I rescheduled my work week this week from Tuesday & Thursday to Wednesday & Thursday, so I could use today to finish up the newsletter. It’s important to me to get it out this week, since registration opens today, and this edition contains “course ads.”
I took the bus over to State, and finished up the newsletter after several hours’ work.
I listened to several podcasts on the way over, two of which I just thoroughly enjoyed. These were part of the NPR Driveway Moments series and were called, “Precisionist Nears a New Pasture,” and “Oboist Liang: His Reeds Come First.”
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All Things Considered, October 2, 2006 · At a retirement home for Thoroughbred racehorses in Kentucky, a once-great stallion is nearing the end of the line. In his career, Precisionist earned more than $3 million.
Michael Blowen, founder of Old Friends, a retirement and rescue farm for Thoroughbreds, and his wife, Diane White, say goodbye to Precisionist. Listen to the podcast here. |
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All Things Considered, September 16, 2006 · At 26, Liang Wang is new on the job as principal oboe with the New York Philharmonic. He makes his own reeds, spending hours each day hand-crafting the essential equipment with incredible precision. This Driveway Moment was suggested by Patty, who listens to WGTE in Ohio
“I was completely riveted by this story. All the work that goes into such a fleeting thing, it’s amazing there are any oboists at all! I have a sister who once played, and so many of the jokes were particularly funny to me. But what really struck me was how talented of a musician [Liang Wang] truly is… his instrument never sounded like a duck!” |
Elizabeth came into the office for a while, where she picked up on transcribing proceedings of that same meeting she was working on the last time we were both in the office together. After a little while, the batteries on the tape recorder she was transcribing from went dead, and she couldn’t find any more in the office. There was a “quick” charger, however, so she let them charge for a little while, and then picked back up on the task.
I met Steve for dinner in Garner, stopping by his house to pick him up, and then driving us over to El Dorado at the Vandora Springs shopping shopping center.
There was a very loud Mariachi band playing there tonight. It was one of those situations that you knew you’d be saying something really loud when they would abruptly stop their song and leave you shouting something like, “…yeah, what a cock he had on him.”
The guy who brought chips and salsa at the same time to both our table and the one across from us, put down two little bowls and two small bottles of their salsa on our table, and then, turning to the two people at the table across from us put down the same thing, but added to their table two baskets of chips. Hey, one of those is our chips!
I stopped in to Steve’s when I dropped him off, and we viewed pictures — still on his video camera, but attached to his ridiculously huge HDTV screen —of his trip to P-Town and then to Blowing Rock.
After that, he showed me a few scenes from various episodes of Nip Tuck. What a hot show, and what twisted sub-plots. Oh yeah, hot men, and homoerotic overtones and sub-plots, too. If I had a television, I would probably get hooked on this show.