May 2005

Leah and I got our library cards from the Simi Valley Public Library, part of the Ventura County Public Library network.

I listened to the audiobook of Scott Turow’s Ultimate Punishment: A Lawyer’s Reflections on Dealing with the Death Penalty. I admit that this is not the funnest thing I could have checked out, but it was pretty good.

I dig the unabridged audio books as work and driving accompaniment.

This morning we awoke late because we got in late last night.

We got home at 1:30am or so, after having come home from a record release party in Hermosa Beach. The club was Club Boogaloo, a funky restaurant slash bar slash live music venue. We dug it.

Astute readers of ArtLung Blog and Leah Peah will note that we’re not wont to attend record release parties willy-nilly. We attended this one because the brother of a friend of ours is the drummer. That’s so cool. Oh, you’re wondering what the name of the band is, ain’t you? Eric Lindell, who is described on the Boogaloo site as a New Orleans Soul & R&B man, which is accurate enough. They played roadhouse rocking blues in a sort of Stevie Ray Vaughn mode. Very guitar driven, but not overbearing with the solos. They got a pretty sweet sound out of a three-piece. On one song Eric’s son played the trombone. This boy was no older than about eight or nine. Kinda fun.

In other news, I will head to Moorpark College this week to see about a summer class or two. Wish me luck navigating whatever paperwork I need to. It seems simple enough.

I used Freecycle the other day and got a cookie jar. I drove to Fillmore to do it. The drive was scenic, lots of orange groves back here. Sadly, the ceramic teddy bear did not make it all the way home. I managed to drop the thing and so now I have a teddy head. Dang. I really wanted a cookie jar.

Have you been to 20q.net. It’s a quasi-AI/expert system designed to guess what you’re thinking of. It asks you questions and spits back an answer.

It’s mildly addicting, which sounds like an oxymoron, but it is apt.

So let’s think of a “newspaper” and see if it can guess it in 20 questions or less—shall we? (what follows is the output:)

1. It is classified as Mineral.
2. Is it heavy? No.
3. Would you give it as a gift? No.
4. Does it go in your mouth? No.
5. Was it invented? Probably.
6. Is it made of metal? No.
7. Does it fold up easily? Yes.
8. Is it colorful? Sometimes.
9. Does it have writing on it? Yes.
10. Is it used to record an event? Yes.
11. Does it come in a pack? No.
12. Could it be found in a classroom? Probably.
13. Does it open? Yes.
14. Can it cheer you up? Sometimes.
15. Does it have cash value? Yes.
16. Is it used for communications? Yes.
17. Is it pleasurable? Yes.
Q18. I am guessing that it is a newspaper?

So it guessed right in under 20 questions, and so it wins. Clever clever.

It’s Sunday evening now, and Leah is doing a little gardening. I think she’s planting some cherry tomatoes and some jalapeños. I dig her green thumb.

This week Revenge of the Sith aka Episode III comes out. It’s the culmination of 30 or so years of my enthusiasm for Star Wars. I’m not sure what quite to think. I hope it will be good, though Episode’s I and II were disappointing.

I did very much enjoy the Clone Wars animated DVD, which I think I mentioned before.

Leah and I did laundry today. Not as un-fun as you might think.

Yesterday we saw (soft and base)-ball games deaturing Tony, Ty, and Alex. They did pretty well. Tony got two sweet line drives in his game.

Friday night Leah and I went and saw the movie adaptation of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – which we both enjoyed. I still enjoy the TV series best of all. Well, and the novels of course.

I remember seeing a piece of the TV show when I was in maybe 8th grade, just seeing the title in the TV listings, the reception was fuzzy. I heard somewhere it was also a book, and I remember purchasing a copy of Restaurant at the End of the Universe—or perhaps it was my parents who purchased it for me—when we took a trip up to Stanford from San Diego. My Dad was doing a fellowship I think, and was away. We went and visited him and on the way back I got that book in some bookstore in the Stanford area. Or maybe it was further south, on the way home? I could be imagining this memory, but it seems like I had seen the fuzzy Restaurant sequence on the TV show, went as I always did to the Science Fiction section of the bookstore, and it caught my eye.

I’ve been watching a lot of music videos on our cable. I have no stomach for long-form (like, 1 hour) shows, but I can get behind some music video. Leah is a bit in awe of my ability to spout trivia about various artists we see. Like I see a Raphael Saadiq video and I instantly recognize him as the lead singer of Tony! Tone! Toni!. Or maybe it’s The Tubes, or Todd Rundren or De La Soul and where in their career they were when that song came out, and which version of the song it is, or even who directed the video or produced the record.

The dispassionate side of me has no problem thinking about going into a record store, even a large one, and thumbing every single CD in the place. For Leah this would be information overload, but it sounds like quite a bit of fun to me.

But my emotional intelligence looks at this thought with a bit of revulsion. Like—this is not a “normal” kind of desire to have. Both things are true. I think the ability to take in vast sums of information, shallowly and come up with something like knowledge is something I must be using in my work. I used to get called “Google on Legs” at work—which is sort of a scary thing to imagine, really.

I’m getting tired. I think I’ll have a fresh cherry and or strawberry we bought at the roadside in our travels today. That could be quite tasty.

I feel like I’m doing spring cleaning. I forget what these links are, but I thought they were worth blogging enough to save them as draft, but not enough to go back and read them again:

one, two, and three.

I meant to post these some time ago, but never managed to. They’re a series of BBC shows about the power of fear and nightmares.

part one: the power of nightmares

part two: the power of nightmares

part three: the power of nightmares

You can read about it more here.

I’m doing some blog housecleaning this morning. Here’s the code I used to use to display an archive list of blogger entries:

/*
blogger file listing to file processes things special

*/
exec(“ls -r *_01_archive.php”, $archlist);
$i = 0;
while (($archlist[$i])) // this bit makes links for all the images
{

echo ““;
echo substr($archlist[$i],5,2);
echo “/”;
echo substr($archlist[$i],0,4);
echo “
n”;
$i++;
}

?>

Pretty straightforward, it grabs a list of files with the right name pattern, then prints a pretty display of the previous listings.

Now that we’re on Wordpress, it’s not necessary. I blog it to back it up, just in case.

Bus Errror, Core Dumped, originally uploaded by artlung.

This made me laugh harder than I would have expected.

Effective immediately, my cell number is 805-857-3951.

The old 619 number is no longer in service.

I’m not too pleased with zero transition—but you blog readers now know, I need to update my resume online and such, and send notes to family about the change.

-licious and -tastic, are suffixes of the day.

So… it’s Fridaylicious!

Or, it’s Fridaytastic!

Feh.

I thought I had the energy to be clever here today. Sadly, I do not.

Have a wonderful weekend y’all!

In contrast to the other day, when my eggs got messed with, today’s breakfast was excellent. Eggy cheesy soy-milky goodness. Oh and salt and pepper.

We had the kids yesterday afternoon/evening. It truly felt like not enough time. But such is life in joint-custody-land.

So Meg and Jukebox made some excellent comments about ferrets, and they actually got me to feel sorry for the little guy.

I wish I could adequately describe what the little fellow (lass?) looked like running—sort of twisted into an “S”-on-its-side shape that expanded and contracted as he ran. I have not seen him since. I hope he or she okay.

On the right hand side of the page I have reinstituted my blogroll. Some familiar names there, and perhaps some unfamiliar ones to you. Anyway, I hope perhaps you enjoy the list. It’s not meant to be a complete list, how could it be? But if you have suggestions for blogs to take a look at and add, please do let me know.

Later taters!

It looks like it’s going to be a nice day here in Simi. Let’s get to it.

Yesterday morning I was making breakfast, as I always do for Leah and myself. The eggs were perfect, golden yellow in the frying pan. Scrambled lightly with some soy milk and some grated cheese. Yummy looking and tasting, they were a perfect picture of breakfast bliss. SPURT, went the ceiling, dropping some kind of fluid directly into my frying pan!

Aghast, I cursed the ceiling, which I now noticed had a drip coming from a vent above the stove in the kitchen. I was quite offended, to say the least! Dripping ceilings get the day off on the wrong foot.

Had I been posting about this yesterday you would have seen a much less measured tone than I can manage this morning.

Luckily, I called our landlord and he came yesterday evening to fix the toilet which was leaking. Yes, there was toilet water (pre-use) in the eggs yesterday. Luckily I was watching just as it happened, and it was localized enough that only half the eggs were ruined.

I had made enough for Leah’s breakfast, my breakfast, and Leah’s lunch—and now there was only enough for breakfast. Ugh! Actually, maybe I can muster up some anger now. Feel the burn.

I suppose that ended happily, more or less. Which is to say—I’m grateful that the whole ceiling did not cave in on me. There are worse things than ruined eggs.

Like weasels in the back yard!

I was working away here in the home office yesterday, 10am—3 hours since the leak event—of course the ceiling was still dripping away. All told we collected about 8 ounces over the course of the day. Drip. Drip. Drip. I have a window that looks out on part of the backyard, and suddenly along the fence line I see a little creature running! He was about a foot long, reddish, with a racoon-like black mask! I yelled out loud WEASEL!—which I had no idea if it was—but it looked sort of like the creatures from Who Framed Roger Rabbit who hung out with the Judge. Yeah, so most of my natural history education comes from animation, what of it?

I was still in my robe, having foregone a shower to that point on account of not wanting to use the upstairs plumbing and exacerbate the drips; but like the fellow in Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas aka “Twas the ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas…” I leapt to my feet and went outside, to do… what exactly? It’s not like I was going to attempt capture… but I was mostly thinking of Leah’s newly planted vegetables in the side yard.

He kept on running and disappeared into the ivy.

Later, I was on the phone with a friend and she said that based on my description, it was more likely a ferret. Ferrets are against the law to keep as pets in California, or so I’ve heard, and I’ve no idea if they are native to Simi Valley—but what I think I saw was a wayward, illegal, pet ferret running through the yard.

I have not seen him since then, or this morning. The new seedlings and plantings remain undisturbed as far as Leah and I can tell, but I’m on the alert for illegal mammals.

And that was just the first few hours of yesterday.

Truly, I never know what’s going to happen next.