Author: Zingblog 2

Sailing Away to Key Largo

We’re into the second half of winter now.  The days are starting to get a little bit longer and the sun is inching higher in the sky around midday.  Still, we’ve just had another good wallop of snow and we’re starting to think about our next ski trip and whether to combine it with visiting friends upstate. 

But that’s getting ahead of the story.  Jeannie and I took a nice break from the winter weather.  Took in some warmth and sunshine and got to rest and recharge.  Every year this feels like more of a necessity.  After maintaining complete focus on work and all my other tasks the entire month of January, I was ready for a break.

This year the destination was south Florida.  We flew out early on Saturday morning and got into Fort Lauderdale mid-morning.  Our first stop was Key Largo, and we were there on the seaside by lunchtime.  They upgraded our rental car to a BMW convertible roadster.  It was  a very powerful car and alot of fun, although we could only fit one carryon-sized suitcase in the trunk.  The rest went in the back seat, which was just as well because it was too small for passengers.

Anyway, we were at our hotel by lunchtime.  It was a charming, sleepy kind of place right on the ocean, with a garden and pool, and surrounded my mangrove forests.  Our room wasn’t ready yet when we arrived, but right next door was a beach bar and restaurant.  So we got a table outside and enjoyed some frozen drinks and yummy seafood dishes.  My favorite drink was made of bourbon and peaches and crushed ice, with jalapeño salt crusting the rim of the glass.  Ah, perfect.  Jeannie was enjoying Key Lime Coladas.  They had a guy singing and playing guitar, and it was only two or three songs before he played Margaritaville.

That afternoon we went on a boat cruise around the Florida Bay, out among the mangrove groves and sandy shallows covered with seagrass.  Saw some dolphins and lots of different kinds of birds, and an amazing sunset. Afterwards we went back to the restaurant next to our hotel for dinner.  One of the specials on the menu was a whole fresh caught snapper, complete with corn on the cob and taters and veggies.  It was yummy, but they should have warned us that it was sized for two people!  No matter, I ate half of it and we had the rest for lunch the next day.  That evening they had a full rock band, who were excellent, with strong vocal harmonies and great guitar player, and songs from bands like Santana and Sublime.  I had a dream about Martin that night, waiting for him to come home but he never showed up.  Very sad.

Sunday we went on a kayak trip out among the mangroves, up a channel into progressively smaller bays and inlets until we ended up in a swimming hole, which was lots of fun too.  Saw some sharks and more different kinds of birds.  That afternoon we put the top up on the car and drove all the way out to Key West on the water highway.  Got the car up to 100 mph on the seven mile bridge.  It was a long trip, almost two hours; Key West is closer to Havana than Miami. Key West is a cute little boating and tourist town, good for walking around in.  We went to the southernmost point in the continental U.S., visited the aquarium – sharks and sea turtles were the top attractions, watch the sun go down over the Gulf of Mexico, and had dinner in a place that used to be the original headquarters of Pan Am Airlines, which got its start in the 1920’s flying to Cuba and back.

Monday we visited the Everglades.  Took a boat tour around the swampy backwaters, saw lots of crocodiles and yet more birds, as well as lots of different kinds of mangrove trees and other plants.  We went on a couple hikes in different parts of the park with different ecosystems, including a knot of forest in a sea of marsh grass.  All in all a fascinating place, I dubbed it America’s ultimate swamp walk.

From there we drove back to Fort Lauderdale to spend some time at the beach.  We got to the hotel well after dark, but they had a tiki bar right out on the beach that was perfect for dinner and drinks.  Next day we spent the whole time lounging about, going back and forth between the ocean and the tiki bar, with a side trip to the pool.  Aaah, vacation!  That evening we went out the Benihana, which was just up the road, for Jeannie’s birthday.

Wednesday was our last day, and we had to check out of the hotel in the morning but our flight wasn’t until the evening.  So we decided to go check out Miami Beach.  Miami is a big city with lots of freeways, and the vibe is alot like the New Jersey turnpike.  But once we got there it was great for walking around, another beautiful sunny day.  South Beach, Ocean Boulevard, all the old fancy art deco hotels, even a little art gallery.  There’s the beach with a park and bike path, and a beautiful botanical gardens a little ways uptown. 

The flight home was smooth and uneventful. I feel like we’ve had a run of good luck flying the last few years.  No major mishaps in the last dozen flights.  Of course we came home into freezing rain turning to ice, and woke up the next morning with snow on the ground.

And I Will Draw the Chart

Ok, lots to talk about here with music.  Before I dive in, I’ll mention that the weather has gotten a bit warmer.  It’s still down in the 20’s at night, but it’s creeping up above freezing for a couple hours in the daytime and last week’s snow is beginning to disappear.  Still, I’m not going start biking again until the roads are clear and clean.

First off, my jazz group Spacecats has a show coming up on April 2nd at a place called Jazz on Main in Mount Kisco.  We’re hoping to build on the momentum of our last gig, add a bunch of new material and sharpen up the songs already in our repertoire.  More on this as the date draws closer.

One of the songs we’re working up these days is Son of the Sun.  This is a fairly long and complicated song with lots of changes in meter and open jamming sections linked up with thru-composed parts.  I feel really lucky and grateful that the Spacecats want to tackle such a challenging song, and in fact we’re gonna knock it out of the park.  But I needed a better chart than my old hand-written one to get the music across to the group.  My drummer Rick suggested I try an app called MuseScore, a notation package from the sam people who make Audible.  In the past I’ve used Finale, which I found hugely slow and cumbersome although hugely feature-rich, as well as things like the built-in notation for midi in ProTools, which I found quick but not very good.  MuseScore hits the sweet spot in the middle, rich and full featured enough for jazz charts, but pretty fast too.  It’s not tied to a midi sequence or performance (although you can import a midi file); the focus is a hundred percent on the notation, and you can do things like add repeats, fermatas, a D.S, or coda, hash marks for soloing over, and chord symbols.  This is a big step up from writing out charts by hand.  Hopefully now I can write out and teach my band a bunch more songs that I’d been afraid might be too much to try and notate.  So here I present to you my very first lead sheet made in MuseScore. Enjoy!

In the Dead of Winter

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.

In the Year Twenty-Five Twenty-Five

The new year has arrived and we’re settling into the winter routine. I’m feeling pretty good for this time of year, I guess I finally found the right combination of vitamin D, activity and rest. I’m working out at full weight, and actually went out biking five days in a row last week in a spell of mild weather. I used to think fifty degrees was about as cold as I’d feel comfortable riding, but I got some gloves and a warmer base layer and now I’m good down into the forties. Today it was thirty-five when I got up and I thought I’d try that, but by mid-morning it started snowing and the temperature dropped. Ah well, maybe that means we can go skiing soon!

We also got out ice skating this weekend, which was fun except for the rink was rather crowded and people were skating in all directions, making collision avoidance a nonstop concern, with very few chances to get up to a good speed. We’re gonna check out the other rinks around here to see what they’re like. In other fitness news, Jeannie has decided she wants to run a 7k race in April and asked me if I wanted to join her. So we’re gonna figure out how to start training for that.

I’m back to work and off to a good start. Meanwhile at home I’m trying to beat back a long list of random tasks and new project, after slacking off for the holidays. Making steady progress and checking things off one by one. A big one we need to do a big round of organizing the house and throwing things away. This was set into motion when Jeannie asked me to into my closet and pull out some old legos for her to used in the toyland town she set up neat the Christmas tree. Things got jumbled up and there was no way to put everything back and make it fit, so there you go. One thing leads to another since we only have so much closet space.

As is tradition, we’re watching The Lord of the Rings movies again. I’m also re-reading the books, which I haven’t done since the aughts (I used to read it once per decade, but skipped the teens cuz I was busy). This time around I’m appreciating how much the filmmakers actually drew from the book in terms of dialogue and plot details, even if things were generally sharpened up and condensed for the movie. Also remembering how much lore and backstory there is, and how many songs in the book that got cut. So far my favorite was the one Frodo sings at the inn in Bree, an epic retelling of the classic Hey Diddle Diddle.

Also deep into some new music projects. More on that soon, I swear, but it will take more than one post to explain it all.

Oh What Fun to Ride and Sing a Slaying Song Tonight

We’re in the midst of a long and languid holiday break.  I’ve been off work for a whole week and a day, and don’t go back until Thursday.  I finished off work on a high note, having successfully merged my R&D branch of the codebase back into the main branch, deployed it and all.  The project is turning the corner from R&D into productization, always a fun part of the curve.  Also lots of planning meetings for big ambitious new features and new R&D threads in the coming year.  After a long uphill slog into strong headwinds I now feel that the tide has turned, the wind is at our backs and filling our sail, and we’re gaining momentum as we cruise downhill.

Michelle came home from school a week before Christmas, and Lizzy a few days later along with Josh.  We even got snow a couple times and it remained cold enough for the snow to stick around for a white Christmas.  We did Jeannie’s family party the Saturday before Christmas, and went to Mary’s on Christmas day.  In between was lots of food and drink, movies and games, music, wrapping presents, opening presents, hanging out and getting things done at a relaxed pace.

We’re shaping up for a new release of the Global Jukebox in the new year.  Nick has come up to speed as my new second software engineer, which is great.  I still miss Martin whenever I work on the jukebox.  He wrote so much amazing code and did so much of the devops stuff too.  I’m always inside his thoughts and mind when I read thru the code.  Anyway, Nick is now filling that role and bringing his own approach and perspective.  The major new feature we’ve been working on converting the existing Cantometric codings for all the songs to a new simplified schema, to make it easier to train new coders and to eliminate some ambiguities in the original system.  Nick wrote the script to do the conversion, which required understanding alot of domain knowledge as well as the architecture of the web application.  Meanwhile I created the spec for the new schema and did all the UI and UX work on the client side.  Now it’s all on the staging server and we’re looking at finishing off some P2 features to get into the next release.

I bought a drum mic kit as a present to myself.  It’s bundle of eight microphones for all the different drums plus overheads, along with stands and cables.  I’ve decided I want to use more real drums on my next record (more on that soon) and so it’s essential to be able to mic it up.  Next step is to get it all set up and learn how to use it.  Oh, and I’m going to upgrade to a 16-input preamp/DAC unit as well.

Oh, and Jeannie got a Nintendo Switch, so I’m gonna get some games for that too!

We went up to Buffalo for a few days after Christmas.  They had a ton of snow when we arrived, but while we were up there it got warm and started to melt. Kathleen and the kids came up too.  It was a little sad because we all felt Martin’s absence, but we also felt his presence. There was coming together and healing energy, and it was good to see everyone.  I’ve been trying to bond with the kids and get closer to them.  I took them out for a long walk around the neighborhood one morning to the park and the lake and all the local playgrounds.  Played some chess with Match and Abbie. We also had dinner with Larry and Jackie and place in Allentown called Mother’s which was really good.  To top it all off, the Bills demolished the Jets on Sunday.  Looking good for the playoffs.

I’ve started a D&D campaign with Martin’s kids as a fun way to try and be a presence in their lives.  We’ve had three sessions so far over the last three weeks.  The first week we rolled up characters, the second we did a warm-up wilderness encounter en route the the start of the main adventure, and this last weekend the party got the the base town, met some of the locals, stocked up on provisions and all that, and set out for the ruins of the Sunless Citadel, where the adventure begins in earnest.  They climbed down into a ravine and are now at the front door of the main dungeon (where a trap awaits, unbeknownst to them).  The party consists of the three oldest kids, Charlie, Matthew and Abbie, as well as their cousin Rylee, all aged 12 to 16.  Also joining in are Michelle and Jeannie.  It’s a good mix of races, classes and alignments.  Rylee is and Elfin Fighter, and Charlie and Elfin Ranger.  Match is a Dwarven Barbarian, and Abbie a Gnomish Bard who rides around on a giant rabbit.  Michelle is playing a Halfling Cleric and Jeannie a human Sorceress.  I’m DM’ing, which is something I really enjoy.  Everyone is first level, and their alignments are centered on chaotic neutral, which fits with their general attitude. 

We’re using a combination of software.  It’s amazing how all this stuff has advanced since I first started playing D&D online twenty years ago with Nick.  We’re using google meet for the video conference.  This mostly works great by the call only lasts and hour, so I have to start a new meeting halfway thru.  We’re using DND Beyond for the character sheets, stats, and related stuff like spells, weapons, bonuses, modifiers, and hit points.  And we’re using Owlbear Rodeo for maps and combat.  All free apps that run in the browser, very convenient. 

So far it’s lots of fun, and good to be able to spend time with everyone in a casual, semi-structured way.  They’re all definitely enjoying it.  My plan is to keep it going thru the winter at least, and maybe longer if everyone remains into it. 

Be of Good Cheer

Well this is my last week of work before a well-deserved break for the holidays.  I’m trying to lean in to the spirit of the season this year, even though we haven’t gotten any snow down here.  The most snow I’ve seen was at the Bills game a couple weeks back.  Tons of fun.

We put up our tree a week ago, and started listening to lots of Christmas music.  I’ve discovered all the great jazz singers like Ella Fitzgerald have Christmas music that’s much better than your typical pop radio fare.  I guess the big problem with Christmas music is there’s only 50 or maybe 100 songs, so it gets repetitive fast.  We watched the movie Elf, as well as The Hogfather, neither of which I’d seen before, but were recommend by Kathleen and her kids.  Both fun and charming in completely opposite ways.

I should mention the Origami USA holiday tree at the American Museum of Natural History, since I contributed some Flying Fish models to it this year. Go check it out if you haven’t yet! https://origamiusa.org/holidaytree/2024

I also saw not one but two rock shows in Brooklyn over the last week, at a venue call the Kings Theatre, which I’d never been to before.  It’s a big, beautiful, ornate, overwrought art-deco kind of place, similar to the Beacon in Manhattan.  I guess it’s been completely restored recently and now they’re having cool acts play there.  Predictably, drinks are way overpriced.

The first show was Beat, a King Crimson isotope featuring Adrian Belew and Tony Levin from the original lineup, along with Danny Carey from Tool on drums, and Steve Vai on guitar.  They did 80’s Discipline-era Crimso, and in fact played most of the three classic albums that Belew and Levin made with Bill Bruford and Robert Fripp.  The show was most excellent.  The band was tight and energetic and really delivered new interpretations of the material.  Probably the most interesting thing was how Steve Vai, legendary guitar shredder that he is, sort of pointed up the amazing complexity and difficulty of Fripp’s original parts.  Vai covered some parts exactly, and interpreted others; he did alot of stuff tapping that Fripp originally did picking, and skipped some of Fripp’s parts entirely, such as the intro/bridge to Frame by Frame.  On the other hand, Vai was able to impart a bit of a slinky greazy bluesy feel to Fripp’s very mechanical-sounding parts, and that lifted everything.  His solo on Sheltering Sky was one of the high points of the night.

Less than a week later we were back to see Brooklyn’s own They Might Be Giants.  Their music is also pretty complicated, but the vibe is complete opposite, being wacky humor rather than wacky seriousness.  Needless to say the show was alot fun, with a horn section and lots of moments showcasing all the players.  I realized the song Particle Man perfectly describes the graphic novel Watchmen, whether by coincidence or by design.  Dr. Manhattan is Particle Man, Ozymandias is Triangle Man, and Rorschach is Person Man.  Small world, go figure.

Next up: D&D

Autumn Leaves

We had a very nice Thanksgiving weekend.  I was ready for some downtime, since it had been a pretty busy couple of weeks.  The week before I hit a major milestone for my project at work, so now life got a bit easier just in time for the holiday season.

Biking season is over now because it’s too cold and too dark, but I did manage to get a few rides in the first few weeks of November.  Looking forward to starting again next spring.  Meanwhile we have ice skating and skiing to look forward too, and I’ve switched back to the Nordic Track on what used to be biking days.  On the plus side, I can listen to tunes while I do that.  Meanwhile, my shoulder has been hurting off and on the last few months, no doubt from using the computer too much.  So I’ve been going up and down on the amount of weight I’ve been using on weightlifting days.  This is the time of year when I usually start to feel generally tired and achy and low energy anyway, and I often go down in weight for the winter and back up again in the springtime.  In any event, I seem to have stabilized at a level that’s close to my nominal maximum for everything but bench press, which is about 20 lbs. less.  If I continue to feel okay, I’ll probably go up in a week or two.

November is the time of year for raking leaves, and we’ve been out and at it every weekend since we got home from our trip out west.  Most of the leaves are down now, and this last time we filled up only two cans, compared with 6 or seven cans and bags a couple weeks ago when it was peaking.  We also put up fresh new holiday lights outside.  I like to keep them up over the winter, and last year I just never got around to taking them down, but they all burned out over time. 

Lots of people in our neighborhood go in for big Hallowe’en and Christmas displays on their lawns.  Some of them even do Thanksgiving, but compared the other holidays the choice of imagery is kind of thin.  Pretty much you can have an inflatable turkey, and that’s about it.  If I ever do a lawn display, I want something that will last the whole season.  Start with a scary dragon, then give him a pilgrim hat, then a Santa hat.  Something like that.

Michelle came home from school to visit for a whole week.  The weekend before Thanksgiving we went up to Albany to visit Kathleen and the kids.  Now Michelle and I are planning a D&D campaign with them as a fun way to get more regular face time with everyone.  More on that as it develops.  Michelle spent Monday and Tuesday baking up a storm – cookies, sós kifli, more cookies. 

On Thanksgiving day we had a whole lot of family over: Mary’s family, Denis’s too, and Jeannie’s parents.  She made a turkey and all the things – stuffing, potatoes, gravy, and our guests brought lasagna, sweet potatoes, Brussel sprouts, pie, lots of great stuff, and a really good time.  Good to be around family. 

The next day, which in our house we’ve dubbed Slack Friday, we normally stay home and strive to nothing at all.  This year, however we went out to Long Island to visit Mary, since Denis was in town, as well as her cousin Carla.  After that we went over to visit Nick and Lisa, who live just ten minutes away.  The motivating excuse was to sync up with Nick on his progress on the Global Jukebox, but we ended up staying and enjoying Nick’s homemade bread and talking well into the night.

As for Nick’s progress on the Global Jukebox, that’s coming along nicely.  He’s been ramping up and doing his first major chunk of feature work, so we had a code review and I was able to explain to him a bunch of things he wasn’t ready for before, but now that he’s in the problem space he can grok.  He’ll make a good partner going forward.

Saturday was the Spacecats gig up at the Green Growler.  It went amazingly well and was alot of fun.  Thanksgiving weekend is a bit of a wildcard for playing in bars.  Sometimes it’s dead because everyone is out of town or doing family things.  Other times is packed because people are home visiting family and also want to go out and see their friends.  This night the place was really packed, the most crowded I’d ever seen the place because it turned out thee was a group having an informal ten-year high school reunion.  And everyone seemed to really dig the music.  They’d come in, notice the band and start bobbing their heads or doing a little dance.  We also had a good number of family and friends of the band, including a couple of the guys from my Wednesday group.

We did combination of straight-ahead jazz and more rock-funk oriented stuff, including eight songs off our record Los Gatos Del Cosmos, and a new song by Josh called Getaway Car.  We also had our drummer’s wife Robyn sitting in on vocals.  She’s sort of a theatre and show tunes type singer, but can do some standards and pop stuff.  She’s really good.  So we had her sit on on three songs each set, plus accompany the sax on the melody of Kamasi Washington’s Street Fighter Mas.  Having a singer provided a different kind of energy that helped the overall package I’d say.  We’ll probably ask her to sit in again.

The only downside is we were supposed didn’t have quite enough material to cover three hours.  We ended up spending more time rehearsing with Robyn than I’d planned because we wanted her songs to sound good.  We tried a good bunch of songs with her before we settled on the ones we chose, and there was just some getting to know one another musically and work out the arrangements.  A few of her songs had rubato beginnings and endings and we had to get a feel for how to do that together as a group.  This meant there were a few other new things that weren’t adequately rehearsed that we decided to skip.  Ah well. We ended up closing the second set with an extended jam of John Coltrane’s Mr. P.C., which went over great, and did a short third set that included a couple repeats from the beginning of the night.  No one in the audience seemed to mind, and the bar invited us back for another gig.

Sunday we finally had a day to sit at home and relax.  The Bills game was on TV.  The week before they defeated our arch-rivals the Kansas City Chiefs, which was great to see.   This week they played the Forty-Niners, and it was a lake-effect snowstorm the whole game.  Buffalo showed their cold weather prowess and won handily while SF totally fell apart, and the Bills clinched the AFC East championship.  Woo-hoo!

Spacecats Live at the Green Growler November 30

My group Spacecats is going to be making a rare and much-anticipated live appearance at The Green Growler in Croton, NY on Saturday, November 30 from 7 to 10 pm.  The group features John Szinger on saxophone, Josh Deutchman on piano and synthesizer, Ken Matthews on Bass and Rick Arecco on drums, with special guest Robyn Ferracane on vocals.  We play a blend jazz and funk, originals, standards, and pop songs with our own unique twist.  Come out and enjoy!

Spacecats – Jazz and Funk
Saturday, November 30, 7 to 10 pm
at
The Green Growler
4 Croton Point Ave., Croton-on-Hudson, NY 10520

Plutonium Dirigible is Live!!!

Here it is at long last, Plutonium Dirigible, the new album by Buzzy Tonic, available on all your favorite streaming services. Buzzy Tonic is my home studio project, and the new record features nine new original tunes.

This record is dedicated to my brother Martin, who started Buzzy Tonic with me years ago, contributed a song to the record, and will always be a part of the creative spirit of the project.

Spotify
https://open.spotify.com/album/5zyYCVFrVi6U4BYPKD8PDW

Apple Music:
https://music.apple.com/us/album/plutonium-dirigible/1777655404

Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DLLMJ657

For more info, check out the album’s web page at:
https://zingman.com/music/plutoniumdirigible.php

Enjoy!

Comings and Goings

It was another busy week.  We got home from our trip Monday morning and it was straight to work.  Wednesday evening we went to see a rock show, Cyndi Lauper at Madison Square Garden.  Had dinner in the Persian place Jeannie likes before the show.  Cyndi put on an excellent show.  The band was great, and so was the light and video show, and she can really still sing.  There were lots of costume changes, and a fair amount of long storytelling intros to songs.  Between the two, they rarely played more than two or three songs without a pause.  Ah well, she’s got alot of great, fun hits.

Friday night we went up to Boston for the OrigaMIT convention, which was on Saturday.  It’s fun to be able to say I teach a MIT every year, even if it’s just origami.  This year I taught my Flying Fish, since I recently folded a bunch of the for the OUSA holiday tree, and made some improvements to the design along the way.  This year’s convention seemed a bit more low key than other years, and the only person I really ended up talking to in any depth was Brian Chan.  Erik Demaine did his usual lecture on his research, and this year seems to have made good progress in cracking the layering problem, which central to the whole question of modeling origami in software.  After the main classes were over, there was a group activity, a design challenge.  For the prompt “things you find in a kitchen” I folded a cake with a slice cut out, and the missing slice out of another sheet of paper.  Interested 3-D geometry challenge. 

We drove Saturday after dinner.  It was good to get an extra hour of sleep Sunday morning, and finally have a low pressure day off.  The weather was nice so Jeannie and did a bike ride, maybe the last of the year.  I went sixteen miles in a little over an hour.  Also took the Mustang out for a ride, and raked up the leaves in the yard, which we hadn’t done since before our trip.

Monday came and I was pretty exhausted today, and also feeling out of sorts with it getting dark so early now that the clocks have shifted.  Ah well, looking forward to not having to do any traveling for a while, and get some things done at home.