vacation report

The shower at my parents' house has a light that casts a perfect shadow of your ass as seen from above, and I saw my shadow and I thought "damn", so that was a nice feeling. This trip has had many nice feelings beyond admiring my own ass, including:

• the nervous, exciting feeling of sitting right at the back of a motorboat before it planes when it seems like everything might fall on you
• the blissful feeling of swimming in a calm lake with pool noodles behind your neck and knees so you can float on your back without any effort
• the calming feeling of your partner falling asleep on your shoulder on a long drive
• the righteous feeling that comes from telling a parent that they are treating your sibling unfairly and getting yelled at for it

We did a few cabin chores, which are always what give any trip to the cabin its structure. When we arrived, the water pump was broken and we had to re-plumb the whole thing so we could have water for dishes and showering. On the next day we took the shingles off the roof of an old shed that is being slowly retired, which revealed a farm of carpenter ants that had been busy eating the shed’s roof. I took off the shingles that the ants were living under and they picked up their eggs and ran away with them, which broke my heart a little bit. We also chopped down an old dead birch tree, and ignoring my (annoying, obstructive) desire to think about safety, my 70 year old dad watched maybe half a minute each of two youtube videos, plunged a chainsaw into this tree and then stood right next to it as it fell. It fell exactly where we had hoped and didn’t kick back, so he did not die, so it went pretty much exactly as I had hoped.

music zone

I have been listening to a lot of Bleeds by Wednesday and especially the song Townies. In voice lessons I’m going to start working on In The Aeroplane Over the Sea on Monday so I’m listening to a lot of that to prepare.

Before I left, I spent a bunch of time playing Super Gemini and Analog Rytm together but I had a hard time getting excited about anything I was doing, which I think was probably because I was in a mood bad enough that not even digital synthesis could break through it. It was maybe the closest I’ve ever gotten to convincing myself I should be a modular synth guy, which would, of course, change everything. But then I looked at prices on Perfect Circuit and I thought about buying a house and having a baby and I closed the tab.