67th Post

My mom rarely paints her nails -- she "doesn't like the suffocating feeling." It therefore follows that my mom rarely removes paint from her nails.

With my mom's help, I dressed up as Frankenstein for my orchestra concert last Tuesday (or rather, to satisfy the prescriptivists, I dressed as The Modern Prometheus). I had the bolts, the dark hair, the dead-looking flesh and blackened nails -- only the fingers; I neglected painting the toes since I'd be wearing shoes.

To complete my getup, I bought a nice suit from D.I. (parenthetically, how does one punctuate the end of a sentence in which the last word ends with the mark you intend to use? It feels a little silly to write it again. People might read it like they're descending a flight of seven stairs expecting six) . The suit fit right about my waist, and fit most of my legs nicely as well. See for yourself:


I enjoyed the concert -- we played some fun "scary" songs:

• Danse Macabre - listen to this one if you have time for only one song.
• The Sorcerer's Apprentice - but in real life... not cartooned.
• Baba Yaga something something - the conductor on this video is funny, though I wouldn't enjoy playing for him. He hasn't always a very pronounced ictus.
• Pumpkin Eater's Fugue - can't find a recording,
• and Noon Witch Overture - it's okay... not my favorite.
  

And I scared some kids.

Finally at home I unscrewed the bolt from my neck, showered out the darkness from my hair, cleaned the deadness from my face and asked my mom to help me remove the blackness from my fingers' nails. She pulled out the bottle of remover (that she probably bought when she was four years old and hadn't used in a decade) and only managed restoring six nails to life before running out. So I went to work on Wednesday as an emo kid. Without the goofy hair.

Contemplative Frank:


Drum-playing Frank with fellow drummers:

Hundreds of Thousands of Words

Here are some things I've been working on lately. I'd put them on my more nerdly blog, but I'm not explaining anything technical here... so... here:

This demonstrates a simple watchdog timer thinger. The circuit will activate unless in receives a signal within a certain amount of time.



We (at work) used that circuit to power this fan so that when our website went down, the fan would turn on:


I fixed the dome light in my car. No, this was not the cheapest way to fix it. Yes, it was fun to do. Yes, it's pretty bright. And it makes me smile when I get in my car at night.


(and no, the light isn't just dangling from the ceiling -- this photo was taken before I put it in the cover)

And this is one of my mom's flowers before we pulled them all out before winter: