African Hand Drumming

I started taking African Hand Drumming classes at Brittannia Community Centre about a year ago. The drum I play is called the Djembe and involves three basic tones, the bass, the slap and the open tone. Learning simple beats and developing your tones and handing is the basis for the level one class. I am now taking the level two class (which I have already taken) where we learn harder beats, with multiple parts including the dununs (which you can see a picture of if you link through the drumming site).

As many of you may know, coordination and musical ability aren't exactly my strongest traits, which is why I choose Djembe in the first place. I figured if I could play a musical instrument at all, it would certainly be a simple one such as banging a drum with your hands.

After a summer hiatus, I went back to class last night. I often have difficulty learning a beat in class, as I get lost in the sounds of the people around me and it is difficult for me to find my own beat. So I merely try to remember the basics and practice at home for the next week. Fortunately, this week we started with my favourite beat called Yankadi. It is a little bit complex (although still slow), but I had learned it previously which made my return to drumming a little bit less intimidating.

I also tried the dununs for the first time, they are round drums that are played horizontally using drum sticks. A simple beat is played using your weak hand on a piece of 2x4 wood placed on top of the drum, then your strong hand is used to hit the head of the drum on certain beats. This results in an amazing sound of deep drum beats and simple clicking or almost pinging sounds of the drumstick on the wood.

When it was finally time to try the dununs, my first instinct was to mirror Russell (the teacher). Which of course resulted in me using the wrong hands for each part the first two times, and thus I pretty much sucked. But once I figured out I was doing it wrong and started using the proper hands I got much better (I guess it does affect the coordination). Although scary, the dunun was also very fun, and it sounds amazing when you get all three dununs parts and both djembe parts playing at the same time. It's a beautiful melody, and during one round, Russell played about 8 solo pieces over all of the other parts, it was absolutely amazing.

I can't wait for next week, so I can learn something new.

T.G.I.S.

Thank Goodness it's Sunday
It doesn't have the same ring to if as TGIF, but the meaning is definitley the same. This week has felt very busy and stressful and I have been looking forward to my weekend immensley. There's not too much planned for monday or tuesday which means a big sleep-in is definitley in my immediate future, and who couldn't use a little extra sleep?!

I'm hoping to start the weekend off with a relaxing sunday evening with my man. Hopefully it will involve some take-out (I'm rooting for chinese, but then again I nearly always choose chinese) and some quality tv.

I realized last week that Sunday is a prime time to veg in front of the tv. Not only do I lack the motivation for much else at the end of the week, but the TV shows don't totally blow. Fox manages to entertain me for a full two hours with The Simpsons, Some new show (I can't remember what it was called, but it was funny), Family guy and American Dad.

Well, I think it's time to get started on that relaxation thing...

Cardio Kick Box

I've been feeling lazy, lethargic and generally inactive for the majority of the summer. YES, I played softball, but we all know that it doesn't really require a ton of physical activity. I mean you get a break in between running each base (thank goodness)!

Prior to summer I began attending a cardio kick boxing class, but unfortunately fell off track during the busy months of summer. I am however, ready to get back into exercise mode and I actually just got home from class now, and boy am I sweaty!!

what's great about this class is that we spend the first part of class doing aerobic type activity, punching, kicking and generally moving around the room. Then it's time for my favourite part of class, the punching bag. We use wave masters, which sit on a water based stand rather than hanging from the ceiling. We wear boxing gloves and wraps and we beat the crap out of the bag with punches, and a multitude of kicks such as round kicks and front kicks. Finally, the last part of class we call torture, this is when we sit on the ground and do mat exercise (generally a variety of pushups and sit ups) before stretching and going home. As much as torture sucks, we all know we need it, and it somehow seems more tolerable when there are other people around.

And all of this costs only $4 per 1.5 hour session once you buy the gloves. It feels so good to exercise, although it may hurt like hell tomorrow...

mini-vacation

For our labour day long weekend Jason and I headed out to whistler; we stayed in a beautiful condo in the creekside courtesy of my parents timeshare. The place included a master bedroom and living room with a mountain view, two other small windowless bedrooms (which were perfect for napping), two bathrooms, a full kitchen with a dishwasher, a washer drier, TV, VCR, BBQ and fireplace. It was absolutely
spectacular.

While in Whistler, we didn't do much except relax and try to veg out from our busy lives. We slept in late, made bacon and eggs for breakfast then headed off to the village to stroll the shops. We had hoped to ride the gondola up the mountain, but unfortunately it didn't work out. At first I forgot the camera, then by the time we made it back the gondola rides were coming to a close and we didn't want to be rushed at the top. And on Wednesday morning, it was cloudy, so unfortunately no gondola this trip.








Fortunately, we did however find time to make use of our fabulous accommodations. Rather than go out for lunch, we opted to feast at home. I had a beautiful ahi tuna steak and Jason had an amazing piece of ribeye steak and we completed the meal with some macaroni salad and a cesar salad.

Overall, this was a fabulous trip, very low key and relaxing and I can't wait to do it again. These picture were all taken off of our patio in the suite, what an amazing view.

last nights lesson

Courtesy of "the Simpsons":

Handsome means he spends all day looking in the mirror. Rugged means you look at him.

my job

Last November I started my job as an environmental biologist/lab technician. What does that mean exactly you ask? In short, I test water. But here's a more convoluted response to my occupation.

Any company that has effluent (waste water) that is going to be released into a water body (i.e. river or ocean) is required--by the government--to test the effluent to ensure that it is not toxic to the level of harming the ecosystem, or the organisms within the system. That is where we come in.

We test the water on both rainbow trout and Daphnia magma (water fleas) to determine the lethal concentration for 50% of the organisms in the test (LC50) or the lethal time for 50% of the organisms in the test (LT50). Once these values are determined, the test either passes or fails based on guidelines presented by the government. A failure results in repeated testing, and in extreme cases closure of the company until the situation is remedied.

You will all be happy to know, that failures are few and far between so although the water often looks nasty, it is not nearly as toxic as we might imagine.

Big Box Rant

One Happy Big-Box Wasteland Oh my yes, there is indeed one force that is eating away the American soul like a cancer
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Do you want to feel like you might as well be in Tucson or Boise or Modesto or Wichita or Muncie and it no longer freakin' matters, because we as a nation have lost all sense of community and place? Why, just pull over, baby. Take the next exit. Right here, this very one.

Ah, there it is, yet another massive big-box mega-strip mall, a giant beacon of glorious community decay, a wilted exclamation point of consumerism gone wild. This is America. You have arrived. You are home. Eat it and smile.

There is the Target. There is the Wal-Mart and there is the Home Depot and the Kmart, the Borders and the Staples and the Sam's Club and the Office Depot and the Costco and the Toys "R" Us and of course the mandatory Container Store so you may buy more enormous plastic tubs in which to dump all your new sweatshop-made crap.

What else do you need? Ah yes, food. Or something vaguely approximating it. There is the Wendy's and the Burger King and the Taco Bell/KFC hybrid (ewww) and there is the Mickey D's and the Subway and the Starbucks and the dozen other garbage-food fiends lined up down the road like toxic dominoes, all lying in wait to maul your arteries and poison your heart and make you think about hospitals.

And here's the beautiful part: This snapshot, it's the same as it was 10 miles back, same as it will be 10 miles ahead, the exact same massive cluster of insidious development as you will find in roughly 10,000 noncommunities around the nation and each and every one making you feel about as connected to the town you're in and the body you inhabit as a fish feels on Saturn. In the dark. In a hole. Dead.

You have seen the plague. I have seen the plague. Anyone over 30 has seen the plague evolve from a mere germ of disease in the late '80s to a full-blown pestilence of big-box shopping hell. I was recently up in northern Idaho, where my family has owned a beautiful house on a lake in a tiny burg near the Canadian border for 40 years, and to get to this region you must pass through the explosively grown resort town of Coeur d'Alene, and the plague is there perhaps worse than anywhere within a 75-mile radius.

I am officially old enough to remember when passing through Coeur d'Alene meant stopping at exactly one -- one -- traffic light on Highway 95 on the way north, surrounded by roughly one million pine trees and breathtaking mountain vistas and vast, calming open spaces, farms and fields and sawmills and funky roadside shops and gorgeous lakes for miles.

There are now about 20 traffic lights added in as many years, scattered down a 10-mile stretch of highway and each and every one demarcates a turnoff into a massive low-lying horribly designed strip mall, tacky and cheaply built and utterly heartless, and clearly zero planning went into any of these megashops, except to space them so obnoxiously that you have to get back in your goddamn car to drive the eighth of a mile to get to the Target to the Best Buy to the Wal-Mart to the Super Foods and back to your freakin' sanity.

Do you want to know what depresses the American spirit? Do you want to know why it feels like the center cannot hold and the tyranny of mediocrity has been loosed upon our world? Do you want to know what instills more thoughts of suicide and creates a desperate, low-level rage the source of which we cannot quite identify but which we know is right under our noses and which we now inhale Prozac and Xanax and Paxil by the truckload to attempt to mollify?

I have your answer. Here it is. Look. It is the appalling spread of big-box strip malls, tract homes like a cancer, metadevelopments paving over the American landscape, all creating a bizarre sense of copious loss, empty excess, heartless glut, forcing us to ask, once again, the Great All-American Question: How can we have so damned much but still feel like we have almost nothing at all?

Oh and by the way, Coeur d'Alene has a distinct central portion of town, well off the toxic highway. It is calm and tree lined and emptily pretty and it is packed with, well, restaurants and art galleries. And real estate offices. For yuppies. Because, of course, there are no local shops left. No mom-and-pops, few unique small businesses of any kind. No charm. No real community per se. Just well-manicured food and mediocre art no true local can actually afford and business parks where the heart used to be.

I have little real clue as to what children growing up in this sort of bizarre megaconsumerist dystopia will face as they age, what sort of warped perspective and decimated sense of place and community and home. But if you think meth addiction and teen pregnancy and wicked religious homogeny and a frightening addiction to blowing s-- up in violent video games isn't a direct reaction to it, you're not paying close enough attention.

This is the new America. Our crazed sense of entitlement, our nearly rabid desire for easy access to mountains of bargain-basement junk has led to the upsurge of soulless big-box shops which has, in turn, led to a deadly sense of prefabricated, vacuous sameness wherever we go. And here's the kicker: We think it's good. We think it helps, brings jobs, tax money, affordable goods. We call it progress. We call it choice. It is the exact opposite.

Result No. 1: Towns no longer have personality, individuality, heart. Community drags. Environment suffers. Our once diverse and quirky and idiosyncratic landscape becomes ugly and bland and vacuous and cheap.

Result No. 2: a false sense of safety, of comfort, wrought of empty sameness. We want all our goods to be antiseptic and sanitized and brightly lit and clean. In a nation that has lost all sense of direction and all sense of pride and whose dollar is a global joke and whose economy is running on fumes and whose goods are all made overseas and whose incompetent warmongering leader makes the world gag, that toxic sameness is, paradoxically, reassuring.

Result No. 3: We are trained, once again, to fear the different, the Other, That Which Does Not Conform. We learn to dislike the unique, the foreign, foreigners. We lose any sense of personal connection to what we create and what we buy and I do not care how cheap that jute rug from Ikea was: When they are mass-produced in 100,000 chunks in a factory in Malaysia, it ain't quirky.

Sameness is in. Sameness is the new black. It is no different than preplanned Disney World vacations or organized religion or preplanned cruises or themed restaurants where all edges have been filed off and every experience has been predigested and sanitized for your protection because God forbid you have an authentic experience or nurture genuine individual perspective or dare to question the bland norm lest your poor addled soul shudder and recoil and the Powers That Be look at you as a serious threat.

I have seen the plague and so have you. Hell, you're probably shopping in it. After all, what choice do you have?

welcome

Welcome to the first post of "days with amber". I have created this blog as I am beginning to realize that I am losing touch with a number of my friends and family. Unfortunately, this is due to pure laziness and a lack of enough hours in the day.

I am constantly busy and often tired at the end of the day, and I certainly don't send out enough email updates to keep the people that I love in close contact. Hopefully, if I manage to keep this blog updated regularly, when YOU have some extra time you can peruse and know what is going on with me.

A worthwhile goal I know, but we will see how the reality of the situation turns out!

Happy reading, I miss you all!
amber:)