David Wilcox
For my birthday my wife bought me two tickets to see David Wilcox performing in what my brother would call a coffee house setting.Her one request was that I find someone else to go with :) I knew that if they were free, both my brother and my son would enjoy it. When both *were* available, I just ordered another ticket and invited them both. If I've had a better idea in the last 6 months I don't know what it was.

The only thing I'd change about last night is that we'd have run into less traffic getting to Arlington and then on to Ft Worth so we could have had dinner before the 7pm show we attended. If that had worked out, we might well have taken them up on the offer of a discounted ticket to the 9:30pm show with our 1st show ticket stub.

I knew Wilcox only by his recordings, many of which I enjoyed even after many repeated 'listenings'. I was pretty sure that seeing him live would increase my enjoyment and this show did not disappoint me. Just Wilcox, his guitar and the crowd. What a fun evening.

And if you want to catch up with where Wilcox is now, give a listen to this (apologies for the realmedia link - I know there are those who raise the shields at anything real.com has to offer - if you want to hear it but not accede to real.com terms, email me and 'we can work something out'. :)

I'm very close to deciding on a new home for these ramblings - livejournal. skaughtisch and his significant other, and MY significant other sotraveler all have livejournal identities, and it seems sort of familial to choose that, although I have reserved the ripvansabre identity on blogger.com and journalscape.

 

The other tipping factor was finding a windows client that makes posting easier. I'm not 100% certain, but for the time being I'll post a pointer here to my livejournal home.

Or at least it is GOING TO BE...

 

I worked from home this a.m. - troubleshooting a network design I've been pondering for months. I was deep into experimentation mode when I decided to stop for 'lunch' which today for me was a walk in the park. I decided I'd try for an extra long walk today, because all anybody on tv can talk about is the winter weather event we supposed to have tomorrow...COLD with winter precipitation, which I guess means it might be snow, it might be ice, it might be rain, we just aren't sure.

 

Anyway, the real point of this entry is to speak in favor of getting up and walking away from the keyboard. I wasn't 10 minutes into my walk when I had an inspiration on my network design that helped me put the pieces in place. I'd played around all morning (and some of last night, too) and had gathered a lot of data, but not much in the way of conclusions on what I would do. I put the mp3 player in my pocket, locked the front door and took off walking, listening to Karla Bonoff singing. After a few steps I was NOT thinking about work. After a few minutes, from out of the blue came the keystone thought that had eluded me all morning. It was *almost* enough to get me to walk back home.

And after the intermission we were really amazed at the DSO's performance of Mahler's Symphony No. 1. I'll admit I am not familiar with Mahler, and when I sat down and realized that the piece runs 55 minutes, I was wondering what I had put myself in for. But the performance was wonderful and I can honestly say that 55 minutes flew by, regardless of how late I'd stayed up the night before.

 

Gosh, you don't think I fell asleep during it, do you?  Surely Chris would have noticed and jabbed me awake if I had.

Chris and I attended the DSO last night and were wowed by both halves of the program. In the opening we saw Caitlin Tully as violin soloist as the DSO performed Beethoven's Violin Concerto. As I watched her play, all I could think of that she just 17. Her bio says she asked for a violin for Christmas when she was 4. I'm no expert, but it was clear that she has a rare talent and obviously enjoys performing.

 

During intermission, I told Chris that I had realized I've lived 3 times as long as the soloist. I don't think that type of thought has ever occurred to me.

 

This morning I realized that she's only been playing since Christmas 1992 when she got that first violin. I wonder what I could have accomplished if I'd started working on it then.

Well if life has you feeling a little down and you wonder if people are worth the trouble, I can point you to this article (subtitled "While the feds fumble, hurricane survivors find relief thanks to a Dallas hotel owner and friends") in the Dec 1 issue of the Dallas Observer. If you read that and aren't a little bit encouraged about the basic decency of people, then I'll have to buy you a Three Musketeers bar to try to cheer you up.