We finally got some snow over the weekend, and then it turned really cold the last few days: in the teens in the daytime and single digits at night. Looks like the snow will stick around a while. Of course this meant we got to go skiing for the first time this season. We went Monday, which was a day for for me and Jeannie, and Michelle’s last day at home before going back to school. We got up early before sunrise, went up for day and got home again sometime after sunset. It was a good time, and we all had a good days skiing after getting used to it the first runs. The snow was mainly good, even great for the northeast, with just a little bit of icy patches here and there, easy enough to avoid. Only trouble it was pretty crowded, and by mid afternoon there were alot of kids taking lessons zigzagging all over the place, so we decided to call it day. All in all we skied ten runs, over four hours. Next time Jeannie and I are gonna play hooky from work and go up when the kids are all in school.
All our wintertime projects are coming along. Maintaining good health and good focus. I finished a major chunk of cleaning out my studio over the weekend, clearing the way for new origami and other projects (more on that later). Only downside is Michelle went back to school before we had a chance to watch Return of the King. The Bills are in the playoffs and have advanced to the ACF Championship (once again against the Chiefs, after beating the Ravens in an intense, high-drama matchup), so that’s cutting into our TV time. Ah well, I guess there’s spring break.
Aside: my friend Robert Lang, one of the most accomplished and creative origami artists of all time, lost both his house and his studio in the recent fires in L.A., including a lifetime of literally priceless artwork (much of it has been exhibited at galleries all over the world), all of his tools and his supply of high-end origami paper (I read that Michael LaFosse is coming out of retirement to make a new batch of origamido paper just for him.) and literally everything else except his pets and one origami cuckoo clock. My heart goes out to him and his wife. Amazingly, Robert seems pretty upbeat for the situation, or at least resilient and determined to get thru the current tragedy and rebuild.
Back here where things are more stable, our D&D campaign continues. True to their chaotic neutral alignments, the party decided to open a half-dozen doors at once at the end of the last session, revealing a captive dragon and whole host of goblins. Next session should be fun. I hope they figure out a way to get the dragon to attack the goblins, or that they can run fast. Also they’re on the verge of having enough XP for second level.
I’m also helping Charlie set up a Minecraft server on Martin’s linux box in the cloud. It turns out this is not exactly straightforward, since he wants a modded version, but we’ve made some good progress, and we’ll probably get there soon.
Most of the rest of the stuff I want to talk about has to do with music, and I think I’ll cover that in a separate post.