Adios, Ines…

I had to work late today. I’ve been trying to make up for the collective lost time of hundreds and possibly thousands of people who’ve been slacking off on the development of their projects and left documentation – which I write – until the very last possible moment, when the systems that are supposed to be documented are still not even fully functional.

So at about 4:30 or so, my girlfriend called me to tell me “it’s snowing downtown!” While I couldn’t even see it yet at that point, it built over the course of the late afternoon up to the point where the flakes started to stick to the cars parked along the streets that I could see from the tenth floor of the building I work in. I left at about 6:05, and by that point the snow was coming down in huge clumps and getting in my eyes as I walked towards the parking lot, building up on the tops of cars and on piles of leaves along the sides of the road. It took me until 6:48 to get home, when it rarely takes me more than 15 minutes to drive back from work… apparently, when it snows in Atlanta, everybody has to drive like either a total vegetable or a complete maniac. And also, “everybody has to go out for bread and milk,” according to my fiancee. I confirmed this two minutes later when my manager came out of his office saying “It’s snowing? I better go buy bread and milk!” The traffic situation is quite a clusterf**k.

And yet, its crazy how pretty everything looks!

I’m not sure that Ines ever got to enjoy the peculiarities and subtle beauty of this kind of weather, but I wish she could’ve seen how it looked tonight.

I wrote, recorded and mixed the piece in the hours after I found out she had passed away, and haven’t really touched it since other than to make a couple of EQ changes and change the reverb on some of the drums. I played all of the parts except the percussion instruments which are sampled. It’s not mastered.

The absolutely beautiful piece above is by my sister.

Adios, Ines… (mp3)