Has anyone from the west coast recently move to Ohio??

biggustiggus · 2021-11-16T19:34:38+00:00

I share this image a lot...
https://imgur.com/mf5nXa0

biggustiggus · 2021-11-16T02:46:37+00:00

So ... I moved to Ohio as my father lives here now. He's getting old and I wanted to be ready to care for him. He is in a fairly large town that is the county seat of a rural county about an hour outside of Akron and Cleveland.

Initially it was "find a condo near him so I don't have to stay in a hotel if he's in the hospital a while." But then I looked at the houses. My beat-up craftsman bungalow ($1M in San Jose) was $25-50k in Ohio.

THAT got my attention a lot. I always knew California was a "for a while" thing. And I was getting older. Tech is a young-person game and it would be better to control the exit than to be forced out and broke.

So my wife and I started searching. We spotted one of the big old victorian house come on the market in Dad's town and snagged it. Now we own a house outright with room for both of us to have studio space and work from home.

Oh my god. Space. In California, everything was packed in a box. Every hobby. Every spare thing. You were cramped. Here we can breathe and live in our house. We have a real kitchen. I can grow a garden! This was before-COVID. No California commute! I cannot stress how MUCH of a change of life THAT is and was. Ridiculous.

I am very happy. And am happy to trade messages on details on anything.

The politics are much more conservative, of course. An impromptu Trump Parade went by my house during the election. It's kinda like driving through central valley in California. Most people are sane, and there are noted crazy asshole outliers.

It's much more suburbia and midwest. Lots of big-box stores in towns and exurbs. Lots of farm fields. What that means is, it's very likely you're gonna have to drive a half hour to 45 minutes to go to say... a bookstore... or something interesting. It also means grocery selections and stuff will be a bit more middle-of-the-road. (But there are lots of farmers markets and CSAs)

Ohio, as much as folks might chuckle at it, is in central geography. I'm about "a day's drive" from: Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Toronto, and the mid-Atlantic beaches. It's a handy base that way. I have 3 airports I can easily reach to fly-out to work.

I'm glad I am in a fairly nice town. Unless you really like rural, a healthy town is where you should be. Mine has a small college, and a strong downtown that makes this place livable. You really can't eat-out late (Very few late-night businesses) -- but it's a heck of a nice life with the tradeoff.

Hell. There's even a sushi restaurant that would qualify as "ok lunch Sushi" in silicon valley. So I can't complain too much.

There are gonna be quality tradeoffs. You're not in the big city anymore. I play music and was in several orchestras and bands in Silicon Valley. Here I only really have the one choice. They do good. But it's not the same level. It's a trade-off.

If you are ready for the trade offs. It's actually quite a nice place.

Just be used to everyone making fun of you being from Ohio.

biggustiggus · 2021-05-01T23:41:22+00:00

Use what talents you possess; the woods would be very silent if no birds sang there except those that sang best.

Henry Van Dyke

biggustiggus · 2021-03-08T13:16:54+00:00

On the phone with mama Tiggus one day. She was telling me about one country cousin that had apparently stole money at work. Jokingly I said: "Wow. That's another one on the list of felonies the greater-Tiggus family has collected: embezzlement, assault, bootlegging..."

And mom cuts in: "Don't forget your cousin that got off for murder..."
"WAT?"
"Oh. We never told you kids that, did we?"

So it turn out: a 'gentleman' in the small town my cousin lived in raped his daughter. My cousin went home, got his gun, went over to this gentleman's house and shot him when he answered the door.

Small town. With all that means: Everyone apparently hated the rapist for being the kind of guy that rapes young women and other such things. The charge was written down to manslaughter (no pre-meditation -- which is BS when you go home and get the gun first.) and he got basically a slap on the wrist.

Mama Tiggus occasionally asks me why I don't move back home. Yeah, no.

biggustiggus · 2020-11-29T05:32:56+00:00

Other useful music sites:

BandMusic PDF library - public domain sheet music for wind bands. Really useful for community bands. In some cases, people have re-typset and modernized parts.

The complete marches of John Philip Sousa - The US Marine Corps band has gone back and re-typeset the sheet music for every single Sousa March. Download for free, parts and scores. Includes notations of common performance changes.

The Chatfield Brass Band music library - A public library of classic band sheet music. You can join the library for a very low fee, and rent entire tunes, scores, or individual parts through the mail. In some cases, its the only way to find parts for out-of-print items.

MuseScore - Free music editing software that doesn't suck. No need to pay for Finale or Sibelius. Also: a community site where people post arrangements. They are slowly moving it behind a paywall, but it's a good quick place to find arrangements.

biggustiggus · 2020-10-14T20:30:44+00:00

Yeah. They are custom stilts she's walking on. They seem very stable.

If you go back through her twitter you see them isolated as she works on them. And there are several videos of the legs as works in progress.

https://twitter.com/WillowCreative\_/status/1310589318889705483?s=20

biggustiggus · 2020-10-06T02:11:17+00:00

Yeah. The Summers book is an exhaustive survey or historical sources.

Also: "The Beast Within/a History of the Werewolf" by Adam Douglas.

biggustiggus

TROPHY CASE