Brianna's Piano Recital

Brianna has been taking piano lessons at this great place called Ethos Music, which is right here in our neighborhood in Northeast Portland.  This is a fantastic program, which is dedicated to building communities through music.  This place is right up my alley, so I'm happy to let anyone know about the great work they do.

The folks at Ethos did a great job running the recital.  Each child came to the front, bowed or curtsied, proceeded to play their peace of music, gave a bow or curtsy again, and then returned to their seat.  Most of the kids played piano, but there was one drummer, and one little girl accompanied herself on piano as she sang.

Brianna was accompanied by her piano teacher.  She was so proud of herself after she was done.  It's great to see her get that kind of self-confidence.

Of course, Brianna had a friend from her classes.

Here's a job opportunity that would be interesting.

http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2008/jun/HQ_08158_astronaut_deadline.html

If only I had my bachelor's degree, or experience flying a high performance aircraft.

The Amber Spyglass - Phillip Pullman

The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars
The Amber Spyglass concludes the "His Dark Materials" trilogy. Much like the second book, The Subtle Knife, the action in this book paled very much compared to The Golden Compass. In my review of the Golden Compass I pointed out that what the book lacked in character development and depth of Character it made up for in action and suspenseful plot movement. This cannot be said of The Amber Spyglass.

The third book in the trilogy suffers from a need to advance an increasingly complex plot, which carries forward its authors message with all the subtlety of Kevin Smith's Dogma. Phillip Pullman's point of view and values are interesting to a point which is crossed about 2/3rds of the way through the book.

I will avoid a spoiler, but suffice to say that the book ends with an inexplicable love story that truly comes out of nowhere. Overall I would say that this series is good, but not great. The series is saved by its imagination and when the action does pick up in these two last books it is well worth the wait. I just wanted more.

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Long Time Gone

I owe you an apology.  I have not been living up to my end of the blogger agreement, which consists of frequent updates about the less mundane aspects of my life, making sure to try and filter out the boring parts. 

It's hard.  I've been busy with work, kids, broken arms, my pending return to academe, and my constant search to find time into which I can squeeze some guitar playing.  But excuses and explanations aside I can tell you that Baby, I'm real sorry.  It won't happen no more.  I'll stick around, I'll make posts.  I promise.

In other news, a new development is that we bought a webcam and now we're all set up with Skype, which means we can do video chat with our peeps all over the world.  Last night Jen and I had a great conversation with our friend Aaron and my brother Dan.  Tonight we got to set up a video chat with Dan's family and I got to see my nieces, who are all unspeakably adorable.  Great stuff.

If you're interested in getting my Skype handle leave a comment and I'll send it along.

The Get Out Clause

I think this is kind of old but I saw this video linked from Guy Kawasaki's blog and was pretty impressed.

Apparently the band filmed this video at a bunch of different public cameras and then used the freedom of information act to obtain copies.

If you ever see a video of me picking my nose on the internet, that's what I'm doing too.

Ain't No Mountain High Enough

So today I did a 4.5 mile run, but things didn't go so good.  I mapped out the route on the computer:

One thing I didn't really consider is that coming off of 33rd avenue and going up Klickitat there is this gargantuan hill. To give you an idea, here's a graph of the elevation gain over a quarter mile according to Heywhatsthat.com/profiler.

 

Well needless to say, after I got up that hill my energy was zapped.  I kept going the best I could but I started to get that woozy, nauseous, not very good feeling you get sometimes while running.  Unfortunately I had to start walking at about 41st and wasn't able to run again until about 45th.  On the way back towards the starting point I also had to walk the last couple of blocks on Prescott.

This is the first time I've had to walk during a run since I started running programs in January, so this was a pretty big moral defeat for me.  In fairness to myself I had to take a break from running when I had the cast on, obviously. 

I think I'll be repeating this week in order to get a 4.5 mile run in that I don't have to walk during.

Every Rose Has Its Thorn

Expanding on this blog's great tradition of both admiring and loving Trimet while also complaining about it incessantly, I experienced one of my more interesting commuting trips yesterday. 

The Rose Festival is going on right now in downtown Portland.  For my friends and readers not from the great state of Oregon, the Rose Festival is a civic festival that's been going on for over a hundred years in the city.  The city fancies itself a Rose capital because of its ideal weather for growing the flowers.  I'm not sure if the Rose growing is relevant to the festival or not, though.  The festivities include a parade, high school popularity contests, and a kind of fair on the waterfront with a Ferris wheel and a bungie sling.  For some inexplicable reason a big part of the Rose Festival is what is called the arrival of the ships.  Boats from the Navy, Coast Guard, Army Corps of Engineers, and Royal Canadian Navy come in and dock on the waterfront.  It's a bit of an inside joke around Portland that local girls head down to the waterfront to meet sailors.

The weather has been unseasonably cold and grey, and I every time the subject comes up my coworkers say "it's always like this during Rose festival" in a way that I'm getting tired of.

Yesterday I was headed home and reading and I absent-mindedly got on the yellow line MAX, which goes into North Portland, instead of the red or blue line, which go towards my house.  I do this all the time and realized my mistake at about the 1st & Salmon stop, and was proud of myself for getting off before it was too late.  No big deal, I thought I would just wait for the next train.

Well, turns out because the ships were coming in, the Steel Bridge was up, so the MAX of any color couldn't run over the river.  Trimet did a good job of getting shuttle buses ready so we were all hussled over to make a detour over the Broadway Bridge.  When we got on the bridge, though, we discovered no love.  The Broadway Bridge also went up to allow the ships to get through.  We were stuck on the bridge for about a half hour.

My fellow bus-mates were many of the usual MAX commuters, but included specifically:

• a very loud and sarcastically bombastic gentleman from an unidentifiable country
• his mid-life female companion, who found his sarcastic complaints to be uproariously funny
• a generic semi-jockey kind of guy with the heavy gauge piercing and tattoos that scream "I used to be way into Limp Bizkit, but I'm more of a Muse kind of guy now" that was very upset to be missing the beginning of the celtics/lakers game
• A woman who agreed with him, about Limp Bizkit, Muse, and the game.
• A hipster guy with glasses who knew a lot about a lot of different stuff
• his female companion/girlfriend?
• A hipster gal with a bright green knee-length mohair coat who seemed to be trying to make the best of the situation

It was one of those situations where I wished my earphones were just a bit more noise-canceling.

Of course, the vast majority were complaining which annoyed me because like my green-garbed friend I was in a mood to make the best of the situation and watch the ships come in.  But it was still interesting to see the ships, with the sailors all standing out on deck like little white smudges. 

At one point the fire boat started spraying out water, like an overexcited puppy.  Suddenly the water was dyed red, white, and blue.  Here's a picture:

photo credit: Jason McHuff

At that moment the girl in the green coat goes "isn't the USA awesome?" in a totally deadpan way I found to be very funny.

This morning I snapped a pic of the ships off the steel bridge:

Oneonta Gorge

On Saturday May 17th Jen and I went hiking up above Horsetail Falls by Oneonta Gorge, a hike in the Columbia Gorge, not far from Multnomah Falls.  Incidentally, this was 10 days after I broke my arm, and 10 days before they put the short-lived cast on.

It was a beautiful weekend and the weather could not have been better.  The pictures speak for themselves.

This is Ponytail Falls...

And here's Jen by the falls:

Here's the view from under the falls.  The ceiling is lava rock.

By the trail a rock wall was covered by moss that was being watered from the fall above:

Strange Days Indeed

Really weird morning today.  First off, I got Jen's cold so I've got that going on in addition to the arm thing.  Annoying, but not a big deal.  More interestingly, I finally had my appointment with the orthopedic specialist today.  As you may recall this has been an ongoing saga over the last few weeks.

The appointment started out kind of weird - the doctor took off the temporary cast and almost immediately told me that the biggest problem is that I have stiffness in my elbow because I've been wearing the cast for the last ten days.  He said that there was no reason for me to be immobilized and that the cast may have already caused me permanent stiffness in my elbow.  He showed me the x-ray, saying that really all I need is some physical therapy and to go back to just taking it easy on the arm.

At first I was really relieved and happy, but as I waited for the x-ray tech I started to think about the fact that I had worn the temporary cast because *his office had told me to*.  For the last week and a half I haven't been able to do some pretty routine things like tie my shoe or do the dishes because I was supposed to not take the cast off.  Frustrating.

After the x-rays the doctor confirmed that everything is healing well and far from not requiring surgery I'll just need a little occupational therapy and to wait until about the middle of July before I go back to canoeing or lifting heavy objects.  The best news is that I can start jogging again and I'm now typing with two hands, so look out frequent contacts.  You're about to get an eyeful. 

Related and kind of funny, while I had the cast on my friend Chris let me borrow this rubber thing that you can put on your arm to take a shower while you wear a cast:

The glove is incredibly affective, and also works great for:

• An endless list of proctology jokes
• Impersonating both the stay puff marshmallow man and the Michelin man
• Smurf slaughters
• Challenges to gigantic duels

The Golden Compass

The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman

My review

The Golden Compass is a very fun and imaginative book, featuring a young child protagonist in a dreamworld of obtuse reference in a similar genre to the Narnia series, Holes, or The Secret Garden.

As my friend Jeana pointed out, this is not a novel of deep character development. The characters are developed by the things they do and the book does employ an overall "good guys" and "bad guys" world-view that is only experimented with when characters we thought were bad guys turn out to be good guys or vice-versa. To be fair, though, this is one of those stories aimed at children that is literary and layered sufficiently to appeal to adults, so a certain amount of moral compass is to be expected.

Where depth of character may be the weak point in this novel, pacing of action is its great strength. The plot moves very rapidly and if the reader feels to be in a lull she need only wait a page or two for her head to be spinning again.

Great imagination and inventiveness are the foundations of any novel in this genre and The Golden Compass delivers in spades. I've begun reading the second novel in the series and only know are the purposes of some of the characteristics of the world becoming clear. It is effortless, however, for the reader to buy in to the devices because their internal logic is solid.

I'm really looking forward to reading this book to my daughter - and even to seeing the movie.

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