VirtualSound’s blog

Spent a week at the cabin in Dungeness. Left Tuesday after work, worked remotely from the Sequim public library and Hurricane coffee on Wednesday and Thursday, took Friday and Monday off. Friday the weather was beautiful so that was sweet. The cabin’s kitchen sink wasn’t draining (it had been problematic for a month or two), so I called a local drain cleaning guy to snake our kitchen drain. It didn't help and he explained that our drain into the dry well had probably been sealed by food residue. He described how to fix it by digging out the drain and creating a new drain with an inverted bucket with a hole in it for the drain to enter. He used a radio transmitter to track the drain to the dry well and marked it for me.

I spent a few hours digging up the dry well, then expanding the hole a bit as I looked for the drain pipe. After about tripling the size of the hole I found the drain. I made the hole a little bigger so that I could climb into it and hunker down to reach the drain. A filthy job, it was hot & I wasn't wearing a shirt, and I was much too lazy to dig a big hole. Not a pretty picture – me squatting down in a hole only slightly bigger than myself, getting dirt all over my sweaty back, sides, arms and shoulders, hacking at the drain. Eventually we had an additional pile of gravel added, the inverted bucket with the drain running into it on top of the gravel, and several layers of tarp on top of that to keep the dirt out. Getting it filled back in and running the sink without it backing up was a huge relief. That and a nice shower. I know it wasn’t a pretty picture, I saw the photos my wife took. I also got a lot of lawn mowed - the cabin hasn't had a lot of use yet, and the weather is still mostly cool and damp so the grass gets out of hand pretty easily.

Birds were a theme of the trip. We saw adult and juvenile bald eagles, several family of quail, rufous chested towhees, a sparrow hawk, a kingfisher, red winged blackbirds, great blue herons, the usual gulls and sparrows and crows and grebes and ducks and robins and so on. We got a few pictures, the kingfisher was perched on the top of a stick that

Bird photos

had been stuck upright into muck before the tide came in, very photogenic although my picture is a little too far away and low resolution.

We went to Railroad Park in Sequim for lunch one day. The weather was nice and we found a nice picnic table with a view of the railroad bridge and the Dungeness river. Very pleasant. As we got ready to leave we checked out the new Audobon interpretive center in the park - it was excellent. They had probably 50 or 70 stuffed birds and a few other odds and ends like cougar. It was quite interesting, kept us busy oohing and ahhing over the birds for another hour.

Traffic in the Straights of Juan De Fuca was mildly interesting. Every day we saw several container cargo ships, it seems like more of the outgoing ships are semi-full than was typical a few years ago, perhaps the week dollar is increasing exports. We saw a variety of small boats, a few cruise ships, a coast guard vessel, and an aircraft carrier. We saw the carrier when we were down the bluff playing in the lagoon inside the spit, so it appeared to rise above the spit and looked pretty cool with Mt. Baker in the background and the Dungeness Lighthouse on the horizon.

We took the boat out, but the waves started picking up in the late afternoon so we didn't spend long on the water. Crab season started the day AFTER we left, though. I was tempted to call in to my boss and take another day of vacation so that we could take the boat out and put the crab pots down, but lack of pre-planning, work pressure and lack of fishing licenses finally tipped the balance and we came home on Monday, a day later than we had originally planned.

We didn't do the hike up Mt. Zion and didn't hike out to the light house, but other than that we did all of the activities we planned on. A nice vacation, if a bit more too much work for it to be really restful.

Went to the waterfront in downtown Seattle in late spring for the lowest tide of the year,

-3 feet. Took my lunch break from my job at Cisco in Belltown and walked through the sculpture park and down to the water front. There were some volunteers with pamphlets with several interesting species already scoped out, but the beach was actually pretty dead until the last couple of feet.

According to the volunteer, the shoreline in that area of Myrtle Edwards park had been torn out when they repaired the sea-wall and replaced less than a year previously. From perhaps 0' up to 2' the rocks were slimy with simpler sea weeds. Below 0' a few interesting things were visible - barnacles, snails, limpets, several kinds of sea weed. It was slippery and rough, scrambling over the last 6 or 8 feet of sea weed coated rocks to get down where the water was splashing. Fingerlings swam by, a few gulls were visible. The shore is an isolated pocket, to the south the piers cover the shore, and to the north bulkheads drop steeply into the water up towards the grain elevator in West Seattle. There isn't an adjacent inter-tidal zone, so it's been slow to re-populate. I’m glad they took the time to rebuild a little inter-tidal zone back up, even if it may take a decade or more to really regenerate.

Rapidly changing conditions – reminds me of the recent story about the fish in Lake Washington. As the human population grew and the waters of the lake got more cloudy, this one species of little fish dropped most of their armoring of scales over a couple of decades. Apparently since the predator fish couldn’t hunt them visually they were less likely to be bitten, so the armor provided less benefit and the balanced tipped to favor fish that mature more quickly and avoid the extra metabolic cost of the extra scales. Then in the 70s Seattle and King County put in sewers and storm water retention ponds and the water cleared back up. Within a couple of decades the armor was back, and the fish now look about like they did before: moderately armored. With our rivers and lakes, swamps and marshes, erosion and flooding, we get large swings in visibility all the time. I speculate that there is a sort of meta-evolution occurring – these fish have evolved an ability to evolve additional or fewer scales quickly in response to competitive pressure. Their ability to evolve is evolving – meta-evolution.

Odd puppet like thing hanging from wires that moved around. First time it looked vaguely like a horse or a dog, didn't do much for/to me. Later after circling around through the works and losing Dana, I circled back and looked in again and it moved oddly, almost organically, and the work suddenly hit me with meaning and promise. I didn't spend much time with it, but somehow it has eclipsed my memories of the other works. There were several I liked, particularly the city scape photography, but nothing else really stuck with me. I need to take notes, that way I can credit the artists (and to tell you the truth, my decaying memory needs the assist).

Took Carina & Grandma Helen to the Frye to see the R.Crumb exhibit. Crumb did seminal counter-culture comics, or graphic novels as they are called now. From Mister Natural to Shuman the Human to some pretty sick and twisted stuff in Zap! comics he was a productive and interesting, perhaps genre defining artist of the 60s and 70s. Powerful stuff, he was more talented than I had realized. The selected work also said interesting things about him - his taste in women, the blues musicians, his insights into drugs, pop culture, and sex, his fearlessness in pursuing topics that reveal parts of him that most of us would never willingly expose. He did a haunting bit about seeing a girl on the bus in New York who was so beautiful it was almost magical. Of course he couldn't say a word to her, probably hardly made eye contact, and yet decades later he could still recall it and draw beautiful cartoons about it - sad, human, heart rending. Very real, it resonated and stuck with me. The cynicism and jaded sensibilities also can be over the top, but they only had a bit of his more hard-core stuff. Grandma Helen said "I just didn't look at the rude stuff."

It's been an interesting, somewhat challenging year.

Driving home one day I saw my kids on the front porch as I I pulled in. Ben was in his underpants. What was that about? They stepped out into the front yard and as I got out of the car Carina said "the house is on fire." A moment later I heard the fire alarm and my heart started racing.

I went in and checked. We had a small fire in the upstairs bathroom, a fair amount of smoke but not too much heat yet. I put it out by smothering it, and turned the fan right above off - it was a charred, melted mess and had obviously started the fire. The fire had moved up from the fan into the beams in the attic, which I couldn't really reach.

I told Carina to call 911 and tell them we had a house fire. The fire men were there less than 2 minutes later. With their oxygen equipment they were able to get above the fire in the attic and put it out quickly.

Everyone was fine, Carina & Ben handled it beautifully, and we're insured so it's not too bad. Deductibles suck, though.

Dana's health has been a concern. She went in for some reasonably major surgery, and hanging around in the waiting room as things ran long was unpleasant. She was fine, everything came out fine (the doctor showed me pictures of what got taken out - oog). One of those moments that forces you to consider mortality, even as you try as hard as you can not to.

My oldest daughter got married, so our family has gotten bigger. They live in an apartment in north Seattle and work hard for very little money the way young people always do. I hope they are enjoying life as much as they should, this really is a peak experience in their life: they'll never be so young, fresh, and innocent again. They make a beautiful couple and I hope, wish and pray that things go well for them on their journey together.

Work is hitting a peak as well - we're at the end of our product development cycle, when we have to finish making fixes and get the product shipped pretty soon. Keeps me busy. Last night I was mildly insomniac and checked my e-mail at 11PM. A coworker from Bangalore (India) had posted a follow-up question. I went ahead and followed up, remotely accessing a server in some lab in Bangalore (I assume, I only know it's IP address) to figure out what broke and how to fix it. By midnight or so I got it patched and he was able to get it upgraded, allowing him to move further into getting the next load tests going on that system. By the end of the e-mails it was ridiculously late, so I slept in a little and worked from home. Gotta love the commute - down the stair, down the hall. Take a seat.

Spring was unusually cold for the most part - a good snowfall in April, lots of cold late May and June days. As summer gets here we're getting maybe our second or third good stretch of the year, well into the 70s. It feels like it's been a long time coming.

We're headed to our cabin next week, we'll stay there for most of a week depending. No crabbing yet, not sure if we'll take the boat out. Probably will, we've got plenty of time to kill.

I've been singing in the church choir since December and it has been interesting. I sang in choirs back in High School and at the University of Washington, but that was a long time ago.

I started just in time for Advent, and during Advent they use no instruments, it's all a cappella. We had one rehearsal on Thursday and a small rehearsal just before mass. Some of the songs were familiar - Christmas carols - but I was singing the tenor part so it was unfamiliar. It was a challenge but I did OK and it was fun.

Oddly enough, one of the harder parts is letting go - we did several songs that I really enjoyed, but we only practiced them perhaps twice, performed them, then we were done with them. I don't have a very good vocabulary for describing why I liked them. We did one song that had the lyric "Peace, peace, wonderful peace..." where the tenor part started fairly high on the first "peace," then went up and down a half step at a time while the other parts changed through chords, it sounded beautiful but I don't know how to describe what was so moving about it. Then we turned the music back in and went on to the next week.

Some classics and old favorites were nice - "O Come O Come Emanuel" is one of my favorites, and it was fun doing it in 4 part harmony. Between Advent and Christmas I recognized perhaps half of the songs we did. During the 4 weeks of ordinary time through last Sunday I pretty much didn't recognize any songs at all. For the most part it doesn't make much difference being familiar with the song, since I'm never singing the melody anyway.

Last night we sang at the 7PM Mass for Ash Wednesday, which marks the beginning of Lent. During Lent they don't use instruments either, just like Advent, so it's challenging - if you blow it it's pretty obvious (no instruments to cover you), and you can't pick up your pitch from the instruments either. We did a song called "Miserere" in Latin that has an interesting history. It was originally written in the 1600s and performed exclusively at the Vatican only during Lent; the author was jealous and didn't want it performed any where else. Eventually some famous composers heard it and wrote the parts out, so several alternative versions were created with slight differences. Finally the original version was released, and that's pretty much the basis for what we do. It's a very typically Catholic song: all about guilt and our need for God's forgiveness. As Greg our choir director said "this is not a happy song: think guilt!" to which one of the altos said "we're Catholic, we know how to do guilt."

I read many good books last year, some of my favorites:

This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession by Daniel J. Levitin
A wonderful book on a couple of my favorite subjects, music and the human nervous system. Pretty technical in it's own way, the first 60 pages are all about music and it's components: pitch, rhythm, tone, timbre, and so on. Then it gets really technical, introducing many of the latest findings on human neurological development and music. Fascinating stuff, he really hammers home how even though most everyone says "I don;t really know much about music" was are almost all in fact amazingly gifted when it comes to music. We can recognize our favorite songs within one or two beats based on timbre and a couple of notes, we can generally classify types of music nearly instantly, we often can guess who the band is that performed a piece of music the first time we heard it, and we can tell if a performance is a different or rerecorded version, even when it's nearly identical to the original. Great book, highly recommended, he makes the technical issues resolved in cutting edge research understandable and applicable to our own lives.

Salt

I saw several good shows, I can't really pick a single best show, so I'll blog about the ones I enjoyed. Among other things.

In February we saw the 1st Annual Presidents Day show. My 2 daughters and their friend went with me. Intros were interesting, particularly the Trucks. Funny and obnoxious women band, I think my daughters (at least the older one and her friend) really enjoyed them. My daughter has a Trucks sticker on her laptop now - the gold standard, ranks right up there with the Briefs.

The Presidents were hot and tight, as always. They were the best act we saw at Bumbershoot a few years ago, and they were on here as well. They also have an hilarious schtick, from the final countdown on one song "On 137" bang bang bang bang... I swear I counted and they did exactly 137, I guess you had to be there - to the final climax of "We're Not Going To Make It" (after the quick spoken review of the Presidents career they usually cram into that song) where the bass player/singer Belew climbs up on the drum set, and jumps into the air, and as he lands they hit that last massive chord - only it wasn't massive, it was a little "blurp" and the show was over. Cracks me up every time, even though I expect it now. We also got to see the Presidents again, crashing an outdoor show at Microsoft. The Microsoft show was also a milestone for my (then) 9 year old son, his first rock show. He enjoyed it quietly, we'll have to teach him to pogo, scream, and mosh. The band messed around quite a bit, including a very odd version of Lump played country tempo, immediately followed by a normal (fast) version. Presidents day show was better, since they didn't get yanked before they were done. At the Microsoft show they were "last songed" before they were ready.

The girls got me tickets for the Who for Fathers Day, so I got to see them over the summer. Pretty good show, but since they were  flogging a new album they played too much of that and not enough of the old stuff we know and love. I never saw them with Keith Moon, but I saw them several times with Entwistle, I miss him. Probably the best rock bass player I've ever seen or heard. Now that he's gone too they aren't quite the same, but they did have Pete's brother playing backing guitar parts and a keyboard (I wonder if it was Rabbit, who played on the Rocky Horror Picture Show soundtrack again? He played with them when I saw them on their first tour after Moon passed away) so the sound had good depth. Elaborate 3 part moving projected video screen above the band added some visuals to the show.

Fell asleep at a heavy metal show at El Corazon - if the lyrics are unintelligible growling, the music had better be extremely good, or it's going to put me to sleep. They weren't. Don't recall who the bands were.

Saw a punk show at El Corazon that kept me awake, much better show but I've forgotten the bands. Maybe The Divorce was on the  bill? I should ask my daughters, maybe they'd recall. It was someone in the audiences birthday, so they took a cake onto stage, sang happy birthday, and smashed it into his face. Gotta love that punk ethic. It was hot, so they were spraying water on us. The icing and cake along with the water made for an extremely slick mosh pit with people falling all over. Then the beer started leaking from the ceiling. Definitely one for the ages.

Bumbershoot had some great moments, but I was suffering from the aftereffects of an emergency root canal, which made me hard to please. If they weren't good enough to make me ignore the pain, we didn't stay long. Googol Bordello was the highlight - they had 'em and us packed in and dancing. Not sure what "Wear Purple" was about, but the critique of governments and warnings not to trust them sure rang true, and that music is an automatic party every time. Another highlight was seeing the Lashes first show since their lead guitarist took a bad spinal injury. Seeing him up there shredding away in a wheel chair was inspiring, and the prank call to the TV station was classic, even if (as some sod in the audience pointed out) they called the wrong station, it's Fox that overlooks the stage back behind the Science Center, not KIRO. To quote the band, "way to ruin a good prank!" Instant classic performance, I hope to catch them on New Years day after mass at Sonic Boom records. Probably crowded, but it should be fun.
I also enjoyed the Agro-Lites & The Trucks; speaking of instant classics, hearing the Trucks vocalist explain that "our parents are here, so we were going to skip 'Pervs in the Bushes' but we decided to do it anyway" sure added some spice. Fergie was better than I expected, but my expectations were pretty low. Blondie was good, Steve Miller was good, they gave him an extra-long time slot. Saw School Yard Heroes as well, they seem to be doing well; we saw them at the EMP Sound-Off (Battle of the Bands) years ago, they can be fun. They no longer do "I Hate Your F___ing Boyfriend" which was a personal favorite, doesn't fit their style any more.
I took my new digital camera and took some pictures, but due to crowds, motion, and poor light, they mostly didn't turn out.

Ones that got away:
Young Fresh Fellows at Seafair hydroplane races - couldn't quite get my bleep together to make it to this show. I saw the YFF at Bumbershoot when I was teen, very late 70's I think, at the Mural Amphitheater. Fun show, about the only chance I got to see local bands I read about in the Rocket was at Bumbershoot, since I was too young for bars. I saw them again on New Years Eve at the Backstage in Ballard in 1987. My wife was pregnant with out first child so we didn't drink much. Good show, they had some of the female singers from the Dinette Set doing backing vocals for the "Young Fresh Fellow's Theme." I have a CD of covers of YFF songs (Presidents doing Rock & Roll Pest Control, great covers of Teenage Dogs in Trouble, 99 Girls, etc.) and I would've liked to here the band do 'em. Dang.

Neil Young show - he put on a long show that got great reviews. Wish I had gone, it was pricey but there may not be many (or any) more chances to see him, and I never did manage to see him. I particularly like playing and singing Neil Young's music, the man is a genius who has created an amazing body of work over decades. Dang.

Too many others to list (Police reunion, Flaming Lips, was Sleater Kinney's final show this year? At least I saw them a couple of times). Every week there are good shows I don't go to. Dang.

What was the best movie you saw this year?

I just saw Juno and enjoyed that quite a bit. The girl who starred in it was luminous and the humor was great, but the sentiment was the best part of it. The relationships between the star and her boyfriend, family (especially dad and step-mom) and with Jennifer Garner's character made the movie.

The Korean film "The Host" was awesome. Best monster movie I've seen in a while, mostly because it tells the story in a very human way through experiences of a family. Wonderful film, if ultimately somewhat sad.