Whatta Fiasco

After almost twenty-five years of living in this town, I finally managed to get up and out of the house in time to make it to the farmer’s market on Saturday. What a hopping place! It’s still early enough in the season that there wasn’t a huge amount of produce yet; lettuce, radishes, snap peas, herbs, some hydroponic tomatoes. I bought a head of broccoli and some radicchio. The white radishes I wanted were gone by the time I made it back around on my second circuit. A couple of churches had coffee and pastries for sale. There was local honey and meat for sale, some crafts (gorgeous baskets) and breads. And lots and lots of people and dogs having a good time in the nice weather.

Did I mention all the people? I had planned on stopping by my favorite local bakery for a late breakfast afterward, but the place was so packed that the line was out the door. So I walked around the corner to find that the patio at the Pig was also packed. I ended up at Divine where I got some reading done while drinking some coffee. By the time I got out of there, around ten-thirty, the visible crowds were almost entirely gone. I may have to get up and out of the house earlier on the weekend more often.

Most of the rest of the weekend has been discussing how to proceed with various house projects, collecting data and discussing sequencing. It’ll be a lot of work, but it’ll all happen and won’t bankrupt us. Parts of it might even be fun. (Destruction!)

The rest of the weekend was a massive reading fest. I finished up Ken McLeod’s The Cassini Division (entertaining and not as sickeningly political as I had feared), and Junichiro Tanizaki’s A Cat, A Man, and Two Women (not as sad as it could have been, and how bad could it be with a cat as a heroine?), and Terry Prachett’s Monstrous Regiment (fun with Disc World, but more on the thoughtful side). I finished another few chapters in Poodle Play and am finding the experience of reading this much description of Frank Zappa’s music without listening to it to be a slight;y surreal experience. So I stopped the library yesterday to pick up a copy of an Edgard Varese piece conducted by Pierre Boulez when I spotted a copy of Yellow Shark sitting on the shelf. I’ll have something more interesting than news concerning Iraq to listen to on my commute this week.

Tomorrow I think I’ll get some cleaning and prep work done to get ready for the real destruction. And some more reading.

Oh, the joys and marvels of modern technology! Yes, the CD burning experiment went splendidly well. Nothing like being able to listen to those weird gleanings from the classic MP3.com in my car during the morning commute. Before you know it, I’ll be making data backups on the things. Too damned easy.

Speaking of easy, a full week after flubbing a stock transfer, the central office finally pulled the lagniappe stock from my account. And about time. I was beginning to wonder if I was going to have to buy it a birthday present, or file for custody, or put an ad in the lost and found section of the paper. But, instead, seventy-two(!) shares of Florida Banks have (presumably) gone winging their way home to some shepherd-crooked portfolio more savvy in the matters of mortgage related interest income than mine. Farewell and godspeed. Now I can get back to funding the cash side of my account so I can buy a handful of shares in something else.

And now it’s time for another holiday weekend. Plans? Fencing tonight, dinner afterward, and then large amounts of nothing much at all. I’m half thinking about making it to the farmer’s market tomorrow morning. I want to get by the library to get a particular CD. It would be good to get housecleaning and/or yard work done. How much of either will depend partly upon the weather. Reading, most certainly, and I have a few movies waiting to be watched. I’ll find something to amuse myself. Carry on.

It’s been another week so far. A busy weekend meant that I didn’t make it to the grocery store for lunch supplies, so I ended up eating at the greasy spoon until today. It’s not bad but the crappy grilled sandwiches just don’t taste as good (to me) any more. I like my own goofy lunches better. Today was dinosaur kale cooked in a dab of canola oil with nutmeg, salt, garlic chili sauce, and more of that mushroom flavored olive oil for seasoning. Oh, and an egg stirred in at the end to add enough protein to keep me away from the vending machine later in the afternoon.

I also unvented (all hail Elizabeth Zimmerman!) a fruit drink the other day. Take a handful of less than optimal strawberries, half a cup or so of fat free milk and a generous pinch of pungent ground cinnamon with optional sugar to taste. Dump it all into your cheap-o blender and pulse until frothy pink. Decadence. I added the cinnamon to help balance the grittiness of the strawberry seeds and it works well. Hubby though it was a fruit chai because of the spice. (Hmm.)

The hole in the roof is now only on the inside; the patch appears to be keeping the water from getting inside. Now to get a quote or two on getting the roof repair work done so we can prepare to put in a new ceiling. And the dead tree in the back yard has been taken down and hauled away along with other dead limbs I’d been meaning to drag out of there. We’re slowly but surely sneaking up on getting caught up around here.

I’ve been reading some interesting books lately. The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play continues to get more interesting and frustrating by turns. (Sexist musical forms? Aargh!) I finished Gibson’s All Tomorrow’s Parties earlier in the week. It’s not a bad pseudo sequel to Idoru but the ending was a bit pat. Junichiro’s A Cat, A Man, and Two Women is proving sad enough to be difficult to read. That poor cat! This afternoon at lunch I took a stroll down to the library to check out the audio/visual collection. Closed stacks, darn it. Ah well. I have a small project in mind to look up some of the non-Zappa music mentioned in the Poodle Play book just to check it out. (Have you ever heard anything by Edgard Varese? How about Pierre Boulez?) While I was there I picked up Walking on Glass by Iain Banks and The Cassini Division by Ken MacLeod. A multi-planet, space faring Solar Union where capitalism has disappeared. The politics may get a little heavy handed before it’s over but the writing is so far, so good. (No surprise on either the writing or the politics as he keeps a political weblog I read now and then, The Early Days of a Better Nation, where the color scheme is appropriately red.) Oh, and I was reminded last night that my newish iBook has a built-in CD burner. So one of my missions tonight is to track down some blank media and make some shiny new coasters.

Less happily I got the news today that a good friend and fencing buddy leaves next week for Iraq.

Just as we were finishing packing up at the end of fencing practice last night, the school janitor stuck his head in to the gym to suggest that we might want to head home because of the bad weather. Uh, except we’d already heard and most of us would be driving straight into the worst of it. So, maybe not.
Beer and good food being the better part of valor, we decamped to the local brewpub and tried to wheedle a tornado discount out of our waitperson. No discount, but we did have a nice waiting for the tornadoes to go away party.

The waitstaff kept poking their heads out of the front door to watch the progress of the weather. Except that just as the worst of (the first) front blew through and the rain came down in poodles and the electricity flickered, there was a sudden matching torrent inside the pub in the middle of the bar area. At first it looked as though the corner of the roof was caving in. Instead it was just the boiler (upstairs??) eviscerating itself. By the time the worst of the rain had past (and the boiler innards had been mopped up), the tornado sirens started so we were herded into a more interior part of the building. More jollity ensues as we get to chat with our regular Tuesday night waitperson. By shortly after ten they called an all-clear and my head was spinning from too much noise, so off I went.

I really should have stuck around for another fifteen minutes or so because I managed to drive into the second line of storm. At least there weren’t any tornadoes and no hail, but nearly nonstop random strobe lights of lightning. About ten miles from home I had passed most of the front and was only seeing patchy rain, but the whole sky was a flickering dome with the crescent moon visible near zenith in the broken clouds. Quite pretty.

It was a lovely weekend. On Saturday we slept in a bit and then ran off to fencing practice. It was a good one and the first full practice in my new uniform. Who would have thought that white polyester double knit could be a good thing? It’s all about context, and right now I’m still adjusting to a context that gives me full range of motion when fencing. I can deal with that sort of shift. I also got a lesson that put me back in a head space where I’m thinking more tactically again. This is also a good thing and I hope to keep it going.

Afterward we got a bite to eat and then hubby decided he wanted to stop and see Expo, a home decorator store done by Home Depot. Clearly someone has to cater to all those new developments in Johnson county, and from the look of the crowds moving through, I’d have to guess that they’re not having trouble paying rent on their display space. We saw some nice display bathrooms but figured we’d have to knock out the wall between the upstairs bath and the master bedroom to get enough space to install one of our own. Ha! And I loved the translucent colored glass tile, but when it starts at a hundred dollars a square foot (yikes!) then it will have to settle for looking pretty in the showroom or someone else’s house. We did decide that given sufficient funds we’d likely make our on little Taliesin, only with more bookshelves and more comfortable seating.

Yesterday, a gorgeous day of unflinching blue-sky weatherlesness, we got on the motorcycle and took a back route to Cottonwood Falls or thereabout. We headed west on Highway 56 through Overbrook, Scranton and Burlingame, turning south on 177 at Council Grove. Lots of cows and fields and the smell of same. It took us not quite two and a half hours including a stop at Jack’s Cafe in Overbrook to get something to drink, and an even shorter stop in Council Grove for gasoline. I was amused to spot a business called Coffin Insurance (in the old Coffin Telephone building), but the cafe in the center of town looks as though it might be a worthwhile destination on its own. Spent some time laying in the sun playing with a strawberry bedecked Ms.K., had a yummy lunch, enjoyed our friends’ new home theater system, and then catapulted back home down I-35. Well, we made a stop along the way to have some pizza and cards with Zoe and Kernat, and then back home in the dark, watching the orange lightning off to the south. Quite the pleasant day, but I need to find more time this week to get things done.

One of the reasons I put off moving my brokerage account for as long as I did was the concern that something would go wrong in the process. Of course, something did go wrong, but I never expected that it would involve crediting my account with a significant position in a stock I’ve never owned and is one I’m not likely to have ever purchased. Nor did I expect it would take more than one phone call to get it cleared up. Please, dear Mr. Discount Broker, please stop undermining my confidence in you by trying to slip extra stock into my account. Please.

Update: It turns out that the mistake was almost certainly made by my original broker and they’re the ones who will have to ask to have it sorted out. Which just underlines that my decision to switch brokers was the right one. What a pain.

Ok, so they condensed a nine year siege down to about three weeks of script time, but did it really need to be three hours of screen time? It meant dinner was popcorn and a diet coke shared between us. The costuming and jewelry was fun,the bastards were dirty bastards, and the pretty boys were pretty. Sadly, spotting the inconsistencies and mistakes was more fun than watching the mass battle scenes. The foley work was a bit crude, cliched and uninspiring. It’s a decent sized splash but I don’t expect the ripples on this one to last long.

The restaurants in the area were all closed by the time we got out of the movie, but we had dark chocolate and a nice single malt for desert; my birthday present to hubby. What a nice combination (Sharffen Berger nibby bar and a fifteen year old Dalwhinnie.)

There’s been no word lately on how Lisa is doing, but Max is still employed and is enjoying his job. He may enjoy it even more when he gets paid, or maybe he’ll be disappointed by how much of it disappears in taxes. Either way, his current plans seem to be to work for a few months to save up enough money to buy a plane ticket to Argentine. It could be interesting.
On the home front, the roof has been sealed from the inside and we’re waiting for a good rain to see if the patch will hold for now. In the meantime hubby is in the process of getting quotes to replace the roof. He’s also no talking about other projects he wants to get done. That could also get interesting.

May showers bring June flowers… in Kansas. They also bring me home to find a two foot by four foot hole in my living room ceiling. At least it was controlled destruction instead of being complete chaos. And most of the blown in insulation that had fallen was cleaned up too. After we got home from fencing practice, it eventually rained enough that we could see where the emergency patch needs to be applied while we wait to get the roof replaced. No, none of this is a big surprise and the roof is due to be replaced anyhow. And we have the money to cover the cost. (knock on wood.) No sweat. The biggest hassle will be fixing the living room ceiling, but that needed work even before all this started. Chalk it up to the joys of home ownership and life goes on.

Now that things are stabilized for the moment, we’re planning on going out to see Troy tonight in part to celebrate hubby’s birthday and in part just because. The Iliad has long been one of his favorites. It should be fun.

This afternoon at lunch time I walked down to the downtown library. Hot, humid, and sticky. It was still a pleasant walk. I limited myself to Junichro Tanizaki’s A Cat, A Man, and Two Women and Gibson’s All Tomorrow’s Parties. They’re starting to get labels on the shelve ends but the computerized card catalog access points require you to log in with your library card id number to use them. How very bizarre. They also keep to personnel stationed by the metal detectors at the entrance, presumably to detect and thwart any undesirables. What have we come to when our public libraries need bouncers? But the reading room upstairs is nice and the reference librarians are safely ensconced upstairs, well out of range of any riff raff that might make it past the bouncers.

How odd it is to walk down a city street openly carrying a library book. When I checked out my two books (note to self: lunch time is rush hour at the library) the librarian asked me if I wanted a bag for my books. A bag. For two not very substantial books. As if it were as socially unacceptable to walk in public carrying books as it would be to walk down the street swigging from a wine bottle. Here, read your book from a brown paper bag and no one will be offended.

And another tournament is done. The Duel in (West) Des Moines was much smaller than expected with only eleven in mixed epee and only four women, but the quality of the tournament was quite good. My fencing was good in that I fenced smart and was moving well. I even used some very specific material I’d been given in lesson the week before. (Hooray for fencing a B rated left-hander!) I also had my worst case ever of bad directing coupled with a weapon failure I didn’t spot soon enough during my direct elimination bout. It’s frustrating but it happens and it’s part of the game. And once again, in spite of some really decent fencing on my part, the results were abysmal. And then the women who beat me in DEs decided she didn’t want to fence another even that day. The entire process is so emotionally draining that it’s sometimes difficult to remember why I do it at all, except that it really is fun in every other respect.

My next tournament is likely to be a team tournament up in Sioux City. We’re still trying to figure out who our third is going to be. Or maybe we can even get two teams together if we’re lucky. Other than that, we’re just practicing and waiting for the Summer National Championships.

In good news this week, my car loan got paid off and I received the release of lien in the mail. (Time to request a new title.) We also got our federal refund check. Hooray. In bad news, the recent rains have moved dealing with the roof from the when-we-get-the-time column to the must-fix-soonest column. Which is not entirely bad news but it does rearrange things a bit for the coming week.

While I was recuperating from the weekend with a much appreciated vacation day, I finished up Dan Simmon’s Illium, a sci-fi view of the siege of Troy complete with gods on the Martian Olympus Mons, time-traveling scholars, and robots who are obsessive fans of Proust and Shakespeare. I give it three out of four chariots and would enjoy seeing further stories involving those robots. Then there was Vonda McIntyre’s short story collection, Fireflood, which had a couple of stories I had read before (or read in expanded novel form) but they’re still entertaining. Her novels can be hit and miss but her short stories are impressive. Four and a half out of five snake bites.
After that I dug through the preface to Frank Zappa’s Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play. At a quick count I found roughly ninety-nine notable names dropped in the space of thirty-three pages, everyone from Aristotle to Saddam Hussein and every single one is referenced in the context of FZ. It’s a little daunting. It’s a wait and see kind of book, so I’ll wait (and read) and see.

I told you about the French film set in Poland. Quite unintentionally I managed to follow that up with a Polish film set in Poland (It’s Me,The Thief) and a French film set… someplace (City of Lost Children). Both are good films. To Ja, Zlodaziej is lots of gritty realism. City of Lost Children is gritty unrealism, a sort of Dickens meets Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. (Ha! I just read the reviews on greencine and I wasn’t the only one to make that link. And honestly, if you like Brazil,this one is worth the time to see. Plus it’s by the same team that did Amelie and Delicatessen. How bad could it be? Unless you don’t like dwarf princesses, brains in a jar or narcoleptic clones, you’ll enjoy it. And Ron Perlman is lovely.) The Polish film is three and a half out of five stolen cars. The French film gets four out of six clones.

t as a quiet night before what looks to be a busy weekend, so I took the time to myself and watched a movie that showed up in my mailbox this week. The Chessplayer is a 1927 French silent movie (Le Joueur D’Echecs, director Raymond Bernard, based on a novel by Henry Dupuis-Mazuel) set in Poland in 1776 after the first great partition that wiped it off the map.

A silent movie that lasts over two hours? It’s worth it. Grim and valiant Poles in Vinius (in Lithuanian Poland, controlled by Catherine II) do battle with grim and valiant Cossacks. Great looking costumes (except for poor Catherine, a notably bad exception), funny Polish hairdos, and mechanical, humanoid automatons. You can tell the Russians from the Poles because the Russians are all wearing French clothes and powdered wigs. I’m still not quite sure why Boleslas has a three strand braid on the right side of his head and a four strand braid on the left.

If the opening images on the DVD spark a vague memory in you, you’re likely remembering the pivotal piece in this whole story, the chess playing automaton known as The Turk. (Lots of interesting history provides framework for this story, but don’t learn your history from films like this or you’ll be sorry!) If you take the time for this one, you’ll be rewarded with some great battle scenes (look for the soldiers fencing with bayonets!), spooky looking mechanical soldiers, and a fantastic art deco skeleton playing the role of death. Think Tolstoy meets the Twilight Zone meets The Prisoner. (And you can see a few stills from the film. My apologies for the crappy quality.)

It’s been a quiet birthday so far. I celebrated this morning with a stop by the good bakery for palmier and some of their excellent, strong coffee. Tonight I’ll go to fencing practice and drink a decent beer. Happy thirty-ninth.

Yesterday morning on my drive in to work I got a piece of phone spam. Isn’t that just what I need? I should be happy that I get so little of it. Last night Mail.app choked on a virtual fish bone, claimed it was holding an email message hostage, and then swallowed my entire in box. It might have burped but I was too busy cursing to hear it. This morning my boss wants me to whip out a fantastic new web application with all sorts of groovy and useful information, but he hasn’t got a clue what information that might be, who will be supplying it and who gets to keep it updated, nor even what form it’s going to be in. Once we get all those fiddly little details worked out, it really will be an excellent addition to our web services, but project specifications cannot be woven from a cloth of blank stares. (Whine whine.)

Also this morning, I heard that the tickets for Clinton’s lecture on campus next week were all gone within twenty minutes. In addition to a few thousand people lining up in person (some since Monday morning), they logged over sixty-five thousand phone calls to the box office. There were only seven hundred tickets available after all the dignitaries and the well-connected were taken care of. The chosen venue seats just under two-thousand people. To accommodate the excess demand, they’ve arranged to simulcast the speech in another hall on campus, one that seats five hundred. Lovely.

And my apazine is due this week. Which means it should have been copied and mailed by late last week. My efforts in that direction have been short-changed for the last few mailings and I’m not happy with myself about that. In the interest of sanity and reality, I’ll likely end up missing my first mailing since joining. Serious bummer. We’ll see.

Not that today is as bad as it sounds, but tomorrow will be a better, or at least another, day.