Snowboarders. They remind me of hipsters, but without the irony. They also seem to enjoy a general camaraderie, instead of the special uniqueness that hipsters cultivate.

This afternoon I shared a gondola cab with a trio of snowboarders. (Boarders? Riders? As as skier, I’m too square to keep up with the terminology.) One of them, my hand to god, used the word “gnarly” without a hint of irony. As in, “They went out to [some cool place], but they couldn’t do anything gnarly because there wasn’t enough snow [or something, I forget exactly what she said].”

Earlier in the day I overheard another boarder use “gondy” for “gondola” and “pow” for “powder,” again, completely seriously. This must be what it’s like for people who come to the South and hear us say “y’all” like it’s no big deal.

In related news, I skied today for the first time in almost four years. Good snow, decent weather, and I didn’t fall down: a good day.

So it’s been a month. I’m sure you’re all thrilled to finally hear that I didn’t die in a fiery plane crash. In fact, I had a pleasant, if short, trip to Nashville to see my brother graduate and then a lovely week in Vancouver with John to celebrate the last few days before he turned his life over to the Man.

Yes, my fiancé is now working full-time for a huge worldwide (but relatively non-evil, IMO) corporation. It would be tragic if it didn’t pay so damn well. Still, I haven’t seen him much lately. They put him up in a hotel in town for the first week of training and flew him out of state for the second week.

I’ve started my own summer job this past week—an unpaid internship at a place downtown—so that’s kept me busy. The job’s only vaguely related to law, which is fine by me. I’m planning to find a standard summer job clerking at a small firm for the second half of the summer, but I might as well diversify a bit for now, right?

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I was on the road with Kaminari from 9:30 Saturday morning to 1:15 Monday morning, making our annual appearance at the New Orleans Japan Fest. When we got to the hotel, I was disappointed to find that my laptop didn’t like the smell of the hotel’s wireless.

New Orleans, the gig, and my taiko family managed to keep me alive and happy for a whole weekend without internet access. I did tweet a lot, though, especially on the bus ride home. The fuse to the interior lights and the door blew in the first hour, so our entertainment options got pretty limited. But you won’t hear any complaints from me—having to climb in and out of the driver’s door a few times and riding home in the dark are two of smaller sacrifices we’ve had to make for this poor bus.

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For the few of you who haven’t heard through email, text message, Facebook, YouTube, or Twitter, but mostly so this momentous occasion doesn’t get left out of my blog, John and I got engaged last week on our trip to Colorado. Squee!

Before we started planning the vacation, we’d talked about how we might be able to move our conjectural wedding date up six months or so from what we’d thought, so I suspected a proposal was coming, but I didn’t know exactly when.

On our first full day in Colorado, John picked out a hike for us up towards Pacific Peak, thanks to this handy website. The weather was perfect, and the views of mountains and blue sky all around were breathtaking.

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The Tennessee trip was FANTASTIC. The bus gave us its fair share of problems, and we lost a little sleep, but both shows went great and we had a blast. High point of the trip: getting to stay in the same hotel three nights in a row, or maybe the professional massages we got on our day off. Low point: no hot tub in the hotel. Who doesn’t have a hot tub?

I’ll be editing together a video or two about the trip. I hope I can get it all done in the next few days, before finals swallow me up and memories of the trip start to fade into the fog of the recent past.

I also got my brief turned in thanks to my partner from class, who printed out the pdf I emailed her from Memphis at 3:00 Monday morning and turned it in for me. (Thanks Elizabeth!) It’s hard to believe that LRW is practically over, maybe because this semester I spent the last few days before the due date rocking out with taiko instead of going OMGBRIEFBRIEFBRIEF non-stop.

And there’s more rocking out to be done: This weekend is the Houston Japan Fest at Hermann Park*, and then the next Saturday we’re playing at the Dragonboat Festival at Allen’s Landing. Come see us? You should.

Sigh, I’m on such a taiko high right now. I love practicing, I love performing, I love travelling, and I love my taiko family. I’m afraid I might explode from all the happy-making…maybe I should tone it down a bit so I don’t crash hard once all the big shows are over. Hmmm…nah, gonna keep living it up. Taiko on!

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* I’ll be there for all the Kaminari shows, 1:00 and 4:40 on Saturday and 11:15 and 4:15 on Sunday.

This past weekend we visited John’s oldest brother Michael and his adorable family. They recently moved from Florida into a huge new home outside Dallas. It’s so far outside Dallas that it’s technically part of Frisco, which appears to be made up entirely of shiny new suburbs. I’m sure it’s a real town with a real center somewhere, but the only bits we saw were miles and miles of chain restaurants, Targets, and generically-named neighborhoods.

Their house is lovely, and it’s close to Michael’s work, and they have two playgrounds and their kids’ future elementary school within walking distance, so I can’t fault them for living there. Still, the neighborhood densely packed with nearly-identical luxury houses creeped me out a little. There aren’t any trees! There aren’t tons of trees in that area to begin with, but there are more than NONE.

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The trip? The trip was fabulous. We met with a few misadventures on the way to Tupelo. You can watch the story unfold in hastily-edited-on-the-bus detail here. The good news: we made it to the venue before showtime with all of our members and most of the bus intact.

Depending on how you count them, we played either three or six shows, most of them with different set lists. It was a good deal less organized and polished than TaikoFest, but I got to play a bunch more, so I’m not complaining. I messed up twice in ways that were totally obvious to the audience and at least a dozen times in less obvious ways. My crowning achievement, I think, was when I miscounted one section of a song, transitioned four measures too early, and brought two other people down with me. Believe it or not, I think we looked good enough doing it that almost no one noticed.

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We’re within twenty-fours hours of our California trip, so it’s that time when every thing you do revolves around getting ready for vacation. Did I remember to pack my swimsuit? Will I need a sweater? What earrings go with this top? Will my prescriptions be refilled in time? Will anything in the apartment rot and/or explode if it’s left alone for two weeks? Do my parents have enough of the kind of rawhide that Sam likes? And so on.

It took John just over an hour to pack. Me? I’m glad I managed to pick out fourteen days’ worth of clothes and only need six pairs of shoes.* Can I get by with just one purse? I was going to go with the medium black one because (a) it’s black, (b) it has pockets, and (c) it can be zipped closed, but one of my outfits is REALLY brown, so maybe I’ll bring the small not-black purse, too. Don’t even get me started on belts.

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