northshoredad

This composer, Mindaugas Piečaitis, found Nora The Piano Playing Cat on YouTube, and contacted her owners about writing an orchestral piece around the cat's performances. He wrote out the cat's playing in music notation, and then wrote an accompaniment to go with it. Performed live, the orchestra had to stay in sync with the edited-together video of the cat playing, which is no small feat in itself. That he was able to put together a cohesive piece around these seemingly random notes that the cat played is just amazing. I love this. Enjoy!



More info, including interviews with Nora, available here - www.catcerto.com

I was reading an article today that had nothing to do with driving, but which was using the idea of "steering into a skid" as a metaphor for doing something that goes against what instinct would tell one to do. That brought up this idea, which I've thought about before; namely, what is so "counter-intuitive" about steering into a skid?

If you're going down the road, and hit a patch of ice, say, and your car starts turning to the left on its own, wouldn't you turn to the right to correct yourself? If you weren't skidding, would you ever turn your car toward the side of the road? No. So why is it suddenly counter-intuitive to aim your wheels toward the direction that you want your car to travel?

To be fair, according to some sources, professional driving instructors now teach a new way of thinking about this, because honestly "steering into the skid" is not exactly illustrative language. You could think it means "turn in the direction the car is skidding" (you'd be wrong), or "turn back toward the middle of the road" (which would be correct). I've even heard this described as "turning the wheel in the same direction that the BACK of the car is going". What are we, driving backwards now? Who thinks that way?

The new teaching is to turn the car in the direction that you want the front of the car to go, or align your tires with the direction of your intended travel. Seems obvious to me. Aim where you want to go. Don't we do that every day, just driving around?

My problem with this is not so much the teaching - both of these instructions are the same, even if the old way is confusing - but rather with the idea that this goes against every intuition, that we somehow naturally want to turn the car in the direction of the side of the road, thereby putting the car into an uncontrollable spin. Sorry, but if your intuition tells you to steer toward the snowbank, instead of the middle of the road, you have a very serious problem, and you need to call and inform me when you're going out on the road, so that I can avoid getting in my car at all costs.

Last night, Snow Wife went to take a soothing bath, but when she ran the water, no hot water came out of the faucet. Turns out, we might be out of heating oil, which will need to be taken care of today. In the meantime, I had to take a cold shower this morning. I still maintain that this is better than NO shower, but it's a toss up.

So, The Boy (who is 5) is potty trained now, but he's still having a hard time making it through the night. In addition to having a water-proof mattress pad, we have him sleep on a towel, so that he doesn't completely soak his sheets if he ends up having an accident in the middle of the night. He's such a sound sleeper, that this mostly doesn't even wake him up when it happens. Lately, I've had to remind him that if he gets the towel wet, he should put it in the laundry room in the morning when he wakes up, along with changing his underwear.

This morning, he came to me and, very proud, told me that he had woken up in the middle of the night, and because he was wet, he put the wet towel in the laundry room, where he got a dry one to put on his bed. And then -- and this is the real kicker -- he dried off his underwear on one of the towels in the bathroom, and then put them back on and went back to bed, where they dried out the rest of the way while he was sleeping.

Of course, he told me this while, you guessed it, I was getting out of the cold shower and toweling myself off with one of the bathroom towels. I said to him, "which towel did you use to dry off your underwear?", and he looked around the room and said, "um, I don't remember". Now, I'd say he probably didn't use the one that was hung on the shower door, because he largely ignores those ones when he dries his hands after washing, and there were two others he could have chosen from. Still, given the possibility that he DID use the one on the shower door, I'd give myself a better than 1 in 3 chance that I took a freezing cold shower and then toweled myself off on the very same towel on which my son had "dried off" his pee-soaked underwear just hours before.

So now I'm cold and (maybe) covered in pee. Life is great.

Okay, this just rocks. It's a musical piece played entirely on wine and beer bottles. I totally want to do this now, with some musician friends...hmm...anybody?

My friend/boss John started a garden in his backyard earlier this year, but he's had tremendous difficulty in getting many of his plants to grow, because there is a groundhog (or several, he's not sure) apparently living nearby which keeps eating his broccoli and other plants. I should mention that our company is temporarily working out of his basement in Gloucester, which is why I know about this. And because I...you know...talk to him.

Anyway, he decided it was time to take action, and after exploring several options including The Rodenator (which was dismissed as too expensive and, honestly, a little gruesome), John opted for a have-a-heart large animal trap, and I helped him set it up and bait it with fresh vegetables on Friday (all part of the job).

This morning, he informed me that he had caught a groundhog on Sunday and had successfully released it (alive) in Dogtown. The picture below is of said groundhog, pre-release. Kind of cute, actually. But not when it's eating the fruits (and vegetables) of your labor.

As a follow up to my "New Ukulele" post, I had to point out Jake Shimabukuro, who we saw play live at a July 4th festival on Kaua'i while we were there last week. He does a version of While My Guitar Gently Weeps that is just incredible (click the link to view a live concert version on YouTube, which is very similar to what he did when we saw him). I don't think you can talk trash about the ukulele after watching him play...

I was lucky enough to be able to travel to Hawaii last week with my family. Snow Wife and I had gone there on our honeymoon, so it was a bit of an anniversary trip as well, although having the kids with us definitely made it less about us and more about them, but that's okay. We started referring to it as our "family trip" rather than our "vacation", because it wasn't nearly as relaxing as a "vacation" should be, but it was still awesome.

On our honeymoon, my only regret was in not buying a ukulele while we were there. I thought of it a couple of days before we left 7 years ago, but never had time to do much looking, and the only ones I saw at the time were either cheap toys or $1500 hand-made-on-the-island models - nothing in between. This time, I did some advanced research, and found one that fit my budget. And I got IOUs for our anniversary and my birthday in order to "save up" for it. Although not a picture of my particular instrument, this is the model that I got (a Kala Koa Concert ukulele, which is just slightly bigger than the "standard" soprano ukulele):



I'm really enjoying it. It's small, so it's really easy to just carry around the house, play for the kids, etc. And it just makes playing every song so much fun. In Hawaii, when we were in the condo, I spent much of the week sitting outside on the deck playing it. And last night I used it to sing "On Top Of Spaghetti" to the kids before they went to bed. So awesome.

Our church in town had a new digital organ installed in April. Yesterday, they had a dedication ceremony -- who knew there was an actual liturgy for the blessing of a new organ? -- and then the guy who installed the organ gave an hour-and-a-half-long concert, which was very cool. This particular organ plays a combination of real pipes (in the choir loft) and digital sounds (through speakers in the choir loft and at the front of the church). He played pieces from a number of different composers (Bach, Handel, etc.) from different periods, and the selections used a lot of different sounds that the organ is capable of producing including, at one point, timpani drums on the pedals. The range of sounds, from quiet strings and flutes to blaring trumpets, was quite amazing.

I've only played the organ a bit -- I had to learn some basics when I was the music director at a church in Somerville -- but I'm really more of a piano player, and my feet have a tendency to simply play whatever note the pinky on my left hand is playing. The things this guy did, with his two hands and his feet all playing separate, complex parts, was just unbelievable. Still, it's fun to sit down, pull out all the stops, and feel the notes shake the room as the organ blasts away. No other instrument has quite the same kind of power.

I dropped off Snow Wife (tinuviellen  ) at South Station today so she could take the bus to New York City to visit valancy_s and keep her company driving home tomorrow, so I have the three kids to myself today and most of tomorrow as well. I made blackberry pancakes for us all this morning, and then we headed out to go to the strawberry festival at the Methodist church in town, where we all had strawberry shortcake (it's a berry-themed day today). We then had to run an errand at Target, and then we went to the Coolidge Reservation in Manchester-By-The-Sea, one of The Trustees Of Reservations properties. This was our first trip there.

You can read more about the history of the place here, but basically the property was once owned by Thomas Jefferson Coolidge, a great grandson of President Thomas Jefferson. At one point, a large "Marble Palace" resided on the Ocean Lawn part of the property, at the end of this peninsula between Magnolia Harbor and Kettle Cove. Now the house is gone, and the Coolidge Family donated the property to the Trustees to be used by the public.

You park off of Route 127, and if you take the right-hand path just off the parking lot, you climb "Bungalow Hill", the name of which I just love ("Hey, Bungalow Hill / what did you kill? / Bungalow Hill..."). There is a nice view of the ocean from the top:



After coming down from the hill, you continue along the path and eventually come to the Ocean Lawn, which was even bigger than I had pictured it after having looked at the map. It's just gorgeous. There are large trees with benches under them, which was a perfect place to take the Wee One off my back (she had been riding in a backpack) and take a snack break, which consisted of (of course) berry fruit snacks. Here are the kids walking out onto the Ocean Lawn, and a view from a little further down toward the ocean:





On the way back, I had to carry a fading Big Girl on my shoulders, while still carrying the Wee One in the backpack, which thankfully worked pretty well, as the Wee One didn't complain, and it only moderately cut off the blood flow to my arms. Taking the shorter path back to the car and avoiding the climb over Bungalow Hill -- "Hey, Bungalow Hill..." -- we got back to the parking lot and chugged some water before heading home.

This would be a perfect place to take a blanket and have a picnic. The view was amazing, and the lawn was immaculate. Bring a frisbee, or a kite on a windier afternoon, and you'd have a perfect day on your hands.

I finished off the day with a nice home-made fruit smoothie with, naturally, frozen wild berries. Yum!

Additional pictures after the cut...

Okay, so I promise to talk about other stuff besides hiking, but I'm just really into it right now. It's just great exercise, it's peaceful, and it's beautiful. I can just get so blown away at seeing God's creation in so many different forms, like a rock formation, a stand of trees, a babbling brook, or whatever. Anyway, I worked through lunch on Friday and took off an hour early so I could hit the Thomson Reservation in West Gloucester again on the way home. This time I went in through the "Old Thomson Road" entrance, in the northern part of the reservation. Here is a picture from the trail, looking up at the top of "Eagle Rock":



The view from the top of this hill, and more info on my hike (including getting totally lost) after the cut...

Yesterday on my lunch break I found a new trail in Dogtown Commons, in Gloucester. If you don't know anything about Dogtown, it's worth checking out the Wikipedia link above, or this site, which has lots of great history and info, and links to other sites about it. Basically, the Commons was an old settlement in Gloucester from about 1730-1830, originally the best part of town with many prominent families living there, and then, in the end, mostly widows of the Revolution lived there, with only dogs for company (or protection), hence the name "Dogtown". Roger Babson, the founder of Babson College, then came along during the Great Depression, and hired workers to carve mottos into about 2 dozen boulders scattered around the area, saying things like "Get A Job", "Help Mother", "Truth", "Keep Out Of Debt", etc. The "Babson Boulder Trail" is one of the more interesting walks in the area for this fact alone.

So, yesterday, I started out from the Blackburn Industrial Park (off the second rotary in Gloucester, for those who know the area), and followed the Old Rockport Road, and then a trail that followed a brook, then crossed the brook and the commuter rail tracks (I found an old, rusty railroad tie next to the tracks, which I took as a souvenir), and then wound up a hill through the woods, with large glacial boulders all around. Very neat trail. You could spend all day in Dogtown and still not see everything. And all I had time for was a 15 minute hike in, a quick lunch, and then back out.

After eating my lunch at the top of the hill, I was running a little late to get back to work, so I decided to run a bit of the way back. Down the hill I went, over the tracks, back over the small boardwalk bridge that crosses the brook, and as I'm running full out on the other side of the brook, I see a snake right in the middle of the path, directly in front of me! It was maybe 2 1/2 feet long, and I was literally going to step on it. All I had time to do was yell "aaah!" and perform a sort of leaning/side-stepping/hopping thing around it, picturing in my mind the thing lashing out at my ankle. But when I stopped a few feet up the trail, it was still frozen in the middle of the trail, having not moved at all (thankfully it was probably just as freaked out and surprised to see me suddenly stomping toward it as I was at seeing it sitting there in my way). Do snakes sit? Anyway, I took out my camera phone to snap a picture, and moved back toward it, but it must have then decided that it had been seen, and quickly exited stage left and moved off under some rocks near the bank of the brook.

All in all, a fun hike, and both the running and the snake-avoiding had my heart pumping pretty good.

First, a little background, and then I'll get to the specifics of the Tompson Street Reservation. In an effort to get outside more and get some exercise at the same time, I've been doing a lot of hiking lately. I've always enjoyed hiking, but haven't done much of it lately, and actually starting getting back into it when I discovered geocaching, which is using a GPS unit to find hidden boxes of trinkets in public spaces. I've found around 25 or so of them in the area so far, several of which I found with my children and Snow Wife. However, more recently, since my office moved from Beverly to Gloucester, I've been taking lunch breaks and just going on short hikes in some of the open spaces there, and that has morphed into my going on several pre-work morning hikes, and I've really been enjoying it, despite my general aversion to anything that involves getting out of bed any earlier than I have to.

I've found a number of really cool public hiking spaces by looking at the websites for the Trustees Of The Reservations and the Essex County Greenbelt Association, both really great organizations that preserve open spaces in Massachusetts and help maintain trails, etc. for recreational use.

Last week, I tried a new one, called the Tompson Street Reservation, in West Gloucester. If you know the area at all, it's right at the intersection of Route 128 and Route 133. When you get off 128 onto 133 heading toward Essex and Ipswich, there's a big rock formation immediately on your right. The property is right behind that rock (it's 300 acres, though, so it goes quite far back). You can park across the street and take a trail just to the right of that rock formation, or you can take the next street (Fernald St.) and there are a couple of small parking areas on that street. See the PDF document at the link above for the trail map. When I tried this last week, I initially thought it might be good for biking, so tried it on my mountain bike, but I found the single-track trails to be too hilly and rocky to handle on the bike, at least for me. Back into the car went my bike, and I took off on foot. I ended up hiking up "Sunset Mountain" (really just a hill that's probably 250 feet in elevation), and at the top it's all granite ledge with a nice view. You can see the Annisquam River from up there, and it's really picturesque. From there, I went back down the other side of the hill, and took the trail which circles around the base of the hill, and headed back to my car. According to my GPS, it ended up being 2.5 miles total, including the part that I tried to bike.

I thought that the climb up the hill would be doable with the family, so on Saturday, with nothing else to do and the prospect of staying inside all day a good possibility, I proposed that we go hiking, and Snow Wife and the kids agreed. We started from the parking lot at the cemetery on Fernald Street, walked in to the woods and up the hill to the summit, which was fairly steep in places for the kids, but they did fine with a little hand-holding. It was beautiful at the top, with a great view, and plenty of room to stop and have some water before continuing on.





From the summit, we went back down the other side (toward Route 133), then took a right and went straight back to the car. All in all, it was only a half mile hike, which was fine for the kids. The Boy had actually started in with "can we go home now?" before we even walked through the cemetery, but once we got into the woods, and especially once we started on the narrow trail up the hill, he perked right up and was very excited about "leading" us up the trail, pointing it out to us whenever the trail took an unexpected turn. I would definitely recommend this hike to anyone in the area. As you can see from the trail map, there are plenty of other trails to explore as well, so happy hiking!

So, I've been watching Snow Wife doing the LJ thing for a while now, and I decided to get in on the action. I tried setting up a blog for my extended family a while back, but nobody else followed through and posted anything. Then I revised that blog and set it up so that I could post info about the kids, etc., but then realized that I didn't really have a place to talk about MY interests, like hiking, music, etc., in a place where I could be reasonably sure that at least a few people that I know would read it. So I signed up today, and I'll post periodically about things that are going on in my life, and I hope that a few of you will be at least passingly interested in reading about it. I'll share, you care. Or not. It's up to you.