How Does It Know?

This past Sunday, my friend Chris and I went up to Lansing to record with John, this time so Chris could lay down his saxophone part on one of the songs, and also so he could record some piano on some others. We didn’t end up finishing (everything in the studio always takes more time than we have budgeted), so we’ll take another trip up there soon, but I’ve got to say — the saxophone parts kick ass. The piano we did ain’t too shabby either. There is still a ton to do, the hardest of which will be the vocal harmonies, but I’ve been reinvigorated in terms of the project based on Chris’ saxophone and piano. They really bring out something in the songs I wasn’t hearing before, and I’m really pleased.

Totally changing subjects:
I don’t often drag my really personal life out for display here, but my step-father-in-law (is that right?), a totally cool dude who was a Hawaiian musician and all around awesome guy, is really ill. Some kind of blood cancer that is eating his bones. Seriously. So it’s been kind of rough with the news of it worsening, etc. My wife will be going to Hawaii to visit in December, but I won’t be able to make the trip. Needless to say, the emotions surrounding the illness, the last minute travel plans, etc has been interesting. We are simply trying to keep our heads up and I’m trying to be a strong support for my wife. Whatever ends up happening, I am glad I have gotten to know and talk to my step-father-in-law.

Anyhow, Thanksgiving is a couple days away and that means long weekend, which I am very much looking forward to. Have a happy one!

Yesterday, having purchased a half gallon of whole milk for the express purpose of making paneer, I figured that I should actually do so, and so I did.

I had been a little intimidated by it at first, seeing as how you’re basically making a really simple cheese, and making cheese is supposed to be difficult, right? But in fact, it turned out being incredibly easy, and actually tasted like it was supposed to.

Basically, you bring the whole milk to a boil in a big pot, then take it off the heat and start adding vinegar (you can also use lemon juice or lime juice, or EVEN, I read somewhere, the whey (liquid) part of the milk from making your LAST batch of paneer, which seems kind of weird to me, but ok) a tablespoon at a time and stir the milk until it separates into solid and liquid. Then you line a colander with several layers of cheesecloth and pour your solid and liquid milk through it. The solids left behind in the cloth, squeeze it and get as much liquid out of it as you can. Then set something heavy like a bowl of water on top of it for a couple hours. Congratulations, the paneer is ready.

At this point, I refrigerated mine, as I didn’t feel like doing anything with it that night. But tonight, after a bike ride (which gave me a boost of energy, as well as made me hungry), I cut the whole paneer into “blocks” (the shapes are actually more odd, because the whole paneer isn’t exactly square in any way, but that gives it some of its charm, I think) and pan fried them. The horrible photo below illustrates:

Having tasted the paneer pan-fried, I deemed my paneer making a success. I almost don’t know how you could do it wrong though, because I was SURE I hadn’t gotten enough water out of it (i.e. it was still too damp), but it fried up very well and crispy. I ate it with spinach, rice and a bit of Patak’s rogan josh sauce I had. Totally worth the effort, and I still have two meals’ worth left that I’ve frozen.

My wife got this Etch-A-Sketch at work, and gave it to me last night as a gift.

I attempted to write “Thank you” on it, as an expression of my gratitude, before I realized that Etch-A-Sketch is hard and not that much fun.

She replied, “You’re welc”.

So the holiday weekend has come and gone, and it was a nice one. Wife and I have been biking a lot lately (well, not really a lot, and actually she’s been biking more than I have, but it’s more than I did last summer, so, “a lot”!) and it’s really fun. It just makes me really happy to be riding around, and afterwards, the tiredness is a good tiredness, distinctly different from the type you get from sitting in a cubicle all day and staring at code. Actually, we’ll be going out for a ride after I finish writing this. Anyway, we spent most of the 4th of July biking around Kensington and then rowboating. The rest of the weekend was pretty cool too, but not worth going into in-depth (though I’m sure EVERYONE was dying to hear about it).

Anyway, with the biking and the Super Tennis, and all the walks I’ve been taking around the lake here at home and at work, I’ve come to the scientific conclusion that physical activity is good!

As far as the recording is concerned (for How Does It Know?), we’ve had to postpone and reschedule the guitar/piano recording in Lansing due to first, my schedule, and then, John’s schedule. We’ll get it done soon, I’m sure, but the lagtime has got me distracted and not worrying so much about the recording, which isn’t necessarily good. I’ve still got parts to write to make things fuller, but I’m liking the approach I’m taking so far. I’ve been trying to do instrument parts that aren’t necessarily strummed guitar (which have taken center stage as far as my guitar input is concerned on my last several records). This EP will also feature some piano and (if possible) other keys. Maybe some hand percussion to augment the drums, too. Basically just trying to make it sound full without being all mid-range strumming, which has been kind of challenging, but it’s good to break out of my method and routine.

I haven’t been inspired to do much musical lately at all, though several motifs have been repeating in my head since last week for the Marshmallow Mission EP I plan to record at home. One of these days… With the weather, though, spending time in my dark basement setting up microphones and tweaking the EQ is just not what I want to do right now… Maybe recording is more of a fall/winter activity.

I am feeling much better this afternoon. I should be ready for life tomorrow.

This past weekend, in addition to getting sick, I attended the wedding of an old old friend. He’s the same age as me, but we’ve known each other since 6th grade. This was sort of the “unofficial” wedding, as there is the “official” one later in May in NYC (where said friend lives).

The wedding was nice and all, and it was great seeing old friends who have mostly moved all around the country. But a striking thing was how popular a dress color for the ladies brown was. Wife wore a brown dress and wasn’t really sure if that was OK for a wedding or whatever. But it turns out almost EVERYONE wore a brown dress, or some accent of brown (a sweater for example). Strange! All the guys wore suits, of course. It’s a no-brainer. But I must say I particularly like my suit. Though it seems I’ve gained some weight since last year.

The end.

So I’ve been back since Monday and getting back into the swing of things. I miss Paris already. It was a great trip. But back in reality, things are pretty good too. Flew kites with wife this afternoon, which was pretty fun. Made chicken parmesan. I’m getting caught up and back into stuff at work. Wife has been working really hard to put up photos of the trip. And I’ve been working on recording for the little thingy I’m putting up on parttimesongs.com this Tuesday. Turns out it’s going to be a single (A-side AND B), instead of 3 songs. I just won’t have the time or energy to do the third one. Oh well. The two songs I have are sounding good to me, so far, though.

That’s about it for now…

I totally forgot to mention that on 3/29 we went to East Lansing to see Ira Glass, and it was so good! It was VERY similar to the first I’d seen him (I think in Ann Arbor), but with more funny banter about the failed Michigan primaries.

Both times I’ve seen him, he gave tips on how to be creative and do creative work; one of his main points is that you need to generate and put out a large amount of material before you’ll get lucky and come across the thing that works (be it songs, radio stories, written stuff).

And it makes me happy that I’m still doing music and still generating lots of song ideas all the time. He recounts his beginnings as a tape cutter at NPR 30 years ago, and how he basically sucked at doing radio for the first 10 years, when he did some stories for All Things Considered and NPR News. He played a hilarious story he did way back when about tortillas and U.S.-Mexican relations or something (pausing the playback briefly to punctuate with “What is this story about, anyway?!”). Pretty bad. And hilarious.

As a side-note, I tried to capture audio from the show on the BB Pearl as a voice note. And I was able to get some audio. The BB Pearl stores audio as AMR files, so they’re nice and small and easily email-able, which is fine. I’ve been doing this with song ideas, and then converting the files to MP3s for listening on the computer with this MIKSOFT mobile media converter. So anyway, the quality of the audio is really bad, so I decided “hey, with my audio ‘expertise’, I should try to clean up this file”, and I tried to open it up in CoolEdit to boost the wave and maybe do some simple EQ on it to make it a little more listenable. However, neither CoolEdit (nor FL Studio 7) could recognize the wave for editing. The file PLAYED just fine in WinAmp and iTunes, but I couldn’t edit it at all. I’m totally confused, and the only thing I can think of is that the MIKSOFT program converts it to some wave encoding that isn’t supported by these editing programs, but I don’t know exactly what or why. Anyone got any thoughts on this, or any better programs they use for converting AMR files to waves or MP3s?

(3 days till Paris!)

I got into a car crash yesterday morning. I am OK. My neck and shoulders hurt a little (but not more than if I, say, slept on it wrong), but I think I am fine. I rear-ended a pickup truck. He braked abruptly to stop for a yellow light and I didn’t think he was going to do that. I slammed on my brakes and couldn’t stop in time. The road was slick with a slushy rain, and before I knew it I had hit and my airbags deployed.

I obviously called in to work, called D. I got a ticket for ‘failure to stop in an assured clear distance’, which totally sucks. D came and picked me up. Insurance has decided it’s a total loss, so I got my money (more than I thought I’d get, honestly) to put a down payment on something new. I wanted to make it to 100000 miles on my Saturn (it had ~90000 so far), but I am mostly glad that I am all right.

This afternoon is car shopping. Looking at slightly used Hondas at this moment. Any better ideas? (reliability and longevity are important to me, as is fuel economy).

It’s also my birthday today. I guess this is the world’s way of forcing me to buy myself a new car for my birthday.

RIP Snickers (family dog); 1992-2008
Snickers, our family dog, was put to sleep this morning. He was ~16 years old. Still quite sharp in the mind, but suffering physically, and otherwise becoming incredibly difficult to deal with. I am told he had an Arby’s roast beef sandwich (his favorite food) for dinner and breakfast the night before and morning of, and was allowed to sleep without his cone on his final night.

Got a strange fortune cookie this weekend at a place in Ann Arbor.

Sorry ladies, I’m yi jin jeh huan! Why is this a useful Chinese phrase? If I go to China, am I going to be bombarded with marriage proposals so numerous that knowing this phrase will be vital?

This one is strangely relevant to my week. Our fridge died and we lost all our food, but I did identify the issue (when the first serviceman was lousy and didn’t do anything), and brought the attention of a second serviceman (who was awesome) to it.

This was the part that got fried. It’s a starter relay.