We’re gradually assembling ourselves for our upcoming trip to the Inauguration in DC. It looks like we’ll be road-tripping with a few other people from the LGBA contingent, and will be staying out in Fairfax with much of the rest of the band. Fred’s working on bringing all the color guard members up to speed, and it looks like he’ll be writing one of the routines (probably for the Washington Post March, which always reminds me of rhubarb tart).

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Speaking of the band, though, I did take possession of my old cornet and my younger brother’s trumpet, along with a few mouthpieces, so that I can perform with our friendly local gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender band this spring and/or summer (still uncertain). It has been a long time since I played, so it’s going to take a little while to get my embouchure back; I also need to clean both horns rather thoroughly and re-lube the slides and valves.

I think that I’m going to try to recover my embouchure better with a few bugle calls. I don’t need valves for those, since they rely entirely on tonguing and embouchure changes, and they do work the transitions rather heavily (especially “To the Colors”).

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On a whim, I invited my parents to the Band Together holiday concert…. and neither one winced during the show. I’ve never experienced such a thing, so I’m not quite sure how to interpret it.

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And yes, I am adding a “band” tag.

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Neither Fred nor I sang in the last chorus show; the house stuff was too much on its own without adding a full program of (memorized!) choral music. We went to the performance on Saturday night, though, and the boys did a great job with a lot of interesting material. I will confess, however, that it was a little disconcerting to be questioned by other audience members at intermission: “Why aren’t you doing this show?” “When are you coming back?” etc.

I won’t be able to sing with the chorus for the spring show (and possibly the Pride show) because of classes. Fred has no such burden, but he’s still on the fence about this show, and will make up his mind after seeing some of the music.

Busy week ahead. Tonight’s a final in theology, my least favorite class in a long time. Tomorrow night I have the option of taking a final in psychology, but I’m skipping it because the prof is dropping our lowest individual test score and because I have 78/80 on every single test so far (which is kind of creepy). Wednesday I have to appear before a judge to see if s/he wants me to serve on a grand jury; we also have a chorus-small-group rehearsal. Thursday morning I have an appointment to get a permanent crown on tooth #12; this will finish the work on that tooth. And this weekend, Fred and I are going to Chicago for a Brotherhood of the Phoenix event.

More later, if I get a chance.

Still here, just busybusybusy with work and school and chorus and Wikipedia-related things. Posts to come later on today and tomorrow, as I have time to write them.

(This post’s title is an homage to the song that’s been kicking around my head all weekend. In my head, though, it’s the climax of a rockin’ marching band or drum corps show, with a middle-brass duet for the “Here am I sitting in a tin can” parts; the xylophones rocking out on the bridge; and the color guard miming the story, complete with pyrotechnics during the launch sequence. [At the end, the guard member playing "Major Tom" books it for the end zone. CLASSIC.])

As you may recall, neither Fred nor I are singing with the full chorus in the upcoming show. We are doing the smaller ensemble, though, and had our first rehearsal last night.

The show’s theme is movie songs, themes and otherwise, and as a smaller group we get to chip in cool little extras. We’ve done two of our three numbers before: an up-tempo version of “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” and a rhythmic, nonverbal accompaniment to “Circle of Life“. Our third number is a medley of James Bond songs, including the best of ‘em all, “Live and Let Die“, with the ensemble doing the Paul McCartney part and the chorus singing “You know you did you know you did you know you did” and syllables for the major instrumentation. (I’m a little sad; I really wanted to do the chorus’s “nah nah nah! nah nah nah! nah nah!” bit.)

“Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” is going to be a cakewalk; we’ve performed it a jillion times. The James Bond bit isn’t that difficult, and should be exciting (graphics of Daniel Craig in that little swimsuit notwithstanding). I’m a little concerned about “Circle of Life”, though; not only is everyone singing a different part than they had before, and not only are we taking a dramatically different tone this time (boisterous and celebratory instead of soft and insightful), but we also have to break more than a few people of their longstanding overdone-vibrato habit.

Ah well. Should be a good show anyway.

Just as the pain and swelling from the one tooth subsided, another tooth elsewhere in the mouth started making trouble. In a lovely little bit of placement, though, this one is on the jaw itself and has a sharp edge that scrapes up the left side of my tongue. Scraped-up tongues tend to swell, and that has made the sharp edge even more difficult to avoid, which causes further scraping, further swelling, etc. Swollen tongues also make ordinary speech very difficult to understand, so I’ve had to get wildly exaggerative with my facial expressions and the non-lingual bits of consonants.

A friend of ours gave Fred a great suggestion for a temporary fix, though: melt candle wax, let it partially set, and pack it around the sharp bit. It’s an odd taste and an even odder feeling, but it works, as evidenced by my mostly-coherent speech and my renewed ability to chew and swallow without pain. I’m being extra-cautious about the temperatures and textures of my food, though, as I don’t want to melt or mangle my improvised crown.

I see the dentist tomorrow morning and again next Wednesday. Hopefully we can work out something a little more permanent.

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Nigel is still out of service; apparently his tires would have to be ordered from a warehouse, which delays things somewhat. I don’t really mind riding the bus to and from work, but it would be nice to Just Go sometimes without all the extra planning for transfers.

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Speaking of work, it was eerily quiet these past few weeks, but now that the winter break is over it’s picking up again. The quiet was kind of nice — made a bunch of patch cables and got a few other large-ish projects done — but it’s even nicer to stay busy with “real work”.

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Did the bulk of the whole Yule thing with Fred’s family on New Year’s Day. We had had a preview showing a few days earlier when my father came by to have me check out a computer issue (isn’t that how it always is?); he brought a couple presents, including a Roomba, which will be the first member of my robot army once it finishes the living room rug. Fred’s folks outdid them, though, giving us (among other things) a bread machine and electric grill which will need to find a home in our crowded kitchen.

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The Powerbook named rupaul got rebuilt with the Gentoo “hardened” toolchain and a different file system. Unfortunately, hardened is very very shaky on PPC, so I’ll probably go back to the regular toolchain for now and switch again later once the herd stabilizes a bit. Sticking with XFS, though, as it mounts faster and seems to perform better on this hardware than reiserfs.

I have a PCMCIA USB 2.0 card and an external hard drive enclosure en route. Once they arrive, the old server (“pangloss”) will be going down, and all of its data will be backed up off-site (woo-hoo rsync and a fat pipe) before the big drive gets re-partitioned. Since pangloss manages DHCP and DNS for the local network, though, the transition will require a little more reliance on the sometimes-flaky VOIP router (which is going to get replaced soon, just you watch). Since pangloss also hosts a local mirror of the portage tree, the transition is also going to stall some tree updates on my work box until I can get rupaul settled.

Also, I’m very tempted to sing “you bettah WORK!” every time I reboot rupaul to try a newly-modified kernel.

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Chorus rehearsals started Monday for the spring show. We weren’t there for the big chorus, but we will probably be doing the small ensemble again once that starts in a couple weeks.

School also started again Monday. This semester I’m taking a sociology class and a short fiction class. I’d much rather be taking something more major-specific, but there was nothing available that I hadn’t done and for which I had all the prerequisites. (boo.)

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So, caucus and primary season is upon us. I find it fascinating that the turnout so far is a smidge higher on the Republican side and a whole fucking lot higher on the Democratic side, yet all our “liberal” media can talk about is “HILLARY WAS EMOTIONAL THEN SHE WON OMGWTFBBQ”.

That said, it is extremely tempting to look into being a delegate to the DNC this summer, if only to see for myself how it all goes down.

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More later, I think.