After running around Schlitterbahn for the day yesterday, I decided to treat the kids to a new ritual that I called “Grocery Store Feast”. The way it works: we all go to the grocery together. Each family member selects one non-junk-food item to be a part of dinner. We then take the whole pile home, cook it all up, and enjoy!

Thus we found ourselves enjoying a balanced meal of whole wheat pizza, eggrolls, fried chicken and basil & garlic polenta last night. Now that’s good eating! (And a lot of fun to boot.)

Wednesday: In anticipation of Saturday’s wedding, Kathy hosted and attended Christina’s bachelorette party. I picked up Daniel, who was coming in for the wedding, from the airport at 11:00pm. Christina’s air conditioning failed, so some of her entourage relocated to our house for the evening.

Thursday: Hit the outlet mall with Daniel to pick up another baguette pan so he could exercise his baking skills to supply the wedding with lots of fresh bread. Went to work. Played with The Grant Mazak Band at Veramendi Park here in San Marcos for the city’s “Summer in the Park” concert series. We’d been looking forward to and preparing for this for a couple months and were a bit nervous about it. Things went beautifully, however, with an article in the paper beforehand, about 400 people in the audience who, and lots of nice comments afterward.

Friday: Work. Wedding rehearsal. The rehearsal dinner, which was going to be at the happy couple’s home, was moved to the church because of the A/C failure. While cooking on the grill, it began to rain torrentially. We enjoyed soggy hot dogs, soggy children, and soggy dogs together. Lots of bread baking later that evening.

Saturday: More bread baking. The kids and I went down to San Antonio for a couple hours in the morning for Becky’s Year-in-Texas Tea, which was very nice indeed. We regrouped at the house and headed off for the wedding, where Kathy was matron of honor and I played pennywhistle for the recessional. We then ate, drank, and were merry for several hours until I finally toted the young ones back home for bed. Kathy showed later with a refrigerator’s worth of leftovers. (Where are those tamales?)

Sunday: Church and another concert at Cheatham Street Warehouse where we announced the band was changing the name to The Patio Boys. Celebrated Abigail’s birthday there with friends, family, and cake. Came home and collapsed.

I don’t think I’ve gotten around to mentioning it here before, but we adopted two kittens, brothers from the same litter, about a month ago. They’ve been settling in nicely, and have quickly become much-loved parts of the family.

So last night, while Kathy and Will and I were watching Jack Bauer’s latest adentures on 24, I pulled out the trashcan to clip my nails into. I had been happily grooming away for about 4 minutes when suddenly a mouse jumped out of the trash can and ran under the couch I was sitting on.

“Holy cow! Did you see that? A mouse just jumped out of the trash and run under my couch!” Kathy and Will were wrapped up in the program, they had missed the rodent’s mad dash for freedom. Now alerted, we quickly teamed up and made a plan: pull out the couch and catch the mouse.

“How are we going to get it?”, Kathy wondered. This was a good question, as we had 5 mice trapped in the closet once, and all but one managed to get past our clumsy attempts to catch them.

Will: “Get the cat!” Anubis, the black kitten, had been sleeping on his lap, so he picked it up and played with it a second to rouse it. We then turned over the couch. The mouse made a terrified run along the baseboard. It took Anubis about a second to figure out what was up, and then a second more to catch the mouse in his mouth.

“Good boy!” We put him and his prey outside, as we didn’t particularly want to have to watch the process or clean up after it, and went back to 24.

Final score:
Human Success Rate: 20%
Feline Success Rate: 100%

Dad McMains and Lana have been married 25 years today. In recognition of the occasion, Chris, Meara and I decided to put together a celebration for them where they could be feted by family and friends. Our friends the McNeels have a lovely ranch house, and offered to make it available and lure the couple to their place for the party. We schemers put together the guest list and coordinated the planning, a task made considerable more challenging by the fact that Chris was in England and Meara in Laos for a large portion of the lead-up time. Thanks to the joys of covert email, however, we were able to pull it off.

I arrived with my family and the rest of the Grant Mazak Band about an hour before the honorees were scheduled to show. We quickly set up, got everybody positioned, welcomed the other arriving guests, and then waited.

And waited.

And waited.

It turned out that while we had told everybody that the honorees would be there at 6:30, they had been informed that their ostensible dinner with friends was starting around 7:00, and they were running late even for that. We struck up some music to keep the guests entertained until they arrived, which of course they finally did.

Now, Dad is notorious for finding out about surprise parties in advance. Previous to this, we have only been able to pull the wool over his eyes once, when we celebrated his 60th birthday. Thus, we were delighted when they finally showed up to see the astonished looks on their faces. “That’s twice!” he told Chris.

They made their rounds, greeting friends from in town and family that had come from as far away as Fort Worth. We all dug into huge piles of delicious Rudy’s BBQ, passed around champagne, toasted the couple, cut into a large and delicious chocolate cake, and whiled away the rest of the evening with music, dancing, good conversation and the company of friends. We even launched into an unrehearsed rendition of The Chicken Dance at one point, recognizing that the crowd was receptive.

The night was a thorough delight, and everything we’d hoped that it would be. Many thanks to the McNeels for hosting and to everyone else who was involved in making it a special time for some very special people.

Emily left yesterday for her annual pilgrimage to visit with Kathy’s folks and Martha — a 3 1/2 week stint this year. She was supposed to leave Monday, but her plane had a flat tire, and she wouldn’t have made her connecting flight, so she and Kathy had to come all the way back home from the airport and get up at 4:00am to return the next morning.

In spite of all that, she’s up to New York safely, and we’re already missing her. Have fun, kiddo!

Long-time readers of this weblog may remember The Amazing Pneumatic Cannon, a potato gun I built several years ago. Unfortunately, it suffered an ignominious end when it fell from the back of the car and broke.

Jason and I recently decided that for our next mad-science project (after the trebuchet and water rocket) we would build potato cannons. His writeup is here on his weblog. I’ll post some video once I get it put together.

My first encounter with a theremin occurred when I was about seven years old. We had gone up to Oklahoma City to visit my grandfather and decided to spend the afternoon at the Omniplex, a marvelous hands-on science museum near the zoo. Among the kinetic sculpture, the demonstrations of various physical principles, and the periscope to the outdoors, I stumbled aross a big, yellow plastic box with two handprints on its top.

I began to fool around with it, and was thrilled to discover the range of sound I could elicit from the box merely by waving my hands around. It sure beat practicing scales on the piano! Other attractions in the cavernous Omniplex soon pulled me away, but the theremin left its mark, so I was quite excited when I later started to notice its distinctive sounds in various movie soundtracks. Years later I even tried to simulate it in part of the soundtrack for The Screaming Electric Pumpkin.

In spite of the repeated encounters with the instrument, I had no idea that there was a level of mastery above that of making spooky noises, so I was floored to hear, while listening to a Radio Netherlands Documentary on the instrument, an absolutely beautiful rendition of The Swan, by Camille Saint-Saens. I had learned the piece on cello in middle school, but never played it half as expressively as it was rendered here by Clara Rockman, widely regarded as one of the best players in the instrument’s brief history.

The documentary played several other lovely works of “precision theremin” which sealed my reevaluation of the instrument. If you have any interest in electronic music at all, I highly recommend giving the documentary a listen.

Kathy and I saw Poor Man’s Fortune, a Texas-based celtic group, for the first time last night at the San Marcos Summer in the Park concert series. They weren’t quite what I was expecting, but were quite enjoyable and engaging. Some of the surprises:

• When I heard the first strums on the guitar, I was arrested by the sound — it was definitely not using the usual guitar voicings, but wasn’t any standard alternate tuning I could figure out. About halfway through the show, the front man explained that the guitar had been set up like a lap dulcimer, which has several courses of doubled strings, which accounted for the unusual sound. The fretboard was still set up for a chromatic scale, however, rather than the diatonic scale the dulcimer uses. He called it a dulcitare. I really liked the sound, and will certainly encourage Grant, my irredeemable guitar-collecting friend, to acquire one so that I can play with it.
• The group focused on instrumental music, but also did several accompanied songs. To my surprise, a good number of them were in French, which I don’t usually think of as being a particularly Celtic language. Apparently, however, Brittany is a part of France that is home to some of the Celts, and is a musical tradition these performers mine heavily. Live and learn.
• The flute and whistle player at several points pulled out an instrument with a flare at one end and a oboe-eque double-reed at the other. It had a strident, reedy sound and appeared to be fingered the same as a pennywhistle. He eventually explained that it was a Bombarde — another influence from Brittany.

They played some really interesting enjoyable stuff, and I look forward to getting to hear them again. Here’s their gig calendar if you’d like to catch them sometime.

I’m not feeling much like writing right now, but so as not to leave too great a gap in the weblogging, here are a few bits for your reading enjoyment:

• I’ve taken each of the kiddos out for a day together now, all of which were good times. Emily and I did a movie and chinese food marathon, I took Abigail for a small-scale kayak trip and shopping, and Maggie and I enjoyed the estimable San Antonio Zoo together. I’m grateful to have the opportunity to spend that time with each of these wonderful people.
• We enjoyed Independence Day at a friend’s lakehouse on Lake McQueeney. Since we used to have family who lived on the lake, it was a treat to get back there and enjoy scooting around on the boat and watching their 7 year old son wakeboarding. (He’s pretty spectacular, and is on a first-name basis with many of the celebrities of the wakeboarding world.) Kathy also rode the Molecule behind the boat, tenaciously clinging to it even while it flipped over and send the two college guys who were also riding on it flying through the air.
• Seth has written an excellent essay on Creating Custom Events with Javascript. It’s well worth a read if you’re into Javascript hackery. He’s also still raising money for the 2006 Pan-Mass Challenge. Your support goes toward finding a cure for cancer.
• We enjoyed dinner and a viewing of Cars with Dad McMains for Father’s Day. The time with the family was excellent, and Pixar hit another one out of the park.
• The Grant Mazak Band played again this past weekend after a long-ish break. It was great fun to be together with the crew again. We’re also getting to play for San Marcos’ Summer in the Park concert series, which should be a good deal of fun as well as the largest crowd I’ve played for with this group.

Thanks to my friend Scott Morse, I’ve recently been learning Go, one of the oldest games in the world. While the mechanics are beguilingly simple (Liam caught on quickly enough to put up a good fight in his first game), the strategy is incredibly deep. The complexity that emerges from such simple rules reminded me of Conway’s Game of Life, for which Go turns out to have been an early inspiration. If anybody would like a match, I’m “SeanMcTex” on the Internet Go Server.

In other news, my group at work had a picnic last friday along the river. We have a bunch of good cooks, so the food was great, and the kids and adults all had fun swinging on the nearby rope swings over and into the water. Maggie made me laugh — she didn’t like jumping into the water, so she would patiently wait in line for her turn, take the rope firmly in hand, push off, and swing way out over the river. Clinging tenaciously, she would then return to her launching point, alight on the shore, politely hand the rope to the next person in line, and go back to the end of the queue to do it all over again.

The best part, however, was that a couple of the attendees brought out kayaks and offered to share them. The kids were, of course, all over them right away, and had a grand time padding around the nearby island, hunkering down to float beneath a footbridge, and cruising upstream to meet other boaters. Passing tubers were referring to Liam, who cruised around for an hour straight at one point, as “River Patrol”. Seeing how much the kids were enjoying the boats, Brianne Corn very generously offered to let us borrow her boat for a few days, so we strapped it to the top of the van and headed home.

Since Mondays are my night to have a little self-indulgent time, I decided last night that I needed to go for a paddle. I grabbed my flashlight, took Brianne’s boat up to the river, unloaded it into the water, and set off with a plan to paddle from Rio Vista Park up to Sewell Park and back again.

The first thing I noticed was that the river is much darker at night than I’d expected. While the nearby footpaths are reasonably well lit, there’s very little illumination to help your night vision on the water itself, and what there is often shines into your eyes rather than on the water. Paddling quietly past ill-defined shore, occasionally hearing the sounds of people talking, not being sure what was making those nearby splashing sounds was downright spooky. While the lighting situation was better once to Sewell Park, the oddities continued, as I saw something plowing through the water that I took to be a dog until it went under and didn’t come up. Nearby observers helpfully suggested that they thought it might be a huge snake.

Once I turned around and started back downstream, the boat felt winged. I raced past the placed I’d plodded through on the way upstream, but as I approached the railway bridge, a freight train thundered overhead, horn blasting with an awful roar that sent my heart into my throat. Something loomed out of the water ahead — an egret, on inspection with the flashlight. More distant laughter from shore. And then I was back to the park, happily pulling the boat from the water. It was a fun adventure, but creepy enough that I don’t think I’ll repeat it solo.