Birthdays

We've had a sweet set of birthdays the past couple of days. Since my real birthday is today, a Monday, I had my celebration on Saturday. Basically my wish was to get a couple of people over and just have an hours long electronic jam session. And that happened. Jacques was the first to come over. Josh came a few hours later. After Josh left Paul came over. We even got Mary Beth to play a few notes on the string synth! It was a lot of fun. Primarily, noisy. Filled up two sd cards recording it! I'm estimating that's between six and seven hours. The plan is to go back to it at some point and edit it. Sculpt it into pieces. Loop things to make parts here and there. I did record the instruments stereo separated. So ALL the instruments aren't crammed together all the time, just half and half. Jacques gave me a cd for a present: Tangerine Dream: Sorcerer! Pretty excited about that one. Josh seems to get more and more into his idea of starting a barcade here in Memphis. I'm totally behind getting involved if that ever happens. Mary Beth baked the most awesome two layer chocolate cake (with rasperry jam between the layers, mmm). It was pretty damn intense, which was what I wanted.

Okay, now yesterday was Mary Beth's birthday! I'll make note of the present I got her, because it's of note for other reasons: La Dolce Vita special edition box set thingie. I was surprised when I got it 'cuz the box is so huge. I was also annoyed because two days after I ordered it Criterion announced they're gonna be releasing it in October. Well, this version probably has stuff it won't have and it's a fancy box and that's months away. It is out of print now and took a small bit of effort to track down, but the deal I got made it pretty worth it (a small fraction of the actual price it originally went for). Anyway, Mary Beth's birthday wish was to meet a bunch of people at Bryant's. Knew this would be tricky as it's always crazy busy. We did seem to beat a bit of a rush. I'm not sure how, but we somehow managed to pull it off relatively successfully. There was a long table that was almost completely empty somehow. That's the main thing, don't know how that happened. Well we claimed it. I did have to chase away one woman. Tough talking to the employees as they're so busy, but we managed and they were really nice and accommodating and hooked us up. Someone came to us to take our orders so we didn't have to wait in line and lose the table. It came off really well, I think (considering how Bryant's is at that time). Jacques was there, and Dustin and Courtney and Daphne, Josh showed up with Maria and LIla, and Paul came too. I had cinnamon roll french toast. It was especially nice 'cuz Jacques had the same thing but didn't want his strawberries so I had double strawberries! Okay, after this we all went to Overton Park. It was a lot of fun. Jacques and I played double frisbee disc wars. There was the cake again. I pushed Lila on a swing and got a little bit dizzy (I guess I just get dizzy extremely easily). The wather was nice. After the kids and parents left the rest of us sat around talking a good while. At home Mary Beth and I watched The Earrings of Madame De . . . (and actually ended up taking a nap in the middle out of tiredness). I did get a stomach ache last night. That was lame. Later Mary Beth wanted to fulfill a craving of ironically eating at Friday's. So we went and had fried greenbeans. I was up super late unable to go to sleep due to my stomach. But I'm awake and alright. Actually got up and did my tabatas (oh and the day before too I thought it'd be rough 'cuz we were up pretty late then too but I did 'em straight away and felt pretty good). Sent in an application for a job Paul told me about at his workplace. Well, what am I gonna do today?

Oh shoot! I'm losing it! Almost forgot to mention that after getting up this morning I finished reading Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin. Been working on that one a while. It was good. It had good use of repetition and digressions and other modernist niceties. Okay. Oh man, I'm really losing it over books 'cuz now I'm remembering what Dustin gave me: Music Synthesizers: a Manual of Design & Construction by Delton T. Horn. It looks really awesome.