The Long Ride Back to Normal

Drove back from Connecticut with JW today, got in around 6:30 PM or so. We took a trip through the Yale Art Gallery while we were in New Haven, and had lunch at Claire's. The gallery seems to have a pretty small space, though we only visited the first floor. On display: Several dozen freaky clown face photos peering out through frosted glass, a film of a dapper gentleman literally kicking some peasant in the ass over and over, a bunch of sculptures of what appeared to be College Spray Paint Rocks (i.e., RIT: The Quarter Mile's Rock, Tufts: The Cannon - or is theirs an elephant?), drawings of hand-turkeys cross-cut with strong lines to fool you into not noticing their true nature, a sketch-book-animation of a woman pouring water between two cups, and a number of paintings featuring three buses traveling through a town square (with different Photoshop filters applied to each).

Classy-tacular.

This evening involved a very low key dessert, wine, and conversation evening at some friends' of JW's place. We talked about mortality rates during pregnancy, tuberculosis, stockings, cookies, champagne, and pediatrics. It was a medically themed evening, indeed.

We've decided that next week, we'll start up with our exercisamacation again, after using the remainder of 2009 to repair our upheaved lives. I believe I don't have any more lessons this year until next semester. Something like that; I'll have to talk to DZ.

Every so often, when learning to play an instrument, you come back to it to discover that you can do something that you couldn't do before. On Saturday I made such a leap, solidified today in my brother's living room. It's a little jazz line that I picked up from Duke Ellington's C-Jam Blues, off of Takin' The 'A' Train (trumpet, I believe). It's the solo from the first four bar break. I used to have trouble playing it properly in time, as I wasn't capable of playing a down stroke on one string (D, for instance) immediately followed by an up stroke on the string below that (A, for instance). I'd have to pause for an instant to get my pick up over the D string, back to the A string. I seem to be able to do this now, which makes me quite happy.

Progress can be made, and it's glorious when you can see it happening.

Tomorrow's my first day of work after this week long break - the office ought to be pretty quiet, I think, and I might finally have an opportunity to file my expense reports from the year. (Two from May, one or two from... October or so?) That, I think, will be my first order of business.

I should find out if I have class tomorrow. (Update 30 seconds after writing that sentence: I don't!) This may give me an opportunity to head to the mall to fetch my (brother's) laptop, and perhaps pick up an external keyboard to compliment my new, spifftacular 30" monitor. Oh, yes, you read that right boys and girls: 30 inches of monitor goodness. My computer can't even run WoW at that resolution - it chugs away at around 9 fps.

I think it's probably high time I start a fourth blog (followed by a fifth) for technical topics. I realized that I should probably find somewhere to record all the things I learn at work, trying to do my job. Often I spend hours scouring the Internet looking for information on this or that, and it might actually be useful to the world if I could aggregate and consolidate that information gathering into a form that will save other people time. Not a bad idea.

Blog number five will be for random works of fiction. How I intend to have time to write in all these, I don't know, but it should at least be a good time.