It was a quiet and good day today on the work front, here in Aspen. I started at the Center relatively early (having risen at about 7:00am today – a bit later than I have been) and the plan was definitely a vastly-mostly-physics day, digging into some of the things I’ve been puzzling over, and having some conversations with one or two people about their projects. The first order of the day, once arriving, was to turn off my phone and go dark on IM, and turn off my email… The plan for such days is to only check messages and so forth at lunchtime, and then much later in the afternoon, which is rather helpful, I find. (In fact, I ignore the phone for the entire day until the evening…)
I won’t give you a tedious blow by blow of my day, since it was mostly a mixture of sitting and reading or staring into space (along with some scribbling here and there), and so forth. I also went for some walks, down by the Aspen Institute (where there’s currently the interesting “Brainstorm Tech” conference sponsored by Fortune magazine going on) and of course over to the Music tent, where there were lots of people in the morning, since the Music Festival orchestra (and a lot of very young pianists – maybe from the piano competition? – taking turns) were rehearsing for tonight’s concert. I sent an email or two, I’ll admit, but they were specifically concerning a project I’m working on with a colleague back in LA, and so they count as ok.
I went for a walk to think and eventually returned to the tent after one or two interesting conversations over lunch, and sat for a while as two pianists (adults this time, a woman and a man) played through some pieces they were working on. (There were a few other people dotted around the tent, but that was it, so it felt very intimate, in a way.) The image at the top of this post is a quick sketch of one of them that I did on the iPad (the other piano was right alongside the other one, but I drew neither it nor the other pianist…). As with a couple recent ones I’ve shown you, it was done with Brushes, and I’ve uploaded a short movie of the “pencil” strokes:
Then the afternoon saw me working some more (with a break to chat with an old friend and colleague I haven’t seen in 8 years …about Harry Potter, Star Wars, Star Trek, and Dr. Who …hey, yeah I know how it sounds, but… hey!) and chatting with another friend and colleague (who I have not seen since last Century) about their (rather interesting and beautiful) project. Somewhere in there I did end up doing a bit of admin-type stuff, as I had a discussion or two (in person and over email) with some colleagues about some organizational matters concerning the running of the Center.
Come 6:00pm, I set off home for dinner. And a little blogging…
…and here we are. It was a good day at the office, I think.
Ok. Back to work.
-cvj
