How Does It Know?

My wife and I went to the Detroit Public Library today for the Obama/Biden rally. We got there around 8:15am and stood continuously until about 3:30pm. The rally didn’t begin until 1:30pm, but getting there early allowed us to see stuff being set up, and also (and most importantly), getting a good spot to watch from. We were incredibly close to the stage, perhaps 15 feet away. My lovely wife took some excellent photos, some of which I’ve posted here. The rest of them can be found here.

[sidenote: I will say that the continuous standing in cramped crowded areas for over 7 hours has really worn us out. It was worth it to do it once, but I don’t think we’ll be going to any more political rallies anytime soon.]

Detroit’s new mayor spoke a bit

Joe Biden (who was very energetic and overall a very exciting speaker to watch)

Obama listening to Biden, waiting his turn (and looking sort of like he’s posing for our camera)

Obama himself got off to sort of a slow start, but ended up giving a good speech.

I ran into this while taking a walk around the building I work in, in Detroit.

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…

This basement we played in. In retrospect, kind of a cool venue.

So yesterday, I was lighting up the grill to grill up some chicken and sundried tomato sausages from Trader Joe’s*. We have a gas grill, so I turned on the gas valve at the tank as usual, and turned on the gas on the grill control knob. The electric starter doesn’t work anymore, so we light it with long wooden matches. So I did that as usual, and the flame LEAPT up in a giant ball and singed me! It was freaky. It was just a split second and I didn’t think anything had happened. But then I eventually looked down at my hand and the hair near my wrist was half white… I brushed it and the bits fell off. I realized I had been singed by the flame and ran inside to check my face. It actually got a bit of my beard on the chin and got my eyelash tips (despite my glasses). But luckily, there was no permanent disfigurement or anything, and you can’t really tell anything happened. I’m not sure why the grill did that this time when normally it just lights. Now I’m going to be kind of scared to use it again…

There are some photos of the last show at Jacoby’s at the Low Hello website.

Well, it’s time for bed. Tomorrow’s work. I would like a week where I just hang out at home. I’ve never really done that as a vacation. If I’m taking prolonged periods of time off, it’s always for a trip. I wonder if I’d have fun at home for a week. Or if I’d get bored. It certainly would be conducive to working on the solo EP. Anyway.

* As far as the sausages are concerned, I wasn’t thrilled with them. I was really hoping for a much more seasoned, flavorful sausage, with a stronger sundried tomato taste. But really they were mainly plain chickeny tasting, which was disappointing. I put ketchup on them and they still weren’t as satisfying as a good Hebrew National hot dog.

My birthday is coming up this week. Everyone knows the best thing about your birthday is that you get to renew your license plate tabs and your car registration.

The story of Michigan’s license plates goes like this: In the 70s, they had a plate that was solid black with white lettering. My parents had a few of these sitting around the garage, so I know this without having been alive for much of the 70s. Then the state switched to a solid blue plate with white lettering. This is the most familiar, most “Michiganesque” license plate to me. Solid blue, white lettes, the phrase “GREAT LAKES” printed across the bottom. 3 letters, 3 numbers. Nothing else. Up until this year, the state had allowed drivers to keep their blue plates, even while they came up with new designs (Mackinaw Bridge, college alumni plates, etc). A lot of drivers switched plates, but I stuck to the blue with white letters. None of the other plates seemed right.

The point of all this is that this year they are forcing holders of the old blue plates to switch to the new basic plate design, which is white with blue lettering, like this:

But instead of “SAMPLE”, mine has 3 letters and !!!4!!! numbers. What? That’s way too many numbers. Why’d they have to change the number?
My old plate is this one:

STX 630. I loved that one. It’s easy to remember. STX. Like the river Styx or the band Styx. 630. Like, er, a good time to come home from work? Or, um… yeah, so the 630 part isn’t that memorable. Anyway, the moral of the story is Don’t Mess With Texas.

In other news, I got a new bike today! My wife helped me pay for it as a gift for my birthday, which is very generous of her.

We took them out today (she has one too, obviously) and rode around. I’ve gotta say this is the most comfortable bike I’ve ever had. I had this garage sale bike I tried to ride with D last year, but I was all scrunched up on it and I hated riding it. This spring/summer, I am sure I’ll be biking more.

In other news, the Low hello recorded today. Despite the fact that Robb’s computer kept rebooting itself at various points (the worst being RIGHT in the end chorus during an otherwise perfect take of Strong Leader), we got my guitar and the drums recorded for the 5 main songs we had. We tried to record what we had done of 3 newer songs too, but I clicked on something in Sonar and then the computer rebooted itself, so none of that was saved. Anyway, hopefully we’ll get together again soon and get the rest of it done. I’m not sure if we’ll do anything with this recording or if it’ll serve as demos for another better recording. I mean, how good is good enough? I like the idea of working it more even after this recording to get it REALLY right. We’ll see if our patience and time are free for dinner.

D put them up on Yahoo Photos… There are 4 albums (Mumbai, Rajkot, Delhi and Agra) up for viewing.

Click clickÂ

Because we have about 1.5GB of photos and video clips from India (granted, most of those video clips are of driving), the process of sorting through the photos has been overwhelming. Luckily for me, my lovely wife has taken care of the vast majority of sorting of the photos, and has put them up on her Yahoo! Photos site. I think we’re still in need of better captions, and I can’t seem to find the Taj Mahal photos in any of the sets, but once that’s all squared away, I’ll post
links to that here.

But for now, what I’m going to do is write a few smaller posts based on a few photos, in a segment I like to call “Representative Image: India Edition”. Here’s the first installment now!

While we were in the state of Gujarat, we travelled by road to a few places to see some temples. My family has roots in a town called Balambha. In this town, we were whisked around from small temple to small temple, all the while not really knowing what was going on, other than that these were temples. This was due to my barely-there grasp of Gujarati (the language). Whatever we were doing, it was stuff that’s supposed to lead us to having a good and auspicious marriage. Most of it involved “praying” and eating bits of coconut.

However, at one of the temples, we came upon this giant electric drum machine. This caught my eye, and I asked about it… As a demonstration, he turned the thing on. IT WAS LOUD. Really loud. We actually jumped, startled, when he flipped the switch. The mechanical mallets beat that drum with immense force. We were told it was “to wake up the gods”. It’s probably also to alert everyone within a mile radius that it’s time to wake up and come to temple. Someone with more Hinduism-cred may want to comment on that, but that’s what they said. Inside the thing there were also bells of some kind that played in rhythm with the drum. It’s a really cool sound; we actually heard one from farther away at my grandmother’s house in Rajkot, and it was great. Being that close to it, though, takes away most of the enjoyment.

I should try to get my hands on one and use it on my next recording. Well, not really. It is quite an impressive piece of musical machinery though.