Month: December 2011

‘Tis The Season

Been doing lots of holiday stuff the last couple weeks. A trip to the museum, two family holiday parties, three kid’s performing arts shows, and four work-related parties, town halls and similar functions. Whew.

I took the kids to the AMNH a couple weeks ago, and we had a great time. Spent a long time with the dinosaurs and the frogs, and in the hall of minerals. The Origami Tree is in the south hall this year, since they’re doing renovations in the lower hall on the Central Park side. My elephants were featured in the “folding the museum” display at the base of the tree, and they saved a number of my models from years past, which are in the tree.

I also folded some models – a dragon and a moose – as ornaments for the tree at the kids’ school.

Yesterday was the big family xmas party for Jeannie’s dad’s side of the family. A good time and great to catch up with all for Long Island cousins. Today was a party for her mom’s side. Had to skip that one to get some things done.

Our kids a in this after school theatre program, in which they do singing and dancing and acting. They had two different shows last week, one for the younger kids and one for the bigger ones, and it’s pretty impressive the level of the performance. Later this week there’s some kind of holiday play. Lizzy is an angel and gets to say some lines.

There’s been a lot of end-of year holiday parties, for my immediate team, for the platform group, and for the whole company. Our corporate parties tend to be rather boozy affairs, but I survived alright. I’ve been there long enough that I have friends in all different divisions, so it was good to catch up. Then there was a town hall in which our corporate overlords are telling us out of one side of their mouth how the company had a great year and made tons of money, and out of the other how internet piracy is destroying our business and killing innocent people and must be stopped. Umm, yeah.

All this has been great fun, but it’s really hard to get stuff done. Looking forward to taking a few days off this week and getting caught up.

Back in the New York Groove

I was sick with a cold Thanksgiving week, and it took me a while to recover. My energy was really low the last couple of weeks and I mainly worked from home and even (gasp!) took a couple of sick days. But the last few days I’ve been feeling better and I’m back at work. It’s good to have my strength and energy back. Been catching up on a few things.

I finished the diagrams for origami Inchworm. Now it’s on the my new Butterfly II and my Rocketship. Hoping to re-establish a groove with that.

My neighbor lent me a stack of Bob Dylan albums a while back. Believe it or not it takes me a long time to listen to music, because the first time I hear it, I want to listen to the record the whole way thru with no distractions. It’s harder to find the time than you might think. I did manage to get thru a few when I was sick, and only have one to go now, but it’s a double live album. Listening to it now.

I finally got together with Blick to jam over the weekend. It’s sounding really good and fun as always. I love that he’s really focused on working out vocal harmonies and making them sound good. I think my singing is better after the Cabaret show; all that horn playing got my breath support back in shape. I want is to get together with the Cabaret rhythm section soon, but it’s the scheduling question makes it hard. And I think it’s about time to start looking for gigs.

My only issue is that I want to spend more time on originals, because they take longer to develop. But this is partly my fault. Every time we get together we spend the first part of the session just jamming songs that one or both of us know, rather than working on getting our originals tight. And I keep calling tunes. This time we tried to figure out a good Zeppelin and Floyd song to do. It’s harder to pick one than you might think, since both groups have lots of long songs with many complicated parts that may not come across stripped down. Ah well.