Gaudete, gaudete!

One thing that Tim brought into our lives was the musician George Winston, who he saw in Maine at some point, and in particular Winston's solo piano albums.

(His other interest is slack-key Hawaiian songs, which don't speak to me at all, but made for an interesting show when I saw him play at the Troy City Music Hall. I was with the talented concert pianist I was dating at the time, and his technique has some obvious quirks that drove her nuts, which I of course exploited to needle her. ANYWAY.)

The album December probably has original compositions on it, I dunno, but my favorite track has always been the souped-up (instrumental) arrangement of "The Holly and the Ivy." I don't actually know the song from anywhere else, but in looking for a good video of it (check out this one!) I came upon the old Latin carol "Gaudete." As you'd expect, the King's Singers do a tight traditional madrigal thing.

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BUT. You can also hear it done by Steeleye Span, one of the stalwarts of the English folk revival! Their approach is much more of a "humans without conservatory training" vibe, just having at it with their daytime accents.

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It doesn't exactly feel secular, what with the "Christus est natus / Ex Maria virgine" refrain, but despite the Latin—which is not rocket science, as Latin goes—their performance is definitely vernacular. The dude in front is wearing a white t-shirt and seems to have mixed feelings about this song interrupting his glass of wine (which he continues holding). It's entirely likely they can make themselves sound like a regular choir, but that territory has been amply covered for centuries. Regardless, clearly Maddy Pryor has found an application of her voice that she's content with.

Steeleye Span is also my favorite version of "The Boar's Head Carol":

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We used to go to the huge Boar's Head Festival at the Neo-Gothic church where I went to nursery school, and it was amazing. If you grabbed some artists and said "Build me a medieval Christmas festival inside a church" you would get that sort of profusion of acrobats, jugglers, minstrels, people on stilts, acrobats on stilts, pageant, and music. Steeleye Span's "rehearse a lot and then get a couple drinks in before the show" approach really honors the material.

"The Boar's Head Carol" also connects with the text of Carl Orff's Carmina Burana, of a similar vintage. It wasn't until an adulthood blessed with Wikipedia that I looked them up and learned that mixed-language texts are called "macaronic." Knowing this has had no apparent impact on my life, except that I know it, and learning is my most fundamental joy.

now with 18 strings!

I bought a guitar! Well, two. Taylor Guitars is having a holiday sale with a steep discount on their very well-done small guitars, the GS Minis, and I kind of wanted one anyway, so I allowed myself to be seduced. The GS Mini is a delightful "sounds good, fun to play, throw in the car, won't be heartbroken if it's stolen" instrument. The bigger guitar, an 814ce, is thoroughly delightful, and wildly different from my old one. I've never had more than one acoustic guitar at once, and now I have three, which is a real treat. I'll try to make some recordings, though I tried today and wasn't satisfied. (I mostly resent the intrusion of electricity into my hobbies, and I'm a perfectionist about my music, so recording is annoying and I don't get better at it.)

My guitar since 2003 has been a very faithful and anonymous 1970s Japanese copy of the classic Martin D-28, a shape Martin invented in 1916 and named after a battleship. Like many pre-amplification instruments, it's designed to stand up to loudmouths like violins or horns, and even in the modern age of microphones, the Dreadnought sound is what you hear in just about every bluegrass, country, and old-time tune, and a whole lot of folk and rock. Gibson, a venerable company with a very different vibe and level of design and quality control, also makes Dreadnoughts, which don't sound like Martin's.

I have a lot of affection for my pseudo-Martin, and we've spent a long time together, but the more I play the Taylor, the closer I get to moving the pseudo-Martin to its next home. That may mean just gifting it on to some kid with no money, because being that it's not actually a Martin, it's worth a fraction as much as  a Martin, no matter how good it is. It's what used guitar ads call a "player's instrument," which I guess is opposed to "collectible": if you only care about making music, sink a little money into this thing which will not appreciate over time, but will help you make music.

And, hey, if the not-Martin and my earlier Yamaha electric both leave the house, there's space for a 12-string, and a short-scale bass...

elk. moose. large...deer. thing.

J ran D&D for us Sunday, and it was awesome. Instead of playing my dynamic duo of Sneaky McStabStab (J created and named him for me eons ago) and the cat-humanoid Fluffy the Disdainful, I am playing my chipper, optimistic, trusting little Gnome Druid, Edda. Druids can cast spells and whatever, but much of their utility on an adventure is an ability to "Wild Shape" into an animal. You keep all your intelligence and abilities, but you stack on the abilities of the animal. The animal takes damage instead of you, so you can be doubling your hit points in a combat.

It's worth going through the Monster Manual to find just the right animal for a situation, and when it came time to fight the Big Bad—some sort of demigod-ish evil tree sorcerer thing—I looked at the map and decided I needed to get there fast, and just be what gaming calls a "tank." Charge in, do a bunch of damage, absorb a bunch of damage.

I turned the page to the Giant Elk.

I have spent basically none of my life learning anything about elk—just a vague understanding of wild-ungulate problems around the world. I had the wrong image of an elk, because the Continental-Germanic word for "moose" (Alces alces, which the Continent has, unlike elk, Cervus canadensis, which it does not) is commonly a variation on "elk" (e.g. Swedish älg). I figured the Europeans who invaded North America said "that's sort of like a moose" and couldn't be fucked to learn anything like the indigenous word for them, wapiti.

But, says Wikipedia, English-speakers didn't really know what moose were:

By the 17th century, Alces alces (called "elk" in Europe) had long been extirpated from the British Isles, and the meaning of the word "elk" to English-speakers became rather vague, acquiring a meaning similar to "large deer".

It occurred to me to look up the French terms, them being the other major invader of North America. They call an elk wapiti. Their word for moose is apparently élan, which also means "momentum, impetus, burst," demonstrating that they were indeed familiar with moose.

Just this once I will cut the colonizers some slack, because if you have a word for "unspecified large deer" available, this is a Very Large Fucking Deer. I had been envisioning the relatively benign and rounded moose antlers, but no, elk antlers will straight-up impale you in a half dozen places.

In D&D, a Giant Elk can move 60' in a combat round, compared to my character's Gnomish 25'. It takes up a 15' square on the map. The horns get there 10' before the rest of it. With a running start, it does extra damage, and can knock the target down on the ground, where they can be conveniently stomped on.

Evil Sorcerer Guy's torso fell off the evil tree onto the ground. Honor's owl-humanoid was able to glide over to my antlers, then get the extra damage attacking from above. Evil Sorcerer Guy exploded, but the Giant Elk form took the damage.

Because Edda can be a Giant Elk for 6 hours at a stretch and only needs an hour to recharge, the fastest and funniest way to get back to town was to have her Giant Elk just...carry everybody. Quickly.

I would be remiss if I did not also suggest reading the verified classic, Dogs In Elk.

"Come back and see me, if I'm still here."

A month or two ago I joined Ancestry.com, where my uncle Stephen said I would find all the work he'd done over the years. It's fun, like a particularly nerdy sort of video game. I've mostly been fleshing out the Norwegian side of the family. But I have a calendar event for today! Peg died, in 2000. I wasn't told until after the fact, so I didn't get to go to the funeral.

Peg, our next door neighbor, was a huge presence the first half of my life—essentially the grandmother who was always on scene. She and her husband Jack lived in that house for...a long, long time. I see them listed there in the 1940 census. The story I know is that they lived there with a Greek guy named Michael, who left them the house and a dragonfly-green Mercedes sedan; that's a relationship probably lost to history, except for the deed transfer.

Peg was born in 1906, in Cambridge, to Scottish Canadians—I had no idea about that part, but they were from the places that really preserved Scottish folk traditions, in Nova Scotia and Cape Breton Island. She was Very Very Catholic™, which I imagine she was raised with, given the family naming scheme:

Yes, Lochlin's mother was Margaret, Lochlin married a Margaret, and they raised Peg, another Margaret. It's not clear to me that there are Saints David or Sarah, but maybe they skated past a less assiduous priest or two. Peg was staunchly anti-abortion, which in all our time together was probably the only disagreement of substance, so we did what grown-ups do, and talked about everything else. She was always on the ball, a sharp Bostonian tongue that ran at lightspeed, and a conversational engagement that was basically improv comedy.

(Ancestry.com claims she and her husband Jack had a child who is alive enough to remain anonymous; that's sort of mind-blowing, if true, but I Occam's Razor says it's a computer hiccup.)

One Christmas Eve I went to visit her in the nursing home, I think after Jack died, and she got crabby at me: "Go away. I told everyone not to visit me."

Being an honest relationship, I mocked her with a sentence of grouchy animal noises: "Rahrahrahrr. Rarrararar. Raarerrrrarhar!".

She didn't miss a beat: "And I understood every word!".

She had a lot to offer a super-smart wiseass kid. I'm sorry she never got to meet Honor or J, and also sorry she never got to meet Honor's grandmother. I'm not sure what they had in common besides being spectacularly feisty elderly women, but what else do you need? It would have been fun to see.

Every time I saw her at the nursing home, I would head back to college, and she would give me a couple of the most brand-new $100 bills I've ever seen, with the same message:

"Don't spend it on beer and women. Come back and see me, if I'm still here."

Not to worry, Peg. I spent it on gin and bagels. 

that could have gone better.

There's a phenomenal fiddle+guitar duo out of Boston, called Rakish, and when I saw they have a new album out, I thought I'd see where they're touring. They don't usually come to the West Coast, obviously, but lo and behold, they were at the Bellingham (WA) Celtic Festival, doing a show, and leading a "session," which is an Irish/Scottish thing where musicians gather, usually in a pub, and a leader starts playing a tune, everyone else joins in, they play it for a few minutes, then signals the transition to the next song.

"How can this possibly work?", you ask. For some reason nobody wants to say this out loud, but the way it works, I shit you not, is that the participants know hundreds and thousands of tunes. Musicians do the same for the American offshoots of Irish/Scottish, what are now things like Old-Time and bluegrass. I saw it happen when I was at Fiddle Tunes in 2019. It's really daunting, if you don't know the tunes or you're not able to make it up as you go along. Or, like me, it takes you the entire eight repetitions of the tune just to start remembering the melody.

Rakish were absolutely stunning in concert, everything I could have hoped. And everything else about the week was the worst travel I've had since being in Mexico with The Bad Relationship™ twenty years ago.

It's a long story, but mostly, the Airbnb I rented turned out to have had cats living in it for several weeks. It was a huge place, beautiful woodwork all over, with a million little places cats would just love: for example, the roll-out shelves where I put my clothes. I found out the cat thing after the first night.

(There is a pattern in my family tree of fathers who don't want cats in the house justifying it to the kids by falsely claiming to be allergic to cats. I however, am actually allergic to cats. Not anaphylactic-shock allergic, but it's easy to overwhelm anything an antihistamine can do for me.)

The hosts were super nice about it, and they worked with Airbnb to refund my remaining nights. It's definitely their fault—cats were mentioned briefly in the last line of the listing, and the house is so big it couldn't be de-catted in just the few hours used for cleaning. I moved myself to a hotel.

Unpacking my clothes at the hotel, my ears started to itch again, and I realized I was going to have to wash all my clothes. Bellingham turns out to have the best laundromat I've ever seen, but even so, it sucked up most of a day.

The hotel couldn't extend my stay to my last day, and it was just an ordinary hotel, so rather than fuck around with it, I reserved a different Airbnb for the last few days. I carefully asked the host about cats first. Success!

I went to a workshop about playing in sessions, which I was really hopeful about, because I want to play music with other humans. But it turned out to be a very very very chatty Irish-American, who just went on and on, talking about balancing the various interpersonal and musical dynamics of a group. That is (a) how I make a living, and (b) something I've been doing for 30 years, in theater and music before I was in tech.

On the bright side, there's a lawyer from L.A. who I'd originally talked to when I first wanted to buy a Mats Nordwall cittern, eons ago, and he's generally been down an expert version of my musical path, so it was surprising to discover he was staying on the floor above me. For his part, he and his girlfriend had no idea there was another unit in the basement there, so they had a different surprise.

And finally, one of my least restful vacations ever came to an end, and I got to go home, exhausted and dissatisfied. That didn't last long, since I got laid off a couple weeks after, and had a whole series of other things to think about.

it was a bad week.

It happens a lot that while I meander through all the paths of my life—walk the dog, mess around in my workshop, hang out with the household, teach engineers how to communicate with each other—I'll think of something I don't know about Tim, and that maybe someday I could ask him. But he's gone, so that won't happen.

I wish Tim had found his way through. I wish we had my brother I rarely saw or talked to. I wish his kids had their dad around for their graduations and marriages and kids or whatever. I wish his students had their amazing teacher.

I think about Tim and the rest of my extended family of origin all the time, though I think they don't believe it. I've never really Done Family The Right Way for them, whatever that means in the moment.

All I know is that my heart is full of grief upon grief. A lifetime of loss and isolation, laid like a building, stone on stone. We can mourn things we never had; feel the lack, the voids that intuition tells us should be populated.

My extended family on both sides is remarkable. We have:

• Vast evidence for a biological component to intelligence. It's so bizarrely obvious, and it doesn't matter where any of us grew up, or what our childhoods were like (though mostly bad), or if we went to or finished college. There's even a handful at least as smart as me.

• The magisterial suffering of intergenerational trauma. It's tricky to speculate about where it started, when almost everyone is unable to remember their experiences (which isn't a good sign).

Tim was a casualty, and it sucks. It never stops sucking. I don't even know if I'll get used to it at some point.

cumulonimbus—uh, I mean, it's a horse!

Not to jinx it, but we are having a blessedly mild and smoke-free summer—for once, everyone in the Northern Hemisphere is having a heat wave except us. Not to worry, though, since we still have a megadrought and increasingly unstable or unseasonable weather. It rained one night last week, enough to leave modestly damp pavement behind. My broken-climate strategy was to live "someplace uphill, with rain," but that looks less tenable as everyone's weather becomes, as was promised, less predictable, and consequently more hostile to human life.

I can't overstate how weird that is, by the way. Growing up in Massachusetts, I would see Bert on Sesame Street, saying "It's a beautiful day, not a cloud in the sky!", but there were always clouds somewhere in view. I'd never seen a cloudless sky before moving to California, and I've always hated it, but at least it used to be consistent.

One of the better books I'm in the middle of, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, is a pretty stunning and terrifying look at the history of soil and erosion. It turns out productive soil is a thin skin over bare rock, and a lack of basic stewardship, very much tied to enslavement and the manifest destiny of bashing our way across the continent, has left formerly productive land still poor, hundreds of years later. As with aquifers, we can consume in decades what took millions of years to develop. The math is universally extremely bad. But here we are.

I quite like my adorable little drafting surface...except it really needs a table to put it on, and while we technically have a table, we at the Snugglehaus are going through a period of clutter—also, it's our only table. I bought what is basically a 17" W x 11" H clipboard, and I can make drawings on it that are satisfying enough for practical use. For now.

Deep Magic From Before The Dawn Of Time

Maybe a little bit more than most projects, the metal shop has been a yak shave. I knew roughly fuck-all about machine tools, beyond the many YouTube channels which are amazing, but not really aimed at beginners. The smallest lathes and mills are made by Sherline, and while they have been around forever, and I think they make good stuff, they're limited in the size, shape, and material of the parts you can make with them. People often run them happily enough on a table in their house.

I am confident in saying there is no other machine tool that will run happily on a table in your house. My lathe weighs 120 pounds.  

Anyway, it's been a journey, one which involved getting another 120-pound tool (a mill) to make some stuff so I could satisfactorily use the first 120-pound tool (the lathe). And I have some work for the lathe to do so I can use the mill more easily.

This is the thing about machining as a hobby: I don't need to have something in mind that I want to make. It generates its own problems. Need a hammer to tap parts into place? I can make a hammer, out of metal (probably not steel), with knurling and everything. Yes, ideally everyone gets some kind of machined thing for Christmas this year, but the path from here to there involves a lot of very shiny mistakes.

(You want a tiny brass hammer, right?)

One thing I need for the lathe is a thinger to use a cordless drill or driver to drive the different slides that move the cutting tool. (I also need those slides to move more easily, but one thing at a time.) So I go into the shop, confident I know what I want to do.

Well...that turns out not to be true. Sure, I can write down measurements, but how do I write them so they make sense? How do I plan the order of operations so I don't fritter away my precious aluminum stock on failed parts.

(Large hunks of aluminum are expensive!)

I need...a technical drawing. This sucks, because these days, that implies a program like Fusion 360 or TinkerCAD, which are free, and the actual problem is that I really resist using computers for my hobbies. Because I use computers all day. Hobbies are the things I'm not using computers for. (A notable exception is MuseScore, because otherwise music notation is so difficult for me that I simply won't do it.) So I haven't learned a CAD app, and maybe won't until I need to 3-D print something.

This project—just the first of many!—is stalled without the right picture.

Luckily, I know how to do old-school, pencil-and-paper, T-squares and eraser shields, drafting. Amidst the appalling violence and terror of middle school, we had vocational things that I think were more or less randomly assigned. If I remember right, I pulled 2 semesters of cooking, 1 of sewing, and 1 of drafting. I was very good at the paper sort; there was a computer there, a text screen switchable between green, white, and amber, and it had software on it, but I never particularly tried. But paper! Making pictures without needing to be visually creative! Another form of communication. Not that I'm not grateful to have a throw pillow embroidered with far too many lines from Masefield's "Sea-Fever" to be done well, but drafting has always been the exact sort of arcane but interesting skill that is my cognitive catnip.

In college I was good at it again, in my theater tech work: lines, templates, architects' rulers, protractors, more lines. It was always very satisfying, and I'm looking forward to picking it up again.

...and then I'll have a drawing of the thing to make on the mill which will make the lathe better, so I can make stuff for the mill...

the privilege of enjoying a job.

I am having a ton of fun at the "new" job (if that still applies after ten weeks or so). Having a boss hire me to do what I'm best at is just magical. And unlike the last job, I haven't had to convince anyone that we actually should all be communicating and cooperating; I get to skip the much more fun step of interpersonal work. Busy people, and engineers, are rightfully leery of meetings.

I don't enjoy wasteful meetings any more than the next person. For this project, I make small meetings and mark everyone optional; sometimes there's a planned agenda, sometimes not, but right now there's such a communication debt that it almost doesn't matter who shows up, because there will be something that will benefit. And, of course, if it's not useful, we should all ditch it and go for a walk, or refill our coffee.

Since I joined, the Giant Company-Wide Project has gone from "stalled for several months" to "making headway and shipping in the foreseeable future," which I am more than happy to take credit for. An even broader scope beckons, involving more teams and projects and features, and expanding further into the future. My local scope—my team and surrounding environs—so far looks like nobody is trying to do anything demonstrably insane, so I can look up and find the people who would like to do something demonstrably insane, and probably would, if I didn't work there.

I live with a certain amount of anxiety about having to get a "real" job someday, by which I get I mean physical; I'm not sure how well my current skillset of keeping people organized and talking would transfer outside the realm of modern knowledge work.

I'm still working remote, of course, as I have since 2014, and has turned out to be a gift for all of us here, since it's nice to see each other so much, I'm around to pick up some kid-related stuff, and then it turns out I have always loathed offices, finding them acutely anxiety-provoking, and every inch toward open-plan setups has been one more inch of deadened productivity.

pausing

When a company IPOs, those of us who own mere Cattle Class shares pre-IPO get to wait out a 180-day "lockup" period before we can transfer shares to a different owner, whether in exchange for money—what the finance geeks call "selling"—or just because we feel like it. In theory, the intention here is to prevent current and former employees from dumping all our stock the moment we can, so the price doesn't crash. You might think this is a giveaway to privileged investors, who get to cash in at the stock's opening price of $50/share, instead of 6 months later at $20/share, and you would be correct.

I've already mentioned my experience with the Hapless Stock Guys, who bought most of my stock in advance, but fat-fingered their valuation of the company by 100%, thus paying me double what they intended to. As it turns out, they would have lost money on the deal anyway, just...considerably less. And really, I would have done better if I'd just unloaded everything (or more like) at the time, but without knowing when the IPO would be, or anything, I just didn't. Except for needing money to pay taxes, it's all intuited guesswork.

So the lockup just ended. I transferred the stock to them—contractually forgiving 100% of the loan and its interest I borrowed from them last year, which is amusing—so now that deal is concluded, and they can move on past what has probably been among the crappiest of their years. The tightly-wound one of the pair actually apologized for his aggressive behavior back in November, and said he's really taken it as a moment to reflect and learn some life lessons. I didn't inquire further, but emotional responsibility isn't super common among Finance Guys, and I really appreciated it (and told him so).

I don't know what happened to the other guy, the mellow one who went to my private school, and who contacted me initially. He was pretty chill back in November, and I would not be surprised to learn he's backstopped by generational wealth, and/or he's been stoned this whole time.

It's a nice moment to stop, and feel at least one item drop off the long mental list. It's not a long moment, but it's there.

economics of the moment.

The world is a little hinky. There's a nationwide housing...thing, which I was somewhat skeptical about, until I saw that houses in my ancestral village, a New York Rust Belt hamlet which is convenient to absolutely nothing, has seen house prices double in the past couple years. Our house, where we've been for 9 years, is definitely much nicer than when we moved in; is it 170% nicer? Well, to live in, yes, but from a tax appraisal perspective, we haven't changed anything.

(The rat-infested garage is gone and replaced with a gorgeous new concrete pad; the house is surrounded by an alligator-filled moat lovely fencing. All but two windows replaced. Foundation brought up to date. The shed is ≤ 120 square feet and technically movable, and the shop is a trailer, so the official square footage/bedrooms/bathrooms are the same.)

I have struggled to understand the economics of being a landlord. Using a typical example, not even in the Bay Area, you'll see a place, say "Four units, never vacant, $3800/month turnkey," and it's selling for (say) $2,000,000. That's $86,400 of income per year! And...even with maintenance or rent increases, it takes numerous decades to pay off its purchase price. So if the revenue from the asset isn't the point, it must be the value of the asset, either to sell later on, or to borrow against for other financial plans (like buy more properties!). We did see people running a string of leveraged properties as Airbnbs, suddenly having a sort of cascading margin call when local governments decided the law applied to them the way it does with hotels; we saw it again with the pandemic crash, which indicates that, yes, one buys real estate in order to buy more real estate. It looks like a lot of work, although it is nowhere near as much work as having a real job, so there is that to consider.

I'm on a Slack instance with some folks from Rochester, NY, who linked a "10 Cities Where Home Prices Have Started Falling" listicle, and Rochester was #2, but #5 is my sadly post-industrial hometown. Or it was sad, anyway; but it looks like it's far above state and federal rates for violent crime, and only slightly above for property crimes.

(Not much change, I guess: we weren't in a bad neighborhood, but I did wake up one night to hear someone trying to jimmy open the back door under my bedroom. That door, probably solid wood aged from 1914, also had a pretty epic Yale deadbolt, keyed on both sides, so they only got the trim off. The door got deadbolt guards, and eventually we got an alarm system.)

Back when I spent three weeks at San Francisco Zen Center, there was a guy there who was fast approaching his priest/monk ordination—the ambiguity is a long story, but comes from Japanese Zen's histories in both Japan and the West—and he struck me because he was so young to be a professional cleric: somewhere around 22. He'd been at SFZC for a few years, and I don't know if he did college or not, and he didn't chat much with us transient students, but what struck me most was that he'd never lived on his own, only in groups of one kind or another.

I know quite a lot about solitude, and loneliness, and isolation, and so I know that the solitude of meditation (zazen specifically here) is one form of being with your self and your mind; and living by yourself, instead of in community, is quite another. And doing zazen when living by yourself is yet another other thing.

Hopefully I was not condescending at him, but in my head, certainly, thinking about my long road to living alone but mentally healthy, I thought he would at some point find he would need to figure that experience out.

Post-ordination, he left to be the resident priest in a place that needed them—one problem the Bay Area has with Zen clerics is that nobody really wants to leave—and blogged a bit, until he stopped. A few years later, I looked him up, and he's definitely practicing the Buddhist Right Livelihood...as a public defender in my hometown.

it's funny because it's true.

 I do not know this mad genius, but this is so, so spot-on.

This came up when I was sharing "If Bostonians Loved Other Local Institutions The Way They Love Their Local Sports Franchises" with folks, which states that Connecticut

wants so hard to be part of New England but is actually just part of New York, and it knows it, and so it’s got all this twisted anti-Boston resentment.

I went to a prep school in Connecticut, and I can't speak to the anti-Boston resentment—most people have trouble understanding that I grew up in Western Massachusetts, not Boston, and that the Boston accent stops abruptly at Worcester—but that is absolutely Connecticut's level of New England-ness relative to its New York City-ness. I went to college north of Albany, NY, so the Northeast/Mid-Atlantic/Rust Belt population was more diverse, and that's...still what Connecticut is like.

I am still on unemployment, which I'm happy to have, but it's also a grim window into the finances of living in the area; I'm sometimes amazed anyone is still here who's not making a Relative Fuckton of Money. Much like NYC, there are always the people here making $300k/year and moaning about the impossibility of making ends meet. Dig in a little bit and it's rarely hard to find big-ticket items they think of as "necessary" and the rest of the world thinks of as "costs a year's salary (or more)." At some point we'll get a plug-in hybrid. Is it going to be a BMW? Audi? A shiny Porsche Cayenne?

Dear Reader, it will not. Those are choices we make.

Do you have any idea how many musical instruments a Porsche could buy?!

nono, this toy is *much* nicer.

My cittern arrived from Sweden last week, 10 strings of awesome shipped in a very, very robust case.

I haven't gotten around to recording it yet, let alone recording it next to its colleagues which will be moving on to their next homes; not that it matters, since I'm not exactly competent at any of them.

It's amazing.

It's beautiful, to start with. I ordered it from Mats Nordwall (a Swedish luthier who's well-known in the right circles) about a year ago, but didn't get to play one until a few weeks ago, when Timbre Folk & Baroque in Berkeley happened to have one of his more economical mahogany citterns in stock. The sound was what I've heard in my years of watching and listening to Esbjörn Hazelius recordings. He's playing the same instrument, only he's good at it.

You wouldn't know it from the house, but I actually only buy the instruments I need in order to have the sounds I want. I bought a cheapie electric guitar when I wanted to get into that, and then I replaced it with a Line 6 Variax that will mimic almost any electric guitar to my satisfaction, and donated the cheapie to a local school. I have a tenor guitar, a mandolin, a little solid-bodied mandolin, because of the sounds they make.

(Well, mostly. I bought the mandolins because earlier in my violin career, I wanted something tuned the same as a violin, but easier to play. I'm keeping the acoustic, and the electric is decorative, and not worth the hassle of selling.)

I expect to own more guitars because the Variax's acoustic mimicry is far short of its electric, so a 12-string guitar and some sort of smaller-bodied guitar would be nice.

It turns out there's a few things that make it such a distinctive sound:

• It's common for instruments with paired strings to have the lower pairs be one pitched high, and the other an octave below it; for some reason, Swedes use a classical guitar string (nylon wrapped with silver) for the lower-pitched string. So of course it sounds different.
• This reduces the total string tension, so they can build the soundboard with fewer stiffening braces, which means it has more freedom to vibrate.
• The lighter build means you can use a capo really, really far up the neck: usually, instruments will lose their resonance if you capo them above maybe the 5th fret, because physics.
• (Not that you shouldn't do it, because it can be just what you want, but you'll lose complexity and sustain.)
• My cittern's sound doesn't change much until maybe the 10th fret.
• If you capo your instrument up really high, it's reasonable to expect it will go a little out of tune and you'll just have to tune it for the higher position. My cittern...does not have this problem.

It's literally everything I hoped it would be. I am very pleased.

keep on shippin' on.

My cittern has gotten as far as Stockholm, which is enough to get into the USPS tracking system!

I have spent the last week assuming "UTRIKES" is a place, but it actually just means "to/about a foreign country," which means that my cittern is probably on a ship on the ocean. Luckily, Evergreen shipping—of last year's Suez Canal blockage—has grounded a different ship—named, I shit you not, EVER FORWARD—outside of the Port of Baltimore, but courteously off to the side, on a shoal just over half the ship's draft, rather than blocking the channel.

I stopped by Gryphon Strings the other day, and exercising great discipline, I did not acquire a single new instrument. Martin Guitars, of which I own an admirably illegal Japanese copy from the 70s, does try a lot of new things, for a 190-year old company, and they created this weird thing that I wanted to try. It is delightful, and maybe that will make its way here. We're doing some rearranging and refurnishing the living room, which will involve changes in instrument storage/display. We're not out of wall space, as such, but it's definitely not a blank canvas.

INCOMING

Just over a year ago, I ordered an instrument from a maker in Sweden, who said he would start it in November, which he did. And now, a year later, as promised by his website, it's actually in the mail!

If you can believe it, this is just his standard model, even the mother-of-pearl inlay. When it comes to aesthetics in musical instruments, the answer is that, while you can most certainly overdo it, the most important thing is that it makes you want to pick it up and play it.

The only custom bit I ordered is the soundport there. I've really liked them when on guitars I've played in shops: it expands where the instrument is projecting, but more importantly it projects it to me, the player, so I can hear more like what an audience would hear. And I'm not performing, which means I'm always playing mostly or entirely for myself, so I should get to enjoy it fully.

It's called a "cittern," which I've written about before, and the fastest way to describe it is that it's

1. a big mandolin, 
2. the size of a regular guitar, 
3. with an extra pair of strings.

The particularly Swedish aspect is that in place of the heaviest metal strings, it uses classical guitar strings. This gives it a distinctive voice, and lowers the string tension, so the maker can build it more lightly. And, finally, this all lets the instrument resonate with a capo on, all the way up the neck. Fretted instruments like mandolins and guitars tend to feel sort of...pinched, or tight, if you try to capo past, say, the 7th fret. By all reports and observations, Swedish citterns just go ahead and keeping ringing out, more or less wherever you want to put the capo.

Anyway, that's exciting, since I've wanted one of these for half a decade now. Maybe Honor and I will sit down with my cittern and their gorgeous banjo and bring our full "this is not my primary instrument" energy. 😀

workin' it.

I'm interviewing a lot with early-stage companies, in search of a leadership role above that of line manager, even if temporary. The title bump always matters, much more even than an IC (Individual Contributor) role. Four years as an Engineering Manager (EM) at a well-known and successful company meant it was easy to get another EM job; they hired me directly as my first EM title, but that's far more rare, and in fact I'd spent the 3 years prior struggling to land one. I suspect that companies' reasons for not hiring EMs directly are not usually the right ones, but the end result is the same either way. They get more skittish as you go up the ladder, but now I have a neat confluence of (a) understanding why I enjoyed joining a 55-person company, and (b) having the freedom to join something even smaller.

My friend Alexa, although I'm older and helped her navigate her way into leadership, has been moving in executive circles for quite a while now, and gave me some immaculate advice about interviewing for things like Head/VP of Engineering jobs, and why that might be a better fit for me. When you're talking to a younger company, and especially at the executive level, they want to see who you are, and not just if you're comparable to another employee with the same title. Basically, I show them a Chris-shaped human, and the two sides together talk about whether they have a Chris-shaped space.

My whole life, I have been utterly unable to not be Chris-shaped, except for very short periods. I'm terrible at it. It has caused me a lot of trouble, but on the other hand I have needed to spend less time figuring out who I am. A Chris-shaped job at an earlier-stage company can save me a lot of stress, by not having to convince entrenched people they need a Chris-shaped person. Or, at least, I convince the founders and executives, and then back it up with competence.

(Or get removed, I suppose. Some of these can also turn out to be inherently time-limited, since I can most certainly pull off scaling an Engineering department to somewhere in the 30-60 range, it's rational enough for you and/or your investors to want someone more experienced in the 200+ size.)

I'm finding I learned a lot from this past job, which was not an earlier-stage startup, and it comes out in how I talk about the job, what's important to me, what I think should be important to them. I feel more rooted, and that I'm inhabiting my professional space more fully. No small part of this is that I took care of myself after Tim died, and took a placeholder job that wouldn't push me very hard.

And now I can choose what I want to do.

At Play In The Machine Shop Of The Lord

One consistent theme running through what I guess you might call "metalworkers YouTube" is the amount of time metalworkers spend on maintenance: restoring beat-up machines they bought because they have more elbow grease than cash, or fixing something that broke, or just the periodic (often frequent) cleanings and lubricatings these things require. I don't recall anyone doing that with woodworking machinery, but then woodworking machinery doesn't usually have the scale or complexity of, say, a power hammer, or the high-precision shenanigans of a lathe or milling machine.

I did finally get my lathe partly bolted to the bench: there are two feet, with two screws each, and they form a rectangle, and one diagonal pair of holes has bolts in them. I want to say that the other two holes are somehow not where they're supposed to be, but since I have flubbed both the "measurements" method and the "put sharp objects directly into the holes and mark up a target surface" method, I think it's just beyond what I can accomplish in the situation I've created for myself. I have many many ideas about how to move this heavy object around in an enclosed space. You know what would be useful for implementing said ideas? A lathe.

Following tradition, I learned a whole bunch about how the lathe is made by removing a part (to see if I could lubricate something to make it move easier), having an unexpected piece of metal fall out, and having to figure out how to put it back and have it work again. It's not magic, but it is extremely clever: basically there's a slide that moves on a dovetail channel, and the piece of metal has depressions for three set screws, and it's basically a 6-inch long wedge to make the dovetail fit tightly. How irritatingly difficult that slide's crank handle is depends on those set screws, but also on how tightly the handle is screwed on, and also if the slide fits too loosely in the dovetail, the whole system loses so much precision as to be useless.

I find this whole thing particularly engaging because historically, while I'm very good at taking physical objects apart, I have not been very good at fixing them, or indeed of just putting them back together so they still work.

I'm very good at fixing software sorts of problems, but there's no physical distinction between the act of fixing software, and the act of breaking it in the first place. Arguably software is broken by default, but that's a different discussion.

every time a door closes, you better notice before you try to walk into a closed door.

There's a lot going on behind my eyes these days. Sadness, loss, integration. I still can't read the news, really. One thing at a time, or, at least, as few things at a time as possible.

Through a complex sequence of events outside my control, I find myself between jobs again. It's not the worst thing: I have much more energy for doing errands or projects when I'm not spending my days being diplomatic to people who are making bad decisions. I'm not worried about finding another job, this time with an earlier-stage company where I can have an impact on the culture as it's ramping up. I've been able to pick up some tasks around the place, since it's Anna's turn to be working a lot.

Something I never really appreciated about machine tools is that they can just be their own project. I tried some test cuts on the lathe, and of course it was uselessly rough, but that was because the lathe bounced a little on its rubber feet, and the trailer bounced on its suspension and tires, and machine tools have to be as rigid as possible. So I go to take off the rubber feet—which I had put on when I unpacked the thing, and that sucked—and there's this whole challenge of lifting something on the bench, and it's 100 pounds, but focused in a small area, and it comes with a sheet metal tray to catch chips (the metal bits removed by machining) and cutting fluid and such. The tray isn't rigid enough to lever the machine up with. What you can lever it with are the feet of the cast-iron frame, but you have to lever the lathe up just to get to the Allen-key mounting screws holding the rubber feet on, then get the tray out of the way, the lathe on blocks and moved down the bench, then drilling mount holes through the bench, then...

I am famously terrible at this particular task of drilling holes using only measured distances. Anna is amazing at it, but even she couldn't make progress on this. I'm resorting to a brute-force tool called "transfer screws," which are literally sharp points that you screw into all the holes you want to transfer from a source workpiece to a matching workpiece. It's me saying "yes, I understand that I have the exact measurements for the mount holes, but I'm giving up and I'm going to stab my way to success."

As a DIY project, this has already held my interest more than any other DIY project ever has, and I haven't actually been able to make any parts yet. Once it's mounted to the bench, and the shed is installed, and the trailer is jacked up off the suspension, then I'll be aligning the lathe properly, and then...I can make more tools. For the lathe. You see? It's very satisfying. I could use a machinist's hammer. And some clamps. Maybe some keychains or beads or something. I dunno. I don't normally learn stuff to accomplish something; my primary hobby is learning stuff.

all in the preparation.

So I've been learning about machining, that strange process where we take our world full of bumps and flaws and irregular forms, and turn out a million identical parts with almost arbitrary precision: 0.0005", half the thickness of a human hair, is achievable on amateur home equipment. And the hobby budget has opened up somewhat, paving the way for me to be cursing at different things than I curse in my day job. With the dog, and no garage, there hasn't been a place to set up any tools, let alone tools that create piles of razor-sharp shards of metal...until now.

With the garage gone, we had a dense pile of crap sitting out under tarps, and a different, sparser pile of crap inside a U-Haul storage trailer (which, for the record, is every bit as shitty as U-Haul). Our new, well-built shed was still a month away, and the shed people need the whole backyard to work in, and we don't want a permanent building anyway...

I watched some YouTube of a master carpenter who carefully built a full wood shop into a utility trailer that he drove out to job sites. Other examples came to mind, like folks who make the rounds doing repairs and tweaks at race tracks. Or the main repair service for old Linotype machines.

(Linotype aimed to speed up typesetting for newspapers, back when everything had to be printed on paper. Picking out individual letters and spacers is exactly the pain in the ass you'd imagine, so Linotype and its peers built a machine that looks like a small church organ, slightly larger than my car. The operator types out a line and hits the equivalent of Enter. That typing has created a mold for that entire line, and hitting Enter fills the molds with molten lead from the reservoir in the machine, casting the Line-O-Type (get it?). The lead castings were placed into a frame and used to print. When finished, the casting was melted down again.

I once wandered into a museum in Palo Alto, located in a mansion downtown, and out back, in a building that might have been stables, then was definitely a garage, there was an older guy, somewhere in his early/mid 70s, restoring a giant printing press. I love the history of technology, so I got a tour of the Linotype, and a description of his career in newspapers, and how he was the only person they could find to fix the things.)

Hmm. If I were to choose machinery carefully, keeping the weight down because a shop crane won't reach inside...if we had a shop trailer, we could solve our temporary storage and longer-ish term shop space problems all at once. In a sort of kismet moment, there was one for sale on Craigslist right there. The workbench and everything was fitted out by a master carpenter, but the trailer is made by, no joke, Wells Cargo.

So I bought a metal lathe. Don't confuse this with a wood lathe, which is also made of metal, because the most basic machinist lathe requires reams and piles of highly-specific bullshit that wood lathes don't need to bother with. Take, for example, ideas about "flat" or "level." These barely make any sense on a wood lathe, where you're cutting everything by hand anyway. If a wood lathe is twisted by 0.1", you probably won't notice, or you'll manually account for it. On a metal lathe, your parts won't be even or fit together. You need to align the lathe so it's all in a plane. How do you get a flat plane? Take 3 plates of granite or iron, mark them up and rub them each against each other, chisel or grind off the high spots, and then they'll be equally flat.

How do you transfer that plane to the machine? Take an adjustable level, make it match your flat plane, and then you have your shop's definition of "level" that you can use on the machines. It may not be "horizontal" in the sense of being at a right angle (90º) to the direction of Earth's gravity (down), but it doesn't need to be. Ships have machine shops, which obviously won't be horizontal much, so they just bolt everything to the floor, and it's fine.

The best answer to machine rigidity is always "bolt it to the heaviest thing you can find," but I have a tiny lathe, sitting on a not-really-flat workbench, in a trailer, tilted backwards so the rain runs away from the leaking part of the roof, still resting on its tires and shock absorbers. So there's some stuff to account for.

This is without having actually tried to cut a part, because I'm pretty sure it would just be a mess.

One of the things I am finding satisfying about this is that everything takes a lot of thought and planning. On any machine tool, it's not unusual to spend an hour or two of setup for an actual cut lasting several minutes. It's really cool to have tangible problems in front of me. This is all "manual" machining: most machining nowadays is by computer (CNC). But I find the same thing I've found about music, which is that there is software that really enhances the experience, but I spend my life on computers already, and I'm avoidant about adding more computer time by way of hobbies. My brain needs the break.