Early spring continues to get springier. Last Friday I finished up raking the yard, filling up three more big bags of leaves and debris. This morning the town came and picked it all up, so it’s on to the next task.
Sunday morning I took my ’67 Mustang out for the first drive of the season. I’m happy to say it started right up, and sounded and felt good on the highway. Woo-hoo!
Then Sunday afternoon Jeannie and I went for a bike ride. Last summer we started doing bike rides on local trails around the area, but we only did a few. This year, I figured since we had such a good ski season, I want to do something athletic the rest of the year too. So we’re starting early in the spring (just two weeks ago we were still on our skis) and hope to get a regular pattern going. This one was just over ten kilometers, in about an hour. Nothing too huge, but not bad for the first time out.
I also finished a longstanding software development project, adding some sort functionality to the class scheduling tool for conventions on the Origami USA web site. This was a rather drawn out endeavor because it’s built in PHP on an old version of Drupal, and the whole dev environment is an enormous pain in the neck. The overhead of keeping the site running locally is non trivial: updates from the git repo, managing the dependencies, updating the scripts to sync the database and media assets, it’s all a major headache and time suck, and there are breaking changes from time to time. All this is before one can even start writing code. So I’m pretty happy it’s done with. Well, maybe one more tiny change. Robert Lang, who is OUSA’s web master and the only person who really understands how the site works, helped me drag it over the finish line, so thanks to him for that.
Meanwhile, my origami stellated icosahedron is coming along. I’ve finished pre-creasing on the smaller one, and on the larger on I collapsed it halfway, then unfolded to reinforce the valance of all the existing creases to make it hold its shape better, and refolded it. All that’s left is to fold the lock. I’m thinking I’m going to wetfold this one when it’s done, since it’s folded from Elephant Hide and it will hold its shape amazingly after that.
In other news Nicolas Terry has started selling Elephant Hide paper in large sheets of previously unavailable colors on his web site, so I ordered a whole bunch.
Finally, my new song, In the Purple Circus is almost finished. It’s basically a prog metal song, so naturally I added a tenor sax part. It came out totally wailing, channeling some Michael Brecker energy, screeching and growling in the high altissimo rang, up to the fourth C#. The next day I added a bari sax way down low to reinforce the tenor, and blend with the overtones of the subsonic bass synthesizer. Now it’s pretty much down to the final mix, which I hope to share soon.