New Lighting

The lighting in the main part of the house has been an eclectic mix of stuff, ranging from some lamps that were given to me by a friend to fixtures selected by the ex-wife. All of it has been insufficient for this house. Let's see--I've been in the house for what...fifteen years now!?

Since she moved in, Sabrina has been wanting to replace the lighting. Her apartment had a south-south-west facing view, and so she was very used to the sunlight. The main living area of my house, quite differently, faces north, and there are many fewer windows, those are smaller, and I put up floor to ceiling drapes. The relative darkness has been bugging her for just over a year.

Well, we fixed that this last weekend. New fixtures. New lamps. Even the kids got new ones for their rooms. Okay, so it was more money than I wanted to spend on Father's Day, but it sure does make the day memorable!

I broke my own guideline. Since wrapping up so many projects outside work, I told myself I wasn't going to do anything else that got in the way of me sewing my outfit for the wedding. Well, at least I didn't give myself a project that would last; I got everything installed (except the one we had to order) installed yesterday.

Okay, so there is one small thing. The law of unintended consequences came into play. The light switch now has 570 Watts running through it--I need a more robust one. But, that's a quick fix!

Here are some of the things we got:

• http://www.lampsplus.com/products/Apollo-Collection-Eight-Light-Chandelier__72587.html
• http://www.lampsplus.com/products/Bronze-Tortoise-Shell-Font-Floor-Lamp__98142.html
• http://www.lampsplus.com/products/Bronze-Tortoise-Shell-Font-Floor-Lamp__98142.html
• http://www.lampsplus.com/products/Casa-Sorrento-19-1-8-inch-High-Bronze-Wall-Mount__45219.html
• http://www.lampsplus.com/products/Apollo-Collection-Four-Light-Pendant-Chandelier__07324.html
• http://www.lampsplus.com/products/Fairy-Dreamer-Statue__56213.html

Performance...but with issues

When your hobby is in an organization where the political structure is very top down, like the military is, and by design, the folks at the top can do things very right, and very wrong. In the past, I've seen some very good things happen, but this last weekend was one of those times when it left...well...a lot to be desired.

I guess a good idea is to fully understand the consequences of your scheduling choices when lots of people are depending on you. The ones at the top didn't do that, and so our performance got nuked. Well, okay, shut down instantly. (But that is the same as nuked, isn't it!?)

When things happen in sequence, and they all must be done by a certain time, the delay of an earlier one affects the later one. They delayed their start by two hours, to take advantage of the view of the stars in the mountains. They ran three hours, instead of two. So our originally scheduled three hour performance stopped 45 minutes into it. And I'm the one running the performance.

With about fifteen (maybe even twenty) drummers, even more dancers, and perhaps hundreds of folks in attendance, you can imagine that the total frustration has been insanely high. As the music leader, it's my responsibility to coordinate things. Here it is Wednesday, and I've been dealing with my personal frustration and the feedback from other folks since Saturday. It took until yesterday to totally come to grips with it.

A quiet weekend

It's been a weekend without responsibilities, and I've had fun doing not much of anything. Except that my "not much of anything" is actually a lot of stuff, it's just that it's stuff I choose to do. :) Movies, computer playing, exercise, hanging out with friends a couple of times--yeah, I nice weekend.

A really long time ago (9, 12 months, so long I can't really remember), a Microsoft patch killed my computer. Wouldn't even boot. I've been sorta messing with it for month, but this weekend I finished rebuilding it completely so that the kids can use it, including getting the cool sound system and high-res monitor working like they are supposed to, the network working again, the music applications reinstalled and working, and the music copied over from the other machine. And as is so typical for me, I made improvements to the music applications on both of the computers--I configured things so that I can move the music and playlists back and forth between machines, even though the location of the music on one machine is different than the other. :) (Yeah, there are times when I enjoy knowing how things work and how to make things go the way *I* want them to; okay, the term is "nerd"!)

We're talking a complete catch-up on the mundanities of life, too: rotating the mattress, washing the mattress pad and comforters. It's weird, but it actually feels very relaxing and de-stressing to have all this stuff done. It really is like a mini mental vacation!

I even had a relaxing enough time that I went and hung out at a bar down the street with a bunch of friends. I don't recall the last time I just went out and actually did *nothing* but relax. A friend and I went out to lunch, and using crayons at the steak play, we designed a cool firepit for camping. We've got a lot of people in our group that want to make them, so if we get the design right, we might go into (a small version of) mass production.
Okay, so I pretty well nuked my sleep schedule along the way; it was 12:30 a.m. and 2:00 a.m. each night dinking around with things. But--I was having *fun*! It felt again like the days when I was a kid and playing on the computer until all hours of the morning.

Sunday felt like the first totally, completely down day since my sabbatical in 2001, but at the time I was fried from work. This time it was just relaxing. Watched a couple of movies, but basically did nothing. I even started getting a bit antsy at the end of the day to get into something, so the weekend was just the right amount of time of not doing much.