The correct way to spend a snow day!

I just found this post that I had forgotten to publish, so I though I would do that now!
In the 12 years (plus 1 for kindergarten) I have been in the public school system, I have experienced three snow days. The third one occurred last week (well, because I'm posting this today, it was actually more like a few months ago). The first one in 5 years! Since I am a senior in highs chool, this will be my last snow day, so I made the most of it.

My siblings and I suited up in our snow gear and went outside. Since the weather had been relatively warm recently, the snow was wet, perfect for building snowmen, and even igloos! Now, I had never built an igloo before, but I understood the basic concept. Traditionally, or at least on tv, an igloo is built with little snow cubes. We do have some of those molds but that would have taken forever. When the snow is wet, you really only have 1 day to work, because it gets cold over night and then the wet snow freezes making it useless for building.  So instead of making hundreds of small cubes, I thought it would be easier to make it out of giant snow balls that get smaller and smaller as the igloo gets taller and taller. This was a much more efficient way to make a fairly decent igloo (although it did end up a bit lumpy if you look at the pictures below).
To start my sister and I  rolled the largest snow balls we could and placed them in a ring. Then we started making snow balls that were small enough for us to lift so that we could make another row on top of the first ring. We slowly shrank the ring so that eventually, it would become just a single ball as the roof.
Overall, I think we were very successful. It may not be the prettiest igloo, but my brother though it was awesome, and it was tall enough for one person to stand in at a time. Here are all of the pictures I took. (If you haven't noticed yet, I really enjoy taking tons of pictures!)

the Front

one side

another side

the inside

Looking up at the ceiling, although its really hard to perceive depth in this picture

 

Me (left) and my sister

Me and my sister when we are actually looking at the camera

My sister and I again 

My sister and my dad, no more explanation needed :P

Music for Seniors by Seniors

At our high school, participation in NHS requires a senior leadership project. My friend and I wanted to do our project together, and since we are both in orchestra, we decided to help out in the community by providing entertainment for senior citizens at nursing homes. We played for about 2 hours at 2 different nursing homes in our local area. We both played our violins for most of the time, but we had a few of our friends come and play too. Here are some photo's of us (I only have photos from the first nursing home we played at. My friend didn't realize that she had to be out of town for the second one so I played by myself at the second one, and its pretty hard to take pictures while playing the violin :P ). 

My friend Lesley(on left) and I

My and my quartet from school
we played "the bird" by Handel

Lesley playing with our friend Sarah

Me playing violin

Me playing piano (WAY in the back!)

We had a lot of fun. At first, it is a bit frightening to have to stand up in front of so many people to play, but I was able to relax a little when I saw that they still enjoyed the music even if I made a mistake once in a while. They really appreciated us playing there, and hopefully we can do this again in the summer.