Sunday, August 31, 2003

Kids, Origami Butterflies, and Dinosaurs

Well, okay, I wasn't going to do much detailed blogging, but visiting Kid's Community with Tina this morning was so much fun I've got to put in a bit about it. Tina helps run the class of about 10 or so K-1st graders, and I got to be a visitor, about midway between a kid and a volunteer. (As in: I'm sure I acted quite mature for a six-year-old. :-) There's something really nice about being able to play with kids, and to be sort of accepted as one of their own, to a certain extent. You can really tell when a kid doesn't like you, or doesn't want to play with you, or whatever. They let you know -- none of this "tolerating" or "being polite" stuff that grown-ups learn how to do. But also, when they do like you and play with you, it has a very special, genuine feeling to it, and that's what I really love. Plus, it's just fun to goof off sometimes. :-) Anyway, there were some highly amusing moments during the morning, so I'll leave you with a couple of them, in case they're even half as amusing to read....

I had folded a couple origami butterflies during craft time and I gave one to Charlotte. She liked it so much that she unfolded it and ripped it in half. Hmm. Unfortunately, she still wanted a butterfly, so later on I gave her the other one. A few minutes later I saw that it was still intact, but she cheerfully informed me that "If I decide I don't want a butterfly anymore, I can just kill this one, too!" I told her it really wouldn't be nice to unfold this one, and she must have taken it to heart. The next time I saw the butterfly, it had every one of its folds stapled shut. Ouch. For a sweet little kid, she can be awfully vicious with origami.

Another kid quote, from Melissa I think, on going through various toys in a box: "Look! A giraffe, right here with all the dinosaurs! Who would have imagined it?"

I suppose I could also tell about Matthew's thousands of magazines, Brooks' thumb-eating beans, or the kid who wanted to give somebody "a swimming frog that actually vomits," but that's probably enough for now. :-)

This weekend is much too full

I really just have too much to do sometimes, even for three day weekends. My current project, which I haven't had a chance to do much with yet, is working up some new possible blog designs. Aside from that, I have my usual large amounts of reading and fair amounts of writing that I like to keep up with, plus fragments of music time whenever I can squeeze them in. This particular weekend has also seen a quadruple-birthday/dance party, movie watching (The Red Violin, with Tina and Justin), a contra dance (I got to teach the beginner's lesson), visiting Tina's church (The River) and Kid's Community (fun with little kids!), and several hours of being choreography helper for the T-K-J team (I don't know if I was really all that helpful, but I could at least be a fourth body for testing things out). Tomorrow will be full, too. It can get a tad frustrating for me sometimes, because I can't do everything I want to and because I need a certain amount of down-time in between stuff, but oh well. Certainly better than being bored to death all the time.

Thursday, August 28, 2003

Back from Ireland by way of Italy

Interesting night of music tonight. The session was at somebody's house in Mountain View, and it sort of sprawled across her large back porch. It was the sort of thing where you could see how the circle started with just a few people, and then more and more just sort of glommed on, without expanding the original circle. So it wasn't a very good setup for things like communication between musicians, or being sociable, and there were just a few too many people for my idea of a good session. Makes me appreciate Patrick's session a lot more. But it was still pretty fun, and I played banjo for a while so I could hear myself over everybody. The really nice parts of the evening were later on, though. The session had started fairly early, so people were drifting away by around 10:00 or so. Eventually it got down to just me and Art playing, with various people still around just hanging out. I got out my mandolin since I could be quieter then, and we had a number of fun tunes together. I really like just doing some one-on-one playing, in contrast to a large session. After a bit of that I was going to head home but found Gary, Jenna and Peter playing waltzes inside. I love hearing Gary play neat Italian tunes on his accordian. It makes me want to start playing that again. He even learned that beautiful, chromatic waltz from Bread and Tulips that I sent him (I had to re-learn it on the spot, though). So we did some more waltzes and a couple O'Carolan tunes before I finally went home for real. Very nice way to end the evening.

De España a Irlanda

Someone decided that today at lunch we should all speak in Spanish. That was kind of cool, though as usual I did far better at understanding than speaking. Good practice, though. We should do that more often.

I'm heading off to an Irish session now. Patrick's was cancelled but there's another one I've never been to, so we'll see what it's like.

Moo

Happy Birthday, Justin!

Wednesday, August 27, 2003

Where I Get It

This last weekend I discovered that Mom had a certain treasure in her keeping, and I even got to borrow it: Great-Grandpa Boone's Bible, the second one he wore out during his ministry. It's fascinating, the perfect image of an ancient, mysterious book. It has a very worn dark-leather cover, largely indecipherable handwriting in the margins and inside covers, and some of the pages in Luke consist almost as much of scotch-tape as actual paper. Even better, tucked inside the binder are various papers: short writings on topics like how to read the Bible, letters to my mother, a letter to my father during the divorce, and even a poem. That last is the one I'm aiming at with the title of this post. The Boone men are notorious for their awful poetry, and this is no exception. But the joke is one of those that absolutely delights me while making most other people groan. Here it is:

I've heard a lot of sweet pet names
That men do call their "gal"
Like "Honeybun" or "Sugar Loaf"
Or "Dolly Pots" or just plain "Pal".

But now comes one that takes the cake
One I've never heard before
Patti's boy friends call her "Hinges"
'Cause she's something to a-dore!

Oh my goodness, that was funny. By the way, Patti is what my mom was called when she was younger. She claims nobody ever actually called her Hinges, which of course I believe. But I can certainly understand how Grandpa Boone wouldn't want to waste an idea like that. I wish I'd thought of it.

Tuesday, August 26, 2003

The Three-Dimensional Orgasmatron

Daniel finished his project just in time to head off to Burning Man. As you can imagine if you know Daniel or have ever been in our house, it involves flashing lights in hypnotic patterns. He's going to mount it on a pole and walk around with it in the dark. Take a look at some AVI's of it running in the dark (2.1 MB) and in the light (1.2 MB).

Hmm. What with various housemates going to Burning Man, getting married in Texas, or moving out, as the case may be, it's going to be pretty quiet around here for a bit. Cheryl and I are going to be the only ones left. Maybe a good chance to start getting in some piano time again.

Monday, August 25, 2003

It got better....

fRed came home safe and sound today. Probably in better shape than I was, after a long walk in the hot sun, trying to get from the CalTrain station to the car shop before they closed. He had the guys at the shop stumped for a while, just trying to figure out what the problem was. I almost thought I wasn't going to get him back today because they took so long to call me about it. But anyway... all better now.

Sunday, August 24, 2003

Muscles

Another silly sister-moment from this weekend: I've been working out semi-regularly for the last few months and I don't really notice a change because it's so gradual. But apparently Lacey noticed a difference in my muscles. I flexed my biceps for her and she was so impressed she said "Wow! Your muscles are bigger than mine now!" Oh joy -- now I can out-muscle my little sister. What a compliment. :-) But still, Lacey's usually in better shape than I am, so I guess that's something. I was just amused because she said it as though I had passed a major milestone in physical fitness. :-)

Family, Visits, Dancing, Music, and a lot of Car Nonsense

Well, it's been quite a weekend. A very interesting combination of fun stuph and not-so-fun stuph, such that I'm not quite sure what to make of it overall. Oh well, I'll just start at the beginning.

I drove up to Mom's on Friday night and we picked up Lacey at the airport. That was actually kind of funny, because Lacey and I were both standing in the crowd, turning around, looking for the most likely place to find each other. We were literally about 5 feet apart and didn't know it. Then we both turned and at the same time did an absolutely beautiful, classic double-take. It was great.

On Saturday, Pa and Monee came over, too, so Pa and I opened fRed up to see if we could see any little parts holding up signs saying "Fix me!" No such luck, though we did see a hose that had come detached. Thinking we had found the Villainous Part, we hooked it back up and started the car. It didn't make a lick of difference. Sigh. So the job was declared Beyond Us.

On an even more unpleasant car topic, we also found that fRed had been broken into sometime Friday night. He was parked out on the street and someone had managed to pry a window loose from its fitting, unlock the door and get in. They went through the glove compartment, ash tray, and trunk, but it doesn't seem like they took anything. They didn't find the place where I keep my spare change (not in the ash tray), and for some reason they decided they didn't want my CD player, which was just sitting on the floor. So I guess I lucked out. Still rather disturbing, though.

I came back home Saturday evening (fRed still runs, he just doesn't idle right anymore) and went to the contra dance. Driving with Fergus was immensely fun, even though Lewis wasn't there. They had a good banjo/guitar player sitting in for him, though. They also invited me to play his banjo in a set with them and that was quite fun. We did a few jigs, ending with one of my favorites, that's straight but sounds crooked (the B-part alternates 6/8 and 9/8, but evens out to 8-bars of a regular jig).

Today I managed to find a shop open on Sundays and took fRed in. So far the official diagnosis is Wonkiness of the Carburetor. They guy who comes in tomorrow is supposed to be able to figure it out, and hopefully I'll get it back sometime during the day. That will be a bit tricky, what with taking public transportation to work and then trying to get to the shop before they close, but I'll work it out somehow.

I got a ride to shape note this afternoon, so I still got to sing a bit. I'm rather tired now, though. It's been a long couple of days. Quiet night tonight.

Friday, August 22, 2003

Life at Google

So that I don't have to do my own blogging (and because I haven't been taking many photos recently) I'm going to direct you all over to some of Kimmy's photos for a close-up view of our office. Notice the lovely view out our window. Pay no attention to the man being attacked by a dragon.
Happy Birthday to my wonderful Mother!

Wednesday, August 20, 2003

Meta-Blogging

On my way into the library tonight I happened to notice The Weblog Handbook, by Rebecca Blood. So I grabbed it, and since it was a slow night at Project Read and not a huge book, I ended up reading a lot of it and skimming the rest. Very interesting to see how vastly different two people's conception of the term "weblog" can be. She focuses quite a bit on the "filter" sort of weblogs: lists of links to other sites and articles, with varying amounts of description and/or commentary by the blogger. But this is very much not my conception of what a blog is. Tina's blog was my introduction to the concept, and my idea of the whole thing mostly followed her model of personal thoughts and updates for family and friends. To me, that's much more interesting. There are already far more ways to get information on the internet than I know what to do with, so why add myself into the fray, even if the idea had occurred to me? On the other hand, there is very little about me on the internet and there is a very specific audience for this topic, namely the people who know me and want to keep in touch. Small audience, sure, but there it is. Ms. Blood includes these sorts of blogs, but they seem very peripheral in her book. She spends a lot of space on things like choosing stuff to link to, building an audience and dealing with your public, and sometimes it really just sounds like a lot of work. Very different paradigm. Still, I guess historically, these filter sites were the first blogs, so she's got a bit of a reason to focus on them. I'd be curious to know what fractions of bloggers fall into different categories today, though. The historical perspective was actually the most interesting part of the book, I thought. There was also a fair amount of stuff that was relevant to bloggers in general, regardless of type, such as web etiquette, writing advice, etc. So it was interesting for a quick read.

One thing I'm still trying to figure out (and perhaps always will be) is exactly what relationship my blog has to my pen-and-paper journal. Obviously, they are at opposite ends of the public-private spectrum, but there's also a varying amount of overlap. Sometimes my journal, when I'm feeling like writing a lot, contains a lot of random information about my life, much of which gets copied directly into my blog, leaving the more private stuff behind, of course. Other times, especially when I'm busier like recently, my blog gets more attention and I turn to my journal only when it wouldn't be appropriate to blog about something. Sometimes I feel like my blog gets too much just of "I did this" and not enough interesting thought or deeper description, which is more likely to go in my journal. I'm not sure I've found the right midpoint yet between interesting posts and the privacy of my mind/journal. Part of me doesn't really like splitting information between the two media, but I'm getting used to it. They both have their advantages and disadvantages.

Anyway, blogging about blogging can only go on for so long before it gets ridiculous, so I'll stop now.

Tuesday, August 19, 2003

Car Guts Scare Me

I wish I knew things about cars. fRed's been doing strange things the last couple days, dying on me when I come to a stop, or shuddering strangely. I talked to Pa about it tonight, and he was very helpful but my mind loses track of carburetors and throttles and whatchamadoodies pretty quickly. Just opening up the hood and looking in there is intimidating for me. But it seems like it'll probably be okay for a few more days and then Pa can take a look at it with me when we're all together at Mom's this weekend. He said it could just be something we can clean out and take care of ourselves. Meaning himself, of course. I can be the lovely assistant holding the oil can or something. All I can say is, I better not get stuck up in Berkeley again. Although I suppose this time I'd at least know where to take fRed for repairs.

Sunday, August 17, 2003

Santa Cruz and The Sacred Harp

I went down to Santa Cruz today for a shape note convention. It was a really different experience to sing with about 60 other people, as opposed to the dozen or so who show up to the local sings. It was also pretty different to sing for 5 hours instead of two, but I tried to go a bit easier on my voice, and drink more water and everything. During the lunch break I actually got to talk to a few people about taking care of your voice, doing warm-ups, and expanding your range. That was good because I really don't know anything about how the voice works, so I don't know what to do to do it right. I also got my own copy of The Sacred Harp, which is the book everybody sings from, and a few CDs, including Barry and Shelley Phillips doing instrumental arrangements of shape note songs. The singing was a lot of fun, as usual, and I also felt like I was getting a bit better at reading the music (though that may have been simply an effect of having lots of good people around me singing the same part).

It was also nice just to be back in Santa Cruz, albeit briefly. There was even some nice morning fog to greet me when I got there. That's not really the sort of thing you get around here in Palo Alto. I spent most of the day inside singing of course, but after it was over I spent a bit of time walking around downtown and poking my head into places like Logos, Gateway, and Bookshop Santa Cruz. I also went by the harbor and "our" beaches before heading home. It felt like it had been a long time since I had seen any of those places. On the way back over the hill I hit all the tourist traffic, which was a bit of a pain. But then, I'm just spoiled from my years as a native, when we would always be traveling opposite all the weekenders. Anyway, all in all a good day.

Saturday, August 16, 2003

Around the World in 188 Pages (With a Side Trip to Hippo, Algeria)

I reached the conclusion of Phileas Fogg's adventures today. Some day I've really got to start doing some traveling of my own. It's sort of tricky, being a stay-at-home introvert, but the part of me that wants to go see new places will eventually get loud enough and strong enough to get me somewhere. I thought it was interesting watching Fogg and Passepartout going around the world together with such entirely different personalities. One was completely in control and unfazed by any difficulty but also remaining aloof and separate from everything. The other actually interacted with people and places more, and seemed to do a much better job of making the most of his travels. Of course, he was also the one to get lost, abducted by Indians, etc. I think I would aim for a careful combination of the two.

The copy of Around the World in 80 Days that I had checked out was actually a Jules Verne omnibus, so I think I'll go for 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea next. That's another one I've wanted to read for a while.

I also recently finished Confessions of St. Augustine (of Hippo). The autobiographical part was wonderful. It actually reminded me a lot of The Most Reluctant Convert (about C. S. Lewis) but it was much more powerful and emotional, being written in the first person and addressed directly to God. The last 90 or so pages, however, got into a very detailed analysis of the first chapter of Genesis, and that was a bit much for me. Too many flashbacks to the dense reading I had to do for my philosophy classes in college. (Yeah, I know, I only took two. Still that was more than enough for me.)

Hmm. I graduated over a year ago and it still feels strange to say something about "my classes in college" and have it be in the past. I guess I'll get used to it eventually.

Tango Swing

FNW last night was fun, though rather different than usual, being in Alameda, smaller, earlier in the evening, and with a strangely high proportion of tangos. And some of those tangos were considerably more swing-like than tango-like, the most notable example of which was the Pink Panther Theme. I followed Miriam on that one, in some strange tango-swing combination thing that was actually pretty incredible, in spite of the fact that my following instincts from the two styles are so different that they kept clashing and screwing things up. After that dance, a photographer from the Alameda Journal came up to us and asked for our names. This was mildly disconcerting, as the only photo I could remember her taking of us was of Miriam dipping me, and I don't dip all that well. So I don't know if I should hope we make it into the paper or not. The Journal is online, but only the articles, not the photos, so I won't really be able to check very easily.
Happy Birthday, Betty Lue!

Friday, August 15, 2003

Amish Friendship Bread

I was too much of a baking-wuss to make my own and spend 10 days multiplying the yeast or whatever you do to pass it on to people. But Tina gave me a couple slices of the batch she baked. Delicious and cinnamony!

Thursday, August 14, 2003

Tired Fingers and Tapping Feet

Ah, that was fun. Nice to be back at Patrick's session again. It's been over a year since I've been there, and I've missed playing tunes with everyone. My hands even lasted pretty well. I played mandolin the whole time and they didn't really start getting sore until the end. (I had my fiddle there just in case, though.) I don't feel like I've been practicing much recently, but I guess that Bach piece has been a good workout to keep my hands in shape. I enjoyed the speed we played at most of the time, too. In the past sometimes it's been too slow for me, but tonight it felt about right. Not so slow as too be boring, but it still gave me a bit of breathing room to think about playing harmony and whatnot (which I need to work on more) rather than simply trying to keep up. So it was a good evening. I'm going to try to start going there more often, like I used to.

Virtual Bubble Wrap

You can come across some really silly links when you spend all day looking at random people's blogs. Check out www.virtual-bubblewrap.com. It amused me.

Irish session tonight! Yay! I haven't been there for ages. I've been listening to lots of Mom's old session tapes from Lark recently, so I've been itching to play more tunes.

Tuesday, August 12, 2003

Green Zebra Heirloom Tomatoes

This was an actual ingredient in something from lunch today. I thought it was very silly. In fact, it was silly enough to inspire me to start using the title function on my blog posts, just so this could be one of the titles. Maybe I'll go back and add titles to some of the previous posts. I'm still deciding how I want them to look, though. I'm not quite sure how I want to balance the colors. Oh well. The whole site might be up for a redesign sometime soon. We'll see.

In other news, work was immensely improved by my acquisition of wrist rests for both my keyboard and mouse pad. That will definitely be good for my hands.

In still other news, apparently the scientific term for a tune that gets stuck in your head is an earworm. Yes, there are people who study this stuff. My current earworm is "The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything," but I'm still enjoying it so it's all okay.
Happy Birthday Grandma Jackie!

Monday, August 11, 2003

Mango Lassi

Yum. I had Indian food for only about the second time in my life tonight. At the same place as the first time, interestingly enough. Good stuff.

Sunday, August 10, 2003

Fa So La, Round II

Shape note singing was fun today. That's my second time now. I don't really know that I'm any better yet, but at least I'm feeling a little more comfortable with it. Something that amuses me about the shape note songs is the way they're named. Some of them have normal titles that relate somehow to the actual lyrics, but a great many don't. A lot have names of places, and some just have completely random names. Seriously -- I saw one called Lloyd. Very silly. Another interesting thing is how compact the notation is, which makes it tricky sometimes to figure out which bit of the music to sing next. On the songs with fugues in them, the different parts may have repeats marked in different places, to save the need to write it all out the long way. That was strange the first time I saw it, but I think it's sort of cool, too. My throat's a little tired again. Hopefully it will start getting better at this singing stuff that it's not used to. But there's probaby also a lot I ought to learn about warm ups and taking care of one's voice.

The rest of my busy-ness plans for today (the dancing part of them anyway) have gone kaput, so it will probably be a laid back afternoon for me. Just as well, I suppose, since I was feeling less and less like doing the required driving.

Saturday, August 09, 2003

Music, Dancing and a Pleasant Surprise

Wow, what a fun evening. The band at the contradance was Lee Anne and her fiddle students, the same students I played with when they were first starting out, plus a bunch of younger / more beginning-level ones who only played a couple sets. But as I walked in and heard them warming up, I was surprised to hear a flute playing. I looked in and there was George! I hadn't seen him in ages. (For those of you who I know are getting confused, this is music-George from Santa Cruz, not dance-George from Stanford. I know him from back in high school when we used to bring pennywhistles to school and play between classes.) I was so excited to see him I ran home and grabbed my mandolin so I could play some tunes with him during the break (well, I said hi and everything first, of course). It was wonderful to hear him play again. He's just fantastic. I'm really out of shape, but our mini-session in the middle of the dance was a lot of fun anyway. I've got to start getting to more sessions and finding more times to play with him (and just play in general). And the band really sounded pretty good. Having George there, and Paul on piano, helped a lot of course. I even got to play the square dances with them, since the squares are usually when I take a break from dancing anyway.

There were also a couple new people at the dance, who I was happy to see since in general there are precious few people in my age group there. It turns out they're from Boston though, and they're road-tripping around the country, stopping at contradances wherever they find them. Good plan, I say. Sad though, because they were fun to dance with and they're even musicians, so they would have been neat people to have around. Oh well. Funny how people can just sort of make hit-and-run appearances in your life sometimes.

So all in all, a good night. Time for bed, though. I've got a busy day tomorrow.

Friday, August 08, 2003

Friends Are Good

I had lunch today with Quetzal and Neal, who are also both working at Google, though in different buildings. That was nice. I like the Blogger team of course, but there's also just something comforting about finding outside friends at work.

Also tonight, thanks to Tina's influence, I've started downloading Veggie Tales songs. Oh my goodness, this stuff is hilarious. I can't believe I've never listened to these before. I'm practically crying....

Thursday, August 07, 2003

Blogging Fun

I finally made my blog template much more clever. Now I actually have mini-blogs for all my sidebar stuff and they're included into the file with Javascript. That actually wasn't too hard, but making the archives all work together was a bit trickier. Especially since I kept making stupid Javascript mistakes and having trouble finding them. Oh well. It seems to work now. And now I can change my template all I want and not have it keep erasing all my old reading lists and whatnot. That was what I mostly wanted, though the principle of separating data and presentation is always good, too.

Golly, what do I do after working at Blogger all day? I come home and futz around with my blog. Oh well. I did have choreography-testing break (with Tina, Kari and Jeremy) and a piano playing break (with a piano). So I guess I'm not entirely imbalanced yet. :-)

Wednesday, August 06, 2003

Little Kid Silliness

Dani and Georgina were back at the library again tonight for the first time in a while. Dani was happy to see me, but one of the first things she said was "I got the [birthday] card you sent me -- you didn't send no money!" Sheesh... kids these days. :-) And then later on she told me she was going to give me a slice of the peach Georgina was cutting up for her. She told me to close my eyes and hold out my hands, so I did. I waited like that for a minute, then heard from the other room, "Hee hee. I ate it all." Sigh. But she hadn't and she gave me some later. Other than that, she was her usual nice, amusing little self. She wanted to learn to type as fast as I do, so she started out by doing one word at a time and lining up her fingers over all the letters in that word at once and then pushing them as fast as she could. "Sandwich" turned out to be a tricky one. Then she gave up, saying her hands were too small. So we did some of her math homework. (Well, when I say "we" I really mean that she did the homework while I made the magic finger-wiggling movements at her head that made her think of the right answers. Apparently this was required.) When that was done, and the actual students had left the computer lab, she got to be spun on a swivel chair for a while as a reward. I think we might have overdone it, though. Between insisting on almost constant dizziness and occasional tickling episodes, she was starting to get a bit nauseous by the end. But I think she'll be alright. :-)

Tuesday, August 05, 2003

Inigo, Imago and Indigo

My first addition to my desk at work my three-headed dragon puppet. Google is a neat place because people have all sorts of wacky decorations everywhere, so hopefully I'll find some more amusing things to bring in and personalize the space. Kim and I are also contemplating bringing in some plants and possibly even her fish.

No dancing for me tonight, but I finally got myself over to campus again to play a bit of piano. It's been almost a month and a half since I was really practicing at all. It was nice to play again, but my hands get tired quickly (my brain, too, I guess). Other than that, most of my evening was taken up by a good but long phone conversation. Most of one, anyway. Sleep has a way of intervening sometimes.

Monday, August 04, 2003

Upgrades: Blog, Job and Food

Notice anything different? I've got BloggerPro now. On my end that means I can do spiffy things like uploading files and changing post times. On your end that means you don't see any banner ads at the top of the page. So that was a cool little perk. Another perk was arriving at my desk to find it all ready with computer, phone, pens, a notebook and (this is the part that amused me) a toothpick. One single, individually wrapped toothpick. I was looking closely to see if it had a little Google logo on it, but I guess it may also have been left by the guy who used this desk before me. Funny, though.

The first day of work was good, though not a whole lot happened. First days rarely seem to be all that interesting. I had paperwork and account setting up to do of course, and I got shown around the buildings, along with another blogger-newbie. We're in an office with two other people and a full wall window looking out on a lawn and trees, so it's pretty nice. It's also good to be sitting with friendly people you actually work with, as opposed to just being shoved off in an inconspicuous corner and ignored, as in so many temp jobs. As far as actual work goes, we mostly just spent today getting familiar with some of the existing documentation and websites. The actual support system itself is in the process of switching over to something new right now, so there's not much point in getting us into that until tomorrow. So it was an easy day today.

Also, since I know a lot of you will be asking this, yes, the food is awesome here. There are snack rooms everywhere, a barbecue lunch outside, and a gourmet chef in the main building across the street. Here's a sample menu, just to rub it in a little more. :-)

Oh, and here's another funny thing I found out about. There is now a HotOrNot for blogs. Kind of interesting for checking out random blogs by other people.

Sunday, August 03, 2003

Get Ready, Get Set....

Well, I've had a nice, relaxing weekend. All ready for starting work tomorrow. Exciting! Full details will most likely appear tomorrow evening.

Saturday, August 02, 2003

The Relation of Banner Ads to Religion. Also Reading.

It's always interesting seeing what sort of ads show up at the top of people's blogs, since it's basically an indication of what some computer somewhere thinks any given blog is about. I've noticed that mine has been stuck for a while on things like being a "disciplined follower of Christ" and whatnot. So it seems like it's paying more attention to my reading list than anything else, since I haven't been posting about anything like that. Interesting. I wonder if it will pick up on the Judaism books I've been reading, as well. Something I've become really curious about from reading the Bible is the difference between the old and new testaments and, by extension, the difference between Judaism and Christianity, so I've added a bit of Judaism to my reading. I'm having a little trouble figuring out exactly what to read, though. Why Be Jewish? by David Wolpe was good, though kind of short. Judaism by Arther Hertzberg might be good, but it also looks like it might be kind of a slog. I can't tell yet. What I really want to find is sort of a Jewish version of C.S. Lewis. I'm not sure if there is such a thing, though, or who it would be. Back on the Christian side of things, St. Augustine's Confessions has actually been a lot more interesting than I expected. It's sort of like one huge, autobiographical prayer. Well, most of it. At the part I'm in now, he's sort of digressed and gotten bogged down in a lot of thick philosophizing about mind and memory and perception, and that's not the sort of stuff I take to as well. But for the most part it's been very good. I suppose that's why it's been a classic for the last 1500 years or so. :-)

In an entirely different vein, I've also started reading Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne. It's one of those books that's always been on my enormous but vague list of things that I mean to read "eventually" though I never tend to think of them when I'm actually looking for books to read. But seeing an episode of Michael Palin's show where he recreates Phileas Fogg's journey made me start thinking about it. It'll be some nice armchair travelling, too.

Dance Highlights

Highlights of Friday Night Waltz, as I'm cooling down before bed: The Chewing Gum polka (always a favorite); leading John in a tango (sort of); amusing zweifacher trickiness with Tina; following swing with Kari; re-learning the Wooden Nickel with Bob; Joan's birthday waltz (and 21 pivots!); Wierd Al's "Spider Man" parody of "Piano Man"; and many other fun dances. Thank you, everybody!

Friday, August 01, 2003

Finished!

I'm all done with this temp job finally. Boy, if I never see that evil printer again it'll be too soon. Not to mention the postage machine. That thing was horrid. In one final burst of annoyance, however, I am all ready to leave and I can't find my supervisor to get her to sign my timesheet. Grr. But Friday Night Waltz tonight should be fun, and a good celebration of job-transitioning.