bfields's blog

For some reason the snore was greatly toned down my second night at the San Francisco hostel, so I didn't get a recording. Alas.

The one bizarre night-time annoyance was the guy that came in at 3am to call his girlfriend on his cellphone. He wouldn't stop when I asked, but he hung up soon enough--I guess it's awkward trying to talk to your girlfriend with a grumpy roommate glaring at you.

Hostel etiquette tips:

1. The dorm room isn't a place to hang out at night--hostels always have common rooms for that.
2. If you come into the dorm room after someone else has already gone to bed, your job is to get into your bed with the minimum noise possible. It is, however, permissible to flick on the light switch for a moment if you need it.
3. Please don't hog the telephone/internet terminal/bathroom/other limited resource.
4. If you notice someone else being totally obnoxious, ask them (politely) to stop. You may feel you're alone, but, like you, everyone else in earshot is actually just trying to decide whether it's worth waking up any further to complain themselves, or whether someone else will do it for them.

The third night I slept very well.

Since then I had a week of work followed by a week lying on my back with some kind of ugly flu that just wouldn't go away. My only accomplishment last week was to get caught up on my backlog of podcasts. My French comprehension is getting a little better.

It's some sort of rule that each room of more than a certain number of people in a hostel must have at least one with a spectacular snore.

When I stayed at the Fort Mason hostel a few years ago there was someone with an earth-moving rumble of a snore. I suppose it was just the contrast with the otherwise quiet surroundings, but at the time I remember being amazed that one person could make a noise that loud. And do it in their sleep!

Last night's wasn't a rumble so much as a piercing wheeze, like the buzzy sound you get if you let the air out of a balloon with the neck stretched out. Not as impressive, but still quite effective. I'm not sure what to do about that--is it acceptable to shake someone awake in that case? Would it accomplish anything?

Maybe I should try to make a recording to document this snore for posterity.

I saw the Urban Iditarod pass by today. In some ways it wasn't actually as cool as the local shopping cart races, since it was a big parade rather than a fast race.

There's a certain exhileration, though, to seeing something that ridiculous burst out across a major thoroughfare in a city as large as San Francisco.

So much for daily entries.

My parents visited the weekend of February 17th--20th. Their original plan was to do some skiing, but the weather didn't cooperate.

And a lot of other stuff probably happened in the last two months, but I don't remember it right now.

Last week was connectathon. This year it was on Sun's campus in Santa Clara, which is less interesting than downtown San Jose. Though the location wasn't totally useless--at least there was a little shopping area next to it with some restaurants and a Safeway.

I did less testing than usual but had a lot of useful conversations with people.

Thursday night (last night) I went out to a good Malaysian restaurant with a couple connectathon people that I didn't know, which turned out to be fun.

Today I took the caltrain to San Francisco, then sat around and did a bit of thinking about some interesting acl problems leftover from connectathon. After checking into to the hostel I did some email, then met Cary and his friends Elaine and Tamara at an Italian restaurant. It was a little expensive, but very good. Then we went to Club Fugazi for Beach Banket Babylon, which was corny but fun.

And afterwards I came back to the hostel, where I'm typing this because I don't feel like going to bed yet. There's pounding music coming from the social room. The bedrooms upstairs looked kind of homey, but am I going to get any sleep tonight? We'll see.

Once again we got to the gate with lots of time to kill, but again it meant we nabbed the exit rows.

They were offering $300 vouchers if we'd take a later flight, so we ended up waiting another 3 hours, which we occupied by wandering around the airport shops, eating lunch at taco bell (thanks to concessions vouchers), and, mainly, sitting and reading.

The flight back was uneventful, and we caught a lift with a custom transit van that happened to be leaving, which actually probably didn't save us more than a couple dollars.

Thursday morning we got off the metro at L'Enfant Plaza and walked to the Botanic garden, which was featuring a set of models of DC landmarks (the Capitol, the Lincoln Memorial, etc.) made out of natural materials--bits of pine cones, bark, leaves, etc. Which sounds kind of cheezy, and maybe it was, I guess, but it was fun to look closely at them and pick out the clever ways they'd used different things. (Did you ever notice that the cross-section of a cinnamon stick has a scroll-like shape that might work well as, e.g., the top of a classical column?)

Next we went to the National Museum of the American Indian next door. Their cafeteria is maybe a little expensive and not entirely reliable (the indian fry bread Sara got was a little tough--maybe it wasn't fresh enough)--but it definitely raised the standard for museum food. There was a wide variety of native-american-themed food, and except maybe for the fry bread everything we got was really good.

Museum exhibits can be kind of frustrating--they try to cover so much material in so few words that it can feel very superficial despite the profusion of stuff to look at. Somehow the NMAI particularly feels this way, maybe because of the vast diversity of the communities they try to cover.

Our next stop was the Hirshorne. Of the stuff we saw there my favorite consisted of hanging columns of clothes hangers (the paper-covered type, in this case plain white paper), arranged in a sort of grid (actually staggered rows of colums, of lengths 5, 6, 7, 8, 8, 7, 6, 5), 18 to a column. Each hung by its hook from a corner of the one above, and each such hanging causing a slight (maybe pi/4? pi/8?) rotation. So hangers at the same z-coordinate all had the same orientation. It made a nice effect.

We walked by the Arts & Industries building, but it was closed for renovation, so we took a look around the castle--the new coin collection was the most interesting thing there--then skimmed through an exhibit of fancy costumes from the Ottaman empire.

Finally we stopped by Teaism on our way back to the Gallery Place metro, where we met my dad and sister to ride back home together.

Amid the packing we also found time to play another game of Bohnanza and watch a few "Creature Comforts" videos.

We got to the Shakespeare theater about 11:40, thinking "The Comedy of Errors" was at noon, but it turned out to be at 2. So we wandered about Chinatown a bit, poked our noses into the MCI center, had lunch at Jalejo, walked through the Navy memorial, and visited the bead museum--a cute little museum with exhibits, library, and gift shop all crammed into one room.

The play was fun. The amplification was a little weird--most of it was unamplified, so the occasional amplification called attention to itself in odd ways. ("Where's that coming from?" I'd think; "is it live or pre-recorded?") For me, the definitive performance of The Comedy of Errors is the version done by the Karamazov brothers in the late 80's, which overflows with silly jokes and stunts. I've watched our tape of their Live at Lincoln Center broadcast so many times I feel like I have it memorized. So inevitably I'm caught up short when some line of Shakespeare isn't followed up by the Karamazov joke that I expect. And I still don't think this version could compete with that one for shear fun. But they had some interesting ideas--a few odd broadway-like songs, some wild sets, including a bit of odd fake topiary and a dali-like clock, and an odd comic treatment of the asides, where the other players would freeze and then be surprised to find the speaker in a different location at the end of the aside.

The play ended up with just enough time for a quick walk through the Natural History museum before hopping on the metro to Silver Spring to meet my high-school friends Darren and Evan at a local Starbucks. I got a heavy liquid chocolate drink there, then we went to a Thai place, where we had fun catching up.

My dad gave us a ride home, then we looked at Hawaii photos and stuff.

After breakfast my mom went with Sara and me to the metro, which we took to her favorite shoe store, where she got me some new shoes. I think I wore my previous pair for at least five years and, except for a period of less than a year when I temporarily switched to some running shoes, they were the only shoes I wore. I got married in them and walked all over the world in them. Now they lack the comfy cushioning they once had, and the heels are noticeably worn down.

The shoe store was kind of dusty and old fashioned, and the two older guys working there were competent and knowledgeable. I liked the shoes I came out with, though Sara thought they were a little ugly.

Afterwards we met my dad for a nice lunch at a lebanese restaurant, then Sara and I went to the zoo.

The high point of the zoo trip was when the keeper threw a ball out to the Cheetah cubs (well, they were more like adolescents I suppose). They kicked it around and ran back and forth, their long tails waving above them.

We also saw one of the panda adults eating bamboo (what they spend 70% of their time doing, according to my mom), scratching, then sprawling out on some branches for a nap.

The panda couple had a baby recently, which rarely emerges. You can watch it on the "panda cam" if you'd like, but patience is required to catch it doing anything other than sleeping. Nevertheless, this has made the pandas an even bigger attraction than usual, so there was a large crowd oo'ing and ah'ing at the panda's every move.

We also saw giraffes, elephants, hippos, a capybara, beavers, and a wolf striking a classic pose on a rock and howling--a howl with no growling, yipping, or articulation of any kind, just a long eerie tone.

The zoo was fun, especially since neither of us had been to one in years, though some of the animals seem depressingly understimulated in their small enclosures.

At closing we met my parents then took the metro home. In the evening we played BuyWord, an interesting word game.

My parents do a big christmas-morning/present-opening thing, so they postponed it till today for us. It went fairly well, and afterwards we went to Sears and Ikea for a few (size- and color-) exchanges.

Aunt Nancy/Morgan had sent a collection of christmas carols "in the style of" various classical composers, which was extremely amusing. The liszt example (an extremely dramatic version of I forget which carol) was particularly over-the-top.

Sara, Helen, my mom, and I played a game of Bohnanza at night. Everyone seemed to have a pretty good time, though it dragged on it bit.

Sara's mom had some tasty cardamom bread for us in the morning, so we ate that and opened our presents, then packed a little more of it for the flight.

As usual we allowed a lot of time to get to the airport and ended up much earlier than necessary. One advantage, though, was that we managed to snag exit row seats at checkin. Before that our seats hadn't even been together.

We had just enough time in Memphis to get a couple sandwiches before boarding the flight for BWI, where my parents met us at the airport.

One of the advantages of Arizona in the winter is that you can eat lunch outside in the backyard. Today we had portabella mushroom burgers with a bottle of pinot noir courtesy of Sara's cousin Sonya.

We went to the co-op for cardamom in the afternoon. In the evening we did the traditional neighborhood luminaria lighting, then went to the traditional post-lighting party. We stayed a little longer than usual and actually talked to some people.

Finally, we went to the christmas eve service at the Unitarian church. I have an extremely low tolerance for church services of any sort, but the music was pretty good, and I had some math to think about to get me through the rest, which was pretty short.