bfields's blog

This flu has been tenacious, so I'm still not doing much. Yesterday I reread most of "Pierrot Mon Ami". I think the first time through I entirely missed the hints that the "poldevian prince" was actually the animal trainer. What do you know.

Though I'm not in perfect shape, I'm better, and just can't spend all my time doing nothing, so today I'm doing a little debugging. And I upgraded drupal since it seems there've been a couple security fixes.

Whether it's the jet lag, or the crowds of people in small places, or something else, I'm especially susceptible to coming down with stuff in the few days after returning home from travel.

My first thought Monday morning was that I had a mild hangover. We'd considered having a few friends over for new year's eve, but a couple phone phone calls and a lack of people at juggling suggested that most people would either be out of town or have other plans. So we had some champagne on our own. I didn't think it was that much, but it was beyond my usual (minimal) alcohol intake.

The day continued and I didn't feel any better, and eventually my a thermometer confirmed that I had something likely to be more lingering.

So here I am, Wednesday, having spent my third day at home drinking lots of fluids, doing some reading, writing the occasional email (or blog entry), and trying to get some sleep. Ugh.

With luck I'll feel well enough to do some work from home tomorrow. I'm more than ready to *do* something, but my head still feels like it's stuffed with straw.

The rest of the trip went fine, and our flight home last night was uneventful.

I took a walk downtown Wednesday and spent an hour reading in Borders, with the result that I had a couple thousand pages of linux kernel books to entertain myself with on the flight home.

We had a ton of Christmas cards waiting for us on our return.

Christmas morning went well. Sara's dad made some muffins which we had with their yummy dark honey marmalade. Sara and her mom cleaned out the outdoor stove they've had in their backyard for years but never used, and we lit a fire and made s'mores. I don't really like s'mores, but it was fun anyway. We watched some Buster Keaton shorts from the library at night.

Saturday night Sara's friend Jon took us to dinner with his girlfriend Kris (no idea if that's the right spelling). We went to a nice Vietnamese restaurant where she was a regular and then got some gelato across the street.

Then today we met another of Sara's friends, Shelly, and joined her for an REI trip where she got a backpack for their friend Andi, and I finally replaced my shoes. I'd bought them about this time last year, and the soles were falling apart. We had some coffee then made a brief stop at Borders before parting ways.

The sun was back today, so we hung out laundry and ate lunch in the back yard. At night was the traditional christmas eve luminaria lighting and party. Sara and her dad left for the 9pm service at the local Unitarian-Universalist church, while her mom and I stayed behind.

Part of my plan for the evening was to populate the external hard drive I'm giving Sara for christmas with our digital photos. I'd brought my own drive with me for that purpose. But of course all my data is on an ext3 filesystem. No problem, I thought--even though I don't have a linux machine with me (aside from the Nokia 770, which can't act as a USB host), I could install ext3 drivers on her mom's XP machine. The drivers work fine, but Windows refuses to accept some of the directory names. I also tried a standalone program (expore2fs), but it doesn't seem to do recursive copies. So in the end I had to give up.

After a long boring plane trip Monday afternoon, Sara's parents met us at the airport, fed us some snacks, then sent us off to sleep.

Wednesday and Thursday night we went with Sara's dad to a couple music events: the weekly Encanto Park meeting on Wednesday, and then an open mic at "Fiddler's Dream" on Thursday. As expected, performances were a little uneven, but some were very good, and most were fun regardless.

I have a so-so ear: I've practiced just enough to get myself to the point where I can understand a simple melody (where by "understand", I mean, not necessarily know what all the notes are--that would take perfect pitch--but at least know them all relative to each other). But anything more complicated is hit-or-miss, and I can rarely get chord progressions.

So part of the fun with performers doing simpler stuff is that if I'm lucky sometimes I can get to the point where I could pretty much transcribe the whole song--chords, melody, rhythm. There were a couple songs like that last night.

Also, I realize I must be slow, but I'd never really noticed before how this whole "strumming" thing works. Some of the guitarists at least had a very straightforward procedure: you move your arm up and down with an unchanging regular rhythm--with each up or down stroke corresponding to roughly to an eighth note in a 4/4 measure--and create different rhythms by your choice of what you do on each stroke. Assuming that's all you do (and for one or two people at the open mic it was), the only choices you have to make are the chord to fret with your left hand, and which strokes to strum on or not to emphasize.

The weather has been a little colder than I've gotten used to in previous years (highs in the low sixties), and today (Friday), to add insult to injury, it's been drizzling all afternoon. Oh well.

I checked out "Tout Va B!en" from the library and watched it over a couple days, then watched the interviews that came with it, in hope of understanding what it was all about. Gorin (who directed it with Godard) said something about political films normally being designed to explain something that everyone already agrees with, or to dramatize the struggle they're already a part of, whereas they wanted to raise questions. I guess that makes some sense out of the confusion.

We also re-watched Delicatessen with Jeunet's commentary. I still like the movie, but I'm not sure I learned much.

And then last night was the annual Smithee Awards. Well, sort of--normally they're in the spring, but every five years they have a special best-of-the-last-five-years thing. So a lot of the clips were familiar.

If anybody ever suggests that you watch "Zombie Lake", run.

Tommorow we leave for Arizona. There's lots to do between now and then.

Several friends of ours are leaving around the end of the semester, including Ben to California, and Noé to Hawaii. So there was a party at Ben's house. It was fun, so we stayed too long and I didn't get to sleep till almost 3am, I think. My schedule hasn't quite returned to normal since then.

I like staying up late. It's peaceful, and for some reason I feel like I can concentrate better at the end of the day. I've actually gotten a fair amount of work done after Sara's gone to bed over the last few days.

But this schedule is incompatible with daily fact of the arrival of sunlight. And with daily obligations such as my 9am dental appointment this morning. So I'll have to return to normalcy some day.

The university's dental school has some kind of partially student-staffed dental service that I've never used, but have heard is extremely time consuming (if cheap). But there's also a regular dental office in the back that's staffed by faculty. I like it a lot--as with most places these days the dentists are busy and only see you for a brief time, it's big and not beautiful, but they seem very good, and (as you might expect from teachers) they seem to really like explaining stuff to you.

So anyway my appointment went fine (no cavities or anything), and my teeth are squeaky clean.

Saturday some family friends came over, including: a classmate of Helen's from her Japanese classes in Kumamoto, with her husband, child, and a couple portfolios of her excellent sketches and paintings: my cousin beth, with her husband and kids (who six-handedly raised the house noise level dramatically); and my parents' friends the Grays.

Sunday we went to the newly constructed national garden, had a tasty lunch at the NMAI cafeteria, and the saw the newly renovated American Art and Portrait Galleries--definitely worth a visit! I mostly spent my time in their special exhibition on Joseph Cornell.

We got back in time for dinner with the family that used to live across the street from us when I was about 10 to about 14. The son, Shawn, is my age, and except for one visit right before college, I think, I hadn't seen him in over 20 years. He and his father were still both instantly recognizeable. Shawn's mom, wife, and twin 6-month olds were also there. They're a great family, and I wish they could have visited for longer.

After they left, all of us but my Dad (the one non-game player of the family) played a game of Bohnanza. It was Aunt Helen's first game, but she picked it up OK as we went along.

Monday Sara and took the metro back to the newly renovated museums. Since our train was leaving from union station that afternoon, we had all our luggage with us. To the guards' disbelief, we managed to cram it all into their lockers, then spent a couple hours poking around the museum some more; I saw the rest of the Cornell exhibit, Sara looked at the collection of presidential portraits, and we both found some amusing surprises along the way.

After extracting our luggage and redepositing it at Union Station, we had a lunch of Indian fast food, and took a quick tour of the neighboring postal museum. The most interesting part for me was the reproduction train car with lots of mysterious mail-sorting equipment. (The most boring part is the stamps--so a certain stamp is rare because of some odd feature detectable only to an expert--why do I care?) Anyway, probably worth another visit when we have more time.

The train left on time and we had a pleasant evening watching the sun set, then snacking, reading, and watching the occasional christmas decorations go by.

When we went back to our seats to sleep we found there were a couple people in front of us who just wouldn't be quiet. I tried asking them to be quiet a couple times, and probably should have made more of a fuss, but I kept just hoping I'd fall asleep anyway.

So we arrived in Ann Arbor with very little sleep, had a solid breakfast together at Angelos, then went our separate ways to work. I wasn't able to get much done--I was just too tired to do much more than answer some email and fix an easy bug or two--though for some reason by the evening I was feeling revived.

Wednesday night we played Carcassonne. The last time I'd played was at Maria's, in January, 2005, so I needed the rules explained to me from scratch.
I wasn't sure it was the sort of game the others would like, but we all had a good time in the end.

We had a full turkey feast Thursday, and later Laura, a friend of Helen's, later brought us pumpkin pie, and we played Bohnanza. Sara, mom, Helen and I had fun, but Laura seemed to be getting a little tired.

I'm leaving out the perquacky and scrabble. We enjoy our games!

We picked up Aunt Helen at National Airport this evening and had dinner at the Crystal City Jaleo afterwards.

In between everything else I've been hacking away at the git documentation. There's a lot of material there, but somebody needs to sit down and think how it should all fit together--it's pretty disorganized, and, as a result, very disorienting for new users.