howeird | Entries tagged with music

But it felt like a Wednesday anyway, despite the 4-day weekend. Fully recovered from my vacation, including entering all the credit card slips into Quicken.

Work was typical, I was 2/3 done with a script when I got stuck because Automation's documentation sucks. And Automation Guy took and early lunch and was in meetings after. Finally got him to take a look, and it was simple but completely non-intuitive. But it worked. Tomorrow I'll send it in for the programmers to finish up, which I can't do because it has to run on one of their machines using machine-specific proprietary license files.

Last night after I journaled the remembery said the Seagals 2003-4 calendar release party was last week, so I went to their site to see what the new calendar was like. Unfortunately it is the same blah FAIL as last year's. So I went instead with teams which understand that a cheerleader needs her own month, and if you have 40 cheerleaders like the Seahawks do, you have to show some tough lust and go with just as many photos as you have months on the calendar. Seagals are cramming three per page, which makes them too small and creates too busy a design.

So instead I went with:
Redskins (My only repeat - a 15-month calendar with brilliant photography and design)
Colts (just to try something different)
Buccaneers (possibly the most attractive cheerleaders)
Ravens (because they are almost Washington and have a similar design)
Saints (because NOLA women have a reputation to uphold. Maybe "uphold" is the wrong word.)

On the walls from last season are
Dallas (inconsistent)
Jets (boring photography. Photog thinks it's all about the location)
Dolphins (boring photography, and they slap two smaller images of the pinup girl on the lower right of the main image)
Redskins, as mentioned above

In the dumpster:
Seagals 2013.

Which reminds me, I need to take out the garbage soon.

Before lunch I looked up places which claimed to have the Nexus 7 32GB in stock, and GameStop came up a winner. So that's where I went at lunchtime, and my next stop was UPS to return the Kindle Fire. When I had picked it up, the UPS guy had wanted to know how I liked it (Amazon ships in a clearly labeled box) and was surprised I didn't. In that same strip mall is a classy looking place called Ocean Blue Sushi Club. This is a huge place, good for three company team lunches at a time, but at 1:15 it was so empty that the hostess was not at the front door, and it took a good (or bad) 5 minutes for someone to take my order. The food was very good, not as expensive as it could have been.

After work, home, sat out on the patio with the Nexus plugged in (it had about half a charge), set it up, and it actually grabbed all my Android phone stuff from my Google account, including the wallpaper photo of Domino in the window and the locked device wallpaper of the park bench.

It seems lighter than the Fire, and it is more comfortable to hold in portrait mode. Very smooth Youtube playback on my 5GHz wireless connection, and Kindle app worked better on it than on the Fire. More accurate "last page read" and easier brightness adjustment.

It's basically the computer part of the Android phone, minus the phone functions and fees. After it finishes charging I need to see ho to turn off the keyboard click. The voice recognition so far has been flawless. But give it time,,,

Marie Calendar's roast chicken frozen dinner & the last of the chocolate chunk ice cream. While watching the Tivo replay of the Seahawks-Denver game, in which the theory is completely demolished which says the team which controls the ball for the most minutes wins. Denver has a superb team, but Seattle was far more opportunistic. And they have more attractive uniforms. And the best helmet logo in the NFL. One nice touch is a walk-on from the University of Washington was one of the stars of the game. Great to see a hometown boy show up the draftees.

Have also been looking online for a used 3-valve Baritone horn/euphonium. Starving Musician's prices are too high, so I may sell them the 4-valve one I have now. Lots of promising junkers on eBay where the shipping fee may be higher than the high bid. Fine, if the horn plays.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
Manicure
YOTB rehearsal (last one before Sunday's concert)

Current Mood: relaxed
Current Location: Newest Furball Hall

I left the apartment at 11:30 with a croissant and a baritone, took a slightly alternate route to Shoup Park which did not include the bumper car merge lanes of San Antonio Blvd or the jaywalk capitol of the west bay, Los Altos' Main Street. It took maybe 7 minutes longer, but was much safer. Someone was parked in my spot, the same someone was parked there Thursday night, so I'm thinking it may be an abandoned vehicle. I don't think it was a band member because there were still plenty of spots down in the park's lot.

It was about noon, th concert doesn't start till 1:30, but everything was already set up.

I had brought my Kindle, but instead of reading I found a nice shaded park bench and phoned my Baltimore sister. We had a nice chat, she encouraged me to try a gluten-free diet to see if it solves my tummy issue. I told her I don't have any cellulite. She laughed. Both because it's celiac, but also because "everyone has cellulite".

We chatted a little about my missing the Princess Bride quote-along. Her one and only son named his one and only (so far) son Wesley. Wes is 4 months old, and nephew says the first thing they are teaching him to say is "As you wish". :-)

We had nice but not optimal weather for the concert, it started out windy and stayed chilly through the whole thing. I got a chance to try out my new fancy music holders, see-through plastic strips about an inch wide, with a short L on one end with a magnetic strip to help hold it onto the stand. It took a little experimentation, but by the 3rd or 4th number I was able to use them without the aid of clothes pins. Much easier to flip pages and slide multi-page music into place.

It was a fairly easy set as far as lips go, but challenging reading. Lots of medleys with lots of time and key signature changes, and we had one case where two numbers in a row were in the same time signature but one was at 120 and the other at 40. Threw me off big-time.

At halftime one of the tuba players (we have 4! - 2 of them female) raved about a new Thai place which just happens to be one I have triued to go to many times, it is in the same stip mall where Janice and I have coffee every week we are both in town, but we usually do that on Sunday, and this new place is closed Sundays. I was pleasantly surprised that she uses Phad Thai as her test for whether it's a good place. She said their "medium" is very spicy. It really shouldn't be. But she said they barely speak English and the waitress is cute, so I need to get there on a non-Sunday and check it out.

Home by way of an auto supply which had a pair of the right size bug-eye mirrors. Then to the Milk Pail, which only had one piece of my favorite sheep milk cheese, but they also had French brie on sale for $5/lb so I bought two $3 wedges. And 99 cents a pound for green grapes. I skipped the limes, 8 for $1 but too small and coloring looked like they were picked off the ground.

Kaan was waiting right at the door, but he's scared of the baritone case, so he scooted away. Come to think of it he's scared of anything I'm carrying low to the ground. A couple of days ago he did bolt, but came right back when I shouted at him. Good doggie.

Put the stuff away, checked on the computer's restore program (16 hours to go. It was 32 when I left this morning. Their estimator sucks). Got undressed and tried to take a nap, but Domino decided to park herself near my head, and then Kaan jumped on the bed and there was hissing and growling and they both took off for parts unknown.

Remembering I had not showered this morning, so I took care of that, got dressed and headed for Starbucks. Cookie crumble frapp. Cute barista, some nice customer eye candy both at the tables and coming through for "to-go".

Time to go home and have some dinner and do some more reading, and maybe preview the DVD I'm auctioning at BASFA tomorrow.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
Talk to boss about the new automation foo and other things to do
BASFA

Current Mood: squeaky clean
Current Location: Starbucks Mathilda BatCave

Both Kaan and Domino are only using the new "traditional litter" box. Which means the second one cannot arrive too soon.

Work may have been my most boring day ever. Spent all day pushing the "go" button, waiting an hour, checking the results, lather, rinse, repeat. Ironically I was trying to get it to fail. After 5 successful runs, I gave up on the bug (which I had seen 2 out of 4 times yesterday) and submitted the script to Automation, making it Somebody Else's Problem™.

Lunchtime was wasted at Fry's, looking for standard items which they used to carry all kinds of (push buttons, cordless soldering iron, solder, shrink wrap tubing, small-guage stranded wire) and left with a junky looking cordless soldering iron, the right kind of solder in the right amount, way too much shrink wrap tubing in two sizes, the wrong kind of button and no wire at all.

Back to work.

After work, Radio Shack had All Of The Above. I bought everything except solder. Will return the button and the iron to Fry's soon.

Home, just enough time to tape together the sheet music which I'd brought home to repair last week. Grabbed my horn and headed for rehearsal, planning on being 5 minutes late. But there war a HUGE birthday party at the park, no parking spaces for two blocks. So I was 15 minutes late, but a lot of other people were too.

We ran through a lot of pieces, and for most of it I was not doing a good job of keeping up, especially with key and time signature changes. We play a lot of medleys arranged by people who have cut and pasted instead of transposed, so there is a lot of that.

Home, dinner was falafel, hummus, creamed spinach, pickles with chocolate chip macadamia cookies for dessert. And my home made lime seltzer.

And somewhere on the ride home I went to test the new amp/speakers with some Sarah Chang violin pieces, only to discover I had erased all the classical music on the iPod because it was recorded at 120 bps and sounded like crap, and I never remembered to re-record them at 360. So I just did that. And it reminded me I also have at least 2 CDs of theFine Arts Quartet which I'd meant to put on there. And now that I have found them, I see why I never did. The husband of one of my parents' cousins, Abram Loft, was a violinist. violist with them for decades. He wrote a book about it:

clicky. Looking at the CDs, they were made after he left the group. :-(

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
Re-do the valet button
Veg with the cats

Current Mood: weird
Current Location: Home

Started out okay, I remembered to take the HUGE cardbard box (broken down) and the litterbox cartridges to the dumpster. Remembered to pack a lunch because I was taking time at lunchtime to have my nails done.

Forgot that at noon-ish the diabetes doctor was supposed to call for an update, so I did not have my Hgl or BP numbers, and couldn't remember them for shit. I know my last two days of home BP readings were off the chart. Doc says come in for a BP screening so I do the math and I can have my nails done, nip home and print out the data and grab the BP meter then go to the screening in Mountain View and still have time to get back to work.

At the time I need to leave for the manicure, I get wrapped up in some coding foo, rush out to the car Just In Time for my tummy to tell me to go back inside and check the plumbing. On my way back I phone the nails place and tell them I'll be 10 minutes late. Turned out to be 15. But Michelle of Michelle's was in the back room finishing lunch and waiting for me. She is gorgeous, and was wearing a cowl neck sweater which showed off enough to be "hey, my eyes are up here" and "but your cleavage is down there".

I'm sure she's married, because she wears a diamond solitaire on each ring finger.

From there to the nearby UPS store, suspenders have arrived. Then home, fire up the PC, download the latest data from my meters, print it out and zoom down Central Expressway to MV.

The BP screening is simple. You wait for 10 minutes, they take a reading. If it is good, you're done, if not, one more 10-minute time out and another reading. While I was waiting I took a reading on my meter, and it was high. Not way high but "wait 10 minutes" high. Called into the test seat, perfectly normal reading. WTF?

Since I had the data printed out I went downstairs to drop it off with Diabetes doc, but he was in and was free to do a full review. Bottom line: my home meter is defective, and I need to drop one of my hypertension meds.

Back to work, managed to get some stuff done on the next very complex test script. Stayed till after 6, part of it researching BP meters online. Stopped off at Fry's to look at USB 3.0 cables and BP meters. They had many brands, 2 or 3 models each, but not the ones I'd researched. Phone alarm goes off - reminding me I was planning on going to Palo Alto for a very special concert. Reilly & Maloney. The story goes like this:
( Read more... )
It was 86° outside, hotter inside (nobody knew how to turn on the aircon), but the place is a circular pavilion with several openable doors, so it wasn't too bad. They played some new pieces, but most of the applause was for the old ones. Palo Alto Cowboy was a sing-along, I only saw three or four people not singing.

Lots of applause, well deserved. Two things I missed is Ginny Reilly did not play the piano, and David Maloney did not break out his uke and sing the Marlene Dietrich classic Falling in Love Again. After the show I told him I had snagged that as an audition piece, and he said they were going to do it tonight but he forgot the uke. Or something. His version is low-key like Marlene's, which makes it all the more hilarious coming from a Senior Citizen™. He gender bent a line to make it more poignant:
"Girls cluster to me like moths around a flame
And if their wings burn I know I'm not to blame"

Maybe next time.

Home, had a dinnerette of frozen pot roast, while watching Restaurant Stake-Out.

Plans for tomorrow:
I have no clue
Pick up another package at UPS
Unload the dryer and put away the whites
I suppose I could go to Vallejo for Pirate Fest, but that's a long way to drive

Current Mood: gloomy
Current Location: Home of the Weird

TMI -( Read more... )

Work. Got there at 10 because the Internet reached out and glued me to my computer chair for an hour. For the record, we are encouraged to get there by 10. Not that it matters. what I'm doing these days is a lot of "write code. Wait for it to run. Debug. Rinse, lather, repeat."

This morning I finished the paperwork to submit yesterday's script, and finished the next one by about 5 today, but will wait till tomorrow before doing the paperwork because they still haven't tested the one I did last week.

Lunchtime I was stood up by Automation Guy, went to Kaiser to p/u my insulin instead. Lunch at Stuft Pizza, a small Stuft Special, very good. Best pizza I've had in a while.

By go-home time I was on YouTube between code runs, listening to more Kenny Chesney (he does a pretty good rock and roll when he wants to) but finally went for the "comfort food" of Rose Sirintip's A Tu Corazon (Thai & Spanish) and then really sinking into as-closed-to-depressed-as-I-ever-get รักเอย Rock Oei" (Love, Eh?) which I seem to remember was the theme song for a particularly morose Thai soap opera.

It has a beautiful melody, even if you don't understand the words.
( I'll embed it here )

After work, home, planning on changing the litterboxes which looked rank this morning, but this evening they looked good for another few days. Hmmm.

Vegged out on the recliner for a bit, Domino let me run the undercoat rake over her a few times. when she jumped off my lap, Kaan followed her and did his best nonchalant suitor routine, lying down on the carpet and stretching out until his forepaws were almost touching her as she scratched her face on the big semicircular scratcher thing. She whipped around and swatted at Kaan who went up on his haunches with his forepaws raised like "hands up!" and he backed away a little. This little drama has been playing all week, with Kaan getting more and more in her face and she being more physical in shooing him away. Used to be she just growled all the time. Maybe there's hope - she used to start making rude noises from 3 feet away. Now he has to actually touch her.

Current Mood: ose
Current Location: Starbucks Mathilda

Today's earworm. Love the lyrics. Love the fans joining in the responsive lines.Love the venue.

I was raised in Suburban NYC (Lawn Guyland) where the accepted musical forms were rock, pop, folk, easy listening, classical, showtunes, and your religion's liturgical music. Country Music was an oxymoron. Or just a moron.

We moved to Seattle, and despite the fact that the nearest cowboy was on the other side of the mountains, there were two or three country music stations on the radio. Pop stations occasionally played "cross-over" tunes. I ignored them, shunning them as music for people who dropped out of 4th grade to pursue a life in the rodeo.

Even when I worked in rural Oregon and Washington where I covered rodeos and took the mug shots of the rodeo queens, and most of the "music" on the radio was country, I detested it.

And then I heard, as I was channel surfing, an announcer introduce a song which he claimed was called "Work Your Fingers To The Bone, And What Do You Get? Bony Fingers" which was then played live for the studio audience. I can't remember when or where that was, but ever since, my attitude changed. There were people in country music with the same warped sense of humor as me.

One thing led to another, and I sought out country novelty songs. And then that leaked into finding singers I enjoyed. Reba MacEntire sings in my key (an octave higher). So does Anne Murray. And Dolly Parton. Which brings me to a little twist - the first time I heard "I Will Always Love You", it was Dolly on the soundtrack of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. Her version still makes me all misty-eyes, and when Whitney hijacked and completely eviscerated it, I was livid. That was after I discovered Dolly did not only sing it, she wrote it. She wrote the whole musical. I'm impressed.

Then there was the country which I didn't know was country. In 1973 I was in You're A Good Man, Charlie Brown at the Astoria, OR community theater, and to pass the time during gaps in the rehearsals, the guy who played Schroeder taught us a bunch of John Prine songs. "Grandpa Was A Carpenter", "4-Way Stop Dilemma", "Dear Abby" and my favorite "Please Don't Bury Me". Somehow a song taught you you by Schroeder doesn't click as country. I learned "Illegal Smile" as a protest song in college.

And then there's Jimmy Buffet, who has come up a lot of clever lyrics and catchy tunes. One could argue that his music isn't really country, so I will. :-)

What got me going on this topic is I was in the car yesterday in a Dayquil haze, and the clever lyrics of a particular country song got me to thinking about a Facebook meme:

Current Mood: puzzled
Current Location: Home of the Weird

the way the government is running these days, April Fools' Day would be a Federal holiday.

This morning was quite the time suck. I was intending to sleep till 10, do my morning routine, change the litterboxes and relax or read until 1 when it was time to go to rehearsals.

But Kaan wanted to play fetch at 9, and I had the GoPro by the bed with the battery charged, so I snapped it onto the headband mount, fired up the app on my cell phone, and recorded some rounds of fetch. And that needed to be transferred to the PC, edited and exported for Youtube. But the transfers take a while, and I had read the help page on Turbo Tax which showed what I had been doing wrong in trying to amend my taxes, so I multi-tasked between the two, and before I knew it it was 12:45 and I hadn't done any of my morning stuff.

So I took meds and grabbed my reading glasses and jacket, punched the address of the rehearsal into the GPS and headed for some middle school in San Jose, which was more like in Cupertino. It only took 20 minutes to get there, and rehearsals did not start till 2, so I had a lot of time to walk around, watch soccer practice and discover I had forgotten to bring my Kindle.

This was the first rehearsal with the orchestra, and it was okay. Cast and musicians wandered in over the course of the first half hour. Seating was inadequate for such a large cast, and that orchestra is twice as large as it needs to be in most sections. I recognized a few of the musicians, one has worked several shows I have been on, a very good double-reed player. At least one of the two cellists sounded great. String bass player was familiar, and excellent. Overall, they sounded okay. Intonation was pretty good, they mostly played all the notes, and by the time we open they should be fine.

I'm still worried about our leading man, though. Excellent voice, but I have not heard him project well either in dialog or singing. We have a woman singing tenor and playing a man, and she is having a tough time learning a very difficult part and making herself heard. She's really an alto with a very low bottom note, I think. Lovely person, fun to be on stage with. There are three or four very weak soloists in the ensemble who have one solo line each. I like the share the wealth idea, and none of them will destroy the show if their line is not heard. But I'd rather have strong singers all around.

Maestro managed to work it so the chorus could eave early, which was about 4 or so. By 4:30 I was waiting for a manicure, a half hour wait and once again I regretted forgetting my kindle. I think it was tattoo special day, several of the women clients had a lot of ink on them. Two of them were very large canvases.

Next stop, my local PO to get another priority mail envelope (I had one for the IRS, needed another for the Franchise Tax Board). They have a display in the unlocked section for all the various free envelopes, but it was empty. So I went to the little PO near Sunnyvale CalTrain, and they had about a thousand express envelopes, and almost as many small flat rate boxes, but only padded flat rate envelopes. Around the corner is one of those contract stations, and he was open and gave me the kind I needed.

Home, took care of the litterboxes and staged them by the door then crashed on the recliner until I was ready to take them to the dumpster.

Printed PO labels from the USPS.com site for the tax stuff, and now those are ready to drop off Monday.

Launched Quicken, saw that both my paycheck and bonus arrived in my account, so I paid off my Amex Blue, Capitol One and Discover cards. The first two were small amounts, Discover was about equal to a paycheck. Will have to wait another paycheck to pay off Amex Costco card. That one's a 0% interest card. Actually, so is the Capitol One and Discover, but the latter is coming close to the end of its grace period.

With Things Being As They Are In The World™, I want to be as solvent as possible.

Broke for dinner. Last night I'd baked a 10-lb honey glazed spiral cut bone-in ham, the first time I have ever even thought of doing that. I did it in honor of Good Friday, and all my superstitious non-meat-eating friends. Before I went to bed I pulled all the slices off which I could, bagging them and throwing the bags in the freezer. Whichever company does this ham poops out before they cut the last few inches, so those I had to chop off in ugly chunks, which went into a bag in the fridge for further processing. Tonight I threw the chunks into the Cuisinart and made chips and slice-lets, and took about 1/3 of them, threw that into the cast iron skillet with some eggbeaters, string cheese and American Singles, and had a nice ham & cheese scramble. The remaining bits went back into the bag, and into the freezer.

Took the litterbox cartridges out to the dumpster, where a Chinese mover was trying to understand an Indian tenant. It was not pretty.

It rained intermittently all afternoon, but it's still pretty warm.

Fed the cats their Fancy Feast, caught up on LJ, FB and Twitter. Part of that was looking at the Hugo nominations (science fiction fans vote on these). The Bay Area club is very strong, and works up a list of nomination suggestions for members by gathering them from the membership and posting them on the web site. I think LA, DC and maybe Boston does this too. There may be others. Anyhow, I was not surprised to see us well represented. Also not surprised to see

seanan_mcguire on there 5 times, and actually wondered why she wasn't on there for graphic novel-ish things too. I'm a fan of her, but not the genres she writes in. I was bothered a bit that she was running against herself in one category. Officially the Hugo is for the work, and not the author, but I'd bet real cash dollars that most people vote for the author as much as, if not more than, the work. I'd be in favor of a limit of one nomination per author per category. Which would also widen the "short performance" field which had three Dr. Who episodes running against each other.

And once again I have a dilemma on voting for fan artist, because

dinogrl and

maurinestarkey are both nominated, I love both of them and their work, and it's apples and oranges because Mo does stunning drawings and paintings, Spring does the most amazing genre jewelry. And dinosaur poop. Mo won last year so I think I'll vote jewelry this time.

I was tempted to throw my name in the ring, my photos have been seen by fans in the Bay Area, Denvention, Chicon and Boskone. But photography never draws the ooohs and aaahs of hand-crafted art. And I think that's probably As It Should Be.

My left knee has been hurting a lot the past few days, and not responding much to Tylenol. Can't take Ibuprofin because my liver is already waving the white flag.

Plans for tomorrow:
Fry's, buy a couple of reams of printer paper. I made a couple of mistakes printing the tax forms, fed the shredder a lot of paper.
It may continue to rain, in which case I'll catch up on Tivo & maybe throw Princess Bride on the blu-ray. My newest great-nephew was named Wesley, which made me want to puke at first, but on his first posted FB photo a light went on and I wrote a comment: "As you wish..."
I also may try to have a late lunch at Shoreline Park, especially if it rains.
Oh yes, Easter Sunday. Time to bite the head off a hollow chocolate bunny.

Current Mood: snarky
Current Location: Newest Furball Hall
Current Music: The Heather on the Floor

At Conflikt in Jan. there was a very sexy woman selling her home-mixed tea blends, many of them named for Firefly/Serenity characters. She had an obnoxious young daughter with her. Or rather, mostly running around loose. She's based in Seattle, so it was a surprise to see her at Consonance. I had wanted to buy some Darjeeling from her up there, but she had sold the last batch. I asked again here, and she had not brought any. But she gave me a discount coupon to buy online.

Ookla the Mok West had a whole table full of CDs. I am told their lyrics are easier to hear on those, but their concert completely turned me off to them. And the audio in the pieces I saw on Youtube were distorted. :-(

Another three tables was apparently a combined offering from three dealers, but managed by only one. All by hand, too slow for me. Surprised to not see anything from the Toastmaster, Scott Snyder, whose concert was epic.

I had Stuff To Do in the morning, got there in time to catch a new guy's set, Adam Sakellerides, who was later join ed by the way too cute LARP addict Nicole Dieker whose screechy singing drove me out of the room during her solo concert last night, but she's great at harmony in her real range. Adam has a ways to go, but this was his first ever gig, and not much slack needs to be given because he was well prepared.

The second round of 2fers was disappointing. I don't even remember the first two, Bill Roper's two were ose. The surprise was Bill Laubenheimer, who got some major audience participation, especially in his second number.

I stayed for just enough Puzzlebox to run screaming from the overly enthusiastic drummer. This is not the Puzzlebox I grew up on. The story is their keyboard babe married a drummer.

Somewhere they announced the 2014 guests, with Kristoff & Margeret as GoH and Mark Osier as Toast. Here's Mark's acceptance song:

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=10151462702387566&l=6932659319272764926

I had to bail, needed to hit Ranch 99 for Asian foodstuffs and bring that home before meeting Janice for coffee. Managed to pay for next year's con, too.

Back home, made ravioli for dinner. Very strange, the string cheese turned to cottage cheese in the microwave. I must have gotten some non-fat stuff or something by mistake.

Watch Shark Tank and was pleased to see one of the sharks make an actual investment as opposed to putting money into a company which already had great financials. Once. Out of 5 or 6 times.

I had taken a cheap SD Sony camcorder to the filks, it's tiny and records to memory so it has good battery life and is noiseless. Image stabilizer worked well, but I did it hand held so there's nothing I want to put online. The stills I took with it sucked real bad, very low resolution, very grainy. Odd because the video is sharp. Took 15 minutes to find the firewire slot in the back of my PC and plug in the cable. Only to find this camcorder only has USB. And I needed to download an app from Sony to get the PC to recognize the camcorder.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
Brigadoon music rehearsal

Current Mood: okay
Current Location: Home

But I should have started studying lines an hour or two ago. Just that some financial stuff came in which I had to deal with, and the the sucking sound of Facebook, and recording a voice message to my aunt & uncle in NYC (uncle has macular degeneration, and would rather hear my voice than read text). And then there was a reply to

lemmozine which I had only half-finished this morning. Oh, and I had to bring the laptop in and figure out why it had failed to VPN to work last time I was at *$'s. Worked fine, which meant finishing an installation of linux, which pretended to work but didn't.

So here I am, before midnight.

Morning started with a walk to the apartment office where I waited for way too long for two reps to explain something to a new renter which one could have done by herself. Picked up two packages. One is a remote for my camcorder, the other is a set of Bose earbuds.

Back to the apartment, it was now too late to install a VM on my work PC, so I got in the car and headed for Mountain View to be way early for my doctor's appointment, but after a block I turned around to get to the bathroom. Now I was only slightly early. Doctor gave me the exam I expected, and hindsight, she says, tells her last week I had a bladder infection, which triggered bacterial prostatitis, but now the bladder is fine and the prostate is mostly fine. Continue to take drugs, and get a blood test in a month to verify the prostate thing was transient.

Mountain View is lunch heaven, and I was feeling like wor won ton soup would go down well, so I had a huge bowl of that at Fu Lam Mum, which is also where I go for birthday lobster when I'm thinking straight. They have a super dim sum brigade, but this time I needed soup. Huge portion, I took home 5 juan tons.

The north end of MV has about 6 new eateries, including a Greek bakery on the corner which replaced a place called Neto, which was a bakery too, but seemed ashamed to pin down its ethnicity. I'm pretty sure it's the same staff, and all they did was change the sign and add a couple of Greek columns to the display behind the cash register. I bought some baklava and tiramisu, and headed to work

The project at work was to install a virtual machine on my PC with fedora linux, and install snmp bits. It took 4 tries to get fedora installed properly, the VirtualBox software from Oracle sucks the big one, and never asks for the OS. But won't run without it.

A little after 6, I bailed when it was clear I had succeeded with linux, but not with snmp.

Home, I did that stuff above, checked out the remote (it only works with my tape-based camcorder, not with the smaller lighter better memory-based one). Plugged in the earbuds and now I know why some people stay attached forever. Bose audio is excellent, it makes craptastic MP3 listenable.

Plans for tomorrow:
AM, go to the car audio place which installed the alarm and have them fix the trunk release, and install a backup camera. I had given them one to put in when the alarm went in, but it was junk and died months ago.

Work after that

Consonance by 8 pm.

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Location: Home

Had a nearly normal night, woke up around 8:30. Found a really nice go-to-sleep music station on the Internet radio, a classical stream from PDX. KQAC.

Still a trace of headache, and not as much energy as I'd like, but all the other foo is gone.

I had nothing on the calendar, and the only chore was the litterboxes. Took care of those, and am now out of spare cartridges. Music director sent more vocal parts, but I probably won't be putting them on the web page. I do need to finish highlighting my part in the score, but that will happen tomorrow.

Chatted with my youngest sister. She works for the Navy, and her hours have been cut 20%. She and her husband can survive that - when you build your own house there's no mortgage - but many, maybe most of her co-workers might not.

Went to my fave nails place and had a manicure. I usually go weekday nights, the staff today was very different. I was assigned to a chubby Vietnamese woman with lots of artistically done eye makeup and a very low-cut blouse which showed off impressive globes. She wasn't as good as the others, but she got the job done without making me scream or bleed.

From there to Safeway, on my list was bread, milk and dinners. I was very liberal with the latter, plucking several new store-brand "feeds 3-4" entrees. Did not buy ice cream. Looked, didn't see anything I needed. I did buy two cans of whipped cream for Domino, which I did not need. Didn't buy bananas because what they had looked like it had been stomped.

Home, got onto eBay and listed my two Moto phones. I had no idea where the box for the older one was, so I listed it as phone-only.

Pushed the bed away from the wall about a foot, placed a tripod there, mounted the camcorder and set it up for Kaan fetching recording. Could not find the remote, which is crucial because the controls are at the back of the camera and I will be in front. Went looking for the remote, couldn't find it, but in the process found the box for the older Moto phone, so I re-listed that and raised the starting price. I should be able to buy a remote at Fry's.

Watched some of the NFL combine, including all of Manti Te'o's press conference. He was pranked, he is over it, he has moved on. They only asked him one football question, and his answer was Ray Lewis is a major role model for him, with a long list of reasons. The kid is articulate, composed, and after his NFL career I bet he goes into broadcasting.

DHL was supposed to attempt a second delivery of Thai CDs today, but they didn't. Idiots didn't try the office yesterday when I wasn't home. :-(

Plans for tomorrow:
Get time-sucked by Facebook
Highlight the rest of my vocal score
add those music files to the web site
Oscars party at a theater friend's

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Location: Home

Last night was pretty bad. So bad both cats spent most of the night on the bed. I took photos using the webcam app on the phone, but very bummed that they went to neverland. The folder the app says they went to doesn't exist. :-(

Chills made me put on a t-shirt, which got soaked after an hour. Put a towel on the pillow, which helped. Was up six or 7 times to pee, and drink more water.

The alarm woke me at 7, I connected the VPN and emailed the gang that I would be working/sleeping from home. Put on sweat pants and changed t-shirts and went back to bed. Did some actual work on automation scripts, and about 3:30 got permission to borrow someone's test machine to run a stress test which passed, and let me close a bug.

Lunch started with the thought of macaroni, but I'm out, and way low on past shells too. Found an ancient packet of Uncle Ben's Parmesan rice, cooked it up, and attempted to eat it. It tasted like petroleum product. Threw it away, had a banana in lactose-free whipped cream.

Brigadoon music director emailed us some piano parts for a particularly difficult section of mostly "ah". I put those on the web site and updated the index file.

Meanwhile, the producer sent email saying he had set up a Yahoo group for us, which would link to the Dropbox files. No thanks, Yahoo is a spam magnet.

Back to bed, read the ending to Octavia Butler's Kindred. What a crock. She went for the most violent possible ending, totally unjustified. The book begins with a teaser where the heroine has just had her arm amputated. In the final pages we are told why, and it is something she just pulled out of her ass. Or rather, out of dozens of "what if you teleported into a wall" sci-fi con panels. Without setting it up in a way to be remotely defensible. Her writing is okay, but I never had trouble putting the book down when I had to. Another FAIL about the ending is the heroine could easily have carried the proof she had of a family relationship, proof which would have made for a happy ending, but the thought never occurs to her. Exedrin, sleeping pills, a knife and shampoo yes. Family bible, no.

The book was not good enough for me to lose any sleep over, so I went to sleep. Woke up at 6:30, fever of 100.6. Took Tylenol and decided to take the second antibiotic of the day as well. Parked on the recliner with a damp washcloth on my forehead, Domino climbed onto my lap then onto the top of the recliner. Also took two Anacin.

At about 7, I got dressed and in 15 minutes was on my way to rehearsals, feeling about 80%. It was a music rehearsal, so no lengthy standing. Singing makes things better. And I figured if something went wrong, there were friends around to help.

It was an intense rehearsal, music I had not looked at yet, and had not highlighted my part either. Music director has a nasty habit of stopping abruptly when he hears something wrong, but he makes up for it later by letting us sing things through all the way. We had a new, young accompanist who was brilliant. She had obviously practiced a lot - the piano part is torture. The men were let loose early, so instead of going straight home I went to the 7-11 near the apartment to pick up something from the Amazon locker there. Neat idea, they deliver to the locker, no need to mess with apartment offices which close early. I punched in the code they gave me and it didn't work. It wanted 7 character, they only gave me 6.

Will try again tomorrow. Maybe there's a trick.

Plans for tomorrow:
Sleep
WFH
Call Click Away to find out why they haven't called me about the Samsung phone repair

Current Mood: drained
Current Location: Newest Furball Hall

Had a good night's sleep after the residual feeling of being on the train subsided. Had breakfast at about 10:30, very sweet rum raisin french toast with turkey sausage. It said sausage on the menu, but they were patties. Not the same thing and certainly not worth $6. Very expensive meal, I'll have to brave the cold and eat elsewhere tomorrow.

At 1, I went the mile or so to the con site. I'm staying at the Hilton, and the con site is the Hilton Convention Center, but our rooms are the furthest ones from the convention center, and the con is at the far end of that.

They said they were only registering VIPs, general reg would be at 3. The hike back to the room reminded me that my left knee is acting up too much for this kind of walking, so I went to the light rail station and took the train to Westlake where there is a Bartell's drugs, which I figured ought to have the three things I needed:
A cane
A folding knapsack
Reading glasses (I scratched the pair I had been using, and though I have a spare that would leave me with no spare....)

Found the cane right away - a nice folding one, quite solid.
Found the glasses hidden at the end of an aisle near the photo dept.
No travel knapsack.
I also found a small sewing kit and a dark chocolate salmon.

went across the street to the shopping center and did not find a folding pack, but did find a knapsack which looked like it was by Maurice Sendak, and paid way too much for it in a boutique. Kind of like this one:

Back on light rail to the airport, by now it was late enough to register, so I unfolded the cane, put on the pack and walked to the con.

Went to the con suite, a floor above my room, and was disappointed in the lack of diet coke and munchies. There were crock pots of soups and such, maybe 4 of them, but they didn't look that appetizing.

Stuffed the pack with some auction items & my camera and walked to the con at about 5:30, expecting the room for the 6:30 opening ceremonies would be open. But I forgot this was Conflik, where they set up all the audio for the evening before letting any of the fen into the room. As usual, it was not open by 6:30 either.

They started with announcements, not too many of them, then we sang the Bonhoffs' "Knight's in White Satin" spoof for the con CD. That went very well, it was done in on practice and one take.

we had a break, in which time I donated one of my calendars, the Bloggess' book and the chocolate salmon to the Interfilk auction.

Next up was a concert by a trio from Iowa, "Cheshire Moon". They were adequate musically, but their songs were tuneless, the lyrics utterly forgettable, and I was bored with them quickly.

Then came "burnt Toastmaster" bluesmancd aka CD Woodbury who turned things completely around with a wide variety of pieces and astounding guitar skills. Great showman, knew his audience (brought down the house by starting with a chat about blues, and then launched, blues style, into Code Monkey.). He started out with a Seattle theme. There was a patter song about coffee which drove the sign language interpreter up a wall. There was a lovely tune which described an octopus hunting and killing a shellfish from the shellfish's point o view. A couple of numbers I lost because his guitar drowned out his voice, but it was great guitar playing. He did a touching rendition of Tom Smith's Fantasy Lives and made me cry with a number I had never heard before - Uncle Bonzai's Just One Angel. That alone could have made the con for me. He also did a very scary version of Monsters Under Your Bed. And stuff I don't remember.

From there I went to the Bonhoff's workshop on parody writing, where they basically described exactly the way I write parodies. It was good to hear Anne Prather praising one of lemmozine's classic parodies.

Back to the room, dumped my stuff, hit the con suite because I am very hungry but all I got was a bowl of not quite cooked soup. Back to the room again to get the laptop and bring it to the area with free wi-fi. to write this.

Name dropping dept:
Chatted for a couple of hours last night with Anne Prather. hsifyppah arrived while we were chatting. Also Bill & Carole and Admiral Naismith.

walked back to the room with quadrivium aka Dr. Mary, chatted with lemmozine at the concert break, we'll get together for lunch or something. Good to see Frank Hayes here. Betsy Tinney and her daughter were in the con suite the first time I was there. They tell me Seanan is here but I haven't seen or heard her so it's probably not true yet. Chatted in the con suite with Fleetwolf, whose sketch book is remarkable. Talented guy. He said he wanted advice on what guitar to get as a beginner, and i suggested asking lemmozine, whom I asked at the concert break,and I relayed the suggestion to rent something, but Mr. Fleet lives in Whidbey island, so no chance of that. Saw filkferengi in the con suite too.

Dr. Kathleen was at the workshop with the same pack as mine. She got it at the Chicago Field Museum.

Plans for tomorrow:
Have too much fun at the lunch (used to be a brunch, I like it this way better)
Phone my sister to find out why she hasn't replied to my email about dinner Sunday.
Concerts
Interfilk Auction
Maybe go to the international district for Chinese dinner. Tempted to invite susandennis to join me. I'm not sure what time I'll get there, though. I'd leave here 5:30 or 6, depends on how lucky I am with light rail schedules. And not sure which restaurant to go to.
quadrivium said she has a concert at 10, but I don't see it on the program. I'll be there anyway.

Current Mood: numb
Current Location: SeaTac Hilton

Work was the usual. Boss came over noon-ish to compliment me on the latest set of Thailand 1975-77 scans I uploaded to Flickr. His wife is Thai, they have a house there and his most telling comment is nothing has changed in 37 years. It's pretty much the same old backward place.

Lunch at the Korean buffet called China China.

Home, the Cuisinart electric fondue pot arrived. There was also a USPS note that there is a parcel for me at the PO. In the mailbox was also a "no such address" for a calendar I'd mailed to someone whose address has not changed since 2008. Double checked the label and my spreadsheet, and there was a typo putting the address on 1st instead of 21st. I redid it and will try again.

Watched some of MNF, it had its moments, but not enough of them to stay home nd miss BASFA.

The meeting was fun, got in some good puns, but I was disappointed that I was not auctioned off. Someone else was who is not as regular an attendee.

Palo Alto Players sent an audition notice for Miss Saigon. There is no part for me in it, and it overlaps too much with Brigadoon, but I might be able to work backstage. That's a show I really want to be involved with some time.

Doing my birthday list this morning, I was reminded of one of the most touching songs I know. Not too many people on this side of the pond remember folksinger/songwriter Ralph McTell, and neither did I until I saw this on Youtube:
( Read more... )

Made me cry. As much for what the audience participation said to me as for what the song does.
More versions:

( Read more... )

Enough ose.

Plans for tomorrow:
PO, pick up parcel
Work
???

Current Mood: melancholy
Current Location: Home

I slept really well last night. Got up once at about 6 am, then at 9. Sundays the alarm is at 9:30, with a folk guitar podcast on the Internet radio. It's getting old, I may change it back to one of the Thai music radio stations.

Domino yelled at me for a while, then jumped up on the bed and head-butted my arm for a while. I turned on the TV and watched pre-football and a little bit of football, I had nowhere to be till 3 pm. Played on the computer, explored some sites which I used to visit regularly, and saw why I stopped.

Opened the piano, played some of the tunes I was thinking of auditioning with. Old Man River has been getting old. But How To Handle a Woman started too high and got higher, I can't sing the top 3 notes anymore; My Way is fine until the climax, which is too high in the music I have (Elvis and Sinatra both used this arrangement); What Kind Of Fool Am I gets too high too quickly, and I don't really know the words to Fine, Fine Line or This Nearly Was Mine.

Watched some of the Raiders game, grabbed the book with Old Man River and my theater resume, and headed for the Lyric Theatre warehouse aka rehearsal hall near SJO. It's a really convenient location for me, a straight shot down Central from both the new apartment and work. My appointment was for 3, I was there at 2:30. They took my picture and printed onto the application form which already had all my particulars (I had entered them online when I made the reservation), checked a couple of boxes, answered some questions (my only conflict with rehearsals is Conflikt), signed on the line, and hnded it back to the itinerant registration worker. She stapled it to my resume and handed it back to me with a page of "sides" - and said I could choose any of them as my cold reading, went into the Green Room and waited for 15 minutes for my time to arrive.

This gave me a lot of time to get nervous. Two lovely women came in for their appointments right after mine, which helped.

Called downstairs to the vast empty warehouse from the green room above, the dais was populated with familiar faces, except one. I think she's the assistant choreographer. The producers, stage director/choreographer, music director and accompanist are all people I have worked with before.

Found the black X on the floor about a mile from the dais, gave the accompanist my music and showed him where to stop playing, back the X and sang my number. I think it went very well, I was a little tentative on one of the ending notes but diaphragm support saved me. Then I read a paragraph from the sheet, which was supposed to be a speech by the mayor to the whole town. I used my stage public address voice. The director asked me to make it bigger. Imagine 10,000 people. This didn't work the way the side was written, so I asked and he agreed that the HUGE VOICE came after a line which was an aside to the person next to me. Anyhow, I don't know where it came from, but it sounded a lot like Charlton Heston in The 10 Commandments.

On my way out I let the director know about my torn meniscus, so he would understand just how non-dancer I'll be for the show. He thinks I may be healed by then, but I doubt it. It would not prevent me from being cast in any of the Old Fart roles.

I was pleased with the audition, and don't care if I'm called back or make the show. It would be nice to work with these people.

I was out of there by 3:10, and my coffee date was not till 5, so I drove to Walmart in search of shelves or plkastic drawer sets or something to replace the linen cabinet missing from the new apartment. Autopilot took me to Costco, but I turned right around and got going in the right direction, an saw that The Milk Pail was on the way, so I stopped in there for some French goat an sheep brie-like cheeses, was reminded they don't sell sourdough baguettes, but as I was heading for the cash register there was a basket of nice ripe large limes. 16 for a dollar! Usually they are 50 cents each. I bought 8. My cashier was a gorgeous Scandinavian woman, about 25, who was very cheerful and bantered well. She was not banded.

Then Walmart, but that was a FAIL, they already have converted the garden section into a Christmas store, and the aisles are piled 7' high with boxes plastic wrapped together which either need to be hauled to storage or shelved. Hard to tell which. I didn't see anything which would work for shelf space.

To Starbucks, there was nowhere to sit inside, but it was 80° outside and no one was smoking, so I grabbed a table there. It was 4:30, Janice showed up a little before 5, which was a surprise. She told me a lot about her adventures in China where she had spent the last 3 weeks on a tour. There were three nurses on the tour, and she needed all of them. Petite mal seizure climbing the steps to a temple in Tibet. Tripped on the step leaving a squat toilet and mashed up her arm. And something else I forgot. But she did get to Tibet (which was iffy when she left) and she also saw the panda preserve.

It got cold and breezy about the time she had to leave, so I headed off to the Target store, found something which will work for storage, a welcome mat, mint Klondike bars, and breathsavers, but did not find a non-glass butter dish. I'd left mine in the fridge at the old apartment.

After I put stuff in the trunk, the phone rang and it was a contract recruiter congratulating me on my new job in San Mateo. Huh? After I told her I',m not that guy and am happy in my work she wanted to keep chatting. Data mining. I don't know how she ignored the noise in the parking lot, but she kept chatting for 20 minutes. I finally decided the Klondike bars had melted enough and told her goodbye.

Home, unloaded the car, had to spray Domino a few times to get her out from being hit by the fridge door. Was disappointed that there was no Sunday Night Football. Decided dinner would be pasta shells with beef frank slices in a sea of creamy goat cheese, but in the end the cheese turned all crumbly. Tasted great, but the texture was all wrong.

Checked my DNA test progress at NatGeo, they received the samples and have begun testing. 4 weeks and I may have an answer.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
Football
BASFA if football becomes a boring pitchers' duel

Current Mood: crazy
Current Location: Home

Slept till 9, played on computer till 10:30, watched some football, decided Sunday was not a good day to drop anything off at Costco's photo department when I can go there at lunchtime from work.

Drove to Shoup Park, was a little earlier than I wanted to be, but not much. My favorite parking space was way open. 12:15 for a 1:30 downbeat. By 1:00 the parking gets impossible.

Excellent turnout, very appreciative audience. We played a lot of good stuff - Hoagy Carmichael, Frank Sinatra & Fred Astaire, medleys from Grease, Phantom of the Opera & Fiddler, 4 or 5 Sousa marches, a non-Sousa march, and the piece which lured me into this band in the first place, The Sousa Scramble. The latter being two pages of music, never more then 8 bars of the same march, sometimes only 4, ending with the original, very stirring Sousa Stars & Stripes finale (our usual S&S arrangement does not have the counterpoint Baritone Horn part). Oldest & newest Baritone players were absent, but Hue-bin was there, so I tried out my Anything Goes Chinese line on her, and she told me what was wrong with it - I had 3/4 of it in Mandarin and 1/4 in Cantonese. Turns out my original choice is all-Mandarin, and she liked it a lot better.

Home with a stop at Fry's to get a better car charger for the phone, and also picked up an ear bud headset and some AA batteries. Huge line today, but it moved quickly.

Spent some time fast forwarding through the 49er-Denver game, and while I am still not impressed with the alleged QB, at least they put up lots of points, and won the game.

At about 6 it was time to drive to the theater, no traffic so I was there in 15 minutes, way early for the 6:30 sit-n-sing. Unpleasantly surprise that the set is not complete - considering how far along they were when I left on Saturday and all day today to work, there should have been a lot more progress. As in it should have been done except for some trim.

They have a "spacing" rehearsal scheduled for tomorrow, which will be a total waste of time if the set is not finished. I doubt it will be. From what is built it is clear that my two trips to the balcony will have to be made much earlier than we have blocked.

We ran through all the big numbers with the orchestra. It is a tiny group, only one trumpet/cornet, one trombone, three people switching between sax and clarinet, the director on keyboard, two percussionists (lyre, wood blocks, etc.), one traditional drummer, and a string bass. It really needs twice the brass.

They sounded pretty good, but I'm not sure the trumpet player will hold up for the whole show.

We were crowded on stage with them, it was impossible for the leading singers without mikes. The conductor is making no effort to quiet down the orchestra, which was just plain not polite, though IRL all the leads will have mikes. But IRL the orchestra will be at the top of the balcony, and that will carry way more than they realize.

Home, Made franks & frozen veggies. Domino likes bits of franks, but she loves the corn kernels even more. Very strange cat.

Speaking of which, here is the old cat tree I'm replacing:

Plans for tomorrow:
Work (team meeting at 10)
Costco
AG rehearsal (?)

Current Mood: mischievous
Current Location: Home

As planned Saturday was mostly about going through all the photos I had taken since the last Worldcon, and choosing 20 for the upcoming one. It took almost all day. There were patio breaks (lovely weather, not much of a view) with Domino, who has started to camp out there if I leave the door open. Now that it's cat-proofed I'm fine with that. In the mornings she finds a spot in the sun and splays out on the concrete, other times she either sits on her chair (it's a standard patio chair with a generic cushion) or on my chair (same kind of chair but the cushions are Chinese silk and there are 2 of them).

First pass was about 30 pix. I cut some good ones which I'd used before, and then a few which had no sci-fi appeal. That got me down to 20, but I remembered I wanted to have one of my Unwoman photos in the set, so I picked one and she gave me permission to use it, so it took the place of a not quite as good macabre make-up photo of one of my roller girl friends. Great make-up, less than great lighting job. And there was another tough decision to oust one of my model rocket favorites for a still life from Kanchanaburi. Thirteen of my best Thailand shots did not make the cut. They may not all make the 2013 calendar either.

That's one difference between hand-made art and photography. I can produce hundreds of gallery-worthy images a day.

Now I need to fill in the bid sheets and labels. Well, not now, but soon.

Next chore was to sign each photo using a macro I'd created in Photoshop last month. It's pretty nifty - I have a signature scan in cobalt blue which was sized to be like an artist's signature on my standard Nikon 12.3 megapixel JPGs, and the macro takes that, finds the right-hand margin and then the bottom margin and slaps the signature in the lower right, then merges it with the photo and saves the picture. It only takes about 15 minutes for 20 photos.

I had tried logging into Costco.com, but got a 500-level error which said the site was down for maintenance. It stayed that way all day and night, so uploading and printing would have to wait.

Part of the plan was to drink soda water with fresh-squeezed lime while I was doing this, but my soda siphon leaked all over the fridge, twice - the second time with a replacement tube - so that didn't happen.

After the photo project was as done as it could be without costco.com, I drove to Bevmo to buy a replacement siphon. They don't have any, they only have the cartridges. Boo. Hiss. There's a massage place next door which I had never tried, so I tried it. Very poor massage. She didn't know what she was doing. It didn't hurt so I didn't complain.

Home, ordered a siphon online (two, actually), watched some Olympics on Tivo. The only way to watch, because the commercials are repetitive and mostly stupid, and so are the announcers. Way too much intro crap, and they bundle events in the most bizarre way. They may show several hours of cycling in the same segment as a short burst of gymnastics. Swimming gets decent coverage, and there was some boxing which was contiguous, but last night one chunk was 11 hours, and Tivo can't FF that fast.

Slept well, almost slept in this morning. I tried Costco on the cell phone, and Google showed it was working. It needed the www. They really need to change the system down message on the costco.com site to a redirect. Anyhow, that let me upload and order prints. They should be done tomorrow afternoon.

Also printed out the music & script for Anything Goes and put that in a folder.

Noon-ish, put the baritone in the car and drove to the park for the monthly YOTB concert. The new guy showed up, and so did our student, so we had a record 6 baritones. Also 4 tubas, and two more trumpets than ever before. It was an easy concert for us, he chose music which was not lip-splitting.

From there to Fedex/Kinko's, where I bought a 3-ring binder and dividers and used their hole punch on the script & music. Then home for some Domino time and more Olympics.

6-ish, off to rehearsals. I was only half an hour early, but no one else showed up for 15 minutes. My friend David, another bass, who had performed in a matinee at Foothill that afternoon. People mostly arrived right on time or a few minutes late. It was not very hard music, though some of the bass line is WTF. I hate it when it jumps all over the place, bass lines ought to stay toward the bottom of the staff. The final note in the show is kind of a WTF, almost everyone is singing the same note. Ought to end in thrilling mind-blowing 12-part harmony.

It was good to spend the day being musical.

Home, dinner, watched some Muay Thai instead of Olympics.

Voted for the Hugos. The only one I felt strongly about is the short story, and I'm 90% certain my choice will not win, due to the overwhelming popularity of one of the other entrants, whose entry IMHO was either the worst short story ever, or a brilliant "best related work" which probably would not have fared well against Jar Jar Binks Must Die.

As a fan of irony and recursive humor, I sincerely hope

johnnyeponymous wins for the video of his 2011 Hugo acceptance ~~speech~~ melt-down. I also hope Drink Tank wins again because the sample submitted was one in which many of my photos were used as fillers, and I had an article in it too, which would make me something like 11/300th of a Hugo winner.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
Costco: P/U prints, get gas, see if they can refill Epson inkjet cartridges. Otherwise buy a set.
Aaron's - leave the prints for mounting.

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Location: New Furball Hall

Gotta journal.

Weekly meeting at work this morning almost ran out of things to talk about after half an hour, but somehow we managed to run 5 minutes over. Weekend testing on one release went fine on my machine, so I installed the next release and found they had done a wonderful job implementing my suggestion on how to add a particular feature to the GUI. Ran out of time putting it through its paces.

Lunch was a trip to Fry's and Barn Thai, where they did have my CHM hat which I left there last week. Didn't get the email from the apartment so there's a package waiting to be picked up tomorrow. Barn Thai fails on their Pat Thai. They use some horrible thin round egg noodles not the flat rice ones. And not enough fish sauce.

Sill no pistachios at the Arab-Mexican market.

Changed at work and went to callbacks in Saratoga. We were warned that there would be a lot of waiting around, which is good, because the director/choreographer did almost everything in the wrong order. First she called all of us on stage at once (about 40 of us!) to learn what was supposed to be a simple number to show how well we moved. It was way too fast, and while each step was simple, it was put together in a complex way. Most of the other people actually are dancers, which made it all that harder for those who were not. Long story short, I was the only one who didn't even come close to getting it. Not interested, I won't be dancing in that (or any other) number. After she taught us all that, she sent us away, and taught a ballet number for the ballet folks, and then a tap number. She had the tappers audition first, then the ballet, then the rest of us.

After all the dance stuff, they had the women's ensemble all try a phrase from one musical number, and ended the evening with those of us chosen to try out for the sailor's quartet. It would have been nice if the first two notes of the song had been in the music he gave us. I'm not cut out to be a sailor, and luckily my buddy and highly experienced barbershop singer David was there to share the bass singing duties. I did well, he did better. And he looks the part. It was interesting because the bass part was mostly easy, but the other three lines were just horrible. There was one tenor with a great voice who sang perfectly, but the rest of the guys were challenged. We did a bunch of combinations, and one of the ones David was in sounded great together.

I have music and lines to read tomorrow for the two parts I do fit, so that should be fun.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
Vote
P/u package
lunch
more work
callbacks

Current Mood: energized
Current Location: Home

Not that I was much younger yesterday. Do the math, Howeird.
22356 days old yesterday
22357 days old today.
22356/22357 = 0.99995527127968868810663326922217 is how much younger I was yesterday
22357/22356 = 1.0000447307210592234746824118805 is how much older I am today

Approximately. I did not count for leap days except for this year. So sue me.

But I digress.

Last night's low-carb dinner (you would think two ears of corn would be a lot), and my usual overnight insulin dose resulted in mild insulin shock at about 7:30 am. Hgl of 73. No ice cream permitted by my diet (it's the best thing for bring up blood sugar levels slowly and evenly) I put my teeth in and chomped a pair of glucose tablets. And then a trio of mint oreos.

Back to bed, because those attacks are very draining. Woke up at 9:30, which was enough time to email work I'd be late. Hgl up to 140, a little higher than I wanted but within my target of <150. Took my pills and shot up about 3/4 of my daytime insulin and got to work at about 10:30.

There was some work to do, on both products, and some stuff to read. It was automation guy's birthday, and I was taking him to a late lunch when he remembered he had a meeting. Turned around, dropped him off, and went to lunch at Sizzler because by that time the lunch place we were headed for was closed, or close to it.

More work & weekly report.

Home, the delivery which yesterday's postal bozo had left a note to pick up at the PO because it was registered mail was in the mailbox. He mistook a simple customs form for registered. It was a solar filter, shipped from Korea. Also in the mail was the one of two Howard The Duck #1 issues I bought on eBay by mistake. Maybe I'll auction one of them at BASFA. If it goes for more than 25 cents I'll be surprised.

Decision time - what to sing for tomorrow's audition. When I'm going for a major role I usually haul out Old Man River, which is in a great key for me, and I have known to make theaters echo with it. But this time I am trying out for smaller parts in three fairly lightweight comedies, so I needed something more subtle. So I hauled about 10 inches of music from my bookshelf and started looking. It needed to be something I knew the words to, or could learn them in an hour or so. Fine Fine Line from Avenue Q almost worked, but I always forget the words at the end of the first verse. And it is a little too high. Where Is Love from Oliver is too high for me to nail the tricky part at the end of the verse. Everything from West Side Story, Carousel, Camelot and about four others were too high. I Am What I Am from Le Cage is in the perfect key, but it's too much of a blockbuster. Finally tried the tongue-in-cheek number I'd been thinking about, I'm Not That Girl, from Wicked. It's not only in the right key, the low note is my 2nd-lowest note. I need to work on the words a bit, but an hour of practice should do it.

Got approval from the Worldcon art show maven to mail in my photos, so I went online, filled out the application, PayPalled it, and will now forget all about it till August. That's when I'll select the 20 prints, have them mounted, make the labels and ship them.

Next: Dinner, then practice.

Plans for tomorrow:
Take a stab at putting up a Domino fence on the patio
Haul a room heater to Goodwill & a broken TV to Best Buy for recycle
Toss two or three of Pumpkin's scratching posts (He preferred carpet, Domino likes rope)
Auditions @ 2:30
Whatever

Current Mood: anxious
Current Location: Home of the Lost

This post was inspired by a tangent on

smallship1's pages, which did not need to be further cluttered up with my nostalgia.

As a musician raised as a practicing Jew and avid choir member, I was steeped in the concept of most religious music being in a minor key. I sang in Hebrew, and while I never gained fluency in the language, the cantor was thorough about making sure we knew what each word of each song/prayer meant. I mention this because I know some folks who know the sounds but not the meaning, whether it be Hebrew or Latin.

I went to a public school, and was not in chorus, mostly because I played trumpet in the band, which was at the same time as chorus, as if they were separate religions. Unfortunately, this made me think for a long time that my singing was just something I did at Temple, and my real music was with the band.

But I digress. Since I went to a public school in suburban NY, every concert was just before school break, which meant Easter tunes at spring break and Christmas tunes at winter break. End of the school year was all secular. We also played Jewish tunes, mostly thanks to my mother, who helped organize the PTA, which had a large percentage of Jewish members, and lobbied the school board - or maybe just the local administrator - to represent all religions in the concerts which were represented at school. At the time this meant Js and Cs. There were no Muslims or Hindus or Pastafarians - there well may be now.

Long story longer, playing Easter and Christmas tunes in the band was always uncomfortable for me. We chose the popular ones, the ones everyone knows the words to. And though I was only playing the music, the lyrics would be in my head. I had mixed feelings about the Jewish songs, because although it was fun to actually know a tune some of the other band members didn't, a school concert was not the place to be playing them.

I said all of that to tell you this story:
Many moons ago I worked for HP, my job was to support recipients of grants. I worked for six very high-powered research scientists, and one of them was from Mainland China. He was the audio expert, very proud of his new car with Infinity speakers and a high-end cassette player. He popped a tape into the machine just as we pulled out of the parking lot and wanted me to listen to this beautiful music. He was in love with the music, and it was a thrill for him to hear it played with such good fidelity.

It was beautiful. The audio was first rate. The orchestra excellent. When it was over, he raved about what great music it was, and I was at a loss how to reply. The tune was Ave Maria. It was quite a WTF, because he was not Christian, and he had no idea this was religious music. I could not get the words out of my head, even though this was an instrumental.

There is some irony here, because the reason I knew the words is my mother loved Nelson Eddy's voice, and it was on both an LP and a 78 of his which she played from time to time.

Current Mood: contemplative

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