Been trying to get back to normal life the last few weeks, and settling into some kind of fall routine. There’s been alot of random tasks piling up. Did a bunch of yardwork the last few weekends. Almost at the end of the late summer cycle, nothing to do after but wait for the leaves to start falling. Also been doing work on our various cars. Michelle and I patched the bumper on the camry before she went back to school.
One piece of good news of good news is that I got the Mustang fixed. Way back in July one day I took it out of the garage to take it for a spin, only to discover the brake pedal felt soft. I did a little research and determined it was probably nothing I could fix myself. Being an old car, I didn’t want to take any chances. However I didn’t have to time to actually take into the shop until September, and then it took them a couple days because my mechanic needed to order a new master cylinder. So I finally got the car back and took it for a spin last weekend. Good as new, woo-hoo!
I’ve also been getting back to biking and working out. For a while my energy felt very depleted, and it was hard to concentrate. Working out was one thing I could do that was good for my focus, but I had to drop down to like 70% of my regular weight. Over the last few weeks I’ve been building back up, and now I’m basically I’m at the point where I was before, and building up to surpass my previous plateau this fall.
Meanwhile, back in July I had built up to biking over fifty miles a week. The first Sunday in August I decided to go for a little further than usual. On the ride, I passed a woman who then asked if I’d mind if she rode behind me to catch my slipstream. She looked all cute and sporty in one of those one-piece spandex biking outfits, and in any event why would I object? After a few miles she had caught her breath and pulled up next to me, and we got to talking, mostly about biking and going further and faster. She said she was going 30 miles that day, and told me “never plateau”. When I was done my ride I saw that I’d gone twenty-two and a half miles in a little over ninety minutes. I was really looking forward to telling Martin, but never got the chance. In August I scaled back, averaging closer to 30 miles, going out only three or four times a week. Now I’m ramping back up again. September is the perfect time for biking. The weather is not so hot, and you’ve been training all season. This last weekend I went 22.5 miles again, beating my previous time by about three minutes, closing in on the ninety-minute mark. Next weekend I’m gonna go for 25 miles, and hopefully do a 30 mile ride before the end of the season. I’d like to keep on biking into November if possible.
I’ve also returned to working on The Global Jukebox and getting that back on track. I’ve recruited my friend Nick to work with me as a second engineer. Nick and Martin and I worked together to create an online version of the game Iron Dragon back in the year 2000. For now the main tasks is to get him ramped up. Also, Martin left behind some unfinished work in the form of an experimental branch that he never committed. I’ve pulled it of his old computer but I have yet to merge it.
In my day job I had been finding it hard to focus too, but that’s steadily improving. If I can find a task where I can follow a prefab pattern or script rather than have to do deep, open-ending thinking, that suits me better these days. Fortunately, on one of my project I get to just that: building some new web pages and updating other based on mocks from our designers. Ginny said that building web sites is my happy place, and that’s not so far from the truth. In my other project it’s all herding cats, pulling together multiple engineering and management teams from multiple companies for integration testing. I think I finally found the root cause of a strange, intermittent bug that’s been bedeviling us and blocking our progress, and designed a workaround. Hopefully I’ll have it implemented this week and progress can resume.
There’s lots going in in music these days too. For one thing Jeannie and I saw Earth Wind and Fire and Chicago, two of the greatest horn-section bands of all time, at some amphitheater in New Jersey Saturday night. We attempted to go see this show the first Saturday in August, but it go rained out. This time the weather was good, but the traffic, limited ways into the venue, and chaotic overcrowded lawn seating arrangements made for a less than promising start.
I’ve always been a big fan of both bands, but particularly Chicago, with their prog-jazz influenced stuff from the Terry Kath days in the 70’s. They played plenty of that, including some great deep cuts, and were quite good. But I guess I’d mentally blocked out their cheesy power ballad phase from the 80’s. They played a good number of those too, including not one but two about You being the/my inspiration.
Alot of people seemed to have left after Earth Wind and Fire, so it was easy to move closer for a better view. At then end, both bands played together, which was pretty epic. A six-piece horn section, plus two or three of everything else: drums, percussion, bass, guitars, keyboards and singers. You’d think it might be a giant mess, but they were really tight. They closed the show with an extended jam of 25 or 6 to 4 (presumably in answer to the question Does Anybody Really Know What Time it Is?) It seemed we were among the younger people at the show, which was great because by time we got back to car at the end of the night, the parking lot was mostly empty, and it was a breeze getting out of there.
Lots more going on in the music work including a new guitar, a tribute concert, and a new Buzzy Tonic record about to drop. More on that in a future post.