It’s January. The darkest darkness has passed, and days are getting longer again. At five o’clock there’s still some daylight. We’ve had alot of rainy and overcast days too since the new year. Up in Buffalo all the snow from the big Christmas blizzard has melted. It’s been colder here again recently, and we even had a snow flurry or two over the weekend, which puts me in the mind of skiing.
Of course with the holidays over it’s back to work. Things are off to a good start with both my main gig and The Global Jukebox, moving to grand strategy to operational tactics to writing and and deploying code.
With Michelle home on winter break for another couple weeks, we’ve been playing lots of board games, and as is tradition, watched entire extended edition of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, about four lads from Liverpool, er, The Shire, who have come into possession of a ring they want to get rid of, while singing songs and being chased by bad guys all over the world, er, Middle Earth to the Bahamas, er, Mordor.
Lizzy came for a visit last weekend, since she didn’t make it home at Christmastime. We all had a fun weekend which started with going to Billy Joel at the Garden Friday night. He still puts on a great show, has a great band, and does a fantastic job of mixing up the set list and keeping things fresh. This night his band did two songs by Jeff Beck, including a stirring rendition of People Get Ready and an impromptu jam of I’m Going Down after the last encore.
The next night we went out to Long Island to Mary and her family, since we didn’t see them at all over the holidays. We went to Benihana for fancy cook-at-the-table hibachi seafood, which was most excellent. Haven’t been to one of those in years. Sunday we watched the Bills game. They made the playoffs and one the first round. Two more to go to get to the Super Bowl.
I printed out a bunch of lead sheets for some Billy Joel songs to practice on piano. Surprisingly, these can take some time to prepare, since chords found on the internet are often not accurate, and the charts always need formatting. I want the song to fit on one page from start to finish and be as clearly readable as possible.
Lots more going on with music, origami, and other creative and artistic endeavors, but it’s all a work in progress right now. Will share when the time is right.