On Thursday, AEJ dropped me off at LAX so I could fly to Oklahoma City to work with the Central Oklahoma honor band on a new piece to be conducted by Rick Clary. I got to the airport, checked in, bought a bottle of water, claimed a seat on the floor next to a power outlet at my gate, plugged in the DS, started to play Animal Crossing — and my phone rang. I didn’t recognize the caller ID number, so I ignored it. Hell, even when I do recognize the number, I usually don’t answer my phone. I hate talking on the phone when it’s work related. If somebody wants something, I’d prefer they email me. Part of this is because I can be a hard ass via email, but I tend to agree to just about anything on the phone.

A few moments later, I get the little chime informing me that I have voicemail. The message is from Marc Mueller, the organizer of the honor band in Central Oklahoma, telling me that due to the forecast of severe weather — an ice storm was reportedly coming on Saturday — they were going to shorten the whole rehearsal/performance time period from two days to one day. The new plan was for me to fly in as scheduled, arriving Thursday night, then rehearse with the wind ensemble on Friday morning at 10am. The concert — not just including my piece, but several other pieces — would be at 4:00 that day. Not ideal, especially for a premiere, but the weather forecast seemed pretty bad. Fortunately, the storm wasn’t likely to arrive until Saturday. Marc changed my return ticket to fly me home on Saturday morning instead of Sunday, easily getting home by the time the storm hit.

The flight into DFW was fine — until the landing. Roughest landing ever. The approach was really fast due to 30 knot gusts, and we just hit the ground with a huge bang — and then proceeded to bounce up and turn slightly to the left before bouncing on the ground again. I was a little surprised that the rear landing gear could handle the impact, and I wasn’t the only one. The couple sitting next to me said they, too, had never felt a landing so hard. Oh, and there was some kind of medical emergency on the flight, so when we landed, everybody had to remain seated while the paramedics came on board to get some teenage girl off the plane. Fun, fun.

The flight into Oklahoma City was uneventful. Marc picked me up and took me to dinner with Rick, the other conductors, and several other people. I had a Shiner Bock. I know I wasn’t in Texas, but it still felt like an appropriate beverage choice.

The next morning, I got up at 7am — Central! — to speak with Marc’s students at Moore High School. I turned on the TV while I got ready, and the news was all about the pending ice storm — now expected to hit within hours. This was the kind of storm that weather forecasters love — where they can talk about the likelihood of power lines downed by the weight of the ice, and tell you that if you must go out, you have to take a blanket in case you get stranded — otherwise, you’ll freeze to death. There they were, the full Weather Team, standing outside as the sleet started to fall, each equipped with thermometers that they could stick into the ground or wherever else they’d fit. The storm, it seemed, wasn’t coming on Saturday. I was coming right now, and it was going to be a doozy, if they were to be believed. And for once, the weather forecasters were spot on.

While it had been in the 60s on Thursday, when I walked out of my hotel room on Friday morning, it was below 30. Marc’s wife picked me up and took me to Moore, as at the time, we were planning to just stick to the schedule. Here’s one I haven’t seen before : my name on the high school marquee!

(I’m sorry I missed the Lion King Pageant the night before.)

The students at Moore were really nice. I didn’t get long with them — probably 10 minutes with one band, and 10 with the other — but they had great questions, and were really enthusiastic. Some of them even took my picture!

One student named Dustin talked to me for a few minutes after class. He wanted an autograph, but the only thing he had for me to sign was… well…

That’s RIGHT! That’s my autograph on the cover of Eric Whitacre’s score! HA! STICK IT, ERIC! (I’m kidding — there’s no need to stick it, but this was the funniest, most surreal autograph signing ever.)

From there, Marc and I headed to the university for rehearsal — as the sleet came down more and more heavily. On the way there, a few schools pulled their students from the honor band due to the weather. I got on the phone with American Airlines and found that there was one seat left on one flight out of Oklahoma City that day. Sensing that the whole festival was going to be cancelled, Marc gave me the go-ahead to book the flight.

William Wakefield, the Director of Bands at the University of Oklahoma, drew the short straw and ended up driving me to the airport. Bill wanted to make sure that I got out of there okay, since the weather was already getting bad, so he parked and came inside to check on me. As I was waiting to check in, American cancelled all of their outgoing flights. It appeared that I was going to be stuck in Oklahoma City for presumably days, as the storm was likely to last until Sunday, and temperatures wouldn’t get above freezing until possibly Thursday. Bill did something that I still can’t believe he did. He offered to drive me to Dallas so I could catch my connecting flight back home to Burbank. I had plenty of time — I was going to have a 4 hour layover in Dallas anyway — and this was an incredible gesture.

It was slow going getting out of Oklahoma City, but we eventually made it to Dallas. My flight was delayed by two hours, but it did eventually take off.

And then it got hit by lightning.

I shit thee not. We took off out of DFW, flying through the storm that was then drenching Dallas with flash floods, and about two minutes into the flight, there was a huge crash outside of the plane — it sounded as if an engine had exploded — and a blinding flash of light through all of the windows. (Lucky for me, this was one of the few times when I had a window seat, so this was extra fun.) Moments later, certainly aware that the 140 people on board were convinced we were about to perish, the pilot came over the PA and told us that we’d been struck by lightning, but the plane was totally fine, and he wanted to make sure we were all okay, too. Later, after we reached cruising altitude, he told us that American Airlines flights are hit by lightning about once a week. It’s scary (boy howdy, it’s scary), but not a big deal for the plane itself.

I can’t thank Bill Wakefield enough for driving me all the way — all 190 miles — to Dallas, just so I could get home last night. If I hadn’t gotten out yesterday, I’d be stranded for days. Every flight out of Oklahoma City was cancelled again today, and hundreds of flights out of Dallas were cancelled, too, due to the weather. (The ice storm hit them today.) So, thank you, thank you, thank you to Bill.

I’m going back next year to try this whole honor band premiere again, and I’m reasonably sure it’ll go fine then. I mean, what are the chances that lightning would strike twice?

“Nintendo DS Lite is the best-selling video game system in the world right now. It has an amazing library of great games for people of all ages, which only adds to its popularity. Nintendo DS Lite proved to be a huge hit for holiday shoppers, which undoubtedly resulted in some spot shortages in various regions. As with all our products, we’re working to keep the supply chain filled to meet consumer demand, and the DS Lite should be more readily available over the next couple of weeks. We expect the popularity of DS Lite to continue well into 2007 and beyond.” – Nintendo of America

Part of the problem could also be that, as of Thursday, our household contains two of these.

As she had with the Wii, AEJ convinced me that the Nintento DS Lite was something awfully fun, so on Tuesday, I drove around LA looking for one. No go at Target in West Hollywood, where they seemed to think I was crazy for even imagining finding one. Same deal next door at Gamestop. Just past Gamestop, though, was a Best Buy. I hate Best Buy, as I’ve written about before, but by this point I was getting a little desperate, so I checked there, and by chance, they’d received a large shipment of DS’s that morning. I bought a black one (they come in black, white, and pink) and two games — Clubhouse Games (so I can play darts on the plane — something that would normally be discouraged by Homeland Security) and Big Brain Academy (so I can have a numerical rating of how dumb I’ve become).

Both games were fun, so that night, we headed to Burbank to see what games we could find at Costco. And the Target in Burbank. And another Best Buy. We may have gone a little overboard with our games.

We were having so much fun with all of the games, but I thought it would be extra fun if we could play together — something that can be done wirelessly with two DS’s. So, I bought AEJ her own DS for her birthday. And I bought more games — things that I thought she’d like, like Nintendogs where you raise and train a puppy. (The puppy responds to voice commands, so I don’t plan on taking this one on the plane,I don’t quite have the self confidence to feel comfortable saying things like “who’s a good puppy?” and “who wants to go outside and do his business?” out loud in front of strangers — especially not in my “I’m talking to a puppy” voice.)

Yes, I bought two copies of Animal Crossing: Wild World because it’s awfully fun (you move to a town populated by nothing but cute animals!), and I’ll definitely want to take it with me on my trips, but I don’t want to deprive AEJ of playing it while I’m gone.

A few days ago, we networked the DS’s so we could visit each other’s Animal Crossing towns. I took some oranges from her town back to my town to sell them (you get a lot more money selling fruit from a foreign town), and I collected shells from her beach. I know it sounds lame, but it’s pretty damn fun. The game is soothing and engrossing at once. There’s a movie based on the game, coming soon to Japan. Watching this trailer will not help you to understand the game any better — unless you know Japanese, and perhaps even that will not help.

Of the above games, Elite Beat Agents (a game where you listen to music and tap the DS screen in time with the music) is great, and Catz, believe it or not, is lame, lame, lame.

Here are the two DS’s side-by-side – with Loki in the background. I swear, that cat sniffs out cameras better than Britney’s hoo-ha.

And here they are open, AEJ’s running New Super Mario Bros., and mine running Cooking Mama (a game where you race against the clock to, yes, cook – including dicing onions, flipping a steak on a skillet, and eventually arranging your meal on the plate to make an attractive presentation).

You’ll see that the DS has dual screens – thus the name. The bottom screen is touch-sensitive, PDA-style, using a stylus. In Cooking Mama, for example, you use the stylus like a knife, cutting the tendons out of a cut of meat. In Kirby – Canvas Curse, you use the stylus to draw bridges for Kirby to cross, or walls to block Kirby’s path so he doesn’t fall off a platform.

You have to hand it to Nintendo for developing systems as creative as both the DS and the Wii – systems based more on the creativity and fun of the control mechanism than the graphics engine. The graphics on both systems are just fine – it’s part of their charm, and means the games have to be deeply fun and not just rely on eye candy.

It’s also nice to have such fun distractions to entertain me while I avoid any thought of music for a few weeks. I just hope I can eventually pull myself away from these systems to get some work done…

Today is AEJ’s birthday, so last night — her Birthday Eve — we went to Mario Batali’s new restaurant here in LA, Pizzeria Mozza. Holy wow, it’s tasty. The place is small, friendly, and loud, and the atmosphere felt much more New York West Village than West Hollywood.

We had some incredible oven roasted olives (pictured) and a variety of warm beans baked under a bread crumb crust (insanely good, but not particularly photogenic).

We had two pizzas. One was fennel sausaga, panna, and red onion. (It was infinitely tastier than it looks in this dark photo.)

The other pizza was squash blossoms, burrata, and tomato. This ruled. I’d never tasted squash blossoms. I expected them to be like squash, but they’re literally the blossom outside of the squash. They were earthy, and contrasted really nicely with the gooey fresh burrata (basically just a fancy kind of fresh mozzarella) and the best tomato sauce I think I’ve ever had.

For dessert, we had the special key lime pie with candied lime peel. If you love lime, you’d go crazy for this. It reminded me of something my dad told me once. He said that one piece of dry cat food tastes like a thousand fish exploding in your mouth. This was like the lime equivalent of that — in a good way. Lime has never been so bright and wonderfully concentrated.

AEJ’s dessert was the butterscotch budino (pudding) with creme fraiche and fleur de sel and two cute little rosemary and pine nut cookies. This was also extremely rich and yummy. The cookies were insane — who knew that rosemary and pine nuts on shortbread could be so good? (I guess Mario’s pastry chef.) The pudding was unlike any other butterscotch pudding. It was much less sweet — like pudding “all grown up.”

So, it was an excellent dinner. We’ll definitely be going back to Pizzeria Mozza — maybe in February when my mother comes to visit.

Happy birthday, AEJ! Be sure to send her happy birthday wishes!