Pondering this often, I’ve come to observe that a great deal of my own personal satisfaction and perhaps a lot of my sense of self worth comes from perceiving myself as “good at” things. I want to be on the right hand side of the bell curve, at least on a small set of things where I have a certain amount of talent and motivation, I want to feel like I’ve built up a set of accomplishments and skills that put me pretty far out there to the right of the bell curve. I don’t know why I have this desire. I don’t know whether or not it’s ultimately healthy. I’m somewhat torn on that fact. There’s a part of me that thinks if you don’t get really “good at” a few things, you’re ordinary, ineffective, and unremarkable. There’s another small Zen camp in my psyche that thinks ultimately this doesn’t matter and it’s not important. One part of me thinks its latent indoctrination from grade school and my love of getting “A”s. And there’s another statistical camp in my psyche that says I should expect to be toward the middle of the bell curve by definition and there’s not much escaping that ultimately because it’s baked into how we compute the bell curve. But anyway, at least right now this notion of feeling motivated to excel is winning the overall debate in my psyche.

So now let me discuss each of these plateaus a bit, which I think will be therapeutic. Musically, my saxophone playing skill pretty much peaked on April 7, 2001 when I had my senior recital at the Oberlin Conservatory. After that I did make some additional progress, especially in the realm of live performances with Sunny Daze, altissimo playing, and some more chamber improvement from the trio and quartet playing I did with Chris, Alex, and Charlie. But the slope of graphing that improvement over time was much more horizontal compared to the steep curve during my conservatory training. After another six years of not much effective individual practicing and just riding that plateau, I sort of gave it up, moved to Colorado, and switched focus more to athletics. The good news is that my technical abilities seem to more or less self maintain. Were I ever to start practicing again, I think my speed and finger technique would quickly return, my altissimo capability seems to have been baked into my throat and does not seem to deteriorate due to lack of practice, which is actually pretty cool. My endurance however has completely gone to pot and my face muscles are exhausted after fifteen minutes of playing. That would take a few months to come back I think.

But the classical stuff wasn’t really my main concern. I felt like through school I kept up well enough with the classical sax players at my level. But my interest wasn’t strong enough for me to go onto the graduate school or professional level. I really like playing and studying classical saxophone music, but the truth is I don’t like listening to it. I listen to music voraciously still to this day, but I’ve never owned more than a dozen albums featuring classical saxophone, and there’s only a small handful of pieces that I will get in the mood to hear and actively go and play on the stereo. So graduating from Oberlin with recital performances I’m proud of and still enjoy listening to feels OK to me as the pinnacle of my classical saxophone experience. I loved the experience at Oberlin, but I didn’t have the motivation and interest to go on to graduate school or to due what it takes to play classical music at the professional level. So I feel very much grateful for that experience and at peace with where it came to a conclusion.

The jazz side is where most of the frustration and feelings of inadequacy reside. So given the choice, I would have majored in Jazz Saxophone Performance at Oberlin. I auditioned for both classic and jazz but got rejected from the jazz program and a nice scholarship for the classical program, so that settled that. However, I still took a lot of improvisation courses, and played in the Oberlin Jazz Ensemble big band as well as doing a few small jazz combos.

There was a time when the jazz majors had a period of accelerated growth where it became obvious that the woodshedding they were doing and the dedicated improvisation practice took them out of the student level and into the young professional caliber. I saw this with frightening clarity case after case after case. In most cases, it happened in their junior year. In the case of my friends Moppa and Kelly, toward the end of sophomore year we were all still playing pretty much at the level of really talented high school students. But there was an enormous and profound change that happened to them (but not me) in their jazz playing over junior year. By the end of junior year, they had learned to “get around on the horn” as Peter Dominguez would say and had developed individual voices coupled with virtuoso technique and a big repertoire of memorized standards. At that point there was still a voice in my head that believed I could do that too if I was able to dedicate the amount of time to it that they are since it was their major and for me it was just a hobby I squeezed in to my spare time as best I could.

Having been pondering this for almost a decade now, my current outlook is fairly bleak. The hard truth is my ear is not nearly good enough for me to realistically play high caliber jazz music. My ear has always been weak. When Andy Fusco first started working on it with me and trying to get me to do transcriptions, I was basically functionally tone deaf. He would play a note on the piano and ask me to sing it. It would take me a while to get it right and even when I did I wasn’t confident I was singing the correct pitch. With a lot of focus and training in high school and in my aural skills classes in college, it got much better. I was able to get through four levels of aural skills, which was pretty challenging, but for the most part I didn’t see a huge disparity between myself and most of my classmates, and I got “A”s in Aural Skills I-III. It was only Aural Skills IV which focused on a lot of atonal and twelve tone stuff where despite my efforts I couldn’t muster more than a “B” due to the errors I was making with my ear. That plus the “B” I got in a more advanced Jazz Improvisation class were the first “B”s I ever got where I thought that was the best I could do. In reality the “B”s were probably generous grades. I think conservatory teachers tend to go easy on students academically because the performance aspect is so rigorous.

Anyway so at this point it is clear to me that my ear is so weak that I just might not make it in jazz. I took extra ear training courses (from Neal Creque) as well as a private study with Tim Weiss. Sadly of course Neal Creque has an amazing ear as everyone on conservatory staff does, so I felt like it was the sighted trying to teach the blind to see. If it’s just an effortless sensory reality for you, I don’t think you can comprehend what it’s like when things just sound like undifferentiated notes. Tim Weiss I think was more sympathetic to my struggle and tried to teach me the “sound colors” approach. Anyway, I knew I had a challenge here and I was making a concerted effort to overcome it. I was doing extra ear training practice, buying miracle cures from the back of band instrument catalogs, walking around with A 440 on a loop in my mp3 player (the Diamond Rio, one of the earliest portable MP3 players ), and so forth.

But now when I think about this, it seems like an insurmountable problem. If you can’t hear and interact spontaneously to a certain level in jazz, you just “can’t hang” as they say. When I auditioned for the jazz program at Oberlin, Peter Dominguez checked my ear. He rightly detected major problems. I still remember it vividly. He asked me to play “Happy Birthday” and I said I didn’t know it. So he asked me to play it by ear and I couldn’t. I think I got the first three pitches but not much more and had to stop. My assumption has been this alone was enough to get me rejected from the jazz program. Not sure if that’s true, but part of me wishes someone along the way would have stopped blowing “you can be the first astronaut president” smoke up my ass and sat me down and said “look, kid, you’re 5’4″ and you’re ear is weak. Basketball and jazz are not going to work out for you career wise, really, and there’s nothing to be done about it”. (Not that I was in to basketball, I’m just trying to make the point that sometimes there are fairly obvious indications of a mismatch happening).

So that’s pretty much where I am today. I quit my band after several years of not making significant improvement, and having my improvisation limited to modal tunes with very few chord changes. I’ve now come to terms with this reality but I’m not really sure how to proceed. I’ve had a few thoughts on this over the years. First, stick to simple music, as in the Boston band “Morphine” that basically just jams everything out in D minor using a 2-string bass and calls it done. Secondly, I thought if I got into electronic music, at least I wouldn’t have to worry about intonation. I bought my Eigenharp hoping that would rekindle my passion for music, but so far it hasn’t caught on (yet). I’m still optimistic that some combination of a new keyboard or Garage Band or the Eigenharp might do the trick.

The other observation I’ve had is that while compared to the other students at Oberlin, my sense of pitch was very weak, compared to them, my sense of rhythm was significantly better than average. I’ve always been really good and reading complex rhythms from sheet music and transcribing them as well. Based on that I sometimes think about learning to play the drum set. I think I could be good at that. However, the problem is the music performances that really inspire me these days are all melodic and vocal. I don’t know. Maybe I’ll try it for a bit and see how it feels.

OK, whew, it feels good to type all that stuff out. On to the next plateau: computers. Ironically, this is probably the complete opposite of my music experience. Here’s something that I seem to have significant talent at but I’ve not had much formal training or focused practice. The realization I had while I was attending the Henri Mancini Institute that being a professional musician wasn’t going to work out, coupled with realizing I really liked computer programming and I was effortlessly good at it was a defining moment in my growth into an adult. I say “effortlessly” not to mean I didn’t bust my ass working on it, but comparing working really hard in 16 credits of Comp Sci over 2 years to 10 years of relentless dedicated practice of the saxophone makes it seem comparatively effortless.

So with the help of one truly great and inspiring Professor Stephen Wong, using my remaining electives over my junior and senior year, I learned object oriented programming in Java and with the help of my CS lab buddies I learned a lot about linux systems administration. Of course, I didn’t have most of the mathematical prerequisites, so some stuff went completely over my head. But honestly, only once in my networks class where we did some graph theory equations and stuff did I just have to write “I’m sorry I don’t have the knowledge to even begin to answer this question at all. It’s probably something like 2n ÷ (n - 1) though.” All those problems seemed to involve 15 minutes of intense mathematical machinations, but the answer always seemed to be the same as far as I could tell.

So I learned enough about web development and Java to pass Sun’s exam and eventually get my first job out of school doing programming at CodeFab. Nine years later, I’ve built a handy little career here. I’ve worked with lots of the biggest companies in the world, gotten some good travel experiences, been through a big acquisition, and been inspired by some really talented coworkers. But again I think I’ve hit something of plateau here. It’s not as flat as the music plateau as there’s always a certain amount of growth happening, but basically now there’s so much awesome community happening on the Internet that my scope of my peer group keeps expanding and expanding. I’m reasonably comfortable saying that even with a very large peer group of about 14,000 software engineers at HP software, I’m probably well to the right of the center of the bell curve. Not sure exactly how far right, and probably not the extreme right, but somewhere along that descending slope. That is, considering overall effectiveness at making software. I’m definitely not the most whiz-bang programmer and I’m not going to be winning any awards for algorithms in C, but at the end of the day I can get shit done and it usually comes out “less bad”, let’s say, than average.

So now I think I’m ready to expand my peer group to the Internet at large and work toward becoming a legitimately world-class programmer. I may need to go back to school or at least take a leave of absence and do some focused self-training to fill in the gaps in my education and broaden my skill set. I’ve made a pretty good mind map of this stuff, so I feel like I know what I want the end state to be. I’m not clear yet on which of several alternative paths I’m going to take to go in that direction.

What’s not clear to me is what is the right balance here in terms of how much time/effort I put into the computer stuff versus the reward and sense of accomplishment and self worth I get out of it. I think clearly if I double down a bit and level up a notch and overcome the plateau, I’ll enjoy that. It’s not clear just how much higher the next plateau has to be for me to feel satisfied. I think in my mind I’m pretty ambitious but in my life experience I’ll probably be satisfied with any plateau that is noticeably higher than my current level.

So the third area of athletics is more straightforward. I’m not deeply committed to athletics but I enjoy exercising and rock climbing has become more or less my primary hobby these days. I’ve had pretty good commitment to exercise since January 2009. I’ve been doing something active at least three times a week continuously since then, with a few intense periods of even more than that. I’ve been stuck climbing around (barely) 5.11 in the gym for probably 6 months now. I took a bunch of expensive personal training sessions last winter and worked on it a bit, and I got a bit better, but I seem to progress pretty slowly. Most of my climbing partners progress much faster than I do, sometimes to the point where I’m dumbfounded and I literally have no explanation for how they are doing it.

Also, it’s not even clear to me that I like rock climbing outdoors that much. I still haven’t done a ton of outdoor climbing, but whenever I go I’m always looking around at my buddies skeptically like “do you guys really like this that much?”. It’s logistically kind of a pain, and constantly worrying about the gear and the weather makes it pretty stressful for me. I might just need to get beyond the red zone here, but I’m a bit skeptical and maybe taking sort of a South Butt approach to it. I suspect ultimately I’ll end up wanting to spend less time exercising and choose some exercises I can do quickly at home so I can focus on my other two big areas of interest, but I guess time will tell.

So that’s what I’m thinking about now. These plateaus and whether or not I want to try to level up. And how much of that desire is healthy. Comments from family and friend are welcome!

Uck. Last night was my worst performance at Climb Fit class yet. I’m not sure what happened. I did OK on the first 2 laps then faded very quickly and by the fifth lap I was “pumped out of my tree” as the instructor likes to say. The tops of my forearms are sore these days from computer RSI all day. After class the bottoms of my forearms were aching relentlessly. I’m not sure what that’s about but it was frustrating.

Tonight Michale came home and we went to the first half of Ignite Denver which was some good people/hipster watching combined with some so-so presentations. Tomorrow I’m off to Vermont for vacation and reunion with the Lyons side of the family!

Two weekends ago I got Michale a used mountain bike and surprised her at breakfast on Saturday. We took it to the bike shop since it turned out to have a bent front wheel, and then we went on a long ride out to Lafayette and back along a nice bike path. We road under a flooded underpass and got our shoes wet though.

Last week on Thursday my Eigenharp Tau finally arrived. I ordered it on the very first day it was available and it took a month to arrive. I’m excited about the possibilities but I’m still just working on figuring out the basics. It doesn’t come with much documentation at all, so its a bit mystifying, especially considering the interface consists of mostly 95 unlabeled buttons. We’ll see how it goes. So far I’ve figured out how to change sounds and scales and I can play Happy Birthday with unintented pitch bends.

This past weekend Michale and I did a fairly spontaneous camping trip up to Frisco to escape the heat. We headed up to the mountains after I finished setting up a network build system for Boulder Community Computers. We were able to find a decent car camping site and secure a space close to Dillon Reservoir. Then we took the bikes out and biked along the path between Frisco and Breckenridge. It was nice to be by the reservoir but I think it fostered a lot of mosquitos, so now we’re each nursing a dozen or so bites. We did “restaurant camping” as it were. I didn’t have the motivation (or equipment) to pack and cook our own food, so we just headed into downtown Frisco for dinner Saturday and breakfast Sunday. Sunday we biked about twenty miles round trip between Frisco and Keystone, which was a lot of fun and I’m pretty sure it’s the longest bike ride I’ve ever done. I think Michale really liked the experience overall, especially the bird watching.

Sunday evening back in Boulder I met up with some friends for a pot luck picnic and then we heard the Colorado Music Festival orchestra play some nice Brahms pieces. It was another really fun and varied weekend.

Tonight is my little “You Film Fest” party #3 where we’re going to watch some Ignite Boulder talks. Then Michale is off to Seattle to visit her peeps this weekend and next week I’m headed to Vermont to visit my peeps.

Photos from some of these events are here.

So Janet played mostly instrumental on a “prepared” acoustic guitar. “Prepared” is the term used in conservatories for when pianists put stuff onto the strings and otherwise futz with it under the hood. Janet had some really cool effects with hooking small metal bands onto the strings as well as tying a loose guitar string around one of the strung strings and then dragging the loose string along the regular string. She played in a bunch of unusual tunings and her songs had lots of nice crunchy harmonies while still being tuneful and sonically very interesting. It was also cool to watch how relaxed her left hand was and how lightly she pressed the strings to the frets. Definitely an unexpected pleasure especially since I’m primarily listening to melodic pop bands these days. It reminded me of my days at Oberlin.

The space is a small 60-seat theater in a recording studio, so it was very intimate and the sound was terrific. This reminded me of when I got to hear Charlie Hunter upstairs at Mo Pitkins in NYC. The audience was quiet and attentive with the one exception of one very young girl who was there at the beginning for a few songs before her parents’ delusions about this being an appropriate place for a five-year-old finally wore off and they carried her out.

In other news I went code complete on a major release as well as a subsequent patch release this week so there’s a good ten months of work or so that is done and done. Now it’s on to the next big project full steam ahead as always. Got some fun plans for the weekend as well. I was glad to be back to climbing and exercising this week as well after lounging around eating Oreos on vacation last week. Chris Wall turned it up on notch on his Group Fitness 2 class on Tuesday and made us do 12 sets of each exercise instead of the usual 9. I’m still a bit sore in the thighs and shoulders from that. I also did some lead climbing on Wednesday and tried out my new rope. Just need to wait for my backordered carabiners and I’ll be fully equiped for outdoor sport climbing.

I went straight from the show to Bill and Leslie’s house. I showed up at 1am, rested a few hours, and then we left for the airport at 3:30am. We just had a lovely week on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina for our family reunion. This is our third year in a row. It’s lots of golf and tennis plus some swimming both in the ocean and in the pool and a bit of bicycling as well. There was lots of good food this year, which is featured prominently in the photos. It was a very fun age for Will. He can’t really say much of anything yet but he is happy and fun. He knows High Five and is good at walking around, carrying tennis raquets, and hiding in cabinets.

My sleep patterns were pretty disrupted so I spent two dawns out on the beach watching heat lightning and sunrise. The weather overall was pretty oppressively hot. We got a bit of a break this afternoon with some clouds and a cool breeze, but most of the week it was low to mid nineties, sunny, and humid. Of course we watched a lot of World Cup matches as well, all slunked in along a big wrap around couch and alternating not paying attention, with most people browsing the web on their laptops, with intense vocalization at the interesting parts of the match.

Photos from the trip are here.

I also bought a bunch of new toys! I got a set of my own climbing gear (a rope and some quickdraws) finally. I had been watching prices and got the REI outlt deal of the day – a 60 meter rope for less than $90 (normally they are in the $225 ballpark). Then, after about 12 years of using Linux on PCs as my primary operating system, I bought a MacBook Pro. However, this is mostly triggered by the fact that the EigenD software that accompanies the (hopefully) awesome Eigenharp Tau only runs on Mac OS X. So now shipping to me is an Eigenharp, an electronic instrument designed for live performance, which I have been lusting over for many months since they were first announced, and a tricked out MacBook Pro loaded with RAM and a 256 GB solid state disk drive. I’m hoping the conversion to Mac will be mostly smooth, and I think it probably will, but I’ll miss the awesomeness of the Debian package format and associated tools infrastructure and a bunch of other things. I’ll probably write a post about that on My Professional Blog in a few weeks.

After climbing I met up with Michale and her friend Cecilia who was in town. We wondered around the Pearl St mall a bit and eventually headed home for a nice meal with broiled salmon and some good veggies. Of course we played some Guitar Hero as well.

Sunday we had a big pancake breakfast and then had a lovely drive out to Golden to hit the Heritage Square Alpine Slide. It was pretty fun, you get a really nice view of the whole surrounding area from the ski lift that takes you to the top, and it’s just $7, so overall worthwhile if you’re passing through. Then we headed back to Boulder, grabbed some loaner bicycles and some eats, and then headed over to Scott Carpenter Park for the B360 Bike Ride. We had fun riding all around Boulder with a big crowd and lots of free yummies from vendors at the end.

Finally got back to the Level 2 Group Fitness class at BRC last night and then rested for an hour before my climbing partner arrived for another ninety plus minutes of climbing. Next up is a highly anticipated Imogen Heap concert on Friday in Denver, and then Saturday morning it’s off to Hilton Head for the Pizzi family reunion!

OK, now that that bit of jazz nerdery is over, here’s a quick update. Over Christmas I had a nice visit with the parents. Since I was flying in to Philly, they made a day of it and went in early to shop for bar stools then see a movie. Then we went to a very fancy restaurant called James to celebrate Mom’s birthday. The decor was great and the food and beer were pretty good. It was nice to have some time with just me and the folks. The Christmas festivities were good. My young nephew Will was exhibiting extreme cuteness.

I came back to Colorado after just three days and immediately hit the slopes at Breckenridge with Erin. They must have opened up a few new trails that day since we got to make a few fresh tracks. Over all for early season it was a very good day and we ended up skiing a pretty full day – more than I was anticipating. Then that Tuesday I did the CHAOS blue moon hike with Mags. It was before the official full moon, but still a gorgeous night. Clear and still and not too cold. It was a nice short hike with a picturesque section under some overhanging trees. Everyone brought something blue to share.

Michale and I spent New Year’s Eve at the Phoenix Asylum Speakeasy roaring 20s party, which was a good time. Many folks had impressive costumes. Saturday I hiked Mesa trail with a big Pizzi/Abrams crew, which was a nice early morning outing still leaving a full day ahead. I got a dual membership at both Boulder Rock Club and The Spot for the next six months, so I’ll be ready to do some serious outdoor climbing this Spring. I did yoga classes and climbing at BRC Monday and Tuesday and will do some bouldering at The Spot tomorrow. Michale and I are also starting to book a trip to Belize in February, which I am very much looking forward to, especially considering we are in our second severe cold snap of the season. It’s six degrees outside right now.

The week of work was both disappointing and exciting. We did a bunch of planning and realized we would fall quite short of the mark for our next release, and a formal procedure was started to notify interested parties that we would be dropping features from the release, so there was some stress and frustration associated with that. However, almost instantly after the announcement, the team started making huge strides of progress, so that got me excited that maybe A) we could still deliver the main functionality we were shooting for but B) people might not be constantly panicking about it.

Bernie and I took a very nice run at Rancho San Antonio park Tuesday morning. We saw some wild turkeys and enjoyed running on the curvy, hilly dirt trails. I met up with Ed one night to do some rock climbing. I gave him a crash course in belaying and he took the test. Administration of the test took longer than it should have so I figured he was probably not quite passing it, but apparently he was good enough to be permitted to belay me that night after some additional instruction from the gym staff, but not convincing enough to get the permanent “OK to Belay” card. We did some fun climbs though.

I was set to come back Friday night but a bit of snowy weather in Denver caused United to cancel my flight and reschedule me for Saturday morning. I ended up booking a rather weird and appealing hotel called the Domain Hotel on El Camino Real in Sunnyvale for that final night since my original hotel was full. It was dirt cheap – $50 – so I expected it to be basically a Super 8 type setup, but I was surprised to find it fully remodeled in a modern high-tech but weird decor and nicely appointed with sleep number beds, a fancy office chair, and actual wired ethernet. I’m not particularly skilled at describing the weirdness of the hotel, but let’s just say it was weird and odd and I liked it. However, I had worked from 6:30 am to 11:30 pm that day, scarfed down a turkey sandwich at the Denny’s next door, and had to gas up the car, return it, and get on an early flight so I went immediately to sleep.

Back in October when I went to hear the Kronos Quartet Cynthia and I got Boba Tea. I have a fascination with Boba Tea, and some of Cynthia’s friends that we met at the auditorium asked why I liked it so much, and I wasn’t sure, but I said something like “I don’t know. It’s just yummy and Japanese and weird”. And that made me realize that Boba Tea is just strange and random enough to be weird and delightful and I think these days I am quite delighted by things that are pleasantly weird.

Michale picked me up in Denver and came with me that evening to the Imogen Heap concert at the Fox Theater in Boulder. It was an odd show at 7pm because apparently they had double booked the theater so they gave Imogen an early show and had a second show afterward. It was fun to see Immi in person and enjoy her fetching stage presence. As with most of her live performances though, it was fairly lackluster. Her opening act had technical difficulties that prevented him from doing anything at all. And sadly the new Ellipse album is just not stellar. It’s certainly got some good tracks, but nothing more. Just some good tracks.

Sunday evening I had a meal with Jennifer in Denver and then took a swing dancing class at The Mercury Cafe. The band they had was called Impromptu Musique and they were “gypsy jazz” and quite good, especially the trumpet player.

This past week I had two fun climbing sessions Wednesday and Thursday with Stephanie and Safia, respectively. I’ve been working a lot and not doing much else, although it was good to do a little yoga now that I was back home. Last night I went with Michale and her friends Tollie and Zack to an America Indian Fry Bread Taco place and then to the Bindery | Space theater to see a very funny black comedy called “Big Love”. It was really quite great. It was a modernization of an ancient greek play and there was some great acting, singing, riding around on roller skates, and a constant swing between the macbre and serious grandious and the silly and humorous and humble. I go to very few plays, so it has been quite a while since I have enjoyed one this much. I also really like being very close to performers, and the theater had seating on three sides of a square stage at floor level, so it was very up close.

I’m composing this post on a flight to Newark. I’ll be in the NJ area until December 1. Tonight Marc is getting me at the airport and we’ll have Thanksgiving The Prequel with the band crew. I haven’t seen most of my old bandmates and their families in two years since last year I got a cold in transit and had to cancel the visit while I was contagious, so I am very much looking forward to it. Tomorrow it’s up to Mom’s for a big Italian Pronzo meal which I am also very much anticipating.

Slight change of plans today but all for the better. (inside joke). I got to most of the Developer Day which was cool. There is a tech startup incubator company called TechStars in downtown Boulder that I wasn’t aware of. It is encouraging to know that it is there, though. I also got to meet Bruce Eckel, the author of the first ever book on computer programming I used (his Thinking In Java was the text for my now-infamous CS 150 class). We have a lot in common: java, python, colorado (with the implicit skiing, hiking, mountain biking), and Burning Man, so it was fun to meet him and chat briefly at the happy hour after his talk. I also went to the Google Boulder office where they were hosting a Python Unconference. As I said in my facebook status update “The fucking Google Boulder office has a fucking rock climbing wall in the fucking lobby”.

I hate emoticons. I can’t believe I used two in this post.

Saturday during the day I exercised with yoga, weights, and swimming. I set another personal best: 65 laps, which is about two miles. It took me about an hour and a half or so which is about four different lifeguard shifts, apparently. Then I went to a party with Erin thrown for a bunch of her friends/family celebrating three concurrent pregnancies in their core group. Afterward we went to hear Galactic at the Fox Theater, which was a pretty good show and enthusiastically received by the Boulder crowd. The covered a Balkan Beat Box tune, which is unbelievably hip, and their drummer is the amazing Stanton Moore.

Today it’s mostly working from home on a Sunday, but I’m making some good progress which has been long awaited. Lots more good stuff in store for October.