Writing Wrongs

instead of waiting till I've had dinner. Yeah, stupid move. But I've had two large glasses of home made lime soda and one of lactose-free milk to hold me.

Long day at work, going through a section of test cases I wrote one-liner summaries for, hoping to be able to write the actual steps, but I need the hardware, which isn't due out for months. It's like being told the next model car will run on helium, and you have to write a test which measures how much oxygen is consumed. Until they build the car you don't know how to do that measurement.

At the end of the day Automation Guy gave me a project to work on, but I found two bugs and thought up a third, which he says he will fix by Monday.

Lunch was supposed to be at Sizzler, but between a bunch of new companies moving into the neighborhood and a new hotel opening up next door, and $2 off on the endless salad buffet, it was packed. And of course since it was after 1 pm most of the staff were on break and there was only one person at the register to handle a very long line. So I left, went to Coco's, beause I have not been able to go to BASFA meetings since rehearsals started. The NY steak is pretty thin, so medium is more like well done. And they had alleged vegetables. The chocolate cream pie made up for a lot of that.

After work was Costco, I had an Amex cash back check for $123 and spent $270. $50 of that was for a set of solar powered outdoor path lights, which have been on my list for months. Well, not 8, more like 4, but for that price, whatever.

Home, put the food away, remembered that tomorrow I'm taking the car in to have a new in-dash GPS/entertainment unit installed and they will probably need access to the trunk. So I emptied the trunk. It took about an hour. One of the reasons I bought the Corolla was for the big trunk, but I keep being too lazy to remove things I don't need in there.

Recovered in the recliner with the livingroom fan on, and Domino half on my lap and half on the arm rest, being a shedding machine. Watched some TV non-news. Fired up the PC and caught up on Facebook, updated Quicken, and scanned a bunch of photos from an album inherited from my mother's mother when mom passed away. One is an intriguing mystery - it's from, I think, my mother's cousin in London:

The right-hand side is the back of the photo.

I can't remember who Max was. Posted it on FB and tagged my sisters and UK cousins. One of them will set me straight, probably the Baltimore sister who Sees All and Knows All about family. That pin she is wearing may also be a clue. RAF?

Plans for tomorrow:
If I wake up in time, put the month's collected soda cans out for the homeowners' association monthly drive. 8 am.
10 am be at All Pro Audio to have the new in-dash unit installed.
Use my Clipper card to go to the mall. Hang out at the food court and play on my laptop
If they are done by 1, go to the Sunnyvale Players' set shop and help paint
Bad Movie Night at Bob & Sharon's. I'll bring along a bad movie DVD. 

This is one of my more obscure Small World™ stories.

I went to high school at Rainier Beach, the southernmost one in Seattle. Probably the easternmost too, but I won't bet real cash money on that. Looked on a map and would bet money on it. Somewhere during my senior year a DDG blonde was added to the senior class, her last name was Applegate. Or maybe Applewood. I don't remember her first name, but it was something not very common. Call her Brina. The story is she was there because her parents had split, and needed a school to be in until they decided who she would live with.

She isn't in the yearbook, and isn't on the graduation list. Sometime before those were made up she transferred out, and that's the last I heard of her. That would have been sometime in late 1967 or early '68.  

In 1974, after I was fired from my first real-world newspaper job, I found one in Omak, WA, just the other side of the Cascades about 90 miles south of Canada. It was a town of 5,000. My first day on the job, the boss sends me out to take a mug shot of someone for the Society column. It was her. Turns out she had grown up in Omak, her father was a big name in the area with a cattle ranch and apple orchards. When her Mom got the divorce,  she took Brina Far Away To The Big City, hoping to get custody. But Brina turned 18 before graduating high school, and took herself back to Omak to live with Daddy. Part of the reason for the mug shot is she had gone to college at WSU, and was now back home.

It was obvious she didn't remember me, so I didn't bring it up.  I never saw her again.

lisa_marli re-posted on FB a graphic purporting to show a teacher doing school work on hs own time, and a diatribe caption about how teachers do that. And she commented that she used to help grade his class' work because he taught accounting, and she is good at accounting. I will tease her here instead of there and mention that my father once taught Werner von Braun's undergrad classes as a TA, and graded those class papers, but I never learned any astrophysics or orbital/celestial mechanics. But that's just a tease because by the time I was old enough to learn that stuff, he was an engineer and all his work was top secret, so even if he wanted to he couldn't teach it to me. And he didn't want to.

But it got to thinking about my grade school teachers. I am going to try to remember them and say a smidge about each one.

Kindergarten: Name??? Blonde, young, was insulted that I could recite the alphabet before she taught it to us.
1st Grade: Miss Moshey. She had taught German to US soldiers during WWII. Her favorite phrase was "mach schnell, bitte". She was horribly strict for a 1st grade teacher, but eminently fair. Here is an example:( Read more... )

2nd Grade: No idea.
3rd Grade: Another blonde. She tried to reason with me that the baby Mom was pregnant with might not be a girl. I was certain it would be. My sister was born two weeks after school ended for the Summer, and I had to wait for months to nyah nyah nyah the teacher.
4th Grade: no idea
5th Grade: Mr. Costa. Science teacher at heart, he had the best field trips, and supported my science fair entry. His tests were easy for me, I kept getting 110% (there was always a bonus q). He also change my life for the worse by assigning me to a different 6th grade class from all the others just because I hit a bully with a rock while we were filing back to class from recess.
6th Grade: Mr. Egger. Total jerk. Did not deserve to be teaching. When I corrected him in class for his WRONG definition of vapor, by reading it out of the big dictionary, he took my report card, slapped an overlay strip and made all my grades D or worse. My parents complained to the principal, and he did not get re-hired the next year. Irony, he went to a high school elsewhere in the district, where he taught science. The next time I saw him was in 8th grade, he was judging the science fair. :-(

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It was also Nurse Appreciation day/week/eon. My appreciation for nurses started in college when I shared a house with a bunch of fellow folkdancers, and one of them was dating a nursing student who was living in a houseful of nursing students, and I dated one of them and hung out with all of them. They all had stories about how a nurse had saved their lives, and inspired them to become nurses.

I have never been sick or wounded enough for nurses to have done that for me, but I saw them in action when my folks were in hospice care at a nursing home. There were two kinds of nurses - the basic RN, who saw his/her job as helping and old person live; and the hospice nurse, who saw his/her job as helping the old person die. Mom's hospice nurse was a total drag. Mom and Dad both had two or three basic RNs who were wonderful.

Saturday Kaan needed to be poured into the carrier to go to the vet. They told me his poop sample was clear before they took him to have his blood sampled and a distemper shot. That took about 20 minutes as I waited in the lobby.

Home, watched some college bowl games, and finally got up and got stuff together to make Kourabiethes. Greek shortbread cookies. It comes with a short story: When the Daily Astorian social editor, Vernice Berg, found out I cooked, she signed me up to do a "cooking for bachelors" column. After 11 months there, I took a  Greek cooking class at the local community college, taught by the woman who owned the local pancake place. She was Greek, and hoped one day to open a Greek restaurant. Her son was often her assistant in the class. Several months later, I was in a production of Camelot in Astoria, OR, and he was our Sir Lancelot.  For dessert night, one of the things we made was Kourabiethes. I loved them, they were melt in your mouth, and made with cardamom they had an exotic flavor. The recipe was so simple I never wrote it down for myself. But guess what? I just found it in my string book:

( Cut for kindness )

Wish I'd looked for it yesterday, because what I found online had baking soda, baking powder, almonds (which I ignored), and called for far more sugar in the cookies. And now I am wondering where I got the cardamom idea from. Maybe we made some other cookie with them that class, or maybe the teacher added that in class but not on the printed recipe. I wonder. Probably not the latter, because when I wrote those cooking columns I usually put in all the variations.

I had gone online and found three recipes which seemed close to what I remembered, and merged them. They called for baking powder and baking soda, which I did not have, so I went to Lucky's and got that, and more flour and more powdered sugar. Turns out I needed both.

The cookies I made yesterday had too much flour, an extra egg, baking powder and baking soda, and came out too dry. They still tasted great. I like the hint of cardamom too.

Cookies done, time for more football. About an hour before party time (it takes about half an hour to get there from here), I realized I did not have the address. I had been there a few times before, but had always just punched the address into my GPS. But I have changed GPS systems a few times and it's not on the one in the car. I didn't have their phone number either. ( The way I found the address  )

Got to the party with two containers filled with cookies, returned with 1 container full, left about a dozen behind for the lateniks. I think they would have all been eaten except the desserts were down two flights of stairs from the wine and beer, and the snacks and horses d'ovaries were on the dining room table next to the wine and beer table. Many people never knew the cookies were there. :-(

Excellent party, lots of people from many walks (and limps) of life, some brilliant conversations, and I managed to catch some of the hostess' photos from her summer teaching in China, which was in slide show mode on a laptop in the conversation pit. Huge turn-out, many people arrived after going to the movies, or dinners or other parties. I left at 2 am, it did not feel that late, probably because the party was still going strong.

I wore my new SF Giants jacket, it got lots of compliments.

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One of the party latecomers produces an online fanzine called The Drink Tank. I am not sure where the name came from, I suppose I can ask him some time. I am an irregular contributor, mostly photos, but sometimes an article. He had put out a call for 2012 nostalgia, and I sent in some words and lots of pictures of the shuttle Endeavor fly-over at NASA Ames. At the party he announced that the issue was sent to the web site, and my article was in it, along with articles from two or three others at the party. Click here to see the zine.

It was good to see figmo at the party, she said she'd seen my posting about it, and thought she had forgotten, but I think what happened is they had several possible dates and she missed the final choice. Anyhow, I'm tagging susandennis here, because figmo is a brand new IBMer, going for her disorientation this week, and she posts about it on LJ. Susan has been posting a bit about her 25 years with IBM, now that she is retired. Both have a background in writing, too.

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Sunday. Nothing on the agenda until 5 pm coffee with Janice. After a 3 am bedtime, waking up at 9:30 was about an hour too soon, blame the automatic light switch. There was a lot of football, but most of it was not what I wanted to watch. Bummed that they did not show the Seahawks game, but the Raiders and 49ers were at the same time slot. I also wanted to see the Jets get beaten again, but that was not available either.

Lunch was a major project, which involved taking a leftover lunch of leg of lamb with veggies which had been made in Awful Sauce™ and remove the offending bitter flavoring. Long story short, 4 sessions of simmering in water for 10 minutes, drain and refill each time, then make a casserole gravy. My mom used to do this all the time, but she never taught me how to make the gravy. I tried a simplified version of what's in the Fanny Farmer cookbook, which worked okay but needed salt & pepper. It was very filling, half of it is in the freezer for a later meal.

Maiming time until I needed to leave for coffee, I ordered a pair of oven mitts and a set of no-longer-sold-in-stores food storage containers online, watched more football, played on FB and Twitter, and just as I was about to leave my tummy said it needed to check the plumbing. That done, went to the car and once again tummy decided no, not yet,

I got to Starbucks with 5 minutes to spare, plus Janice had emailed she would be late. But she wasn't, she arrived just as I was paying for my drink.

Long conversation, as usual, she gave me a CD to copy for her. I thought it was photos, but it turned out to be a recording of a speech at an AA meeting by a friend of hers who passed away recently. It is an hour long, which surprised me, I thought maybe the original was defective, but nope, he talked for that long. Without going into details, it was the most incredible story of how much denial an addict can sustain.

So now she will have a copy, with an attractive printed disc.

Home, hungry again, ate a whole can of stuffed vine leaves (15 small ones) in two shifts. All the time, Domino is standing beside the recliner staring at me, even though I've offered her a piece and she did not like it.

Took a break to try to feed Kaan his liquid meds, because they have been working well but I missed last night's dose. He hates being dosed, and ran all over the place to get away. I finally went back online for an hour, and got him while he was half-asleep on the recliner. It still was difficult, but I think I gor most of it in him and only a little bit on him. But tah's okay because he will lick it off.

I am a happy sports fan, as little as I pay attention to these things. Oakland almost came back from certain defeat, only losing by 3. Seattle won again, putting them in next week's playoffs. Washington won, making them the Seahawks' next opponent. Baltimore lost, but they already clinched a playoff spot. 49ers won, it was ugly and against a vastly inferior team, but that gives them next week off before they play their first playoff game. I wonder if Baltmore sister, whose husband works in DC, will be going to next week's game there. We are both Seahawks fans, being from Seattle, but she also roots for the Baltimore and DC teams since she lives there now.

Posted more pix of the cats here. I espeically like these:( Read more... )
Plans for tomorrow:
Work
Plan A: Troll Facebook for a NYE party to go to.
Pan B: Make pigs-in-blankets, take out the egg nog & nutmeg, and have my own party while I watch it on TV.
Midnight, take down all the 2012 calendars. Confirm the world did not come to an end. Put up the 2013 calendars.

 

Slept real well, did not wake up till the lights came on at 7. The "alarm" eases in too, but it's on the internet radio, and it's KOMO, Seattle's news station, which doesn't help clear the morning disorientation. My phone was blinking, reminding me there was an online corporate meeting at 8. My plan was to watch via VPN from home, but after my morning stuff I got dressed anyway.

Could not get connected to my work machine, something screwy with the new wireless setup which kept shutting off the router as soon as VPN connected. So I drive to work and got there at 8:30, and the Q&A session had already started. Odd, because this was billed as a 2-hour meeting. It was the usual non-answers. A little after noon the replay was available, and it was half an hour of my life I will never get back.

The rest of the morning was spent in much more constructive activity, I solved the mystery of the disappearing files from last night, it seems a feature of the machine is to clean up the files on every reboot. So I had to not reboot after I applied the patch. As soon as I got that going, the new patch crashed the machine a few times. I helped the engineer duplicate my test setup, and loaned him my machine. He had it fixed in less than an hour, so I re-tested. Yup, working. Now we need to wait for the next release where his code is in as a regular part of the product.

Lunch was at Barn Thai, a nice hole in the wall place in an obscure shopping plaza. Very slow service today, but while I was waiting for my change, I went over to the wall and tried to read the gold inscription around a pair of 50-Baht bills in a fancy frame showing heads an tails. The one staff member who always speaks to me in Thai came over and I said the writing was too small, what did it say? She said it was a 50-Baht bill. I asked her what made it special, and she said it was very old. But looking at it, it could not have been more than 30 years old, judging by the age of the King in the picture. It looked more like it was a special edition. Next time I'll bring my ancient 100-Baht bill and impress her. It's at least twice as old as that 50.

Which reminds me, I need to look up glassine envelopes on the web. It's about time I tried again to put some of my foreign bills on display.

The afternoon at work was spent creating test cases for a new feature which may or may not make it into the release we are working on. There are more to write, but I need to have a working model of the feature before I can write the cases, since we have no detailed spec for them yet.

By the time I got home, the Giants were ahead of the Tigers 4-0, so I mostly ignored the game. I tuned in for the start of the 9th, but shut it off when the manager made what IMHO was a stupid pitching change, which resulted in a 2-run homer. I didn't want to see if the home team would blow a 4-point lead. They didn't, maybe because I wasn't paying them no nevermind.

I am impressed by the Giants this October. It is a team's team. Everyone on the squad has made a positive difference. It was good to see the fat kid go 4-4 with three of those home runs. And Timmy has come back from the dead. Funny to hear the fans shouting "Barry, Barry" again, for a pitcher. A pitcher who hit an RBI. There is a rumor that at one point the manager smiled. The game still bores me to death, but the highlights are a lot of fun, as are the many friends of mine who are fans.

With the game in the bag, I Took The Bull By The Horns™ finally, went out to the patio storage room, removed almost everything and then:
- Cleared a space in the livingroom near the bedroom door
- Moved the big storage rack into that space
- Moved a wide, 3-drawer plastic cabinet full of parental snapshots & postcards into the space alongside the rack
- Lugged four very heavy boxes from the storage room and office into the rack area
- Re-arranged the remaining stuff in the storage room (luggage, plastic tubs of Stuff, musical instruments, spare cat carrier, etc.) so it is easier to get to
-- this included bringing the big tub with my big scripts and posters and the little tub with my little scripts, programs and posters near the front
- Placed two boxes of framed photos and art in there where I can pull them out later. They belong on top of the rack, but I need ballast first

Dinner was half a roast duck with orange sauce, iced jasmine tea, reheated frozen tollhouse cookies.

Someone de-friended me here after I went all Le chevalier des miroirs on his ass on Twitter. Looks like he unfollowed and blocked me on Twitter and FB too. BFD, not someone who makes any impact on my life, and I'm  sure I make even less on his.  

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
Home, unpack the photo records, photo albums and big mostly framed family photos onto the rack
Consider installing my New Orleans bead art and framed Thai temple rubbings on the walls of the livingroom

But now I'm starting to feel like it is past my bedtime.

This morning I was so sleep deprived I emailed in that I would be late, stayed in bed with my eyes mostly closed while I called Comcast for the 4th time (plus two trips to their office) to get the second Tivo's cable card fully authorized. This card did have actual Comcast data on it, so I was able to provide a host ID and card ID to the nice man, and in about 45 seconds ESPN showed up on the TV. He was surprised it was there so soon. That was after 10 minutes of punching digits on the phone and waiting on hold. Hint: each time you enter another menu level, they try to sell you something. Hit 0 and it will abort the marketing crap and move to the next prompt.

So now I have the lovely Tivo GUI and all my Comcast digital channels. Yay.

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Got dressed and drugged and out by a little before 10, went for a haircut, then to Costco where I picked up the first DVD and the 200 slides which were scanned onto it. Looked at them at work while other things were rebooting, and was very surprised to see a couple of ct photos and a handful from Tel Aviv beach in 1978. Or maybe it was still 1977. They did a goo job of cleaning the slides, and they all are in focus. They did not do any color correction, so before I post these they will need some serious photoshopping.

Yesterday I received surprise email from Ed Jilek, who was in the Peace Corps with me. We were nextdoor neighbors my second year - he taught and lived at Prince of Songkhla U which was at the south end of the Rubber Research Center's plantation. I photographed his wedding, which was at the local US consulate, and he had found one of the photos on my Flickr page during a web search for himself (now that he is retired he has time to play online). Coincidentally, the whole set of pix is on the DVD, so I'll make up a special disk to send to him & his wife Noi, whom I knew as Umaporn. Because she was a department head, and they are not called by their nicknames, especially on formal occasions. Soooooooo excellent to hear from Ed!

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Work PC is now fully configured, and I was able to tweak an encoder to send the right audio signal, which let me record a couple of scrambled videos which our latest box can unscramble. And I did some other neat stuff. It's a very fast machine, 64-bit Win7, I don't know how much RAM but probably a lot since it's the company's standard engineer's model.

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Found the latest updates for the Clarion in-dash unit. It needs two micro-SD cards and a USB drive. Tomorrow, I hope.

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Preview performance, once again they ran the whole year-long big dance number. I expect they will do this every night. It HATEHATEHATEHATEHATE that. It effs up my prep for the show. It effs up everyone's prep for the show.

This was out first time with an audience. When I peeked through the gap in the curtain and saw only about 1/3 of a house, randomly scattered, I was disappointed. But they were LOUDly appreciative from the get-go, and the applause and shouts at the end of the big numbers hit me like a wall of sound. It felt like a Seahawks game.

They absolutely loved the show. Okay, so it helps that these are all friends of the cast who got in for free, but still. Looking online, there are only 3 center section seats left for the gala grand opening, and maybe a dozen on the left and right edges of the side sections. Walk-ups ought to sell out the house. This will also be a friendly audience. The big test will be the Sunday matinee - mostly retired folks who know their musical theater, have seen this show a few times before, and won't be yelling and clapping just to support their friends.

After the show they made us stay so they could give awards. All the cast members I would have given the Gypsy Robe to had already won it once (I guess this theater won't let anyone repeat) so it went to someone who didn't really deserve it. They gave the tech award to the stage manager, who mostly phoned it in this time. There were two others on tech staff who were more deserving, IMHO. Newbie award went to a great guy - come to think of it, I would have given him the robe as well.

Then there were photos. Taken from the booth. Cast, then cast&staff then add the crew & band.

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Went on  Safeway run, the GPS sent me to a mall which used to have one, but now it's an REI or something. Next choice was the one closest to work. Bagger has never payed Tetris. There's a Lucky's much closer, but they don't have the mint chip Klondike bars. Main reason was to buy some baby wipes. I bought a big bag of Huggies brand, which looked like it had two or three containers inside. Got it home, and it was a FAIL. One big pile of wipes, fan folded into a 1-foot-high stack. And they did a lousy job of removing makeup.   

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Oddball dinner. Rice pudding + cinnamon, sourdough baguette slices with cheese-n-bacon squirts, corn nibblets on the cob. Klondike bars.

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Plans for tomorrow:
Change the litterboxes
Update the Clarion
Bake some cookies, and freeze them for next week's shows
U-haul, buy boxes. I have lots of tape and markers from the last move
CVS, buy better baby wipes
Spend some Starbucks time with the laptop
6:30 call for the show.

Probably the most powerful thing my father ever told me is that, like us, he and his father did not get along, and one of his biggest regrets was he never had the chance to reconcile with his father. His father was a handyman, and fell off a roof when my dad was 19. It took decades, but by the time my father was gone, we were on good terms with each other.

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Someone who had a crush on me when she was in high school (I was 23) is now one of the production staff at Seattle Opera. Over on the Book of Face, she posted the trailer for their current production of Madame Butterfly, as well as an article in a not-quite-local paper about the 6-year-old girl whom she found to play the part of Pinkerton's son. I did not want to be rude to her over there so I'll say it here.

First, there are plenty of boys in Seattle who could have played that part. Plenty of girls too. Okay, so the kid is only from Lynnwood, but that's a nasty commute from the northeast end of Lake Washington to the opera venue in downtown Seattle, at least an hour one way after school.

Seattle used to be a place where young opera talent could get a break, but they decided to cast an older performer (14 years since her debut) as the leading lady. She looks older than that. The role calls for a teenager. The woman has enough vibrato to stress test a 747. The fellow playing playful boyish Pinkerton is a stuffed shirt. Nice voice, though. The mix was horrible - the orchestra in most of the clips was too loud to hear the soloists' words. It does not look like a production I would go out of my way to see.

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This morning listening to KNBR, the local all-sports station, they played a Home Despot commercial and an Orchard Supply commercial back to back. OSH was advertising patio and outdoor furniture on sale, and I've been thinking about buying a chaise for the patio, so I went there after work. I did an online search and found nothing I wanted, but often the store has more than the web page. I did find a nice one for $99 at overstock.com. Anyhow, OSH had nothing I wanted. Heavy iron ones for $179 which needed a pad for more $, a horrible flat plastic one in gray, and something called a Zero Gravity Chair which looked a lot like the dreaded Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal. Almost went straight home, but remembered that everything I had planned for this weekend fell through, so I had time to make pickles. Detoured to the produce place and picked up 4x7 pickle cukes. And a nice big celery bunch. And some medium big limes. Celery meant needing bleu cheese dressing, so next detour was to my local supermarket, which did not have the brand I liked but they had "good enough".

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Home, the 2012 map from Garmin was under my welcome mat. I'll try it out tomorrow.

Watched the latest episode of Who Do You Think You Are? which followed Quincy Jones' daughter Rashida's search for her Jewish mother's ancestors. It was incredibly moving, I'm pulling it from TiVo onto my PC and will make DVDs for my sisters, and my aunt.

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Work was boring. I cranked out a ton of test cases for a new feature, but I think I'm at a dead end for now. Will pursue it Monday.

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Lunch was a rare case of me driving the gang, irony being we went to a hole in the wall Japanese place across the street from my apartment. I've eaten there once before and was not impressed. But it was a nice day so we sat outside. One of them has a very loud voice, and is virtually un-interruptable, so it's nice that he has interesting things to say. He does pause from time to time, but not often.

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I forgot to go to the PO, mostly because I usually do that at lunchtime.

Plans for tomorrow:
PO, mail the calendar to Michi in Japan
Manicure (my nails have grown way faster this last 2 weeks than usual)
Best Buy - see about having the GPS antenna in the car placed where it gets a better signal
Make pickles. Plan A: 7 jars w/4cukes each. Plan B: same as Plan A, but spears instead of whole pickles. Plan C was pickle chips, but I've already scrapped that.




 

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.

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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.

I'm going to put most of this behind a cut, because it will be long and shocking.

It started out like this: Facebook saw that I had included in my history a stint as a summer intern cameraman at KOMO-TV the summer of '69. They suggested I find friends from that gig. The first person who came to mind was Don McGaffin, who came to KOMO as an investigative reporter. THE investigative journalist. For a week or two, Don was conscripted to host the station's daily morning show, which had a small live audience (maybe 30 people) and one special guest. His included Tiny Tim, Dr. Irwin Corey and Shari Lewis. I was one of the cameramen. Don was a Character. And very sharp, and a heck of an interviewer. He showed up roaring drunk at least once, but not on a day he was on the air.

When I was about to go back to school, Don gave me a photo of an AWOL Army draftee he was looking for, telling me the guy had started an underground anti-war newsletter which the soldier somehow was distributing at Fort Lewis. In Fort Lewis. Don was strongly anti-war, knew I was too, and he knew I was on the campus daily newspaper. I don't remember if the newspaper published the photo, but one night I came back from a rehearsal to find the dorm counselor waiting for me. It seems my roommate had parked himself near our room with a bottle of Jack Daniels and a Bowie knife. By the time campus police arrived, he had finished most of the whisky, and apparently he was planning on killing me.

A few nights before, he had seen the photo on my desk, and asked how I'd gotten it. I told him Don McGaffin gave it to me at KOMO. The counselor said the roommate had thought I said "Tacoma" , checked it out, discovered Don had never worked in Tacoma, and figured I was an Army spy trying to trick him into giving up his brother's location. You can't make this shit up. And it gets better. Roommate had been in a mental hospital, and was at the University because the shrinks thought he might be ready to handle the real world.

McGaffin did find the AWOL soldier, did a series of stories on anti-war draftees, and I lost track of him when I left Seattle in 1972.

I wanted to find out what ever became of Don, so I did a search from FB, which sent me straight to the following obituary-cum-memoir by a Christy Diemond, who had met him when she was working as a helper at the Seattle PD's horse patrol, and saw that one of the senior officers was abusing the horses. Don loved stories like that, and loved cleaning up the mess they pointed to. Here's the article. It's long, and worth reading all the way through to get the full impact of what I found next.

( Don McGaffin 1926-2005 )

The article moved me. I wanted to write to Ms. Diemond and thank her for it, even though it was written 7 years ago. I looked at the Uninformed Consent web page, the organization she headed for years, but it hadn't been updated since 2009. Linked-In had a listing but it was also out of date. A web search for her name produced a shocking article about her in the Seattle P-I:

( Animal Cruelty )