Whatta Fiasco

Rain. Spring rain ought not to be depressing but the entire city skyline disappeared in the haze and the wet. All of it. And Bob Edwards sounded as if he was delivering his own eulogy. Then there’s Col. Jill Morgenthaler, a military spokesman in Baghdad, saying that the soldiers at the facility, most of whom were Army reservists, were not trained on rules for handling prisoners of war under the Geneva Convention, the internationally accepted rules on the conduct of war and treatment of prisoners. As if to say that was any excuse at all for what appears to have happened in U.S. run Iraqi jails. Horrifying just begins to scratch the surface on that one.

But Lisa successfully moved back in with her mother and both of them are living in the trailer down the street instead of with grandma. And I not only found two new shirts to buy last night, but I also found three bucks stuck in the pants pocket of a pair of slacks on a sale rack. But who decided that anyone over a size fourteen no longer wants to wear skirts? And if you’re not going to sell skirts, why don’t you sell slacks cut for people of different shapes? Silly people.

It’s been a couple of days again. They’ve been reasonably good, if busy. Six hours of sleep a night isn’t quite optimum for me and I need to change that next week.

I still managed to finish Alastair Reynolds’ Revelation Space. Eh. Not badly written. (Faint praise indeed.) Lots of plot driven motion. Best word used: fulgent. But the spotty character development hurt the book a lot. Normally in a plot heavy book where many characters die, it’s reasonable to skimp a bit on the characterization. It doesn’t work so well though when too many critical plot points depend upon personality driven decisions. Finding one too many character reading the script on stage instead of selling the story has left me reluctant to read the follow up novel. (But what if the next one is better?) I’m currently in the middle of What I Learned Before I Sold to Warren Buffet: An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Developing a Highly Successful Company (isn’t there a rule against titles that are longer than the books they denote?), the second James White Sector General omnibus, and I’ve just started Dan Simmons’ Illium.

Through a series of misadventures and a stunningly blonde moment, I managed to miss seeing Don Giovanni on Monday, the one opera of the season I most wanted to see. (There’s nothing quite like finishing a sweaty fencing practice bout at just after eight only to realize that you have tickets for an opera that started at seven-thirty.) So I decided that I could probably finagle my way in to see it last night. I even considered just presenting my Monday night ticket as if it was a Wednesday night ticket and simply waiting until just before curtain time to find an unclaimed seat. Then a combination of getting home late, leaving early, and a previous cleaning episode left me unable to find said ticket. Instead I decided to take the opportunity to see whether the seats in the front of the balcony were any better than my current season subscriber seat. Eh. You can certainly see all of the stage all of the time. You’re at a height where you can look down at the musicians without standing up, and up at the translation board without craning your neck. They’re very nice seats, but they feel too remote. It felt too much like watching opera on television. I think I’ll keep my current seat.

The opera itself was, well, silly. It can’t help it; it was written that way. The opening scene has a dead body and blood all over the stage. Soon enough the saucy peasant girl, Zerlina, steals the show. (”If you’re good I’ll share some of my special ointment with you. It doesn’t taste bad. You can’t get it from any apothecary. Would you like to know where I keep it?”) The pregnant lady gets groped by Don Giovanni’s buffo manservant. And then a statue announces that he’s there for dinner. Much silliness, but there were two notable things about this performance. First, at the curtain call, the principals were all clearly happy with each other and having a great time. I haven’t seen that level of open joy at the end of a performance nearly as often as I would have expected. Second, I heard various audience members singing the music before the performance, during intermission, and as they were walking out of the theater. Absurd plot but memorable music. I was certain that this was going to be my favorite opera this season, but that turns out to have been Benjamin Britten’s cite>A Midsummer Nights Dream.

This afternoon Lisa went back to live with her mom. I hope that goes well.

Well, that was a weekend with interesting news. Saturday afternoon we got to visit Ms. K. and discovered that she is now Walking Baby. In the space of just a few days she has made the transition to bipedalism. I don’t think I saw her crawl once all evening. Very cool. Toddling along. Bridge was fun too but I’ve gotten very rusty of late. It’s time to brush off that part of my brain again.

Sunday was reading and movies and laundry and attacking little trees. I now understand why people (and some people in particular) rave about Neon Genesis: Evangelion. You don’t often see as effective a portrayal of teen rage as when the Eva mechanoid Shinji Ikira is piloting goes berserk. It’s also a good lesson in why the mechanoid theme is so popular, in case you hadn’t wrapped your head around the psychological ramifications of that one. And then there were personal reminders for me, seeing the kids playing in a field of pampas grass in bloom, and the sound of the cicadas. And if you’re looking for a non-sappy Christmas story, Satoshi Kon’s latest, Tokyo Godfathers is not a bad choice at all and it has the bonus of hearing Silent Night sung in Japanese, which I did when I was a kid. Does anyone else play the game of Guess Which Character Represents the Director when watching Satoshi Kon movies? I still think you might want to wait until closer to the holiday season to see it though.

The news on Sunday was that we have tickets to go to the Berkshire-Hathaway shareholders meeting next weekend in Omaha thanks to Zoe. No, I don’t own any BRK stock but I’m going to get a chance to hear Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger speak. Think of it as performance capitalism. I guess I’d better do some reading this week to prepare.

This morning’s news came in the form of an email request for a copy of a paper I presented back in 1998 at a symposium at Brandeis. Not the greatest paper ever, but it turns out that one of the attendees at the symposium cited it in a more recent paper. Woo! I’ve been cited! Not published, just cited. Still, that’s fairly cool. (Darius, you can jump up and down now, wherever you are.)

Oh! And I got word on Saturday that our ten year old saber fencer won the 10 and Under Women’s Saber competition in Atlanta this past week! It’s her first gold medal at a national event so we’re pumped and proud of her. She’ll be back in town tomorrow and I expect they’ll be some amount of celebration and congratulations to go around.

And this afternoon the software upgrade I’d been needing on my work PC was finally done. Why couldn’t I do it myself? Why did it take a month of negotiation to get done? Don’t ask. I’m just glad that as of tomorrow I can (theoretically) start doing the rest of my job again.

Ok, so the kitchen sink isn’t quite fixed yet. On our way back from the hardware store we stopped to relax and have some dinner in the hunk o’ flesh variety. (Cognitive Dissonance: When your waitperson sets a tidy slab of sirloin in front of you but all you can smell is fish because your dinner companion ordered the salmon. Weird.) By the time we got back home, cleaned out under the sink and turned off the water, our discovery that we were missing two crucial pieces of hardware came too late to return to the store. So it was a dry run (so to speak) and the actual repair will happen tonight. (Knock on wood.)

The other news is that we now have a more or less specified go-forward plan for Lisa. When given the choice between having Lisa officially move in with us and losing control and use of Lisa’s disability money, or having us make a one-time payment on a back utility bill so that she and Lisa can move into the trailer they were originally going to move into over a year ago, Louise decided she’d rather have Lisa living with her. I still have plenty to be unhappy about the way things have worked out on that front and I still don’t think that this is the ideal solution. It does, however, look like the available solution that will come closest to meeting Lisa’s needs for now. I’ll save the rant.

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And even though fate was tempted by not beginning the process until after the hardware store was closed, we have a new kitchen faucet with hot and cold running water . And when you turn it off it doesn’t drip. There was much rejoicing and a beer or two might have been consumed in celebration.
By the by, I don’t suggest reading a cleverly written dissection of how lazy scifi and fantasy writers are at plot (especially not here (fans of Stephen Donaldson beware) (consumers of beverages who also have delicate nasal passages should also proceed with caution)) just before picking up a space opera such as Alastair Reynolds’ Revelation Space

Yesterday didn’t start very well. It was a long slow drive through the rain, past the two-trailer semi that had been blocking three lanes of traffic an hour earlier and was now taking up just one. Then the construction zone closer to the city complete with a large hot cup of coffee. A solid hour later I’m walking into the office only to see a sign announcing that we have no water pressure, and thus no restrooms. Yes, a one hour drive plus a large cup of coffee plus no restrooms. Worse, it turns out the problem was multiple water main breaks and it was affecting nearly all of downtown. (I had visions of them trying to find enough port-a-potties to provision all of downtown.) The temptation to turn around and go back home was strong, but we had a mandatory software testing session that morning. No exceptions. And then the message came through not to drink any of the water either. Whee. Luckily, by the time the testing was over the water crisis was solved.

The evening was much fencing. I don’t remember ever having fenced enough before that I ended up having trouble breathing before my arm or my legs turned all wobbly. No, it wasn’t that tight throat/tight chest asthma feeling. (Been there, done that. Got the epinephrine shots. Ow.) Instead it was the feeling of needing to stretch my lungs out a little farther. A lot farther. Deep breathing. Good fencing. I got home to find a Lisa who had come as close as possible to having done nothing at all that day, only to have her inform me that the cat’s food dish was empty. (Does she know where the food is? Why, yes.Did she think to do anything about it herself? Well, no. She was too busy sleeping because she was bored.) Aaargh. So I washed the dishes and refilled the cat’s dish and tried to relax the edge off. After Lisa went to bed I sat down and watched the first episode of Neon Genesis: Evangelion. So far it’s not as visually pretty as Lain but it looks like a promising story.

Today was spent cleaning up after people who see nothing wrong with putting ampersands and apostrophes in the file names for PDFs. (Word to the wise: Don’t do it. Just don’t.) Then there was the web database that mysteriously stopped working after someone changed the code to a new standard without consulting the developer or even doing a functional test. There have been enough frustrations that I could swear it was a Monday. Ah well.

Tonight I have a hot date to replace the kitchen faucet. Don’t be jealous. I’m sure you have some little household repair job lurking in wait for you. I’ll just be glad not to have a continually leaking faucet anymore. I may even get some dinner too.

In the process of getting some extra time for myself this weekend, I finished a few books. First was Sherri Tepper’s Beauty. It’s an odd scifi/fantasy resetting of the Sleeping Beauty myth with a bunch of other stuff (time travel, faeries, Cinderella, ecodisaster, etc.) thrown in. It’s quite a bit better than it sounds while still managing to be pedantic in spots. I understand the impulse to recast fables in a political light (it’s just too obvious a step), but heavy-handed moralizing that places the noble savage on a pedestal is a bit too much. And once you catch site of him, that pesky noble savage is like a plague infesting romantic literature and he’s more than happy to walk arm in arm with rosy-fingered feminism. I still enjoyed the book.

And then I finished up Jared Diamond’s The Third Chimpanzee. Ostensibly it was a book about the evolutionary development of man and what makes him human. By the halfway point it was clear that, although the evolutionary history part was a major focus of the argument, the book was much more concerned with how we could avoid obliterating ourselves. Well written. Interesting. Less fluffy than the Calvin book I just finished.

Saturday was fencing and more fencing. We had regular practice in the afternoon. Afterward hubby and I drove around a bit. looking for a place to eat and ended up at a place he’d been wanting to try for some time now. The French onion soup wasn’t too salty and the albacore tuna salad was neither too salty nor too heavy on the mayo. And then it was time to head back toward the city proper in order to help with a fund raiser at the Alcott Arts Center. We entertained folks as they entered the building by demonstrating some historical style fencing out in the parking lot in front of the building. It was hot and windy enough that not too many people stuck around outside, but a few did. And at one point we were fencing to the accompaniment of a waltz played on a tiny accordion. It was amusing how often we hit one another just at the end of a phrase. There was only one idiot who screamed at us from the convenience store across the street, complaining that renaissance fencers didn’t wear masks. Whereupon I clocked my friend in the side of the head with my point, making us both quite happy to be wearing masks. We’re not theatrical fencers; we actually hit each other and leave bruises sometimes. Authenticity be damned. We’re not stupid. We wear masks.

In other news, there’s not much news. I’m assuming Max made it back from Nowhere yesterday, although I haven’t heard definitively. I found a copy of Dan Simmons’ Illium at the library so I don’t have to buy a copy (not even the cheap, used hardback copy I found) unless I fall in love with it. I had buttered eggs with garlic chili sauce for dinner. They were good. (I was going to warn you not to bother looking up buttered eggs because I just made up the name myself. Except that I went and looked and they’re all over the place and have been for centuries. Yes, they’re just eggs scrambled in melted butter, but isn’t it a quaint sounding name? Wouldn’t you expect to find them on the menu of a cozy bed and breakfast? Thai garlic chili sauce is optional as they taste great either way, assuming you like scrambled eggs.) And some other stuff I’ve doubtless forgotten by now.

This morning listening to NPR on my morning drive, I got to hear Ashley Kahn’s review of the Charles Lloyd/Billy Higgins disc, Which Way is East?. It was a good review of what sounds like a very interesting disc. But puzzling. Almost immediately, Mr. Kahn left the impression that he didn’t understand how the title of the disc related to the music. Or maybe I misunderstood him and what he really meant was that the music was not what he had expected from those two. But no, I’m not buying that one. We were informed in the introduction to the piece that Mr. Kahn was the author of The Story of the Love Supreme, a book about John Coltrane.

Dear readers, are you still confused about the title of the disc? (Maybe, but only if you’d managed to completely avoid learning anything at all about 1960s American jazz and politics.) When later in the piece Mr. Kahn mentioned that Lloyd and Higgins went through similar life stories after going their own ways forty years ago (drug use followed by a spiritual redemption), I was a little shocked that the subject of religion and how it had influenced the music wasn’t mentioned at all, in spite of the corroboration provided by the music playing behind the commentary. Giant pink elephant at two o’clock. Please ignore. Even given the clear antecedents of the music, I could have understood not dragging the religion thing into the picture, but in combination with the title and the history of the players I have a difficult time understanding why not even a passing mention was made. Is Islam really such a dirty word again? Still?

Lisa is back with us again. When she left for the most recent visit to Nowhere, her mom packed up most of the clothing Lisa had here and took it with her. Lisa returned yesterday with one small suitcase, less than a week’s worth of clothing. All of smelled like cigarette smoke. Max left with Louise to spend the weekend down there, so she’ll be back up on Sunday. Maybe she’ll bring more clothes then. The good news from that front was hearing that Lisa’s doctor in Nowhere has the same sorts of attention deficit and obsessive-compulsive problems she does. He’s been pulling the I did it and you can do it too (and here’s how to start) card on her. This is a good thing. It’s one thing to tell her that she’s capable and needs to start doing things. It’s another to have a living, breathing role model.

The other good news is that we have the start of a plan to resolve Lisa’s problem of being in limbo. The universal lubricant of money may just do the trick. In this case it involves an offer to help resolve overdue utility bills so that Louise’s sister will move back into her own (currently without utilities) house leaving the trailer available for Louise and Lisa. The trick is making sure that it all happens and not just having the cash disappear down another rat hole. It’s going to take some juggling and negotiation, but I’m feeling optimistic about the situation for the first time in months. We should know more next week.

Having Zu: Warriors of the Magic Mountain turn out to be a bad disc was disappointing. All that disappeared when I discovered that Satoshi Kon’s Tokyo Grandfathers is winging its way toward me as I write this. And I have the first volume of Neon Genesis: Evangelion to keep me company in the meantime.

I discovered that the Lacinato Blue kale I enjoyed so much a few weeks back (so pretty, so blue, so tasty) has another name: Dinosaur kale! Who could possibly resist eating dinosaur kale? Especially when it looks as delicious as this. I need to get back to the Merc and see if they have any more. I also need to find out when the local farmer’s market starts up for the season. It’s some time next month. I need more fresh fruit and veg. It should be in about a month.

Taxes are done and just need to be signed and put in the mail. And there was much rejoicing. Getting the refunds will be even better. Getting the dead tree taken down sometime in the next week will also be good.

With nothing more exciting to report at the moment, here’s a candy bar review. Have you seen the New! Hershey’s S’mores bar? Save your nickels and dimes. First of all, the size of this thing should clue you in on current sugar prices: 1.65 ounces. A whole whopping 46 grams. It’s minuscule, but don’t be looking for a price break. (Which isn’t to say that smaller candy bars aren’t a good idea.) You might remember a few years ago when the MilkyWay Dark came out, how the picture on the wrapper showed a dark chocolate covering over a pristine white nougat inside. Well, the S’mores label has a similar picture, similar white creamy center but with milk chocolate on the outside. But when I broke open the candy bar what I found was a yellowish marshmallow center. If a candy bar is going to have yellow marshmallow in it, I’d much rather see FD&C yellow number 5, no matter how vile. Instead I got an eyeful of coffee-stained beige. Yuck. And is that supposed to be a graham cracker underneath? Well, no. According to the label it’s graham cracker bits. Oh goody. No, it doesn’t taste much like the namesake either. Pretty disappointing. I’d give it a miss.

Did you have a good weekend? Ms. K. had her birthday party on Saturday, and a good time was had by all so far as I could tell. Any party that ends with a baby covered in frosting can’t be all bad and hers was pretty darned good. Good friends. Good food. And then hubby and I took a short ride on the new motorcycle. It was just a quick jaunt around town and it was a bit on the nippy side, but fun. I like the new bike. It feels solid even at slow speeds. It’s comfortable to ride two up even with all the saddle bags. Not just tolerable, comfortable. Very nice.

On Sunday we helped Kernat burn his pasture again. This was much less exciting than it was last year. No fire trucks were involved. No one got burnt using the flame thrower. No trucks got high-centered in the middle of the pasture. No pregnant ladies leaped over fences. It had rained recently and the grass was green enough that the fire took serious encouragement while we were burning the fire break. It’s still fun to herd little flamelets with a rake (pyro grrl strikes again!) but it was all done in three hours with nothing more than a few lungfuls of smoke and a fake sunburn. The splitting headache went away later in the evening.

Also this weekend I finished William Calvin’s The Ascent of Mind: Ice Age Climates and the Evolution of Intelligence. Eh, some interesting ideas but he’d too enamored of Lewis Thomas style science writing and not quite up to pulling it off. I also got tired of being told once every chapter or so that if I wanted to know what he really thinks, I should go read an earlier book of his. And in looking over his bibliography, he appears to be one of those people who tries to write a better version of the same book. I’m likely being horribly unfair, especially as he has some interesting ideas and he’s anything but unreadable. I’ll almost certainly be reading at least one more of his books sometime soon, but I’m hoping for more substance and less fluff. Truthfully, it’s a difficult balancing act. How do you write popular science that both satisfies the lay-geeks and still entertains and enlightens the less geeky without leaving them floundering? At my own level of geekery, Daniel Dennet seems just about right, William Calvin is just a bit too soft, George Lakoff gets me up on my tiptoes, and Umberto Eco leaves me up to my eyeballs and sinking fast.

I also tried watching Tsui Hark’s Zu: Warriors of the Magic Mountain but the DVD I rented deteriorated to the the point of unwatchable about two-thirds of the way through. So sad. (More Sammo Hung!) Imagine a Harryhausen Greek mythos movie done with slightly more money and bigger stars. B grade cheese at its best. Luckily I got to see the giggling fish before the disc refused to show me any more. It was worth the price of admission. Ah well.

The best news so far? Our taxes are done and doesn’t look as though we’ll owe anything. We’ll probably even be getting something back. And there was much rejoicing.

And about time too. I got to bed a bit early last night after not being good for anything when I got home from work, but a little bit of sleeping in would be much appreciated if I can manage it. Having Lisa at her mom’s house this weekend will help with that endeavor.

Max turned down a job this week and I can’t say as I blame him. It was a temporary grounds crew position. They only had him scheduled to work three days, but they wanted him to buy three uniform shirts and a jacket and the cost was going to be pretty close to what they were going to pay him for digging ditches. And if they weren’t happy enough with his ditch digging abilities to call him back for another job, at least he’d have those useful mementos, right? So he’s still job hunting.

This weekend is the gala birthday fest for Ms. K. which should be glorious amounts of messy fun. Cake for all. And then on Sunday it’s time to burn the pastures again if the weather cooperates. I’ve already promised not to burn myself on any flamethrowers this year. Heck, you can hardly see the scar anymore unless you know to look for it.

Other than that, I need to do some shopping for materials to do some repairs around the house this weekend. I also intend to sort through stuff and make a decent pile for the trashman next week. Then there’s that stack of books calling my name.