After going up to H Mart for a bit of shopping and Lowe's for some cleaning stuff like a small bucket and a "dog bone" sponge and so on, I got back here and ate some stuff and relaxed for a bit, then decided I'd get my practice in because otherwise it'd be far too easy to get involved doing other things and never get it done.
So I practiced for two episodes of "Treme" on video, and it went pretty well especially considering how long a break I'd taken. And by that time it was past 9PM, and I ate a bit more and decided to just go to bed at 1AM.
I only had a bit of the "double buzz" I'd been anguishing over, was able to go up to high C OK, and just did my usual thing which is lots of lip slurs and lots of grinding away on exercises from Clarke's Elementary Studies. While watching Treme, I came up with little things to play along with songs on there, and worked a little on things that came to mind. Lip slurs and Clarke exercises may not sound very inspiring, but I notice I'm getting better at playing that has some "soul" to it which is largely a matter of having developed physical stamina.
This yucky spillage of green stuff isn't even my biggest worry these days; I worry more about Ken's business that I'm working at here can hold together for the next few years. We're probably heading into a slowdown between the normal business cycle and this coronavirus scare.
I woke up at 9:30 which is just right because I'd spend 1/2 hour reading a book I'm working on, and I had just a small headache.
Saturday, February 29, 2020
Friday, February 28, 2020
A sneaky $20
The headache I woke up with yesterday subsided through the day, and by evening I wasn't thinking about it, but by then it was kind of late to think about trumpet practice. I'm not really supposed to be in here in the evening, in this industrial park, and I certainly don't want to advertise my presence to the sketchy characters who live in the parking lot here.
So I went to bed promptly at 1AM and was up at 9AM. This is a huge change from the schedule I'd followed for years, beddie-bye at maybe 7AM and up at 3 or 4 in the afternoon.
This is the schedule my boss follows, and he can keep it as far as I'm concerned. I'm done with this night-time stuff. I put in years of getting up at a quarter to 6, to clock in at work at (tech co.) at 7, and in bed each night at 10. When I lost that job it was a great feeling being up and around and not have to show up anywhere, just riding my motorcycle around at 9 or 10AM, enjoying the day. Soon enough though I feel into a late enough schedule that I no longer had that enjoyment.
It's been hard, adjusting, but my idea is to get my work done in the daytime, and then have the evenings free for practice, busking, etc.
I woke up with a headache again which is not at all normal for me. Maybe that bacon I got for $1 a package wasn't a good idea after all. It's warm enough that it's time to switch over to my warm-weather diet which does not call for a lot of bacon anyway. My warm-weather breakfast is a couple of hard-boiled eggs with Kewpie mayo and furikake seasoning on top and of course delicious chicory coffee.
I had just started on my coffee when a guy pulled up in front, who was here to pick up a very large and heavy spectrum analyzer. I had it up near the front of the shop and only had to open up the roll-up door and we loaded it into his car, and he looked around at things. He wanted "feet" that go on the bottom of HP instruments, and I found a set of 5 and one single one that had been listed on Ebay at one time but had somehow fallen off of the system. "'Bit rot', I call it", I explained, and sold him the 6 feet for a $20 bill which is OK because I buy a lot of stuff that gets used in my work here.
Aaaaaaaaaand... this happened:
It's ... Oobleck, right out of that Dr. Seuss book! Actually it's some sort of oil/water emulsion used in an automatic CNC machine big enough to live in, I know because I ran over to the machine shop we're end-to-end with, and there was the machine, and there was the green stuff, which they were cleaning up too. The stuff must have started leaking in about the time I was selling the instrument feet to the guy. My little shop vac does an unreasonably good job of cleaning the stuff up, so I know how my afternoon will be spent.
So I went to bed promptly at 1AM and was up at 9AM. This is a huge change from the schedule I'd followed for years, beddie-bye at maybe 7AM and up at 3 or 4 in the afternoon.
This is the schedule my boss follows, and he can keep it as far as I'm concerned. I'm done with this night-time stuff. I put in years of getting up at a quarter to 6, to clock in at work at (tech co.) at 7, and in bed each night at 10. When I lost that job it was a great feeling being up and around and not have to show up anywhere, just riding my motorcycle around at 9 or 10AM, enjoying the day. Soon enough though I feel into a late enough schedule that I no longer had that enjoyment.
It's been hard, adjusting, but my idea is to get my work done in the daytime, and then have the evenings free for practice, busking, etc.
I woke up with a headache again which is not at all normal for me. Maybe that bacon I got for $1 a package wasn't a good idea after all. It's warm enough that it's time to switch over to my warm-weather diet which does not call for a lot of bacon anyway. My warm-weather breakfast is a couple of hard-boiled eggs with Kewpie mayo and furikake seasoning on top and of course delicious chicory coffee.
I had just started on my coffee when a guy pulled up in front, who was here to pick up a very large and heavy spectrum analyzer. I had it up near the front of the shop and only had to open up the roll-up door and we loaded it into his car, and he looked around at things. He wanted "feet" that go on the bottom of HP instruments, and I found a set of 5 and one single one that had been listed on Ebay at one time but had somehow fallen off of the system. "'Bit rot', I call it", I explained, and sold him the 6 feet for a $20 bill which is OK because I buy a lot of stuff that gets used in my work here.
Aaaaaaaaaand... this happened:
 |
| Oobleck! |
Thursday, February 27, 2020
It's a whole new pie
As I write, it's the Thursday after the Wednesday after Mardi Gras which I actually watched some of on YouTube, thanks to nola.com which is the New Orleans home TV station. Yes, I watched the New Orleans one, the real one.
I'd been doing a blog about my busking activities in the so-called Silicon Valley, where it's been observed that the only silicon left here is in the landfills and the groundwater, the whole area being effectively one big Superfund site. Busking, or playing music on the street for tips, is actually one of the more reliable ways to make what bare living this area can offer.
If busking blog numbers are any indication, though, no one cares. There were a few, and now there is one, Planet-wide, busking blog. That one belongs to a "Street Musician Daniel" in New Orleans. It contains much about finagling a free living from "the system" and a little about busking. That's fair enough, as I'm sure many more are interested in how to finagle a free living from "the system" than to earn it playing music on the streets of New Orleans.
But the day-to-day of playing music on the street can be pretty boring, as it's the same parade of nameless faceless donors and of one's fellow buskers, most are out there using their instrument as an attention getter to facilitate begging.
It took me a while, but I finally got out the habit of trying to relate to this area's street musicians. Besides their goal of making that day's cigarettes or pot or harder drugs, they really have no aspirations. Just turning the crank, they're just doing the same thing that the few who are lucky enough to still have office jobs do, just puttering along until it's time to knock off for the day.
I'd found a great place and time to busk, outside the local Whole Foods during the last hour or two in the evening before they close. By that time the beggars and petition-hustlers and so on have left, and the people going in and out of Whole Foods are done for the day, done with work, done even with their dinner probably, and in more of a relaxed, "what the hell" mood. And I felt I could work on what I wanted to work on, and they'd be receptive to that.
And they apparently were. I finished up one night and went into the store to buy a few groceries and a fat housewife followed me in and handed me a few bucks and gushed about my playing. I finally asked her if she knew what songs I'd been playing, and she had no idea. It's how you say it, apparently.
But the weather got cold (into the 30s in the evening) and the area I stood got blocked by Christmas trees for sale, and I got sick and was coughing my lungs out for a while, and somehow a couple months went by at least.
What practice I'd been doing had been after everything else was done for the day, and since I'd been on this weird night-mode schedule for years, it'd generally been from about 6:30-7:30 AM and without my best energy or attention. I finally decided this night schedule is stupid, and got myself around to a day schedule again.
So I practiced on the day, Mardi Gras, and had the most horrible "double buzz" making a very rough tone. I was horrified at how bad I sounded. The next day I got up and was decided that F this, if I can't take some time off without sounding this horrible, then I really need to re-consider playing the trumpet. I was ready to go up to "Hornucopia" in San Carlos to look for a decent used clarinet, and if they didn't have anything I liked, it looked like West Valley Music in Mountain View would have something. But before I left, I'd practice an hour on my trumpet and the double buzz was just about all gone. So I'm saving my money. It was just a relatively long layoff.
So I'm re-starting this blog, with a bit more honestly about how little about busking there will actually be in it.
On a pound-for-pound basis, there may be more about pie. When I was a kid in the 1970s, when the hungry times were just starting, on the back of a Ritz cracker box there would be this recipe for "Mock Apple Pie". First it was just like wallpaper, it's just there on the box, but after seeing it so many times I started to wonder... you were supposed to mash up the crackers somehow and make them into something like pie filling? Where were you supposed to get a pie crust, and the crackers, and the sugar, and all that stuff, all together in one place? In what world .... I mean once, exactly once, someone made those Rice Krispy Treats, and I still don't know what they taste like because the adults, being bigger and stronger, got them all. In what world ..... the pie is a lie.
I'd been doing a blog about my busking activities in the so-called Silicon Valley, where it's been observed that the only silicon left here is in the landfills and the groundwater, the whole area being effectively one big Superfund site. Busking, or playing music on the street for tips, is actually one of the more reliable ways to make what bare living this area can offer.
If busking blog numbers are any indication, though, no one cares. There were a few, and now there is one, Planet-wide, busking blog. That one belongs to a "Street Musician Daniel" in New Orleans. It contains much about finagling a free living from "the system" and a little about busking. That's fair enough, as I'm sure many more are interested in how to finagle a free living from "the system" than to earn it playing music on the streets of New Orleans.
But the day-to-day of playing music on the street can be pretty boring, as it's the same parade of nameless faceless donors and of one's fellow buskers, most are out there using their instrument as an attention getter to facilitate begging.
It took me a while, but I finally got out the habit of trying to relate to this area's street musicians. Besides their goal of making that day's cigarettes or pot or harder drugs, they really have no aspirations. Just turning the crank, they're just doing the same thing that the few who are lucky enough to still have office jobs do, just puttering along until it's time to knock off for the day.
I'd found a great place and time to busk, outside the local Whole Foods during the last hour or two in the evening before they close. By that time the beggars and petition-hustlers and so on have left, and the people going in and out of Whole Foods are done for the day, done with work, done even with their dinner probably, and in more of a relaxed, "what the hell" mood. And I felt I could work on what I wanted to work on, and they'd be receptive to that.
And they apparently were. I finished up one night and went into the store to buy a few groceries and a fat housewife followed me in and handed me a few bucks and gushed about my playing. I finally asked her if she knew what songs I'd been playing, and she had no idea. It's how you say it, apparently.
But the weather got cold (into the 30s in the evening) and the area I stood got blocked by Christmas trees for sale, and I got sick and was coughing my lungs out for a while, and somehow a couple months went by at least.
What practice I'd been doing had been after everything else was done for the day, and since I'd been on this weird night-mode schedule for years, it'd generally been from about 6:30-7:30 AM and without my best energy or attention. I finally decided this night schedule is stupid, and got myself around to a day schedule again.
So I practiced on the day, Mardi Gras, and had the most horrible "double buzz" making a very rough tone. I was horrified at how bad I sounded. The next day I got up and was decided that F this, if I can't take some time off without sounding this horrible, then I really need to re-consider playing the trumpet. I was ready to go up to "Hornucopia" in San Carlos to look for a decent used clarinet, and if they didn't have anything I liked, it looked like West Valley Music in Mountain View would have something. But before I left, I'd practice an hour on my trumpet and the double buzz was just about all gone. So I'm saving my money. It was just a relatively long layoff.
So I'm re-starting this blog, with a bit more honestly about how little about busking there will actually be in it.
On a pound-for-pound basis, there may be more about pie. When I was a kid in the 1970s, when the hungry times were just starting, on the back of a Ritz cracker box there would be this recipe for "Mock Apple Pie". First it was just like wallpaper, it's just there on the box, but after seeing it so many times I started to wonder... you were supposed to mash up the crackers somehow and make them into something like pie filling? Where were you supposed to get a pie crust, and the crackers, and the sugar, and all that stuff, all together in one place? In what world .... I mean once, exactly once, someone made those Rice Krispy Treats, and I still don't know what they taste like because the adults, being bigger and stronger, got them all. In what world ..... the pie is a lie.
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