Let’s Pick Up the Pieces

Today is the first really hot day of the year, and hot night too. Sitting around with the windows open and the fans on trying cool down.

Work has been going well. Only one more homework left in the Scala class and then it’s onto learning web frameworks. We’ve had two perfect sprints in a row, beating the previous record we set last month of one perfect sprint ever. Today my team’s boss called a meeting to discuss what’s going right. I told her “We’re awesome.” I also told her good code begets better code. I’ve been working quietly to improve our code quality for some time now, and I think it finally got to a tipping point where we’re spending less time on bugs and technical debt and more on getting it right the first time.

I tracked the bass part to Your Dancing Shoes. It took a few attempts because there’s very few places to punch in, so I had to get it essentially in one take. Had to practice it to the point where it was tight and grooves well.

My new rock group seems like it might be a thing. It’s made up of two guys from the Relix, two guys from another band, and the drummer who had been in both. The new guys are Michael on vocals and Jeff on guitar. Both sound really good. We got together last week and jammed a solid two hours of music, twenty songs or so. So there’s one set already. We’re picking a bunch more songs for this week. So I’m learning a bunch more new songs again, which is always fun. Now the challenge becomes getting them to learn a few songs I want to sing, because my songs tend to be a bit harder and not everyone is as fast at learning songs as me.

Meanwhile in jazzland, I got my tenor sax fixed, and it plays great, especially on the low notes. Last week we had a really excellent jam with the group. This dude Charlie sat in on guitar, and he was really good, reminded me of Keith Martini. Everyone’s playing seemed up a level from usual that night and we had some great moments. Left with a really good feeling. Charlie invited me to sit in with his group, which rehearses on Monday and has a few of the same players as my Wednesday group. I met this really smokin’ alto player Omar, who really had the Charlie Parker bag down. Very melodic with that bebop slink, reminded me of Ron Palidino. Best sax player I’ve heard in a while.

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