Lyn

Comedy of Errors

Fri, 25 Dec 2009 03:40:56 GMT

We traditionally exchange gifts with T and D at this time of year, but it's been unusually difficult to put our schedules together this year:

SATURDAY: T offers to drop by in the evening, but we have plans

MONDAY: Maybe we can exchange gifts after T and chikuru have their usual Monday workout? Nope, T has to cancel.

TUESDAY: It's getting late in the holiday week. I'd better call, lest we miss our window. Lunch tomorrow? Sure, sounds great.

WEDNESDAY: We all arrive at lunch except chikuru, who has a work function. I bring our gifts for T and D, but they forget to bring theirs for us. They decline to open ours in favor of waiting for the next morning, when we're all hitting a movie together and can do a proper exchange.

THURSDAY: We arrive at the movie, and T and D have remembered to bring our gifts. Yay! Wait, whoops, I forgot to bring theirs. Of course, they're heading for Temple this afternoon, and we're leaving on vacation tomorrow morning.

So, we went ahead and opened their gifts to us, then they made a flying trip to our house to open ours for them. I guess the universe couldn't think up any more pranks on the spur of the moment.

AVATAR Review

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 05:23:44 GMT

After seeing the promos for AVATAR, I was a bit concerned that the plot would turn out to be hokey and preachy, though I was too intrigued by the spectacular special effects to be put off by that. So, today chikuru and I went to see it with friends. The plot was hokey and preachy, but I just didn't care. There were plot holes (subtler than one might expect in a modern blockbuster, but definitely present), and I didn't care. It's more than two and a half hours long, and I totally didn't care. Midway through the movie I was grinning like a kid on Christmas morning, and I felt like one.

This was not entirely because of the special effects, incredible as they were. The movie has interesting characters and fresh, entertaining dialogue ("We have tried to teach the sky people before, but you cannot pour water into a cup that is already full." "My cup is empty. Trust me. Just ask Dr. Augustine.") Furthermore, it cultivates a sense of wonder that is all too rare in modern movies in general, let alone high-budget special-effects blockbusters. Highly recommended.

BROTHERS Film Review

Sat, 19 Dec 2009 05:58:21 GMT

I saw the movie BROTHERS last night. It's an intended-to-be-powerful drama about a pair of close-knit brothers, one of whom is his family's golden boy while the other is a ne'er-do-well just out of prison (hereafter referred to as "base-metal boy"). Golden boy goes to Afghanistan, his helicopter gets shot down, and his death is reported to his wife. Over the next several months, base-metal boy starts bonding with golden boy's wife and kids, which helps them enormously with their grief... except that it turns out that golden boy isn't dead, and returns home after some horrific POW experiences that have changed him in fundamental ways, leaving deep scars.

It ought to have been a powerful movie. It could, in fact, have been one of two entirely different powerful movies: (A) one with base-metal boy as antihero-coming-of-age, a bittersweet romance, and the damaged brother as adversary; or (B) one with golden boy as wounded hero and base-metal boy as a supporting character who transcends himself to provide loving support. Instead, unfortunately, it is an uneasy mix of the two. It's difficult to be precise without providing spoilers, but I could feel a puzzled frown in my forehead as I left the theater -- and thinking back on it, I'm beginning to suspect that the script underwent a massive rewrite after filming was already under way. Certainly the previews, while they don't contain any footage that isn't in the movie, strongly suggest (A) above while containing no hint of (B). The end result, however, suggests that the writers changed their minds in mid-stream about which movie they were making.

Which does make a kind of sense. With so many U.S. soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan now, it might well have been decided that the unsympathetic portrayal of the traumatized golden boy (not to mention an affair between his brother and his presumed widow) was likely to alienate many moviegoers. A hasty last-minute effort to correct this could easily have produced the film I actually saw.

Austin + December = Fall?

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 05:01:27 GMT

The other day, after taking the cats to the vet [*], I succumbed to an urge to drive around the back streets of Northwest Hills. (OK, so I'm already off the rails truth-wise. In point of fact, I completely forgot which road I was on, and tried to go home by means of a route that was half a mile north of me at the time.) The cats were remarkably patient for this, so I was able to take in something I've seen very little of in Austin this year: fall color.

I don't think the trees involved were indigenous to the area, but I have no quarrel with that; they're here now, which is the main thing. There's one type of tree in particular, whose leaves are heart-shaped rather than maple-like, and whose color is just breathtaking -- an almost incandescent blend of pink, orange and yellow that somehow powerfully evokes the idea of flame without being the color of any fire I've ever seen.

Clearly I need to bring my camera with me more often. Description just isn't the same.

[*] Just claw trimming and vaccination, nothing scary.

Projects

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 04:57:57 GMT

I mentioned a few days ago that I need another long-term project, "preferably something intellectually stimulating". Now, I can list dozens of projects that need doing, many of which I am interested in doing, but most of them don't meet that last criterion. "Cleaning the garage," for example, would be satisfying but hardly stimulating.

In fact, the only two ideas I really came up with were:

Write a work of fiction (probably a short story to start with)
Practice my programming skills

Of the two, one seems more fun while the other is more potentially lucrative in the long run. Or am I kidding myself? If writing is that much fun, how come I only blog three times a week?

(I did think about growing an elephant in a Petrie dish, but that would be silly. I haven't got a Petrie dish.)

Oh, Holiday Tree?

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 05:09:55 GMT

Tonight I went with chikuru and indigo_rose99 to the state capitol for Christmas caroling and the Christmas tree lighting, and I just want to say brickbats to the introductory speaker who called them "holiday carols". When we're all holding booklets with the words to traditionals like "O Come All Ye Faithful", "Away in a Manger" and "What Child is This", it's a little mealy-mouthed to pretend that the event is not specifically about Christmas.

And why shouldn't it be? I realize that the current fashion is to speak generically of "the holidays", but I don't agree that this is the best way to achieve religious and cultural inclusiveness. Glossing over all the rich traditions of the various religions that celebrate at this time of year, reducing them to a generic, vanilla "Happy Holidays" for fear of offending someone -- is this really what an enlightened society does? Suppose I throw a dinner party for a group of friends that includes carnivores, vegetarians and a diabetic or two. Am I going to serve a variety of dishes, or just a big vat of sugar-free Jello?

If we want to be inclusive, let's acknowledge various traditions rather than pretending that none of them exist.

OK, I'm done now.

Wake-up Call

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 07:10:18 GMT

While I was having lunch with my sister today, she casually asked me "So, what are you doing with your time off?" I was a little taken aback to realize that I didn't have a good answer to that question.

This is not to say that I'm not doing anything. If you ask me, as chikuru often does, what I did with my day, I can usually give a fair list -- as long as you ask me that evening, before I forget. I have a list of basic chores that I do every day, and each day I make an additional list of specific tasks to be done that day. It is admittedly a good day when I finish everything on my list, but I usually get to most of it. Certainly there is never any lack of things to be done.

So, my days are not unproductive, and I am neither bored nor unhappy -- but my lack of an answer to my sister's question reminds me that it's time to pick out another longer-term project as well, preferably something intellectually stimulating. It's been relaxing not to have one since I finished helping my post-doc professor to edit a journal paper earlier in the fall, but relaxation can be overdone.

Besides, it doesn't make for very interesting conversations.

Tomorrow: thoughts on what to do next.

Living on the Edge

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 04:28:37 GMT

I am doing something difficult and risky at my gym these days. [Uh, raaga123, you jump off 10-story buildings on a semi-regular basis. You've been parasailing, rock climbing, and scuba diving, and you even jumped out of an airplane at 10,000 feet once. What exactly do you think qualifies as "difficult and risky"?]

Just this: I'm taking a dance class.

Now, it has always been possible for me to learn a dance routine with sufficient patience and practice. My body memory isn't bad, so there's a good chance that once I do learn it, I will remember it and be able to perform it reasonably competently for a long time. This fact, added to certain other evidence such as our wedding video (we practiced that waltz MANY times) may have given some people the impression that I can dance.

These people have never seen me in a dance class.

The usual format is for the teacher to take us through a longish piece of choreography gradually over the course of twenty minutes or so, showing us the moves four bars at a time and having us repeat them until "we" have them down, then moving on to the next segment. Unfortunately, only one or two of the repetitions are at half speed. So for me, it goes something like this:

[Half-time demonstration]

ME: That looks pretty cool. Give me a min--

[Run-through at tempo]

ME: Uh, what?

[Run-through at tempo, during which I get a couple of steps right, fumble the rest, and finish about half a beat behind]

ME: Um....

[Run-through at tempo, during which I get a different couple of steps right, fumble the rest, and finish more or less on the beat by rushing through an approximation of the last move]

ME: ...

[Etc.]

On a very good day, I have more steps right than wrong by the last run-through of the whole routine, and nobody is looking too closely at what I do with my arms. Still, I'm hoping that with enough practice, I can clean the corrosion out of the connection between my brain and body, and actually get better at this. Meanwhile I shall persevere, because I have no shame. (Or do I mean sense? One of those 's' words, anyway.) And fortunately, dancing is a good workout even when you do it badly.

The Blind Side

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 05:34:02 GMT

I went with chikuru to see THE BLIND SIDE today after my sister mentioned that it had been filmed at our high school. I was hoping to recognize bits of the setting here and there, but wasn't expecting more -- it has been many years since I was a student there, and I'm not sure I've set foot on campus since. (I gather I'm expected to be cagy about the number of years, since it seems to be fashionable to start being embarrassed by one's age a few years after reaching one's majority. I will therefore bow to convention and merely say that it has been [27 years] a while [27 years] since I graduated [27 years].) I was surprised to find that it wasn't so at all -- not only did the buildings and general layout look familiar, but I could usually tell which building was in a given shot, and from which angle. Sometimes I remembered the specific room that appeared in a given scene. Memory is a funny thing.

I enjoyed the movie very much. It was based on a true story, and while that story is set in Memphis, the school where it takes place is very similar to the one I attended, and in much more than looks: the culture of the campus and of the suburbs around it were more than a little reminiscent of Westminster and Buckhead respectively. As a result, the story seemed much more vividly real to me than such stories usually do. (If it were a work of fiction, one might legitimately criticize it for racial and socioeconomic stereotyping, but that, alas, was vividly real to me as well. The deep south still has some growing up to do, in my humble and not unexasperated opinion.) Even without that advantage, though, it's a good movie. I recommend it.

Tuppence and Nickel (cont.)

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 04:33:42 GMT

I know that the two-cat arrangement is working out well because Nickel is no longer bouncing off the walls.

Mind you, she is still spelunking in all the cabinets, moving objects at random from upstairs to downstairs and vice versa, and shredding any and all bathroom tissue she can find. But she seems much happier doing it than before.

And here, as promised, are the photos of cats at play together:

Tuppence and Nickel

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 03:12:03 GMT

It has been brought to my attention that I have neglected to update this site on Tuppence's progress as our new pet and Nickel's new companion. The answer is, in a word, spectacularly. After a little initial doubtful hissing and growling, Nickel succumbed to curiosity and began following Tuppence around, sniffing at her when she wasn't looking. (On the end she wasn't looking from, unfortunately, but that's just how cats are.)

These days they're constantly playing and wrestling. They take turns instigating, and seem to be quite gentle with each other. Occasionally Tuppence will howl a protest, but if we separate them she immediately jumps back in more often than not. They are ridiculously cute together.

Inevitable, really. As I said in the last cat update, Tuppence's origin story was just too good to go to waste.

Tomorrow: pictures.

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Bah.

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 06:54:38 GMT

I got suddenly tired/sleepy this afternoon, for no apparent reason. I've been eating about as usual, getting lots of sleep and exercise, and at about 4:30, suddenly, bam! I wanted a nap. (This was a bit inconvenient as I was out shopping at the time.)

I did manage to doze off for a bit after I got home, but only for a short while before it was time to get up and go to T's birthday party, from which I have only just returned.

Which is why this entry is so boring. Sorry.

Jeopardy-style A&Q

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 05:50:18 GMT

ANSWERS:

1) The (closed) middle right-hand drawer of my dresser

2) The (closed) bottom left-hand drawer of my dresser

3) The (closed) middle left-hand drawer of my dresser

4) The (closed) bottom left-hand drawer of my dresser again.

QUESTION: Where have I found the kitten at various times today?

(I wish I were sure she could find her way out by herself, but given the piteous if muffled mews that helped me find her each time, I'm guessing not.)

Changing habits

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 04:41:52 GMT

Lately I've been making a habit of doing a serious workout (45 minutes plus, strength and cardio) five days a week. In theory, this should be making me buff, lean and strong. So far, it's mostly making me tired.

But hey, it's a good tired.

Farewell, Penny

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 04:18:04 GMT

Today chikuru and I paid our final respects to Penny, the perennial kitten with the sad eyes, rabbit-soft coat, and insane compressed-spring energy -- at least until her final illness. I picked up her ashes from the pet hospital a couple of weeks ago. Yes, we did splurge on a private cremation with return of ashes; call me sentimental, but it gave me comfort to think of having her still with us in some form.

The ashes came in a tasteful black gift bag, which contained a dark purple velvet drawstring bag, which in turn contained a tiny polished wood box and a little brass plaque engraved with her name. I was impressed with the class of the whole thing, though somewhat less so when I discovered that the box was sealed shut. Um, what were we going to do with a sealed box of kitten ashes, keep them on the mantel? Bury the box whole? I mean, really.... Still, it was a very pretty box:

Fortunately, although the top was permanently sealed, the bottom was held on by screws, so we were able to open it so as to mingle her ashes with the soil of the rose bed as I had intended. We did so, and planted the little rosebush pictured above over the site. This pleases me; if the rosebush lives more than a week or two, Penny will in a sense become part of it.

Meanwhile, I buried the box next to the bush, with the lid above the ground as a marker. I know this won't last -- the wood isn't designed to wear well outdoors -- but it makes a nice temporary monument.

Yes, as a family we have done yet another thing backwards (a specialty of ours) : we have created a gravesite with a temporary marker and permanent flowers.

Oh, and the little bush is next to, but not shaded by, a larger rosebush. Since this more or less describes her relationship in life with her sister Nickel, it also seems fitting.

A Couple of Random Numerical Facts

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 13:56:40 GMT

According to the actual vet she saw yesterday, I was right the first time: Tuppence is about 6 weeks old.

The dialogue of the movie THE HAPPENING contains the words "happening", "happened", or "happen" at least 21 times. And it's a short movie: 91 minutes. (This translates to an average of less than 5 minutes between uses.)

Small Miracles (update)

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 18:52:45 GMT

According to the vet counter at Petsmart, our new kitten is (probably) female, and already 8 weeks old. This surprised us, but chikuru accurately points out that we've probably forgotten how tiny the last two were when we got them. We'll be calling her Tuppence, until and unless she turns out to be gender-misidentified.

And here, as requested, are photos.

Little Miracles

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 08:04:45 GMT

The Universe has handed us a kitten.

Nickel has been visibly restless and bored, so yesterday I started seriously looking into finding a new feline companion for her. That search ended abruptly this morning when a little girl came to me with a thoroughly adorable 5- or 6-week-old kitten in a brown paper bag and asked me anxiously if I could give it a home.

OK, so this isn't *quite* as coincidental as it sounds. The girl and her father had found the kitten abandoned beside Mopac(!) and stopped to rescue it, bringing it with them to the Austin Celtic Festival, where they happened to run into some acquaintances of theirs, who happened to be friends of ours who knew of our recent bereavement and who happened to have seen me helping another friend of ours to work a jewelry booth at the same festval... come to think of it, this is still sounding more than a little miraculous.

I wish I could say that Nickel took to the newcomer instantly, but she is still skeptical. Surely she'll come around, though -- this is too good a story to come to nothing.

Passion

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 03:39:33 GMT

It's amazing what you can accomplish when you have a real passion for something.

A little hackneyed, you say? Let's see if I can make it a little more amusing by adding another equally true observation: our cat has a passion for bathroom tissue.

It started with the usual kitten antic of unrolling the rolls all over the floor. We tried reversing the rolls. That took her about five minutes to figure out, then it was all over the floor again.

Then I got inventive. I made a little two-ring adjustable strap to fasten the roll so that it couldn't be unrolled. It could be tightened as needed as the roll became smaller, and human hands could easily shift it to one side when the roll was needed. This did defeat her for awhile, and I was very pleased with myself about the elegance of this solution.

Alas, there were two problems with it. First, humans forget, and cats are quick to take advantage of that forgetfulness. In other words, the strap would sometimes be left on the side, with predictable results. Second, our little feline genius soon discovered that even when she couldn't unroll it, she could claw the edges of the roll to a delightfully dramatic fluffiness.

We finally resorted to hiding the tissue in the cabinet under the sink. That worked for several days... then I found a mauled roll among the shoes by the front door.

I'll be childproofing the cabinets next week.

Another Shooting

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 05:14:10 GMT

There was a mass shooting at Fort Hood in Texas today. At least twelve people were killed and many more were wounded. A cousin of mine posted about it on Facebook and expressed concern about a friend who lives there. "What's wrong with people?" she added.

But the sad fact of the matter is that, on a planet of six or seven billion people, it is statistically certain that some will be broken, and a few will be very badly broken indeed. We can look for early warning signs and try to avert individual incidents, but we can no more cure the whole problem than we can eradicate tornados and tidal waves. Crimes will happen; even horrific and senseless crimes will happen from time to time. It's a built-in hazard of the miraculous, fertile chaos that is humanity.

None of which is likely to comfort the wounded or the family and friends of those who were killed, of course. Sorrow is appropriate -- just maybe not rage.

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Sun, 01 Nov 2009 05:56:32 GMT

Where are all the trick-or-treaters this year? We only saw seven this evening, two of whom were brought to our party by their mother. Surely they can't have thought we weren't home; we had the entryway lights on and a skeleton hanging from the doorframe, and both our cars were in the driveway. OK, so the entryway lights were a dim red instead of the usual bright white, but still. Last year the doorbell hardly stopped ringing, and in addition to children in costume we saw parents with their own candy collection bags, assorted teenagers without costumes (but also with bags), and one young man who brought what appeared to be his grandmother. With her own bag.

What's changed?

The odd thing is that I'm hearing the same complaint from other people in other neightborhoods. There seems to be an amazing lot of leftover Halloween candy in various households. So apparently it's a trend, or possibly fear of the swine flu.

At least I bought candy that chikuru and I like. Or maybe that's a bad thing...

Wait, what?

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 03:23:40 GMT

For this year's Halloween costume, I attempted something I've tried several times before: to re-design an existing article of clothing based on my mostly non-visual imagination. In this case, the idea was to alter a tank-topped, ankle-skimming acrylic knit dress into a cute little mini with a diagonal hem. Seemed like a good idea at the time, but of course, I've been there before.

So, yesterday, in my usual seat-of-the-pants manner, I cut the full skirt off at roughly the right level, and proceeded to pin it up and hand-hem it (I am good at hand hems -- one of my few outstanding sewing skills). Late this afternoon, I finished up the hem and tried it on. The result startled me in three ways:

The length was about right -- neither timid nor frighteningly remeniscent of a reject from Star Trek.
The hem was not puckered in any way despite my hasty job of hand-hemming with an artificial fabric.
The result was exactly as I intended.

This confuses me greatly.

Smart squirrels?

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 02:10:18 GMT

I think I know why some people hate squirrels. You know these people: when a squirrel is mentioned, they wrinkle their noses, shudder, and mutter epithets like "tree rat". I believe, though, that this show of disgust is no more than a facade, and that the underlying emotion is ... fear.

It's not as implausible as it sounds. Squirrels are amazingly agile and athletic, and they've figured out how to use their forepaws as hands better than almost any other non-primate animal. How long can it be before they develop flame-thowers and grenades and try to supplant us as the dominant life form on the planet?

But they're not smart enough, you would say. You'd think not, wouldn't you? But brace yourselves, for I have evidence that there's more going on in those little rodent crania than they want us to think...

It was Shawn, our tame squirrel, who accidentally gave the show away the other day. You see, she showed up on one of our deck railings the other day and started looking through the window as she often does to see if one of us will come out with food. As it happened, I had left a little pile of pecans out for her on another railing four feet to her right. So, I caught her eye from inside and gestured firmly to my left (her right). And she...

...immediately looked over her right shoulder, saw the nuts, and hopped over to begin eating them.

Hey, wait! Why are you looking so disappointed? Don't you see that this is just the tip of the iceberg? Today, correct interpretation of hand gestures... tomorrow, who knows? Hey, quit wandering off! This is scary stuff!

Well, OK, it will probably be awhile before she comes up with a Unified Field Theory. For a squirrel, though, it was pretty damn impressive.

John D'Oh

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 03:37:45 GMT

Our next-door neighbors had a "Dead Guy Party" this evening. It seems that they (or he, anyway) have been working for years on an elaborate life-sized Halloween dummy. Said dummy was propped up near the door, and we were all invited to write suggested names for him on toe tags. Some of my favorite suggestions were:

Prometheus
Dead Bob (mine)
Leroy
Sunny Jim (chikuru's)
Herman (The Munsters)
Kenny (South Park)

Though he didn't look at all like Prometheus, Kenny, or Herman Munster. What he mostly looked like was a half-decayed Larry David. But Larry isn't dead and is still using his name, so that one may not take.

Catventures

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 04:21:10 GMT

Things my cat will play with:

Bottle caps
Bits of trash
Scissors
Loose clothing
Shoes
Socks
Curtains
A blob of congealed fabric glue
(if all else fails) Cat toys

Things my cat will not play with:

[Trick question. She'll play with *anything*. I haven't actually seen her play with a quark or a quasar, but I'm sure she would if she could get her paws on one.]