Evidently, I’ve been on blogging hiatus lately, enough to cause Leon to link to a certain other website instead. No real excuse, other than discovering BitTorrent and the availability of shows you can’t get on cable around here, plus way too much video gaming. Briefly, what’s happened in the last few months.
I spent five weeks starting in May living with Susan in Oakland, having managed to swing working out of the Emeryville office for the duration. I actually drove the Integra down there in the span of two days and 800 miles. For those attempting a similar trip, I shall simply state that I-5 through Oregon is extremely boring (I counted 27 pieces of roadkill and listened to many country stations), and that Roseburg is not exactly halfway between Seattle and Oakland. Ashland seems to be a neat place though.
The cohabitation experiment went well, although there are some ignoble traits of my personality that are in dire need of deprogramming. More importantly, I think I’m committing myself to moving down to California in a time frame of six months - at least, I’ve started to tell everyone this, canceled my opera subscription, etc. A very important order of business is to get my bathroom remodelled before then. The first contractor I’ve had in recently quoted me upwards of $20 k, which was a grand scale of ridiculousness for a 5×7 room even without the solid gold fixtures which really weren’t on the plan to begin with.
Beginning of July we took a week off work to attend two weddings. Jeff and Cathy were married in Orange County. We looked in at the Getty museum, then jetted off to Tampa via Dallas and drove to Orlando where we spent three days eating too much and getting theme parked out at Disneyworld. Susan now has hard photographic evidence of what happens when I get near the “it’s a small world” ride - it’s quite disturbing. Then it was back to Tampa for Ben and Laura’s wedding. Hurricane Dennis chose that weekend to come ashore but fortunately gave Tampa a miss, although it did get quite gusty at times.
Shades of my former piano life managed to track me down a couple of weeks ago when I went to see a friend play at the Summer Festival of the Seattle Chamber Music Society. Jonathan and I met when we were both winners at the Canadian Music Competition - that first infamous year when due to budget cutbacks the winners didn’t get to play with orchestra. (Story of my life - it took me years to make it to the CMC finals, let alone past the CMC provincials.) Anyways, I think I was 19 and he was all of about 8 at the time. He’s grown up to be a little musical terror since then, studying piano under Lorraine (my old piano teacher) as well as continuing with violin. Lorraine made the trip down to Seattle to attend the concert, so it was nice to catch up with her after a few years and also watch Jonathan, barely a teenager, tear through utterly difficult piano and violin pieces and encore with two Paganini caprice etudes on the violin.
Work has been various degrees of stress lately. SIGGRAPH is next week (begins for me on Sunday morning), if PRMan is your cup of tea you’ll hear exactly what I’ve been working on for the last two months next Wednesday at the User’s Group Meeting. The news may partially excuse my recent mental state.
Finally, I’ll mention that I saw Fantastic Four yesterday, and now I can’t decide which was worse, that or Daredevil with Ben Affleck. Oddity: I saw two people with Incredibles shirts in the span of two minutes while walking to the theatre, one of whom ended up in the audience. Pixar conspiracy? Anyways, F4 wasn’t as bad as Punisher (the Dolph Lundgren version!), but Dolph at least had camp value. Save your money.