the eve of a new year

Just before Christmas one of Curt's neighbor's tossed a poinsettia. I rescued it with a plan to make images. Today the light was right and I was home to take advantage of it.




45 minutes of guitar practice late last night devoted to 3 against 4 work. The best I was able to achieve with that investment was to count aloud in four, playing in three and give a slight emphasis to the weight of the note played on the 'one'. No foot tapping.

Today, 3 against 4 work without the guitar. Then primaries.

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Meditation practice up in the loft this morning rather than my usual spot. That is because the large machines of destruction were at it early this morning still gnawing away at the carcass of the bowling alley.

Spent two hours today re-crafting my cover letter/resume for yet another job posting and submitted it through MonsterJobs - a few moments letter I get a confirmation that my posting went through - and then a 'MAILER-DAEMON' message saying it hadn't - that the email address MonsterJobs had forwarded it to did not exist. Frustrating.

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New Years Eve festivities over at Taylor's this evening, though I suspect the bigger bash will be at the Van Burien's. I'm probably better off.

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Quite by accident, I discovered Abdullah Chhadeh today.

Patchwork post

I mention in an email to D.E. that I'm planning to visit soon and he asks if I will be bringing my guitar. Is it possible that there may be someone out there who might actually want to play with me!?! Lordy!


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Intense guitar work at Trinity on Saturday. Alternately invigorating and frustrating. Fortunately, the frustration never dominated. At times, confusion did dominate.

I seem unable to retain – in body memory or mental memory – the patterns in this work. We worked on three successive phrases, and then we returned to the first, and it was already gone. Completely. Five measly notes - gone in about 30 minutes despite many, many repetitions.

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Saturday evening I spent more than an hour and a half with the metronome, separately working on the right and left hand of the B.R. exercise. Finally managed successive executions of the exercise with the metronome. This exercise employs the 2nd through 5th strings, so after recognizing my difficulty this morning with the 1st and 2nd strings, I move the exercise over to the 1st thru 4th strings. It was like moving to another continent.

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I do not know how to use my hands. Morning guitar practice today in the new continent was a little more within reach. Still, I don’t know how to use my hands. It astonishes how often I repeat the same mistake. Not only that - an immediate effort to attempt the note still results in the same mistake – somehow the needed adjustment isn’t made. Of course, the reality is that I don’t understand how it works when I play ‘properly’ either. I am reminded of something the physicist David Bolhm said at a talk I attended some 30 years ago. He spoke of how awkward he was as a child, how once he approached a stream wanting to get across. He recognized he would not get across, making every step from stone to stone, by thinking about each movement that was required. He simply needed to move. It seems something similar is needed – yet, at the same time, accurate and precise relaxed adherence to the pattern. I don’t know how it is achieved. And the manner in which I work/practice doesn’t seem to be bringing me any closer.

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Went to see a house for rent in Ballard today. I’d called on it earlier in the day and the landlord said he already had enough appointments, but he’d take my name & number. A little later as I readied to go to the café, I decided to drop by and check the place out from the outside at least. He was out in front with one of his appointments when I came by. I stood by until he was done and then introduced myself, acknowledged I was there without an appointment, but asked if I could see the place anyway. He said sure. Nice, though small place. A bonus, is that it has a basement which I could use. The kitchen is the largest room in the place, which would make it the center of the home. It is just a stone’s throw from the Ballard Market and perhaps a generous mile from Trinity. The landlord acknowledged that the place gets hot in the summer. I believe him because it has several large south-facing windows. It has garden space all over the south side of the property. In other words, it has plusses and minuses. The landlord said that he got a good feeling from me and would give me the place, but wanted to honor that others were in front of me in the queue. Where would I put the behemoth?

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While looking for something else today, I found this.

"It's love," they say. You touch the right one and a whole half of the universe wakes up, a new half. -William Stafford

Returning to roots

Looking in a new/old way again.

The delightful Z!

On the job hunting front....

One of the many temp/employment agencies, just sent me a decline email and suggested I check their website for other jobs I may be interested in applying for. So I checked, and found this promising posting: Seeking Entry Level Project Manager

Now, I'm not an entry level project manager, having significant experience, but when I checked the qualifications - which included this warning: (If you do not have ALL of the following below please do not apply)! - I found I probably don't qualify:

· MSOffice Suite Expert
· Business Requirements Expert
· Technical Requirements Expert
· Rational Suite Expert Required
· Identity Management Desired
· Project Management Required

I am trying to wrap my mind around an 'entry level' role that requires 'expert' level skill - and since I don't even know what they mean by 'Rational Suite' I guess I am not an expert. (Turns out this is IBM's project management tool.)

Job hunting is so much fun!

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David and Z. came to visit today!


This one reminds me of that double mask - Comedy and Tragedy - symbol for the theater:


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And while they were visiting, my cellphone went off. I pulled it from my pocket, planning to simply silence it - something I have only recently figured out how to do - and saw who was calling. Glancing at the clock, I decided that a call from this person at this time could only be urgent. Not sure how urgent it really was, but it certainly was good news. The Stranger, Seattle's entertainment/culture/and counter culture weekly publication, mentioned Tuning the Air!

Snow descends on Seattle this Christmas Day

Sitting in my place today, I noticed that the sounds of cars outside had a different quality, similar too, but not exactly like the sound of cars on rainy pavement. I peered out the window and saw this:

My car slowly being covered by a layer of snow.

My neighborhood must be significantly higher in elevation, because the snow sticks so readily. Just a few blocks away at Sandel playground, snow is giving way to slush...

...at at Green Lake, only a few miles away, the snow is barely sticking.


Still, my first White Christmas since 1975.

Phinney Ridge

I'm still cat sitting over at Curt's place. One of the pleasures of doing this is getting to take walks over in his neighborhood. This is the view from Phinney Ridge where I took my walk again this morning.


And this is the same rose from yesterday - without the rain.

It is quiet in Seattle this week. Many of my friends have left to visit relatives in various places around the country. And my sister's family is visiting Montana to fulfill Kelly's wish to spend some time in the snow.

Still working on the job hunt. I'd expected things to cool down considerably during the holidays, but two interesting prospects have turned up.

The Lelani Pin comes down.

Yesterday, as I pulled out to head over for my cat sitting gig, I saw the crane set up to nab the giant bowling pin as a workman dis-attached it from the pole it has hung from for many years. For some locals, this is quite a momentous event.

Yesterday, IgorA invited me over to watch a gift he'd been recently given - the 10th anniversary edition DVD of Toy Story. I'd never seen it (and neither had he) and we had a great time. I brought over a quart of chocolate ice cream and banana, and with walnuts he had, made banana splits for both of us.

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This morning, taking advantage of my temporary digs as a cat sitter, I took a walk up to the top of Phinney Ridge in a light rain. Brought my camera along with me and found this rose.

Tuning the Air - final show of the Fall 2007 season

The largest Tuning the Air audience so far. BillR counted 83. The house team, which has only had to contend with audiences of less than 25. was scrambling. Assisted (thank god!) by BillR himself. The set design was conceived to accommodate 40 - max! You can imagine what it was like. Fortunately, with the recently introduced sound re-inforcement, everyone heard a good show even if they were in an unfortunately position visually.

Images from Monday's performance

This was the last chance to get the whole team together this season as Howard and Diana leave for Mexico on Saturday.




BillR brought his ears to help balancing the sound reinforcement that has been in place for several shows.

Godfrey Reggio

Last night I pulled the DVD Koyaanisqatsi from the shelf and watched a bit of it. That sent me to the web to see if I could find out what Godfrey Reggio was up to these days. I found an interview from last year (where, coincidentally, GR is being interviewed by someone I know from the SF, Richard Whittaker.) Here is a portion of that interview.

GR: ....I’ll use a reference to Joseph Brodsky, the expatriate from the old Soviet Union. He was an American poet laureate in 1991, I think. I’m a big, big fan of his poetry and books, and especially his essays, one in particular Less Than One which begins with his explanation of the great conundrum of Marx: is it your mind that determines your behavior or your behavior that determines your mind?

Brodsky knew that for most people, clearly, it’s our behavior that determines the content of our mind, because we’re creatures of habituation. So Brodsky’s brilliant insight on how to change one’s mind is to change one’s behavior, and his response to that conundrum of Marx’s was to step outside of the world and yet be in it. That echoes, of course, Christ’s statements of being in the world, but not of the world—very meaningful to me. So I’m referring to the Middle Ages in that sense, of being outside of contemporary American life.

What I learned is that it’s what I did every day that determined what I was going to think. I’ve never forgotten that. Every now and then I’ll give a convocation address at a university and I try to always caution the students to not let their diplomas become their death certificates. If you give up your imagination, if you give up your ability to create for the wages of a good job, then you might give up that which predicates us as human beings, the ability to create our own lives. So I felt that stepping out of this world, yet being in it would be a way of achieving some relative degree of freedom. I’ve tried to live that way and I’m grateful to the church for that experience.

RW: I’m struck by your discovery of the importance of the things you do every day. Can you say more about that?

GR: I’ll give you an anecdote. I was in Albuquerque in the early 90s and the Dalai Lama was at the university of New Mexico giving a talk. The place was packed. He’d just finished giving his talk and said he’d take questions. A woman jumped up and asked, “Your Holiness, what is the single most important thing that I could give attention to?” Without even a thought, he answered, “Routine.”

Now I understood that immediately. In my order, the rule, or routine, was the highest order of attention, that is, being attentive to what one did every day—because what we do is what we become. It’s not just what’s in our minds. That’s an illusion. Our minds are a very small part of who we are. Although we consider our brain our largest organ, it’s vastly humiliated when compared to our behavior.

RW: The attentiveness, that’s the thing, right? Because my routine is usually just a place for daydreaming.

GR: Exactly. In Sanskrit there’s a word ekagrata, which means one-pointedness. Let’s give it a free form translation. It means the ability to focus on something. That ability to focus unrelentingly is what gives one the ability to walk on water, move mountains and do things that are beyond our wildest imagination. But that’s not something we learn. It’s something we have to struggle to acquire. We’re going to have to go upstream to do that.

A crazy-enchanting experience

Last night, the house team met to circle up. The last meeting we had was - as described by one participant - 'a disaster'. So a few of us had email and face to face discussions about this circle and developed a plan. The result was a pretty successful circle. I opted to adopt a Four Quarter Maintainer position during the session. Primarily, we worked on alternating triplets and 16th notes with the metronome, eventually employing some short sections from Eye of the Needle for this work.

After our circle, Ian and I headed over to Travgor's to meet up with the other grant team members and arived early enough to drop in at The Wilson's to catch the last few minutes of the performance team's rehearsal. They were working on a double, reversed circulation of a short Bach piece. That is, the right hand notes (of the piano arrangement) were circulated to the right and the left hand notes were circulated to the left. A crazy-enchanting experience inside the circle where Curt had invited us to sit.

Snow in Seattle!

After a productive Tuning the Air rehearsal and a pretty good apprentice circle, we had our first Monthly Open Circle. Just before it began, I noticed wisps of snow. 'How quaint,' I thought to myself.


Then the flakes got bigger and even began to stick.


And here's what my car looked like after about 2 hours...

I believe this is the first time I have ever driven in the snow. Very strange! Looks like I may need to get a scraper for the car.


Up in my neighborhood, the snow persisted even more:








It is supposed to rain tomorrow - which means this all turns to slush. Fun!