Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

Some recordings of our parade music from band camp.  They’re a long way from the Sheherazade of our spring concert!  Percussion is way over-emphasized in these due to the room where we did the recording, but it’s OK by me because they bring it righteously.  We’re a little light in some areas (we march about 45, half the size of our concert band.  And only one clarinet?!  Calling Mrs. Perils…), but I hafta say, in my unbiased opinion, the trumpets ride into each song like the damn cavalry.  You really have to be a band geek to play more than one or two of these, or else you want multiple 80s-era flashbacks.  I’m posting them mostly for my marching-band brother, and maybe my mom.

I think these are going to be really fun in the parades we have scheduled this summer.  As we practice marching through the neighborhood near our rehearsal space, we pick up a camp following of kids and adults as they come out of their houses in slack-jawed amazement (and maybe annoyance), and then follow us gleefully from block to block.  I like to think we’ve given them a little ray of sunshine in this extended spring of gloomy weather.

Jai Ho, the theme song from the movie Slumdog Millionaire. Interesting mixture of Indian rhythms and motifs and pop-song refrain.

[audio:http://phil2bin.com/sounds/05_JAI_HO.mp3]

Pick Up The Pieces. Your Average White Band.  Nice trumpet breakout in the middle:

[audio:http://phil2bin.com/sounds/09_PICK_UP_THE_PIECES.mp3]

Mas Que Nada, a sultry samba.  It’ll be summer here sometime… I first heard this in college by Sergio Mendes/Brasil 66. We do a drill routine during the 16-bar percussion feature:

[audio:http://phil2bin.com/sounds/08_MAS_QUE_NADA.mp3]

Let’s Groove - Earth, Wind & Fire.

[audio:http://phil2bin.com/sounds/04_LETS_GROOVE.mp3]

Bad Romance, Lady Gaga. Not an 80s song.

[audio:http://phil2bin.com/sounds/10_BAD_ROMANCE.mp3]

Don’t Stop - Fleetwood Mac:

[audio:http://phil2bin.com/sounds/01_DONT_STOP.mp3]

Soak Up The Sun - Sheryl Crow:

[audio:http://phil2bin.com/sounds/01_SOAK_UP_THE_SUN.mp3]

Americans We - Henry Fillmore. Just to show you we can play a straight-on Fourth of July march. And follow the dynamics now & then:

[audio:http://phil2bin.com/sounds/07_AMERICANS_WE.mp3]

Gimme Some Lovin’:

[audio:http://phil2bin.com/sounds/06_GIMME_SOME_LOVIN.mp3]

Mickey:

[audio:http://phil2bin.com/sounds/03_MICKEY.mp3]

Drumline cadence when we’re marching, not playing.  You really have to be a band geek to listen to this:

[audio:http://phil2bin.com/sounds/11_DRUMLINE_CADENCE_2010.mp3]

Still chewing on May here.  One of the fun things we did was band camp with Rainbow City Band.  It was held over a weekend at Fort Worden in Port Townsend (where most of the movie Officer and a Gentleman was filmed), and it represents sort of a breakpoint between the sit-down concert season and the less-structured marching season.  The fun started on a Friday night with a music rehearsal (of course), then a talent show that sounded like a gas.  We missed it, because I was out of town the week before, and didn’t arrive at SeaTac until nearly midnight Friday.

Mrs. Perils & I got up at 5 Saturday morning in order to catch a ferry at 6:10, as I really wanted to attend all of the planned activities on Saturday.  And planned they were.  Even as a late arrival, I still participated in 1 sectional, three music rehearsals and 3 marching/playing rehearsals in about 36 hours. In between, there were festive mealtimes in a dining hall where we sat at various tables and really got acquainted with other band members.  Our Tuesday rehearsals are so tightly focused, and the space is so cramped, that I actually had not met many of the people from the other side of the band. I was gratified by the warm and ready acceptance of Mrs. Perils, and of us as an entity.

The piece de resistence occurred Saturday night. The theme for the weekend was Alice In Wonderland and, after our post-dinner music rehearsal came a Mad Hatter’s Tea Party.  All of the communications about Band Camp had encouraged costumes, but since I was out of town the previous week I never got anything together. This, as it turns out, was a huge mistake.  The costumes at the party ranged from clever to extravagant.  There was a fully-formed green caterpillar with a hookah, Tweedle Dee & Dum, a Cheshire Cat, various playing cards including the Queen of Hearts with a formidable-looking axe, and one or two Alices in drag.  The costume that tickled me the most, however, was a guy in street clothes with a pregnancy tester hanging around his neck.  When we asked what he was supposed to be, he looked at it, frowned, and said, “I’m LATE! I’m LATE! I’m LATE for a very important DATE!”  There were numerous tables with various board and card games going on, and every 20 minutes or so, the Mad Hatter would scurry around the room forcing people to move and mix with others at different games.  Among all of the wine and other beverages and hors d’oeuvres, someone uncorked a huge barrel of a deadly concoction called Strip and Go Naked (contents: beer, lemonade, vodka), as if this occasion needed more encouragement.

We slept in a large dormitory building that used to be barracks at the Fort, and the organizer thoughtfully polled everyone regarding their bedtime/noise level preferences, and arranged our accommodations accordingly.  We were fortunate to land at the end of the “quiet” folks, as there was apparently an after-party to the tea party that left one wing of the band decidedly fuzzy Sunday morning.

At one point during our marching practice, we were approaching a chapel in which a wedding had just been consummated, and it was our (or their) misfortune that we were just finishing Bad Romance (Lady Gaga).  We tried to make it up to them by playing Over The Rainbow and Don’t Stop, but I’m not sure they were amused, and it seemed politic for us to hie ourselves to another part of the facility.  One other amusing thing: a guy who played French horn during concert season is playing Glockenspiel for marching, explaining that he’s bisectional.

We got a lot of work done, and had a great time.  Even got several beach walks in (click to enlarge):

The trumpet section…and the perspective of the drumline

I see that May has gotten away from me, but here’s a sorta-Memorial Day post anyway.  The last time I visited my mom, I was startled to run across this whilst rummaging in drawers and boxes looking for the gold ingots I know are around the house somewhere (click to enlarge):

The “W PHILBIN” is my great-grandfather, and “PHILIP” is my grandfather. He would have been a little over 16 at this rendezvous with law enforcement.  This episode was never mentioned among the tales of hard work and Depression-era gypsy-wandering that my grandparents related.  The story was that, when he turned 13, my great-grandfather bought him a “suit of clothes” and turned him out of the house to fend for himself.  My great-grandparents were middle-class people, so that treatment seems to be more of a custom of the time than an economic necessity (although they had 7 kids). The presumption was that he found his way into the workforce and began building the stable life that I observed him living.

I know that my grandfather knocked around in the southwest sometime in the years before the Navy and meeting my grandmother in Waukegan, but I never knew what exactly he was doing.  Was this the end of that sojourn, a white flag of surrender, or was it another excursion entirely?  What did he do to attract the attention of the St. Louis police?  Was he incarcerated, or in protective custody?

Despite the best intentions of Memorial Day, people slip inexorably through our fingers, their essences yellowing and crumbling in the closets of our recollection.

Fully decompressed now from my two weeks on the road, and today (Saturday) slaps me upside the head with some true spring weather.  Son and girlfriend took Mrs. Perils off to Index for a Mother’s Day rock-climb, and I’m mellowing in a coffeehouse after mowing the lawn.

As mentioned previously, I followed my monthly Milwaukee gig with a trip to Atlanta to attend the Microsoft Convergence 2010 conference.  One of my clients uses one of MSFT’s ERP packages (Navision), and we’re about to undergo a significant upgrade, so a handful of us attended in order to learn what changes were afoot and to perhaps apprehend additional ways we could use the software.  Since my youngest brother lives in a northern suburb of Atlanta, I bunked out at his house for the 4-day conference and rode the MARTA rail system right up to the doors of the Georgia World Convention Center.

The first day, I arrived and thought I could just saunter into the first session.  What I didn’t realize was that 8500 people were attending the conference.  Registration reminded me of a huge Customs operation, perhaps what it might have been like to land at Ellis Island.  The whole thing was very well-done, though - everything ran like Swiss trains.  It was lavishly catered, at least in the context of other things like this I’ve attended.  The first night, there was a reception with all kinds of performers, and about 15 different food a beverage kiosks scattered around a massive hall:

(Shaquille O’Neal clone)

In another area, there were several hundred networked PCs set up so attendees could run tutorials and demos on their particular software package (4 ERP systems were represented, plus several other productivity tools like CRM):

One thing that was kind of hilarious was hearing the session moderators repeatedly say, “if you Goo…uh…BING it…”

On the Tuesday evening that the conference ended, my brother & sister-in-law had tickets to a Jimmy Buffett concert at an outdoor venue south of town.  I rode the train down to meet them in the parking lot, little realizing what an event the pre-concert tailgate is for a Buffett concert (it was my first, but they’ve been Parrotheads for years, and they love going diving in the Florida Keys).  You could walk around the parking lot and encounter various tableaux, almost like dioramas, often with a bowl of jello shooters set out like Halloween candy.  The guys below had built a tiki bar out of bamboo especially for the concert.  The guy sitting behind the bar sported a pair of false (I assume/hope) buttocks that he invited all & sundry to autograph (Click any photo to enlarge):

Eventually, there was actually a concert:

Mrs. Perils flew in on Wednesday and saw my brother’s place for the first time.  Then Thursday, it was off to Myrtle Beach for our annual spring family reunion.  I’m not sure how long we’ve been doing this spring meeting.  It started back in the mid-90s when my parents would golf their way south from Toledo and end up at my middle brother’s place near Charleston, SC.  They found this resort called Litchfield By The Sea on Pawley’s Island, just south of Myrtle Beach, and started making it a destination.  I’m not sure when I began joining them, but it must have been ‘98 or ‘99, because I’m sure I tagged it onto a business trip for the company I was working for then.

It’s a really nice time to be there - it’s usually 65 - 70 degrees, which the locals find too chilly to draw them to the beach, so despite the colossal condo buildings there, we have a lot of beach to ourselves.  Attendees this year were all 3 of us brothers and our wives, my mom, my niece and her squeeze.  We walked a lot, rented bikes, ate, drank and generally enjoyed ourselves (and each other):

View from our room

My bro, SIL and Mom

Watching the Kentucky Derby at a seaside bar

Mrs. Perils saddling up (in blue, center)

Probably happy to see our plane leave.

(Ed: Looks like this got stuck in my Wordpress queue and never got published.)

It’s hard to comprehend, but I’ve run out of April here in Seattle.  Tomorrow I head for Milwaukee for a week; on Friday, I fly to Atlanta to attend a Microsoft software extravaganza called Convergence; on the following Wednesday, Mrs. Perils will join me in Atlanta, and we’ll fly on to Myrtle Beach, SC for our annual family reunion at the Litchfield resort.  When I get back to Seattle, it’ll be May.  2010.  The lilacs, just budding now, will likely be gone.

I continue to play my trumpet.  The Rainbow City Band has entered its summer “marching season”.  I was wary at first, because what I liked about the band was the quality of musicianship and the challenging music we have played in our concert incarnation.  The “marching” rehearsals have sorta disabused me of this wariness, as the director has carefully chosen pieces to perform, and breaks us down and makes us play them with a high level of musicianship.  He avows that we’re a “concert band that marches”, a theme that I like.  A sampling:

• Jai Ho - the Bollywood-ish theme from Slumdog Millionaire.  It’s an interesting mix of Indian meter and American song standard, and the rhythms are challenging.
• Soak Up The Sun - I have always liked Sheryl Crow
• Let’s Groove - Earth, Wind & Fire is great outdoor music
• Mas Que Nada - a little Brazilian touch to offset the funk
• Pick Up The Pieces - Average White Band

What I think is happening here is, we’re reprising our director’s salad-day soundtrack.  We’ll perform in several parades during the summer, and I’m thinking it will be a lot of fun.

I’ve also been whoring around with another community concert band on Thursday nights that plays more standard fare like Oklahoma, Music Man, etc.  Not as demanding as 1812 Overture, to be sure, but amiable, and I find it preferable to lace up and play with a group than schlep down to the basement to practice.  And I continue to take a lesson now & then, and play trumpet trios with my teacher and another of her adult students.  We may do a recital later this summer, if we can settle on 4 or 5 of the gaggle of stuff we’ve been experimenting with.

After a premature warm spell that got everything blooming and budding early, our weather has been drippy and chilly for two weeks or more, and the light in the evening is often the only sign of progress in this stillborn spring.  I think it’s driven me to “cocoon” a bit - there have been a couple of days lately that I didn’t leave the house at all.

The NCAA basketball tournament may have had a lot to do with that.  At first, when Ohio State was playing, I felt compelled to watch, both their games and, of course all the others, because you never know which of the other teams they might end up playing; then, after OSU bowed out in the Sweet 16, it became merely an excuse to dally.  Since all the games are now available via online streaming, I could sit with a game on one of my dual computer screens, pull up a spreadsheet on the other and tell myself I was multitasking.  Didn’t even need a “boss” key.

The license to sloth ended Monday night with a thrilling championship game, however, and I need to get out & get active a little more.  I’ve been barely maintaining: biking to the gym every second day but, other than a leisurely 12-mile kayak trip a week ago, the bulk of my other exercise has been walking to restaurants.

I’ve had a chance to process the videos Mrs. Perils took of my band’s From Russia With Love concert.  Here are my favorites, not necessarily in that order.  My camera records sound nicely in stereo, but likes to normalize extremes, so these sound better at higher volumes than lower:

Stravinsky’s Infernal Dance and Finale from the Firebird.  Relentlessly driving, then a gorgeous horn solo before the finale.

Shostakovich 5th Symphony Finale:

1812 Overture.  Sprawling with thematic ebb & flow, 15 minutes long.  Amusing when Mrs. P figures out where the “cannon” is coming from:

The whole concert here.

OK, I’m going to go act on my assertion above.  Still drippy & cold, but it’s a downhill ride to the gym.

Pretty much settled in with the new Macbook, slowly adding amenities and adjustments.  Still sort of mystified by a few things, but that’s just cuz I’m suffering IT fatigue and just naturally lazy anyway.  I’ve spent my entire professional career - the part that involves software consulting, anyway - condescending to retail training courses and “for dummies” manuals.  But the PC, DOS, Windows and I grew up together much like siblings, and I learned their features and quirks incrementally, as we shared bathwater and blamed each other when things went wrong;  OTOH, I’m late to the Mac party and hence ignorant of many of the simplest things that the allegedly non-techie Mac aficionados know by rote.  So, I’m thinking I could actually benefit from trekking down to the Apple Store at University Village and sitting through a couple of courses on the Mac, even if they patronize the crap out of me.

However, Saturday morning at 9 am would probably not be the best time to try to saunter into those heady environs, because that’s when the doors open for the first day of sales for the much-anticipated iPad.  I think it would be a blast to be there, but more to view it at a distance.  It would be like watching the Battle of the Little Bighorn through binoculars. Or Jonestown.

I’m intrigued by the iPad as a piece of technological eye candy, but when I start to think about how I’d actually use it, things get a little blurry.  As I move through the world, I almost always have my Macbook, my phone, an iPod and a digital camera in my pack.  Oh, yeah, and a book or two.  At first blush, the iPad seems to represent a convergence of all of these devices in a light, pretty package. On closer inspection, however, it doesn’t have a camera; has no phone capability unless you use something Vonage or Skype; can’t run my Windows software (like my Macbook can under VMWare); and only has access to a fraction of the books in print.  The net result is, I will still have to haul my separate electronics around most of the time and, given that, throwing the iPad into my pack doesn’t add a whole lot of functionality, except perhaps the 10 hours of battery life.

I’ll keep my eyes peeled for the first brace of kool (aid) kids possessing iPads, and perhaps I’ll see something I’m missing.   By that time, I presume it’ll be somewhat cheaper than $700.

I thought I’d get my monthly post out of the way early here in March.  I know that’s not how I usually do things, but here we are.

Since we last chatted, I’ve been to Milwaukee and back, destroyed a Macbook by spilling hotel-brewed tea and taken a couple of trumpet lessons.  Among other things, of course.  I’m a vibrant and fascinating fellow.

The Macbook incident was particularly galling.  I’d done this before - coffee vs. Dell laptop.  The Dell warranty I had, however, covered stupid stuff that owners did as well as hardware failures, and I got a free motherboard replacement.  While my Macbook was still covered under Applecare, I believe that Apple presumes that Macbooks are all operated by Geniuses® who would not under any circumstance fuck up the liquid/gravity/Macbook relationship.  I got a “D” in high school physics, however (I lied about it when I filled out my application to own a Macbook), and there’s a fine-print Applecare exception for people like me.  The repair was estimated at up to $1200 if the system board had to be replaced (likely).

This happened on Tuesday of the week I was in Milwaukee.  I limped through the week working on various desktops at my client’s, and lugged the corpse home Friday night.  I spent a day dithering about whether to repair or replace, which sounds like I was engaged in critical thinking, but I was just wallowing in the Grief stage. Then I started looking around Craigslist for a replacement.

I ended up finding a 17″ Macbook 2008 vintage (the dearly departed was a 15″ 2008), stopped at the bank for a wad of Benjamins and made a UW student’s Sunday night. I had done a Timemachine backup in early January, so I was able to get my system, including my Windows VMWare machine, back as of that point.  I had determined that my old hard drive was undamaged, so I looked up detailed instructions on how to extract it from my old Mac (the Internet is the best thing since people learned to make arrowheads out of flint).  I put the drive in a casing and brought my system pretty much up to the Milwaukee Valdez incident. All of that took me up to last weekend.  Little fires flare up now & then, and I’m behind on my billing and a few other things, but life is pretty much back to normal.

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The trumpet lessons have been an interesting turn of events.  I haven’t had a trumpet lesson since I was a sophomore in high school.  Since I’ve been playing regularly, however, I find myself wanting to improve a bit.  I found an instructor and signed up for an initial session.  It helped quite a bit, as she espied some bad breathing and embouchure technique I’d either fallen into or always had, and I got a nice handful of new exercises to practice.

She also got the idea to hook up with another of her adult students and have the three of us play trumpet trios.  I’ve done that twice now, and it’s fun - I can hear myself in a way I can’t when I’m playing with the full band, and it pushes me into higher ranges, as we trade off parts.  We may try to do some performances if things proceed.

In band, our Russian concert on the 19th and 20th looms.  We had an “extra” rehearsal Saturday (we usually rehearse Tuesday evenings), playing 1812 and Sheherazade, and I thought the wheels fell off in a few places.  There are a lot of solo bits and “bikini note” exposures where intonation is critical.

A couple of funny bits from rehearsal:

• We were stopped for a bit, and the conductor was admonishing us to play as loudly as we could during a crescendo, but not to lose control of tone quality or intonation. Once we got outside our control envelope, he said, “it’s like a little old lady walking a Rottweiler.”
• We were rehearsing 1812 Overture, and really working on some passages, always approaching, but never playing, the triumphant climax. About the fourth time we were locked & loaded to drive Napoleon back to Europe, but stopped just short, a woman trumpet player next to me said, “this is Tantric music.” (Her point was that the whole piece is just an extended tease until the ending, but the rehearsal situation made it all the more humorous)

These guys are pretty frisky.  Makes me glad it was a piano they happened upon instead of a bed.  (They may feel just the opposite, though)

A couple of amusing signs sighted as I walked around our neighborhood (click to enlarge)

The one on the right is an apartment building in the vicinity of the Fremont Troll.  Looking at the Troll, I think a 1-bedroom might be kind of tight.

In a sad bit of news from the ‘hood, one of our long-time favorite joints, The Luau, has closed.  Just a few blocks away, it provided an aura of tropical vacation on many a drippy, dark night. There are plenty of other places a few steps away from the house to grab a beverage, but we’ll really miss this one. (ED: Those two drink pictures were not taken on the same night.  All right, they probably could have been, but they weren’t.)