bfields's blog

I walked downtown, picking up a quart of cherries at the farmer's market on the way.

I passed clubs with Dave a bit and tried fooling with devil sticks. I'm still no good at that.

After a sandwich with Fred, Deanna, and Wendy, I puttered a bit at work, then went to Top of the Park, arriving maybe halfway through Jeremy Kittel's set. Too bad, I should have showed up for the whole thing--he was great.

Jo Serrapere was OK too. Does she get tired of "Jesus in a Snowball"? I don't, but I only hear it once a year.

"Big Foot Bob and the Toe Tappers" was good but kind of cheesy and, once again, we were getting tired. So we went home after a few songs.

I think the cherries were finished by about the time Jo Serrapere was.

My new music player came today. I apt-get installed the necessary software, uploaded some oggs, and... it worked. Weird.

I hadn't heard the bands at night--The Boomerangs, Measured Chaos, and Universal Expression--but they were all pretty good. But when the final reggae band came on we decided we were tired and had had enough, so we left after a couple songs.

Bugs Beddow and Dick Siegel are always two of our favorites, and this year was no different.

We stayed for the "The Wedding Singer" Wednesday night. It was reasonably fun, but I just don't know what to make of Adam Sandler movies.

Thursday night I was kind of looking forward to The Incredibles, but rain was threatening and going home seemed the safer move.

I seem to be an employee of the School of Information now. Weird.

Back at work on Tuesday, I finally got tickets for the Ottawa Linux Symposium. This'll be the third time I've gone, and I've enjoyed Ottawa before, so I decided I'd take some vacation and spend a few extra days there.

At night we saw a bit of the II-V-I orchestra. When the rain started in earnest they made a quick exit from the song they were playing at the moment and started throwing tarps over everything. We decided to go home instead of waiting to see whether the movie would be rained out too.

The local public library has set up a new site with a front end that seems to be based entirely on Drupal. Those crazy librarians.... Actually it's a pretty interesting idea. I hope it works out. But by replacing everything all at once they've invariably introduced all sorts of regressions, and they're forcing everyone to learn a new interface. Why does it always have to be that way? Is it that hard to make these sorts of changes in smaller steps?

In the morning we walked downtown for the local 4th of July parade. Politicians like to throw candy to the spectators. Actually, *everyone* throws candy. So we had lots of candy.

The libraries were all closed, as was Eastern Accents. Those are the places I like to sit around and kill time. So it wasn't the best time to be sitting around downtown Ann Arbor. We ended up sitting in the math common room for a while. And we ate some candy.

The math social room looks weird.

At 7 we wanted to go see the Ann Arbor Civic Band do their Sousa marches and whatnot, but it started raining, hard, as soon as we got to Top of the Park. It didn't look like anyone from the Civic Band was even there, so I guess they were all smarter than us.

I also didn't have an umbrella, or even a jacket for that matter, none of the buses were running, and I just couldn't see walking in the rain 40 minutes. So we waited a really long time. The second band was also waiting there to see what happened, and one of their roadies handed us their CD. Maybe he thought our persistence was the sign of devoted fans....

Russ Collins's legs.

Finally, Sara talked me into walking to the museum. From there we got a taxi. It was the $3/person holiday fixed ride service--which came pretty quickly, actually. Question of the day: for the purposes of tipping, are they a taxi, or an extension of the bus system?

Allthough he doesn't hold a candle to juggler Noé, who takes pride in his ability to speak unintelligibly fast in both French and English, the "400 blows" commentary track by Truffaut's childhood friend Robert Lacheney still left me mostly scratching my head. That no doubt has more to do with my comprehension skills than anything else.

But I finished muddling my way through it this morning, and got one amusing anecodate out of it: when he and Truffaut were teenagers, they were movie-obsessed, often seeing the same films over and over. In response to a noisy couple behind them, Lacheney turned around, hit the man with a newspaper, and said "le cinema est un lieu de silence et de travail!" (Or something like that.) Apparently the couple was shocked into submission.

Anyway, except for a grocery expedition to Busch's, we mostly stayed in.

I slept in kind of late, and then stayed in bed to finish Jaime Hernandez's "Locas"--a kind of wild, at times hard to follow, but very interesting book.

I walked downtown by way of the farmer's market, where I picked up garlic, onions, and squash. I also got a couple DVD's at the library (a collection of Charlie Chaplin shorts, and Kieslowski's "Red"), which I may or may not actually get around to watching. Then I juggled on the diag for a couple hours.

Afterwards we ate at T.K. Wu's (Madras Masala, the original choice, closes Saturday afternoons) and hung out a little while at Amir's. Wendy, Ajit, and Paul went off to see "Howl's Moving Castle", and Sara, Dave and I dropped off some stuff in Sara's office and then walked around the arb and tossed a frisbee a little.

By the time we got to Top of the Park, "Blue Tango" was playing. We listened to some of that, then to a few songs by "Lady Sunshine and the X Band", then went home.

Citi seemed back to normal today. I actually got some work done.

I forgot to take any lunch. There were some berries I had sitting in the work fridge from Wednesday when I'd gotten them at the farmer's market and forgotten to bring them home. But cherries and strawberries don't really do it on their own.

So I was at Top of the Park as it started at seven, getting my pizza. I sat with Andy and his wife during the first band, which was pretty good, then sat with Sara to watch Andy's band Foobar. Which was also pretty good.

The sky was also impressive.

So, we had a good time. But by the third band we were ready to go, so we hopped on the 10 o'clock bus for home. The bus lets off near a path through the woods that has been full of fireflies, deer, and bats recently. The fireflies don't fly around much--they pretty much just sit around--but there are *lots* of them, so the cumulative effect is striking.

I got kind of a late start this morning, getting off the bus downtown around 11am. It was looking threatening, so I ducked into the library, just as it started to pour.

After working in the library for an hour it seemed calm enough outside so I walked to CITI, where I found the other staff standing around outside in the rain, fire trucks everywhere. Charles was huddled under an umbrella with a laptop--apparently the CITI wireless was still working fine and was reachable--trying to log into the power switch and shut down everything in the machine room.

Apparently lightening had struck an air conditioner and smoke was everywhere in the WUOM part of the building. Didn't seem like anyone had been hurt, though, and even the machines turned out fine and were back up later in the afternoon.

It wasn't obvious when they'd let us back in, though, and standing around in the drizzle for a long time didn't seem like the best idea, so I headed back to Eastern Accents, where I did a little work and had some bi-bim-bop.

I also tried to work some more in the library but wasn't concentrating very well. I did make a little debugging progress at least.

So I ended up just coming home a little earlier than usual.

For some reason I had low expectations for the Terraplanes on Tuesday night, but their music had a little more variety than I expected, so Sara and I both enjoyed them.

We couldn't make up our minds, ended up missing the 10pm bus, and decided we'd stay for at least the first few minutes of Meet the Fockers. It didn't look promising, and the rain started coming down, *hard*, after 10 minutes or so. So we went and waited (under a tree) for the bus home.