Travel – Zing Blog 2

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!!!

Origami Chicago

And all at once, spring is here! It got up to seventy degrees today, and all the snow is gone. Nothing much is growing yet, but the grass has turned from greyish-brown back to something resembling greenish. Can’t wait to take a nice long bike ride tomorrow.

Jeannie and I just got back from a trip to Chicago. The main purpose of the trip was to go to CoCon, the Chicago Origami Convention. We went four years ago and had a great time, so we decided to do it again. We flew out Thursday morning to give us a couple days to go sightseeing before the convention started. To me Chicago has a great vibe, somehow combining the best of New York City and Buffalo. The first day we went to the Adler Planetarium. It was pretty cool. It had some shows in the dome including a tour of the solar system and the current state of big astronomy in Chile, plus a bunch of exhibits including a Gemini capsule. After that we walked around the shore of Lake Michigan for a little while. It was a strangely foggy day. We ended up at the Field Museum if Natural History, home of the famous Tyrannosaurus Rex Sue. We went there last time we were in Chicago, but it was so cool we figured we’d go back, being right next door the planetarium and all. They had a bunch of other cool exhibits, including one documenting melting glaciers around the world. And I must say, as a former exhibit designer, whoever does the exhibits there does and amazing job! That evening we walked around downtown near our hotel and got genuine Chicago-style pizza.

Friday we went to the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry. This was a pretty amazing place. Lots of stuff about transportation, trains, airplanes, etc. The have an entire World War II U-Boat that was captured toward the end of the war, and brought the place in the 1950’s. You can take a guided tour inside. There’s also an exhibit that’s a re-creation of a coal mine, taking you thru the history of mining machinery for the last hundred and twenty years. One had a giant model train diorama that demonstrated to role of rail in the cycle raw materials, heavy manufacturing, the distribution of goods, and travel. Elsewhere was an entire train from the F.D.R. era, an early high-speed streamline passenger train made of stainless steel. For me one of the highlights was a 1929 Duesenberg J automobile. It’s my favorite car of all time and I built several models of them as a kid. I’ve never seen one in person before. They’re surprisingly huge! We wanted to go to the Museum of Contemporary Art too, but I guess that’ll hafta wait for next time.

Friday evening was the start of the convention. I set up my exhibit, which did not include any really large models since I had fly with it in my luggage, in the largest box that would fit in my backpack, and spent the rest of the evening catching up with my origami friends. A bunch of us went to the Irish pub around the corner from the hotel later on. Saturday and Sunday I taught several classes, including one for my Flying Saucer and Retro Rocket, another for my Platypus, and a third for my single-sheet polyhedron Semi-Sunken Icosahedron. Whew! I also took a couple classes, including one on making masks and faces by wetfolding thick watercolor paper, and another on a human figure model. This got my creative juices flowing. In evening folding I designed a human figure from a pentagon, since the human form has five major appendages. The idea has been in the back of my mind for a long time, but the folding was pretty spontaneous, and it turned out surprisingly well. I’m thinking of it as a base, and plan to fold a few more figures and bring out different kinds of character in them. I was experimenting more with faces, trying to come up with a good pattern for a face bass so the features line up in the correct place and in good proportion, and also to incorporate things like cheeks, jawlines and brow ridges to make it more lifelike. On the way home I got the idea to try a face out of pentagon too.

After classes Jeannie and took a walk to Daly Plaza, where they have that Picasso, and the next day out the end of Navy Pier, where there’s a statue of Bob Newhart of all people. By Sunday the weather was starting to turn nice. It was sunny and warm-ish, but very windy out on the lake.

Now I’m a folding mood, and have started in on a new version of my semi-sunken dodecahedron. Want to have some new stuff the show at the next couple conventions.

I can bring you up to speed on the music scene too. My Spellbound project is at the phase where I’m listening back to mixes of the first six songs, and they all sound pretty great. There’s still one more song to go, but there’s alot of work ahead on that one so I think I may downshift on it for a while to make more time to do origami in the next few months. Meanwhile, I successfully got my two audio interfaces working together to form a single sixteen-track studio! This is a pretty big accomplishment. Next rehearsal we’re gonna do here and hopefully it’ll all go smoothly on the tech side and we can focus on getting comfortable jamming with the setup. After that we have a couple regular rehearsals for a gig coming up at the end of March. We’ll use that time to sharpen up our originals and pick which songs we want to record. So we’re looking at setting up some recording sessions in April. We’ll keep you posted as to how the situation shapes up.

Cold and Colder

It’s been a deep freeze here the last few weeks. The big snow from a couple weeks ago is still on the ground, with big plies of it on the sides of all the roads turning dirtier by the day. It’s even been to cold for road salt to work.

Jeannie and I managed to get in a little getaway in the form of a trip to Florida. Last year we went all around south Florida, to the Keys, the Everglades, Ft. Lauderdale and Miami beach. This year we decided to focus mainly on Key Largo and Key West.

The morning we left New York City it was eight degrees out, and we had to get up super early for our flight. Unfortunately, the flight was canceled, and they booked us on a later flight with a connection in Atlanta. There was a snowstorm in Atlanta, so the second flight was delayed. By the time we got to Key Largo it was after dark and we were exhausted. The original plan was to have lunch at the beach bar next to our hotel, but instead we had dinner there and then pretty much went straight to bed. Even though it was cold out, it was forty degrees warmer than at home! On the plus side, I watched the new Spinäl Täp movie on the plane and it was very funny.

It was cold in Florida too! When we got up the next morning it was thirty-eight degrees out, and got up to the mid-forties that day. Each day was warmer then the last but it was far to cold to go into the water until the last day. The first day we went to a local state park with mangrove groves and some nice nature walks. They also had alot of info on the coral reef offshore and all the different kinds of sea life to be found there. This was obviously aimed at divers. They had snorkeling trips but they were cancelled that day. They had kayak rentals but it was too cold for that. We also checked out a local bird sanctuary that had a trail on the bay side of the island too. The bay was windy and the water choppy. I thought it was just an urban legend that iguanas start falling out of the trees when the weather gets cold, but they were all over, lying on the ground in a stupor.

The hotel had a really nice grounds like a garden. It was too cold for the pool, but the hot tub felt amazing and was a good place to watch the sun go down. That night we found a great seafood restaurant called the Fish House. Half the menu was a matrix of different kinds of fish and ways to prepare it.

The next day, Monday was full of activity. Our first stop was a place called Theater of the Sea, which had live dolphin and sea lion shows, plus turtles and alligators and birds and other things. The alligators didn’t do much because of the cold. It was a fun place, much more low key than a place like Sea World, and you got a bit a behind-the-scenes look at the training and care of the animals. In addition to the shows there’s rescue and rehabilitation going on. The site was a former quarry that had been flooded with sea water, so they all had lots of space in a set of interconnected pools that were like inlets. As park guests we moved around to the different pools, one for the dolphins, another for the sea lions, etc., and at one end they had an area for the show with bleachers set up.

Next was a glass-bottomed boat tour of the reef. This was pretty cool too, and we saw alot including lots of different kinds of fish, rays, a shark, sea turtles, and of course coral and sponges and other things. After that we walked around the marina for a little while admiring the rich people’s houses and boats, and had a late lunch at a dockside bar. The last stop of the day was a sunset cruise on a little eight-passenger pontoon boat. Since it was still pretty cold and windy out on the open water of the Florida Bay, the captain took us thru the channel to the ocean side, but at point in Key Largo there’s a lagoon and extensive mangrove groves between the island and the ocean. So we got to check out the mangroves by boat after all. We went back to the Fish House for dinner that night since we like it so much.

Tuesday the plan was to make our way out to Key West in a leisurely fashion, taking in the sites along the way. There was a place called the Discover Center that was a museum about the history of the keys, and also had nice beach to walk along. Up the road a little further was the Dolphin Research Center, that had alot of dolphins, many of them rescues, and training going there too. I guess maybe someday some of those dolphins will turn pro. There were a couple of state parks too. The first one I think was on Long Key, and it was a beautiful sunny day so we put on shorts and sandals and waded into the ocean to get our feet wet (still wearing light jackets). The second one was called Bahia Honda, and had more beaches plus a section of the old train bridge from the 1930’s that you could go walk out on. Pretty neat.

We arrived in Key West late afternoon. Our hotel was the Hibiscus, very nice, and just a couple block from the beach where they have the marker for the southernmost point in the continental U.S.A. We walked around for a while and watched the sunset over the ocean, then went out to dinner.

Wednesday we got up early because we were doing a day trip to Dry Tortuga. The boat leaves port at 8am, and you have to check in for boarding around seven. So we got up at six while it was still dark and walked over to the marina district as the sun was coming up (on the opposite side from where it had set, strangely enough). Key West had a large population of wild chickens, so every block there was one or more roosters crowing cock-a-doodle-doo. It was about a half hour walk, and it’s a very picturesque town.

Dry Tortuga is the westernmost of the keys and can only be reached by boat or seaplane. It has a long history as a strategic outpost in the age of sail, and is now a National Park and home to an historic fort build in the mid-nineteenth century. The boat ride was seventy miles, a little over two hours. The boat was quite nice with breakfast and seating inside and out. It was warm enough to be comfortable sitting outside and watching the ocean go by. When we got there the first thing we did was took a tour of the fort. Our guide was very knowledgable and engaging. The fort was huge, so we explored it on our own for a while. Then we got our lunch from the boat and ate it out in the dock area. After lunch we explored the rest of the island. There were seaplanes pulled up on the beach and you could see them up close, which was cool. From time to time you could see them take off and land. Beyond that was more beach, and a population of frigate birds make their home on the island. We were temped to go swimming, but it was not quite warm enough. They also had snorkeling, which was also tempting, since we didn’t get to go out on the reef back in Key Largo. Apparently there’s some interesting sea life among the ruins of the old coaling docks. When we got back to Key West it was happy hour, so we found a dockside bar and got a bunch of appetizers for dinner.

Thursday was our last day, and the weather was finally warm. I started the day by finally going for a swim in ocean at the beach near our hotel! The water was beautiful and clean and clear and beach was pure white sand. I was only person in the water that morning. After that we walked around town and checked out some book stores and art galleries. Then it started to rain and the temperature dropped again. We hit the road back to Key Largo, hoping to get ahead to the weather. We got a late lunch or early dinner at the beach bar next to the hotel we’d stayed at a few days before. All the iguanas that had been on the ground around there were gone, hopefully back in their trees. Then it was on to the airport and home, and luckily no delays or complications this time.

Back in New York it was still bitter cold, and nothing had melted at all. When we got up Friday morning it was six degrees out! It was cold all weekend. We were thinking of going skiing Saturday but it was supposed to get down to zero up at the mountain, we we bagged it. Just as well, they closed the mountain due to the extreme cold.

Tomorrow it’s supposed to break freezing in the afternoon. I wonder if it’ll be warm enough for a bike ride.

A Long Winter’s Nap

We just finished a nice long winter holidays. Jeannie and I had two full weeks off from work, and Michelle had off alot of those days too. Nice to relax and wind down and let your mind go back to its natural shape without a whole day to day pressures. And it’s a good thing too, I was getting pretty run down.

Of the course the holidays are busy in their own way. We did lots of baking, and hosted first and engagement party for Lizzy and Josh, and then Christmas dinner with Mary and Lou and family. On boxing day we went up to Buffalo and visited with my parents, Kathleen and all the kids, and Lizzy and Josh. While we were up there we also got together with Larry and Jackie for an evening of dinner and drinks and catching up on things. Apparently Larry is into improvising jazz on the vibes these days. Good to know if I ever move back there and want to start a new jazz group. He also gave me some tips to improve my drumming. On New Year’s Eve we went out to visit Nick and Lisa and played a bunch of games and watched the ball drop. Fun time.

This was one of the worst winter drives up and back in years. It was freezing rain both ways, slippery and poor visibility. Also, on the drive up, part of the exhaust system went kaput and started making an awful noise for the rest of the trip.

It was a very Lego Christmas in our house this year. Everyone got legos, including all Kathleen’s kids. Also, a few months ago I got a fancy lego castle as a spiff from some bonus points at work, the kind you have to spend on one of a handful of stores. It was Schloss Neuschwanstein, the famous castle in the Bavarian Alps. Part of the Architecture series, it’s a really big model, with several thousand pieces. I started building it sometime after Thanksgiving and finished the last day of winter break. I must say it looks really cool. Next time I play with legos it will be attacked by spaceships and dinosaurs.

We thought of going skiing last Saturday, but there’s not enough snow yet in the places we go in the Catskills and Berkshires. Our favorite mountain, Catamount, had only three lifts and a handful of trails open, less then half the mountain. Ah well, let’s hope for snow.

Meanwhile I got out on my bike twice already in the new year. If the weather is above freezing and it’s not too windy I can bike comfortably. So hopefully I can keep at it semi-regularly thru the winter. I’m happy to say I’m back to a full weightlifting workout too, and feeling good, which is not always the case this time of year.

I also worked a lot on my forthcoming album Spellbound: In the Dead of Winter. More on that next post.

Today we’re back to work and so far so good.

Rollin’ and Foldin’

The weather continues to get colder and darker and stormier. Once it gets below forty degrees of so, biking gets more difficult, especially if it’s windy. So now I’m down to biking every other day or so, and when I go I gotta bundle up. A week ago I did my longest ride of the season, indeed my longest ride in quite a few years. Over twenty-eight miles in just a little over two hours. I’m hoping I’ll get another long ride or two in before winter arrives, but if that’s my longest this year I’m satisfied. The days are short and it’s dark alot, so next time I’ll go for speed to see how far I can go in ninety minutes.

Last Friday Jeannie and I went to see Branford Marsalis playing with his quartet at SUNY Purchase. They have a very nice concert hall there, although lots of little things about it are weird, including the entrance to the venue being in a tunnel, and the lack of a center aisle of doors in back means the entrance to the hall from the lobby is a little made of side hallways. Anyway the show was great. Branford is one of my favorite sax players around today. The piano player was Joey Calderazzo, who is amazing, and so were the rhythm section. The mainly band played an interoperation of the Keith Jarret album Belonging and to to some really great places.

Saturday we went up to Boston for the OrigaMIT convention. The special guest was my friend John Montroll, who had never attended an OrigaMIT convention before, so that was a fun surprise. I also met his sister and nephew, who is a professor of mathematics and computer science. John gave a talk on his approach to origami design, which was very cool. His style of delivery is pretty breezy and laid back, so if you’re not paying attention you’ll miss how deep what alot of what he has to say is.

I folded several new models for my exhibit. I taught my Platypus, so I did a new rendition of that out of purple tissue foil; it came out very nice. I also had a new version of my Lizard and Turtle, both folded out a sheet of beautiful hand-painted paper I bought in Venice, Italy when we were there a few years back. The other model I’ve been working on is a Dimpled Dodecahedron. I came up with a layout folded from a decagon that has polar symmetry. Back in July at the OUSA convention John helped me refine the layout to make the 3-D folding phase more tractable. It turns out to be a very difficult model to fold because as it accumulates layers inside that zigzag in strange ways and tend to push the model open like a budding flower. So most of the work I’ve been doing has been to manage the layers and make them organized and flat to mitigate that tendency. I got thru most of the southern hemisphere and am up to the lock at the south pole, where three tabs are supposed to go together in a pinwheel. Unfortunately, I didn’t quite have the worked out in time for the convention. I’m sort of in the Zeno’s paradox phase: every time I try, I get half the remaining distance to the finish line.