Names I have called Meg's cat
Bodhi
Bodelay
Bode Dogg
Bode-day
Bode
Jackass
Buddy
Hey, knock it off
Dude
Shitbox
Bodhi Wan Kenobi
Bode Diesel
Bizzodhi
Dogg Cat
Brodo
Cat
Kitty
Jimmy
Shitty McShit Shit
A Day
I awoke at around 8:30am this morning. A little early considering the late night last night. I put on my glasses and stumbled to the bathroom, number one only. The right lens of my eyeglasses is scratched to the point of making my vision all foggy in that eye while wearing them. I should go to the eye doctor and get them fixed or replaced, but all this travel and moving business has put a damper on my spending.
Turned on shower.
Sadly, the next thing I do is get on my computer. It's always the first or second thing I do in the morning. Email. News. A couple of weblogs. My inbox, normally not that interesting, contains this morning an email from an old friend of mine from college with whom I've not spoken for several years. Unusual timing noted.
The shower is hot by this time, the bathroom surfaces all steamed up. Shower for about 10 minutes, maybe 20. Longer than I need to, but I love to shower. Decide against shaving. I'm not going to worry about that kind of stuff today.
While I'm in the shower, I think about what I want to do today. Nothing comes to mind, except for the things I have to do.
Out of the shower, I slip back into the bedroom to get dressed, careful not to wake Meg. My big errand for the day is to pick up my car from the body shop. It had a few scrapes and dings on it, so I had to get those taken care of before it goes back to the dealership at the end of the lease in 5 days. My calves finally feeling better from all the stairs climbed this weekend, I decide to walk the 18 blocks to retrieve the car. Car looks good, and I drive it home slowly, enjoying one of the last times I'll ever get to drive it with the music loud on the good-but-not-great sound system.
Meg is up by the time I get back, watching last night's "very special" episode of Friends on TiVo and drinking some sort of fruit drink. She wishes me a happy birthday with a peck on the forehead.
A late breakfast of toast and orange juice. I leave the toast in the toaster a bit too long and it burns around the edge of hole in one of the pieces. I scrape the burned part into the sink and eat the rest, buttered.
More computer stuff. I decide that I'm going to devote part of my day to answering my backlog of email. I also decide that I'm going to record the day's events in this fashion. Open BBEdit, start writing.
I need some different music for all of this email writing I'm going to be doing, so I fire up iTunes and move some stuff I haven't heard in awhile from the server to my hard drive. This takes longer than it should.
It's lunch time...still no email written. It's a wonder I ever get anything done. IMed with Tom about Web design. Meg just got a present in the mail. On my birthday. Running tally: Meg 1, Jason 0.
Anyway, lunch. Bologna sandwich on white bread with mayonnaise, American cheese, and lettuce. A handful of Fritos and a Sunkist orange soda accompany. You can take the boy out of Wisconsin, but you can't take Wisconsin out of the boy.
(01:01) me: and that's a lot of red hair.
(01:01) matt: yep. holy cow do those kids have red hair
(01:02) matt: he must have married Patty O'Flannigan
(01:04) me: it's like that sesame street bit: "one of these things is not like the others..."
The change in music is treating me well. I'm listening to Dntel right now.
After lunch, Meg accompanied me to The California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park to see the Powers of Ten exhibit. I had forgotten how much I like that film. The similarity of the natural across different scales is one of my favorite things ever.
They had a Foucault pendulum at the museum as well. One of the top ten most beautiful science experiments of all time, you know.
The exhibit included some children's drawings of objects at different powers of ten. Two favorites were a drawing of a hydrogen atom complete with proton and electron marked with their appropriate charges and a sophisticated -- well, sophisticated for a 6 yo -- bit of protest art that depicted a man saying, "someday all the fish will swim free". Brilliant.
Then we went to look at the amphibians and aquarium. Submerged turtles and Meg didn't like the way the crocodile alligator was looking at us, not one bit. There were pipe-like snakes coiled like springs, waiting patiently for a minnow to swim under their branch. Frogs with poisonous venoms and coatings. Huge taxidermied turtles and tuna.
A walk home and back at the computer. (I don't know how many different segues I'm going to be able to come up with that involve using my computer. Bear with me.) Got a bit of expected email about potential work, so that's good. Fine weekend reading.
Now listening to the new Underworld. Pretty damn good so far. Nice to see that the lads haven't suffered too much from the loss of Darren Emerson.
A small chat on the phone with my mom, birthday wishes, etc. Then off to the store for dinner supplies. Meg has offered to cook whatever I want for dinner. I decide on some fettucini with roasted mushrooms. And what the hell, a small bottle of good champagne because when am I going to turn 29 again?
Dinner was great. Portobello mushrooms are way tasty, even when a bit overcooked (my fault).
After dinner, we gave Bodhi his medication. If you know Bodhi, you know this is not a simple task. He uses all his guile and 16 pound heft to thwart the pilling. We've taken to wrapping him up in a blanket like a mental patient -- a kitty straightjacket. It usually works OK, but he only got half the pill down this time and spit the rest out. I yell at him, "don't you know this is for your own good?" He pretends not to understand.
Too tired to do anything else, we popped a movie into the DVD player, The Hurricane. It was pretty good, but not great.
Went to bed around 11:30. Didn't particularly feel like going to sleep, but it ended up that way anyway.
A normal day.
That's good content for your blah de blah blah blog
Dude #1: He was crazy. This guy had never flown before. Beefy guy, Marine-type.
Dude #2: Did he have a plastic bag full of antlers?
Dude #1: What the heck does that mean?
In someone else's shoes
Some friends of ours were away on vacation, so Meg and I spent last weekend up in sunny Sonoma County flat/cat sitting for them. My favorite part about staying at someone else's house is all the exploring you get to do. I'm not talking about snooping around looking for porno under the mattress or thumbing through diaries. I'm referring to the casual perusal of the household as you're going about the business of living in that space.
You might think to yourself, "I'm bored. Let's see what I can watch on television." Hmmmm, their cable is different than ours. They get TLC? And they don't TiVo Trading Spaces? That seems weird. Their DVD player seems thinner than ours...is it better?
I needed a band-aid but didn't pack any so I peeked into the medicine cabinet. I was greeted by an array of unfamiliar brands. Can I trust my well-being to any of these brands? Tylenol? Why not Advil? That generic cold medicine seems dangerous, risky at best. At least the band-aids are Band-Aids...I can safely cover my small blister with one of those.
Hunger sends me to the kitchen. The refrigerator doesn't contain any of my favorite flavors of soda, but there's a much greater selection of beverages than at our house. It's like a bar in there. And the condiments...you only see this many condiments at the supermarket. Their choice of ketchup brand rattles me. Have I been using the wrong stuff all this time? They have ice cream. I used to buy ice cream, but not so much anymore. They haven't stopped purchasing ice cream, why did I?
The inhabitants of this particular residence have an higher-than-average selection of books, more books than Meg and I have even, and of very good quality. Having brought six books between us to last the weekend, we spent the first 45 minutes after our arrival scouring the shelves for stuff to read, envious of what we found there. Out of the hundreds of thousands of books published every year, they had selected the finest; we have obviously been wasting our time literature-wise. In my awe, I may have failed to place the books on the bedside table back in their proper order in the stack; I'd hate to think that I've disturbed someone's delicate reading queue, as if they'll return and start reading the wrong book by mistake just because it was on top instead of its previous position of third from the top.
The bed is bigger and more comfortable. The bath towels aren't as large, but they sure smell nice. The exercise equipment looks used; mine is not generally utilized. I looked around at this space that's temporarily ours, possessing their stuff in my mind, comparing it with our similar possessions back home and trying to reconcile the similarities and differences with what I know about these people and myself. Now that I'm back in my apartment with all of our stuff, it feels a bit incomplete; it's missing all of my newly-gained temporary possessions. Maybe a new book or two would set things right. And it might be time to investigate alternatives to my current ketchup choice.
Six degrees of a pain in the ass
In theory, the fact that any random person on Earth is connected to another random person on Earth by on the order of six links is amazing. Like the song says, it's a small world; everyone, more or less, knows everyone else. In practice, with smaller groups of people, all the interconnections wreak havoc with weekend party planning.
You obviously can't invite so-and-so and whats-his-name because they used to date but now they hate each other. Those two worked at the same place and had a falling out so we can really only invite one of them. Whats-her-bucket made disparaging remarks about something someone else really cared about. Whosits laughed at a joke he shouldn't have and we can't have any awkward silences as a result of that (oh, and his girlfriend can't come either then). She fired him and now he works at the same place with this other guy that recently divorced this woman that everyone else adores...can any of them come? A misunderstanding from three years ago festers still; two of the three involved will be uninvited.
Solving GRE logic questions are easier. Tom is Anna's sister's great-grandmother's daughter's stepson's cousin's aunt's neighbor's gynecologist's mistress's favorite football player. If Anna is Frank's second cousin thrice removed, what relation is Tom to Frank's dentist? Piece of cake compared with the matrix of possible party guest list permutations.
As a friend told me recently, "I'm too happy in my life right now to deal with all this." Amen sister.
These colors don't run but they can fade
The people in the apartment across the street have had an American flag hanging outside their second floor window since the day after 9/11. Looking out my window this morning, I noticed that the bottom of the flag is tattered from waving in the brisk San Francisco breeze for ten months. The top red stripe is seceding from the rest of the flag, the wind gradually tearing it away from the other twelve.
I wonder if they've forgotten about the flag and the reasons they bought it in the first place, the respect they must have felt for it then and the disrespect with which they are treating it now.
Silver spoons and smelly garbage
For some reason, the neighbors think its acceptable to clog the trash chute with their garbage and then just leave it that way for someone to clean up their mess. Maybe they think that since daddy paid for the gigantic BMW in the garage, they don't need to bother with stuff like that.
Christian Marclay's Video Quartet
Christian Marclay's Video Quartet was the most interesting thing I saw at the SFMOMA yesterday. Video Quartet is a movie featuring four simultaneous clips from other movies shown side-by-side, each one contributing some sort of music, sound effect, or vocal to a 13-minute visual mix tape. The result is as if Mike Figgis had directed an Avalanches music video...but way better. "Richly layered" doesn't begin to describe the experience.
An eventful non-eventful trip to the grocery store
Possible reasons why I almost got into 3 or 4 car accidents on the way to and from the grocery store just now:
1. Learning new keyboard habits for Mac OS X is so mentally taxing that I forgot how to drive a car.
2. Everyone was hiding in my blind spot. A car and a pedestrian jumped right out of there, looking to kill.
3. When the car radio is turned way up, the music drowns out your voice and you can fool yourself into thinking that you actually sound like Thom Yorke.
4. Chicken apple sausage contains apples? I always thought that was a just a cute name...or a misnomer, like Pennsylvania Dutch. This line of thinking may have caused my mind to wander slightly.
Hiking in Lassen
Paul has some photos up from this weekend's hiketacular. My camera is stuffed with photos but who knows if I will get a chance to put them online any time soon. And Paul is exactly right...as isolated and lost as we were at times, everyone in the group was pretty calm about it. Well, except for the slight avalanche we started. "Heads up! Boulder!"
A visit to the French Laundry
It all began innocently enough with a book. As Meg read The Soul of a Chef, she kept interrupting me on the plane, "Thomas Keller is a perfectionist freak. We have to go eat at The French Laundry. It sounds soooo amazing." I smiled and nodded, going back to my reading each time, not really knowing if she was serious or not. For Christmas, I got her The French Laundry Cookbook. Soon after, the French Laundry Fund was started, saved pennies, quarters and dollar bills with an eye on going to Yountville to dine on Thomas Keller's perfections.
Dollars and coins piled up in the Fund jar. A reservation was made two months in advance, the soonest they take reservations at the restaurant. Friends were enlisted to go along. It was to be an event. We were going to eat art.
It was the best meal I have ever had. Twelve courses in all, each one a little bit of perfection leading you smoothly into the next course. I ate things I generally don't care for -- carrots, lobster, sea bass, and bone marrow -- and I couldn't get enough. The service was great as well; course, pause, course, pause, bread, pause, course...it was well-timed without seeming mechanical. Our server had worked in the kitchen as a chef for a couple years so he entertained us with little tidbits about the food, Keller, and the inner workings of the restaurant during our 3 1/2 hour meal.
As we were reluctantly leaving at the end of the meal, our server followed us out to the foyer. "Would you like to go back and meet Thomas?" We huddled by the door of the bustling but oddly quiet kitchen, watching Keller plate two or three courses for the dining room. When he had a free moment, Meg went over and chatted with him for a couple of minutes, showing him her Fund jar and telling him how much we had enjoyed the meal. As good as our dinner was, seeing the childlike sparkle in Meg's eyes while she talked with Keller was the high point of the evening. It's not often you get to meet your heroes.
Wireless in SF from 3 miles away
The future is here and it consists of cheap low-tech hardware, beef ravioli cans, Rustoleum, and probably some bailing wire. Using a bunch of off-the-shelf items, Jim Meehan has constructed a wireless access point capable of reaching any San Francisco resident with line-of-sight to his house in a 3-4 mile radius. He describes his beach (Web) surfing experience:
"I placed one of the WAP11's on the roof of my place near 26th Ave. and Quintara St. in the Sunset District and aimed the ravioli can antenna down at Ocean Beach, about 1.2 miles away. I connected the other antenna to the Lucent PCMCIA card in my laptop and took it down to the beach. I had little confidence that this setup was going to work, but amazingly, as soon as I aimed the antenna back up at my house from the beach, I got a signal almost instantly and was chatting and surfing from the beach! It was surprisingly easy to keep the link up -- it seemed that the antenna aim didn't even need to be all that precise." (via /.)
Earthquake!
Had a bit of an earthquake last night. The apartment shook for about 2 seconds or so, a little creaking and rattling of things. My very first earthquake since moving here a year and a half ago.
SF Station's Literary Arts Events Calendar
If you're in the Bay Area, SF Station's Literary Arts Events Calendar is an indispensible resource, listing tons of talks and readings to check out each month. Through the magic of technology, you can even have the calendar emailed to you twice a month. (p.s. Dave Eggers on Mon)
Short pieces on my shower
I hate my shower. Hate, hate, hate. First it's too hot, then it gets cold, and then without warning, it stops flowing entirely. Worst shower ever. I want everybody to know just how bad my shower is. To that end, I've commissioned a number of artists and writers of various talents and interests to produce several pieces on the subject. Some of them are as follows:
- interpretive dance: "Getting Out of the Way of the Cold Water Very Quickly"
- an up-with-science book written for ages 8-14: "How the Water in the Shower Can Still Be Hot When the Cold is Turned All the Way Up and Other Seeming Paradoxes in Science"
- painting: "Scalding Flesh"
- weblog: "Jason vs. His Shower, A Very Special Warblog"
- major motion picture: "Dude, Where's My Hot Water?"
- autobiography: "The Shower Always Gets Cold When It Comes Time To Rinse The Shampoo From My Hair"
- a collection of short stories: "Pointy Nipples and Other Tales of a Cold Shower"
- short story from the above collection: "I'm So Cold That My Genitals Have Sucked Up Into My Body Cavity"
- tombstone epitaph: "Friend to All, Except His Shower"
- essay: "Living with Low Flow in a High Flow Society"
- porno movie: "Sex, Interrupted"
- a paper to be submitted to a referred scientific journal: "Foregoing Classical Phase Transitions: Achieving Temperatures in Liquid Water of Above 212°F and Below 32°F"
- television miniseries: "Not Without My Shower: Courage in the Bathroom"
- pop song: "I'm Too Hot For You, Baby"
- a Broadway play: "Some Like It Hot, But Not That Hot"
- Star Trek episode: "The Trouble with Showers"
- rap song: "My Motherfucking Shower Sucks, Yo"
- a volume from the Hot and Cold series of children's books: "Why is Mommy Shrieking in the Shower?"
- classical piece: "Shower Screams in E-Flat Major"
- article for a plumbing magazine: "Practical Plumbing Tips: Routing Cold Water Through the Hot Water Pipe and Hot Water Through the Cold Water Pipe."
- an opera: "L'acqua, è Troppo Freddo"
Am I obsessed with my bad shower? I believe so.
NY subway good, MUNI sucks
A study in contrasts: using the well-oiled NY subway for a week and then coming back home to SF, where I beat a MUNI train walking 7 blocks up Irving...by 2 whole blocks. The MUNI would be a lot more useful if the trains all ran underground and it covered more than 25% of the city.
Waiting in line
Any time I go to the Metreon, people are queued up to buy movie tickets. From the length of the line, I would assume that people spend 10-15 minutes in this line, waiting to buy tickets from the cashiers. I wonder why none of them realize that a mere five feet away from them are 3 automatic ticket dispensing machines with no waiting (and four more upstairs by the theatre with no waiting). Theories: 1. People are stupid; 2. Poor design: machines look like ATMs, not like ticket dispensing machines; 3. People distrust the machines; 4. People want to use the cashiers instead of the machines so that the cashiers aren't downsized and replaced with more machines; 5. Unfamiliar person-to-person interactions are preferable to unfamiliar person-to-machine interactions because they are easier to troubleshoot; 6. People don't like using credit cards for small purchases (via jk); 7. People prefer to pay cash (via fk).
