Author: Zingblog 2

Going Down

Today is the fifth Monday of January, almost certainly no one’s favorite day of the year.  I’ve been trying to shake the doldrums of winter.  Lots of rainy and sunless days. Work has been busy and my increasing load of meetings and random tasks means less time to focus on writing software. Michelle went back up to school yesterday, so the nest is empty once again.

Guess what, I’m in a D&D campaign again!  Our last one ended over a year ago when Michelle went off to college.  Last week out of the blue my friend Mark H. up in the Adirondacks asked me if I wanted to join his group.  So I came up with a few ideas for characters, all of them different kinds of fighter/magic-user combinations.  One was Fingongolfinger, an elvish fighter/wizard, an attempt to re-create the classic elf type from the original D&D game.  Fights with a sword and longbow, and casts spells like fireball and lightning bolt.  But the party already had and elvish wizard.  The second was Hiro Ünliikli, a Dragonborn barbarian/sorcerer. This would’ve been pretty wild and weird, but the party already had Teifling, which was weird enough.

The one they liked the best was Grimli Son of Groin, a dwarvish cleric whose deity is Thor.  He fights with a magic warhammer and axe and shield, and has spells like spiritual weapon, and other spell to boost his and party’s fight ability, endurance, and resistance.  He started at level seven and the DM gave him a bunch of cool magic items.  I’m very stoked.

We had our first session last week, over zoom, and I met the party, Mark’s friends, and the whole thing was fun and easygoing. They’ve been playing long enough to have their own tone and rhythm and in-jokes.  I came at a time when they were choosing where to go for the next major adventure, so there was alot of roleplaying and backstory, but no actual combat.  

Only problem is the group meets on Wednesdays, which is the night of my rehearsal jazz group. As luck would have it that was cancelled last week and again this week.  I’ve been thinking of leaving anyway since the group isn’t all that good.  It’s more like going to the gym for sax playing and improvisation over real book tunes than anything else.  But I kinda wanna find a new and better group to replace it.  I’ve been thinking of signing up for a jazz workshop in the city to maybe meet some new and better players.

Happily Spacecats, which rehearses on Thursday, is still fun and creative and sounding better than ever.  My new song Los Gatos de Cosmos, is developing nicely.  But I feel like we need to find some gigs.

In other news, they finally got some snow upstate, so on Saturday we went skiing for the first time this season.  Good to spend time outside doing something physical and get away from staring at the computer screen.  If you recall I took seven years off from skiing, and started again two seasons ago.  At the time I bought new boots and demoed skis on the mountain.  Last year we went skiing three times, up from one the year before.  This year we’re hoping to beat that.

I demoed skis last year but didn’t like them that much.  They were a little short, and while they were very maneuverable, they weren’t so fast on the straightaways.  This year the skis I got are longer, they’re stiffer and lighter than my old skis, and very controllable on different conditions, ice, powder, etc.  But they’re actually close to the length of my old ones.  I’m thinking maybe 5cm shorter would be perfect.

Anyway it was a great day skiing, and we did sixteen runs, which is good amount more then our first trip last year, when we did ten runs.  Michelle is way faster then Jeannie and me now, and just zips right down the mountain. Jeannie and I are thinking of taking a weekend up to the Adirondacks of Vermont or something in a few weeks. 

Wear Your Blizzard Season Coat

We’re coming to the end of another holiday season.  This one was strangely both eventful and uneventful. I guess I should rewind to the week before Christmas.  Michelle came home from college for winter break, but even though we were no longer symptomatic, Jeannie was still testing positive for Covid, so we all kinda did your best to avoid each other for a few days just in case.  Luckily Michelle never got sick.

We had planned a trip up to Buffalo to visit Lizzy and my parents.  Since she had to work both Christmas Eve and Boxing Day, Lizzy wasn’t coming home, so we figured we’d go up for Xmas day this year.  Our original plan was to drive up on the 23rd and catch the Sabres playing that night.  But then there came talk of a coming blizzard.  When they cancelled the hockey game, we figured it was gonna be trouble.

So we stayed home while the storm slammed into town on the 23rd and continued thru Xmas Eve and subsided sometime Xmas day.  It turned out to be a once-in-fifty-years level storm.  We kept in close contact with Lizzy and my folks, and they were all alright.  My folks just hunkered down and waited it out, and fortunately did not loose power.  Lizzy was at work early Friday morning, but closed her store around nine and left for her roommate’s parents’ house in Arcade, away from the lake effect snow belt.  Made it out just in time.

By mid-morning there was a travel ban in the City of Buffalo and all of Erie county.  All our loved ones were safe, so we decided to stay local for Xmas since.  It was actually really nice to have a couple days of down time with no immediate responsibilities.  I worked out and made more progress on my song, and we all played games and watched movies.

We were going to go over to Mary’s Xmas day, but then Lou got Covid, so that was out.  On Xmas Eve Jeannie went out and got a nice rib roast to cook, and her parents came over, so Xmas was low key but fun.  And everyone got Legos.

We headed up to Buffalo on Monday, boxing day.  The travel ban was still in effect for the city, but in the suburbs where my parents are it was okay to drive.  Once we got past East Aurora the amount of snow on the ground increased considerably.  My folks had a good three feet.  Luckily my dad has a giant snow thrower, and they have a friendly neighbor with a plow.

Lizzy couldn’t go home, so she went to my parents’ too.  And Martin showed up with his family.  We spent two days merrymaking, which was most excellent.  On Tuesday Lizzy took a ride to her store just to make sure everything was okay, and snow was still falling.  I tagged along because I wanted to give my old pair of skis and boots to my friend Larry, who lived nearby. Unfortunately, Larry came down with Covid as well, so I just left them on his front porch instead of going in to hang out.  Ah well.  On Wednesday it finally stopped snowing.  We had thought about going skiing but everyone was too tired.  We ran a bunch of errands in the morning then headed home.

I guess we really needed to catch up on our rest cuz the next day everyone slept in until noon. The last few days we’ve been on a fairly leisurely schedule.   Been trying to go for a walk in the brief, thin daylight every day.  More working out, music, games and movies.  Our New Year’s Eve plans were a bust too since our friends had Covid. 

Ah well back to work tomorrow.

Global Jukebox Plos One Article

Over at my other project as lead software developer on The Global Jukebox, I’m happy to announce our article in the peer reviewed journal Plos One has been published:

The Global Jukebox: A public database of performing arts and culture
Anna Wood, Patrick Savage, et. al.

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0275469

Abstract
Standardized cross-cultural databases of the arts are critical to a balanced scientific understanding of the performing arts, and their role in other domains of human society. This paper introduces the Global Jukebox as a resource for comparative and cross-cultural study of the performing arts and culture. The Global Jukebox adds an extensive and detailed global database of the performing arts that enlarges our understanding of human cultural diversity. …

Chicago Part I – Beginnings

Just got back from a fantastic trip to the capitol of the Great Lakes, Chicago.  Jeannie had never been there before and I hadn’t been since the 1990’s when I used to go there for work alot, but mainly spent my time in an office park out in the suburbs.

The motivating excuse was COCon, the Chicago Origami Convention.  This is the first time for a Chicago convention, and they had it in one of the big hotels downtown.  We arrived a day early, on Thursday to play tourist in the city.  The flight out there was smooth.  We got up before daylight to get to the airport in time for our flight, and we landed mid-morning.  I slept on the plane so it felt like the start of a new day.  We grabbed a cab, checked into the hotel, and were out walking around the city before noon.

It must be said that Chicago is a great city for walking around.  And the weather was beautiful the whole time.  We were right near the waterfront at a place called Navy Pier, and there was a scenic walkway for bicycles and pedestrians.  Then into a park with a funky piece of public art called The Bean.  It’s basically a giant curved chrome blob that you can walk around and underneath and see really interesting reflections.

The main attraction for the afternoon was the Art Institute of Chicago.  It’s a world class art museum to rival the Met in New York or the one in Vienna.  It’s got a great collection, and very well presented.  Famous paintings on display included Sunday in the Park, American Gothic, Nighthawks, a Van Gogh Self Portrait, and one of the missing stained glass windows from the Darwin Martin House in Buffalo (I wonder if the plan to repatriate that someday) to give you an idea.  Also a wing full of great Asian bronze, pottery and sculptures, going from ancient to contemporary artists, ancient Greek and Roman stuff, and a wing of European art including lots of paintings and sculptures and a whole hall full of arms and armor.  On the way back to the hotel we walked thru the Honorable Richard J. Daley Plaza where they got that Picasso, across from the Cook County assessor’s office.

Walking back to the hotel along the Chicago river we came upon a plaza with some cafes, and stopped for some beers and a late lunch.  Chicago is famous for its architecture, and we were right across the river from some crazy art deco googie tower apartment buildings with parking garages spiraling up the lower half and boat docks in the basement.  In and around the river, the museums and various other places downtown I noticed a pattern on the architecture that I’m calling the Chicago motif.  It consists of a square divided into eight triangle by square cross and an “X”.  Coincidently, this is also the crease pattern of an unfolded waterbomb base.

That night we went out to dinner at a bar across the street from the hotel where they had the football game on.  I had a burger with a fired egg on top, cuz if I’m in a place with that on the menu, that’s what I’ll usually get.  Later we met my friend and colleague Ann Marie, with whom I’ve been on several zoom calls a week the whole year, but never met face to face before.  She invited us to join her and her friends at a different bar downtown where there was a hallowe’en themed burlesque show.  It was a lot of fun, with a very positive vibe, and as she put it, classy with a capital A-S-S.  Afterwards, we walked around downtown for a good hour while Ann Marie played tour guide and pointed out lots of notable things like restaurants, architecture, and historical sites.

Friday we went to another great museum, the Field Museum of Natural History.  It’s alot like the American Museum of Natural History in New York which I know well, but maybe not so large and a little bit more shiny.  Great architecture.  The star attraction was Sue the T-Rex, named after her discoverer Sue the human.  It’s the most complete Tyrannosaur skeleton every found, virtually complete.  The T-Rex is the centerpiece of a great hall of the history of life on earth, with tons of fossils and other artifacts.  There was also a short 3-D film about the discovery, unearthing and preparation of the Sue fossil, and how they analyzed and what they learned about the living creature’s life and death.   It turns out Sue was fully grown, 40 feet long, at 19 years old, and died at 29.  During his or her life he or she suffered nine broken ribs and a fractured tibia and recovered from all of those injuries.  Among the things I never knew I never wanted to know was that Sue was infected by parasite worms that burrowed holes into it’s jawbone.  

For all its attention to scientific detail the film’s CG animation was strangely inaccurate in several ways.  For one, they showed the dinosaur’s gait as having wide-set feet like a sumo wrestler, rather than more plausibly with the feet under the the body.  Second was that whenever the terrible lizard appeared, the other little dinosaurs would wait for it to get close, then turn and shreik at it before running away, rather than running off at the first whiff of trouble like real animals do.  Lastly, in a visualization of an epic battle with a Triceratops a la Disney’s Fantasia, where they conjectured the T-Rex got it’s leg injury, somehow the T-Rex almost effortlessly bites the three-horned adversary on the neck under it’s protective crest.  It’s almost as bad as that bit in Toy Story where the light fixture disappears into the ceiling.

There were also halls of taxidermy, a really nice collection of gems and minerals, and whole hall of jade and carved jade art, a bit of crossover from the day before with artifacts from various antiquated civilizations, shown here for the naturally historic rather than artistic value.

After the Field Museum we hit the Aquarium, which was right next door.  Highlights include beluga whales, dolphins, sharks, sea turtles, jellyfish, eels, tropical coral reefs, cuttlefish, a cool movie about octopus, and a whole section of tanks devoted to Great Lakes fish such as pike, walleye, perch, trout, and bass.

We walked back to the hotel along the lakeshore trail and by the time we arrived, other origami people were starting to filter in.  We spent happy hour at the bar with some friends, and then I set up my exhibit (more on that later).  We went out for dinner for authentic Chicago style deep dish pizza.  Most excellent.  Returned to the hotel for late night folding.  I mostly practiced models I would teach the following day.  

More on the convention itself next.  

In the Spaceship, the Silver Spaceship the Lion Takes Control

It’s been a busy few weeks.  The weather has been alternating between mild and sunny and cold and rainy, so I’ve been getting in a few bike rides a week here and there.  Every time I do I think it might be the last nice day. It’s rainy again this week, and of course it’s getting dark earlier and earlier. A week ago Jeannie and I went for for a hike up a mountain called Anthony’s Nose, which looks down on the Bear Mountain Bridge from the summit.  That’s right folks, there are alot of great hikes in the area, but we picked the nose.

I transitioned in my job from consultant to full time lead staff engineer at the Innovation Lab. Last week was heavy on onboarding and strategic planning and roadmapping meetings, as well as tactical planning for the upcoming release of our mobile app in November.  Also got a new computer and been moving into that.  One night after work last week there was a dinner event hosted by one of our partners in the consortium, and I met some of their engineers and some of their customers, as well as an attorney named Havona who was “raised by hippies” and is now living in Spain so her daughters can train to be future tennis pros.  It’s the first time I’ve been to an event like this since before the pandemic, and it turned out to be alot of fun.

And, I’m looking to hire software engineers with a combination of full-stack and R&D prototyping skills.  Ping me if you fit the bill.

Been folding tons of origami for some upcoming exhibitions.  More on that as it, uh, unfolds.

Also Jeannie got me a lego spaceship recently and I’ve been trying to find the time to build it. More on that as it, uh, comes together.

Lastly, been working on music.  I have two I’m working writing/arranging/tracking: In the Purple Circus, and A Plague of Frogs. Additionally, I have six tracks basically done, but the guitar sounds were all over the place.  Last weekend I went back and worked on putting them into some kind of tonal shape.  The main issue is that there’s lots of low end noise muddying up the mix.  EQ helps but not enough.  When I put it thru an amp simulator it cleans up alot of that but also alters the tone pretty radically into the treble range.  I ended up creating a signal chain with 2 buses, one for the raw guitar mix and another for the amp, then mixing the two of them for the right balance. It made a huge differenceI and I applied this to five songs.  Further tweaking can occur but they’re all in the zone.  Hopefully by the end of this record I’ll have something like “my” guitar sound, or at least a sound I can control.

Mo’ Origami

There’s an origami convention coming up Chicago next month, so I’ve been getting organized about folding some new models for the convention.  Having to do an exhibition is a great motivator.  I’ve also been busy at work, transitioning from a part-time consulting gig to a full time staff position as Lead Engineer of Consumer Reports’ new Innovation Lab. I’ll be building an R&D software engineering team to create prototypes and products around consumer’s digital privacy and data rights.  More on that as the situation comes into being, but soon, having Fridays off will be a thing of the past.

So last Friday I spent a good chunk of the day organizing my origami studio.  Since the start of the pandemic there have not been alot of in-person conventions and exhibits, so I’m really just getting back into it.  I have lots of boxes of half-folded experiments and ideas.  I want to take the best and perfect them and fold them at an exhibit-quality level.  Some of the stuff is pretty complex and ambitious.

While I was at it, I threw out lots of old models.  One has to do this every few years, but it’s always funny because the stuff I’m getting rid of was once some of my best work.  Michael LaFosse told me not too long ago that if the model has a face, like a human or an animal, he can’t bear to tear it up or crumple it.  Instead he unfolds it first, then throws away an unfolded sheet of paper.  I found myself doing that a few times.

I registered to teach classes at the Chicago convention.  I signed up to teach two classes, and am thinking of adding a third.  Among the models I’m teaching is my Space Cat, which I designed at the beginning of the summer, right around the time my jazz and funk band Spacecats decided on its name.  The model is a variation on my Sophie the Cat, restyled with a sleek, atomic age midcentury modern look.  Very hip.

And, it looks like the Origami MIT convention is back this year, after three years off!

New Song – My Ol’ Broke Down Truck

I wrote a country song!  Well sort of at least.  The second in my guitar singer-songwriter experiments, My Ol’ Brokedown Truck is pretty much a traditional country song, although with different lyrics and chord voicings it might be something like a jazz standard from the great American songbook.  I wrote it around Christmastime when I was visiting my parents and my Mum asked me to explain to her Nashville notation.  I did so by way of demonstration, starting by writing down the title and eight bars of chord changes, and then a bridge, and suddenly I had the beginnings of a song. The lyrics also came quite quickly and naturally, and I liked it well enough to to finish it.

I recorded a basic track with guitar, bass drums and vocal. The guitar sound may take liberties with the conventions of the genre, bringing in some energy of bands like Cake or the The Black Keys. The vocal has a low and high harmony part, and I decided it’d sound better with a female voice doing the high harmony. I asked my sister-in-law Mary, who has been in a number of singing groups over the years, if she’d like to do the part. She came in and nailed it, and lifted the song to a whole ‘nuther level.

The hardest thing was to get the right sound for the solo on the intro and middle eight. A sax was definitely not appropriate, and I don’t play pedal steel guitar or fiddle, or banjo or mandolin, and the chords modulate so a harmonica won’t work. I experimented with various synthesizer sounds, trying to harken back to a rare moment in pop music where pedal steel guitars played side by side with analog synths, as exemplified by songs Gordon Lightfoot’s The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, Billy Joel’s The Great Suburban Showdown, or Jackson Browne’s The Load-Out. But the right tone eluded me. I ended up using a melodica (a funny little keyboard instrument that you blow into) run thru a boxy amp simulator, spring reverb and tremolo effect.

Enjoy!

…

My Ol’ Brokedown Truck

My brokedown truck and my rotten luck
Have left me here stuck by the side of the road
With my bleeding heart I will make a new start
But first I must get my body home
We’ve made many miles together
Sure in sunny and stormy weather
Well I could trade ‘er in for some shiny new tin
But you’ll never find peace while you roam

(solo)

We’ve rode many roads together
Fast through foul and fair weather
And I might go far in a brand new sports car
But then how can I carry the load?
So I’ll wait here stuck with my rotten luck
And my ol’ brokedown truck

– John Szinger, 2022

Week in New England

Just got back from a lovely family vacation in Cape Cod and the surrounding area.  This was the first full-week vacation we’ve taken in years, since before the pandemic. Lizzy drove up from Buffalo at met us at Martin’s house outside of Albany, and left her car there.  She was all excited because she just bought a new car a few weeks ago. We all took my car from there to make things easier.  It was great to be together with both kids for a week and hang out and have fun.

First day we took the ferry out to Martha’s Vineyard.  We mostly walked around town and ended up a restaurant having lobster rolls and cold drinks.  Then we stayed on Cape Cod for a few days in a sort of resort hotel suite on the beach with a loft and a balcony looking out over the ocean.  Went swimming in Nantucket Sound, where the sea there was surprisingly warm and gentle, although the beach was a bit stony after you got in a little ways.  Enjoyed the sea and sunshine, went out for breakfast, ice cream, and more seafood dinners, played games in the evening.  

One day we drove out to the end of cape, to Provincetown.  It was a cute fun town, alot like Martha’s Vineyard.  We took a whale watching tour and saw several groups of different kinds of whales.  Spent most of our time with a pair of humpbacks who lifted their tails out high out of the water before they dove down.  

Another afternoon we went to the National Seashore on the Atlantic side.  Saw some lighthouses and the landing for the first trans-Atlantic telegraph cable, as well as the Marconi station where they sent the first trans-Atlantic wireless communication over a hundred years ago.  There was also a hiking trail thru the marsh which was pretty cool.  I took a swim in the ocean on one of the beaches there.  The water was much colder than on the south side.

We spent a couple of days in Boston.  We stayed in a hotel right near downtown, and spent a good deal of time walking around the city.  The first day we went to the aquarium, which was pretty cool, and ended up at a pub that’s been there since the 1700’s for dinner.  Next day we went to the science museum, which included the planetarium and an electricity demonstration with Van de Graaff generators and Tesla coils that could play music.  I found these pretty fascinating, but when I asked after the show the presenter didn’t really have a strong idea of how the Tesla coils were made to play in pitch.  So I looked it up, and it turns the lighting actually can be made to fire off at a controlled frequency by modulating the voltage.  This creates a tone and basically makes the Tesla coil a speaker.  The voltage controller can be driven by a midi interface and suddenly, music!  Now I’m thinking of getting one for Spacecats.  I wonder if it’s safe in a bar or nightclub.

That evening we went to see the Red Sox play at Fenway Park.  We’d been trying to get to a Mets game all summer but the timing didn’t work out, so we did this instead.  It’s been years since I went to a baseball game, and it was alot of fun.

The last day we headed out northward.  Spent the morning at Salem, and went to the witch museum, which was strangely fascinating.  Spent the afternoon at a beach in New Hampshire, which had the same vibe as Cape Cod but a bit more low key.  The beach itself was nicer, more sandy and less stony, plus has some big rocks.  After that it was back to Martin’s where we hung out most of the following day, and finally Lizzy took off and we went back home too.

New Song – Slope

Slope began life as a jazz song with my pre-pandemic group Haven Street, written by our bass player Jay, and appeared on our record.  I wrote a lyric for it, but we didn’t do vocals in that group, and I’ve never been much of a fan of vocalese anyway, unless it’s Ella Fitzgerald.  So for this record I changed it from a jazz style into an old-timey blues, with a drop-tuned guitar now carrying the main riff rather than a standup bass. 

The arrangement is fairly sparse, with just a single vocal, guitar, bass and drum.  To finish it off I added a bit of Fender Rhodes, and of course a smokey bluesy sax.  I also added real drums doing brushes on the snare, since I have no way to create that using midi and samples.

Enjoy!

https://zingman.com/music/mp3/bzvr/Slope27a.mp3

…

Slope

(D minor, drop D tuning)

Just when you think that life’s looking up
And you might drink from that flowing cup
Then comes the day when it all turns around
Just then you think that life’s looking down

Climbin’ up that slope
Slidin’ down that slope

Just when you think that life’s looking up
Just then you think that life’s looking down

Scamblin’ up that slope
Tumblin’ down that slope

And you might drink from that flowing cup
Then comes the day when it all turns around

Holdin’ on to hope
Ridin’ on up and down that slope

– John Szinger

The Analog Kid

More summer, more busy these days.  The weather has been beautiful.  One night last weekend we built a fire in our fire pit and hung out on the patio and considered what song we might use to break Vecna’s curse.  Last summer I made a playlist of 80 favorite 80’s songs, and now I’m thinking of making a new playlist of 77 favorite 70’s songs for this summer.

I edited up some highlight form the the Spacecats gig.  I’m going to update my web site soon to feature of few of the best ones, but for now, you can see the whole set here:

zingman.com/music/spacecats/video/spacecats_altmed2206/

I got out for a bike ride five days last week.  I mostly go around our neighborhood, which is kinda hilly and some streets have alot of cars. Sometimes to a local place called Nature Study Woods, which is mountain biking trails, and not particularly well maintained.  The steep parts tend to be washed out and stony, and the low spots muddy.  Also I tend to go on fairly short rides – a half hour to an hour, and usually go as fast as possible.  

All in all Jeannie doesn’t enjoy this style of riding, but we wanted to start doing some biking together.

So on Sunday Jeannie took our bikes out to Jones Beach and biked along the scenic Ocean Parkway Coastal Greenway.  It’s a great bike path, smooth and flat, that runs the length of the island, out from the main beach, through as series of smaller beaches, saltwater wildlife refuges, and the occasional marina, restaurant or bar.  We went out a little over seven miles then turned around, for a total of fifteen miles or so.  On the way back there was a pretty consistent headwind, but it was a very doable and fun ride.   We had a lunch of ice cream and clam strips, then went out to the beach, but it was too cold for swimming.  The water was unusually calm and there were lots of seashells.  Also tons of giant container ships out at see, queued up to get into New York harbor, like I’ve never seen before.  There’s usually maybe two or three, but this time there was over a dozen.

I also got the mustang on the road over the weekend, and continued with the yardwork.  This time is was doing the edging on the driveway and front walk.  Still to go is the walk around the back of the house, and the patio.  It seems everything has grown in quite alot this spring, and needs an extra level of cutting back.  Also I’ve never seen so many bunny rabbits and chipmunks in our neighborhood, nor heard so many songbirds.

Lastly, I’m continuing with doing origami and preparing for the convention, which starts this Friday.  My two dodecahedron star balls are nearly complete, but it’s taking some work to finish them.  They’re single-sheet polyhedra, a very advance form of origami, and closing off and locking the bottom where the edges come together is a nontrivial design challenge.  I’ve also been experimenting with a new design called the Space Cat, a variation on my Sophie the Cat, with a midcentury modern look and proportions.  Hopefully will get there and have a few new pieces for my exhibit.

Meanwhile, I’m teaching a couple classes, and agreed to pre-record them for people who are attending the convention remotely.  This process grew out of last year’s online-only convention, in which all classes were taught live as Zoom calls.  This year we’re recording Zoom sessions, with a camera pointing down at the work as it’s being folded.  I kind of view this a run-thru, a rehearsal for the real class, and good opportunity to make sure I know the model and can teach it.  My first class, Sophie the Cat, went off without a hitch, totally great.  For my second class my Five-Banded Armadillo, I somehow skipped a stepped and messed of the proportions of the bands, which are created by pleating.  I realized my mistake after I did the collapse and it was too late to undo, so I had to just roll with it and adjust the proportions as I finished the model. All in all it still turned out in the end, and I’m sure to get it right in the actual class.