Travel – Zing Blog 2

Where the Buffalo Roam

Just got back from a trip out west to Montana and Wyoming, to visit the famous Yellowstone and Grand Tetons national parks. I’d never been to that part of the country before, and it was truly amazing.

Jeannie and I left very early Saturday morning out of Newark airport and flew into Bozeman, Montana. While Newark is sprawling and complicated, Bozeman is probably the nicest airport I’ve ever been to, all wood and stone and glass construction in the luxury log cabins style that’s all trendy out there. It was easy to get our rental car, a bright blue Ford Bronco Sport that added a fun adventure vibe to the trip, and by 11:25 AM we were at the doors of a restaurant to have lunch.

That afternoon we went to the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman. The main attraction is its collection of dinosaur fossils, all locally sourced. The star was Big Al, an Allosaurus, and there were also lots of Triceratops skeletons. The exhibits included alot of storytelling about the fossils and the geography of the dig sites, and the science behind working out the ages and lineages of the various kinds of dinosaurs represented in the collections. Very cool stuff.

After that we drove to the Mammoth Hot Springs area of Yellowstone Park. Amazing countryside on the journey. We stopped at the famous Teddy Roosevelt arch at the north entrance to the park. As we got to Mammoth village we were greeted by a herd of elk blocking the road, including a buck named Twenty-Four, with the most gigantic rack I’d ever seen, and his harem of does. Apparently they like to come out of the mountains into the village this time of year. Our lodgings were a cute little cabin in the campground.

Next day at breakfast, we learned that the elk like to sleep in the doorways of buildings, probably because of the heat coming out under the door, and sometimes block people’s way out. Luckily not us. We spent the first part of the day hiking around the hot springs, a totally surreal landscape full of colorful, steaming ponds and waterfalls, and bizarre forms of white rock.

In the afternoon we took a safari ride out to Lamar Valley to spot wildlife. It was a van with about eight people, and we stopped several times at the side of the road. We saw a bunch of different animals including pronghorn antelope, some birds, more elk, and lots of bison. Our guide was engaging and knowledgeable, and was very excited that she’s be returning for the winter season as a snow coach driver.

Toward the end our guide stopped at the side of the road and pulled out her telescope because she’d spotted some activity and thought it might be wolves. They were about a half mile or more away, at the far side of the valley where it gets woodsy and hilly. They were hunting a group of bison that had broken off from the main herd. We stayed and watch for more than a half hour as the wolves stalked and chased the bison, and the bison moved away or turned to face down the wolves with their horns and chase them away. The wolves were apparently after a weaker bison, an old or young one, and the others were protecting it. But the wolves were working to wear the bison down. We stayed until it was getting too dark to see. Next morning someone had posted a video on the internet from the same spot, of the wolves finally making the kill at first light.

Early October is actually the end of the season in Yellowstone. The weather was really nice for us. Although there was frost on our car most mornings it was warm and sunny in the daytime, getting into the mid-seventies. We were above 7,000 feet elevation the whole time, so it took a couple days to get used to that. They were expecting the first snowfall of the season any day, and after that they start closing the roads. The weather is dry in the summer, but in the winter they usually get over 400 inches of snow, and they don’t plow the roads, hence the snow coaches. It actually sound pretty cool and I’d like to go back in the winter someday.

As it was, many of the park services were already closed including alot of food options. In the major national parks every hotel has a fancy dining room, and that was open everywhere we went although they sometimes had a long wait. The fallback option was the adjoining bar, where you could get pub food. I’ve learned over the years that when traveling it’s best to avoid french fries and have a salad every day instead; at the end of the week you’ll feel much better. We did okay on that score.

Yellowstone is huge, about this size of the state of Connecticut, and has five or six villages in the park each with its own hotels, cabins, campgrounds, stores, restaurants and gas stations. But they’re all really far apart, a good hour or two drive. So after the second night we relocated to Old Faithful Village, so Monday was mainly a driving day. We took the route over the high mountain pass, above 10,000 feet and full of switchbacks, toward the Yellowstone falls and canyon. We stopped several times along the way for scenic overlooks and short hikes. At the canyon we did a big hike along the south rim of the gorge, past both waterfalls and some distance beyond. Amazing! Spectacular! On the last part of the drive to our hotel we stopped at an area of geysers and hot springs as the sun was going down.

We arrived at the Old Faithful lodge, which is an impressive and unique piece of architecture. It’s a giant log cabin built in 1903, with a central atrium six stories high. Very dark aura, almost like a medieval castle, but made of wood, and with a bar little cocktail bar with a piano and violin player.

It seems every day we got up to a longer hike than the day before. On Tuesday we spent most of the day wandering around the basin the contains the Old Faithful geyser and hiking in the surrounding hills. The first thing we saw in the morning we Beehive Geyser going off. It’s the next geyser over from Old Faithful and is actually larger, but less frequent and less predictable, so that was cool to see. The area is quite expansive with lots and lots of geysers, hot spring, mud pools, and other hydrothermal features. It was quite something. Awesome, alien beauty. When we were done there we drove up to Grand Prismatic Hot Springs and checked that out. That evening we got dinner in the hotel bar, and afterwards went out to watch Old Faithful erupt in the dark. (Like Niagara Falls, they don’t turn it off at night.)

Wednesday was our last day in Yellowstone, and we spent it driving around a big loop in the south part of the park. There were so many bison all over the place that you almost got used to seeing them, even when they’re right on the side of the road. First stop was Yellowstone Lake, which was beautiful in its own right but also had another extensive area of geysers and hot spring, a fancy hotel, and a camp store that was still open and made for a good place to get lunch. Then it was back to the canyon and falls, where we did a bunch of short hikes on the north rim, although some were a few hundred feel vertical, hopping from place to place by car to catch the highlights. Our last stop was Norris Basin, with yet more hot spring. Although there are many areas of these all over the park, each on had a different character.

Thursday we got up bright and early and drove down to Grand Tetons National Park. Did I mention that everything is really far apart? By the time we got to the visitor center at Jenny Lake it was after noon, so we did a comparatively short hike up to Moose Lake. There were no hydrothermal features here gut the mountains were truly impressive. Afterward we had a late lunch on a rooftop patio in a place at the south end of the park called Dornans, that must have existed before the park was formed.

That night we had a hotel room in the town of Jackson Hole, which was much more comfortable the the ones inside the national parks; this one even had its own fireplace. The hotel had a hot tub so we watched the sun go down from there, looking out over the mountains thru an impressive wall of glass framed in wood and stone. Jackson Hole is a fun little tourist town (I can imagine it must be insane during ski season) and we found a nice place for dinner that served things like trout, bison and elk (but no dinosaur).

Friday was our last day and we returned to Grand Tetons for an epic hike up from String Lake, partway around Jenny Lake and then up into Cascade Canyon via Hidden Falls and Inspiration point. This was over seven miles long, and over a thousand feet vertical, our longest single hike (although most days we were over ten miles total walking). And was well worth it, totally spectacular, probably my favorite hike of the whole trip.

Needless to say, by the time we were done we were pretty tired. Back in the hot tub that evening we watched the weather turn dark and cold as storms rolled out of the mountains. We were getting out of there just in time. Our flight the next morning was very early. We were up before dawn and our of the hotel before they started serving breakfast. Jackson Hole airport is even smaller than Bozeman, and you have to walk out onto the tarmac and walk up a ramp to get onto your place. It was raining as well left, and up in Yellowstone the forecast was for seven inches of snow that day!

Another Time Around the Wheel

Although summer is not technically over yet, Labor Day has come and gone, and the vibe now is changed. We ended the season with a nice little vacation down to Ocean City, Maryland, where we hung out on the beach and the boardwalk, went swimming in the ocean, rode our bikes out to Assateague Island, did happy hour at the hotel beach bar, went out to a few nice meals, and listened to tunes on the car trip down and back.

I’m still working on the Global Jukebox as my main gig this fall, as I was over the summer. It’s coming along nicely, although it’s hard to say when it will be ready for release because there’s still alot to do on the data side. We’ll probably start seriously planning the launch before the end of the year. Meanwhile I’m trying to pick up a second gig, helping Origami USA redesign their website and a bunch of associated development work. I’m low-key looking for a new job, but there’s no hurry as long as the freelance project keep rolling along. It’d have to be the right project. Anyway, it’s more relaxing this way and gives me time to work on other things. And there’s plenty to do.

After I got my saxophones fixed, the next thing on my list was to get the Mustang worked on. The windshield wipers, fuel gauge, turn signals and stereo all stopped working sometime over the summer. I figured it was most likely a blown fuse that supplies the dashboard, but I didn’t feel comfortable pulling and replacing the fuses myself, so I took it to the garage. They found the problem was actually a wire with a flaky connection under the dashboard near the fusebox (it is an old car after all), but I had to bring the car back several times before they actually fixed it fully and completely. Well at least that’s taken care of (hopefully), and I can start in on the next phase of the plan, which is to get the body painted.

The major thing with this is to find a place that will work on a classic car, and is reasonably priced. Lucky for me, there’s a couple guys in my neighborhood (both named John) who like to sit around in the mornings on the patio of my local coffee shop, which is next door to the garage. We’ve had a “hello, good morning” kind of thing going for a long time, and sometimes I’ll talk with them about stuff. One of their favorite topics is cars, especially sports cars and classic muscle cars (the Buffalo Bills being another favorite topic). They each know of a body shop in the local area that they were able to recommend. Next week I’ll start calling around.

I’ve also made progress on Michelle’s room since she moved out, touching up the walls with some fresh paint, moving furniture around, and getting rid of old junk. The next step is to get her to come over and organzie and/or throw away the things she left behind. And of course there’s always another yardwork cycle, things are really growing this year (although the wasps aren’t gone yet, that’s another thing), and more organizing the garage and my studio. I finally put away all the origami paper I bought at July’s convention!

In music, Josh is set to come back to rehearsing with the group this week. We’re all very excited. Meanwhile we’re still trying to reschedule the gig that was supposed to be this week, that we had to punt on. Ah well.

On the Spellbound project, I’ve started rendering our all the midi instruments and transitioning to working on the mix. I still have the big guitar solo left to do, but that’s the last bit of tracking. If it turns out to be too much to play the part myself, I have several guitar player friends I can ask to do a guest appearance. We’ll see.

The weather has been beautiful, although it’s getting dark earlier faster these days. It remains great for biking, not too hot. Hopefully it’ll stay that way for a while.

Island Time

Summer adventure continues. Jeannie and I spent a whole week up in the Adirondacks with our good friends Mark and Kelly. It was great to see them and catch up. We spent most of that time camping on an island in Saranac Lake. This is the third time we’ve done this, and the longest trip yet, four days. The island, named Pirate Island, is accessible only by canoe, so we had to haul all our stuff out with us: tents, food, water, firewood and all. This year Jeannie and I bought new lightweight compact chairs and a table and a rain shelter. Fortunately the weather was great the whole time. The canoe rides were all very pleasant and hanging around the island was great. While we were up there I did a nice long bike ride one day on the local rail trail, and we explored the town a little, some bars and restaurants and the local river walk. Tried to go to the local astronomy center but they were closed.

I’ve been trying to make more time to read this summer. I brought two books with me. One was Mixing With Impact, which I mentioned last time, and am now into the the second half. The other was This Must Be the Place by Jesse Rifkin, a music critic and historian who works with me on The Global Jukebox. It’s about the rise and fall of various music scenes in downtown Manhattan over the last 70 year or so, how they were incubated by cheap real estate, and in turn met their demise by wave after wave of urban gentrification. Excellent book, highly recommended. I finished that one, and lent it to Mark. I found a playlist of the recommended listening at the end of each chapter.

I’ve been away or busy the last six weekends in a row, so it’s nice to be home and able to focus on getting some things done.

Planet Tralfamadore

The summer of John continues with more adventures. I took a quick trip upstate over the weekend because my brother Jim was in town from New Mexico to visit my parents, along with my nibling Virgil. I drove up Friday afternoon and arrived in time to go see the band Steam Powered Giraffe, Virgil’s favorite group. They’re not just a rock band but also combine mime and improv comedy with the music. The whole act is framed on the premise that the members are actually performing robots, and the songs, costumes and visuals all have a heavy steampunk vibe. (They started as street buskers.) The show was really good and lots of fun. Everyone in the group sings so there’s lots of harmonies, and the two guys who sing lead the most have nicely contrasting styles. They all switch instruments too, and there’s a pair of dancing girls that are part of the act, and a sexy dancing robot giraffe character too. Blue hair abounds. After we arrived, someone gave Virgil three front row seats, so that made it extra fun.

The venue was a place called the Electric City, and it used to be the old Tralfamadore Cafe. The Tralf was a famous and historic jazz club that closed during the pandemic, so it’s nice to see it back in action as something new. When I went inside I hardly recognized the place. The stage is much bigger and fills one whole end of the hall rather than just a corner like it used to. There’s now rows of seating with risers where there used to be small tables, and I think the bar got moved back.

I stayed with Lizzy and Josh since Jim and Virgil were in the two spare rooms at my parent’s house. She lives in north Buffalo, not far from the neighborhood I grew up in. I brought my bike with me, and Saturday morning I took a bike ride up into Tonawanda. I passed by my old house, elementary school, church, library, and fire station. Then up to my middle school, the house we moved to later, and my high school. There’s a bike path running thru the town that used to be railroad tracks. I hopped on it and rode north to the end, to the City of Tonawanda where the Erie Canal meets the Niagara River, then turned around and took the trail all the way back to the south end and into the city, where it passed conveniently near Lizzy’s house. Twenty-two and a half miles, a pretty good ride.

Josh works nights at the hospital these days, and by the time I got back he was getting up, so I took him and Lizzy out to lunch at a bar in their neighborhood. I discovered a new kind of sandwich called a stinger, which is a combination of a steak hoagie and a buffalo chicken sub. Yum. In the afternoon Lizzy and I went went down to my parent’s house for a barbecue with the family.

Sunday I met my old friend Larry for lunch at a bar in East Aurora, and we hung out and talked for quite a long while. It was good to catch up, since I missed him last couple times I was in town. Larry is a really amazing drummer and percussionist, and Neil Peart was one of his big influences. I remember the summer between 10th and 11th grade the two of us learning La Villa Strangaito from start to finish. Rush was playing in Toronto Sunday night, and I almost convinced him that we should drive up and see the show. Unfortunately, we both had grownup things to do Monday morning.

In music studio land, I’ve been trying to improve the sound of my mixes. I recently got a book called Mixing with Impact by Wessel Oltheten, and it’s exactly the right book for me right now. It’s super well written, and goes into a great deal of technical detail about the physics and perceptual aspects of sound in the electronic and acoustic realms, as well as the human hearing apparatus. The first few chapters break down balance, panning EQ, and reverb. Everything always relates to how the music is heard, and how to make it communicate better, create clarity, space, focus, and all that. Highly recommended.

Yankee Rose

Summer rolls on, the Fourth of July weekend is come and gone. Time to rewind and catch up on things.

The last Friday in June my jazz group Spacecats played another gig at the Green Growler. For this one we decided to play our originals as only half the songs, and the other half split between jazz standards and our renditions of rock and pop songs, on the theory that people who aren’t necessarily into jazz will like it if they hear something familiar. It seems to have worked. After the show various people told me they liked our versions of Black Hole Sun, Black Magic Woman, Mister Magic, Englishman in New York, and Josie. Meanwhile we have enough original, with new ones every show, that we’re rotating them in and out of the set list each show. Another new thing for this gig is I brought my bari sax and played it on a couple songs. One was our original Where Has the Sun Gone, a slow, bluesy number with a low growly riff that seemed just perfect for it. The other was Bemsha Swing by Thelonious Monk, with gave it a cool vibe. Both went over well. Now it’s on to planning the next gig, and focusing once more on making a record. Onward and upward!

Meanwhile in my D&D campaign, the party is in the middle of melee combat with the final boss. The module is White Plume Mountain, which is an original AD&D module that I first DM’d back in high school in the 1980’s. They’ve subsequently updated to 5th edition rules and published it in the Tales from the Yawning Portal compendium. We’re playing 5E rules in this campaign so that worked out handily. It’s fun to compare the two versions; the main difference is that the monsters are alot tougher nowadays. The module’s ending is a bit abrupt. The last encounter is a pair of Fire Elementals who show up to prevent the party from leaving the dungeon. But the party never gets to meet and fight the real big bad, a powerful Lich. There’s a note at the end, saying if the Efreet capture the party, they’ll be taken to an indoctrination center and made into mindless zombie-like servants of the Lich, and the DM should just improvise this.

Well, lo and behold, stuffed in the back of my original module is hand-drawn map of a dungeon “White Plume Mountain, Level 2”, plus some notes in my handwriting. It turns out to be a good series of encounters including said indoctrination center, a bunch of guards, henchgnomes, and other minions, some prisoners to set free, a trap or two, and finally a well-guarded crypt with the fearsome Lich in real undead person! It actually quite well done, so I’m in the process of converting it to 5E. More on that as the situation unfolds.

Elsewhere, in The Global Jukebox I’ve been spending time updating the code for the routes to accommodate a bunch of new features. The routes basically handle representing the state of the app as a unique url and resolving urls to app states. It’s pretty deep and complex and has to handle lots of stuff. Martin wrote the original version of it. We don’t really use any frameworks for the Jukebox, but we do use plenty of design patterns, and the general approach is informed by Angular, since I was doing alot of Angular apps around the time I started the GJB. I remember having long conversations with Martin about the design and the requirements of the routes feature; I was always able to communicate with him about software design like no one else, probably because we taught ourselves programming together as kids and understood alot of deep concepts in similar ways. Anyway, I dusted off the code and started reading it, and I must say it’s a real a masterpiece. So well thought out, so consistent and logical, a joy to work with. I really felt Martin’s presence and missed him like I haven’t in a long time.

Which leads me to the next topic, my work-in-progress record Spellbound. If you’ll recall, this is a new rendition of a record Martin and I wrote together a long time ago. In the last few weeks I sang and mixed all the vocals for the epic eighteen-minute final track. (There’s lots of instrumental jams in there, so it’s not as much work as it might sound like). So I now have a basic arrangement of the first three-fourths of the song, and a sketch of the structure long extended jam at the end. It’s sounding pretty good and holds together musically as an extended piece. The next round of work will be to add more texture instruments such as organ and twelve-string guitars, then the solos, then fleshing out the ending jam. Ought to be done sometime in the fall.

It’s been super hot here the past few weeks, and I’ve been going out early to get my bike rides in. A few weeks ago I saw Diamond David Lee Roth at the Capital Theatre in Port Chester. And although he can’t really sing the high notes anymore, he still put on a great, energetic show, and smartly had a chorus of backup singers, which helped to point up the importance of the vocal arrangements in those original Van Halen songs.

My only disappointment was he didn’t do any of his solo stuff, but I was inspired to listen to his first few solo albums Crazy from the Heat, Eat ‘Em and Smile, and Skyscraper, the latter two featuring Steve Vai and Billy Sheehan and guitar and bass. I must say they hold up way better than I expected. The songs are great, Steve and Billy are out of this world monster musicians, Dave is in top form and branching out into a range of styles and sounds, and overall they have a great summertime party vibe and have entered heavy rotation in my house, especially Eat ‘Em and Smile.

I went up to Buffalo for July Fourth weekend to visit my folks. It was super hot up there too, close to ninety the first two days. But it was even hotter home in NYC, over one hundred degrees! On the second we had dinner with Lizzy at a place on the lake in Hamburg, then went up to the Niagara Falls. I hadn’t been up there in years, and it was good to go in the evening when it was cooler and less crowded. And it turned out the were fireworks shows up by the visitor center, and after that down in the gorge.

The next day was even hotter. Jeannie and Michelle went with Lizzy to shop for a wedding dress. Apparently they found one that’s very nice. Meanwhile I hid out in the air conditioning and build the class schedule for this year’s Origami USA convention. As the special guest I’m teaching five classes this year, so one nice perk is I can choose the times and rooms I want for my classes first. I’m starting to get excited about the convention now. Only three weeks away, and lots to do!

On the evening of the third, Kathleen and the kids turned up, and we spent the evening hanging out. The next day on the fourth, we basically spent the whole day sipping beers, barbecuing, and listening to tunes. Jeannie made a whole playlist of America-themed songs (including songs about states, cities, and other places in America), partly because we can’t let the rightwing nutjobs take over the symbols of patriotism and the idea of loving our country. I thought this was a great idea and offered a few suggestions. Lizzy heard us working on it when she was home a few weeks ago and came up with a playlist of her own.

That evening we watched the fireworks, although this year they moved them to the lake in the park at the end of my parent’s block because there was construction at the school at the far end of the park and they couldn’t use the athletic field there like the normally do.

We got home yesterday and had the air conditioner running the whole time we were gone, but still it was pretty hot inside. Finally last night the heat broke and it started to rain. Today it was cold and rainy all day. What a relief!

Some Summer Fun

Life goes on full of its comings and goings. A week ago Lizzy and Josh came into town for the weekend. Saturday they were at a party on Long Island, then they spent Sunday with us. We did a barbecue and had a fun time hanging out outside. Monday I went to the Bronx Zoo with Lizzy and Josh. That was a fun time too. It’s a big zoo and it took most of the day, but we saw pretty much everything. Lots of birds and reptiles. Did the monorail and the elephant was out to see. Lots of other big mammals: giraffes, rhinos, bears, tigers, lions, gorillas, gazelle and zebras to name a few. Afterwards I took them to the airport. Their flight was delayed, which worked out well because we had extra time at the zoo. However, traffic was terrible because it was rush hour, and the computer routed us on a strange route thru street-level Queens.

This last weekend Jeannie and went up to Westerlo to visit Kathleen and the kids. On Friday, her friend and neighbor John, who is the drummer for the band Martin was in, the East Berne Band, had a backyard party barbecue jam session, and invited me to sit in. He sent me a setlist so I spent a few days listening and learning the songs. Some were pretty basic bar band songs, while other were interesting and quirky. The sound was centered on groups like The Band, The J. Giles Band, and the E. Street Band with lots of extra keyboards and horns. In fact when I got there, there was another keyboard player and another horn player sitting in, so it was a big sound. Off to one side of the stage we a row of people in golf carts, who I dubbed the rolling VIP section.

The bass player Dan and drummer John are co-lead singers, and alot of the songs feature harmonies. Dan is good at directing the group from the middle of the stage, and keeping everything from devolving into chaos. So it was a good jam and a good party, and it was great to catch up with those guys. Only problem was midway thru the second set the skies turned dark and the threat of a downpour was imminent. So we had to pack up in hurry. Funny thing, but by the time we were packed up the rain was lightening up, but there was no way we were going to set everything up again. Ah well, it was a good time even if it was cut a little bit short.

That evening we hung out and played videogames with Charlie and Matthew and Abbie. Charlie amazed me by speed running sixteen stars in Super Mario 46 in about twenty minutes. He did all kinds of circuitous shortcuts and side paths and huge wall jumps, and all kinds of leaps and jumps, even plummeting from great heights land on a hidden ledge, and made it all look super easy.

The next day there was a Renaissance Faire in one of the nearby towns so we went to check that out. There was a bunch of booths selling things like jewelry, chainmail, and metal goods, boots, corsets and leather goods, wooden swords, maces and battle axes, foam swords, maces and battle axes, and even real swords, maces and battle axes. The real attraction was the cosplayers. There were tons of them, and most were very good. They ranged from authentic-ish to totally fantastic. I had no idea elves and fairies were such an important part of the Renaissance! It was a nice summer day for walking around. My only criticism is they should have had more performers. Apparently there was a joust but we missed it cuz we were having lunch, and the next show wasn’t for another three hours. Ah well.

Sunday Jeannie and I got back on the local bike path. I did twenty-two miles in a hundred minutes. Jeannie did fifteen miles, a season’s best for both of us. Tomorrow I will pass six hundred total miles for the year, on track to make twelve hundred by the end of the year.

In my recording project, I’ve laid down the lead and harmony vocals for A Sailor’s Saga, and am in the process of mixing them. Don’t tell anyone, but I’m using a touch of Auto-Tune to make them sound a bit more in tune.

Midwest Adventure, Part 2 – Art and Origami

Where were we? Ah yes, Thursday morning, the start of the CFC6 conference. Breakfast in the conference room at 7:30. Ilan has a background as an officer in the Israeli army and likes things to start early and stay on schedule. Not exactly my general vibe, but no big problem either. Bacon and eggs and all kinds of good stuff, lots more time to mingle.

The conference itself was a series of panels, presentations and discussions around various origami topics. One of the things I like about CFC is that it’s an international conference and a good fraction of the attendees were from Europe. It was four days long, so already things that happened on different days run together in my mind. I must say the level of the presentations was very high, and the topics very cool. Brandon Wong in particular demoed some base CP-generating software he’s working on.

The panels were interesting and covered topics like origami art and science, book publishing, exhibiting in galleries, teaching, leveraging social media, and ways to broaden the origami community. I’m looking to do more of all these things, but the TLDR is there’s no magic shortcuts, and all of it is alot of hard work.

I gave a presentation on folding with fivefold symmetry. It gave some background information and theory, showed a few ways to fold a pentagon from a square, and then dove into a bunch of my own models in various categories including flowers, mandala tilings, fractal/recursive tilings, Penrose tilings, domes and bowls, several of my single-sheet polyhedra, and models that combined more than one these ideas. I ended with some new work in representational figures, namely a human figure base and experiments with masks and faces.

In the evening the first night, I wound up playing pool with Brian Webb. Neither of us had played in a long time, but Brian used to be a professional pool shark back in the day, and I wasn’t as rusty as I expected, so it was alot of fun. He gave me a bunch of pointers along the way for bank shots, spin, and that kind of thing, and I actually learned a few things. Last game we played was all bank shots, and we discussed each shot before taking it. In the end the hotel wanted to close the game room because it was late. I sunk the final shot, so now I get to brag that I beat Brian at pool. Friday night the whole convention went out to a group dinner at a place that had indoor bocce, so I played a bunch a bocce games. Brian bought me a beer since that was our bet from the night before. I’d never really played bocce but it was alot of fun. Playing pool the night before was a good warm up.

Saturday morning there was an origami exhibit. It was only one day because the hotel was using the other conference rooms for other events such as weddings. It was a small exhibition but totally amazing because it was thirty or so of the world’s top folders. David Brill ran a session in which he called upon every exhibitor to explain one or more of their models. This was really interesting for me, especially to hear the newer folders or those whose wore I was less familiar with. Also interesting to hear how people develop their ideas, and how everyone has to work thru design and technical challenges, gets stuck and tends to put things down and come back to them later with fresh insight.

The Buffalo Sabres were in the NHL playoffs the whole time, in the quarter finals against the Montreal Canadiens. We watched three games while were out there, two of them at the hotel bar. Saturday night was game six, and the Sabres came from behind to win big and bring the series to t 3-3 tie, forcing game seven back in Buffalo. Unfortunately, they lost that game in overtime, but it was an extremely well-played series. And, the Sabres went from being in dead last place in December, to a long winning streak culminating in their first playoff run in seventeen years. Lots of fun. Hockey was my main sport growing up, and although I haven’t followed hockey in many years, Michelle got into it after the Olympics and I started bandwagoning when it looked like the Sabres were going to make the playoffs. Lots of fun. Here’s looking forward to next season, eh!

Meanwhile, no one in the conference thought to look for us at the bar that night, but when the game was over I found where people were doing late-night folding and hung out there a while. Some people were actually wet-folding in the hotel pool!

Listening to several days of origami-oriented talks meant there was lots of time to quietly fold. I explored several ideas from my prezzy, where I thought I could use a better example for the picture on the slide. First one I folded was a new level-2 pentagon fractal just for practice. I gave this to Beth as thank-you at the end of the conference. Next was a new variation, embedding the inner subdivision in a semi-sunken dodecahedron pattern. This one had six big faces, half the full form, so I made this one into a dome. Very cool and effective. I’m going refold it out of different paper for the OUSA convention in July. I had thought that this might make a good study to refine my long-fallow flowerball idea, but it’s good as is.

The last one was a level-3 recursive pentagon fractal. Madonna Yoder gave me a 12″ sheet of skytone paper, so I told her if it worked I’d dedicate the model to her. I figured if I was going thru all the effort, I might as well make it count. The figure is basically a pentagon divided into six smaller pentagons, and each of those divided into six smaller ones, and each of those divided into six smaller ones still! It took me basically a whole day to do the prefolding, and another half day to collapse it. Fortunately, it worked on the first try, and it came out awesome!

The trip home Sunday night was uneventful, except that we came back home into a heat wave. I had to put in the air conditioners first thing Monday morning.

Now I feel all charged up again to do origami, and there’s a bunch of new ideas I want to work on before the convention. I’ve also dusted off my web site and started looking at a long overdue update and redesign.

Midwest Adventure, Part 1 – Art and Industry

I just got back from a trip with Jeannie to the Midwest, specifically Michigan, Ohio and Indiana. The trip was centered on an origami event, CFC6 (Conference for Creators, Number 6), hosted by my good friend Beth in Ann Arbor Michigan. We’d never been to that part of the country before, so we figured we’d do a few days touristing before the conference began.

Our flight left NYC Monday morning and landed in Detroit shortly before noon. From there we had time for one daytime activity, and chose the National Museum of the Great Lakes in Toledo, Ohio. The main attraction here was a decommissioned lake freighter. As the big freighters go she was bigger than most, I think they said 800 feet long. You could go up to the bridge and down into the hold and engine room. Pretty neat. The rest of museum was housed in a regular building and featured exhibits about the history, ecology, climate, and economy of the great lakes region, with a lot about the evolution boats and ships, from indigenous people and the arrival of French fur trappers up thru the present day. The museum was situated in a larger park that was nice to walk around.

The evening we drove out to Auburn, Indiana. The main attraction there was the Auburn Cord Duesenberg Automobile Museum. I’ve been a longtime fan of Duesenberg, Cord and Auburn automobiles since I was a kid into building model cars, and this place has been on my bucket list for a long time. And it did not disappoint. For those who don’t know, these were some of the coolest classic cars ever, each with their own unique character. Duesenbergs in particular were the ultimate luxury car, big as a modern extra large SUV or monster pickup truck, but with a giant racecar engine and amazing styling and coachwork. They typically had aluminum bodies. (Each body was custom built on an engine/chassis platform.) Today they’re considered priceless, rolling works of art, with only a few hundred in existence. Twenty or so are in the museum, all meticulously restored. The ultimate Doozy is the SJ, with a supercharged engine and distinctive external exhaust pipes. The Auburn was the Duesenberg’s smaller cousin, smaller, lighter and slightly more affordable, but still with a focus on luxury and performance. They are famous for their boattail roadsters. Cord was its own thing, very advanced and a little weird for the day, being the the world’s first successful mass-manufactured front-wheel drive car, with its distinctive coffin nose and touches such as disappearing headlights. Sadly, Auburn Cord Duesenberg went out of business during the great depression. Amazing to think that these cars are all ninety years old or more, many of them over a hundred.

The museum was in the former company showroom and headquarters, and had a good selection of all of these cars, plus other historical autos including a Cadillac V-16, and a Lincoln and Chrysler from the same era, as well as a fleet of earlier models going back the the beginning of the 1900’s and the origin of automobiles. They also had some rare prototypes, some engines and few historical airplanes, and exhibits on E. L. Cord, the automotive design studio, and the history of the factory and the company, and the rise and fall of the automobile industry in Indiana.

Next door was the former manufacturing plant, which is now a classic car museum with alot of muscle cars from the 60’s, a handful of different kinds of racecars, and a broad spectrum of mainly American historical cars from the entire twentieth century. A couple 1960’s Mustangs like my own.

I will say my one big disappointment for the trip was that my other bucket-list item, the National Brass and Woodwind Museum and the Conn-Selmer factory in Elkhart, Indiana, closed sometime in 2025, even as we were beginning to plan our trip, so we never got to see that. Ah well.

Both days we had dinner at a bar nearby the museum we were visiting. I must say the general vibe of the tri-state region was exactly the opposite of exotic to me, rather it was very friendly warm and even felt familiar. The landscapes, the people, the history and context, all that. It felt alot upstate and western New York, and southern Ontario when you get out west toward London. I guess that’s what they mean by the Great Lakes Region.

Tuesday evening it was off to Ann Arbor. The convention didn’t officially start until Thursday, but there were activities slated for Wednesday. The convention was at a hotel called Webers, which was a very cool and funky hotel with a sort of art deco jazz age vibe. We watched the Sabres vs the Canadiens at the cozy, wood-paneled bar while the likes of Cannonball Adderley and Red Garland played on the PA.

Wednesday we met a bunch of our origami friends at breakfast, including Ilan and Nicolas, who run CFC and organized the conference. A short while later, a bunch of convened in the lobby and were joined by our host Beth for the main activity, a day trip into Detroit and the Detroit Institute of Art. Enough of us had a car that everyone got a ride, a pattern that continued throughout the week.

The Detroit Art Institute is a very cool museum. Its most famous and impressive work is the Detroit Industry mural by Diego Rivera, which fills all four walls of a giant hall and depicts the whole life-cycle of auto manufacturing in a complicated series of panels that merge realism, storytelling, symbolism and mythology in a way that sums up what we’ve seen so far in the Great Lakes Region perfectly. There were several other galleries including American modernists, and some Mid-Eastern and Asian collections that range from ancient Rome to the present day. Apparently there was also a furniture and industrial design collection that I missed. Ah well. It’s always good inspiration when a bunch of artists go to an art museum together.

We all got lunch, and then went to a place called Michigan Central Station, a former train station that was abandoned fell into disrepair in the later twentieth century. The city did not have enough money to demolish it and became a symbol of Detroit’s decline and misfortune. Over the last decade or so, it has been beautifully restored and is now a public attraction and event space, with the the building above the main concourse being an office tower, and overall a symbol of Detroit’s resurgence and renewal. Alot impressive stonework, particularly because you rarely see stone architecture looking new and clean.

Finally, that evening we had a barbecue at Beth’s house. It was a slightly larger group as more conference attendees came into town. It was unseasonably cool but I helped Beth build a fire in a firepit in her backyard. Beth has a very nice design studio in a building in her backyard that used to be a garage, including a large table for folding. Makes me want to rethink my own studio setup. Anyway, it was great to hang out and catch up with my origami friends in a relaxed setting. Although there’s some overlap with the OUSA regular crowd, there’s a bunch of Midwesterners I rarely see.

Okay, halfway thru the trip. The conference is set to begin Thursday morning. I’m exhausted already.

Easter Beagle Birdland

We were up in Buffalo last week for Easter, to visit my Mum and Dad, and Lizzy and Josh. Kathleen and the kids came up for Easter Sunday too. It was a fun trip and a good time. My Mum made a big Easter dinner. We watched some weird TV specials including Peter Cottontail, It’s the Easter Beagle Charlie Brown, and Happy Arbor Day Charlie Brown. Lots of chocolate, my dad really enjoyed that. Charlie is a good chess player. I haven’t played in ages so I’m pretty rusty, but nevertheless he beat me twice. We also played Risk, which was alot of fun. Michelle won that, having consolidated North America early on. On Dyngus Day, Michelle and I visited the Buffalo Zoo, which was a fun time too. I haven’t been there in years. They really have alot of great animals in a relatively small space. Lions, tigers, rhinos, gorillas, giraffes, a Komodo dragon, lots of other reptiles, birds and other creatures, and the largest polar bear I’ve ever seen. That night we all went to play trivia with Lizzy, which was alot of fun too. The Sabres were on TV, having just clinched the playoffs. Back home Wednesday night, Michelle and I went to see the Sabres vs. the Rangers at Madison Square Garden. The Sabres are hot this year and going to the playoffs for the first time in many years. The ended up winning 5-3. It was a well-played game on both sides.

I’ve been binge-watching 1980’s scifi/action movies. So far the list includes Big Trouble in Little China, History of the World Part One (I know, it’s a comedy not action/scifi), Spaceballs, Escape from New York, and first Two Terminator movies. Now I’ve started thinking about it and there’s a ton of fun, cool movies from when I was a teenager that I haven’t seen in many years.

The weather had finally turned nice. I’ve been biking five days in a row. This week I’m also getting rolling on a bunch of springtime projects including getting some work done on the mustang, and project dirt.

A-Hoppin’ an’ A-Boppin’

It’s been a busy few weeks. Winter is over and one or twice a week we get a day nice enough to be hopeful that spring will be here any day now. I’ve been going into the city alot recently. The week after our trip to Chicago we went to a tribute concert to Billy Joel at Carnegie Hall. I’d never been to Carnegie Hall before (even though I practice every day), so that was pretty cool. The concert itself was great. The band was Billy Joel’s backing band, and a series of guest artists sang a bunch of his hits and deep tracks, some doing pretty different interpretations. Among the highlights were the singer who did River of Dreams on ukulele, and Natalie Merchant’s rendition of Allentown, which Michelle called “the saddest version ever”.

The week after that we saw Kurt Elling at Birdland, with the Future of Jazz big band. The show was excellent, and afterwards we were talking to the bass player because his father was sitting next to us in the audience. Kurt did Joco’s Three Views of a Secret and he remarked that he wasn’t really familiar with the song and it blew his mind. I was thinking, you’re a jazz bassist in a big band and you don’t know the record Word of Mouth? Kids today I tell you.

Only a couple days after that I went into the city for work, mainly to go to lunch and say goodbye to my friend Sukhi. She was the product manager on our product Permission Slip, but CR is getting out of the privacy business, so she’s moving on. The general vibe of the company now is fear and uncertainty, so it makes me wonder about the future of the Innovation Lab.

Finally, Jeannie and I took a quick little trip to Boston for a special event for the Global Jukebox. It was in induction ceremony for the Americana Roots and Folk Music Hall of Fame, and Alan Lomax was one of the honorees. Anna accepted the award on his behalf, and got to invite a number of people as guest to the ceremony. So we were part of her entourage. I met Odysseus and his family, and some others of the Lomax clan, and Kiki and Robert were there too. The event took place a beautiful old theatre. There was a cocktail hour in the lobby with amazing bacon Old-fasioned’s. The main event was a dinner with the tables set up on an enormous stage with the band turned around facing us. The house band that played a few songs after each honoree’s acceptance speech, with numerous guests. All very good. Anna mentioned the Global Jukebox in her speech and me by name, so I got to stand up and take a box. Very kind of her.

Finally, my band Spacecats had a gig last Friday. It was a good crowd and the music went over well, although we didn’t make much money. One of the new songs we did was Joy Spring. Another was a jazz interpretation of Black Hole Sun by Soundgarden. This went over amazingly well. Several people sitting way over at the bar came out to stand in front of the stage and record us with their phones.

Meanwhile, like I said we’ve had a few nice days. Over the last two weekends I began the spring cycle of yardwork by raking up all the leaves and debris on the lawn and in the flowerbeds and under the hedges, and did a little but of trimming. I also got the Mustang out on the road for the first time this season. Happily it started right up, even after a brutally cold winter. But now I need to get it into the shop for an oil change, a soft tire, and a bunch of other minor issues. Ah well. Maybe this is the year I’ll finally get it painted.

I’ve also been able to get out on my bike a bunch of times, maybe two or three days a week. I’m over 20 rides and 120 miles for the year already. I’m hoping start going pretty much every day soon.

Ah, spring!!!