Rachel dyed her hair brown and it looks great. This is her in Mary Ann's house. 

We drove down to Irvine to pick up Rachel. This is from the door of her dorm room. 

This cat is on Prozac. When two new kittens arrived, she went nuts, so her MD owner decided to give her half a tab of P. a day. 

I had a customer today whose wife is a disciple of Martha Stewart. The arrangement of items on their kitchen island is so... casual yet elegant! The clear plastic item on the far left that looks like a sex toy is actually a high-tech oven mitt. 

The video camera for my laptop finally came. We inaugurated it with a video IM with Rachel. Really fun, though it was one-sided: she could see and hear us, but we couldn't see her. She still had to type. 

The most important things in the world: pitchers of white and dark chocolate. 

A new version of the sign on the cash register at Espresso Metro. 

This customer has her pool right on the edge of an (artificial) lake. The pool doubles as a waterfall; when she presses a switch, the water goes over the edge into a trough. 

My Secret Shame: I sometimes by wine by the box. Hey, we were out of Two Buck Chuck and I needed something.  

This piano had the last damper installed backward. I wonder, was the damper person a)drunk? b)thinking about girlfriend/boyfriend? c)sticking it to The Man? 

I was at the piano store today and complimented Christine, the Russian salesperson, on her gorgeous shoes. She claims she has to wear heels because she has flat feet. I think she just likes the way they look. 

I asked this barista if he was wearing the wristbands to keep from getting burned and he said, "I don't believe there's any balance in the universe." He stared at my uncomprehending face and added, "Do you think that there can be any two things that are exactly the same length?"

When I asked if I could take his picture he mentioned a book in which the author had taken a picture of everything that he had eaten for a year.

This is me cuddling with Valerie Gebert, Keyboard 2 (or something) with the Lion King tour. A little boy sitting next to us in the audience said of the show, "It's like watching TV, except the screen is too big!" 

On a secretary's computer at Montgomery Elementary. 

The sound of Elmer Fudd's telephone. 

I got a call a couple of days ago from Ron Friedman, who played trumpet on Peter Pan in Chicago. He mentioned that he had just played three weddings the past weekend. "If I see another happy person, I'll kill myself," he said.

Today at the coffeehouse, I ran into Erik Kleven, Sacramento's master of the electric bass. I hadn't seen him since January. He told me that he's going to Indiana soon for a five-day stand with a Patsy Cline tribute show. We had a nice talk about pure vs. tempered intervals (he likes to play a pure major tenth on the bass a la Jaco Pastorius.) He's wearing a T shirt from a traditional jazz band he used to play in; the buffalo was drawn by Robert Armstrong (cartoonist, friend of Robert Crumb, member of the Cheap Suit Serenaders, and coiner of the phrase "couch potato".)

Pianos don't belong outside... but almost all of the Jubilee pianos are outside. We try to tune them anyway. 

The tuners for the Jazz Festival keep the service record by writing it down on the piano itself, old school. The records go back to when Jim Hopperstadt used to do it. He also played bass for bands in the Festival. I remember him at Piano Technicians Guild meetings... he was always ready with a boring, self-serving story only somewhat related to the issue at hand. 

I left my PDA (the one with my schedule, contacts, games, and tuning software) in a bathroom at the Radisson Hotel. I didn't realize that it was missing until four hours later. I called security at the hotel but no one answered. I drove back to the hotel and found it just where I'd left it. The restroom is particularly remote --- it's in a hallway on the way to a stage at the end of a ballroom. It doubles as a dressing room for performers. I wondered if anyone had used the bathroom at all while I'd been gone.