New Song: Is It Safe?

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Ah, so back to talking about making music and art and stuff. You probably thought I’d forgotten about that. But no, I’ve been making steady progress the whole time.

First, an aside. Tonight was the spring band concert at the Kids’ school. Lizzy is in 8th grade, so this may be her last one. Certainly then end with this school. Her band director, Mr. A., is a really great guy and excellent teacher. He was Lizzy’s band director at the old school too, so we’ve known him quite a few years and under his guidance Lizzy has grown to be one of the star performers. He gave a special call out to all the graduating kids in the band, and invited Lizzy to come back for Honor Band next year and thru high school. They’re trying to get a band program going at Lizzy’s new high school, so you never know, this may not be the end. And of course, not to be overlooked, Michelle is coming along nicely on clarinet.

Meanwhile, I’ve been working on Black Swan, the eight-minute epic for my next album. The bass, drums, piano and vocals are tracked and sounding really smokin’. Now it’s up to the solos and the finishing instruments. I jammed out a sax part for the rest of the song, but decided I want to work out a real horn arrangement. Probably tenor and bari. I’m also gonna add either a clav or rhythm guitar, or maybe both. This’ll give me a chance to finally plug in some of those effects boxes Martin left me and try and get a sound. Might also motivate me to go out guitar shopping.

I find it’s best to work on songs in pairs, so the other song I’ve been working on is Is It Safe to Go Outside? This was written by Martin, and I found it in a pile of demos a few weeks back. It’s not a horror story, but an ode to that feeling you get that first day of spring when the weather finally turns mild. It’s really a great song, and at first I just wanted to learn it to play on piano, but it’s really worthy of a full production recording. Martin’s demo features a click track and rhythm guitar, and then the vocals, bass, and sax form three interlocking melodies, almost like a fugue. On top of that, he has this really clever way of turning the time around every few bars.

First I learned the bass and sax parts. My piano part will feature ideas from both of these as well as the guitar. Next I added a drum part. This was fun, to create a beat that grooves and yet follows all the intricacies of the arrangement. The kick drum cleaves pretty close to the bass, while the hihat holds down the backbeat. Everything else takes off from there.

The sax part needs to be retracked because it’s out of tune. When I went to learn the part I could see why: Martin plays it on tenor and it’s really high in the range. Those high E’s and F#’s are tough. If I can’t get a good take on tenor I’ll try it on alto to see how that sounds. I may also put in a bari line for some extra bottom.

Neither song has a ready rough mix yet, but soon, soon. Meanwhile, Is It Safe has great lyrics too. Here they are.

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Is It Safe to Go Outside?
by Martin Szinger

Is it safe to go outside?
Is it time to count up all the flowers growing?
Is it safe to feel the sunshine
Like a long-lost friend returning?
Is it OK to roll the windows down?
Take a ride, I want to feel the wind in my face
Blood flowing in my veins

Is it safe to go outside, you know I try to be strong
But the winter’s been too long
Is it safe to go outside, I hope the forecast isn’t wrong
You know this has to be the day

Is it safe to take myself to the park?
Blame it on my alter-ego
It’s a game of bocce for my soul
Knock ‘em down and keep them rolling
What a shame it would have been
To pass you by and not to see the smile on your
Face… shine… wait…
There’s blood flowing in my veins

Is it safe to go outside, you know I try to be strong
But the winter’s been too long
Is it safe to go outside, I hope the forecast isn’t wrong
You know this has to be the day
There’s blood flowing in my veins
There’s blood flowing in my veins
There’s blood flowing in my veins

Patio Project

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Last week was Michelle’s birthday. She’s ten years old now, getting bigger and more helpful and sweeter than ever. She made her own birthday cake from scratch, including pink and purple layers inside and decorated frosting with writing and artwork on top. She’s been getting into watching youtube videos of cake and cupcake decorating ideas, so Jeannie got her a cake decorating kit and helped her out.

Michelle asked for a bike for her birthday, and I got her a nice shiny red one. Twenty-one gears and nice components. Her first ever new bike after a series of hand-me-downs from her big sister. I got my own bike a for my tenth birthday too. It must be the age where the older sibling has stopped growing and wants to keep their bike.

We got a new picnic table for our patio on the same trip. Our old one, a cheap plastic thing, got pretty beat up in some storm a year or two ago, to the point where on leg was practically falling off. I had been going ‘round and ‘round on what the replacement should be. I’d seen a few nice sets around, but they’re crazy expensive. I was considering making my own, so it would the right dimensions and construction, not to mention more economical, but the labor required was trumped by the patio itself. Then I realized I don’t need new chairs, just the table. Old chairs are cheap plastic too, but they’re great: stylish and well-nigh indestructible. We found a new table that matched them quite well. It’s larger, with room for six, and it’s aluminum, so it’s light and well-nigh indestructible too. And it has a perforated top so it won’t blow over in a heavy wind. We got a matching canopy while we were at it, and the whole backyard scene is quite nice now. Looking forward to the summer.

The patio itself is coming up on ten years old. I built it with the help of my father when Michelle was a baby. It took us a week, after I’d done the design and prep work on my own. It was a pretty big project, and I’m glad he helped me out. It’s made of bluesstone put together in a pattern over a bed of sand and gravel. The stones are rectangles ranging from 1’ x 1’ to 2’ x’ 3’.

Designing it was fun, like solving a tessellation puzzle. I followed the style of people’s patios around here, and the stones go together according to rules. First, they only come together in 3-way intersections, never 4. Second, two stones of the same shape/size should not be adjacent and line up. Third, no seam between stones should run in a straight line the whole way through. Lastly, I preferred putting big stones (2’ x 2’ or 2’ x 3’) in the corners. You can see that these rules generate a strong, stable structure that resists slipping or sliding. Of course these rules can generate a large set of patio layouts, so there’s still some art to creating the best one.

When my dad was here a few weeks ago, he observed that the patio is still “doing well”, but close inspection revealed that was not exactly the case. When we made it we leveled the ground in the back yard, taking dirt of the high spot and filling in the low spot. Over the years the low spot had sunk again, so the whole thing needed to be leveled up. Basically this involves lifting the stones one by one and putting sand under them until they’re back up to true. The small ones are pretty easy to handle but the big ones are quite heavy and require special care. I used eight bags (400 lbs.) of sand, with the lowest stones being raised over and inch. It took me four sessions of a few hours each. Now the whole thing is nice and level again, and should stay that way a few years.

Now With Style

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Today was a rainy day, so I took a break from doing stuff outside to finish off a task leftover from the winter, another part of my ongoing site redesign. Remember way back when this blog was new, when blogging was the new trendy thing, and I promised to upgrade my blog’s style to be consistent with the rest of the site? Well I finally got around to it. Only took a little over five years.

The thing is, editing wordpress themes is a real pain. All I really want is a miminal, clean theme, but all the site themes are crufted up with lots of persnickety layout details that don’t do much to enhance the site. I picked a new theme for my site and the style sheet file was over 2000 lines long. This was one of simple ones mind you, and I still ended up throwing away a lot of it.

And there’s still more to go. There’s spacing issues, and I have to get into the various views, particularly the ones for individual posts, and for comments. Soon I will have gone as far is I can go with the css and will have to get into editing the php templates. Hopefully it won’t take me another five years to finish it off.

Mister Blue Sky

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Sun is shining in the sky, there ain’t a cloud in sight. Don’t you know it’s a beautiful day, hey-ey-ey?

The weather has been absolutely gorgeous the last week or so. I’ve been trying to spend as much time outside as possible. Trying to work from home more and take a long break in the middle of the day to do stuff and then come back an sit in front of the computer in the evening. It feels like just a few weeks ago it was still winter and now it’s no jacket required.

Last weekend we went to a fancy party for the parents of the kids’ school. It was a fun time, more than last year, mainly because we know more other parents now. Jeannie really rocked a new pair of really-high-heels she bought to stay ahead of Lizzy, combined with a new little-black-dress. Woo-hoo!

Also last weekend we went upstate to visit Martin and meet my new niece Abbie. She’s a very mellow baby. They’re doing great. My folks were over too. We all had alot of fun. Martin’s been making great progress on making improvements to his new house.

We’ve been making progress here too. Last week I tuned up the kids’ bikes and washed and waxed Jeannie’s car. It rained that night and the next morning the water was all beaded up on the paintjob. Michelle said “Ooh, that looks like a computer background.” I didn’t know exactly what she meant, but Lizzy snapped a picture of it an shaw’nuff if was her desktop background that night.

I also took the Mustang to a couple of local body shops. Neither of them wanted to touch the car because they specialize mainly in collisions, although they all agreed its a great car in great shape. It’s true you really don’t see may of them here in the northeast, although there’s a guy in my neighborhood who has a Model-A Ford, and another guy who has a banana colored Ferrari. Anyway, they say I want to go restoration not just a paintjob, that I want to “do it right”. I was a bit surprised; mainly the paint is dead on the roof and trunk, and there are a couple of minor dings and a tiny rust spot on one fender. I figured they could take care of that. They made the point that you don’t know if there’s more hidden rust, plus they’d want to re-align the doors and all, and in any event they’d want to take off all the chrome etc., and start with new primer on the whole car. Of course this won’t be cheap, but I’ll end up with a show-quality car and the money I put in will increase the car’s value by even more. This was never my ambition, but I guess it’s all or nothing, so I’m considering it. But I’m also considering just letting it be. If I go all-in, then if the engine every goes I’m already committed to fixing that.

The thing is, neither one knows a guy who does restorations. They both recommend I look away from the NYC area where the cost of labor ought to be cheaper. So this is back to being a research project. We’ll see if I get anywhere.

Oh, and Michelle spilled water on my computer and we had to take it apart and dry it out. Now the wifi doesn’t work and the fan sounds like the world’s tiniest jet engine.

Next up: the patio project!!!

Fast Cars and Rock’n’Roll

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Sounds like an exciting title for a post, eh? But no, this might be the most tedious one yet. The springtime random task agenda continues. I got some repairs done on my Mustang last week. I’m hoping to get around to getting the body restored this spring, but first I had to deal with a weird and rather nasty problem. The first time I took it out this season there was a little drippage coming from under the dashboard on the passenger side. Last time I took is out it turned into a pretty good leak, and it was radiator fluid, all over the floor mat! The leak was in the heat exchanger. My mechanic told me he’d have to take apart the whole dashboard to fix it, which was a really major job. But since I don’t drive the car in the winter I don’t run the heater. So we decided a much easier fix was to reroute the radiator hose to bypass the heat exchanger. Problem solved, fast and (relatively) cheap. He also recommended a body shop, so now I have two places to go for an estimate.

Meanwhile, I’m thinking about upgrading some of my furniture to replace the hand-me-down stuff I’ve had since college. A new sofabed downstairs for next time we have houseguests, maybe some end tables, that kind of thing. After all, they say living well is the best revenge, although I’m not sure who my vanquished nemesis is, which is probably not good. Somehow this led to the realization that our house is full again, to the point were we can’t even put things away, so before we can do anything we need to get rid of a few loads of accumulated stuff.

I sifted the thru the game closet and found some minor long-lost treasures: a bunch of wind-up balsa wood airplane kits. Michelle and I had fun putting them together and trying to get them to fly. Next I got rid of a shelf’s worth of old programming books. It’s amazing how books, CD’s, and even videos have become basically obsolete these days, because they’ve become virtualized. At least for some kinds like reference and pulp fiction; I’m sure glad I never got Game of Thrones as printouts. Instant future trash.

But for other kinds it’s still very much worth having the book. The three main categories for me are sheet music, origami books, and comic books, but I suppose it goes for any book where the layout and graphics are more important than the text itself and a bigger page works better than a tiny screen. I also sorted thru my pile of old Origami USA Convention Annual Collections. These are spiral bound and easy to take apart. I got rid of more than half the pages but also came across a lot of great stuff, some of which I want to fold, and some of which gives me new ideas for a subject or an approach.

As far as the CD collection goes, that was what motivated this whole thing in the first place. Most of the music I buy these days still is on CD. You can get pretty much album for $5 or so. But my shelf space is finite, and for the last year or more they’ve been piling up on the stereo, in my studio, and on the dining room table. Somewhere along the line I got in the habit or ripping CD’s and playing the mp3’s rather then playing them directly thru the stereo, so over time a good number of them have become ripped. So I finally sorted thru all the CD’s and put my favorites on the shelf, and put the rest in a box, which I put in the closet, completing the circle of clutter.

Maybe or maybe not an interesting data point, these are the bands for whom I have ten or more records: The Beatles, John Coltrane, Billy Joel (these are Jeannie’s), King Crimson, Led Zeppelin (they only ever had nine albums back in the day, but have since put out a few more), Steely Dan (they only had seven), Rush, and Neil Young. I guess you could say that these are my favorite bands who were also prolific and enduring.

Along the way found quite a few records I haven’t listened too in a while and ripped them for my commute. Now I’m enjoying rediscovering a lot of favorite music. I’m listening alphabetically and I’m up to Jeff Beck. Such great stuff I might just stay with it a while, but next up is Walter Becker.

Back to posting stuff about origami and/or making music soon, I promise.

Lizzy Confirmation

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Lots of good stuff going on these days. The weather continues to be nice, even if it’s a bit on the cool side. The yard is coming along. Everything is growing now, and it looks like I’ll have to mow this weekend. I’ve been going rollerblading every second day or so, weather permitting. Work is good these days. The VP of the platform group singled out my project for praise at a meeting last week. Sure is better than layoffs, political battles or insane deadlines.

Martin and Kathleen had their baby, a girl they named Abbie. Congratulations and looking forward to meeting my newest niece.

Last weekend was a big one for Lizzy too. She’s a teenager now, suddenly wearing contacts and standing six feet tall in high heels, towering over everyone except me. Wow. Saturday was her Honor Band concert, with kids from all over the lower Hudson valley. She played flute and piccolo. The kids sounded really good this year, and had a great selection of songs. Sunday was her Confirmation.

My parents came into town for the weekend, which was really nice. We got to spend alot of good time together talking and catching up. For the ceremony Jeannie’s folks and Mary’s all came up too. Afterwards we had dinner at a great local Italian restaurant and a party back here. Late in the evening my Dad started telling stories about growing up in Hungary and his experiences surviving the war and its aftermath. I’ve been hearing these stories my whole life, but I still find them endlessly fascinating. Every time there are new things I’ve never heard about before.

Joy Spring

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I took a few days off while the kids were on spring break from school. Got a bunch of stuff done and slept in alot. Played piano every day. Naima in particular is coming along nicely. I worked on some new origami designs and diagrams. New models include some spaceship ideas and some polyhedra tessellation ideas. After all, why just tile a plane? I’ll post some pictures when I have some results. On the diagramming front I’m now midway thru my Rocketship and Zeppelin, and have started in on my Quadrose tessellation.

I did some painting around the house in the stairway, living room, kitchen and hall, and rearranged some of our art. Did a good chunk of yardwork too, and even got our on my skates for the fist time this season. I took the kids to Medieval Times for a fun family outing one night. That turned out to be a great time. Real horse stunts and staged jousting and melee combat. It was pretty cold the whole week, though. Down in the 30’s every morning. The one thing I wanted to do but didn’t get the chance was to take the Mustang around to get estimates on restoring the paintjob. I did take it out for a drive at least.

I also finished up my recording project for Lou for the time being. I have rough mixes for his songs and the next step is to have him come in and lay down the vocals. So I went back to working on my own songs, which I put aside last fall to concentrate on finishing my book. I finally worked out the middle section and ending to Black Swan, and laid down a new bass part. I also found a gem from Martin in my pile of demos. It’s called Is It Safe to Go Outside? and features a really cool loping bassline that fits neatly with an angular, intervallic melody. The song is about the feeling you get at the end of winter, hoping the first real day of spring has finally arrived.

Fotoz Update

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It looks spring is like finally here. Today it was mild and mainly sunny, and we started in on spring yardwork in earnest, scraping off all the old leaves and debris, doing some trimming and planting a few lilies. I also go the mustang out for the first ride of the season.

The main news is that I updated my photo galleries up the end of the year 2012. The most of the pics are from our trip to Florida last summer. As always, these galleries are for friends and family and password protected, so if you need the login info please contact me. Enjoy!

Origami Publications

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Winter lingers on. Believe it or not, we still have some snow on the ground from last week’s freakish snowstorm. It looks like random chunks of styrofoam. Still can’t do much to get started on the yardwork.

So instead here’s another update to my web site. I created a page for my origami publications. Enjoy!

http://zingman.com/origami/zing_origami_publications.php

Speaking of which, the video for my book is done, and I’m back in waiting-to-hear-from-my-publisher mode. I’m starting to work on a new batch of designs, including some advanced polyhedra, so I have some new stuff to exhibit at this year’s convention.