Risotto Jam May 8, 2007
Posted by aikenthum in Moozak.2 comments
Mmm, sounds tasty, right?
Truthfully, I doubt I could convince anyone to make jam risotto, except maybe my wife’s brother who has been known to indulge in a bit of molecular gastronomy. I must confess I’d possibly even give it a try – I guess it’d be a bit like milk rice pudding, but with a fruity twist!!
Anyway, I digress. The title really refers to the fact that I had my first ‘jam’ (i.e. played music with other people, not just our cat) last Monday, and it was a blast! Oh, the Risotto thing – Tim, the dude whose place we played at, made us Risotto that night. Best Risotto ever? Don’t know about that, but it wasn’t half bad!
So there were three of us, all playing the guitar conducting an aural assault on Tim’s neighbours. There was a bit of sonic confusion going on; at times it sounded a bit like three guitars in a blender, but that didn’t stop the smiles!
Definitely looking forward to the next one! I’m keen to get a band together so we can play at the ward Christmas party… we just have to find a new singer (Tim’s heading off overseas, damnit!) so the hunt is now on. If the ward band doesn’t work out, I think I might look for a band on my own anyway. It’s too much fun to miss out on anymore! I’ve played guitar now for 17 years and only been in one official band. Not good enough!
Wabbit Season April 29, 2007
Posted by aikenthum in Bicycling, Moozak, Stuff I wrote.add a comment
No, I haven’t been watching Warner Bros cartoons again, but we have been hunting! Hunting what you say? Well, houses.
Let me take this opportunity to say that house hunting is a fairly depressing pursuit in the current Melbourne real estate market! Prices seem to be ballooning, most unlike my salary, which is seeming more and more inadequate as each day passes.
That said, we were out looking today, and saw a house that seems to fit the bill quite nicely. By that I mean, we both kind of like it. Usually I hate it while my wife loves it or vice versa. It’s being sold at auction, and goes under the hammer on the 12th of May. Assuming we can get our finance sorted in time, then we might finally say goodbye to this renting gig! Yippee!
It’s been awhile since my last post, so I should update the blog with what I/we’ve been up to:
- My abstract to the brain monitoring conference in San Francisco got accepted! woohoo! Now I have to wait and see if they want me to present orally – yep, that means getting up and speaking in front of loads of people far more clever than me – or sending a poster to put up on the wall that describes the work. It’s really expected that you’ll present orally at some stage in your life, so the pragmatist in me is resigned to the fact that I should just get it over with. Conversely, the optimistic scaredy-cat in me hopes that it doesn’t get accepted for oral presentation and that in time, noone will care either way. Methinx it doesn’t work that way. Let’s just wait and see!
- As mentioned above, lots of house hunting. We’re totally over renting and that besides, Amy needs more space in which to work. She works from home you see, and it can be a bit depressing when your loungeroom is your office is your loungeroom, I’m sure you understand. So, we’re outta here. It’s just a matter of when and where to!
- Also on the research front, I got a paper accepted to the European Journal of Neurosurgery! Also known as Acta Neurochirurgica. It’s their ‘local’ journal so it’s no Nature Neuroscience, but they do publish lots of work that’s relevant to what I do so it’s good from my point of view. It means that all the people who I want to read my work will get to read it, and that’s good. Or bad, if it turns out that my work is crap!! haha. The same journal have also provisionally accepted a separate paper I wrote, that I’ve spent the last couple of weeks refining at their request. They reviewed it, and decided they liked the basic premise of the work, but wanted more detail here, add some figure there or another table, etc etc. It’s a better paper now so I’m happy with the reviews I got. In the past some reviews have been frankly pretty poor, so it’s nice to get good solid critical feedback! So, that paper is now off with one of my co-authors being read and refined by him before we send it back to the journal again. If that gets accepted that’ll mean I’ll have 3 first author papers! Yeah!
- Been seeing the physio still, a couple of times a week at least for my knee. I had a strength retest at the 6 week mark, which was about a fortnight ago now. My quads have increased in strength by about 5%, and my hamstrings by over 10%! It’s hard to tell what difference it’s made to my cycling because I lost my speedo, whoops! Last ride home from work felt really good though, so I think it’s helping.
- Have organised a jam with some of the guys from work for tomorrow night (Monday). It’s been ages since I got a chance to play the guitar with anyone else, and there’s a couple of dudes at work who can sing or play the guitar and they’re keen to have a jam. I’d be up for regular practise sessions if they were, so we’ll just have to see how it goes. I’m quietly excited about that! I can never get enough of playing music….
- I’m halfway through the game ‘Phantom Mansion’ on my mobile phone! Now *that* is exciting 
- Speaking of games, I finally cracked ‘Cowboys from Hell’ in expert mode on Guitar Hero! I was being just a little bit facetious on that last bullet point, but this time I’m deadly serious. When I realised I’d finished the song, I squeezed the neck of the plastic guitar so hard while pumping the air, I nearly broke it!!! You have NO idea how hard that song was. The stars were in alignment! Minimal skill, maximal luck!
- Entries for ‘Around the Bay in a Day’ are opening again soon, and I’m going to have another go at it! I’m also trying to convince a friend of mine to do it with me. He’s proving a tough nut to crack, but I think his resolve is weaking in the face of my witheringly strong arguments for doing it Amy has decided she’s going to ride the 250km route this year (she loco!) and I’ll either do the 100km or the 210km. Which distance I attempt all depends on my friend and whether I can con him into having a stab at the long one. I’ll keep you posted…
I think that’s about it. Sorry it’s been so long since the last post. As you can probably gather, it’s been a bit crazy busy around here. In a good way though 
Hope you’re all well!
Cheers!
Tense Liquids March 16, 2007
Posted by aikenthum in Moozak.4 comments
I found out one of the guys at work is seriously into his guitar playing. When quizzed about his musical preferences, he responded with ‘prog rock or prog metal’ and explained that it’s generally dudes being experimental with guitars and trying to do fancy stuff with weird time signatures and the like. One band he mentioned was called ‘Liquid Tension Experiment’. Nuts!
I asked him about Mr Bungle, but according to his definition, their stuff doesn’t use ‘weird time signatures’, more like ‘complete chaos’! I personally disagree, but that’s neither here nor there. It was cool to find out that someone I work with (a training neurosurgeon no less!) is a keen musician, so we’re hopefully going to jam sometime. I’m hoping he doesn’t make me look bad… I’ll have to practise my sweep picking so I can play like this guy!
Midnight Musical Madness March 13, 2007
Posted by aikenthum in Moozak.2 comments
I (try to) play the guitar a bit, and one of my greatest failings as a musician is my incredible lack of output. I fool about on the guitar heaps, but I ‘produce’ precious little. That’s not to say that anything I produced would be listenable, but that’s by the by.
Anyway, I’ve noticed in the last couple of years that from time to time, I’ll have these nights when I can’t sleep (you know those, right? stare at the ceiling, every tiny itch drives you mad and serves to make the insomnia worse) and my mind is all abuzz. Occasionally on these nights, my mind is all abuzz with music. Not other people’s music (I think… see my previous comment about ‘ideas cooked until well done’), but my own. Here’s the thing: In my head, this stuff sounds really cool! Well, to me, anyway. I hear melodies, sounds that could possibly translate to lyrics if I thought about them long enough, and lots of other musical phenomena that just don’t happen in my head when I’m completely awake and trying hard to write a song: key changes, bridges, etc etc.
I had one of those nights last night – I even tried to translate these wordy kind of sounds (phonemes?) into lyrics to see what words fit well.. some of them sounded pretty cool at the time, some sounded completely absurd. Anyway, I thought I was onto something. Maybe I could finally start to turn this midnight musical madness into something useful!
Do you think I could remember any of it this morning?
