Hola!

Good morning all,

Well this is no “Sunday Letter” but more of just a “Sunday Update”.

It’s supposed to rain most of the day here today so of course everyone in Stockton already stocked up on canned goods, batteries and toilet paper – perfect day to stay in! Molly put a weather channel “widget” on our phones so any kind of weather advisory comes through as an alert like a text message or email. This one was a “SPECIAL WEATHER STATEMENT” and warned us about impending rain possibly to include wind. The “Special weather statement” is a few notches down from the plain old “storm warning”, which is followed by storm watch, then weather advisory, and THEN weather statement. After than you get the even weaker alerts like the special weather hypothesis, the special weather conjecture, the special weather musing, and so forth. What’s weird about this region is the variety of weather in a pretty small space. In the summer, it could be 105 in Stockton/Sacramento but only 75 an hour and a half west in San Francisco. Today, we’re receiving the “special weather statements” about rain but an hour and a half east up by Lake Tahoe they will get a foot of snow (there has never, ever been measurable snow in Stockton). The Michigan adage of “if you don’t like the weather, wait ten minutes” could be amended here to “if you don’t like the weather, drive an hour”.

Yesterday I had Orchestra Day at Pacific – got to do an hour masterclass on breathing techniques, then play a short solo on the faculty recital and then another masterclass for the brass students (which turned out to be 2 parents, 3 Pacific students, and one Orchestra Day participant who hadn’t brought her instrument). But it was fun and I’m getting a chance to have the other faculty observe me “doing my thing” and so far they all seem to like it. However, Orchestra Day caused me to miss the Michigan-Illinois game so we DVRd it. By the time I got home Molly had already watched it but then had to be careful not to give anything away while we watched it again, which must have been pure torture. The default time setting to record a football game is three hours, and I had added a one-hour extension just to be on the safe side, and we ended up with only 5 minutes to spare! It was a great game to watch on DVR since we were able to mediate the stress level by fast-forwarding through commercials. In a couple of hours the Lions game comes on, and I foolishly insisted that we purchase NFL DirecTicket on DirecTV so that I could see all the Lions games, and we must be the only household in California watching. But I have to say that we both like the DirectTicket. It has a channel called “NFL GAME MIX” which shows all eight games simultaneously. It’s interesting to see not only the on the field action but other elements as well such as which commercials air in which regions.

We’ve been enjoying reading all of the blog updates – thanks for keeping us up to date!

Matt