People – Zing Blog 2

Adirondack Adventure Plus Jazz

Just got back from a wonderful and relaxing vacation in the Adirondacks with our good friends Mark and Kelly. For whatever reason, Jeannie and I didn’t feel like traveling far away by plane this summer, so we kept it relatively close with a road trip within New York State.

We packed Friday night and drove up Saturday. We got lunch on the way in Lake George Village in a restaurant on the waterfront. By the time we got up there it was mid-afternoon. Lizzy and Josh happened to be spending the weekend in Lake Placid, so we met them for dinner at some nice restaurant there. Fancy cocktails all around, and yummy food. Lizzy remembered Mark and Kelly from when we used to vacation up there when she was a child, so that was a fun reunion. I think the last time she was in Lake Placid we went to see a Harry Potter movie in the theatre there.

Sunday the main event was an epic bike ride. There’s a rail trail going in either direction from Saranac Lake to Placid one way and Tupper Lake the other. Last summer we did the ride to Placid, so this time we did went towards Tupper. We didn’t get all the way into town but it was a good long ride, over twenty miles. We stopped and turned around at a park and campground at Clear Lake Pond (I think it was), where there was a nice beach for swimmin’. On the way back we stopped for lunch at a place on the side of the trail. All in all this took the better part of the day. We spent most of the evening hanging out and listening to music. Mark turned me on to a group call Tin Hat Trio. Neat stuff, sort avant-garde gypsy jazz combined with Americana and twentieth century modern classical. Excelling violin and accordion player. Mark also showed me his guitar pedal board. He’s been collecting pedals and experimenting with multiple loops and delays. Great sound and he’d getting quite good at it.

Monday was the start of the main event, a three-day camping trip to Pine Island (I think) on Lower Saranac Lake. We spent the morning getting our canoe, food and supplies together, then we drove out to the boat launch. Everything had to be brought in by canoe. Mark and Kelly have two small, single-person canoes, which Jeannie and Kelly rode, while Mark and I paddled the larger, two-person canoe. We had to make two trips, since our load shifted right when we set out, and one of our coolers slid into the water! Luckily it floated. It was a pretty long paddle, about a mile and a half, took about forty-five minutes. Mostly thru twisting bays and channels, but the last part was out in the open waters of the lake. After paddling out and back and out again we were pretty tired.

One we set up our tents, the rest of the time there was pretty mellow and blissful. The weather was hot (Jeannie and I seem to bring the hot weather with us whenever we go up to Adirondacks, Thousand Islands or Montreal) so we went swimmin’ every day. Also more canoeing, exploring the other islands on the lake, some light hiking, and hanging around making campfires and cooking. The second night we all went out to the swimmin’ rock to watch the Perseids meteor shower. Saw lots of shooting stars, and even a UFO, all glowing and swirly in the night sky for several minutes. We later learned was a detached booster from a rocket launch, falling back to Earth and burning up in the atmosphere.

Wednesday morning it was time to go. The trip back was much lighter. We’d consumed most of our food and firewood, plus Mark and Kelly left their tent since they were planning on coming back on the weekend. We had planned on hanging out on our little island until after lunch, but there was a thunderstorm coming so we packed down and lit out rather quickly. Good thing too. As we made the boat trip the looming clouds came a-rumbling in, but by the time it actually started raining we were putting our boats on our cars.

Wednesday night Mark’s band Crackin’ Foxy had a gig at a bandshell in a park over in Tupper. The band is soft of a mix of dixieland jazz and and old time country. The rhythm section is Mark on banjo accompanied by a tuba, and the horn section is a trombone, trumpet and soprano sax. All excellent players and a fun sound and repertoire. They recently lost their lead singer so everyone in the group sang a few songs. Mark invited me to sit in, so I brought my saxophone along. Funny thing, everyone else in the band except the sax player is named John, so to bring me on stage, Mark asked the audience if there was anyone out there named John who plays sax. The song I sat in on was the standard Comes Love.

Thursday it was time to head home, and we had lunch in Lake George again. Thursday night I had rehearsal with my own band. Friday was a rare complete day off, so Jeannie and I ended up unpacking our camping stuff, and doing laundry and other random tasks, but at much more relaxed pace than we would otherwise.

Saturday Jeannie and I went for a bike ride on our local rail trail. I did twenty-two and a half miles again. Jeannie’s brother Denis was in town came up to our place Saturday and came out to our gig.

Saturday night was the Spacecats’ gig at the Green Growler. We debuted about six new tunes, three originals and three covers or standards. The group is really connecting and sounding great. We’ve gotten to the point where we have our own distinctive sound, even with a wide variety of material across the spectum of jazz, funk, soul and prog. Everyone is really dynamic and interactive on the stand, listening and feeding ideas to one another. We probably have enough new material to record a second album, and may very well do so in the fall. Only problem is, we need to find a way to get more people to come out to our gigs! The place was only half full, and half of those were friends and family. Ah well, it’s August and everyone is away. Still, the music is happening, and so they’ll come eventually. Meanwhile it’s time to start reaching out to other venues so we can build the thing that way.

Origami USA 2025 Convention

July 22, 2025

Just got back from the Origami USA 2025 Convention. Lots of fun, lots, of folding, lots of friends. The big news this year is that Jeannie joined the convention committee and helped run everything on site all weekend, including leading the registration and check in. This being a volunteer organization, lots of people including myself were quite happy she stepped up to join the leadership.

Meanwhile I spent the week before the convention trying to advance some ideas I had for new models. I kinda had a hard getting back into doing origami this year. Martin passed away just two weeks after last year’s convention, and it took me until the winter to unpack my stuff, and this led to a whole reorganization of my studio. I threw out several boxes worth of old origami, and as I went thru them I rediscovered a bunch of ideas I’d been working on. I finally got out of my rut in springtime when Ilan asked me to make a video for an upcoming online event. The model was my Semi-Sunken Icosahedron, which is composed of triangle and sunken pentagonal pyramids in the shape of a ball. I perfected some internal details of the folding sequence and closure. This led me to also perfect my Dimpled Icosahedron, and a variation with hexagons and pentagons like a soccer ball.

I was on a roll, so I dusted off an idea that I had never finished before, a Dimpled Dodecahedron, where the sunken triangles make the overall form that resembles an icosidodecahedron. The dodecahedron is a very hard shape to fold, for a few reasons. First, it’s made of pentagons, and so requires a fivefold geometry throughout. Second, unlike squares, rectangles, rhombi, triangles or hexagons, pentagons do not tile the plane, so one must use a non-repeating quasicrystal pattern for the layout. Third, once you get into the 3-D part of it, the faces come together in threes, so there’s no straight lines on the internal layers that develop. They always have to turn a corner, which can get awkward and difficult.

I’d folded a version this shape before, using a layout that has the middle of a pentagonal face at the center of the paper (a.k.a. the north pole), and five flaps from the edges of the paper coming together to form the lock at the south pole. This layout works well for models such as my Stellated Dodecahedron and Great Dodecahedron, where there’s a vertex in the center of what would other wise be a pentagonal face. But it’s unsatisfactory for the Dimpled Dodecahedron, because one of the faces is not smooth but has the five pinwheel flaps coming together.

So I’ve been trying to work out a new layout where the center of the paper is a the vertex of three pentagons, and the lock is also three pentagons coming together with tabs in a spiral. Unfortunately, this layout is even harder. For one thing, it requires a decagon rather than a pentagon as the starting shape, since the central point has three wedges of 3/10 coming together for the pentagons, and a gap of 1/10. Then this gap becomes an internal ridge that has to get folded away in a zigzag fashion to get to the south pole. I folded a number of studies, but but had not worked out how to close the model by Friday afternoon when it was time to head into the city for convention.

Jeannie had gone in to the city in the morning by train, and Michelle and I drove in after she got home from work. Once we arrived it was the usual chaos and buzz of setting up my exhibit, meeting up with friends, going out to dinner and returning for late night folding. We stayed at the hotel Friday and Saturday nights since Jeannie had be there early to run the registration desk.

Saturday morning I ended up in the exhibit space talking to people the whole morning. For lunch a group of us found a Mexican restaurant that was serving breakfast burritos along with margaritas. In the afternoon I taught my first class: my Flying Saucer and Retro Rocket, two of my favorite models from my spaceship collection. Each is foldable in ten to twenty minutes. That evening a bunch of use went to an Irish pub for dinner.

When we got back I showed John Montroll my progress with my dodecahedron and explained the difficulty with the hidden layers of paper. I know he’s spent alot of time thinking and working on one-sheet polyhedra, having written several books on the topic. He took one look at my CP and immediately spotted a troublesome confluence of pentagons. He suggested an alternative layout where three pentagons come together and the negative space between them forms a sort of double fork, which can be collapsed symmetrically, thus sidestepping the turn-the-corner problem. I modified my design to take advantage of his insight and began folding a new study. This was a three-quarter sphere (nine pentagons instead of twelve) to see if the layout would work in practice before I dealt with designing the closure and the lock. Shawnuff it was a big improvement, although it took me until Sunday afternoon to get far enough to demonstrate it.

Sunday lunchtime I ran the Paper Airplane contest, this time with the help of Michelle and Paul Frasco. It’s really alot of fun and amazing how people get so into it. The space we use has a spectator gallery, which adds to the excitement. This year, in addition to the usual prizes (gift certificates for the origami store), Boice donated some high-end supercomplex books from Japan as extra prizes.

Sunday I taught another class, this time my Narwhal, which don’t believe I’ve taught before, and haven’t folded in ages. I’m kind of amazed how many people still like my book Origami Animal Sculptures, and come up to me to say it’s one of their favorite books, and ask to me sign it for them. A surprising number of people also asked me about when I’m going to publish another book. I’d love to, and indeed I have enough models for three or four books. But diagramming is alot of work, and so is pulling everything together to make a complete book out of a collection of diagrams. Right now I don’t have a publisher, so I’m looking at self-publishing on Amazon, and that’s a whole ‘nuther level of work. Not to mention that my we site is fiver year out of date for just photographing my models and posting the pics with a basic blurb.

Sunday evening a bunch of us went out to dinner at a Raman place. I ended up sitting next to Robert Lang, and he told me about his current plans and progress around rebuilding his house and his studio, both of which burned down earlier this year in wildfires. Everyone in the community is concerned for him and very supportive, and I must say his resilience and positive attitude are remarkable. His eyes lit up when he described how he’s going to build a new dream origami studio expressly for his needs. Of course it’ll be a couple years before it’s all done and ready to move in. Meanwhile he and Michael LaFosse made a stack of Origamido paper incorporate the ashes from his old studio and his countless lost origami models.

Sunday night was the Giant Folding contest, and I helped Marc Kirschenbaum judge the entries. More great fun and alot of very cool models.

Monday was pretty chill. Jeannie and I slept in late and arrived around noon, and went out to lunch with Eric Ma and Brian Webb. I spent most of the afternoon hanging out with John Montroll (his new collection is Gnomes, which are adorable and a ton of fun to fold!), Brian Chan, Jon Tucker and a few other people. Talked guitars and music with Marc Kirschenbaum. I successfully folded a full model of my dodecahedron. It’s definitely supercomplex and takes some time. But the layout clearly works and it all collapses nicely. All that remains to arrange to tabs for lock to close the model.

I talked to Nicholas Terry for a little while. He hasn’t been to OUSA in a few years, but he was special guest this year, coming over from France. He also asked about when I planned to publish another book, and after I explained my situation he offered to help. Wow, awesome, we’ll see if anything comes of it. In any event he won’t be back home for a few weeks. He brought his family out to the States and they’re taking a month-long vacation around the American west. Very cool.

So even as the convention recedes, I feel freshly motivated again. Hopefully that will translate into making time to do origami every week like I do for music. Designing, folding exhibit-quality instances of my models, photographing, making CPs, posting to my web site, diagraming, page and books layouts, etc. Eventually I’ll get into a rhythm and the results of my efforts will begin to accumulate.

Sunny

A week went by and now it’s July. To celebrate my birthday I went and saw Sungazer at the Blue Note in Manhattan. This was a different configuration than I’d seen the before. The core group of drums, bass guitar and keyboards was accompanied by not just a single sax player but by an entire big band! It was pretty mind blowing. They did big band arrangements of a bunch of their songs (plus a Duke Ellington number), which I’d describe as jazz-adjacent prog rock jam band. My kind of weird for sure. With the addition of the big band the sound was somewhere between Steely Dan, Zappa, and Joco’s Word of Mouth. I must say the band was awesome and the arrangements were great, but my only criticism is the band played just over one hour. I mean, I know how much work it is to compose, write out and rehearse all those parts, but you could’ve thrown in a drum solo and some stuff like that.

The hot weather continues, but not as hot as before. Last week I did couple more ten-mile bike rides. Trying to get out early in the morning these days to beat the heat.

It’s goal setting time at work, and in addition to the usual stuff, they want everyone to come up with and AI goal. Let’s see if I can have some fun with that…

For fourth of July we went up to Buffalo for a few days to visit my Mum and Dad. Kathleen and the kids were there, and Lizzy and Josh came over too. I must say my Mum was in much better sprits than she was back in June. My brother Jim and my nephew William came out to visit them for a couple weeks in June, and helped out with a bunch of things, so that made a big difference. Kathleen’s kids got me some awesome birthday presents. Charlie made me a 3-D printer dice jail in the form a castle, using a very cool filament that glows iridescent green blue and purple when you look at it from different angles. Way cool! And Abbie drew me a card with a picture of a Mimic that unfolds to show the teeth and gaping maw of the monster. Also Lizzy got me a pair of drumsticks from the Rock’n’Roll hall of Fame, and Michelle got me a comic book: Godzilla vs. Thor #1.

We drove up the evening of the 3rd and arrived late, stayed in a hotel in East Aurora, a cool little artsy town. I’ve always wanted to take some time to check it out. The day of the fourth we basically spent the whole time going the the park and sitting on my parent’s back porch drinking beers and barbecuing and listening to class rock. Perfect. In the evening we went to the fireworks show, which was great.

We got home last night and everyone was pretty tired. Today I had a much needed day off, but my list of thighs too is growing longer faster than my free time. Today my replacement MBox arrived and I plugged it in an it just worked with no additional hassles, at least for playback, so that’s lucky. Tomorrow I’m going to test out the recording side.

Halfway Up and Halfway Down

Well the year is half over. I guess I’ve done about half the things I wanted to this year. I certainly got alot of stuff done, and there’s certainly still alot of stuff to do.

One thing in the last half of June is finally stopped raining and went straight up to 100 degrees. It’s been above ninety most days the last week and a half. Last Saturday, right at the start of the heat wave, we had a barbecue and a party, but everyone stayed indoors until early evening when it was time to light the grill. Luckily (or by good planning) we put in the front air conditioner the night before. Kathleen and the kids came down, and so did Lizzy and Josh. Nick and Lisa and Geo and Sara came out from Long Island, and a couple of Lizzy’s friends and their boyfriends turned up too. Burgers, dogs, chicken, salads and desserts, beer and booze. Built a fire once if got dark. A great time.

Jeannie and I both had last Friday off, and it turned out to be the one cool day, so we got back into doing long bike rides. I did my usual sixteen miles, and for the first time this season broke 14mph as my average speed to reach 14.1! Probably because it was less crowded than on a weekend, so I didn’t have to slow down as often. Overall I’ve been feeling good physically. I don’t know if it’s because of the heat, or massive doses of vitamin D every time I go outside, but I’ll take it. For the last year or so I’ve been having low-grade pain in the joints of my shoulders, elbows and fingers, and that’s suddenly gone away. I think part of the reason is the handlebars on my new bike are better ergonomically. Anyway, I’m back up to 115 lbs. on my free weight dumbbells and 196 on bench press. Hoping to reach 120/200 by the end of the year.

Sunday we finally got a beach day after a couple times when the situation wasn’t right. Jeannie and I took our bikes with us and Michelle came along but mostly worked on her tan. We went to Robert Moses State Park on Fire Island. We wanted to go East from the bridge and check out the inlet, but there was no way to get there by bike, only by car on the highway or walking several miles on the beach. So we went to opposite way, past the lighthouse and biked around Kismet, a cute little beach town where they don’t have cars. Fun and interesting perceptive.

Now we’re well into summer and trying to make our plans for July and August and beyond. This weekend I made the schedule for the upcoming OUSA convention, using software I wrote with Robert Lang a few years back. I think we pretty much have all the kinks worked out by now, and everything went smoothly.

Life is a Series of Hellos and Goodbyes

Just got back from a road trip up to Buffalo, for Michelle’s graduation from college. She got a Bachelor of Civil Engineering, and has a job lined up starting in a couple weeks working on train bridges in the Bronx. We’re all very proud and she is quite psyched. Now she’s moving back in with us for the summer and maybe beyond.

We did a few things on the trip. Jeannie and I left New York on Wednesday night and drove up to Ithaca, so we we could do some hiking on Thursday. We picked a hike called Buttermilk Falls, which was quite scenic, and the weather was perfect, sunny and warm, after a long run of cold and rainy days. We arrived in Buffalo Thursday evening and went out dinner with Lizzy and Josh, and met Josh’s parents Rita and Ryan. They’re very nice people and we all got on well; it was alot of fun. It seems like this means Lizzy and Josh are getting pretty serious. He just graduated with a second degree, and tomorrow they’re going on vacation together. I wonder if he’s gonna propose to her soon.

Friday we kinda had a day off. Jeannie and I went to the Buffalo Botanical Gardens, a place I’d heard of but never been before. It’s a 19th century greenhouse modeled after the famous Crystal Palace of Victorian London, all glass with great domes and galleries. Lots of tropical jungle and desert plants, palms and cacti, and an impressive array of carnivorous plants. Afterwards we went up the Michelle’s apartment to help her pack and bring some things back to Orchard Park. That evening we met up with Larry and Jackie for the Hamburg Music Festival. Larry is a band director at Hamburg High School and some of his students were playing in small woodwind ensembles in a park right downtown. Afterward we walked around the neighborhood, where various bands were playing in all the bars. We ended up in a park with a beer tent watching a The Tragically Hip tribute band. Fun night.

Saturday was the graduation. There was a bit of last minute drama that Michelle might not be able to walk with her class because of an AP class that she never got credit for. But it all got straightened out. Technically she’s not graduation until September because she switched majors and needs to complete the last of the electives this summer. But she did the ceremony, and it was great and the Engineering and Applied Sciences school is huge, over 800 students graduating. Beforehand we went out to Board Point and took a bunch of pictures. The weather was windy and threatening but it didn’t actually rain. Afterwards we took Michell, Lizzy and Josh to a nice restaurant downtown.

Sunday morning we spent some time talking with my Mum. She’s been feeling kinda down, knowing she and my Dad are getting older, and wondering how much longer they’re going to be able to keep driving and doing other things, and what that will mean for their ability to get around and all that. No easy answers, I guess. Then we went up to Michelle’s apartment and helped her pack and load up all her stuff into her car and my SUV. It was a long drive and by the time we got home and unloaded it all, it was late and we were all pretty tired. Luckily we all had today off to relax and unwind and get ready for the next adventure. Today Michelle is looking to buy furniture.

In the Dead of Winter

We finally got some snow over the weekend, and then it turned really cold the last few days: in the teens in the daytime and single digits at night. Looks like the snow will stick around a while. Of course this meant we got to go skiing for the first time this season. We went Monday, which was a day for for me and Jeannie, and Michelle’s last day at home before going back to school. We got up early before sunrise, went up for day and got home again sometime after sunset. It was a good time, and we all had a good days skiing after getting used to it the first runs. The snow was mainly good, even great for the northeast, with just a little bit of icy patches here and there, easy enough to avoid. Only trouble it was pretty crowded, and by mid afternoon there were alot of kids taking lessons zigzagging all over the place, so we decided to call it day. All in all we skied ten runs, over four hours. Next time Jeannie and I are gonna play hooky from work and go up when the kids are all in school.

All our wintertime projects are coming along. Maintaining good health and good focus. I finished a major chunk of cleaning out my studio over the weekend, clearing the way for new origami and other projects (more on that later). Only downside is Michelle went back to school before we had a chance to watch Return of the King. The Bills are in the playoffs and have advanced to the ACF Championship (once again against the Chiefs, after beating the Ravens in an intense, high-drama matchup), so that’s cutting into our TV time. Ah well, I guess there’s spring break.

Aside: my friend Robert Lang, one of the most accomplished and creative origami artists of all time, lost both his house and his studio in the recent fires in L.A., including a lifetime of literally priceless artwork (much of it has been exhibited at galleries all over the world), all of his tools and his supply of high-end origami paper (I read that Michael LaFosse is coming out of retirement to make a new batch of origamido paper just for him.) and literally everything else except his pets and one origami cuckoo clock. My heart goes out to him and his wife. Amazingly, Robert seems pretty upbeat for the situation, or at least resilient and determined to get thru the current tragedy and rebuild.

Back here where things are more stable, our D&D campaign continues. True to their chaotic neutral alignments, the party decided to open a half-dozen doors at once at the end of the last session, revealing a captive dragon and whole host of goblins. Next session should be fun. I hope they figure out a way to get the dragon to attack the goblins, or that they can run fast. Also they’re on the verge of having enough XP for second level.

I’m also helping Charlie set up a Minecraft server on Martin’s linux box in the cloud. It turns out this is not exactly straightforward, since he wants a modded version, but we’ve made some good progress, and we’ll probably get there soon.

Most of the rest of the stuff I want to talk about has to do with music, and I think I’ll cover that in a separate post.

Oh What Fun to Ride and Sing a Slaying Song Tonight

We’re in the midst of a long and languid holiday break. I’ve been off work for a whole week and a day, and don’t go back until Thursday. I finished off work on a high note, having successfully merged my R&D branch of the codebase back into the main branch, deployed it and all. The project is turning the corner from R&D into productization, always a fun part of the curve. Also lots of planning meetings for big ambitious new features and new R&D threads in the coming year. After a long uphill slog into strong headwinds I now feel that the tide has turned, the wind is at our backs and filling our sail, and we’re gaining momentum as we cruise downhill.

Michelle came home from school a week before Christmas, and Lizzy a few days later along with Josh. We even got snow a couple times and it remained cold enough for the snow to stick around for a white Christmas. We did Jeannie’s family party the Saturday before Christmas, and went to Mary’s on Christmas day. In between was lots of food and drink, movies and games, music, wrapping presents, opening presents, hanging out and getting things done at a relaxed pace.

We’re shaping up for a new release of the Global Jukebox in the new year. Nick has come up to speed as my new second software engineer, which is great. I still miss Martin whenever I work on the jukebox. He wrote so much amazing code and did so much of the devops stuff too. I’m always inside his thoughts and mind when I read thru the code. Anyway, Nick is now filling that role and bringing his own approach and perspective. The major new feature we’ve been working on converting the existing Cantometric codings for all the songs to a new simplified schema, to make it easier to train new coders and to eliminate some ambiguities in the original system. Nick wrote the script to do the conversion, which required understanding alot of domain knowledge as well as the architecture of the web application. Meanwhile I created the spec for the new schema and did all the UI and UX work on the client side. Now it’s all on the staging server and we’re looking at finishing off some P2 features to get into the next release.

I bought a drum mic kit as a present to myself. It’s bundle of eight microphones for all the different drums plus overheads, along with stands and cables. I’ve decided I want to use more real drums on my next record (more on that soon) and so it’s essential to be able to mic it up. Next step is to get it all set up and learn how to use it. Oh, and I’m going to upgrade to a 16-input preamp/DAC unit as well.

Oh, and Jeannie got a Nintendo Switch, so I’m gonna get some games for that too!

We went up to Buffalo for a few days after Christmas. They had a ton of snow when we arrived, but while we were up there it got warm and started to melt. Kathleen and the kids came up too. It was a little sad because we all felt Martin’s absence, but we also felt his presence. There was coming together and healing energy, and it was good to see everyone. I’ve been trying to bond with the kids and get closer to them. I took them out for a long walk around the neighborhood one morning to the park and the lake and all the local playgrounds. Played some chess with Match and Abbie. We also had dinner with Larry and Jackie and place in Allentown called Mother’s which was really good. To top it all off, the Bills demolished the Jets on Sunday. Looking good for the playoffs.

I’ve started a D&D campaign with Martin’s kids as a fun way to try and be a presence in their lives. We’ve had three sessions so far over the last three weeks. The first week we rolled up characters, the second we did a warm-up wilderness encounter en route the the start of the main adventure, and this last weekend the party got the the base town, met some of the locals, stocked up on provisions and all that, and set out for the ruins of the Sunless Citadel, where the adventure begins in earnest. They climbed down into a ravine and are now at the front door of the main dungeon (where a trap awaits, unbeknownst to them). The party consists of the three oldest kids, Charlie, Matthew and Abbie, as well as their cousin Rylee, all aged 12 to 16. Also joining in are Michelle and Jeannie. It’s a good mix of races, classes and alignments. Rylee is and Elfin Fighter, and Charlie and Elfin Ranger. Match is a Dwarven Barbarian, and Abbie a Gnomish Bard who rides around on a giant rabbit. Michelle is playing a Halfling Cleric and Jeannie a human Sorceress. I’m DM’ing, which is something I really enjoy. Everyone is first level, and their alignments are centered on chaotic neutral, which fits with their general attitude.

We’re using a combination of software. It’s amazing how all this stuff has advanced since I first started playing D&D online twenty years ago with Nick. We’re using google meet for the video conference. This mostly works great by the call only lasts and hour, so I have to start a new meeting halfway thru. We’re using DND Beyond for the character sheets, stats, and related stuff like spells, weapons, bonuses, modifiers, and hit points. And we’re using Owlbear Rodeo for maps and combat. All free apps that run in the browser, very convenient.

So far it’s lots of fun, and good to be able to spend time with everyone in a casual, semi-structured way. They’re all definitely enjoying it. My plan is to keep it going thru the winter at least, and maybe longer if everyone remains into it.

Autumn Leaves

We had a very nice Thanksgiving weekend. I was ready for some downtime, since it had been a pretty busy couple of weeks. The week before I hit a major milestone for my project at work, so now life got a bit easier just in time for the holiday season.

Biking season is over now because it’s too cold and too dark, but I did manage to get a few rides in the first few weeks of November. Looking forward to starting again next spring. Meanwhile we have ice skating and skiing to look forward too, and I’ve switched back to the Nordic Track on what used to be biking days. On the plus side, I can listen to tunes while I do that. Meanwhile, my shoulder has been hurting off and on the last few months, no doubt from using the computer too much. So I’ve been going up and down on the amount of weight I’ve been using on weightlifting days. This is the time of year when I usually start to feel generally tired and achy and low energy anyway, and I often go down in weight for the winter and back up again in the springtime. In any event, I seem to have stabilized at a level that’s close to my nominal maximum for everything but bench press, which is about 20 lbs. less. If I continue to feel okay, I’ll probably go up in a week or two.

November is the time of year for raking leaves, and we’ve been out and at it every weekend since we got home from our trip out west. Most of the leaves are down now, and this last time we filled up only two cans, compared with 6 or seven cans and bags a couple weeks ago when it was peaking. We also put up fresh new holiday lights outside. I like to keep them up over the winter, and last year I just never got around to taking them down, but they all burned out over time.

Lots of people in our neighborhood go in for big Hallowe’en and Christmas displays on their lawns. Some of them even do Thanksgiving, but compared the other holidays the choice of imagery is kind of thin. Pretty much you can have an inflatable turkey, and that’s about it. If I ever do a lawn display, I want something that will last the whole season. Start with a scary dragon, then give him a pilgrim hat, then a Santa hat. Something like that.

Michelle came home from school to visit for a whole week. The weekend before Thanksgiving we went up to Albany to visit Kathleen and the kids. Now Michelle and I are planning a D&D campaign with them as a fun way to get more regular face time with everyone. More on that as it develops. Michelle spent Monday and Tuesday baking up a storm – cookies, sós kifli, more cookies.

On Thanksgiving day we had a whole lot of family over: Mary’s family, Denis’s too, and Jeannie’s parents. She made a turkey and all the things – stuffing, potatoes, gravy, and our guests brought lasagna, sweet potatoes, Brussel sprouts, pie, lots of great stuff, and a really good time. Good to be around family.

The next day, which in our house we’ve dubbed Slack Friday, we normally stay home and strive to nothing at all. This year, however we went out to Long Island to visit Mary, since Denis was in town, as well as her cousin Carla. After that we went over to visit Nick and Lisa, who live just ten minutes away. The motivating excuse was to sync up with Nick on his progress on the Global Jukebox, but we ended up staying and enjoying Nick’s homemade bread and talking well into the night.

As for Nick’s progress on the Global Jukebox, that’s coming along nicely. He’s been ramping up and doing his first major chunk of feature work, so we had a code review and I was able to explain to him a bunch of things he wasn’t ready for before, but now that he’s in the problem space he can grok. He’ll make a good partner going forward.

Saturday was the Spacecats gig up at the Green Growler. It went amazingly well and was alot of fun. Thanksgiving weekend is a bit of a wildcard for playing in bars. Sometimes it’s dead because everyone is out of town or doing family things. Other times is packed because people are home visiting family and also want to go out and see their friends. This night the place was really packed, the most crowded I’d ever seen the place because it turned out thee was a group having an informal ten-year high school reunion. And everyone seemed to really dig the music. They’d come in, notice the band and start bobbing their heads or doing a little dance. We also had a good number of family and friends of the band, including a couple of the guys from my Wednesday group.

We did combination of straight-ahead jazz and more rock-funk oriented stuff, including eight songs off our record Los Gatos Del Cosmos, and a new song by Josh called Getaway Car. We also had our drummer’s wife Robyn sitting in on vocals. She’s sort of a theatre and show tunes type singer, but can do some standards and pop stuff. She’s really good. So we had her sit on on three songs each set, plus accompany the sax on the melody of Kamasi Washington’s Street Fighter Mas. Having a singer provided a different kind of energy that helped the overall package I’d say. We’ll probably ask her to sit in again.

The only downside is we were supposed didn’t have quite enough material to cover three hours. We ended up spending more time rehearsing with Robyn than I’d planned because we wanted her songs to sound good. We tried a good bunch of songs with her before we settled on the ones we chose, and there was just some getting to know one another musically and work out the arrangements. A few of her songs had rubato beginnings and endings and we had to get a feel for how to do that together as a group. This meant there were a few other new things that weren’t adequately rehearsed that we decided to skip. Ah well. We ended up closing the second set with an extended jam of John Coltrane’s Mr. P.C., which went over great, and did a short third set that included a couple repeats from the beginning of the night. No one in the audience seemed to mind, and the bar invited us back for another gig.

Sunday we finally had a day to sit at home and relax. The Bills game was on TV. The week before they defeated our arch-rivals the Kansas City Chiefs, which was great to see. This week they played the Forty-Niners, and it was a lake-effect snowstorm the whole game. Buffalo showed their cold weather prowess and won handily while SF totally fell apart, and the Bills clinched the AFC East championship. Woo-hoo!

On the Way Home

We finally got a weekend at home to relax. This week we passed a big deadline at work, the release of Permission Slip 3.0, delivered on time and without any major problems. I also finished re-architecting and deploying the key generation and storage mechanism for OSIRAA, the API compliance test tool for the Data Rights Protocol, after a long and deep debugging adventure, thus unblocking the road forward to testing. And, I submitted Plutonium Dirigible to get CDs made and put on streaming services, so that project is officially completed.

Last weekend we were traveling again, this time up to Buffalo. It was good to see Mum and Dad and talk about things. They are doing basically okay, very stoic, which I guess is not too surprising.

I also saw old friends Mark C. and Chris S. I hadn’t seen either of them in many years, although we used to be very close, so it was great to reconnect. Mark and Chris were the drummer and piano/synth player in Event Horizon, our prog jazz fusion band that was together for a number of years and was the vehicle for alot of musical growth. We were in several other bands together around that time, and both of them stood up at my wedding, which, by the way. was thirty years ago this week. Chris has a new wife and baby. Life has a way of moving in circles sometimes, and after many adventures they’re both back living in Kenmore, just a few blocks apart, in the neighborhood we all grew up in.

After that we went to visit Lizzy and Josh at their new apartment in North Buffalo, just a few block on the other side of Kenmore Avenue. They have a very nice place, and the main decorating them is legos galore. I always admired that neighborhood when was growing up, with it’s tree-lined avenues and well-kept Victorian houses; it’s good to see the neighborhood is still that way. They’re right near Hertel Avenue, with a district of restaurants and shops.

Back home Michelle is home from school visiting. The weather remains nice. It’s been a super pleasant autumn so far, with mainly warm and sunny weather and beginning to get cool at night. Haven’t really turned the heat on yet. Much better than last fall, when it rained pretty much every day. I’ve been continuing to do alot biking. This weekend I went twenty miles on the local rail trial. Hope to get a few more long rides in before it turns cold, and get up to thirty by the end of the season.

This week I’m trying to finish up some origami Flying Fish for OUSA’s holiday tree at American Museum of Natural History. I also have some ideas for a couple new models that I hope to complete for a convention coming up in November. So watch this space for that.

And the Wonder Will Set Me Free

This past weekend Jeannie and I went up to the greater Berne area, in the hills between Albany and the Catskills to visit Kathleen and the kids and participate in a benefit concert in Martin’s honor. We had to get up early Saturday so I could be there for rehearsal. I hadn’t used my rock keyboard setup in a while, so Friday night I plugged everything in and turned it all to make sure it still worked and sounded good, and if I still remembered my way around the controls of my synth. Then I tore it all down, figured out what to pack, and pre-loaded the car.

The rehearsal was at the East Berne Band’s drummer John’s house. He has a nice rehearsal space, set up a bit like mine in that you come in thru the garage and don’t have to go up or down any stairs. I’d met the guys in the band briefly once before, and had been texting and emailing them, so I felt pretty good about the situation. John sent me a list of tunes to learn a few weeks ago, then last week sent me a mostly different list. One thing that was for sure was that we’d be doing two of Martin’s original songs.

The band consists of John on drums and vocals, Dan on bass and vocals, Chris on guitar and backing vocals, Jim on keyboards in the summertime, and sometime vocalist Lorissa, who wasn’t at the practice. They’re all excellent musicians, who sound really good together, and the vibe was very relaxed and friendly. They’re very versatile and can handle everything from the E Street Band to Brittany Spears. We ran thru a good part of the setlist they’d given me, focusing alot of the time on Martin’s songs, which they asked me to sing. Everyone said I sound just like Martin. I guess that’s not far from the truth. I’ve been going over some old recordings we did together and can’t always tell who is singing what part. I was playing sax as well as keyboards and singing. I’ve been playing more and more on Martin’s old sax, a Selmer Mark VI tenor from the late 1950’s and really growing to love it.

After that I went back to Kathleen’s house and hung out with her and the kids. We’re trying to spend some time with them, be more of a presence and get to know them better individually. This time it was mostly Charlie and Abbie I was talking with, with Match interjecting now and then. I also seem to be their dog Gus’s new best friend, having played countless rounds of fetch with him. I spent some time talking with Kathleen’s father Charlie too. We went for a hike later in the afternoon in some nearby woods overlooking the escarpment and, at the furthest point out, offering a scenic view of Albany. Apparently it was one of Martin’s favorite hikes. Kathleen and Jeannie and I went out to dinner with John and his wife Linda, who had been raising alpacas for their wool. Abbie and Ellie and their cousin Bailey came too.

Next morning we spent more time with the kids. Jeannie taught Abbie how to fold Sonobe modules, a kind of geometric origami system that’s very popular. I helped organize some stuff in Martin’s studio. I found a notebook of some of his older songs. He never seemed to write down his chord progressions, but sometimes there were hand drawn tabs in the margins. He liked to explore patterns alot and figure out the names of the chords later. The concert was out at a brewery about a half hour from the house. I got there around 1:30 to set up. The stage was out at the edge of a big lawn behind the brewery, bordered by wildflowers all around. Out in front was a bunch of picnic tables and a shelter. A very nice scene. With four bands on the bill the stage was pretty full: two drum sets, three keyboard rigs, multiple guitar amps. The bass player Dan was in all four bands, so we pretty much front and center the whole time. The first two bands did a mixture of covers and originals, all very good. The overall vibe was a cross between the Grateful Dead and the Barenaked Ladies. I spent the time meeting and talking to alot of Martin’s friends. He definitely made an impact on people. Alot of people seemed to be part of extended family clans, like Martin and Kathleen. Also a whole networked scene of musicians. There was a food truck there that served dumplings. Very yummy.

The East Berne Band went on third, and we started with Lorissa singing, doing a bunch of songs which we hadn’t rehearsed and I didn’t know about. So they called out the key (sometimes) and I followed along by ear and watching the bass player’s fingers. I sang Martin’s songs, One of These Days and Making Miles, and both went well. I almost made it thru without breaking up, but then I looked out into the crowd and there was Jeannie and Kathleen crying. Still, overall a fun and joyous occasion. At the end of our set, a bunch of musicians from all the bands came on stage for an epic jam session to close out the day. Tons of fun. Lots of good feeling and healing energy. I hope they do it again sometime. Meanwhile we’ll be back up there to visit again before too long.