Boys, Girls, Arts, Tech, and Vacation

Spent most of vacation relaxing. Finished off the remaining college recs, tried to catch up on sleep, and worked on a few project.

We've had an interesting December break dynamic in our household for the past few years. My son, Natan is very much into his music, both as a performer and a composer. A few years ago we discovered KlezKamp. It spoke to both Natan and Devorah. Batya, coming back from college wasn't so into it and I was somewhat indifferent.

The end result is that for most of the first half of the break, Batya and I were left on our own in the city while Natan and Devorah were up in the Catskills.

So, what did we do? In addition to playing tourist, we rebuilt the CSTUY web site (with a little help from her boyfriend Zach) - check it out: cstuy.org. I'm really happy with the result and now have a code base that I'm happy with and can maintain.

I can't describe how awesome it is to be able to collaborate on something real with ones daughter and I hope we can work on more projects in the future.

Of course, I had my Natan time when he and Devorah got home. We spent new years eve at the NYGASP production of HMS Pinafore. Natan loves opera and is something of a Savoyard and he's also a terrific singer. Something he must have inherited from my father, although he never met him.

So, we had our own project:

His is the good voice singing Dick Deadeye and I'm the not so good one doing Captain Corcoran. We recorded it A Capella and he added the midi after the fact. I think he had to change the key and I'm sure he had to mess with the tempo.

Some of you might have noticed that I worked on the tech project with Batya and the artsy one with Natan but don't worry - Natan's planning on majoring in Computer Science and Batya's the musical director and an alto in The Chai Notes up at Cornell.

So that was my break. Back to work in a couple of days.