On Friday, I left work early (I’d been up late working from home the night before and so felt not a shred of guilt) and took the subway to Penn Station and the Long Island Railroad out to Mom’s. I did this all on crutches. Whew. (I was tempted to consider if a workout for iPod goal purposes.) The purpose of the trip was to see Isabella perform in her high school production of “Guys and Dolls”. She played a rookie police officer. She didn’t have a lot of lines, but she did a great job with what she had. “There are no small parts, only small actors.” Three cheers for small actors. And small sisters!

I saw a few of my former teachers, lunchladies, etc. at the high school, and had nice chats with some of them. It was especially cool to see Jordan Hornstein, an english teacher and theater director. He taught one of the best English classes I’ve had, and directed me in numerous plays.

High school theater is great for so many reasons. When else to kids get to stand up and perform in front of hundreds of people, and have their full attention. I guess it has a lot of similar benefits as high school sports. Teamwork, discipline, hard work. One cool thing, though, is that theater is co-ed, where most sports aren’t. Learning to be trust, communicate with, and collaborate with members of the opposite gender is huge.

Isabella used to be a shy girl, and she seems to have left that shell behind somewhere along the way. Good for her!

Monica’s been sick lately. (That’s another sister.) She still has more energy with a hundred-and-something fever than most people have on a good day. She was home from school one day this week and IM’d me at work. She wanted me to send her the lyrics and chords to two songs I’ve written. I obliged, of course. After all, if you’re an eleven-year-old girl home from school with a fever, what else are you going to do but learn how to play your brother’s love songs on your guitar?? She’s a piece of work, that girl. An inspiration to all who know her.

Alec came by today and we had a great perl/guitar session. Talked a bunch about regular expressions, and about references, and some about interwoven. He’s making a lot of progress. I asked him to talk to me a bit about his digital studio set up, and he taught me some skills, techniques and ideas for playing lead guitar. I learned the blues (pentatonic) scale and the major scale. We recorded some progressions and then practiced lead licks while they played back in a loop. Really fun! In the blues scale, everything sounds good. You can’t go wrong. In the major scale, nothing you do sounds bad, but not much has soul.

After the lesson, we had dinner at Spice and then went over to my office (empty on a Saturday) and set up the ping-pong table. We pulled in an iMac to use as a stereo and played some Grateful Dead while Alec beat me in three close games. My podiatrist would not approve if he’d have seen me hopping around.

Alec is going to “produce” one of my songs. I’m really psyched about it!

Last night, after I got back from Long Island, I was about to turn in when I read John’s blog entry. It addressed me by name and the title and was nothing short of a geek challenge. Not one to shirk from a challenge I had an RSS feed for my blog working within an hour or so. It’s a good thing I did it, ’cause the masses were clamoring for it… don’t know how they’ve live without it. Yeah, that’s sarcastic. I don’t see it getting much use. But it was fun.

Whoa, I almost forgot to include this: I bought my tickets for Peru! Mom and I are going to visit Jessica in early June. I’m psyched!