Fitness – Zing Blog 2

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!

Way Out West, Part II

Wednesday we got up early to watch the sun rise. Then we drove out of the Grand Canyon to the east, crossed the Colorado River somewhere around Antelope Canyon, and swung north into the legendary realm of Utah, a place I’d never been before. The maps app said the trip was about five hours, but for us it was more like eight, because we kept stopping for scenic overlooks along the way and doing short hikes to the local vista. It was amazing to see the way the landscape changed over the miles. The Grand Staircase with its layers of all different colored rocks was particularly amazing.

We got to Bryce in the late afternoon and had time for a hike around the rim to a place called Sunset Point. We dipped into the upper part of the canyon, then back up to the top to watch the sun go down. (Fun fact: the sun doesn’t actually go up or down, or around the Earth at all. It’s the Earth spinning that creates the illusion of the sun traveling across the sky!) We were staying at the lodge in the national park here to, and had drinks dinner at the restaurant there. Very yummy. There was no TV or wifi in the room. Next morning we hiked into the canyon. Bryce is much smaller than the Grand Canyon and you can reach the bottom in an hour or so. But the rock formations are the most amazing to behold that I’ve ever seen! So we spent at a few hours hiking around the canyon floor and eventually up the other side at Sunrise Point.

We had lunch there before we took off, then it was another drive across the mountains and desert to Zion. This one was only two hours or so long. Coming into Zion from the east, we had had to drive thru a long tunnel and down an intense series of switchbacks to get the main canyon. We weren’t able to get a room in the park lodge here, so we stayed in a hotel a little ways outside the park gate. We had dinner at a really good Mexican restaurant that from the outside had a vibe like From Dusk ‘Til Dawn before things turned weird.

Friday we hiked around inside Zion, which was really beautiful like everything else, and had looked alot like Sedona actually. Walked along the river at the bottom then up a side canyon to a series of pools and waterfalls. All of these hikes were pretty big – over five miles and 1,000 feet vertical. We ended up at a saloon in the village right outside the park gate having a couple drinks and a late lunch.

Saturday we drove from Zion to Las Vegas, Nevada. This was a short ride by this vacation’s standards, only a couple hours. On the way we stopped at a dinosaur discovery in St. George, Utah. The main attraction there was a giant slab of natural rock which had been cleaned up and had a roof put over it. The rock reveal thousands of dinosaur footprints and told the story of how it was once a sandy beach and shore of a shallow lake.

In Vegas the weather was hot for the first time since we’d arrived out west. And unlike everywhere else we’d been, everything was very crowded and noisy. Last time I was in Vegas was in the 1990’s, so it was interesting to see what has changed. In the afternoon we walked along the strip and got as far as Caesar’s Palace, about halfway up. In the evening we went out to dinner with Jeannie’s cousin Lynda and her husband Carl, who moved to Vegas some years back. It was an Italian restaurant in the part of town off the strip where people actually live. That gave a different perspective on the city. Afterwards we went back to the strip, and starting at the Luxor worked our way back to our hotel at the other end, stopping occasionally to rest and have a drink and take in the sights. The highlight was at the Parisian, where a Moulin Rouge style burlesque show appeared right at the bar where we happened to be lounging. A troupe of cute dancing girls in corsets and fishnets shaking their thang, and a self-aware singer who broke the fourth wall to tell us all she thought the lyrics to Roxanne were really repetitive. We looked for opportunities to play some blackjack or roulette, but the tables had all been replaced by machines that made it feel like self-checkout at the supermarket and didn’t look like very much fun. Jeannie found an arcade of vintage slot machines and spent some money there but didn’t win anything. At least people don’t smoke indoors anymore.

The last day was the drive back to Phoenix to catch our flight home. We did this trip in the opposite direction thirty years ago. Back then it was mostly a two-lane country road across the dessert. I remember a sign in a small town in the middle of nowhere, Arizona saying “No gas next 150 miles.” You couldn’t even tune in a radio station. Well now that middle part of the trip is mostly a divided four-lane highway heavy with traffic, and the no-gas zone is more like 100 miles, and by the time you pass thru you’re in the sprawling exurbs of Phoenix. Compared to the other drives on the trip, it was pretty flat, mainly desert with groves of Joshua trees and Saguaro cactuses.

Our rental car, a Nissan Rogue, kinda sucked BTW. The flight home was uneventful, except that getting in an out of Kennedy Airport is a nightmare these days because of all the construction.

Way Out West, Part I

We just got back from a a great trip out west to Arizona and Utah. Sedona, the Grand Canyon, Bryce, Zion, and 24 hours in Las Vegas. Lots and lots of hiking. A good deal of driving. Epic scenic vistas galore.

Part of the purpose of this trip was for Jeannie and I to celebrate out thirtieth wedding anniversary, which was earlier this month. (We had thought we might do some kind of party or dinner for family and friends, but as it happened we weren’t much in the party spirit in the late summer and early fall. I ended up making a toast to Jeannie and thirty more years when we were visiting my parents a couple weeks ago.) In any event, Jeannie and I had taken a trip to Arizona the year we got married. It was our first vacation together, and my first time out west. So we visited a couple places we’d been to before, and some new places too. It was a good opportunity to reflect on our lives together so far and the way things change and stay the same across the grand passage of time.

The first stop on our itinerary was Sedona. We flew out Saturday morning. Our flight landed in Phoenix, and by the time we got our car and drove up there, it was late afternoon. We took a sunset hike up a nearby mountain, the first of many. It was only about two miles and maybe four or five hundred feet vertical, winding up from behind the local high school, which was across the street from our hotel, and took a little over an hour. But the view was amazing, looking down into the valley and across to the mesas and rock formations all around. Went out to dinner for Mexican food.

Next morning we explored the town a little more and did a little shopping because I needed new hiking boots, and we got some groceries too. Sedona has a vibe very much like a ski town because the main activity there is hiking. It’s pretty small with just one main drag, full of shops and restaurants, quite nice. If you leave town in any direction you’re five or ten minutes away from an epic hike. We chose one called Fay Canyon, which had a side quest to a natural stone arch, and a good scramble up the cliffside at the trail’s end to some great views. That one was maybe three or four miles and a thousand feet vertical. We followed it up another shorter, steeper hike to the top of another mesa, called Boynton if I recall.

When we were up in Buffalo a couple weeks ago, Chris and Mark told us that our old friend Keith, the crazy talented guitarist for Event Horizon, was living in Sedona, and gave us the name of the band he was in. We tried to find him but he didn’t have any gigs the weekend we were there. Nevertheless, we had dinner at a bar where he was scheduled to play the following weekend, and left a message. He was always a difficult one to get a hold of. It would be amazing to hear from him.

Anyway, Monday morning we lit out for our next destination, the Grand Canyon. On the way we stopped at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, after several hours of winding thru very scenic canyon and mountain roads. This is something we both had always wanted to see. Percival Lowell of course was a famous astronomer who discovered the once and future planet Pluto, mapped the famous canals of Mars, and contributed in many other areas. Other astronomers there mapped the moon in the 1960’s and discovered the cosmic redshift that led to the expanding universe model of cosmology. The tour was fascinating; they showed us several working telescopes and explained about their history, construction, operation, and how astronomers use them in their research. We would have liked to have been there at night to look thru the big telescope, but Flagstaff is very remote and we would have had to spend the night. As it was, we got to look thru a few ‘scopes in the daytime. One was trained on the sun and had filter at the alpha red wavelength emitted by hydrogen. As a result it showed mainly the surface of the sun and not the white and yellow light blasting from within. The sun actually looked like a ball and not just a disc, and was covered with the hairy fuzz of solar flares, each much larger than the earth. Another ‘scope showed Venus, which is apparently visible in the daytime if you know where to look and can block out the light of the sun.

After several hours more of driving thru very scenic mountains we arrived at the Grand Canyon, shortly before sunset. We were staying in a cabin at Bright Angel right in the park, at the very edge of the chasm. This was something we’d done thirty years before, and was a special memory for us to revisit. The room had a view looking right out over the canyon, and a fire place which was now gas but thirty years ago had been wood-burning. That evening we had dinner at El Tovar, the fancy classy restaurant there. When we were there the last time I declare the steak I ate that night the best I ever had, and over the years it has gained legendary status. I ordered the steak again, and I must say it was a damn good steak. But I supposed I’ve had plenty of great steaks over the last thirty years. For dessert the chef spelled out Happy Anniversary in chocolate on the plate, which was quite nice.

Tuesday was the biggest hike of the trip, down into the canyon itself. It was a beautiful day for it, although they’d had snow just a couple of days earlier. (We had perfect weather the whole trip, although the air was very dry and the elevation made the sunshine extra strong.) The trip was three miles in, going down more than 2,000 feet in elevation. It was basically endless switchbacks scratched out of the cliffside. But you know, breathtakingly beautiful, and fascinating to see the shift in perspective that came with the descent.

A word about the colors. Everywhere we went out there the rocks were really red, to the point where it affected the way you other colors. Basically all the colors were really vivid and seemed to pop. You’ve never seen a more intense blue sky (maybe that was the elevation too) or greener scraggly desert shrubberies. The pants I was were appeared tan under normal circumstances turned green on the trail. And Jeannie’s hiking boots, which were normally grey, turned blue. Totally wild.

It took us a little over two hours to get to the three mile point, which was about halfway to the bottom in terms of both distance and elevation. After we paused for lunch, it was the long slow climb back out, relentlessly uphill for three miles. We were told to plan on taking twice as much time to climb out, but for us the total trip was right around six hours.

After a rest we decided to walk along the rim trail to a vista point to watch the sunset. It was a bit further than we expected, another two miles or so, so we ended up taking the bus back to the village.

A word about sunrises and sunsets. You can really appreciate the optical effects of the earth’s atmosphere at the tops of these cliffs cuz you can see for miles and miles and miles (oh yeah). It’s best to look to the horizon opposite the sun. You can see the shadows climbing up the rocks in the opposite side of the canyon, and really get a feel for the earth turning. You’ll see a blue zone in the sky that creeps up underneath the pink. After the sun set it continues to rise, as the pink begins to fade. This is actually the shadow of the earth itself, causing the night to fall.

At the end of the night we went out a dark place at the end of a parking lot to watch the starts. Amazing, clear skies, just tons and tons of stars. I don’t think I remember ever seeing the Milky Way like that in the fall.

Next up: Utah!

Fall Forward

Been trying to get back to normal life the last few weeks, and settling into some kind of fall routine. There’s been alot of random tasks piling up. Did a bunch of yardwork the last few weekends. Almost at the end of the late summer cycle, nothing to do after but wait for the leaves to start falling. Also been doing work on our various cars. Michelle and I patched the bumper on the camry before she went back to school.

One piece of good news of good news is that I got the Mustang fixed. Way back in July one day I took it out of the garage to take it for a spin, only to discover the brake pedal felt soft. I did a little research and determined it was probably nothing I could fix myself. Being an old car, I didn’t want to take any chances. However I didn’t have to time to actually take into the shop until September, and then it took them a couple days because my mechanic needed to order a new master cylinder. So I finally got the car back and took it for a spin last weekend. Good as new, woo-hoo!

I’ve also been getting back to biking and working out. For a while my energy felt very depleted, and it was hard to concentrate. Working out was one thing I could do that was good for my focus, but I had to drop down to like 70% of my regular weight. Over the last few weeks I’ve been building back up, and now I’m basically I’m at the point where I was before, and building up to surpass my previous plateau this fall.

Meanwhile, back in July I had built up to biking over fifty miles a week. The first Sunday in August I decided to go for a little further than usual. On the ride, I passed a woman who then asked if I’d mind if she rode behind me to catch my slipstream. She looked all cute and sporty in one of those one-piece spandex biking outfits, and in any event why would I object? After a few miles she had caught her breath and pulled up next to me, and we got to talking, mostly about biking and going further and faster. She said she was going 30 miles that day, and told me “never plateau”. When I was done my ride I saw that I’d gone twenty-two and a half miles in a little over ninety minutes. I was really looking forward to telling Martin, but never got the chance. In August I scaled back, averaging closer to 30 miles, going out only three or four times a week. Now I’m ramping back up again. September is the perfect time for biking. The weather is not so hot, and you’ve been training all season. This last weekend I went 22.5 miles again, beating my previous time by about three minutes, closing in on the ninety-minute mark. Next weekend I’m gonna go for 25 miles, and hopefully do a 30 mile ride before the end of the season. I’d like to keep on biking into November if possible.

I’ve also returned to working on The Global Jukebox and getting that back on track. I’ve recruited my friend Nick to work with me as a second engineer. Nick and Martin and I worked together to create an online version of the game Iron Dragon back in the year 2000. For now the main tasks is to get him ramped up. Also, Martin left behind some unfinished work in the form of an experimental branch that he never committed. I’ve pulled it of his old computer but I have yet to merge it.

In my day job I had been finding it hard to focus too, but that’s steadily improving. If I can find a task where I can follow a prefab pattern or script rather than have to do deep, open-ending thinking, that suits me better these days. Fortunately, on one of my project I get to just that: building some new web pages and updating other based on mocks from our designers. Ginny said that building web sites is my happy place, and that’s not so far from the truth. In my other project it’s all herding cats, pulling together multiple engineering and management teams from multiple companies for integration testing. I think I finally found the root cause of a strange, intermittent bug that’s been bedeviling us and blocking our progress, and designed a workaround. Hopefully I’ll have it implemented this week and progress can resume.

There’s lots going in in music these days too. For one thing Jeannie and I saw Earth Wind and Fire and Chicago, two of the greatest horn-section bands of all time, at some amphitheater in New Jersey Saturday night. We attempted to go see this show the first Saturday in August, but it go rained out. This time the weather was good, but the traffic, limited ways into the venue, and chaotic overcrowded lawn seating arrangements made for a less than promising start.

I’ve always been a big fan of both bands, but particularly Chicago, with their prog-jazz influenced stuff from the Terry Kath days in the 70’s. They played plenty of that, including some great deep cuts, and were quite good. But I guess I’d mentally blocked out their cheesy power ballad phase from the 80’s. They played a good number of those too, including not one but two about You being the/my inspiration.

Alot of people seemed to have left after Earth Wind and Fire, so it was easy to move closer for a better view. At then end, both bands played together, which was pretty epic. A six-piece horn section, plus two or three of everything else: drums, percussion, bass, guitars, keyboards and singers. You’d think it might be a giant mess, but they were really tight. They closed the show with an extended jam of 25 or 6 to 4 (presumably in answer to the question Does Anybody Really Know What Time it Is?) It seemed we were among the younger people at the show, which was great because by time we got back to car at the end of the night, the parking lot was mostly empty, and it was a breeze getting out of there.

Lots more going on in the music work including a new guitar, a tribute concert, and a new Buzzy Tonic record about to drop. More on that in a future post.

Hot Time Summer in the City

Just some quick updates here, major news in the next post. The hot weather continues. In the 90’s pretty much every day since the second half of June.

We went to Medieval Times last Friday with Denis and his family. Lots of fun. I haven’t been in about ten years. Last time Michelle was in middle school. How she’s old enough to drink. I tried to get everyone in our group to bet on who would win. The black and white knight looked he was a singer in a Van Halen tribute band, and so I picked him. And as luck (or however they determine the outcome) would have it, he won the day.

Been doing more biking, mainly in the mornings and evenings. This weekend we went to Jones Beach. I biked 18 miles along the trail there, all the way up to Cedar Beach and back. Jeannie did 13 miles, out to Gilgo Beach and back.

The Mustang needs work on its brakes. Last time I drove it they felt soft, like you had to press almost all the way to the floor. I looked at the owners manual, and there’s a few things it could be, but probably nothing I want to try and service myself. Unfortunately, it’s been so hot I haven’t really had a chance to check it out further in the daytime, but I’d like to get it taken care of before it gets worse. Ah well.

And lastly, the OUSA convention coming up next weekend. Been working on the model I’m gonna teach, hoping to have the time to get around to some others. Crunch time!

Jazz and the Mountains

Just got back from a nice vacation to the Montreal Jazz Festival and the Adirondack mountains. I feel like I’ve been in one long run of deep focus between work and music and other things, so it was a welcome break.

Jeannie and I drove up to Montreal on Monday, which also happened to be Canada day. We arrived mid-afternoon and our hotel was right downtown where the jazz fest was, so we just walked out into the street to enjoy things. The festival is centered around their big performing arts center call Place des Arts, which is on the level of Lincoln Center here in New York. The streets around it are closed to cars and become a big public party space with several outdoor concert stages, and lots of vendors for food, libations and merch. Several other clubs, bars, theaters and other venues host concerts as well. We found a Canadian Asian fusion place for dinner in view of one of the stages. I had a Bloody Ceaser with dinner because, when in Rome …

The main act that night was Robert Glasper, who is sort of a jazz-soul-hiphop crossover guy, somewhat comparable to Kamasi, except he sings and plays keyboards, and his band consists of him, a bass, drums and a DJ. The music was generally groovy and soulful, with some songs featuring modern and minimalist ideas juxtaposed against the main groove. The band were excellent improvisors, individual and collectively, going beyond just taking solos to build moods and structures and atmospheres. It was cool to see the DJ as an integral part of the sound too.

The next day we lounged around the hotel in the morning and got breakfast, then went for a big walk in the scenic downtown dominated by old stone buildings, and finally out to the waterfront. The weather was beautiful, sunny and not too hot. We checked out a science museum on a pier with lots of interactive hands-on exhibit. We got lunch at a cafe nearby: poutine, shrimp and avocado salad, and some Molsons. We bought some souvenirs including a stone sculpture of an Inukshuk in the shape of a human figure. If it can be carved from a single stone, it seems like it might also be a good subject for an origami model too.

That evening the big musical attraction was Joshua Redmond with a new group in one of the theaters in the Place des Arts. The band were excellent and featured a vocalist in addition to the rhythm section. She and Joshua on sax did really cool tight harmony sections together a few times. The theme of the new record they were touring for had to do with the concept place so most of the songs had the name of a place in the title, including some standards like a mashup of John Coltrane’s Alabama with Stars Fell on Alabama, and a surprising way-out jazz version of Hotel California. I’ve seen Joshua a few times at clubs in New York, but this performance was a whole ‘nuther level. There was also a really excellent light show in the theater, which enhanced the sound and mood alot.

After that we took more acts on the outdoor stages, including the Low Down Brass Band, whom we heard on our first trip to Montreal six years ago. Wow, how the time flies!

Next morning we took another walk around the city, looking for baked good to bring back to the States for our friends Mark and Kelly in the Adirondacks. I also picked up a nice-looking (and, it turned out, lovely-tasting) bottle of whiskey at the duty free shop. We arrived in the high peaks area mid-afternoon, and when for a hike at a place called High Falls Gorge on the Ausable River near Mount Whiteface.

The next day was the Fourth of July. Out main adventure in the morning was a bike ride up a rail trail from Saranac Lake to Lake Placid. It was twenty-two miles round trip, my best distance so far of the season, although we took a fairly leisurely pace, and stopped for a while at the turnaround point. This was Jeannie’s fifth or sixth big bike ride of the year. In the evening we went to a party hosted by Mark’s friend Cory, at a very nice summer cottage on a nearby lake. Cory happens to be a passionate cocktail mixologist, and has the best home-bar I’ve ever seen made in a former woodshed. He was very into mixing drinks for everyone using a whole array of bespoke elixirs, infusions, spirits and spices. Like a master chef for drinks. Huzzah!

Mark and I talked at length about improvisational music and the challenges of breaking out of genre boxes and other expectations to explore new frontiers. In addition to his main group Crackin’ Foxy, Mark has been exploring the world of looper jams using pedal and an electric guitar. He played me lots of interesting loop-based stuff from the classical world, including stuff featuring cello and clarinet.

After the party we headed back into to town to try and catch the fireworks show, but we were too late. We ended up at a local bar called the Watering Hole, which I hadn’t been to in many years, and used to be kinda run down but is now very nice indeed. They had a live band doing funk soul party music featuring a trombone player. Alot of fun.

Friday we went for a canoe ride on some nearby lakes. Not quite as epic as some canoe rides of seasons past, but we were out on the water for over two hours. That evening we drove out to a concert venue near Lake Champlain to see Nate Wood doing a project called Four. Nate is a one-man band and quite astounding. He plays drum with one hand and both feet, and also guitar or bass with his other hand (using mainly tap technique), all augmented with some keyboards played in interstitial free moments. The amazing thing is not just that he can do all this at once, but that it actually sounds musical and cool! The songs are basically structured improv jams with a sort of prog-rock-meets-jazz-fusion sound. My kind of weird!

Saturday we drove to a weekend of catching up on chores and things including doing yardwork in the ninety-degree heat. Jeannie and I did another bike ride Sunday morning. I did sixteen miles with an average pace of 14mph, a personal best for speed this season so far. Today Jeannie took off for an IT Admin conference in Pennsylvania; she’ll be back Friday.

Summertime Grooves

First off, I’m happy to announce the Spacecats record is complete and submitted to all the streaming services. The release date is July 1. I’ve also sent off the order to print a small quantity of CDs, just because I feel like it’s important to have a physical artifact to really make the project complete. More announcement around this as the links go live.

For the first time we’re also looking at doing a vinyl record. It turns out you can get 100 vinyl records made for a thousand bucks. Not a bad deal when you think about it, even compared to CDs at two dollars apiece. However, you can only fit a little over twenty minutes of music on a side, and our record is over fifty long, so we’d need to cut two songs for the vinyl addition. On top of that, we don’t know anyone who has experience mastering a record for vinyl, and it’s really it’s own thing compared to digital.

We’ve had continued nice weather until just a few days ago, and then it turned hot toward the end of last week. Lots of barbecuing, and got the mustang out last weekend. Did a big round of trimming the willow tree growing into our back yard, and now the cycle starts over again with the weeding.

I’ve been doing lots of biking. In fact, I’ve been biking seven of the last nine days. I’ve reversed my route thru New Rochelle, so it starts downhill, then the middle is mainly uphill, then a big downhill at the end.

I finally got on the Empire State rail trail with Jeannie and Michelle on Father’s day. Found a new place to park off Tuckahoe Road. I got a flat tire, 6 miles out, which was a bit of a drag. So I took it to the shop, all better, but now I’m thinking of getting a new bike.

On Juneteenth Jeannie and I both had the day off, so we took our bikes down to Robert Moses State Park on Long Island, and took the bike trail out to the little towns on Fire Island. There’s no cars allowed there so it’s really cute and fun to bike around, kind of like Hobbiton but full of rich people’s beach houses. Ended up with a nice hang on the beach and a swim in the ocean. A perfect day for it.

By Friday the weather turned hot — ninety-five degrees, so I actually got out early and did my ride before work.

Saturday Nick and Lisa came over for a visit and Martin came down from Albany too. We did a big ol’ barbecue and built a fire and played games, it was a great hang. For the party I made a new playlist, as is becoming tradition. This summer the theme is 76 Favorite Saxophone Songs. I’ll post a link to it soon, so stay tuned.

Martin stayed over and Sunday morning joined Jeannie and me for another bike ride. We went fourteen miles, the longest of the season so far.

He also brought his guitar so we jammed a while. I’ve been re-organizing my big book of rock songs. I used to have it alphabetical by artist, but then as I moved thru it I’d spend a couple weeks doing only Steely Dan or Billy Joel for example. Now I have it alphabetical by song title. I’m in the letter B and recently added a bunch of B songs, including Bad Sneakers, Bloody Well Right, Break On Thru, and others. Martin brought his book of rock songs too, so we basically took turns calling the tune. We tend to know alot of the same songs, but if not there was a chart. I learned Everybody Wants to Rule the World, which I’ll now have to put into my book.

A couple other things: The OUSA convention would normally be this weekend, but this year it’s in July instead. Feels more relaxed. I’ve ramping up my folding the last week or two. Right now I’m refolding a bunch of models I have out of good paper to exhibit and photograph, including my Platypus and a new and improved version of my Space Cat. Next it’s on to new models, including some more single-sheet polyhedra ideas combined with tessellated flowers, and some animals and insects.

Lastly, at my day job in the Consumer Reports Innovation Lab, my MVP prototype integration the Data Rights Protocol into the Permission Slip application is on the cusp of completion. I’m sort of in the Zeno’s paradox phase, where every day brings me half the distance closer. I’m nominally code complete, and have moved on to integration testing which involves two separate apps, and am encountering pesky deploy roadblocks, cross-domain permission issues, and that sort of things. Ah well, hopefully I’ll be able to declare victory soon.

The Global Jukebox 3.1.0 is Live

The Global Jukebox 3.1.0 is now live at https://theglobaljukebox.org. The major feature this release is a tool for users to submit corrections to song cantometric coding data and song metadata, along with and admin workflow to accept changes and migrate them into the app database. There’s also a new journey about The Roots of the Blues by Lamont Pearley. And of course numerous UI, UX and usability enhancements, bug fixes, etc.

Meanwhile at my day job at Consumer Reports Innovation Lab, we just launched a beta version of AskCR, a chatbot-style application to answer user question about product comparisons, backed by our extensive databases. I’ve been enjoying taking part in testing sessions, and happy to reports so far it’s actually accurate and helpful, even if sometimes it’s just a more verbose way of finding information you could just use our search tool to find. I’ve been asking it alot about hybrid luxury SUVs and high-performance sports cars recently. I learned that there’s a hybrid Corvette out there now that has all-wheel drive with electric front wheels and can go from zero to sixty in two and a half seconds! No information, however, on the storage capacity of the frunk.

The weather had been great, warm and sunny but not yet brutally hot. I took my first longish bike ride of the season last week, going up into New Rochelle towards Larchmont. Pretty hilly, like most places around here, but still fun. Just under ten miles, just under an hour. I’ve also been having a run of good workouts, back up to nominal full weight on all my sets. Although today was kind of rough; I was tired from being up and down a ladder and swinging a chainsaw around over my head to trim the neighbor’s willow tree that hands into my hard. I ended up chopping of a pretty good branch landed my shrubbery and rolled off into my other neighbor’s yard. Talk about a bustle in your hedgerow! Unfortunately, I have not gotten around to taking the Mustang out for a drive in a few weeks. By the time I was done the yardwork yesterday the Hutch was all backed up.

My friend Nick had a barbecue party Saturday, a most excellent time. I ended up talking to his kids and Michelle at length about music, and what people are listening to these days, and how music continues to evolve. Giovani, who is a musician, has weird and interesting tastes, including jazz, prog, metal and lots of stuff I’ve never heard. He’s gotten as far as appreciating Alan Holdsworth, which is super fun.

And finally, the Spacecats album cover is complete. Now I can get on to getting CD’s made (which at this point is really just for vanity) and publishing it to the streaming services, which is more important. I actually got a check last week from people streaming my music. Less than I make in an hour of work writing software, but you know, it’s something. I also got a check from royalties from my origami book, which was more than a day’s salary. So anyway, watch this space.

Another Sunny June

Summer has arrived in earnest. I’m still busy with work and projects, but have been making time for some low-key relaxation and enjoyment. This is important because I feel like I’ve been working since February on the same set of things, and while I’ve been making progress and getting things done, I’ve also been getting weary of the grind.

Michelle is home from school for the summer. Today she started her new summer job, an internship for her study in civil engineering. She’s very excited. The work is mainly inspecting, reporting on and supporting repairs on train bridges in The Bronx. It’s the kind of work where she needs safety boots and a laptop computer with AutoCad. Apparently steel-toed boots in women’s sizes are hard to find at shoe stores around here so she had to order them over the internet. The company provides the computer and software. Rock on!

Meanwhile, Lizzy has enrolled in grad school to get her Master’s degree in Business. This is a mainly online program she can do while continuing at her day job. A year ago she told me she had no interest in grad school. I think she changed her mind because her boyfriend is pursuing a medical degree, but she says it’s to open up her carreer options going forward. Either way, rock on!

In my own little scene, things are grinding along as I’ve said. Things are getting done, but everything is harder and taking longer than one would hope. My day job has entered an unusually chaotic phase, and I was temped to write in my weekly status update today “EVERYTHING IS ON FIRE!!!” but instead wrote “repeated build failures; we are working with the enterprise team to resolve the issue,” which is really just the tip of the iceberg. We’ve hired a new in-house engineer who will start in July, which should help things going forward. Meanwhile the MVP for my more R&D-ish project moves ahead one obstacle at a time, when I have to time to work on it.

The Global Jukebox is approaching the release of version 3.1.0. We’re in the final testing and bug fixing phase. So stay tuned to this channel for future announcements.

The new album by my jazz group Spacecats has been mixed and mastered and ready to publish for a few weeks now. All that remains is the album cover. I put together a cover featuring images of the band members taken from video stills. We all agreed the quality was not the best, so at rehearsal a week ago we took a bunch of new pics of the group as a whole, both playing music and posed at various spots around the studio. I’ve gone thru the images and narrowed it down to a handful of semifinalists. The next step is to drop them into to composition, see how they look, and play around with them until I get somewhere cool.

The OUSA convention is drawing near. I’ve dusted off my list of ideas for models and begun folding, starting with creating exhibit-quality versions of models I’ve already done, then moving on to explore new territory. This year the convention isn’t until late July, so I have a whole extra month to get it together. I also need to decide what I’m going to teach. Probably one of them will be my Spacecat, a variation on another cat, Sophie. I’ve recently refined the Spacecat, changing the proportions and folding sequence, and the final model looks better. Trying to work thru the final sculpting now and looking for the right paper.

I’ve been working out and biking alot, but it’s been a bit uneven as my energy level hasn’t always been the best I’m working thru so weird random pain in my shoulder. I seem to be mainly over it and back up to full weights on everything the last week or two. I still haven’t taken a ride with Jeannie on our local rail trail, but hope to this weekend. I’ve been doing the local loop of my neighborhood (about 4 miles with hills and traffic) about three times a week, and have done the Nature Study woods (longer, no cars, some bumpy trail-ish hills) twice now. We’ve only done one two hikes this spring too. Need to get our into nature more.

We did do some fun things the last few weeks, and at least the major spring yardwork cycle got done, although next weekend starts a new round. Memorial Day weekend I went to a Mets game with Jeannie and Michelle and Mary and Lou and their kids. I don’t care that much about baseball but it was a fun hang, and our seats were in the shade. Amazingly, the Mets rallied in the bottom of the ninth for a come-from-behind victory! We’ve also been doing a bunch of barbecues and hanging out by the firepit in the backyard, listening to playlists from summers past.

Last weekend Jeannie and took a mini-vacation to wild and exotic Connecticut. We went to Mystic, where they have the Seaport Museum featuring tall ships and lots of stuff related to ships and shipbuilding in the Age of Sail, including things like a blacksmith, cooper, printer and other 19th century shops, crafts and industries. They’re also actively restoring several historic sailing ships. There’s also an aquarium there, with penguins, sea lions, beluga whales, and all kinds of fish and even octopus. After that we went out to sushi for lunch. There’a cute little downtown a bunch or restaurants and shops, including a great seafood place. There’s also an 80-foot sailboat parked right there, a three-masted schooner, so we did a two-hour sunset cruise of the sound out beyond the river. The harbor is actually up the river a little bit, so first we had to navigate the channel out to sea. We crossed past a swinging train bridge that seems like the perfect focal point for an action set piece in some adventure film. There’s a train coming and there’s a tall ship coming, and the hero and the villain are fighting up in the control room, trying to gain control of the switch to swing the bridge open or closed.

High Speed on Ice

The lift to our mood wore off after a few days after returning from our trip to the warm and sunny climes, and I was feeling really ready to be done with winter. Then last Tuesday we got six inches of snow at home and started leaning into winter. We decided to do a mini-vacation trip upstate. It began with a day of skiing at Gore mountain in the Adirondacks. Jeannie and I drove up the night before and stayed in a hotel in Lake George. On the drive up we listened to the Queen album Live Killers, which I don’t think I ever listened to the whole way thru before, and is totally amazing. Unfortunately, the weather turned snowy and slippery the further north we got, so I couldn’t listen as closely as I’d have liked.

It was an amazing day of skiing. The morning was just perfect, with fresh snow on a well-groomed base, and a gentle snow falling on off throughout the day. Probably some of the best skiing I’ve had in years. And because it was a Friday, the mountain was alot less crowded than last time we were there. We skied the first half of the day on the North Slope, with long beautiful trails winding thru the trees. Unfortunately, it began to get windy, and some trip up the lift were a little unpleasant. We skied all the way down to the base then went up to the summit via the gondola, another trail and another lift. The top was kinda windy and icy, but once we got partway down the skiing was great again. We ended up the day on another part of the mountain with mainly blue and green trails, because we were getting too tired for the big hills but wanted to keep on going. Jeannie had a ski tracking app, and we skied over 10 miles in 12 runs, meaning the average run was close to a mile, and some a good deal longer.

That night we drove up to the high peaks area to visit our good friends Mark and Kelly. Saturday we went ice staking in the speed skating oval at the Olympic Village in Lake Placid. It was a beautiful experience, skating outdoors surrounded by mountains. The track is a quarter mile around, and Jeannie did 14 laps and I did 18. That’s three-and-a-half and four-and-a-half miles respectively. Needless to say, after all this our legs were pretty tired. Afterwards we went to a bar for poutine and cocktails, then walked around Lake Placid. Out on Mirror lake, there was tobogganing, dogsleds, ice skating and several hockey games going on. Fun scene.

Spent alot of time just talking and hanging out. Mark showed me his new guitar effects setup, but didn’t get around to playing it. On the way home Sunday, we stopped by Martin’s house for a visit. Spent our time there just talking and hanging out too. Martin showed me his new custom-made combination guitar/sax/sheet music/stage monitor stand. Got home late last night, and today we were all tired out. Now back to work, but hoping to get a couple more ski trips in before the end of the winter.