Author: Tim Jarrett

Preparing to land on the moon

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The anniversary of the first moon landing, on July 20, 1969, is always a special occasion for me. It’s my dad’s birthday too, and he was a NASA employee for over 30 years, so the story of the space program is the story of my childhood. I was too young to watch any of the moon landings on TV–hell, Apollo 17 took off when I was 5 days old, and the last Skylab mission happened when I was only 18 months old. But I was always hanging out at NASA Langley with Dad, whether it was for mundane reasons (eating lunch in the cafeteria, playing on the playground, going to the Visitors Center, now the Virginia Air and Space Center) or for historic occasions. I was in the main auditorium with Dad when the videos from the first Voyager flybys of Saturn came in, and for other flybys. And I feel a deep sense of family connection to the space program as a whole.

But I had never seen the photo reproduced above until today. When I was a summer intern at NASA Langley in 1992, I drove alongside what looked like a massive abandoned facility. Red girders above, cracked tan pavement below, weeds around. “It was the Lunar Landing Research Facility,” my dad told me. Apparently they suspended a mockup of the lander from the girders to simulate moon gravity, and the astronaut or research pilot would practice piloting it. I never actually saw a period photo of the facility, though, until today’s Boston.com Big Picture feature, which includes the photo reproduced above of Neil Armstrong at the LLRF. The facility is apparently still in use today for “impact testing” (crashing) aircraft. (More details about the LLRF and Langley’s other contributions here).

I suppose this attachment to NASA explains my visceral reaction to the ongoing “moon landing hoax” foolishness (I would have been right alongside Buzz Aldrin in punching Bart Sibrel in the face). Thanks to Bad Astronomer Phil Plait for his many good humored but thorough debunking blog posts on the subject.

In the meantime, I’m enjoying the non-hoax-related coverage of the anniversary, including @AP11_CAPCOM, @AP11_SPACECRAFT, and @AP11_EAGLE on Twitter. You may want to follow @AP11_MOON as well.

Student directors of the Virginia Glee Club

I uncovered another student director of the Virginia Glee Club this weekend, poking through the New York Times archive. It got me thinking about how the group’s governance and musical direction has changed over the years and how large a role students have played in its direction.

Virginia is not unusual in having had students conduct its Glee Club. Princeton didn’t have a professional conductor until 1907, and the Harvard Glee Club invited its first professional conductor, Dr. Archibald Davison, in 1919. But the Virginia Glee Club is unique in having returned to student and other non-faculty conductors as a consequence of its separation from the UVA music department.

Most of the students who conducted the group are doomed to anonymity, but a few have names that have been recorded, even in the earliest years of the Club. I suspect that more could be found were someone to go through and comprehensively digitize the old University of Virginia Magazine (hint, hint). Some of the students went on to lead interesting lives. Here’s a snapshot of four of them.

John Duncan Emmet (ca. 1879-1880). One of the Club’s first directors, Emmet was there during Woodrow Wilson’s first year at the University, the 1879 – 1880 season. Wilson’s presence earned Emmet immortality, as the New York Times dug into Wilson’s student past to uncover a few gems about the Glee Club:

The [University of Virginia] Magazine contains several humorous descriptions of the reception accorded the Glee Clubbers on their serenading expeditions. A pert comment on the editorial page of one issue is typical of the many to be found in the files: “Painfully do we record the last unhappy adventure of the unhappy Glee Club. Most lamentable was their failure! Wrapped in sweet sleep the serenaded slumbered peacefully on, unconscious of the frantic efforts of the serenaders. We can only wish them better success next time.

Emmet graduated with his medical degree in 1880, and went on to bigger and better things, serving as the chief gynecologist at St. Vincent’s Hospital and founding the American Gynaecological and Obstretrical Journal. Emmet was the grandson of Dr. John Patten Emmet, professor of chemistry at the University, and namesake of Emmet Dorm.

Harrison Randolph (ca. 1893-1894). I’ve written about Randolph before. The only student director named by University historian Philip A. Bruce, Randolph went on to the presidency of Charleston College.

John Amar Shishmanian (ca. 1904-1905). Shishmanian is a little bit of an enigma. His leadership of the Club is attested by a 1905 Atlanta Constitution article about the Club’s concerts there: “The clubs are now undergoing bi-weekly rehearsals under the leadership of Mr. Shishmania [sic], the winner of the southern intercollegiate oratorical medal last winter.” Digging deeper, we find Shishmanian’s accomplishments as an orator attested in John S. Patton’s Jefferson, Cabell and the University of Virginia,which preceded Bruce’s account and is packed with all kinds of trivia–including a list of Jefferson Society medal winners. Shishmanian, who was registered with the University from Lexington, Kentucky, was a graduate student in law, having finished his BA at the University of Kentucky. The October 1903 Alumni Bulletin was a little more forthcoming about his origins: “an Armenian resident in this country, has entered as a student in the course recently established leading to a consular service certificate.”

He was the president of the Jefferson Society in 1905, and was also awarded the medal for oratory in that year. He is attested as a speaker at the honorary initiation of Virginia governor Claude August Swanson into the Delta Chi fraternity in 1905 or 1906. He graduated in 1906 and went west, joining the firm of Barbour and Cashin, before going east, eventually far east, joining the faculty of Robert College in Turkey.

Michael Butterman (1989-1991). Butterman is better known to modern Glee Club members, serving as joint conductor of the group with Cheryl Brown-West in the first season after its separation from the University, then taking over as solo conductor in 1990-1991 during the 120th anniversary year. Butterman was a grad student at the time, and left in 1991 to head to Indiana University in their conducting program. He’s now conducting the Boulder Philharmonic and the Shreveport Symphony, and is director of outreach for the Rochester Philharmonic, according to a 2007 Boulder Daily News interview.

Falling summer leaves

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A day of work today as the sun came and went over the Berkshires. I spent the morning in a coffee shop and the afternoon in a hotel room. If I could have, I would have done all the work in the coffee shop, but giving demos and being on conference calls doesn’t lend itself well to public places.

So I work in my room and flirt with depression. This is a necessary but frustrating part about being in Tanglewood; one is removed from one’s normal routines, for better and worse, and dropped into a new world. Sometimes it feels like being plucked from a stream and heaved vainly gasping onto a dock. Today, I need to see it more as a falling leaf, one of billions that will fall without the world ending.

Successfully evading depression, for me, relies on my ability to recognize the warning signs and turn aside the behaviors. When my normal routines–which function as a daily defense mechanism against the Black Dog–are disrupted, I need to acknowledge the disruption and do whatever I can to fill the void. It’s something that’s done one day at a time.

Off to Tanglewood – Wagner’s Die Meistersinger

I’ll be in the Berkshires this week with the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, preparing for a performance of Wagner’s only mature comic opera, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. We’ll see some old friends among the soloists–Johan Botha, Matthew Polanzani–and of course Maestro Levine, whom we last sang with in February. Meistersinger is totally different from Boccanegra, and it will be fun to see how Jimmy brings it to life.

This being Boston, of course the chorus will also hold an informal discussion group one evening on Wagner’s antisemitism. So there’s that to look forward to.

But seriously–I can’t wait to get out to Tanglewood, though I’m already missing family. At least it will be a beautiful week.

The Virginia Glee Club disbands — in 1912

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This week’s Virginia Glee Club history post comes a little late, but better late than never because it sheds light on an interesting chapter of the Club’s history—its apparent, and apparently intermittent, disappearance in the years between 1905 and 1915. Thanks to a new item that has turned up in Google Books, and which I finally got a photocopy of today, I think we can piece together a fairly decent timeline.

We can piece together the history from a few scraps of evidence. First, UVA historian Philip A. Bruce, who wrote the history of the University’s first hundred years, alluded to the Club’s troubles between 1905 and 1915:

…no play was offered in 1910-11. This fact led to the revival of the Glee Club, an association which had disbanded in 1905. A mass-meeting of all the students interested in music was held; a new vocal and instrumental club organized; and rehearsals at once began. This club was composed of twenty members. It gave two concerts in Cabell Hall and four beyond the precincts. Choruses, quartets, and vocal and instrumental solos, were skilfully rendered. This association failed to re-form in 1912-13 and 1913-14, as the result of the absence of an experienced and attentive director and manager.

We know that the group was still active in the fall of 1905. A letter written on October 29, 1905 by Sue Whitmore, the mother of a University of Virginia student, mentions her enjoyment of hearing the Glee Club perform.

We also know that the Club was around in January 1914, from photographic evidence (above). Then, in 1915, the group was “reorganized” and “trained scientifically” by Professor A. L. Hall-Quest.

But what happened to the group between 1905 and 1914? What did Bruce mean that it “failed to reform”? He laid its failure to succeed on poor leadership, but on what evidence? Here’s where the new discovery sheds some light.

In early October of 1912, the following notice appeared (and was reproduced in the Alumni Bulletin, series 3, vol, 5):

We, the officers of the University of Virginia Glee Club, in consideration of the disadvantageous circumstances under which the afore-mentioned club has operated within the past three years, do officially declare said club disbanded, believing that by so doing an ultimate success may be achieved along another line. (Signed): Roger M. Bone, president, Robert V. Funsten, vice-president, Vaughan Camp, secretary, C.A. McKean, treasurer.

(Thanks to the fine folks at Special Collections for sending me a photocopy of the bulletin.)

So now we have a timeline:

  • In late 1905 or maybe early 1906, the Glee Club disbands.
  • In 1910, the Club reforms, responding to a musical vacuum left by the demise of the Arcadians, a musical theatre group, and struggles for a few years with inexperienced musical and logistical leadership.
  • At the beginning of the third season, in October 1912, the officers of the time disband the group temporarily.
  • At the beginning of the fall 1913 semester, the group re-forms (though the photo is dated January 1914, the re-formation must have happened in the fall—the odds of getting so many young men into matching suits for an official portrait in less than a month are probably no better then than they are today).
  • In 1915, the students connect with a professor, A. L. Hall-Quest, who has connections to the Princeton Glee Club tradition and who sets them on a sturdier footing.

Bruce overstated the hiatus by a year, based on the photographic evidence, but otherwise he was right on. The timeline speaks of an organization that was making it, or not, year-to-year, with little to no institutional support. That sort of existence resonates with my memory of the group between 1990 and 1994, with one difference: we had alumni who cared about the group enough to keep it afloat, and the Club guys of the early 20th century did not. There wasn’t a real alumni association, to speak of, until the first World War.

The next question, which will have to wait for another post, is: what happened after Hall-Quest left? He resigned in 1918, and Arthur Fickénscher didn’t take his job at UVa, and the directorship of the group, until sometime in the 1920s. But this answer might have to wait until I can get back to Charlottesville to do some real research.

New mix: september grrls

My latest mix, “september grrls,” did not start out to be (almost) all women artists, but it ended up that way. After strong releases this year from Shannon Worrell, PJ Harvey, Neko Case, and others, plus Kim Gordon’s contributions to the latest Sonic Youth… well, I couldn’t resist. Add to that a few songs that have been kicking around my library forever, waiting for a home, and you’ve got yourself a mix.

  1. This Is What You Do – Gemma Hayes (Hollow of Morning)
  2. Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God) – Kate Bush (Hounds of Love)
  3. Black Hearted Love – PJ Harvey & John Parish (A Woman a Man Walked By)
  4. Iamundernodisguise – School of Seven Bells (Alpinisms)
  5. Song To Bobby – Cat Power (Jukebox)
  6. Jericho – Greta Gaines (Greta Gaines)
  7. Lake Charles Boogie – Nellie Lutcher (Oxford American 2003 Southern Music CD No. 6)
  8. If You’re Ready (Come Go with Me) – The Staple Singers (The Stax Story: Finger-Snappin’ Good [Disc 3])
  9. When the Other Foot Drops, Uncle – Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings (100 Days, 100 Nights)
  10. Diamond Heart – Marissa Nadler (Songs III: Bird On the Water)
  11. If I Can Make You Cry – Shannon Worrell (The Honey Guide)
  12. For Today I Am A Boy – Antony and the Johnsons (I Am A Bird Now)
  13. Massage the History – Sonic Youth (The Eternal)
  14. Crater Lake – Liz Phair (Whip-Smart)
  15. I’m an Animal – Neko Case (Middle Cyclone (Bonus Track Version))
  16. Who Is It (Carry My Joy On the Left, Carry My Pain On the Right) – Björk (Medulla)
  17. The Way I Am (Recorded Live on WERS) – Ingrid Michaelson (Be OK)
  18. Sweet Like You – Shannon Worrell (The Honey Guide)
  19. At Constant Speed – Gemma Hayes (Hollow of Morning)
  20. September Gurls – Big Star (#1 Record – Radio City)

Improving iPod FM adapter reception in a VW Passat

This one was counter-intuitive, but it worked. I’ve been suffering through static and interference ever since my Monster iPod FM adapter burned out and I replaced it with a different model. My Passat has the rear-roof-mounted antenna, and it’s apparently too far away from the FM adapter that I use for my iPod. It’s great at pulling in distant radio stations, which tend to swamp the empty channels that I’d normally listen to the iPod on.

So I removed it.

Yep, just unscrewed the antenna and now the reception for the iPod is crystal clear. Smart but totally counter-intuitive.

Credit goes to this anonymous poster on MacOSXHints. I read this a while ago and just today had the nerve to try it. No more static for me!

Recovering from an iTunes 13001 error

I hesitate to write this post, but since I found very few reliable aids for surviving this error, I’m writing it up in the hope that it will help someone else.

My MacBook Pro (first generation, dented side resulting in unreliable power cord connection, weak battery) shut off sometime overnight. Unfortunately, when I booted it back up, iTunes told me that the library file was corrupt. Given the size of my library and the fact that I’ve got somewhere close to 100 playlists, and that I just spent about two years going through and listening to everything at least once after the last library deletion, I freaked out.

Then I quit iTunes and started thinking. There are now quite a few files that constitute the “iTunes library,” including iTunes Music Library.xml, iTunes Library Extras.itdb, iTunes Library Genius.itdb, and iTunes Library itself. I knew from past experience that it was iTunes Library that held the playcounts and playlists, so I crossed my fingers, moved everything else out of the folder, and started iTunes. Now it started up, but when it tried to rebuild the Genius data, it told me that it couldn’t save it because of a 13001 error.

I did a lot of research, and through some trial and error I hit upon the following steps:

  1. I moved all my non-Apple codecs out of the Library/Quicktime folder. In my case, this was a DivX decoder and encoder, and three component files from Flip4Mac WMV. (This was nonintuitive; thanks to this Apple support discussion post for suggesting it.)
  2. I deleted the ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.itunes.plist file. (This is iTunes preferences, including your default settings for importing and your library location. You’ll want to reset these at the end of the process.)
  3. I re-deleted the the iTunes Library Extras.itdb and iTunes Library Genius.itdb files.
  4. I temporarily moved my external music hard drive from my AirPort Extreme and attached it directly to my Mac. (This might not have been a factor, but I figured it would be a lot faster to get through the Genius rebuild if it didn’t have to do it over an 802.11g network connection. Yes, the MacBook Pro 1st gen only has an 802.11 card, alas.)
  5. I restarted iTunes and let it rebuild the Genius database all day.

When I came home, it had succeeded.

I don’t know if all these steps were necessary, but I do know that when I didn’t delete the preferences file or the codecs, rebuilding was not successful. Whatever: it worked.

Songs of the University of Virginia: the 1906 songbook

It’s Friday, so it must be time for some Virginia Glee Club history.

Before the first Songs of the University of Virginia album, there was the songbook. Compiled by A. Frederick Wilson in 1906 and featuring a combination of the still familiar (“The Good Old Song,” “Drink To Me Only With Thine Eyes”) and the unfamiliar (“The Orange and the Blue”, “Upidee,” just about anything else), there are some fascinating trends in the music. Certainly lots of drinking songs, two sung fully in Latin, and lots of fight songs where “old Eli” (Yale) and “the tiger” (Princeton) are the opponents.

And there is much that is destined to remain obscure: certainly I can’t imagine how to interpret the song “The Man Who Has Plenty of Good Peanuts,” with its verse “The man who has plenty of Pomp’s peculiar patent perpetual pocket panoramic ponies for passing examinations/And giveth his neighbor none /He shan’t have any of my Pomp’s peculiar patent perpetual pocket panoramic ponies for passing examinations/When his Pomp’s peculiar patent perpetual pocket panoramic ponies for passing examinations are gone.” But with the majority of songs containing four part harmony, and with many fight songs that could be revived, the book is definitely worth a download.

Yes, download–you can get the PDF from Google Books, since the book is out of copyright. So while you’re waiting to purchase the Glee Club‘s new album Songs of the University of Virginia, check out some of the historical precedents.

For incentive, here’s the foreward, in which credit is given to the Virginia Glee Club of the time for keeping the songs alive:

P.S.: This is one of the only sources I’ve seen for sheet music for “Upidee,” one of three songs mentioned as a Virginia favorite in 1871 just before the first appearance of the Glee Club.

Creating a drama-free zone in product management

If there’s any doubt that management skills are portable across industries, consider this: one of the most valuable organizational traits that carried the Obama team to victory in 2008 is one of the most valuable factors for success in product management. I’m talking about the ability to create a “drama free zone,” and the ability to do it convincingly can make or break you as a product manager. Here’s two real scenarios I’ve seen this week that underscore the point.

Scenario #1: “Where’s Feature A? We’ve been asking for it for a year? Why the hell haven’t we built it yet?”

You know this one. Someone’s pain point, which is perfectly valid, simmers along until one day it explodes. Only problem is that this is the first time anyone has mentioned Feature A in a long time, and certainly it didn’t come up in the last roadmap planning discussion.

Solution: The response can be heated–“why the hell didn’t you mention this six months ago?”–or it can be drama free. “Hey, I understand there’s a customer pain point here. Let’s look at the priorities we’ve got and understand where this fits in. Is this more important than our planned work in the next release? If so, that’s where it belongs. If not, then we all agree it can wait.”

There are three steps here: acknowledge, align, act. The first step is to acknowledge that the other person has valid reasons to be upset while shifting the discussion to the common interest–the customer–and introducing an objective measure, the priority. The key is focusing on the external, objective issue — the priority of the request — rather than getting into heated discussions. (Obviously it is easier to do this if you are using stack-ranked user requirements.)

Scenario #2: Suddenly four email threads pop out of nowhere regarding a longstanding customer pain point that has apparently reached crisis proportions for no particular reason. “Feature X is broken! We need to fix it!” goes up the cry. You, as the product manager, know that the apparent failure of Feature X is really a mishmash of legal and contractual issues coupled with a lack of Feature Y and Z. But management insists that the answer is to fix Feature X, and now four separate groups of people are trying to find things to fix in it (and generating long email threads).

Solution: The response should be comprehensive, quick, and above all drama free. It’s natural, as a product manager, to want to fly off the handle when there are so many people digging into an issue. But a quick, dispassionate, thorough response (“Here’s what we know, here’s what we’re going to do about it, and here’s what’s still unknown and our next steps to find out”) has benefits in that it acknowledges the problem, communicates that there are multiple issues, and lets the assembled parties know, to return to our Obama metaphor, “Everybody chill out: I got this.”

What are your favorite drama-free problem solutions? Conversely, are there cases where engaging in drama makes a positive difference in your work as a product manager?

Eight years and counting

True to form for this year, I’m almost a week late with this anniversary observance, but June 11 marked the eighth year of Jarrett House North as a blog. My site, originally started as an occasionally updated static vanity page on March 14, 2000, morphed into a blog during my summer internship at Microsoft in 2001, picked up steam as I finished my MBA, got embroiled in online metrics during my first year at Microsoft then got deep into blogging practice in 2004, did serious houseblogging in 2005, recovered from the aftermath of running the Sony Boycott blog in 2006, kept the pace going in 2007, and crunched the numbers in 2008.

So here’s a retrospective in quantity and quality:

Plus, I half feared that getting engaged with Twitter and Facebook in a serious way would kill this blog, but so far it hasn’t.

Not bad for an eight year old blog. That’s like an 80 year old in blog years.

Where was the Cabell House?

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The standard biography of the Virginia Glee Club traces their formation to the creation of a glee club at the University of Virginia’s “Cabell House,” which the group’s history calls the “Cabell House Men.” Inspired by my visit to the University this weekend, I went digging to find where and what the Cabell House was.

Jefferson’s original university design had 54 student rooms on the Lawn and a similar number on the East and West Ranges, holding somewhere between 150 and 200 students (assuming double residency for all the Lawn rooms except the Bachelor’s Row). So the growth in University attendance from 128 in 1842-1843 to more than 600 in 1856-1857 (figures from Philip Bruce’s History of the University of Virginia vol. III), combined with the lack of further dormitory space, led to a growth industry in Charlottesville boarding houses. One of these was the Brock Boarding House, later known as the Cabell House. Later called the “Stumble Inn,” the two-story brick structure, located on the north side of West Main Street between 9th and 10th, was ultimately razed. Today the block hosts a handful of businesses and a book shop and overlooks the train station on the other side of West Main Street.

The Glee Club’s formation wasn’t the only brush with fame the Cabell House had, however; it was also infamous as the site where John Singleton Mosby, later famous as the Confederate raider known as the Gray Ghost, shot fellow University student George S. Turpin.

2009 University of Virginia reunions

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I returned yesterday from an extended weekend attending my 15th class reunion at the University of Virginia. It was a great weekend and I had a lot of fun, though not necessarily because of the reunion itself.

We started the weekend on a rocky note, driving through pouring rain through Connecticut and New York before it finally cleared away when we got to New Jersey. Lisa and I drove on solo the next morning and made it to Charlottesville about 3 pm. I had grand plans of catching up with a few folks in town but was exhausted by the drive and we punted, managing only to have a few drinks at Michael’s Bistro and to get over to L’Etoile. Okay, so that wasn’t such hardship. In fact, Friday was a pretty amazing date, the first we’ve had in quite a long time.

Saturday was a more structured day. This year I went in with the expectation that we would go to a few things that interested us and otherwise spend most of the day with friends. And it worked out that way, kind of. We did hear Julian Bond speak about the connection between civil rights, changing demographics, and the evolution of R&B and rock music–an unexpected but pleasurable discussion with an old professor, if not perhaps as consciousness raising as some of Bond’s past lectures have been.

Then it was lunch, which was unpleasant. The Big Tent was raised over yesterday’s muddy grass, our claustrophobia was in full swing, and we retreated to a stone planter near the Small Special Collections Library to eat our hot dogs (good) and hamburgers (overcooked). A slow stroll around Grounds followed, during which I snapped the majority of the photos from this trip. We sat in the Rotunda for a disappointing class panel, but the real unexpected jewel was sitting in the Shannon Garden along the west side of the Rotunda. Named for Edgar Shannon, who presided over the University during its most turbulent period since the Civil War during the 1960s and early 1970s, it was a fittingly tranquil place that I had walked past many times before but never appreciated until the weekend. (The picture above shows the colonnade that Stanford White added during the post-fire renovation of the Rotunda to create what became the Shannon Garden.)

The reunion part of the weekend was the least successful, primarily because the 15th reunion is not too well attended for a lot of folks, and partly because I didn’t sign up for enough fun activities. (Lesson learned: will sign up for wine tasting next time.) But we had a great time catching up with Greg, Bernie, Anne and the other folks from the class that were there, and the reunion left me wanting to go back in five years and do it again–which I suppose is the goal of all good reunions.

Charlottesville dinner: L’etoile

Ah, Charlottesville. You continue to surprise me, even after I thought I had experienced it all. Superbly professional at the C&O? Check. Deep beer list and occasionally funny, regularly reliable bistro fare at Michael’s? Check. Surprisingly regionally wonderful at the late lamented Southern Culture (ah, the sweet potato fries!)? Check. Late night emergency room visit after the mushroom soup at the late unlamented Northern Exposure the night of my graduation? Uh, check.

But nothing prepared us for dinner at L’etoile tonight. Well, appetizers at Michael’s helped. But seriously: duck confit amuse-bouche was a tiny morsel of duck perfection. Sweetbreads: large yet delicate and just browned, with bacon and mushroom demi-glace lending depth beneath. Trout, superbly prepared with a turnip puree holding together just enough Virginia ham and peas still toothsome…. and that’s just what I had. Turns out they’ve been around for more than ten years and we never had found them—until tonight, when sitting over beers at Michael’s, Lisa gave my iPhone a shake, and Urbanspoon came up with the name.

Alas, Charlottesville! As various cleverer people than I have said, I would go back there tomorrow, but for the work I’ve taken on.

Getting ready

I’ve been out of circulation a bit over the last day or two at an offsite, so haven’t had a chance to post much about the week I’ve got ahead of me. I’m heading back to UVA for my 15th reunion starting tomorrow, and really looking forward to it.

Logistically, it won’t be simple–we have to take the whole family, including the dogs, down to New Jersey and then Lisa and I will head on solo the following day to Charlottesville. Two days of driving each way, for only two days in Charlottesville. Sigh.

This will be a good reunion for me, I think. Last time around we caught up with a lot of folks but were a little distracted by other business (we were in the middle of selling our house in Kirkland and moving back to the east coast). This time, not only will I hopefully find time to get some better photos of Grounds in full sunlight, but I’ll be fully plugged in to my surroundings in a way I haven’t been before. Doing all the research on the Glee Club has made me much more conscious of the history of the University, and in some ways I feel closer to the place as a result.

A physical reunion in the age of Facebook feels a little like an anachronism, but I feel like, having reconnected with so many folks virtually, I’m ready to seriously hang out and have a lot of fun with everyone without having to do all the small talk.