Christmas Letter 2005
Happy Holidays, Friends!
Well, here I sit again, listening to old music and trying to summarize 2005 in fifty words or less, while Chevy Chase in National Lampoon's "Christmas Vacation" quietly adds additional quirky holiday cheer to the glow of the computer monitor...
For those of you keeping score, yes, I made the half-century mark this year. Lora is still a youthful something less than that, as I keep reminding her. She still practices at the Small Animal Hospital at its new location on Milwaukee's Fashionable East Side. I continue to commute to Marlin Technologies in Horicon, and my '93 Toyota surpassed a quarter million miles this Fall. Woo-hoo!
Sarah graduated from Wauwatosa West High School in June, and she started at Lawrence University up in Appleton this September. She's made a great transition to college life, is having lots of fun, has made many new friends, and still finds time to get good grades. Smart kid. Keep that scholarship money coming. She has a very compatible roommate, is playing clarinet and bass clarinet with the symphonic band, has joined the fencing club, works, plays and even writes or phones Mom and Dad once in a while.
Matt turned sixteen in March, and got his driver's license just as soon as Mom and the DMV would allow. Filling a need for people who know what they’re doing in the low brass section, he's playing almost as much trombone as trumpet these days, including pit orchestra for TW's fall musical. He and Sarah both got jobs at Rocky Rococo's last summer, and Matt's continued to work part time during the school year with the understanding that he keep his grades up to the accustomed standard. No problem, so far. Mmm, leftover pizza.
Peter is now a freshman at Tosa West, and is also playing bassoon in the Milwaukee Youth Symphony Orchestra again this year. He joined Matt on Stage Crew, building sets and 'running the show' for "Anything Goes". (The Cole Porter show, not the Monty Python song.) Besides the usual X-Box and computer games, he's taken to writing programs for his TI graphing calculator, something I never quite learned to do to a slide rule at his age.
Paddington, our Wheaten Terrier, continues to make sure I get a walk around the block before bed nightly, something that's a little overdue as I exercise my proclivity for run-on sentences on into the night... So, further details, rumours and opinions are available on request. We hope you, too, are staying busy, happy & healthy. We'd love to hear from you!
Dave & Lora
3 comments:
have a great Christmas, Dave, and all the rest of your family! Including your old Toyota! (mine is 20 years old in '06- now at 250K long, hard miles)
For the curious and the satanic, the Chicken Fat song has been put back into print in glorious 5.1 surround stereo on a CD-Single thru the American Jaycees. CEMA Special Markets (a-k-a Capitol Special Products) printed the CD after accidentally discovering the original 3-track session tapes unlabeled in their vault.
One reel has the Basic Tracks (brass on 1 strings on 2 and woodwinds on 3) another reel has all that blended into mono on 1, mens' choir on 2 and womens' choir on 3, and a third reel has all THAT blended into mono and a choice of Preston singing in the lead vocal we all know, plus a harmony track that was discarded.
So some bright young digital engineer lifted all three of the same take from all three reels, spent what I assume to be weeks in a digital post suite retiming the tracks to each other, and created the Dolby Pro Logic 5.1 mix that's out now.
Preston sings holophonically in the middle of the room, the girls choir is in the left-rear with the stereo track and the boys' choir is in the right-rear with the stereo track, brass on the right, strings on the left and woodwinds in the center.
In addition to the recreated master take described above, there's several other master-quality takes, plenty of material for Dick Clark and some hilarious studio chatter.
A very interesting---or very terrible--experience, depending on the point of view.
Does Anyone know where to get this CD?!?!?
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