So, I don't know if I've told anyone this, but Easter (and the days leading up to it) tend to be the most tiring, but also most fruitful days of the year, in many ways. Easter actually is my favourite celebration in the entire year, for those who have wondered.

There was the annual last-minute practice in time for Saturday night. Not sharing the video this time because I think past years' videos should show exactly what I was practising. But outside of that, there is so much euphoria I get from Easter Vigil, and the actual Easter Sunday, that it overpowers any other joy I've had up to that point. It feels to me like the surest celebration of light banishing darkness, like the wonderful things I had never imagined before could actually come true.

One day, somewhere in the future, I would love to make an Easter album. There is so much inspiration I can draw from, and there is so much to share with all of you, which I suppose I will do, in the months or years ahead when recording begins. There will likely be an extended version of Sound of Creation if this album ever happens.

Outside of the liturgical celebrations and the immense amounts of drumming, what have I been doing?

Well, I have been practising drawing digitally... again. I have been trying to pick up what I seemed to have lost touch on. So I've just been doing things in my own time. Those of you who know what this image is, you will be able to guess what I have been practising on.

I need to concentrate on making as much of these scenes as I can.

Aside from that, my birthday fell on Wednesday, and I had the most wonderful surprise on that day. I normally go volunteering at Soundskills, a creative place / studio thing at Brookfield, one of Preston's suburbs. On Wednesdays, it's samba drumming over there. Halfway through this particular session, my fiancé Seán and all my friends gathered together and brought a chocolate cake marked "MEEP DAY" and sang Happy Birthday. <3 It was so lovely. I hold it very fondly in my heart even now. It's the best birthday I've had to date, just for how people came together that day. It wasn't a show of pomp, or how big a party I could throw. It was just a surprise made by friends.

So. This was the other of two birthday presents I got this year. I feel advanced now. <3 I already use a good number of sticks in this bag -- the mallets and cloth beaters and a few of the sticks are mine. But this thing came with even more sticks and brushes. A lot of them were size 2B. I was not going to pass them up. A friend of Seán's and mine described it as looking like "an archer's quiver" when it was zipped up.

You be the judge, people.