Category: General

Armadillos and Spiders

Last week one day I took the girls and one of their friends to the Museum of Natural History. It was a fun day.

We checked out the Origami Holiday Tree. The theme this year was collective nouns. I had fold a group of armadillos, called a fez of armadillos. There were lots of others: a murder of crows, a barrel of monkeys, a fold of sheep, a galaxy of stars. You get the idea. I think my favorite was the lemurs.

We got to see the dinosaurs and all that, but the for us this time was the Spiders Alive! Well, my daughter Michelle and I were fascinated, by my daughter was repulsed. Ah well. Lots of giant spiders, scorpions, and vinegaroons. I’d never heard of vinegaroons. Plus a great live demo. Did you know scorpions glow blue under black light? Neither did I. Now I’m trying again to design some origami arachnids. I tried for my book but ended up designing a giant squid instead.

Catching Up

Busy these days with work and lots of stuff. So here’s catching up on a few random things. Work has been busy and problematic, and I’ve putting in extra evenings and fixing other people’s bugs to keep things on track. I think we turned a corner mid-week last week. We have a release coming up this week, and now we’re in good shape.

My book has been done for a couple of weeks, but now I’m waiting on the publisher to get back to me.

We got our xmas tree up today. A nice wide bushy one. Lots room for ornaments. Went out to pick one up in the rain. Always a nice feeling to have the tree up.

I’ve been starting to get back into the music recording thing, picking up my half-finished third Buzzy Tonic album. So far the focus is on playing. I have a backlog of half-written songs, so I think I’m gonna work them up to play and sing live before I get back into tracking. Ought to go faster with the arrangements worked out and under my fingers.

The other day I was showing Michelle how to hammer-on on the bass. I’m kind of a lazy bass player and will often hammer-on or pull-off when I’m doing a fast chromatic riff, just so I don’t have to articulate the note with my right hand. I use my thumb on the right hand alot, especially on the bottom two strings. I generally switch to fingers-only as a tonal effect, from rounder to punchier. So my hammer-ons and pull-offs on the bass are really quite solid, which is weird since I’ve never really consciously worked at it.

One of the most amazing musicians I’ve ever played with was this cat Jim Wynne, who was a master of the two-hand tap technique on the bass. I little two-handed-tap blues improvisation for Michelle to demonstrate his style, playing the bass line in the bottom two strings with my left hand and tapping the 3rd and 7th on the offbeats on top two strings with my right. To my surprise it came out sounding really good! I guess it’s not that different than piano. I’m gonna have to work a part like that into one of my songs.

The girls are having a good fall. Yesterday they had the holiday show at the performing arts group they belong to, Young at Arts. Michelle has been working out Do a Deer from The Sound of Music by ear on the piano. Talented girl. Meanwhile Lizzy is enjoying being in 8th grade and her grades are up, and that comes at a good time. She’s finally getting algebra. She was cast as one of the leads in her school play this winter. The theme of the play is New York, and the songs are all taken from classic shows, with an original story to string them together. She has six songs. Her character is British, so she’s been having fun practicing her accent. I’m going to be playing in the band again this year. I got the list of songs and put together a playlist. It’s a fun set. We listened to it as we put up the tree today. It has two different songs called New York New York.

Wild and Scary

We usually put our Halloween pumpkin out on the front stoop. The local critters nibble at if for a while, and then sooner or later there’s rain and it starts to turn mushy and we have to get rid of it. This year we haven’t had any rain, and the squirrels have really be having a feast, so it’s looking, uh, really interesting.

In other news, Lizzy turned 13 recently. Yes I am now the parent of a teenager. She’s also now 5’7”, having really shot up the last few months. That’s a few inches taller than her mother. Wow. We had a party for her at our favorite local restaurant, the Oriental Palace. It was in the post-hurricane period and feels like a blur to me. After her birthday party Lizzy went on a shopping date with her friend Ella, who shares the same birthday, and bought lots of clothes. They were very excited.

Meanwhile, Erik and I resumed jamming. At this point we’re a little rusty, but it feels good to get back in it. Like I said, now that my book is done, getting back into playing music is a major goal for the winter. This includes doing a few more live gigs.

We had a wonderful Thanksgiving at Jeanne’s parents house. Not thinking about work for a few days. Mary and Lou were there. They’re in the middle of putting a second story on their house. Looks like they’re off to a good start. It only took a week get the walls, roof and windows up. Lou wants to record and EP of some more of his songs and asked my to produce it It sounds like a fun project.

Michelle is all excited about a new Nintendo thing she wants to get.

More Origami

I’m getting to the home stretch on my book. I have all the models (22) designed and folded and all the photography done. I came up with three new models for the book in the last few weeks. Two were the Cuttlefish and Giant Squid, to create a Cephalopod group along with my Octopus. I tried and tried to design a spider but never came up with anything I liked.

For my last model I designed a Lean-To, to go with the Canoe and Adirondack Chair. I really wanted one more intermediate model. This one clocks in at 34 steps, but most of it is pre-folding and it only takes 10 or 15 minutes to fold. And I got the diagrams done in two evenings! I guess I’m finally getting faster.

I went over to Bob’s one night last week to finish up the pictures, and they came out great. I have only two more diagrams to finish now, the Squid and the Turkey. They’re both more than halfway done but they’re complex models, so they have a lot of steps. After the last drawings, all that remains is writing the intro and the basic steps.

In other news, our big Q4 release of my software at work is in QA now. Really looking forward to taking a break.

Went up and saw Martin and Kathleen yesterday and picked pumpkins and apples and grapes. This seems to have become something of a fall tradition.

The weather has been really warm thru the end of September, to the point where we still have our air conditioners in. But there’s also been a lot of rain. Warm and humid. Until yesterday, when it got cold all of a sudden. Now it’s only getting up to the 50’s and we’ve had to turn on the heat.

It Was Twenty Years Ago Today

It was twenty years ago today – half a lifetime ago – that I quit my job, broke up my band, sold my car, left my hometown, friends and family behind, and moved to New York City to attend grad school and begin my career in “Mulitmedia” as it was known at the time. The great leap into the unknown. It’s been one heck of a ride, at the vanguard of interactive media, software and entertainment, including some great years spent in Silicon Valley. Sometime when I’m in the mood to reminisce, I’ll tell you all about it, particularly the years before the crash. For now, I just want to give a shout out to the ITP class of ’94 and say wow, how the times have changed. What used to be visionary is now just everyday life. My kids take the existence of iPods for granted, and care more about accessorizing them than anything else. They’ll never understand the work and imagination it took to drag the dream into existence.

Summertime Green

Just got back from a great camping trip with Martin’s and Nick’s, and some new friends too. Lizzy brought along a couple friends as well, so we were concerned that everything would fit in the car. In the end we left behind ketchup. The weather was great until mid day Sunday, when the skies opened up and started to pour. Fortunately we were pretty much packed, but sill got soaked in the few minutes it took to finish loading, and we drove home thru a pretty intense storm. We’d got a Thule to put on the roof of our car. It turned out not to be fully waterproof. Ah well.

Summertime Blues

Last weekend’s gig went well. An important milestone, our first full-length gig. We played for a smallish but appreciative crowd and the set went over well. Eight originals and ten covers in two sets. It’ll be a few weeks before we can get together again because of vacation schedules and whatnot. Hopefully in the fall we’ll start picking up more, bigger gigs and work on getting a rhythm section.

Meanwhile work has been busy and stressful. At least this weekend, there’s nothing going on and I can some time to recharge.

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Over the weekend the kids’ school had their annual carnival. This is the major fund raiser for the school, and a pretty large-scale affair, taking over the whole north parking lot and athletic field with rides like a ferris wheel and roller coaster and fun house, and food and your classic midway games. It went on for four days and every family has to volunteer. I spent an evening working one of game booths, handing out bean bags to throw, and the occasional stuffed animal to a winner. At the start it wasn’t too crowded and I had a chance to go around and study a few of the games and figure out what makes them so hard to win. It’s a similar design psychology to trade show exhibits and magic acts. I figured out a reliable method for a couple of them, and all the ones involving throwing darts I’m good at, and the ones involving throwing balls or beanbags not so much. I accidentally won a giant lizard tossing a ring onto a milk jug. We named him Carlos Sebastian Bach in honor of the Mets’ no-hitter. Between hanging out and working we were there three of the days. The kids had a great time. The last day had some dramatic, intense but brief rainstorms. At one point it was torrentially pouring and bright sunlight at the same time.

In other news, Lizzy painted her nails to look like the flags of various nations.

Goings On

Lotta stuff going on with the kids lately. Friday nite Lizzy and some of her friends from school went to see The Hunger Games, along with Jeannie and some of the other moms. We’d all read the books and Lizzy in particular was very excited about it. I’m supposed to go see it with people from work this week, so meanwhile, they’re trying hard not to tell me too much.

Saturday nite was a father-daughter dance at Lizzy’s school. It was very nice. Mainly the kids danced while the fathers stood around and watched, but it was fun and I got to know Lizzy’s friends and some more parents from the school a bit better. Sunday was the Lower Hudson Honor Band concert, in which Lizzy performed. The concert was excellent and Lizzy did and excellent job. She had a few friends in it from school, and we all ended up going out for lunch after the show.

Still lots going on with my origami and music, but it’s work in progress, so nothing to say until it’s somewhere. Soon. Also I’ve been under the weather lately. Our summer preview has come and gone and now it’s back to cold and stormy.

Spring Up!

They changed the clocks and it’s back to getting up in the morning before its light. On the upside it’s light out now when we get home from work. Anyway, the days are getting longer fast this time of year. Last weekend we went ice skating, thinking that we’re almost out of winter so we better do it while we have the chance. And shaw’nuff spring has come on all at once right after that. Only two days later the weather was up in the 60’s and I went rollerblading for the first time of the season. The next day the first buds appeared on pretty much all the trees and shrubs around here. There were a few cold, rainy days, but the weekend was beautiful. We did the first round of spring yardwork, mainly raking out the winter debris and old leaves, and taking down the last of the xmas lights. Plus I went rollerblading a second time. Today it was up into the 70’s and I went staking for a third time. I’ve also gotten the Mustang out for a drive a couple times already in the last few weeks.