Moving into summer. I can’t remember a more pleasant May for fine weather. June brought the hot weather, up into the 90’s. We thought of putting in the AC, but it only lasted two days. Now we’re back to another long run of perfectly pleasant days in the mid-seventies.
Been busy doing our best version of living the suburban legend. Last weekend was the Memorial Day holiday and a three-day weekend. Saturday we went for a hike up Mt. Hook. Sunday I went for a bike ride thru Nature Study Woods, then we went to a barbecue on Long Island hosted by Nick and Lisa.
This weekend Jeannie and Michelle and I did another rail trail ride, this time 13 miles for me and 9 for them. I got an app for my phone that tracks me distance, time and elevation change when I go for a ride, and shows it on a map.
I’ve been giving my old mustang some TLC. Over the last few weekends I washed, waxed, and buffed the whole thing, something I hadn’t done since before the pandemic. Then the weekend I cleaned the glass and interior, and polished everything up. Now it just gleams!
Summer is the season for endless yard work. Over the past couple weekends I trimmed our big hedge row, then the two giant forsythia shrubs and some of our evergreens. Next weekend is trimming back the willow boughs hanging into our yard from our neighbor’s tree. Then maybe we’ll have a break and can do just mowing and watering. Or maybe something else will have grown in by then.
I bought a new oven in the springtime at an auction at my job. It’s been sitting in my garage, but this weekend finally schlepped it up the stairs, hooked up the gas supply and hauled out the old one. Glad that job is done with. Michelle has already baked a batch of cookies and declared the new oven to be much more accurate and superior in every way. Only problem is it doesn’t quite back up all the way to the wall because they’ve changed oven design over the years, and there’s no empty space in the back of the oven to accommodate the spot where the gas pipe comes up out of the floor. So now we have to call a contractor to see if wee can get that taken care of.
A bunch of things still in-progress. I’ve been working on a summer playlist of 90’s songs. Continuing in my home studio with my song A Plague of Frogs. And, increasing in importance daily, the annual Origami USA convention is coming up at the end of June, so I’ve been folding new stuff, planning my exhibit, signing up to teach classes, and helping the convention committee with the class schedule. More on all this as it unfolds.
After a pretty solid two weeks of rain, including heavy rains the whole weekend before, the weather finally turned nice this weekend. That basically meant spending the whole weekend doing yardwork. Friday I mowed the lawn for first time. Unusually late and the grass had gotten quite tall. Saturday it was weeding the edges of the driveway and putting vinegar on the cracks of the patio to kill the weeds. Sunday it was weeding under the hedges and in the flowerbeds. Meanwhile Jeannie wanted to start barbecue season, but or old grill was rusted, so we had to buy a new one. She spent the better part of Sunday putting it together.
Our Nordic Track exercise machine broke one day last week, and it turns out they don’t make them anymore, but you can get replacement parts on the internet. Meanwhile I relying on biking as my main form of cardio exercise, so it’s good that we have a spell of nice weather ahead this week. I wanted to take a ride Sunday morning and test out our new bike rack, but Jeannie wimped out at the last minute. I thought then I’d go for a ride on my own later in the day, but by the time I was done with the weeding I was pretty tired and my legs hurt, so it was just as well. I did go for a ride today, and it was quite nice. Hope to get a ride in every day this week.
Friday night often tends to be movie or TV night at our house, as we have time to relax but are often tired at the end of the work week and don’t always feel like going out, or maybe just go out to dinner then come home. However, despite the plethora of streaming options there’s actually a dearth of good shows to watch. The last few weeks I’ve been getting into Nova, the classic PBS show. Lots of cool stuff about the James Web Space Telescope, saving Venice for sinking into the sea, renovating Notre Dame cathedral, and lots about fossils, ice age megafauna and dinosaurs, and how they can reconstruct stories of long-extinct creatures from bones in the dirt. One in particular suggested they may have found a site where the fossilized creatures were killed the day the meteor hit the earth to end the Cretaceous, caught in a flood caused by the shockwave thousands of miles away. They have episodes from past seasons, and I remember as a kid seeing the episode where the theory that the dinosaurs were killed by a meteor impact was first advance. I wonder if I can work my way back far enough to find it.
But last Friday I decided to watch a documentary about recently pass folk singer Gordon Lightfoot, who to me is one of my all time despite not being the any of the genres I listen deeply to nowadays. He seemed to be on the radio when I was a kid, and they played alot of his songs at the ice rink at hockey practice. Somehow his songs had a big impact on me. This led me to a bunch of other music documentaries including one about guitar shredder Randy Rhoads and another about the great vocalist Ronnie James Dio, another one of musical heroes. So now I have this mashup of 70’s folk ballads and 80’s post Black Sabbath heavy metal stuck in my head. Strangely, it’s not a bad combination.
Springtime in New York deepens. I participated in another origami event this weekend. It was FoldFest, a 24-hour marathon online mini-convention, with folders and attendees from around the world. I led a two-hour session of Saturday evening and taught my Astronaut followed by my Flying Saucer, both from my book Air and Space Origami. These are good intermediate level models, and the class went quite well. As always, good to connect with my origami friends. Next big origami event is the OUSA convention in June. Gotta bunch of new stuff to finish!
Also over the weekend I finished project dirt, 2023 edition. You’ll recall the over the last couple I filled in alot of low spots in my yard with dirt my neighbor had excavated to create a swimming pool. It did an admirable job of filling in, but was rather clay-ish and stony, and not the best for growing grass. It started off promising last spring, but when it got really hot in July and August the crabgrass kinda took over on these spots. So this year I found a local nursery who delivered a cubic yard of organic topsoil and I did a thinner version of filling in, and topped it off with new grass seed. The timing was perfect cuz we had a heavy rain Saturday night and everything is well soaked. This was the major project this spring; all that remains is to put mulch under the hedges, and start mowing and trimming when the time is right. Oh and I guess some weeding too, and Jeannie wants to plant some things in the garden. Anyway, probably start mowing this coming weekend. After that it’s get the mustang into the shop for some service, and we’re ready for summer. Hope to get back to more biking and traveling.
It’s been another busy couple of weeks. A week ago, Buffalo NY, where alot of my family lives, got a once-in-ten-years level snowstorm, with my parents in Orchard Park getting six feet of snow. Up in Amherst they only got a foot or so, but it complicated plans for people coming home for Thanksgiving, especially for my niece and nephew whose trains got cancelled.
In the end, everyone made it home safe and sound, and we had a very enjoyable Thanksgiving. We hosted seventeen people and Jeannie made a most excellent stuffed turkey dinner. Spent the rest of the weekend listening to music, mainly classic live albums, and playing games like Ticket to Ride and Quirkle with Lizzy and Michelle.
I also finished some home improvement projects. The big one was was to replace the light fixture in our kitchen ceiling, which blew out right around the end of the summer. It was an old florescent light in the form of a square wooden box with plexiglas diffuser. It first I I investigated the possibility of replacing just the socket and electric components. Once it became clear that wouldn’t work, the quest for a new lamp became a full-blown research project. We finally settled on one we liked, a broad, shallow frosted glass dome with traditional light sockets that could take modern LED bulbs. We ordered from a local showroom, but it took several weeks to arrive, and by that I was folding like a madman in preparation for our origami conventions.
Back home again a couple weeks later, I pulled off the old fixture. I had planned on having to paint the area that had covered because the new light is smaller. What I didn’t count on was that the old fixture was screwed directly to the ceiling, and there was just a hole where the cup for the wiring and structural support was supposed to be. So I had to cut a hole in the drywall, buy and install the mounting hardware to the framing of the house, put back the drywall pieces, fill in the gaps, and sand and paint it. This added considerable time to the job, especially since the ceiling needed two coats of paint. I ended up finally installing the new lamp Thanksgiving morning, with Jeannie urging me along so we could switch the power back on in the kitchen and she could put the turkey in the oven!
I didn’t quite match the ceiling paint, but it’s pretty close. Lizzy, who works for Sherwin Williams, was very helpful in recommending a mini roller and pan kit; I din’t know they made such a thing. She also gave me a deck of all their color chips, so hopefully I can do a better job matching next time.
Oh, and, the week before Thanksgiving was a big one for milestones at the Innovation Lab at Consumer Reports. Here are a couple of press releases about two projects of mine.
Summer continues. The weather has been beautiful and I’ve been spending alot of time outside. We’ve been busy. Lots of the usual, including work, practicing music, biking, and taking the mustang out for rides. Lots of yardwork the last few weekends, including trimming the trees and hedges. So far I’ve filled up all my yard waste cans two weeks in a row. Probably one more session to go, but it will be up on the ladder.
Over Memorial Day weekend we went out to a barbecue at our friend Nick’s house. The presence of a pull-up bar in his backyard inspired me to add some new exercises to my workout to focus on my lats.
We got some new furniture, including an armchair for the living room and a sectional sofa for the downstairs room. A new pair fo end tables arrived today and need to be assembled, and a coffee table is on order. It all looks nice and is comfortable, is a big upgrade from our old stuff, and represents the culmination of a long and tedious research project. Well almost. Now we want to get a new entertainment center, bookshelf and end tables downstairs too.
Of course now we have to deal with getting rid of the old furniture. A friend of mine who just moved into a new apartment may take our futon and gold chairs. Meanwhile we have to store it somewhere, so we cleaned out a whole bunch of old junk and boxes from the garage. Big step forward in project defrag the house.
The other big item is over the weekend I did the class schedule for the Origami USA convention, which is coming up at the end of June. This is our first in-person convention in three years, and around 140 people signed up to teach classes. You’ll recall I wrote the software for the scheduling for last year’s (virtual, online) convention. I made several improvements to it this year. Still not everything can be automated, so the weekend was full of back-and-forth with the teaching committed as we juggled classes around until it met with everyone’s satisfaction. I’ll be teaching two classes, my Five-Banded Armadillo, and Sophie the Cat. I’m also working on some new models for the exhibition.
Lastly, the Global Jukebox 4.2.1 is now live. The cutover to our new, node-based server is complete, and we can now retire the old backend servers.
So let’s see. I guess project dirt was completed a while ago and the new grass is well on its way to being grown in at this point. I’ve been mowing the lawn for several weeks now. We even did the first round of weeding, planting in the garden, and putting down mulch under the hedges. Next job will be trimming.
A couple weeks back I got up on a ladder to unclog the downspout of my gutter in one corner of my job. I used to have to get up there and clean out my gutters every year or so, when there were hundred-foot-tall trees all around my house. But one by one the trees got cut down and I didn’t have to do it for several years. This time instead of leaves and sticks, it was beads of whatever our roof shingles are made of. We got a new roof put on a couple years back, same time we installed our solar panels, and some of the material has worn off with the weather. Of all the jobs I do, this is the one I dislike the most, because of the potential danger of falling off the ladder twenty feet up. So far I’ve been careful and never met with any harm but you never know. Next time I’ll probably hire someone.
Now that the yardwork situation is under control, I’ve been trying to move forward with project furniture. I want to get a good armchair for the living room to replace the awful recliner we have, and a new coffee table and end tables, plus a new sectional sofa for the family room, and maybe and entertainment center too. By the end of the year, if possible. We started thinking about this at the beginning of the pandemic, but it turns out to be a kinda complicated research project, and there’s always something else to do, and every time we find something we think we like, it turns our to backordered for months. Nevertheless, it’s getting to the point where our kids have nicer furniture than us. So it’s time to get moving.
As the weather has been getting nicer, Jeannie and I have been spending more time outdoors. We’ve gone for a couple hikes, mostly at local places like Saxon Woods. I’ve also been getting on my bike alot more, averaging about three times a week this spring, and my strength, speed and endurance are increasing. My typical ride is pretty short, less than an hour, but the neighborhood is kinda hilly. My main ride these days is a loop into downtown Bronxville, then thru Chester Heights and back home. Also went to the Nature Study Woods once, but mostly it’s been too muddy cuz of the rain.
I’ve gotten the Mustang out on the road a few times. Even had to put a tankful of gas in it yesterday. So far it’s been running great. I want to get new tires put on it this spring. The tires I have are the ones from when I bought the car in 1997!
In the software realm, I’ve been working on several thing. One of which is the Origami USA convention scheduling tool. If you recall, I’m on the OUSA convention and web committees, as the person who creates the schedule of classes and events, and the one who writes the software to make that task easier. The last few years we haven’t had any in-person conventions. Last year we had a zoom convention, and I did the schedule for that. Along the way, I discarded the existing scheduling tool, basically a bunch of macros for MS Access, and wrote a web application in Drupal/PHP that integrates with the main web site and other tools. This year I enhanced the functionality in a few ways. First, I created a workflow to reschedule a class without having to first unschedule it then schedule it again. Second I added the capacity to sort the classes by name, to make it easier to find them. On the roadmap is the ability to sort and filter by a number of parameters including the class name, the teacher name, the class type, level of complexity, number of periods, etc. But Drupal and PHP are a serious pain to work with, so I’ll save these enhancements for a future convention.
Meanwhile I have a little over a month to get some new models completed, get and exhibit together and decide what to teach. I have a big pile of half-finished models and an even bigger backlog of ideas. But for the zoom conventions don’t really inspire me and I haven’t been doing that much folding lately. Luckily, this year’s convention is live and in person, at the Sheraton Hotel in NYC, the third weekend in June (I think). Should be alot of fun to reconnect with my origami friends, and hopefully I’ll have a bunch of cool new models.
Been working hard at my new consulting gig at Consumer Reports R&D Lab. Hard to believe I’ve been there three months already. They’ve just extended my contract to the end of the year, which is good news. My group is involved in this thing called the Digital Rights Protocol, which is designed to make it easier for consumers to exercise their rights to opt out of online data collection, tracking, etc., and easier for companies to comply with requests around these rights. We lead a consortium of startups involved in the internet privacy business, and last week we had the first end-to-end test of the Protocol with partners in various roles. Meanwhile Consumer reports is involved in several business-oriented capacities as well, so I am building a reference implementation of the DRP to live in our application ecosystem and provide a touchstone to our partners. Anyway, the end-to-end test was a big success, and now we’re planning out the next phase of development.
Meanwhile at my other big client, The Global Jukebox, we’re getting ready to roll out a new release to Live. This one has a new backend and a cutover to a new server, to get rid of a bunch of old headaches. Everything is all tested and ready to roll. All that remains now is to switch over the DNS server.
Lastly, my music projects proceed apace. Mary came over and laid down the vocal track for My Ol’ Breakdown Truck a week or so ago, and it came out great. Afterwards we went out for Mexican food. Now I have three songs mostly done, with the vocals, bass and guitar tracked and mixed. All that remains is the fine-tune the drum parts, and add a little keyboards and sax to fill things out. Also, Elixr – 2022 Remaster is vary much almost done; all that remains is one final listening back.
Now that my Thursday band has a name and a gig, the music has been rising to the occasion and getting more intense. Today we had a rehearsal where we really drilled down on some of the finer points of some of our songs, to really master the arrangements and make them our own.
Meanwhile, I’ve noticed my Selmer Reference ’54 tenor sax, which I was so in love with, seems to have developed a leak somewhere, so the notes below low D don’t sound clearly and require alot of force to sound at all. Plus one of the mounting posts on the low C keyguard has come loose. So I need to find a new sax repair guy. The guy I’d been using for year – Virgil Scott – was up on Yonkers, only 10 minutes from my house. Sadly, he died of covid during the pandemic. My new guy is great, he’s out in Connecticut up new Massachusetts, almost two hour from here. So I need to find someone local.
For the time being I’ve switched back to playing my Selmer Mark VII, which I had worked on last summer. The low notes are clear and effortless, but best of all, I had the action set up, which it turns out makes a huge difference on tunes like Some Skunk Funk. I’d been struggling with playing that fast and cleanly on my other horn, and now the notes just roll right off. On the downside, I have to get used to this horn’s intonation again. And even worse, I’d been busting my ass to get good on the altissimo range on the tenor, and could get all the way up to the second high D, and play riffs up there. I was developing some real chops. On this horn, the embouchure required is completely different, so I’m back to square one.
Spring continues to tease us with alternating spells of warm and sunny then cold and stormy weather. We got out in the yard again last weekend to turn over the flowerbeds and plant some seeds. Also, I initiated project dirt 2022. If you recall, my neighbor across the street had a big pile of dirt that was dug out from having a swimming pool put int. A year ago he encouraged me to take as much as I wanted. I ended up taking fifty or sixty wheelbarrows to fill in low spots in my yard, and grade the area around my newly expanded patio. This year he moved what’s left of the pile closer to the street and again asked me to help get rid of it. Now I’m just filling in a few remaining low spots, mainly in the front where there were once giant trees and the ground continues to settle years later as the stumps underground continue to decay. Also I did the front yard last last year, and was getting tired of the job toward the end. So far this time I’ve put down six wheelbarrows worth, and am maybe about half done. In the end It’ll probably be twelve to twenty loads total. Anyway, it’s good to spend some time out in the sunshine.
Clubs and concert venues are finally opening again after more than two years. We saw the first of a run of spring concerts last week. The Ed Palermo Big Band played the Iridium in NYC. They’re famous for doing big band arrangements of prog rock songs, particularly the music of Frank Zappa. Usually each show has a different theme, and that night they did a tribute to Gary Brooker featuring the music Procol Harum mingled with a bunch Beatles, Yes and of other prog psychedelia. The highlight was toward the end of the show, when the band did A Whiter Shade of Pale, and the horn section joined in on the organ solo toward the end, and just went round with it and built it up to be absolutely huge and soaring. I’m hoping they’ll do Thick as a Brick Sometime.
Spring continues. The days are getting longer faster, and the nice weather appears more often than not. More and more people I know have gotten the vaccine and getting hopeful about life returning to normal soon.
We didn’t have much of a spring break this year, but it was enjoyable. Busy with work and stuff. Jeannie and I both took a long weekend off from work, and Lizzy came home for the weekend. Hard to believe she’s graduating college in just a month or so. We had family game night Friday night, which was lots of fun. On Sunday we went down to Queens to visit Jeannie’s parents, and Lou and my neblings came over too. It was good to see everyone in person, even if it was pretty low key.
We normally try to go to a museum or day trip this time of year. We haven’t picked a place yet, but we’re looking at next weekend. Most places are running at limited capacity and you have to get tickets in advance. Michelle has asked that we go Washington D.C, this summer to visit a few more museums. That might happen. We might even get back to Ohio for the Centerfold origami convention, and swing my the National Air Force Museum while we’re out that way.
I finished diagramming my Platypus model, called Gladys the Platypus, for the Origami USA 2021 Convention Collection. This is my first new diagram in some time, and hopefully I’ll get back into the groove with that. I hadn’t been that motivated to do much origami during the pandemic, cuz all the conventions were cancelled, and I don’t enjoy the online ones that much. But I’ve been involved in planning and setting up the 2021 OUSA, that includes a virtual gallery, and there may even be some live, in-person conventions later this year. So I’m starting to get back into folding again.
Project dirt continues. I’m up to thirty wheelbarrows of dirt, and have gotten maybe two-thirds of the way around the yard. I filled in one really big low spot on the north side of my house that took four loads by itself. It’s good to spend some time outside, and it’ll be really nice when it’s finished. I made a pretty good dent in my neighbor’s dirt pile, but he has a whole swimming pool’s worth, so there’ll be plenty left.
It looks like winter is finally at an end and spring has emerged. It took a while but all the snow on the ground finally melted and we started having some nice days. A week ago on the weekend I started spending time outside to work on the yard, beginning with scraping up all the leaves and debris from the flowerbeds. Also, we finally admitted ski season is over and we wouldn’t get a second day skiing in this year, so we went for a hike instead. We went up to the Palisades in New Jersey, overlooking the Hudson River across from Hastings and Yonkers.
This last weekend on Saturday I took the Mustang out for a drive for the first time. Happy to say the engine turned over right away and everything seems in great shape. On Sunday I went for the first bike ride of the year, up to my local Nature Study Woods. Since I was tuning up my bike, Jeannie asked me if I’d get hers ready to ride too. It’s been a couple seasons since she did any biking, but she wants to get back into it. I’d like to get my rollerblades on sometime soon too, but the snowplows tore up our street so badly this winter I’ll have to find another place to go skate.
The yard work continued as well. Last fall after I expanded my patio, I had some leftover dirt that I used to fill in a few low spots in my yard. Once I got into it I realized there were quite a few lumpy areas and wouldn’t it be nice to have some more dirt. Well last fall my neighbor across the street put in a new swimming pool, and now he has a great big pile of dirt, that until recently looked like a sledding hill. He invited me to come over and take away as much as I wanted. So far I’ve take eight wheelbarrow loads, about a cubic yard. I’m probably about twenty percent done. So more next weekend. I’d like to get it down and covered with grass seed in time for things to really start growing.
In other news, I demoed the scheduling tool that I wrote for scheduling classes for conventions to the Origami USA convention committee today. It went over well. Still a few details before we can take it live, but it’s basically there. Thanks to Robert Lang for all his help.
Now I’m starting to think about designing and folding some new models for the convention in June. I have some ideas, but haven’t really been folding much since the pandemic began.
I’ve found some new and interesting stuff to practice on piano. One source was from out continuing movie nights on Saturdays. We recently watched a few classic scifi films including Start Trek IV and 2001: A Space Odyssey. I haven’t seen either in many years and 2001 was particularly inspiring. Among the composers whose works Kubric lifted when he put together the soundtrack, beyond the famous Also Sprach Zarathustra by Richard Strauss and Blue Danube Waltz by Johann Strauss, was Atmosphères, Lux Aeterna, and Requiem by the Hungarian modernist Gyögy Ligeti.
The Ligeti stuff was some intense, crazy music, and so I decided to check out more of it. This eventually led my to his Musica Ricercata, a series of pieces for piano that are mostly not crazy but express a variety of moods and styles and are notable for progressively building from simple to complex. The first one uses just one note. His approach to modernism reminds me a bit of how Monk approaches jazz, often unexpectedly humorous in the way it plays with conventions of form and genre, while remaining very self-consistent.
Another series of piano pieces in a similar vein is Mikrokosmos Béla Bartók, which starts with both hands doubling the same figure using the pentatonic scale and a limited range, and progresses to the complex and bizarre.
The third piece of sheet music came from my trying to find a chart for one of my songs I’m introducing to my jazz group. On the way I came across a cache of old sheet music someone gave me once that I didn’t even know I had. In there was a book of Art Tatum transcriptions. Art Tatum is one of my all-time favorite piano players with a unique and virtuosic stride-based swinging style that influence Keith Emerson and Eddie Van Halen, as well as countless jazz carts. I doubt I’ll be able to play these pieces at speed any time soon, but they’re worth studying for his approach to voicings and rhythm, particularly in the left hand, as well as where and how he inserts embellishments while maintaining the flow of the tune.
Since I started working from home full time about a year ago, I’ve been going for a walk every morning in lieu of a morning commute. (I’ll usually practice music in lieu of an evening commute.) Since the pandemic started, alot of other people in my neighborhood have been going for walks too, so I’ve been getting to know my neighbors past my block better than before, although we’ve lived here for many years.
I’m not the only one on my block who’s doing home improvements these days. The guy across the street is putting in a new deck, and the people two houses down are putting in a new patio too, although theirs is made of paving blocks not bluestone flagstones. My next next door neighbor Jose is rebuilding his front porch.
Over the weekend Jose helped my transplant my hydrangea shrub. You’ll recall that I tried to dig it out and basically gave up because I couldn’t get any leverage underneath to pry it loose. Jose is a professional landscaper, which is great cuz his yard always looks fantastic, plus he’s got alot of tools and knowledge. He had a couple shovels with extra long handles, which made it much easier to get underneath and pry the rootball from the earth. One we got it out, Jose had the idea that we could split the plant in half and have two of them. We planted one in the new spot I had picked out, and the other we put back close to where it came out, but about a foot further from the house and two feet further away from the patio, so it has room to grow.
Meanwhile things have been busy with work and various projects. I was on at least one zoom call eight days in a row. About half of these are recurring weekly meetings. While the circle of people I talk to face to face has grown extremely local, the circle of people I’m in social contact with has grown very wide indeed. In just the last week or two it includes people in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, The Bronx, Long Island, New Jersey, Buffalo, Victor, Westerlo, Saranac Lake, Illinois, Texas, Florida, Colorado, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Singapore, Vermont, The Netherlands, Saugerties and Fredonia. Very 21st century.
