red echo

I had planned to go to Katie's party tonight, but as the afternoon drew on I just felt tired and decided to cancel. Instead I wandered over to Heden and hung out with Adam, Janet, and Tad for a while. We played Guitar Hero for a couple of hours, which was all kinds of fun, and then made a bonfire in the back yard using most of the scrap lumber left over from the Nomad Lounge.

I heard back from Glazer's with an estimate for repairing my camera, and decided to go for it. I thought about buying a newer replacement instead, but decided the whole process of picking out the right camera was just too much of a hassle. Anyway, what could possibly be as pretty and elegant as my tiny little red camera?

I decided to make it a quiet night in after tonight's plans fell through, which was probably for the best as I've been out late every night for the past week and needed some rest anyway. I spent a couple of hours cleaning and doing laundry, then started in on a little sewing project. I found a suitable pair of blue jeans at Red Light, and I'm stitching a stripe of black cotton webbing down the seam on the outside of each leg. It's as simple a piece of stitchery as one could imagine, but I think it'll look good, and it's fun to try a piece of non-costume clothing for a change.

I've been working on a design for a revised version of the light-up fun-fur dance leggings I made for Burning Man, and stopped by Radio Shack today to pick up the LEDs I'm going to use. This time the electronics are going to be mounted on a piece of webbing which velcros on to the hem, instead of being sewn directly on. I'm also thinking of running a cord through the upper hem and tying it off in back, instead of using elastic, in hopes of eliminating the need for a garter belt.

Dawn, Greg, Collin, and I finally got together for band practice tonight, after a month's hiatus due to one or another sort of summer busy-ness. Surprisingly, the break doesn't seem to have done us any harm; we kicked off with a fifteen-minute jam session that felt pretty coherent, and made our way through a few of our usual songs with little trouble. We wrapped up a little early, which was fine as the heat made us all pretty tired, and spent a while kicking around ideas for names. None of the candidates have really taken hold yet, but we're getting closer.

After cruising home and unpacking my gear, I walked down the street to meet some friends at the Crescent for a couple hours of karaoke. It's a fun little place, and the DJ is very good, but it was crowded and I don't think any of us sang more than one song. Oh, well; singing is fun.

Caroline came over this afternoon and we ran through some of the Bach chorales we used to practice with Sadie. It took some time to remember my parts, but when we worked it out, ahh, those harmonies were rich and satisfying as ever. We took a stab at the Kyrie from Palestrina's mass “l' Homme Arme,” but quickly retreated - even with only two of the five parts, it'll take some practice before we can make much headway there.

I also spent some time earlier working on my electronica project. I'm getting better at operating the Repeater, and can reliably punch loops in and out on time now. I spent almost an hour jamming, with the drum machine and the looper going the whole time, adding parts, mixing in new pieces, breaking it back down, trying different synth sounds. I'm sure it would have sounded pretty monotonous to anyone listening, but it was the first glimmer of the sound I've been imagining.

Geoff's birthday party was a classic kid-style slumber party, complete with pajamas, fuzzy slippers, streamers, sleeping bags, and movies until dawn. Laura wallpapered the living room with this deserty background stuff plunked an inflatable cactus in the middle, and covered the floor with pillows and blankets. Ah, we had a great time. I think I finally went to bed around six...

It struck me this afternoon that it was time for another set of bookshelves. A trip to Home Depot and an hour of simple carpentry later, I have a new set of shelves sized to fit under the main window in my living room. The older unit which had been sitting in that spot is now moved over under one of the side windows. The new shelf has swallowed up the floor space I formerly used for stacking homeless books, but - for the first time ever, so far as I can remember - I finally have more shelf space than books to store. There are actually blank spaces on a few of my shelves now! I don't expect this situation to last more than another few months, but for today, at least, I feel accomplished.

It's a grey, rainy Seattle autumn day. The wind is blowing, the trees are swashing about, and it's just chilly enough to make long sleeves comfortable. It's perfect weather for hot tea and long piano practice. Seattle summers are fun, celebrating the blue skies with an almost manic energy, but it's fall that suits the city's character best.

I am very happy these days. This is a good life.

My Repeater arrived!

Here we go, new music project.

I've just posted a gallery of photos from the abandoned mill we explored on Saturday.

Tonight was the Grooville decompression party at Heden. I spent a couple of hours getting ready, fixing the lights in one of my furry leggings and sewing a suspender-belt with elastic straps to help hold the tops of the leggings up. Then I grabbed a handful of waterpacks, threw on a big furry coat, and zoomed over to find a party already roaring away.

I felt scattered and a bit hyperactive for much of the night. It was a very energetic, busy party, with lots of people I wanted to see, and I spent a lot of time flitting from place to place. I think sleep deprivation also made it hard to focus. I found my groove around midnight, though, about the time I changed into my over-the-top space cowboy raver outfit, and proceeded to dance and flirt the rest of the night away.

The Hedenites rearranged their living room for the occasion; all the couches were moved into the dining room, so the living room was left free for dancing. Barry and Thomas took turns manning the DJ booth in the corner. I felt too social to stay on the dance floor very long at a time, but it was good music, and I returned frequently.

I tried out the red waterpack #4 tonight, and quickly discovered a couple of problems with the design. The screws on the straps kept catching on my fishnet shirt, and there was an uncomfortable bump where the weight of the pack rested on the small of my back. I'll have to add some foam there. Also, I neglected to add a sternum strap, so the shoulder straps cut into my shoulders a bit. You'd think I'd have learned by now, eh? Oh, well - it's all fixable.

Good party. I felt relaxed, totally at home with the people and the place. Everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves. What a life!

I spent the morning with Thomas exploring an abandoned mill. We snuck in through a window and spent four or five hours poking around and taking pictures. It's a huge building, over ten stories tall, full of partially dismantled industrial machinery - room after room of strange and magnificent relics. It felt a bit eerie; it's the sort of place where you'd expect to have an apocalyptic showdown with an army of zombies.

I was planning to do some recording tonight but ended up rescheduling for Monday. Instead I joined up with some friends and went off to Neumo's for a night of Decibel Festival music and dancing. Lusine was fun, Apparat was great, Telefon Tel Aviv was interesting but not really what I was looking for; and then it was time to leave. A good night out.

Tonight's project was a backpack harness for waterpack #4. I tried a new design: on my previous packs I've punched a hole through the webbing and screwed it onto the bottle, with a layer of epoxy for extra strength. This works, but I've never been completely happy with it, and the epoxy tends not to hold very well. This time I tried fabricating metal brackets, from sections of brass rod; I screwed the brackets onto the bottle, then looped the webbing straps through. I haven't actually used the pack yet, so I don't know how this system holds up under load, but it certainly looks good - this is definitely the prettiest waterpack of the four. The brackets take too much work, though, so I'll try something else next time.

I haven't finished this project yet - there's still the drinking hose apparatus to construct - but I think I can already see the next step from here. Next time I think I can manage to avoid having to drill any holes in the bottle: it'll screw into a base which contains all the electronics, and an elastic strap will hold it against the rest of the backpack harness.

I've just updated the Nomad Lounge page and added a gallery of photos from Burning Man. Check out my main gallery of Burning Man photos, too.

I made a start on waterpack #4 this evening, using a red bottle and eleven red LEDs. The new design has all of the LEDs clustered on the bottom of the bottle, pointed straight up. Assembly took about twice as long as I'd hoped it would, so I don't think I actually saved any time with this change, but it seems to work well enough visually. The bottle glows with a deep, pleasant, ruby-red light, and water-surface motion lights up dramatically.

Now that Burning Man is over, I am ready to start pursuing a certain musical project I've been thinking about for the last half year or so. I want to make live, improvised dance music, with no prerecorded backing tracks. I think I can make this possible with a lot of careful drum machine and synth programming, but mostly I envision a multitrack looper run through a mixer, so I can play my own accompaniment parts and then let the looper carry them on while I play or sing new parts on top. Learning how to make this work will definitely require many hours of practice, but if it comes off it should be a lot of fun.

I bought parts for Waterpack #4 today. This is a lighter, faster, simpler design, based on a 32-oz bottle instead of the 48- or 64-oz containers I've been using, with more straightforward electronics and a simpler backpack harness. It's an economy model, a step toward the sort of thing I imagine would happen if someone were to mass-produce these light-up waterpacks.

This version of the pack will also incorporate a couple of minor improvements to the harness attachment system. Gluing the webbing to the bottle doesn't work so well; the webbing eventually pulls away, and the screws hold all the weight anyway. This time I'm going to try wrapping the webbing around a metal bracket, which will then be screwed into the bottle; it won't be any more functional, but it should be easier to assemble and will look prettier.

In the opposite direction, I'm thinking over ideas for a mega-pack incorporating a cargo bag. One disadvantage of the waterpacks I've made so far is that there's no way to carry a jacket, radio, or any other extras one might want to have on hand in the course of a night. This was not a fatal limitation, but it was sometimes inconvenient, and I'd like to see if there's something I can do about it.

Went climbing this afternoon at Vertical World with Rose, Alexis, Mez, and Connie. It was a little more low-key than usual as there were an odd number of us, but the extra breaks were nice given my not-really-recovered-yet state of general tiredness. I didn't push myself too hard and basically stuck to 5.9s, but it was fun. I haven't been climbing in a couple of months.

I've been back from Burning Man for two full days now, but I still feel like I'm sleepwalking. I didn't push myself quite as hard as I did last year, but nine days of non stop go in the desert will wear you out no matter what.

We left Friday night, instead of Saturday afternoon as we'd originally planned. We drove south in one steady push, rotating drivers, and arrived on the playa Saturday afternoon. Michael and I clambered up on the roof of the van with a boom box and cruised in to Black Rock City accompanied by the steady pulse of Juno Reactor.

Grooville was separated into a number of semi-autonomous “pods” this year, each with their own private shade area. The Nomad Lounge group had a huge parachute structure, containing a cluster of huge personal tents and a kitchen/lounge area. This was a comfortable way to spend time with my closer friends, but I sometimes felt that the camp was too divided - but maybe that's just the cost of camping with a 75-person group.

The Nomad Lounge worked out pretty well, though we had some serious engineering problems that limited its mobility. We were too optimistic with a couple parts of the design, which failed promptly under the stresses of the desert. We made what repairs we could, and managed to get a lot of use out of the lounge without driving it around so much; in the end I felt like we got a lot out of our project, even though it didn't really work the way we expected it to. That's just the risk you take with a Burning Man project, anyway.

This was an unusually energetic year for Burning Man. The population numbers went up again - almost 40,000 people attended this year - and many of them arrived early in the week, full of enthusiasm. The art projects were as numerous and as impressive as I've ever seen. Friday and Saturday nights were a fever of activity. I felt overwhelmed, sometimes, by my good fortune in being able to be there - what a time to be alive!

I had hoped that this trip would be an opportunity for me to turn some acquaintances into friendships - shared experience has a way of doing that - and to stop hanging back and really become part of my circle of friends. Time will tell, I suppose, but I feel good about it. I worked and played with people whose company I enjoy, had some good conversations with people I admire, and made some brand new connections. I felt social and solid all week - it was a great place to be.

Costumes were a bigger focus for me this year, and my efforts paid off handsomely. I got lots of comments on my outrageous blue and white raver outfit, with the light-up leggings and glowing white backpack. The blue sparkle waterpack was a big success, too. It turned out to have something of a pied-piper effect: the bottle was so bright that everyone could always spot me, wherever I went, so people tended to drift in my direction and I led the group by default.

It was good to get some solid testing time in with my waterpacks: Burning Man is really what the whole idea is about, after all, and a week spent wearing one or another of them every night demonstrated both that the concept is sound and that there are a few refinements I can still make.

I'm back home. Tired, happy, tanned, sore, full of ideas.