old friends, new friends, and salsa

Last Tuesday was my birthday, and I was planning on being low-key about it because I wasn't really sure if I knew my coworkers well enough yet to coerce them into some kind of birthday celebration. So to my surprise, on Monday Kristy stormed into my office, demanded to know why I hadn't told her sooner about it being my birthday, and planned a birthday dinner for me. On Tuesday, I came into the office and found a vase of fresh flowers (from my parents) and a card signed by the engineers (with notes like "May your birthday be free of deadlocks"). That night about 10 of us went out for delicious Caribbean food at Delta of Venus, then ice cream afterwards. It was a boisterous and fun dinner, interrupted only occasionally by an over-amplified poetry reading (it happened to be poetry jam night). On Wednesday, Skip surprised me with dinner at Chez Panisse, a restaurant I've wanted to go to for years, home of the famous Alice Waters. It was the best meal I have ever had. On Thursday the fabulous Danielle was in town, and we had an impromptu dinner party with her and a few other new friends. Some of the new friends ended up also being musicians, which lead to the inevitable raucous jam session in the garage. Somehow we managed to avoid getting the cops called on us. We suspect our 90 year old neighbors are mostly deaf. Friday we went over to dinner at Lavinia and Marco's place, and they gave us a salsa dancing lesson. Lavinia and Marco are incredible dancers (and ranked 14th in a national salsa competition in Italy last year), so at first I was a bit intimidated, but they were good teachers and soon we were shuffling around their living room hitting most of the 1,2,3 .... 5,6,7... steps. I'm into it.

The Video Hopper-Kelly revolution

Last February, after returning home from Mardi Gras where we spent 4 days following street musicians and performance artists around (while avoiding frat boys), I impulse-bought an accordion from Trading Musician, and then proceeded to ignore it for about 4 months. My excuse was that it was heavy, and my poor software-weakened left tricep couldn't handle the bellows. This was all a sham. In truth, I was just lazy. But, in the last month I have redeemed myself and rediscovered my fabulous 60s accordion, and in the process, strengthened my left tricep. Soon I will have something similar to bowling arm.


For some reason, my accordion's name is Video Hopper-Kelly. I can only assume its parents were hippies, what with the hyphenated last name. But the first name is just utterly odd. Maybe my accordion is really the one who killed the radio star?

Skip and I recently watched Felini's 'Nights of Cabiria', and the ending was quite depressing. The heroine was taken advantage of yet again, and wanders miserably through a forest at night. But suddenly out of the trees appear young people dancing and singing, apparently returning from a picnic. One carries a guitar, one an accordion. They surround the heroine and play her a beautiful folk song. She finally smiles, and the movie ends. We found this simple guitar/accordion song so enchanting we transcribed it and learned to play it. It's been a great song to learn how to play the accordion with. The folk song structure works well with accordion+guitar: a simple, strong melody for the accordion, and a rhythmic driving accompaniment for the guitar. I'm digging through my old Grieg and Rachmaninoff piano music for more promising folk songs.

yellow and green hills

Here in NE Cali we are surrounded by the hot, dry, flat desert, but on clear days (which is most days actually) in the distance you can glimpse mysterious yellow and green patchwork hills. They almost look like a mirage. Last weekend we set out driving towards this mirage and found ourselves at Lake Barryessa on the highway to Napa. We decided to do what looked like an easy 4 mile loop hike, which turned out to be a 5 mile hike where the first 4 miles were a steep incline (and the last mile was such a steep decline we thought we should be skiing). We found ourselves precariously following the path up and down the tops of the hills. The views were incredible. The yellow in the hills is dried grass, and the green is sturdy shrub-like aromatic trees. We couldn't figure out why the grass and shrubs arrange themselves in stripes along the hillside though. More pictures here.

Wiki and Doggies

I found myself missing Amazon's internal wiki today, as I shuffled through the notes on my desk and the docs that have been emailed to me, so I set up an internal company wiki server. Response so far is positive, though time will tell if the engineers will actually use it. Obnoxiously asking "why don't you document that in my wiki?" after the answer of every question I ask may help.

I set up the wiki server on, gasp, a windows machine, but it was actually pretty easy. This site has an excellent set of instructions on how to install a WAMP (windows+apache+mysql+php) stack and then install mediawiki.

Grant, the VP of engineering's dog, is the sweetest dog ever. He sat on my feet during my interview. He follows the CEO around most of the day, and makes sure no mean people try to sell us anything. He's a yellow lab with a patch of curly fur on his back. He was trained as a seeing eye dog for the blind, but got disqualified at the end of the training process because he broke his front arm. Being well trained, he never barks or tries to steal food (though begging is another story). And if any Amazon people are reading this, yes Grant is nicer than Miso. And cuter.

Company Exercise Day

Maybe it's not surprising that a small health care company run by a pair of health fiends (who could probably individually out-run and out-benchpress the whole engineering team) has Company Exercise Day. Once a month everyone stuffs themselves into stretchy pants, piles into cars, and drives to the local gym, where a special Cedaron exercise class is held. This month it was "Pilates/Yoga fusion."

I was a bit skeptical at the start of class, but it ended up being a lot of fun. All the not-terribly-flexible engineers were good sports, and we saluted the sun, downward facing dogged, and made my ab muscles sore in ways I didn't think were possible. It was kinda funny seeing people who usually never leave their computers and live purely in the realm of the mind with their legs in the air following orders from the world's perkiest yoga instructor. There were more than a few accidental farts, and a bit of groaning and falling over, but overall everyone felt good at the end of the hour. And then we hurried over to Del Taco and ate lots of tasty junk food.

Spreading the vibes love

I have had an irrational love of the vibraphone for as long as I can remember. It's so smooth, so jazzy, so mellow. It can have a staccato or sustained sound, be soft or loud (without additional amplification), and the vibrato speed is adjustable. Last year I achieved my life goal of getting one, buying it from a 13-year-old on craigslist (who was over the vibraphone phase and moving on to the welding phase; too bad). The vibraphone made it's first public appearance at the Greenbean Coffeehouse in Seattle when Skip and Anton and I played some music to help raise money for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Foundation.

A few weeks ago Mike, Sara, and baby Rosie came over for a BBQ, and I showed Rosie the vibes. She loved it (and not just because hitting things is fun when you are 1), and I'm convinced she's going to be the next great jazz vibes legend. I suspect someone hovered me over a vibraphone when I was 1, and that's where my irrational love came from.

More excellent music discovered at Delta of Venus

Delta of Venus continues to impress me with it's unpretentious atmosphere, loyal crowd, and reliably good music. It's a bit like Gallery 1412 in Seattle with a more folk-oriented (rather than jazz-oriented) crowd. We biked down there last Saturday and discovered some wonderful musicians:

Garrett Pierce: Unassuming and straightforward, Garrett Pierce sang simple, poetic songs and accompanied himself on the acoustic guitar. We couldn't help but be captivated by his soft, sad voice and poignant, honest writing. He was simply very good. I liked the solo live performance even better than the recorded songs on his myspace page that have a band behind them.

Ralph White: banjo + fedora + songs about bacon = folk hero. He played both a 6 string and 5 string banjo (that looked like a cross between a guitar and a mandolin), the fiddle, and the accordion, all as a virtuoso. His lyrics are earthy and funny, blending old time americana with psychedelia. And yes, there was a song about going wild pig hunting when the bacon supply ran out.

The Places (Amy Annelle with Ralph White): Dark, melodic, haunting melodies and songs about ghosts. Beautiful and hypnotic.