PyCon Rocks!

I just got back from PyCon 2008 in Chicago. It was awesome. In addition to great tutorials and talks, there were lots of cool and interesting people to talk to, and...

...music jam sessions every night!:

• Stairway to Heaven
• The PyCon Band
• Flute Solo
  

The Stairway to Heaven photo got reprinted here with the caption, "I for one welcome our not-half-bad acoustic Stairway overlords."

Need a walking stick after playing lute...

So I've been playing baroque guitar a lot lately and not so much renaissance lute, but now that Thanksgiving is past, I've dug up a couple of books of Christmas music arranged for lute and have been playing lute a lot more. I'd actually forgotten what it feels like to lose all feeling in one leg... and then get it all back, all at once, all pins and needles.

In case you're wondering: for guitar my legs are parallel and tend to get plenty of circulation, for lute I cross one leg over the other to cradle the lute and then tend to lose circulation in one leg.

On a completely unrelated note, today my wife accused me of being sesquipedalian, which strikes me as a textbook example of a pot-calling-the-kettle-black situation. :-)

Sorrows on both sides of the family

My aunt Addie passed away last week. She'd been suffering for a long time, and she's free from suffering now, but all of us will miss her.

Vandana's cousin Shyamal Sinha and four of his colleagues have been lost on Nanda Devi (a mountain in the Himalayas) for 18 days now (after a blizzard). Apparently the record for surviving under similar conditions is 28 days and Shyamal is an accomplished mountaineer, so we still have hope for him and his colleagues.

Truncation...

Foosball champions!

Ed P. and I are now foosball champions at the office! Hurray! :-)

Another sad day

I found out earlier today that my paternal grandmother just passed away.

Eagle pose

My wife, daughter, and I recently started participating in a yoga class together.

Today's yoga term: गरुडासन garuḍāsana

garuḍa = eagle and/or eagle-like divine beings
āsana = pose

I mention this because:
(a) I think garuḍa are cool (they're right up there with nāga in my opinion).
(b) garuḍāsana seems to help with a persistent pain I've had between my shoulder blades.