Well it\u2019s the second half of the summer now, and we\u2019re getting our first real heat wave. It\u2019s been in the 90\u2019s since last week, with no rain for a change, and no end in sight. We\u2019re getting peppers and tomatoes from our garden daily now. And even though we\u2019ve been busy, we\u2019ve had some time to enjoy summer activities. We took the kids to Playland last Friday evening and the kids enjoyed the rides and we saw fireworks. Michelle is exactly 4 feet tall, which was the cutoff for a lot of rides, and it some of the ride operators were being extra picky. They wouldn\u2019t let her on the big rollercoaster (too short), and then later they almost wouldn\u2019t let her on some the kiddie rides (too tall)! They wouldn\u2019t let me on the bumper cars for being too tall. The park has a bunch of old, classic rides from the 1920\u2019s. The carousel had a genuine calliope, sort of a player piano crossed with a pipe organ and robot percussion section, that was fascinating to watch and listen to.<\/p>\n
We went to beach on Sunday, which was great, except for on the ride home the car started making trouble, one of the brakes was overheating and seizing up. It\u2019s in the shop now, but the car has just about 100,000 miles on it, so we\u2019re starting to think about how long we want to keep it and keep repairing it. There are a lot of things I like about the Jeep, and over all it\u2019s in pretty good shape, so it\u2019s tempting to just keep it running. On the other hand, that\u2019s the strategy we\u2019re following with Jeannie\u2019s car, so we don\u2019t want to be in the situation where we need to replace both cars at the same time. And of course to replace it would be a whole research project to figure out what kind of vehicle to replace it with, and it\u2019s gonna take a whole lot of precious time to do it right. Since I\u2019m so tall, most of the cars our there are not good for me to drive, and even a lot of larger SUV\u2019s are not well designed for tall people. Right now is not a good time for it\u2019s since we have a camping trip coming up this weekend, and another road trip a couple weeks after that. Still, I think we better start looking into it so we\u2019re prepared.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve been making progress on a bunch of side projects. Luckily we\u2019ve had no major home repairs or other projects of necessity for a little while, and things are at an even keel for the time being with my job, so I\u2019ve been doing fun stuff. I\u2019ve basically taken the summer off from working on origami and my book, since I was jamming on it really hard back in May and June. But it\u2019s getting close to the top of the list as other things get done. I dusted off the Foldinator and began development of version 2.0. I worked out a format for Origami XML, and posted a first build. The second build will be along in a few weeks. I stated redoing my web site in PHP to support dynamic pages, and have implemented the first set of scripts. Still on the todo list is take pictures of all my new 2009 origami models, which will happen sometime this fall.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve been making great progress with music. I bought a guitar a few weeks ago, and have been playing it enough that I\u2019m starting to get somewhere. I\u2019m think of writing a guitar based song even, something in the approximate style of Greg Lake. That will be on a future project, as this one is nearing the end. My friend Erik has agreed and to help me mix and master my record, which is great news. And I finished a complete song in record time in July. Now I\u2019m working on the ninth and final song for my record, with the help of my friend John. More on that in a future post.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Well it\u2019s the second half of the summer now, and we\u2019re getting our first real heat wave. It\u2019s been in the 90\u2019s since last week, with no rain for a change, and no end in sight. We\u2019re getting peppers and tomatoes from our garden daily now. And even though we\u2019ve been busy, we\u2019ve had some … Continue reading “Deep Summer”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,11,14,15,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-660","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-automotive","category-general","category-music","category-origami","category-software"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/660","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=660"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/660\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=660"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=660"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=660"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}