Recovery

[jere7my]

I carried my guitar to the recovery party, down in Delaware at Dave Wiesler's house, after a lunch with my dad where we shook our heads helplessly at the things USAir is doing to him and the rest of its employees. (The luggage catastrophe was a job action, he said, but he didn't approve of it. "You don't take away somebody's Christmas," he said.) Dave sat down at the piano shortly after I arrived, and David Knight picked up his fiddle, and I sat with my guitar in a loose semicircle of the nonprofessionals: Larry on whistle, Lance and Nora on fiddle, Chloe on bodhran, someone on an accordian.

Like Tiny Tim miraculously healed, I threw away my crutch for the first time: I played without sheet music. Dave called out key changes from time to time, and when we switched to English tunes I got up to glance at Barnes once in a while, but for the most part I was able to puzzle out the key by ear and play the right chords often enough to get by. In fact, when they switched to Eb (tricky for the git) and I left to tune, I returned to find Dave and David laughingly apologizing for driving me off and asking solicitously which keys were best for me. I was able, after a brief refresher glance, to get through Levi Jackson off-book—and that goes through, like, forty-three keys. It was another rung on my personal long ladder toward competence—and I think I caught a couple of cute young things watching me as I played.

I added a new technique to my repertoire, too—I tried holding a shaker-egg cupped in my right palm while I strummed, which added a nice "shecka-sh-shecka" rhythm to the tunes. Gotta get me one of them, soon soon.

I spent the rest of the party snacking and snuggling, nestled on the couch with Ellen and Karen and flammifera. And that was pleasant indeed, but I kept watching out the window for Miriam, who was supposed to arrive with stowaway_geek but never did; flat tires had kept them at home. And then she wasn't at Greylock when we got back to Swarthmore afterward...and then the other people I hadn't seen much of and very much wanted to (carpenter and zorblak and eclecticboy and stowaway_geek) went out to dinner together as soon as I got there and didn't return until shortly before I had to leave...and then I made K. mad playing Zendo, and agreed to play the Name Game to make her happy, which made me unhappy with its lack of focus...and by the time we left I was grumpy and whining. But I'm willing to blame most of it on lack of sleep, if you are.

I was unhappy about the incomplete Zendogame, since I came up with what I thought was a nifty rule, and K. and Larry gave up before figuring it out. I wanted to try it on experienced players, like zorblak and Prime, but their late return made that impossible. I'd still like to try it again sometime.

Comments

[reldnahkram.livejournal.com]

Shaker eggs are fun. If cupping it your picking hand doesn't work, try balancing it on top of your shoe and shaking your leg :)

With regards to Zendo, I think Larry said something about it that applies to me too - I like it but I'm not very good at it. I think it's the sort of game that requires lots of experience to get good at guessing, because there are so many variables that need to get sorted out.

[zorblak.livejournal.com]

One thing that novices often fail to grasp in Zendo, and which I thus try to point out whenever I can, is that it's important to make koans which are very much unlike each other to try to get more information. It's like Plenty Questions: if you know that the object is more like a video game than banana bread, you don't want to progress from there directly to trying out Zelda, Mario Bros., etc., because if the object is a stopwatch, we're still really not very close, and you won't make progress. If you have a koan with a blue small pointing at a red large, you can learn something by making a koan with a blue small pointing at a red small, or a blue small pointing at a blue large, and so on, but you might learn something more useful by stacking a green small on top of a yellow medium on top of a green large.

[glassonion]

Yeah, i'm sorry about taking off immediately --- would have liked to hang out with you too. But i'd been feeling claustrophobic even before even more people (i.e. y'all) arrived, so it was time to engage plan "grab some people and go".

Eclecticboy and i (well, mostly him) are working on our space allocation for AW this year. If we reserve a bunch of contiguous classrooms, that should make it easier to grab your 5-10 people and go to the next room over. If this works, it'll split the group up more than cramming everyone in Greylock or the WRC, while making people easier to find than if they flee for Media.

It strikes me as vastly silly that we all never see each other, and then wind up crabby when we're in the same place. There has to be a technical solution (or at least a way of mitigating the effect), and i intend to find it. :>)

[miraling.livejournal.com]

If we reserve a bunch of contiguous classrooms, that should make it easier to grab your 5-10 people and go to the next room over. If this works, it'll split the group up more than cramming everyone in Greylock or the WRC, while making people easier to find than if they flee for Media.

I sure hope something like this works out, though I'd've rather have been there and crabby then not there at all...

[irilyth]

I love Zendo! Try it on meeee!

[zorblak.livejournal.com]

Like carpenter, I was sorry to have not gotten to spend more time with you on Saturday (and the rest of the weekend, for that matter). Had I realized that you weren't going to be around on Sunday, I might've tried to figure out a way to accomodate the conflicting desires of going out for dinner with people and of hanging out with you. (Of course, I can't blame you for not being there on Sunday; I can find no flaw in your priorities.)