The Elysian Fields

In no particular order:

Justin has his driver's permit. I took him over to the parking lots - and roads - at Beltzville. We went over everything I could think of - pulling into and out of parking spaces, going forward and backward in line, parallel parking, three point turns, and so on.

Rachel got her purple belt. She also assisted at a birthday party, and, after witnessing how none of the kids in gym could stretch properly, she wrote a letter to her sensei and to her gym teacher, and the end result of her efforts will be that the karate school will be spending a whole day at the middle school assisting the gym teacher.

Mr. B is not hitting his brother, he's whacking him.

Justin received a final grade of 90 in his first college level course.

Rachel played several concerts with the middle school band and went on a trip to an amusement park. Her band received a gold medal - only the second out of eleven years - in a performance for the high school professors.

Deb, Justin, and Rachel will be going down to Philly to volunteer at the Race for the Cure tomorrow.

July 12th, 3-5, I'll be giving a talk on native plants and natural landscaping at the Moravian Book Shop in Bethlehem.

That'd be the end of the good news section. In the quite-possibly-not-so-good-news section, Deb's sister Pat - who a number of you have met at the cookouts - will be undergoing an operation to get a biopsy of... something in her brain. They don't know What, yet. And the entire board of the hospital is being brought in to figure out exactly What. Good thoughts would be welcome.

3 out of 4 of the active members of the Lefty Valdez Band got together last night to work further on The Tune.

We started out on the front porch, until it got dark, and Deb unlocked the door and let us back in. After a few rounds of practice, some playing around on other potential themes, we got to work on The Tune. A second riff for the bass introduced itself to me, and so I played it for noone234 and Rachel. Once we came back inside, we set to work devising the sax part for the transition and the new riff, and, by the end of the night, we had it.

We refined the existing parts by following the lead Justin had accidentally set when he first transcribed The Tune, and we don't give the horns a measure off between each of their lines. Now, we come in pretty much at the same time with only a quick slide on the last bit of the 4-e-and-a, so, boom, we all start at 1. Four measures of intro, then we segue to the new bit, which, on its own is 12 measures of bass. The final holding note of the intro hangs over that first measure (so we have 5 measures of the horns) and we've got the sax part for the next two measures, completing the first figure of the new part. We'll tighten that up once Justin gets back from vacation and writes his trumpet part - posibilities are: harmonizing the sax part, sitting out for a short sax solo and coming in after, or doing something completely different. In any case, the tune is shaping up nicely.

We met, briefly, our temporary percussionist - Korg, his name is - although we couldn't hear a beat he played on account of a distinct lack of RCA plugs (or 1/4" to RCA conversion cables). noone234's cousin sounds like he'd be a good fit, although he'd have some difficulty commuting down from Buffalo. So the position is still officially open.