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.
It’s been a few weeks since my last post. Been busy with work, trying to wrap things up for the end of year, mainly lots of meetings with partners and stakeholders, a few key software commits, and lots of planning and strategy to set up the coming year of projects for our new R&D lab. Plus, it’s been cold and dark and my energy level has been low. On top of that I fell Ill with the covid a couple weeks ago, and so did Jeannie. Totally on brand for this time of year. We’re all better now, but we didn’t get much done beyond the bare minimum for a little while. We did manage to do most of our holiday stuff. We put up a lovely tree, and new holiday lights outside, and wrote our Christmas cards, and got a fair chunk of gifts. Been reading alot, and we watched alot of movies. Among the better ones was the new production of Dune, although it only covers the first half of the book.
I’ve also been working on a new song in this season of darkness, called ‘In the Purple Circus’. I wrote the lyric a while back, and earlier this fall set down at the piano and came up with pretty much the entire song, the main riff, the chords, the overall structure and various sections, pretty much all in one sitting. (Actually also I wrote a song ‘Los Gatos de la Cosmos’ for my jazz group Spacecats around the same time. It’s a nice little samba based on the harmony of a minor-major-seventh chord, and nice atmospheric spacy jam section in the middle. It started as an attempt to get inside the head of Jobim, but owes more to Nica’s Dream by Horace Silver, and ended up taking on a direction of its own. More on that once we get the tune together.)
In the Purple Circus is in E minor (from a certain point of view) and the vibe emerged as dark, proggy and heavy. The main riff is in 13/8 time with a couple extra beats on the end after four repetitions so the complete phrase fills seven bars of 4/4 time. This made it much easier to sequence in ProTools. The riff uses a downward harmony thing, starting on a Dorian minor, moving to the half-diminished, then the suspended 4th and landing on a #9 dominant 7 chord. Lots of buzzy tritones and semitones rubbing against one another. The verse and bridge continue the rhythmic and harmonic motifs. The time goes to straight 4, but there’s an overlaid 3-against-4 feel, with the downward harmony moving around, and the phrases work out to seven bars throughout. Then there’s a middle section which takes the main riff and breaks it down, brings it down to a whisper, and builds it back up into a monstrous sonic maelstrom.
The piano track went down first, then midi drums. It was starting to take shape with some real character. Next was bass guitar, which features heavy use of chording on the top two strings while an open E rings out on the bottom. That sounded pretty badass. A low E is about 40 Hz. Having seen Steve Hackett earlier this year, I was inspired by his prodigious use of Moog Taurus pedals to bring the really deep bass. So I created a bass synth part, an octave below the bass guitar to really emphasize the E-ness on that 20hz tone. This is right about at the lower limit of human hearing, to say nothing of the frequency response of one’s speakers. Even on my high-quality but normal studio monitors it sounds pretty great. I’d love to get a massive subwoofer and hook it into the system.
Next came the electric guitar. For this record my goal is to put guitar on all the songs, and to develop an approach and guitar part for each song. For this one the sound was a pretty full and distorted, and I worked out chord voicings both low and high in the range using open strings where I could, to bring out the dissonance and resonance. I laid down the part and it was just overwhelming! So now I’m rethinking both the guitar and bass parts to have a bit more space and interplay, to fit together as if they’re the left and right hand parts of some giant 10-string meta instrument. And to practice the parts so I can lay them down tighter, with particular attention going to the jam/riff bits at the end of the phrases where it builds up over a B altered chord.
So the song is about halfway tracked, and I expect to finish it sometime in the new year, and it will be pretty killer. Meanwhile, here are the lyrics.
…
In the Purple Circus
By John Szinger
Well I said, get that bidniz done by Christmas But the Devil had his plan So let’s get it thru here by the New Year Can I talk to the weather man?
The purple circus is where the work is Vanilla villain where you been? Chances and changes, chases and cages I don’t know where to begin
We traffic in majick
Grapple the facets
Conjure abjure and summon
Divination evocation
The mountain surely is a-comin’
She tells me you have the energy of a major enemy Thick in the grip of crippling sickness n’all So I vault into the firmament of the permanent tournament Cuz after all we’re born to crawl
We’ll depart our hostess ‘ere the solstice Alight beneath the new snow moon We can check that box off by the equinox But the lion in roars a day too soon
We traffic in majick
Package the tragic
Sensing seeing knowing
Equivocation declamation
The mountain surely is a-goin’
We traffic in majick, yeah traffic in majick Yeah, can I talk to the weather man? Chances and changes, chases and cages, woah I don’t know where to begin First there is a mountain then there is no mountain then there is She’ll be comin’ round that mountain when she comes, yeah
It’s been another busy couple of weeks. A week ago, Buffalo NY, where alot of my family lives, got a once-in-ten-years level snowstorm, with my parents in Orchard Park getting six feet of snow. Up in Amherst they only got a foot or so, but it complicated plans for people coming home for Thanksgiving, especially for my niece and nephew whose trains got cancelled.
In the end, everyone made it home safe and sound, and we had a very enjoyable Thanksgiving. We hosted seventeen people and Jeannie made a most excellent stuffed turkey dinner. Spent the rest of the weekend listening to music, mainly classic live albums, and playing games like Ticket to Ride and Quirkle with Lizzy and Michelle.
I also finished some home improvement projects. The big one was was to replace the light fixture in our kitchen ceiling, which blew out right around the end of the summer. It was an old florescent light in the form of a square wooden box with plexiglas diffuser. It first I I investigated the possibility of replacing just the socket and electric components. Once it became clear that wouldn’t work, the quest for a new lamp became a full-blown research project. We finally settled on one we liked, a broad, shallow frosted glass dome with traditional light sockets that could take modern LED bulbs. We ordered from a local showroom, but it took several weeks to arrive, and by that I was folding like a madman in preparation for our origami conventions.
Back home again a couple weeks later, I pulled off the old fixture. I had planned on having to paint the area that had covered because the new light is smaller. What I didn’t count on was that the old fixture was screwed directly to the ceiling, and there was just a hole where the cup for the wiring and structural support was supposed to be. So I had to cut a hole in the drywall, buy and install the mounting hardware to the framing of the house, put back the drywall pieces, fill in the gaps, and sand and paint it. This added considerable time to the job, especially since the ceiling needed two coats of paint. I ended up finally installing the new lamp Thanksgiving morning, with Jeannie urging me along so we could switch the power back on in the kitchen and she could put the turkey in the oven!
I didn’t quite match the ceiling paint, but it’s pretty close. Lizzy, who works for Sherwin Williams, was very helpful in recommending a mini roller and pan kit; I din’t know they made such a thing. She also gave me a deck of all their color chips, so hopefully I can do a better job matching next time.
Oh, and, the week before Thanksgiving was a big one for milestones at the Innovation Lab at Consumer Reports. Here are a couple of press releases about two projects of mine.
Busy times continue. The week after the CoCon origami convention in Chicago was OrigaMIT. This of course is MIT’s origami convention up in Boston, and one of the funnest ones out there, because of the size, venue, general vibe, and emphasis on origami math and theory in addition to the usual teaching models and exhibition. And also the crowd it attracts. They haven’t had one for three years, so it’s good to be back. I saw a bunch of origami friends I hadn’t seen in a while.
I largely reused my exhibit from Chicago. And I taught two of the same models as in Cocon, and they were well received. Brian Chan gave an excellent talk on how he’s using various CAD software to model constraints, which helps him come up with some very advanced and artistic crease patterns. His new Scorpion in particular is just mind-blowing.
I ended up spending most of the evening with Beth, Brian and Adrienne, it’s just invaluable to be able to getting into deep conversations with other folders at the level. In Chicago I started designing a new spider, which I’m calling Hallowe’en Spider. It’s inspired by some of those classic models with multiple sunken preliminary bases grafted together, but the overall technique is more modern and well integrated. The goal was a detailed, quasi-realistic looking spider with a fairly straightforward geometry that can be folded in half an hour or so. I also wanted nice fat legs to make is scarier.
I came pretty close. There’s not alot of steps, but one of them is a fairly complex sink that’s repeated four times. At one point Saturday night I was showing Beth what I was up to, and explaining how I needed to adjust the proportions and what were some of my options. She said, “why don’t you just pleat right here?”, and that turned out to be just the thing.
Over the next few days I finished a few more models, continuing to refine it. I folded a pair of large spiders out of 15″ paper. One of them is for the American Museum of Natural History’s origami holiday tree. I haven’t contributed to this in a few years, but this year the them was World of Bugs, so how could I resist? In addition to the Spider, I folded one of my butterflies and one of my inchworms, also out of large paper.
Meanwhile back home, it’s peak leaf raking season the last couple weeks, with a couple more weeks to go. And I finally got around to trying to replace the busted ceiling light in my kitchen with a new one I bought back in September, but was on backorder and finally arrived. However, when I took out the old fixture I discovered it had been screwed directly to the ceiling and there was no electrical cup to hold the weight and connect to mounting hardware to for the new lamp. So now I gotta cut a hole in the ceiling, install a cup, patch up the drywall, sand and paint it, and then I’ll be able to go ahead and install the new light fixture. Ah, good times.
COCon, the Chicago Origami Convention, was in the downstairs of the hotel, where they had a reception area and series of conference rooms, adjoining the lobby via a broad spiral stair. It was a perfect setup. There were a handful of vendors including a friendly woman named Katy who made tiny origami art pieces composed and arranged in little glass bell jars. Being from Chicago, she gave us great advice on places to eat.
There were ten or so artists exhibiting, so I got a whole table. My whole exhibit fit in a shoe box in my carry-on luggage, so that was plenty of space. There were a bunch of my “greatest hits” models, including a turtle, lizard, moose, elephant, dragon, flying saucer and retro rocket. Also the models I taught: the Space Cat, Flying Fish, and Butterfly. Then there were three new geometric models. I displayed versions of these at OUSA NYC in June, but wasn’t satisfied with them so I folded newer improved versions.
First is my Hydrangea Cuboctahedron. This is six hydrangea tessellations arranged on a sheet to then form a single-sheet polyhedron, a cube with sunken corners to resemble a cuboctahedron. I changed the layout of the tessellations so that it would have a symmetrical lock formed from the four corners of the paper. This went together easier and held better than that previous lock. I also added another level to the hydrangea tessellations compared to my previous version. I folded it from a 50cm square of marble wyndstone paper, which looks great and is super strong. The model could be wet folded but that turned out not to be necessary. I may still do it if the lock tends to open up over time.
The other two are Starball Variations I and II. Both of these models are based on a dodecahedron, with extra creases to sink the vertices in such a way as to reveal a star pattern on the faces, again single-sheet polyhedra. I use different geometries so that in one the start recedes inwards and in the other protrudes outward. My first attempts were made from 35cm Tant paper, but that turned out to be at the limit of foldability. I made two larger pentagons from a sheet of 70 x 50 cm marble wyndstone, and that enabled me to fold more accurately, and really understand the precreasing involved in the bottom half of the model where there layers stack up, so in the end they turned out much better.
I taught three classes, two on Saturday and one on Sunday. They were my Flying Fish, Space Cat, and Beautiful Free Butterfly. All the classes went really well, despite there being no diagrams and no document camera and projector. I thought ahead and brought a pack of large paper with me, suitable for teaching. Everyone finished the model, and I had time to help a few people who weren’t quite up to the requires skill level. Hopefully they leveled up in my class.
I took a few other classes, including Beth Johnson’s Gorilla, and a Turkey and a Spider. I’ve been thinking about an origami spider for a long time, so now I’m trying again to make my idea work. Since it was a Chicago convention, there were a good number of folders I’d never met before, so it was great to meet them and see what they’re up to. Spent alot of time just hanging out, folding, and going out to eat, mainly with Beth, Katie, and Jared N. from Oregon. Also Eric, Wendy, Patty, Kathleen, June and a bunch of OUSA convention committee people.
Saturday night Jeannie and popped out right at sunset to go to the top of the Hancock Tower, which was once the tallest building in the world, and take in the view. And it’s … flat. There’s Lake Michigan in one direction, and the plains in the otter, and past the city they look more and more the same as the eye draws out to the horizon.
We also discovered Chicago style hot dogs. These are great, served with pickles and tomatoes as well as the more common ketchup, relish and onions, with an extra large frank and bun. Jeannie says Chicago style hot dogs and pizza are on the level of Buffalo chicken wings and beef on weck, and I’m inclined to agree.
Our flight home was on Sunday night. By this time it had started to rain. The trip home was smooth and uneventful. We were able to watch the first half of the Bills game in a bar in the airport, and most of the second half on the plane.
All in all a great convention. I hope they do it again. It was a great time, and there’s still lots to do and see in Chicago.
It’s been cold and rainy the past few days. I got in quite a few good bike rides in September, but now summer is definitely over. Been busy with work, new origami, the Jukebox, setting up new computers, and the recording project. One plus side, I saw two excellent concerts last week.
The first was The Levin Brothers at the Jazz Arts Forum, a cool little jazz club in Tarrytown. The Levin Brothers are Mark on piano and Tony on bass, along with a drummer and, for this tour flute player Ali Ryerson fronting the group. We were seated right up front, so close to the bandstand that I had to move Tony’s music stand and some cords on the floor so I had room to sit down. They played a combination of originals and jazz interpretations of pop and rock songs, including Steely Dan’s Aja and the traditional Scarborough Fair. The tone was mostly laid back and tasty, occasionally reaching out into more abstract and experimental territory. The flute was unusual choice for lead instrument, and fit perfectly. She was an excellent player, great tone, phrasing and soloing, and gave the group a unique sound and brought it all up to another level.
Tony Levin is of course a world famous bass player, and equally famous for pioneering the use of the Chapman Stick. For this gig, however, there was no stick. He stuck to an electric upright bass, some kind of Steinberger I think, and and old Gibson bass guitar with a star-spangled paintjob that might well date from 1976. His tone and playing were much more restrained than with some other groups, but sounded great and tasteful.
After the show the band was hanging out at the bar and we got to meet them. Jeannie had a picture on her phone from when we saw King Crimson last summer. Tony liked that and said it’s good we were there, cuz that’s probably the last time Crimson will play North America. I mentioned the first time I saw Tony was with Peter Gabriel back in the 1980s’. He said Gabriel is gonna be doing a major tour next year, very exciting. I said to ask Pete if he’d do Carpet Crawlers.
The other show was Sungazer at Gramercy Theater in the city. The venue was pretty cool, smallish but not that small, maybe a former vaudeville or movie theater with an open floor in the front half and raised seating in the back, and a bar on each side in the middle. There was an opening act that I’d never heard of, but who were really good, called Childish Jibes, fronted by an attractive, dark-haired singer with a great voice and a sort of Amy Winehouse or Adele vibe, complete with a beehive hairdo and boots so high she could barely dance. The band were sort of a blend soul funk and rock and pop with a unique sound. Excellent players, great songs and arrangements, really polished. I hope they make it big.
Sungazer is sort of a jazz-adjacent jam band like Lettuce or Galactic, but less funky and way more proggy, with elements of metal, techno and jazz fusion. They favor dense, complex arrangements with out meters and multilayered polyrhythms and subdivisions of time. The drummer and leader of the group is a virtuoso of this kind of playing, and his solo was just mind blowing. The synth player had his own devil’s mellotron with samples from videogames and cartoons and things. The bassist and guitarist were prone to unison shredding, and the bassist augmented the low end with a sub-bass synth reminiscent of old Genesis. The sax playing resembled something like Morphine or King Crimson more than what you’d typically recognize as jazz.
All in all totally my kind of weird. It’s funny, Jeannie and I were very likely the oldest people in the crowd. I wonder how a band like that finds an audience in this day and age.
I recently folded a bunch of new origami models for an upcoming exhibition in Chicago. These were well-known designs, but it felt good to get back into folding some exhibit-quality works. As is my practice these days, I folded two of each, so as to have one to keep. Sort of a warm-up for some upcoming conventions I’ll be attending this fall, where I’ll be exhibiting some new work.
Before I put them in the mail, I figured I’d photograph them. This led to a round of experimentation with different cameras. For many years I’ve had a digital snapshot camera with a zoom lens and macro mode. I also have a pretty nice digital SLR with lots of controls, capable of taking amazing pictures.
The SLR is very accurate, and lets you control everything, but it’s painstaking. It also has various automatic modes that give you less control but are less fussy. I also have a full lighting kit but, it’s a major effort to set everything up. In fact, I have a big backlog of unphotographed work since the start of the pandemic for this very reason.
Without lots of light, there’s a three-way struggle between exposure time, exposure level, and depth of the focus field. The photos tend to be dark, or require a tripod to keep still while the shutter is open. And there’s some weird auto-color balance feature that makes all the colors strange if you have just a few colors in your view, as is often the case with this kind of subject matter.
What I’m really after is a workflow that’s quick and easy. I want to be able to put a big sheet of paper on my kitchen table, lay down some origami, and be good to go with the available light. So I tried the camera on my cel phone, and on Jeannie’s phone, which is much newer. These cameras are not as accurate, but in fact much better! It’s like have a mic with a nice warm compressor for recording musical instruments. They’re always in focus, and do a really good job with color balance and exposure level under a pretty wide range, and require alot less tweaking in post. Jeannie’s phone in particular seems to bring out textural detail with extra fine-scale contrast, and in addition to a good zoom has a wide-angle mode that lets you get super close to the subject.
In the end, each camera has its pros and cons, and gives a slightly different image in terms of exposure, color balance, focus, sharpness, and contrast. Definitely a worthwhile study. I suppose the digital SLR is still the best if you have the patience. I’ll use it again next time I do a “real” photo shoot. The digital snapshot camera is okay but kind of old and has been surpassed by newer technology. The phones are the clear winner in terms of convenience and picture quality combined. So now I’m thinking of getting a new phone just to use for taking pictures.
While I’m at it, I’m thinking about getting a new computer. Like my phone, my computer is getting pretty old, and won’t run alot of newer apps. OTOH, there are some old apps that are essential to my work, so there needs to be a plan on how to replace those. Critical among these are Adobe creative suite: Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and the venerable Flash/Flex. The amount of money Adobe charges for a yearly subscription (you can’t just buy it) is ridiculous. And of course Flash and Flex are long dead.
So I figured I’d check out Affinity Photo, Designer and Publisher, the not-a-total-rip-off alternative. So far so good. Affinity Photo seems to work just as well as Photoshop for what I do, which runs the gamut from cropping and tweaking pictures taken on my phone, to serous, multi-element, mutli-layer, effects-laden, composed image and text graphics for things like album covers or strategy game artwork. I haven’t tried Publisher yet but it seems like a cromulent replacement for InDesign, which I use mainly for page layout for my origami books and diagrams, and the occasional poster for a rock or jazz gig.
The main question is whether Affinity Designer is a reasonable app for doing origami diagrams. I had been using Flash for many years, but Flash is well past the end of its life, and it may be time to move on. People in the origami community have been migrating from Illustrator to Affinity over the last few years, but the consensus seems to be that it’s cumbersome and there’s a steep learning curve. Ah well, better than nothing. Last night I modeled a square sheet of paper with a crease thru the diagonal. It took a little while to figure out all the tools, but there’s enough control over everything that it can be made perfect. So that’s hopeful. Whether one can move quickly thru a series of steps remains to be seen.
I’ll also have to build up a new library of dashed lines, arrows, and other symbols. I guess I’ll reach out to my friends and see where they’re all at with this.
As for the automation stuff that I used to in Flash, the Foldinator project remains a perpetual work-in-progress, and last time I checked in with it, I decided to basically start over using javascript, and build on the libraries of people like Robby Kraft and Jason Ku.
We ended the summer on a chill note for the long weekend. We’ve been doing alot of traveling the last few weeks, including our recent tour of Cape Cod and Boston, followed by a trip up to Buffalo a week ago to take Michelle to school.
This was our third trip up to Buffalo this summer (Jeannie’s fourth). We got a car for Michelle this semester, so she and Jeannie drove her car and I followed in mine. The move-in went smoothly and Michelle’s new dorm is quite nice. She’s in a suite with three friends from last year. Very much echoing the pattern of Lizzy four years ago.
Lizzy met us on campus and gave us all a ride in her new car, and took us thru the Delta Sonic car wash. I’d forgotten how much of a thing Delta Sonic is up there. It’s a fun ride but maybe could use an animatronic Johnny Depp in a pirate outfit at the end. Afterwards we went out to dinner at a Mexican restaurant that used to be a Denny’s where I worked as a dishwasher for a couple weeks as a teenager.
I also spent a bunch of time talking with parents, which is nice. One day I went for a walk around the lake with my dad, and he told me a bunch of stories about how his first few years living in Canada, how he decided to go to college at age 25, and what it took to apply and what happened when he got in. It turned out him and a German fellow named Siegfried got the two highest scores in English on the entrance exam, despite both of them being non-native speakers (English is actually my dad’s third language). When the professor asked him how could this be, my dad said, “Well, I studied.” Also something about the French being salty about the Concorde many years later.
Back home, we caught a show at the Blue Note last week, with Jeff Tain Watts on the drums and Daryl Jones on bass with members of the Rolling Stones touring band doing a tribute to Charlie Watts, mainly jazz and blues interpretations of Stones songs. Many were more enjoyable than the actual Rolling Stones versions to me. The great Randy Brecker was the special guest on trumpet. I haven’t seen him play in many years, probably since the Return of the Brecker Brothers in the 1990’s. He’s looking old and rotund and when he came up on stage maybe even not sure what he was doing there. But when he put the horn to his lips, he’s one of those guys who just lifted the whole band to another level. It’s like have Kate Blanchett in your movie playing and elf queen.
So after all that running around we decided to mainly stay at home over Labor Day and catch up on random tasks. We went on one day trip, out to Fire Island, condensing a whole beach weekend into a single day. It was cool in the morning, so we parked near the beach and went on a nature trail swamp walk up to an historic light house and climbed up to the top, which gave us an excellent view of Long Island and the ocean. The next leg of the walk took us to a quaint little town called Kismet, which feels like a real-life Hobbiton. It’s full of little beach cottages but has no roads, only sidewalks, because it’s only accessible by foot, bicycle or ferry. We had an excellent lunch of seafood and frozen drinks and lingered a while. When we got back the beach the weather had warmed up so we hung out and went for a swim in the ocean. The threat of sharks was gone, but there were some dead jellyfish floating around. I got stung by one, just a little on my arm. After that it was time to go.
For some reason I’ve been listening recently to alot early 90’s alternative metal and ska bands like Fishbone, No Doubt, Mr. Bungle, De La Soul, Soul Coughing, Cibbo Matto, and Soundgarden. Not all the same genre I know, but there does seem to be some kind of center of gravity there.
Among my recent musical projects has to be remix and remaster my 2018 album Elixr. I was listening to it back in the spring, and although it was a big step forward for me in terms of musical production at the time, my mixing chops have improved substantially over the last few years and I decided I could do it better. In the end I decided to get a small batch of CD’s made, and so it took some time to do the artwork and get it printed and all that. Now the new version of the record is on all the major streaming services, so go ahead and check it out!
It’s late July. It’s been really hot out all month. Almost every day over ninety degrees, many close to a hundred. I’ve been watering the lawn most every day, and trimming and edging continues unabated. We went to the beach last Friday. It was a good time, despite warnings about sharks attacking swimmers, and the ocean being unusually rough. It took alot of effort just to get past the breakers and swim for even a few minutes. Luckily no one got eaten.
In other news, Lizzy got a raise and promotion at her job, and went out and bought a new car, a VW SUV. She got pretty lucky and found the exact model she wanted, available and at a reasonable price. So I bought back from her her old car, a Toyota Camry that she drove thru high school and college, and that I’d given her as a graduation present. Now Michelle has a car to take to school.
I’ve been trying to schedule another gig for my band, but everyone is going to be out on vacation a different week in August, so it’ll have to slide into September.
I’ve been working on music in the studio. I have two songs, Slope and My Ol’ Brokedown Truck, that are close to finished. I recorded real drums for them last night, since I can’t re-create the sound of brushes with midi and samples. Sounding real good.
