It was a fun weekend, alright: Ava and I spent Saturday hiking up to Pratt Lake and back. We got started late in the day, so we didn’t hike all the way around to the far end of the lake where the trail ends, but we had a nice little picnic on a sunny rock with a great view. It was a beautiful Alpine Lakes Wilderness trail – all ferns and salal in the understory, little streams running across the trail every so often, some nice waterfalls, firm steady earth underfoot.

We were pretty tired when we got back – it’s a twelve-mile round trip – so we didn’t end up going to Dawn’s birthday picnic after all. We picked up a couple of chirashi bowls from Hana and sat on the front porch watching the cars and the sky. I lasted a little longer than Ava did, and walked a few blocks over to Gary & Jaime & Nell’s housewarming – they are neighbors now!

I felt like my set went pretty well Friday night. I had no time to prepare, so I had to just jump in and wing it, but my style is designed to incorporate a lot of improvisation so it worked out alright. I got some pretty solid grooves going, and there were some wobbly bits but only one outright trainwreck (which I could have avoided had I brought the rhythm robot – oh well).

My current sewing project is a handbag; it’s a gift for my sister Joanna, which I’d hoped to have ready for her birthday. I ended up designing a somewhat more complex object than I’d originally made time for, which is good in terms of it being a nice present, but it does mean it’s going to be a couple weeks late. I’d hoped to spend some time finishing it this past weekend but did not succeed; maybe I’ll get it done on Wednesday, which I’ve set aside for sewing this week.

Other projects under way: now that the bloom lights are finished, my focus for electronic work is the walkie-textie. Adam has bought a set of parts for a second prototype, and once we get both devices wired up we’ll do some range tests and see how practical this system can be as a wide-area mesh network. I’ve also been doing some design work on the intelligent juggling balls; I have no idea whether any of what I’m doing will end up in the final product, but I’ve never done electronics CAD before, and this is a great excuse to learn some new skills.

The Maple board I ordered arrived today. I don’t have any immediate projects for it, but I would like to expand my design comfort zone to include higher-powered microcontrollers, and the STM Cortex-M3 seems like a great place to start. I think the first thing I try with it will probably be a percussion synthesizer device, as a companion to the rhythm robot.