This is twice now that one of Thomas's journal entries has sent me off to find really cool things on the interweb.

This time it was a cool video he embedded in his entry. It's of a group of electric string performers playing a very lively medley of familiar tunes. Hearing it took me back to my 7th grade year. I was a member of an area honor band that year, and one of the songs we played for our concert was a piece called "Instant Concert" by Harold L. Walters. It's a medley piece that romps through snippets from something like 30 different well-known pieces of music... all at a constant tempo. It was an absolute blast, and ever since I've been able to remember the melody all the way through.

I did a bit of poking around in Google, and I found out that playing this one song might actually give me something in common with more people in the world than most things I've done. Go to YouTube and search for "Instant Concert". I found 10 different videos of people playing this exact song, and several of them are of people that don't speak English. :) I think my favorite band performance is the performance by the Nanyang Junior College Symphonic Band (from Singapore). You have to skip to 4 minutes into the video to get to "Instant Concert." It's reasonably well-recorded compared to the others, and they do a very good job playing it.

My favorite link of all, though, was of a video made by some band kids who were apparently blowing off some steam and had obviously played this song a bunch of times. They decided to sing it for fun. Amazingly, I'm able to get past the fact that they're hideously off-key, because I can so see myself having done this back in school. I was laughing through the whole video and singing right along. :)

It is indeed a small world.

Stolen shamelessly from Eeyore:

Fill this out about your SENIOR year of high school! The longer ago it was, the more fun the answers will be.

1. Who was your best friend? John Hancock. No, I'm serious. :)

2. What sports did you play? Well, according to the plaque that I have stored away somewhere, I lettered in varsity basketball my senior year but played no other sports. :) I was the statistician for the girls' varsity team that year.

3. What kind of car did you drive? A maroon 1976 Volkswagen Beetle with aluminum mag wheels. Oh. And fuzzy dice. It was unmistakable.

4. It's Friday night, where were you? During the fall, I was in uniform being trumpet section leader for the band. It's one of the things I actually do miss about high school. Once football season was over, I was probably at home. I can count the number of dates I had in high school on one hand.

5. Were you a party animal? *snork* Seriously. Do I even need to answer this one?

6. Were you considered a flirt? It depends on who you ask. In general, no way. I had my moments, though.

7. Were you in band, orchestra, or choir? Band. I played trumpet from 5th grade up, and I was section leader all but my first year marching.

8. Were you a nerd? What's this past tense thing you're using? But yes. Beyond a shadow of a doubt. Cumulative high school average of something like 98.18/100 (we didn't do the 4.0 GPA scale thing). In my class that was good enough to get salutatorian. :)

9. Did you get suspended/expelled? Are you kidding? It got back to me years later that the principal actually delayed an intended policy banning backpacks by one year to allow me to graduate after he found out I really liked carrying a backpack. ("I just can't do it to him. He shakes my hand in the hall!")

10. Can you sing the fight song? Probably, but I'm not sure I'd get all the words right. I can play both the trumpet and baritone parts from memory, though. The baritone player was one of my best friends, and we would often swap horns for at least one iteration of the song. I also knew the silly chant used to the teach the snare part to the fresh meat ("Come to the table, ABC the goldfish, Come to the table, ABC the goldfish").

11. Who was your favorite teacher? Oh, I'm not touching that one. I can't pick, anyway. If I did, though, I wouldn't be able to go home again.

13. School mascot? Wildcats

14. Did you go to Prom? Nope. All that sinful dancin', you know. Actually, though, by the time I was a senior, it wasn't as much about that as it was that from every direction I was getting the message that I had to go. That pretty much by itself meant that I wasn't going to. Instead, I went to a multi-church-sponsored event specifically designed for prom refugees.

15. If you could go back and do it over, would you? Emphatically no. Does anyone ever really want to relive their teenage years?

16. What do you remember most about graduation? As we were lining up outside (minutes before it started), I was asked to sing the alma mater for the ceremony. I had to learn the words on the spot (I had been playing it every year since 6th grade and had the 1st trumpet part memorized, but I'd never sung it).

17. Where were you on senior skip day? Are you kidding? I was in school. A classmate of mine has shown up (in the comments below) and corrected my addled memory. :) The school's Scholars Bowl (basically a quiz bowl) team went to a competition in Tuscaloosa that year. I remember that trip very well (I drove one of the cars), but I didn't remember that it was on senior skip day.

18. Did you have a job your senior year? Yep. Worked as a deli cook/cashier at the convenience store next to the school from something like middle of my sophomore year until I left for college.

19. Where did you go most often for lunch? No one was allowed to leave campus for lunch.

20. Have you gained weight since then? Uh. Yes. *snork* :) I'm convinced that this is the reason why I won the "most changed" award at our reunion dinner.

21. What did you do after graduation? Right after graduation, me and my closest friends in the class went over to one of their houses and had a pool party. I'll never forget that night. It was the perfect endcap on my high school career. These were my "Scoobies" in school. Now if only I could remember who won that game of chicken in the pool... me and Chastity, or Michael and Samantha. :)

22. When did you graduate? May of 1993.

23. Who was your Senior prom date? No prom for me, and no date to the substitute function.

24. Are you going / did you go to your 10 year reunion? Yep. Went, took my wife, had a BLAST snarking with one of my best friends, wrote a post about it.

25. Who was your home room teacher? Kind of an anticlimactic last question, isn't it? :) I don't remember. They were messing around with how our schedules worked, so I'm not sure we had a traditional "home room" that year.

Cleaning up another promised post, details about why my car was gone so long for those who are mechanically inclined. The following details came from the [very helpful] tech who worked on my car.

It all came down to one bolt.

The two camshafts in my car's engine are driven by a chain. That chain meshes with an "intermediate shaft", which in turn meshes with another chain that completes the mechanical connection down to the crankshaft. That "intermediate shaft" isn't really a shaft. It's the oil pump. At some point, a bolt which holds that oil pump in place sheared in two. This allowed the oil pump to tilt out of position. If this had been allowed to continue for any length of time, the oil pump and the entire cam drive train would have basically come loose and thus caused the pretty complete destruction of the engine from lack of oil pressure and from valves smacking into pistons.

Luckily, the very smart engine computer in the car noticed that the cams were out of position from where they should be and lit up the "check engine" light. I dutifully took the car into VW the next day to see what had happened.

When the local tech called VW to get some advice and described the problem, the guy on the other end of the phone put him on hold, and an engineer came on the line. The engineer told the local tech exactly what to look for and said to basically replace the entire cam drive set (oil pump, chains, gears, etc.). In other words, VW knows about this one. By the way, doing the work involves removing the transmission to get to the appropriate side of the engine.

The tech did as he was told, which required a wait for parts to arrive from Germany. He finally got it back together, cranked it up, and it quit. He tried turning the crank by hand, and it wouldn't budge. More calls to VW. To shorten it up a little bit, the replacement oil pump was defective. Verdict? Replace everything again. More wait for parts from Germany. To his credit, the tech decided to pull the cylinder head and to drop the oil pan to look for signs of internal damage. None found. He finally got all the parts, got everything back together, and I got my car back. Total time: 5 1/2 weeks.

So, I'm not happy that I was without my car for so long, and I'm going to be VERY attentive for future engine problems, but they weren't just sitting on their hands. It was a serious problem. Overall I'm pretty pleased with how it went. I hope it stays that way.

What started out yesterday as just a good day is turning into a peach of a weekend. The best new news is that the uberwagon is finally home! :) Total time in the shop: 5 and a half weeks. I'll write that up in another post soon. The short story: the long wait was annoying and undesirable but justified.

Amy and I went to pick me up some new pants, and we ended up buying me shirts, ties, shoes, etc. as well. I gotta give Men's Wearhouse props. It wasn't exactly a cheap trip, but the threads look nice, and they were obtained with no fuss whatsoever. I don't like spending time shopping for clothes. If someone can give me some choices to look at and pick from, I'm a happy camper.

The newly-released (in region 1, anyway) DVD set for three of my all-time favorite Dr. Who serials (The Keeper of Traken, Logopolis, and Castrovalva) arrived yesterday. Cool DVD extras, and I get to see them in the best quality I've probably ever seen them in. The only time I've ever seen them is from the original VHS recordings I made *mumblemumble* years ago from PBS.

As for the previous post... Yes, I know it was cryptic and I didn't allow comments so people could ask the obvious question. I wanted to put it out there how happy I was, and I wanted to have it recorded in the context of when it happened. However, doing it justice requires more detail than I'm willing to put on the site right now. I promise I'll write about it once I figure out how I want to write about it. For one thing, it's still very much a story in progress. Just know that it made me very very happy. Amy can confirm that. She saw it.