Tuesday  28 Feb 2023           comment?

Saturday  25 Feb 2023           comment?

17" of snow outside my south door, 22" on the north side, and it's not finished. It woulda been a good idea to move my car down to the end of the driveway yesterday. I wonder if anyone's going to try to tell me how beautiful all this snow looks.

Sunday  19 Feb 2023           comment?

Thursday  16 Feb 2023           comment?

Time-lapse video (YouTube, 22 seconds): 124 days in the life of my left index finger.

I recommend manually setting the quality to 720p; YouTube often chooses a lower value on my vids if you leave it set to Auto.

Monday  13 Feb 2023           comment?

So. The day after I linked to a cam of an eagle nest, the parents have stopped tending to their eggs. Your guess is as good as mine as to what they sense is amiss and as to whether they will return to this pair of eggs. I've seen a raven eyeing the nest while the eagles are away.

Sunday  12 Feb 2023           comment?

One of the better recommendations I've gotten from YouTube: continuous live feed of a bald eagle nest over 100' above the ground in a pine tree near Big Bear Lake. Infrared lighting at night that doesn't disturb the eagles. There are two eggs in the nest, expected to start hatching this week or so.

Monday  06 Feb 2023           comment?

	U-2 incident	balloon incident
year:	1960	2023
sent by:	USA	PRC
shot down by:	USSR	USA
altitude:	about 60,000'	about 60,000'
manned:	yes	no
shot down over:	land	water
cover story:	off‑course weather aircraft	off‑course weather aircraft

Sunday  05 Feb 2023           comment?

When I started playing marimba, I asked around to see if someone in my area could teach me. I wasn't expecting to find anyone, what with this being a remote rural area and marimba not being a popular instrument. To my surprise there was a skilled percussionist in the valley: Germaine Franco.

When I met Germaine, she was taking a break from her career in music. She was teaching Spanish at a local high school and had the occasional music student like myself. She charged me $35 an hour, a lot less than what I thought her time was worth.

I wasn't a great student. I didn't have a good sense of rhythm when I came to her, I wasn't good at reading music, and I needed work on the basics of mallet percussion technique. Germaine was patient and gracious. But she was also exacting, having come from a conservatory background. When I told a guitarist in my town that I was taking lessons with her, he said, "Ohhhh, I've heard about her. She's a perfectionist." Well, I liked that about her.

Teacher:student is a special kind of relationship. I was lucky to study with Germaine and I felt bad that I wasn't able to honor her by being a better musician.

After about a year she moved back to Los Angeles to work on film music. I stayed in touch with her for a while and she'd tell me what she was learning about the software they used, how film scores get prepared and played, and so on. She was being modest. She told me she was working as an assistant to a composer and didn't mention that she'd scored a few films herself. I started seeing her name in credits of movies I went to.

Every so often I'd look at her page on imdb.com to see what she'd been doing. After a few years of not looking, I checked a couple months ago and saw that she'd been nominated for an Oscar (Best Original Score) for Encanto (2021). The movie's soundtrack album--Germaine's score and songs written by Lin‑Manuel Miranda--topped the Billboard 200 chart in the USA for nine weeks and also reached #1 in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the UK.

The 2023 Grammy awards ceremony was this evening. Encanto won in several categories.

Saturday  04 Feb 2023           comment?

Wednesday  01 Feb 2023           comment?

The last Boeing 747 to be produced is en route to its customer today. I remember the 747 being a big deal when it first came out. For an airplane type to be in production for over 50 years is pretty cool.