I’m spending the weekend out of town helping with a friend’s film shoot. The crew has taken over a good-sized house in the south Puget Sound area and tonight I am running sound on the shots, which mostly entails holding my arms above my head for a long long time. We’ve completed the first of three setups and one of seven shots. We started at 8 or so.

We project continuing to shoot straight through the weekend – the schedule tonight calls for us to work until about 4 am.

Viv and I finally took the walk to the sound through Carkeek Park from the shopping center that sits by one of the park entrances this morning, and we’ll be back. The highlight of the walk was a restored apple orchard by the trailside that had been planted by the Pipers, who originally homesteaded the area a bit over 100 years ago. It was a mix of incredibly old and beautiful fruit trees, gnarled and bent, and younger trees planted at the time of the orchard’s restoration in the late 1980s.

It’s quite rare to find a large orchard with such old trees – my grandfather, a fruit rancher, told me that trees are often pulled out at about twenty to forty years – and it was wonderful to wander around the slope, smelling the various heirloom varieties that were fruiting in great abundance in the summer sun. I came home with six; it would have been seven, but the incredibly ripe par I clambered up one senior citizen to pluck fell away as I jostled the branch that bore them.

As Jon points out below, i appear to have no idea what I am talking about, as my bellyaching is premised on the improbable (and, to me, apparently unwelcome) fact of my prosperity.

I have been sucking on this idea like a lemon for a few days and really don’t have even an analysis, let alone an answer. I value routine and reward as strongly as any bourgeois ever, and of late have been savoring the new rituals of daily lawn and flowerbed watering and the like. Why, just today I have been afflicted with a leaky soaker hose, fountaining profligately all over the place. Naturally, I have elected to pursue the appropriate, environmentally conservative resolution and have discarded the hose in favor of a new one, purchased at the same locale we bought the first, Home Depot. Thank heaven for Chinese labor!

I have to admit, I am frustrated with my decreasing frequency of posts. For three years, roughly, I posted daily. Since the turn of the new year, I have posted every three days, give or take.

I beleive that the difference has primarily been our move to a new home. It was in quite rough shape and every week brings a new task requiring time or money to address. This only satisfies me partially, however. Prior to our move any wacky rentier challenge would prove fruitful for words; in this new location, the discovery of a gas leak or sprung roof seam generates no desire to write about it whatsoever.

I think that the lack of blab can be laid to two things: solving any given homeowner problem requires a greater time investment than solving a comparable rentier problem, and that I, personally, have no interest at all in reading about or writing about the challenges and problems that property owners face.

Don’t get me wrong, I actually do read about such, and even actively seek out sources of information on subects such as the average annualized cost of hydration via hose as opposed to inset sprinklers. But it’s literally homework, of no emotional interest or value to me, and I resent it deeply. Every moment I spend learning how to conduct fiduciary analyses of variant home irrigation systems is a moment I have utterly failed to live my life in accordance with my desires.

Expect blogging to dwindle accordingly.

Our porch thermometer reads 104 degrees.

Yesterday was not as hot although I thought today would be cooler. We began our day at 8 am with a brisk hike at Twin Falls State Park, just beyond Mount Si on 90 east of the city. We went with Greg and Stacey, at Greg’s suggestion. I actually agreed to the plan without consulting with Viv which led to a great deal of crying and moaning at 7 am as we attempted to rise.

It was not hot on the trail but it was steep enough that we were all sweating heavily. It was interesting to note that the heat of the rest of the day did not seem as hot as it was. Next time I know there’s gonna be a heatwave horror, I’ll be trying to do some heavy excercise prior to the height of the heat.

I hear tell it’s hot out there. Here, it is not. I spent my early evening under a cloudless 70-degree sky wrestiling with a mister-tyle soaker hose and recalling heatwaves I have known in the past.

Come visit. It’s in the sixties in the basement.

Apologies for the slowdown on bloggery of late – my Now Playing deadlines and an extended visit by the in-laws coincided.

Happily for me, Viv’s parents spent a solid week working on the yard – sifting soil, ripping up old grasses, planting new flowers and so forth. It’s great to see Viv so excited and happy about gardening and I want to be sure to provide her with all the support she needs to continue developing this interest.

In other news, my Mac Mini, originally obtained with an eye to replacing the current webserver, is now acting as a media server in the living room, with the help of a cheaply-bought EyeHome, a PnP/Appletalk breakout box designed to get the goods from hard drive to A/V system. While it has a few irritations, the cost of the box included software that enables any given Mac as a Plug-and-Play Windows Media server, meaning I can point the streaming media server I obtained from League brother Manuel a few months ago at the smaasset base and get the audio on a secondary amp.

The video playback quality is quite satisfactory. The box’s TV-oriented software includes a rudimentary web browser which makes Microsoft’s initial WebTV offering look positively polished, but happily also includes some minimal RSS capabilities and http-based streaming audio. I haven’t yet gotten it to deliver WFHB, but I will!

The other point to consider in looking at EyeHome is that it provides an optical-audio-out, something that is integrated into the new Intel-based Mini, but not in the model I have; thus I obtain greater audio quality from A/V files than is possible via the two-channel stereo mini jack, in theory.

However, there is one true annoyance in the configuration I have set up. The Mini has a single firewire jack and comes maximally loaded with an 80gb internal drive. It’s been well-known for years that nonlinear video – DVD-quality video stored in formats that can can be manipulated and played back from hard drive by a computer – is currently the queen of storage-space requirements. A single season of a popular current TV show requires roughly 20gb; it’s easy to recognize the need for additional storage space. I have a 300gb drive on the firewire bus.

One of the objectives I hoped to accomplish by moving the Mini to the living room and hooking it up to the A/V stack was to semi-permanently mount the iSight in the living room while using the tube as the computer monitor. Tests showed that this was a satisfactory solution, bandwidth constraints notwithstanding. However, the camera requires that it be powered by the Firewire bus, and the drive housing I’m using isn’t doing so. I’ll toy with running the media drive via USB, but won’t hold my breath for satisfactory results.

Have a happy fireworks day!

Oh, man, having a houseful of senior citizens certainly can keep one busy!

Viv’s folks have been visiting for an eventful two weeks and went home today. I love them dearly and miss them already. It’s good for my noggin to be around Spanish speakers.

In other news, Karel’s gonna get a visit tomorrow afternoon; I found out circuitously that Caleb Schaber is a) from Indiana and b) in Iraq picking up work as a stringer; and we saw Bryan Singer’s Superman tonight, which I did enjoy.

Also, I am up past my bedtime.