Weekend Wrap-up

On Friday night, I surprised Rebecca with a date night to Coopers Hawk in Reston. Dinner was braised short ribs and blackened ahi tuna along with a red wine sampler. We also walked over to Reston Town Center for gelato and to see all of the restaurants that have risen and fallen since we stopped going there on a regular basis.

On Saturday, we went to Alamo Drafthouse for a family-friendly "Cat Video Fest". Maia loved it although it was really just a compilation of TikTok and YouTube clips with minimal, poor editing and transitions. Afterwards, Maia went off for a playdate with her friend, Rahel, then we all met up again later in the evening for Sweetfrog.

On Sunday, the rest of the family went off to church in the morning while I had my own regular quiet time. In the afternoon, Sofia, Kenny, Miles, and Anselm came over for a grill night (simply burgers and hot dogs).

Monday, Labor Day, was a trip to the grandparents with the kids while Rebecca went to a fancy yoga class with one of her old favourite yoga teachers.

How was your weekend?

Quotable Professor Day

Wisdom from Dr. Peter Spencer's Pedagogy of Music Theory class, Fall 2001

• "We're not dealing with Philip Glass here; we're dealing with someone who can write music."


• "The University of Florida has about as much right to call themselves a School of Music as I do to call myself a professional golfer. Actually, I have more of a right to call myself a professional golfer."


• "Not even [John Cage] would argue that you need to know how to write a C major triad. He wrote so many of them!" - on the importance of teaching music fundamentals


• "Fundamentals textbooks are a lot like gerbils -- they proliferate and then they die." - on why he wrote a music fundamentals textbook


• "'This is why you got it wrong, dummy.' Isn't it funny that we can't use the word 'dummy' in the classroom anymore? We can buy books with 'dummy' written all over...we have no problem labelling ourselves as dummies." - on how to explain a student mistake


• "This may be the best first quiz, collectively, I've ever seen. You don't look that bright, but you obviously are."


• "Stephen Foster really irritates me [...] He writes these smarmy, nasty, little tunes [...] But it is a good example of a two-phrase period, blast him!" - on the audacity of Stephen Foster and the use of Camptown Races as a politically incorrect example of periods


• "A mnemonic I use is the phone number, 473-6251. I tell people that's actually a bordello in Miami. Students seem to get a kick out of it." - on remembering the circle of progression for harmonic motion


• Dr. Spencer: "When you go to the store to buy marmalade and there's a whole row of jellies and marmalades, what do you do?"
  Student: "Taste them?"
  Dr. Spencer: "Taste them!? No wonder we've got an anthrax problem."


• "The 'whatever' will hit the fan, and we need to make sure the fan is running very slowly when that happens." - on the pitfalls of overexplaining figured bass symbols in basic theory classes


• "When you're teaching, try to get yourself into the minds of students, to the extent that some of them have minds."


• "'Cadential' isn't the most common word in student conversation. The most common word is 'like'. Isn't it fun sitting at the table with a younger brother or sister and having no idea what they're saying? It took me a while to figure out the word 'bad'." - on defining theory terms for students


• "Let's go on to the Mozart... the hell with Beethoven; he never knew how to part write anyhow." - on clear examples of diatonic seventh chords


• "When one's thirty-five, one knows everything... and then you gradually know less and less. [...] Then you hit eighty and you're suddenly omnipotent."


• "I agree, I don't like the operatic kind where the pitch on each note is everywhere and you could drive a truck through it." - on gratuitous vibrato


• "I think you've got to be a kid, or something better than an undergrad." - on people capable of reading the Harry Potter series


• Dr. Spencer: "Is there a place that students hang out these days?"
  Student: "...the Chiefs hang out in the lounge, the 'players' hang out down by the lockers, the string players hang out on the fourth floor..."
  Dr. Spencer: "I see. So where do the weirdos hang out?"
  Mark Connor, composer: "We hang out in the breezeway!"

Review Day: Blood of the Mantis by Adrian Tchaikovsky

There are no explicit plot spoilers in these reviews.

Blood of the Mantis is the third book in Adrian Tchaikovsky's Shadows of the Apt series. The book offers a brisk, tightly-focused cloak-and-dagger story and avoids the excessive sprawl which colored my enjoyment of the previous book.

The story begins after the siege of Collegium. Stenwold Maker must keep his military alliances intact in the face of differing opinions about who should benefit from the schematics for the Wasp-Kinden's deadly snapbow. Che travels to a Spider-ruled border town at risk of falling to the Wasps in hopes of warning the populace and gaining new allies. Acheos, Tynisa, and Tisamon hunt for the mysterious box stolen from Collegium, fervently desired by the Wasp emperor for some strange Mosquito ritual of power.

Instead of the large-scale battles of the previous books, Book 3 focuses more on political intrigue and subtlety. We learn more about the ancient pecking order of the different Kinden groups and explore the magic of the Inapt, those Kinden without a propensity for using technology. More time is spent exploring the mindsets of the main characters, especially Thalric, which helped to deepen my connection to the characters and see them as more than plot ciphers.

There's still a bit of worldbuilding sprawl, in the form of new characters, new Kinden abilities, and an interesting side plot involving the Bee-Kinden city of Szar that will undoubtedly come back later. However, I found Book 3's sprawl to be very manageable because the main characters are often in close proximity and there are only a few "main" plot threads to juggle.

Be aware that this book feels like a "middle book" with no strong conclusion. The plot in the final chapter goes off the rails like a sabotaged Wasp convoy, and feels more like a setup for the next book, Salute the Dark.

Final Grade: B

Media Literacy Day

Foreign intelligence efforts to destabilize and sow division are ramping up as we enter the last 2 months of the US election cycle. Here are 4 simple tips for improving your media literacy.

Family Art Day

A story about Amber and Abby Cat, written by Ian, illustrated by Maia

A jungle scene by Maia, drawn last May

Ian and I invent new Hot Wheels cars.

Maia as a Pokemon.

Chad Darnell's 12 of 12

12 pictures of your day on the 12th of every month

6:14 AM: Showered and ready for work after an early morning Beat Saber workout.

6:59 AM: Early riser stays behind while Maia heads to the bus stop.

7:04 AM: Bagel for breakfast.

9:55 AM: Work break for vaccines.

10:17 AM: Hitchhiker from Great Falls back to Sterling.

11:15 AM: Working lunch.

3:02 PM: Got off the bus, ran in the back door, and dove on to the couch to read.

4:03 PM: Hadley Park. (We relocated to the mall playground soon after, due to lack of bathrooms).

5:42 PM: Dinner assembly line.

6:02 PM: Excited for Mario Kart.

7:38 PM: Figuring out Finale 27.

8:40 PM: Finishing season two of Line of Duty.

Birth Day

Memory Day: Snapshots

This picture was taken 33 years ago, in January 1991.

It was a moderately warm winter and I was in Huntley Meadows Park with my dad, knocking out the requirements for my Photography merit badge. I'm wearing British Knights tennis shoes and the giant shark's tooth I found at Calvert Cliffs park. As a mid-seventh grader, I had not yet realized that my vision was poor enough to warrant glasses (those would come in 1992).

Review Day

There are no major spoilers in these reviews.

Yellowjackets, Season One:
We watched this in the spring but it must have slipped out of my review queue. This is a tense, unsettling thriller about a high school soccer team that crashes in the Canadian wilderness, intercut with flash-forwards to the only survivors in the future hanging onto a collective secret. Great performances (especially by Juliette Lewis and Christina Ricci), although be warned that the show starts leaning more heavily into horror elements as it goes on.

Final Grade: B+

That 90s Show, Season Two:
The first season of this sequel show had a campy charm and a good balance of cameos versus new character development. This season just feels like a an actual sitcom made in the 90s and starts to drag almost immediately. We watched 6 of the 8 episodes but never felt compelled to finish it.

Final Grade: C-

Asin9ne by Tech N9ne:
I enjoy Tech N9ne's fast-patter hip hop in spite of his incorrect use of "9" for phonetic spelling (however this is not as egregious as Ekoh naming his albums "The Detour", "The De2our", and "The D3tour"). This album has some good beats a little buried in skits and transitional material that gets tiresome after the first listen.

Final Grade: B

Meta Quest 2 Elite Strap:
The cheap plastic clips on my original Quest 2 headband finally broken after 3 years of near-daily use. This $20 strap relies on a twist knob to hold tension rather than elastic which makes it far more comfortable. The only downsides are that it's much harder to put on and take off the headset with glasses without twisting the knob to maximum size, and the headest takes up noticeably more shelf space since you can't tuck the headband into the headset anymore.

Final Grade: B

Deep Tracks Day

While in the process of salvaging old Finale files, I've come across a lot of compositions that I haven't thought about in decades. Here are a couple deep tracks that I enjoy.

Outlooks, Mvt III - The Freewheeler for string quartet

Irish Washerwoman for brass quintet

Ian Year 3 Month 5 Battle Report

Ian turns 3 and 5 months old today.

He's phonetically reading and can easily sightread some simpler books without hearing them first. He plows through a stack of books at breakfast time while slowly eating and his favourite book is a Cars anthology of questionable merit.

When not reading, he likes driving his Hot Wheels cars around. Grandpa got him a box of 50 cars so every Monday morning we take him to "car library" and he gets another one out of the box. He prefers games where he drives cars around rather than pretending to be something himself (although there was a brief phase where he always wanted to reenact the tractor-tipping sequence from the Cars movie and then he pretended to be Frank the combine harvester chasing everyone away from the tractors).

His two favourite songs are "Country Roads" and "Life is a Highway".

His bed resembles a magpie's nest with all sorts of trinkets he's collected from around the house, including a tiny music box, two magnifying glasses, a plastic clock, and a fake baby walkie-talkie that he pretends is his cellphone so he can look at his Weather Kitty app.

He is a SOUND sleeper at night but rarely naps anymore. Once he passes out, he wakes for nothing -- falling out of the bed, pull-up accidents, nuclear winters, etc. Unfortunately, he is also the earliest waker in the house after me, usually getting up around 6 AM (Rebecca and Maia start stirring around 6:30). This morning he woke up at 4:45 AM, opened his door and turned on his overhead light.

Currently, Ian is looking forward to three multi-day trips we have planned in the Fall: Capon Springs, WV, Solomons, MD, and Shenandoah National Park.

Review Day: Salute the Dark by Adrian Tchaikovsky

There are no explicit plot spoilers in these reviews.

Salute the Dark is the fourth book in Adrian Tchaikovsky's Shadows of the Apt series, It is a definite high point, offering a strong, exciting convergence of all of the threads introduced so far.

Although Uctebri the Mosquito-Kinden has finally claimed the feared Shadow Box, it comes at a time when the Wasp campaign may have stretched itself too thin, undermined by personal machinations of its Generals, growing alliances in the Lowlands, and unrest in several key border cities. Stenwold Maker and his allies scatter across the world to put their fingers in different parts of the proverbial dike, hoping that the combination of all their efforts will be enough to turn the tide. Meanwhile, the tortured Tisamon strikes his own path, never certain if his so-called destiny stems from a hidden influence tipping the scales of his guilt.

There are some unusual pacing decisions in this book, with some key events essentially happening off the page or in an abrupt paragraph while other battles and duels are stepped through in exhausting detail. This makes time pass in fits and starts, but the payoff of the steamrolling conclusion (the last third of the book) makes it all worthwhile. And, while the convergence of threads and the nullification of a main threat seems at first to be too neat, the final chapter organically introduces a brooding threat without feeling like a cliffhanger.

I enjoyed the development of all the main characters, but none so much as Thalric and his volatile relationship with the Wasp Empire. Besides characters, I also liked the deepening complexity of the Wasp Empire as more than a unified monolith, and the ongoing evolution of war technology underpinning the story. I was on the fence about the series after finishing Book 2, but Book 4 cemented my appreciation ? it's definitely worth reading the first four books even if you go no further.

Final Grade: B+

End-of-the-Month Highlights Day

New photos have been added to the Life, 2024 album.

• Events
  • Had Kenny & Sofia's family over for dinner (burgers and dogs) on S 9/1.
  
  
  • Visited the grandparents with the kids on M 9/2.
  
  
  • Family dinner at Bungalow Lakehouse on T 9/3.
  
  
  • Solo dad dinner at Local Provisions on W 9/4.
  
  
  • Date night (hike at Bazil Newman Riverfront Park followed by dinner at City Tap) on F 9/6.
  
  
  • Game afternoon with the Smiths on S 9/7.
  
  
  • Solo dad dinner at Local Provisions on W 9/11.
  
  
  • Got my COVID+Flu double tap on H 9/12.
  
  
  • Dinner at Chi & Sena's house before they leave for Abu Dhabi on F 9/13.
  
  
  • Rebecca went on a work bike ride on the W&OD on S 9/14. Date Night at Vino Bistro.
  
  
  • 45th birthday dinner at Ford's Fish Shack with the family on S 9/15, where Maia was adventurous enough to try the snow crab legs off the kids' menu.
  
  
  • Went to the HOA meeting on W 9/18.
  
  
  • Went to a brief Hampton University Marching Band performance at Park View HS on F 9/20.
  
  
  • Went to the Claude Moore Fall Festival on S 9/21, which was packed to the gills unlike the more sedate Spring Festival. In the evening, Marc and Rebecca went out for Indian food while the rest of us had Chinese at home.
  
  
  • Solo dad dinner at Local Provisions on W 9/25.
  
  
  • Rebecca took my mom and the kids to Capon Springs for the weekend on F 9/27. Solo dad dinner at Miller's.
  
  
  • Dinner with my parents on S 9/29 (boneless country-style pork ribs).
  • Doctor's appointment on M 9/30.


• Projects
  • Spent the month converting old Finale music files and purging dozens of ancient school assignments.


• Consumerism
  • Enjoying the new factory sim, Satisfactory, this month.
  
  
  • No amazing new shows, movies, or music.

September's Final Grade: A, growing old with grace and ease.