One Hundred and Eleven, To Be Precise

I’m now more than a hundred days into the year, and the first four months of 2013 have been a whirlwind of doing. One of my few regrets about it has been that this blog has dropped off the bottom of the priority list. What’s been above it?

• Building my first fighting kit and authorizing as an armored combat fighter in the SCA (as well as becoming a herald).
• Getting back into running by slowly up-ing my weekly mileage and doing yoga everyday to prevent the kinds of injuries that have plagued me before, then catching a cold and losing almost a month of workout time.
• Retiring my Dying Kingdoms character in epic fashion and rolling in a new one.
• Spending almost every weekend since the beginning of the year with Gwen, either at a DK or SCA event, or skiing.
• Handing off my Scrum Master responsibilities at work to the person who I had (secretly) trained to be my replacement.

When I write it like that, it sounds like so little, and yet, it’s been all-consuming. It’s also been a ton of fun, though I do like that I’m coming up for a brief bit of air.

Friday Roundup for 21 December 2012

Where am I at this week?

Body and Mind

How can I tell that I’m getting somewhere with my mindfulness work? Because when I got stuck in the Denver airport for an indefinite period of time and had to wait in the customer service line for two hours to find out what my options and fate were, I handled it with equanimity, rather than melting down like the woman behind me. That calmness also helped me work though the possibilities open to me and allowed me to realize a not-terrible solution.

Friends and Family

My folks arrived here yesterday and will be with us through next Thursday. I actually got to drive up the coast with them, because the solution to the “the flight to Santa Barbara has been canceled” problem was to fly to Orange County — where they had been visiting the Nixon library — and have them pick me up.

Create

On my trip to Wisconsin last week, I spent most of my airplane and airport time knitting. Now I’m in search of something to do next that will use up more of the yarn in my stash. I did manage to get out that episode of The Paulcast that I promised last week, and I suspect I’ll do a few more before the end of the year. Last night I actually cooked dinner for the first time in far too long, and it was really, really good.

Absorb

Hardly anything this week. I suspect a backlog will appear next Friday.

This Week’s Soundtrack: Sun Midnight Sun, Sara Watkins

Professional

I had a very valuable week with the whole team together in Wisconsin this week, in no small part because the half-life of trust is six weeks, and it’s been more than two years since I’ve been face-to-face with some of my teammates. We got some good work done, and just as importantly, we did that work together.

The Weekend

Improv show Saturday night, catching up on some reading, and doing a whole lot of nothing.

You?

Improv For Software Engineers

Back in May, I spoke at the 3rd Santa Barbara PechaKucha Night. If you can stand hearing me say, “right?” approximately once every 5 seconds, here it is.

A Rare Bird Indeed

Last Sunday, we saw perhaps the best concert I’ve ever been to.

Now, I’m not the world’s most experienced concert-goer, so that praise might mean less than it seems it should. But both Gwen and I were highly impressive by both the musicianship and showmanship of Steve Martin and the Steep Canyon Rangers. The setup is straight out of vaudeville, with Steve doing the “egomaniacial but blissfully unaware front man” shtick between the numbers, and the band playing the straight man. It’s clearly an act — and a very well-done at that — because during the songs the entire group had a tremendous sense of ensemble.

I’ve been listening to their album Rare Bird Alert quite a bit over the last year, and I was happy see a mix of songs from that and other material. The Rangers also took the stage alone for a pair of beautiful songs from their new album. They closed the show with a tremendous version of Orange Blossom Special, complete with fiddle interpolations of over a dozen songs, including “Norwegian Wood”, selections from The Nutcracker, and the theme from The Simpsons.

The highlight of the show for me, however, came when Steve gave the band a break and played “The Great Remember”. His introduction, in which he explained the difference between Scruggs style and clawhammer playing, made clear his deep love for and understanding of bluegrass music — and called to mind an appreciation of the late Earl Scruggs he wrote just a few months before the legendary banjo player’s death. And as he sat there on the stool, alone on stage with his banjo, I could see the straight line from his teenage years working at Knott’s Berry Farm through the arc entire arc of his career and leading to that night. And it all made sense.

Private Key Art

Gwen and I managed to catch the Picasso and Braque exhibit at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art the day that it closed. The exhibit, comprising a double dozen prints and half that many paintings executed by the pair between 1909 and 1912, explores the beginnings of Analytic Cubism. Picasso and Braque worked closely together — often side-by-side — during this period, and the exhibit explores their similar, though not identical, explorations of the boundaries of art.

Talking about it afterwards, Gwen and I agreed that the best way for us to take in Cubist works is to not think about the original objects the artists were looking at. When we do that, we inevitably try to reassemble the work into those objects, which is usually an exercise in futility. (That’s not always true, as several of Braque’s prints involving bottles of Bass demonstrated.) I remarked at one point that the Cubist style is a kind of “artistic cryptography”: You can’t recover the original without having the key.

Other thoughts:

• I’m not sure why, but I liked Braque’s pieces in this exhibition a little better than Picasso’s.
• There’s something about the way they both reduced forms to sharply-defined areas of color and texture that led to a preponderance of pyramidal shapes in these works.
• Their primary choices of subject material (cafe still-lifes) make me think how nice it must have been to hang around in cafes being artistic all day.
• The layout of the exhibit itself was a bit Cubist, though perhaps unintentionally so. There was no route through the gallery that created a single, coherent narrative. Perhaps we were supposed to simply absorb the whole from different angles.