Whatta Fiasco

With everything else going on this weekend, we had a big dinner scheduled Sunday night for about ten of us. Getting ten people around one table and in range of four fondue pots is not necessarily a simple thing. For my contribution, I decided to make from scratch brownies for the very first time. The look on Mountain’s face when he saw me snapping the unsweetened chocolate bar into pieces and realized I meant it when I said I was making them from scratch? That was almost worth it all by itself. The brownies came out just fine and were mostly consumed before dinner. If you ever find yourself in a similar situation and like a slightly fudgy brownie that needs no frosting, pull out that trusty copy of The Joy of Cooking. They were good enough that we forgot to whip the cream to go with them.

The weekend also saw some walking around downtown enjoying some window shopping and people watching as the holiday revelers got geared up after the football game. I missed Boo at the Zoo (trick-or-treating) with Ms. K. (her first) in the afternoon, but saw a rare Saturday night movie and ate some unexpectedly delectable sushi. By all accounts I missed some serious cuteness when Ms. K. finally connected the dots between saying trick-or-treat and having candy end up in this monster-sized bag. But I did get to see her on Sunday night, whirling like a dervish after getting hopped up on brownies. Oops.

One of the odd bits of news from last week involved an unofficially confirmed rumor that the greasy spoon downstairs will be closing at the end of the year. Not because they’re not making money, but because there’s been a rodent problem on the third, fourth and fifth floors of my building. Word is they won’t renew the lease for the spoon, and will instead be replacing my one reliable source for hot soup and fresh veg… with vending machines. Any guesses as to how much more food will be squirreled away on the office floors once there isn’t a place to eat downstairs? I’m sure that will be of great help in reducing the rodent population in the building.

Anyhow, it looks as though after the first of the year I will have serious incentive to start bringing my lunch to work. Me and a bunch of other people, which will make the current refrigerator real estate squeeze even worse. So now I’m trying to rack my brains for decent pack-a-lunch ideas. What to do? What to do? I’m thinking. I’m thinking I’ll need to add a soup thermos to my shopping list.

Who wouldn’t want ot see Anthony Hopkins on the screen? My biggest problem with this movie is that it is so obviously adapted from a stage play and hasn’t shaken off its roots. It shows not only in the dialog and staging, but in the acting. Hopkins is the only one who manages to never look like he’s on a stage. Would a more film-like adaptation have made it a better movie? I don’t know. It’s pretty good as it standsbut I was left with a sense that more could have been done with the material.

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It’s been a so-so sort of week for fencing for me. Some encounters are things of joy and beauty, like a gorgeous little set up of a push-pull I pulled off Wednesday evening. Other encounters were considerably less than stellar. It was clear I need another lesson soon. There was also a weirdness on Wednesday night where we had five left-handed epeeists and only one right-hander bouting. The other righties were sucked into foil, with the remaining right-hander taking a pass because of a sore knee. An entire evening of fencing left handers meant that when I finally faced the lone right–hander, it felt… odd. Even more fun on Wednesday evening was getting our two young ladies both hooked up to fence electrical foil against each other for the first time. Great fun.

Friday was a rather better attended session than many recent Fridays, but it was cursed by equipment failure. We ended the night on a single strip that had a grounding problem on one side. Alas. I did a temporary repair to that one on Saturday morning, but it failed again. So we dredged the bottom of the equipment box to find yet another floor cord set… that had a grounding problem on one side. So we now have a whole stack of floor cords that need repair.

My fencing continued to be consistently inconsistent. At least I spent Saturday morning trying to work on something specific, even if I only made it work successfully once. I’m orking on not getting my hopes up for the Sioux City tournament and just working on hat I need to work on.

Now I understand why so many writers seem to speak so briefly of J.G. Ballard but in such reverent tones. It’s a marriage of off the wall bizarre with well-honed craft. At least, that’s the way it reads. I can also see why his work has been such a rich source of material for moviemakers with aq sense of adventure. In that respect he’s a lot like Philip K. Dick, only more sane.

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I went to the library this afternoon with the best of intentions. I had four books to return and I just knew that I would only check out another three, tops. And because I have a short stack of fiction at home waiting for me, books I’ve purchased in the last month or so, I knew that I needed to pick up some nonfiction to balance things out. But first I grabbed a copy of Life of Pi because it’s still getting some nice things said about it and because I just read yesterday that Jeunet (The City of Lost Children and Amelie) has been tapped to direct the film adaptation of the book. No problem there.

And then I mate the fateful mistake of stopping by the new book section. My apologies to Carl Zimmer, Evelyn Keller, and Laurie Colwin. I promise I’ll get to your books eventually, but before I knew it I had snatched up three more newish novels I’d been patiently waiting to read for a few months now. I couldn’t very well pass them up, could I? The good news is that sense prevailed and I didn’t go upstairs to the nonfiction stacks this time. I really shouldn’t be trusted in libraries.

Eli Maor does his history of mathematics shtick again. I have previously read his e: History of a Number. This book didn’t feel quite as neatly organized but there’s plenty of good stuff in it, even if you’re a relative dunce on the topic. The depths of my trigonometric incompetence are profound but not hopeless. Maybe if I read enough about the history of mathematics, I’ll get enough of a background framework built in my head for it all to make sense on a full time basis. It’s good to stretch now and then.

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Words for the day come from Pharyngula: anastomose and its synonym, inosculate and the related pleaching.

Yesterday at work was an exercise in beating my head against a wall labeled “Lotus Notes.” Whee. I just love it when software stops working for apparently no reason at all. And today we had a meeting of minds and came to a consensus about what new features we would implement before the end of the year. That was a relief. Now to get it all whipped into shape.

Yes, I scraped frost off my car window for the third day in a row. I’d call it semi-officially winter except that it’s supposed to get up into the seventies this weekend. (And there was much rejoicing.)

When I started this book I was afraid I’d picked up something a little too much in the way of journalistic fluff. Instead it turned out to be an engaging description of how basic research happened in and around 1987 (primarily) at the Whitehead Institute during some early success in searching for the genetic mechanisms of cancer. Natalie Angiers manages a difficult balance between giving enough science to understand the background of hat’s driving the people she’s talking to without overwhelming the layperson. Sadly, the optimism concerning advances in cancer treatment with which the book ends has not entirely panned out in the intervening years, but it’s still a very good read.

[amazon]

Words for the day: loxodrome aka rhumb line, and orthodrome.

Two mornings in a row now I’ve had to scrape frost off my car windows. And when I got up this morning I discovered that sometime last night while he was up late working, hubby gave in and turned the heat on. Having the house at over sixty degrees in the morning isn’t such a bad thing. Being not quite so sneezy and clumsy and sore this morning was also not such a bad thing. (I am not sick. I am not sick. I am not sick.)

We did end up taking Lisa out last night for a movie and dinner. She enjoyed Wallace and Gromit quite a lot, but she’s been a fan of the Nick Park stuff for a long time, so no surprises there. This time through I got an even better look at the stained glass window with the trumpet blowing angels. This time I noticed that not only are the wise men plugging their ears, but the baby Jesus is crying and Mary is shushing the angels.

As usual it’s hard for me to tell where the medication ends and Lisa begins. It’s even harder to so clearly see the person she ought to be while dealing with the person she is. I wish she could be fixed so that she was still Lisa, but a Lisa capable of functioning as an adult in this world. I wonder what she would fix if she had the choice.

It wasn’t a bad practice in general. There as a decent turn out, if not too many kids. (I expect most of the kids will show on Wednesday.) We had two strips of epee going most of the night with folks rotating between then. I had some decent fencing, but my brain wasn’t entirely there. About half way through the evening it felt like I was bonking, like I hadn’t had any lunch. (But I did!) All judgment fled, it turned into a bit of a slog for me, but sweating and working on concentrating when you don’t feel like it is good. So that’s what I did.