Journal Drawing

Every week at the Menlo Park Library I make sure to poke my head into their little booksale room to see if anything interesting has shown up recently. Last night I found a neat little treasure called Off the Road: An American Sketchbook, by Elisha Cooper. I very consciously tend to gravitate towards books (and music, art, etc.) that somehow exemplify something about what I want to do, or ways I want to be. This is a case of that.

The book begins thus: "I'm going to drive around America, New England, the deep South, the plains, Rockies, California coast, and back. I'll go to farms, factories, roadside diners, and ball games — just pull over when I see something neat. I have a sketchbook, my watercolors, a sleeping bag, a set of road maps. I want to see what's out there." Driving around the country is certainly something I'd like to do someday, but what I particularly like about this book is his style of journal keeping. The illustrations are the focus: landscapes and scenes, alternating with individual figures scattered around the pages, and combinations thereof, with only minimal text interwoven with the pictures. What fascinates me is how the images seem to be very simple and yet they still feel like they convey a very high level of detail. I would love to be able to draw that way.

I would also love to be able to include more drawing in my own journal keeping. There is something very appealing to me about quick, informal sketches accompanying written description. Of course, it sort of depends what you're writing about. I did a bit of that sort of thing back in middle school or so, before I was interested in the usual sort of journal writing. What I had instead was a junior-biologist's notebook sort of thing, because that's what I was really into at the time. I'd do detailed drawings of bugs or flowers, a map of our backyard showing where I caught critters, that sort of thing (like this). When I switched to keeping a music notebook, the drawings pretty much disappeared, since there weren't a lot of ways they would have made sense in that context. When I finally decided that it was okay to keep an honest-to-goodness journal (I was sort of against the idea for a while, for no good reason) they came back a little bit. I still only use unlined notebooks, so I at least have the option, but I've hardly done any drawing for ages. I should do more of that.

Cooking

No, I still don't cook. (C'mon -- I work at Google for goodness' sake. When I'm at home, I make sandwiches. A quesadilla if I'm feeling fancy. That's pretty much it.) I cooked today, though. Sort of. Okay, so I still didn't literally cook anything. I was more in the chopping and mixing department. But close enough.

We had a group outing at work today to go to a cooking class at Whole Foods. We made Ahi Tartare on Sesame Crisps with Wasabi Cream, Vegetarian Egg Rolls, Ginger Peanut Soba Noodles, Spicy Sweet Beef and Napa Cabbage Salad, Thai Spiced Chicken in Lettuce Cups, and Banana and Coconut Ice Cream with Sesame Cookies. Then we ate it all. Mmmm. I was in the group doing the noodles and the egg rolls, which came out pretty well, I'd say. My favorites, though, were the Thai chicken and the ice cream with the bananas sautéed in sugar. That's the second batch of bananas, of course, not the first, which somehow involved the fish sauce that was intended for another dish. Oops.

Anyway, it was a pretty cool class (I hadn't even realized they did things like that at Whole Foods). Almost inspires me to start cooking more. Almost. It's not like I have anything against cooking itself, of course, it's just that I don't know much about it and there are lots of other things I usually want to be spending more time on. Also, I'll probably be more inclined to experiment with it more someday when I'm not sharing a kitchen with five housemates. The combination of crowdedness and self-consciousness is what does it for me here.

Oh, and they gave us cheat sheets to take home, too. So if anything on that menu sounded good, just ask me for the recipe.

The Arrival of Phileas Fogg

I have a new computer! A 12" 1GHz Powerbook. Very spiffy. Thanks go to Dom and Eric for helping me get a very good deal on it.

I'm naming it Phileas Fogg, after the protagonist of Around the World in 80 Days, since this is my first laptop, and thus the first of my computers to have the potential to travel (and I hope it will get the chance to do so). The name also follows my tradition of naming my computers after characters from books. My retiring computer's name is Florean Fortescue, after an obscure character selling ice cream on Diagon Alley in the Harry Potter books. No real reason for that, other than the fact that I liked the name. I actually renamed him Florean Fortescue II, after installing OS X. Before Florean was Zaphod Beeblebrox, President of the Galaxy in Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker series. Zaphod was my first good, new computer and I named him for the idea of having a lot of power but not really knowing what to do with it. My very first computer was a hand-me-down called the Dread Pirate Wesley, from the line in The Princess Bride stating: "No one would surrender to the Dread Pirate Wesley."

Hmm. If I really want to take the current theme as far as possible, I could start naming my peripherals. To go along with Phileas Fogg, I could call the keyboard Passepartout, the mouse Detective Fix, and the monitor Aouda. But maybe that would be a bit much....

Experiences of the Quena Kind

Quena has a blog! Finally! I've been working on her to do that for ages. I'm looking forward to tales of Costa Rica appearing there in January, and of course just the general blogging of Quena happiness. Go read Experiences of the Quena Kind.

The Memorial Nutcracker Polka

It's that time of year again, when every time I turn on the radio I hear excerpts from the Nutcracker (I listen to very little radio, and only the classical station). The piece I always enjoy hearing is The Russian Dance, which has a particularly amusing memory associated with it for me. So: storytime!

This was about four years ago now, and Miriam and I had just left Phil 80, the class of gouty toes, tadpole stick figures, and an Irish, tango-dancing TA (I remember nothing of the actual philosophy taught there). We were walking through the quad past MemChu, which for the non-Stanford members of my audience I will explain is Memorial Church. The Stanford population has an amusing speech impediment affecting the names of buildings.

So anyway, there we are, outside MemChu, and we hear organ music. The doors are locked and it's the middle of the afternoon, so it's probably just someone practicing. Not to be put off from the possibility of a free organ concert, we head around the building until we find a door left (unintentionally, it turned out) open. We happen to slip through the back office when no one was looking and make it into the church itself.

It's completely empty of people, but filled with music from the largest organ high up in a balcony. After a few moments of reverence, musical on the organist's part, thoughtful on ours, the mood changes abruptly. The music explodes with a burst of energy -- it's the Russian Dance! Miriam and I look at each other, our eyes light up, and those of you who know us well probably know our immediate reaction: Polka! The backpacks drop, and we start zipping up and down the aisle, filling the empty pews with polkas. We just fly along, carried by the exhilarating music and the absolute hilarity of doing a polka in a church.

That polka will always have a place of honor in my personal list of very awesome dances, but unfortunately, it's a short piece of music. The organist stopped, and so did we. Just in time for a lady to come in and ask us how we got there. She hadn't seen us dancing, but apparently we weren't supposed to have snuck in the back door, so we apologized and left politely, smiling to ourselves.

Hearing the Russian Dance now always makes me happy.