Most awesome monsoon ever

I'm in Epic cafe, watching the road, which has now become a raging river, make cars float off of the ground. Water is flooding into the cafe. Someone just told me to pick up my bag off the floor because the water is now coming into my corner. Oh, theres a trash can floating away. Bye bye garbage can. The thunder is shaking everything around. Everyone's really excited about being trapped in the cafe. Its funny how i came into the cafe just a minute before it really started. THe same thing happened the last time I went to the cafe a few days ago. A storm came in and knocked out the power to the whole side of the street, and everyone is the cafe was just hanging out in complete dark. This place is officially my sanctuary during the monsoons.
I hope hubcap found a place to stay dry.

Grocery shopping at the calories to price ratio

When I'm shopping for food, I'm focused on two things. First is, obviously, acheiving a balance in nurtient and carbohydrate/fat/protein content. The second focus is on the calories to price ratio. If you're not careful (especially at the natural foods grocers), you can end up buying a lot of things in the 100:1 area (100 calories per dollar) that also don't have any special nutrient content. My goal is generally to average a 600:1 ratio. This is nearly impossible if you go around the isles only picking up prepackaged foods, but there are options, such as potato chips, that are in that value range. The place where value really shines is in the bulk section, where one can find deals upwards of 1000:1. However, most of these foods are carbohydrate-rich grains. Two things that you undoubtedly pay a higher price are meat-based proteins and nutrient-rich vegetables. This can be offset with vegetarian proteins such as beans and nuts and careful selection of the right vegetables. The good news is that we don't need as many grams of protein as we do carbohydrates. For instance, 2 cans of tuna fish can be had for $2, and while is only about 300 calories, it is a day's worth of protein.
Being a conscious shopper can help one be healthy while still only spending under $5 a day on food.

Dreamtime

The Dreamtime festival was a blast, totally energizing! Serendipity was a common theme- things seemed to manifest themselves as needed. I VJ'd for 3 nights in a row, total of over 10 hours, definitely one of the biggest crowds I have had the opportunity to VJ for. I drank lots of complimentary Kombucha and Yerba Mate which both kept me well and awake for the duration. Speaking of which, I don't know why I'm so awake right now. I should be sleeping. I hardely got any sleep this weekend!
At any rate, I'm back in Tucson now. We met a Tucson friend at the festival who was looking for riders, so we felt like it was the best thing to do. It feels really good to be back here with all of my new experience and perspective. I love the Tucson smell and air, and we're justin time for the monsoon season. Joy! I'm not going to fool around here with things that drain my energy without contributing to growth. I'm going to strip any drama and surround myself with people who share common ideas and goals. I had some great conversation with Life, our rideshare buddy, on the 15 hour ride home this morning. We are on the same level with a lot of really abstract concepts and had a good session of making sense of it by connecting it all together. Big jump in synchronous energy these days! Now, this week, reflection, writing, sketching, outlining... Back to the dojo to flesh out some of this mass of inspiration

Last night I happened upon an experimental electronic music/video series called Frequencee Mind Control. It represents the best of whats going on underground all over the country with this new generation of digital artists. I had the pleasure of meeting and seeing the work of VJ Movax, who makes a lot of generative visualizations by using Processing to analyze and react to the audio signal. Got me really excited, and he has an equal excitment for all things involving VJing these days. Hopefully I have convinced him to VJ with us at Dreamtime next week! That will help give me some slack as we are short on VJ talent at the event. Also special props to Drayn, who had a really solid performance and engaging sound. One of the members jammed out on a MIDI keyboard to create most of the drum beats for the set. Humanized electronic beats yum! As a whole the scene here in CO is pretty heavily influenced by breakcore, but it also embraces the more spacious melodic side of IDM/glitch music. Great to see it flourishing!

Denver!!

Yeah, I'm in Denver. We got in at 6am and had no idea what we were doing. We first decided that we needed to store some of our gear so we could wander and orient ourselves with the city. Luckily there were short term lockers, so we stowed our packs and found the nearest wifi signal to look for a place to stay. We wandered around the 16th street mall, a pedestrian strip with lots of shops and people. We found some homeless people, one of which offered us food and advice on city living without money. One of our new street kid friends followed us around while we found the Hostel we are now staying at, The Melbourne. Good place, $16 a night per bed, full kitchen, full bathrooms, lots of nice people passing through. In general, my first 6 hours in Denver have been very pleasant.
Backtracking a couple days, we spent Tuesday-Thursday in Omaha, NE, couchsurfing at Hotel Frank, which is a misleading name because its not really a hotel. Its just a big party house with 8 tenants and a constant stream of couchsurfers passing through Omaha. The day we left there were 6 more people arriving. They sure know how to make travelers feel like special guests.

On Monday we spent the day exploring Stillwater, MN while we spent the night at Heather's grandparent's house. Very nice little town with a classic charm. The town center is best summed up as a bunch of antique stores, cafes, art galleries and candy stores (plus a bitchin co-op!) at the edge of the St. Croix river.

Whew, ok, i think i'm caught up on the basic points. Hopefully i'll have more time later to write some more about the details.

applied epiphanies

The theme this summer is turning out to be different than i imagined, but in a beautiful, life-changing way. I'm currently rendering a 5 minute VJ session i just played. The amount of progress I have made with my VJing style has been nothing short of astounding. I am convinced that few have developed such a configuration, and no one has happened upon the exact stye I am discovering. I'm creating a standard for my patches, and as a result I am starting to really work it into my brain in a way that is becoming natural in execution. There is still a lot of work to be done, but it is all complete fun and I will get there as long as I continue to dedicate myself. It is somewhat unexpected that I would be spending so much time VJing. I had originally been prepared to focus on creating music on this journey. While I have been capturing a bunch of good field recordings with my Edirol r-09, I have been doing very little in the way of composition.

I'm in Minnesota right now at Heather's Dad's house. They are all at a family picnic. I opted out because I ate some lactose earlier and it seriously threw my insides out of wack. In general since I have been in this town my eating habits have been less than adequate for my sensitive system. I really can't wait to get to a natural foods store and put my body back in harmony. Other than that, this portion o fthe trip has been pretty neat. I feel like I understand how/why Heather is the way she is after spending some time with her family. I spent 4th of July at the family's cabin by a lake, and we all piled onto a couple boats and watched fireworks. Boats are relaxing.

The last leg of the trip seems to be solidifying. In a few days we will be off to Omaha, NE. We are using couchsurfing.com to find some people to stay with for a night or two there, and then we will be on our way to Denver CO. From there we hope to get a ride out to the Dreamtime festival in Paonia, where we will spend 4 or 5 days camping there. I will be VJing and Heather is volunteering, so we won't have to pay tickets, and I might even get paid a little if I do a good job. From there we will head to San Diego to breathe in some nice beach air and see a couple friends. I'm really excited for that, they are always great for deep conversation and overall chillage.

Oh, yeah. Its my birthday today. Quarter-century old. Definitely time to be moving at high velocity.