sheet music has them towards the top. 

I also got bored of singing the same song, over and over, so I started messing around with it ;) Here's the music and lyrics if you want to play or sing along :)

I have a special project coming up and it requires me to change how I sing, I have to sing only the Western scale. I hate the Western scale. The Western scale is just not as pretty or fluid as the Pentatonic scale that is traditional for my beautiful voice.

Here's my beloved RubyStarfire helping me train my voice. It's kind of a long and boring process, a lot of repeating notes until I get them right.

The Western scale is usually written one of two ways:

• A - B - C - D - E - F - G
• Do - Re - Mi - Fa - So - La - Ti/Si

You have to pay attention to the notes to make sure everything sounds good. My voice also has a very limited range when singing the Western scale, I can only reach three octaves.

The Pentatonic scale that's traditional for my voice uses the following notes:

• A - B - D - E - F#

This scale is much more beautiful and fluid than the Western scale. It's hard to play or sing something that sounds bad, you have to put lots and lots of effort into it. Almost anything you play or sing will sound alright if not beautiful. I can also cover four octaves when singing, this gives my singing a much greater range and lets my voice do more.

There is apparently a piece of music hidden in Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper. There's apparently some disagreement as to if Leonardo did it intentionally or not. All I know is there is something playable in the painting and Leonardo probably won't get around to telling us the answer any time soon.

Supposedly, the hands and loaves of bread correspond to notes, and you should read the music from right to left (the same way Leonardo wrote). There's news articles and Wikipedia which can tell you all about it. 

The music is supposed to be in the same style as what was common in the time that the painting was made. It sounds a little bit gothicy (time period, not the people who wear black and pretend they can't feel anything) or chanty. I decided to take a shot at the song. After all, how many people can say they've played Da Vinci's music? I didn't do a performance quality piece, then again, I just wanted to play it.

I'm still experimenting with my new toy. The Samson Go Mic is doing incredibly well, the sound quality is better than anything I've had access to before. It even allowed RubyStarfire and I to give a private performance online :)

RubyStarfire got me a new toy! He got me a Samson Go Mic to use when recording songs. Before, all I had was the crappy little mic on the front of the computer; now I have something to make higher quality recordings, and it's portable! Here's a video I made while experimenting with the new mic *ignore the man touching me, I'm the one who's important here ;)*.

I did a little tuning exercise to make sure my voice was in good shape followed by some random playing and fingering exercises. The mic was inside to catch the full range of my singing, but I think it caught too much of my range. I will continue to experiment with different positions and see how well they work. 

The mic was real easy to setup, I just plugged it into the computer and voila! There was one slight hiccup, the computer decided it was a sound out device as well as sound in, so it tried to use the mic as a speaker. It also comes with music editing software that can record audio and add audio to video, but unfortunately it doesn't capture video as well :( 

Recording the video was a lot of fun. It's been awhile since I've been done a recording and I hope to do many more in the upcoming months. Follow my progress with new music here!