What it is that I do, exactly

I made this today. Or rather finished making it yesterday. I wrote most of the articles, named the topics, put the articles in the topics, and am generally the boss of this website. At least for now.

So, if you must know, that is what I do.

Tea and cookies at the Museum of Jurassic Technology

I think that when you are spending an afternoon with John, things are bound to be magical, and the Museum of Jurassic Technology is always a good idea. With John, it's only that much better.

They still have the dioramas of trailer homes put together carefully by the Creative Land Use people next door. And they still have the micro-miniature sculptures and the folk remedies and the light is still so dim that you might suspect you're in a haunted house, only now there is an upstairs as well.

If you make your way back past the bats that fly through walls and the human horns and the geometric diagrams of maybe something to do with the theatre, there is a staircase. And if you follow it up and up and up, past the logic alphabet and the portraits of dogs in the Russian space program, there is a small elf who will serve you tea from a large bronze urn - tea in dignified glass goblets. There are candles all about and cushions built into nooks in the wall and vases of lilies and the loveliest curtains.

The in and outside of the door to the MJT are quite like two different worlds. I am reminded of Invisible Cities and travel and the other world.

these boots were made for walkin

Jolly

It turns out that the song that Ingemar's uncle in My Life as a Dog listens to over and over and over is actually a Swedish version of I've Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts, which, as you may or may not know, is a positively first rate song. Having discovered that, it became imperative that I own a copy myself to play ad infinitum, and I'm happy to report that iTunes is in the process of supplying me with Merv Griffin's version as I type.

Really quick before I start actually working

I just want to say that the light outside looks incredible. It's been raining all morning, but we're on a break at the moment and the sky is this intense blue with white-white puffy cumulus clouds over the golf course, and the rain has turned the grass a healthy green. I love the fresh clean radiance that rain brings. It's energizing. It almost seems worth working to sit next to this big window and witness it all.

Last night was lovely as well. Molly and I played through the old folk songs we haven't touched in ages, made soup, watched the Good Life, and then Hajera and I popped in on the 5th String holiday party. I didn't bring my banjo because it's heavy and it was raining outside, but I slipped my picks in my pocket, drank a few glasses of wine, borrowed a tuner and sat on a stool with a banjo on my lap. Everyone was there. I mean, not Everyone, but still.

All my favorite 5th String kids (some of whom are probably in their 50s and 60s...) and Jimbo Trout (who was a total sweetheart to me even after I bungled my attempt at a Cripple Creek solo) and a bunch of other people I've seen play around town. They played mostly songs I didn't know, so I tuned a ukulele and tried to find someone playing chords that I could copy. Once we started playing everything in G (as in, once there were only banjos and guitar left) I could almost figure out what the guitar chords were and got better at recognizing the banjo chords even when people were picking them (and kept moving their fingers and not using the whole chord).

These people are all amazing musicians. It was so cool to be playing with them, even if by "playing" I mean bobbing my head and smiling. The other banjo boy kept smiling at me sympathetically when the piss drunk old Japanese man almost fell on top of me trying to play the bass or when he stuck his ear about six inches from my ukulele (then a snazzy Martin on sale for a mere $1600 - really why should you bring your own banjo, when you can play their $6000 one?) and exclaimed that I was doing a great job and should insist on playing a ukulele solo. There was a funny German woman whose tattooed, leather covered and metal studded daughter spent the party passed out on the floor of the guitar room. She also had this incredible fur lined pointy leather hat that looked like it could have come from the set of Genghis Khan. If she'd've been conscious longer, I would have complimented her on it. The guitar/ukulele boy with the curly brown hair accompanied me home on BART. That whole scene is a big barrel o' sweetness.

Anyway, a good time was had by all.

You're not going to believe this

but I just saw a rat sleeping on a cat sleeping on a dog on the sidewalk in front of the Macy's in San Francisco.

There was a red haired man standing over them saying something about hope or possibility.

I was reminded of lions and lambs.

v. stressed about work and future-related things, esp. as pertaining to goals, the economy, direction, brain death, &c., but have started to have conversations with people about things, which makes it slightly better, but not so much better that my eye twitch has gone away.

am trying to find a compromise in all of it.

am trying to engage.

also

I saw two girls playing jumprope on the sidewalk in West Oakland as I was biking to work on Wednesday morning, which made me happy because I read that jumprope is the first thing to go when you start cutting back sidewalks to make more space for street, which is supposedly problematic since sidewalks are meant to be a city's lifeblood and an indicator of a neighborhood's health/degree of safety. So, after seeing all those other enclosed courtyards that no one uses because they're not private enough to be private and not public enough to be public, it was nice to see something reassuring.

And also. Noah saw my calendar as he was leaving. The Treehouses of the World calendar, a most amazing and inspiring calendar. And it turns out that he has considered learning how to build treehouses being that he did study architecture, etc. So, this is promising because my architect sister declined to build my pirateship-like treehouse for me.

a couple of things

a. i tried to buy cowboy boots and they should have arrived early next week. only now i have checked my email and it tells me that actually they prob won't ship till the 19th, which feels devastating even though i understand that in the big scheme of things waiting another two weeks isn't a big deal. but before and after christmas seem like two completely different universes of time. i am considering canceling my order. i am unhappy with these people. shame on them for withholding my boots from me. shame shame shame.

b. it turns out noah really wants to join the peace corps too. so he came over last night to discuss it. he is for it. and for doing it now. i'd still want to learn spanish first and i still need to get some volunteer experience, but it's not such a bad idea - taking a few classes in interesting things after work and then applying. god only knows how that boy has money to live, but it might be possible to figure out a way to work And learn things at the same time. if it's true that the peace corps backlog is really as long as it sounds like it might be, it can't hurt to apply sooner rather than later. and i could always do my interesting thing on the side assuming i know anything about it. so, i am thinking about it.

i still miss iceland though.

c. i am learning a new banjo song. something with a really long title that involves like railroads and blues and a southern state. i have learned half of it although my fingers don't quite want to do what they're supposed to yet. but the crazy and potentially flattering thing is that Tim the Banjo Teacher claimed that i could learn the second half of the song next week and maybe even start learning another song, which is a big deal. since usually i spend at least a month per song and now i'd be learning practically two songs in one day granted i don't think he'll actually start a new one. i need to practice.

Cuteness overload

They call her Amélie Jr.

Once upon a time... from Capucha on Vimeo.

It's cute because she's French, and it's cute because she's a fucking genius. I can't wait until she starts putting together elaborate, personal, and heartbreakingly delightful pranks on the citizens of Paris! ~Videogum

She even has almost the same toys as Amélie.

And has already earned a marriage proposal.

Going under the drill

I am feeling muddled about this morning's "follow up" dentist visit.

There has been something curious going on with two of my teeth - nothing too painful - but it appears that two of my teeth were too tall and so I have in fact been chipping bits of them off along the gumline over the past 15 years or so because the "neck" of the tooth is apparently the most flexible.

So, I had them paint a little something on the chipped bits, which they insist on calling a "filling," and they did some occlusal something or other to make my teeth all more or less the same height, which should prevent me chipping them off more.

And that's good, right? Only I liked not having "fillings" in my teeth. I liked having my real teeth, which I still have, except now they feel different. Well, two of them do. I can feel the resin paint, and I miss feeling my shiny smooth teeth. Sigh.

They do look normal though, and my bite does feel more even. So, I suppose if this keeps things from getting worse later, it is a net positive. I just don't like the idea of them sanding off my perfectly good tooth parts to make the resin paint stick, and I want my one tooth to feel less like a brick on the outside - which is partially my fault because I didn't notice it felt like a brick while I was still there.

Anyway, trying to have happy thoughts.

Plan B

What if I started applying for the Peace Corps now? Would that be a bad idea?

Pro's
- I could start doing "interesting" stuff sooner.
- I would potentially have another job lined up for late next year/early 2010.

Con's
- PC is having trouble getting funding :(
- I'm not qualified for farming/plant stuff yet.
- I can't speak Spanish yet (and therefore would be ineligible for Latin America, which means chances are I'd get sent to Africa, but is that a bad thing? I could get sent there anyway...).
- Band stuff is not happening in PC countries.

So I guess now isn't the best time. But then when is a good time for doing something scary like quitting your job to move to a developing country when we'll be in a world-wide recession for the foreseeable future?

I would love to just sit down with some accommodating and objective but neutral person to really puzzle this out. Where do you find these people? My parents are out since they will always oppose quitting one's job to do something not fully fleshed out during a recession, but there should be some reasonable person. Or does that really and truly sum things up?

I almost want to drive to Virginia to ask Barbara Kingsolver what to do. I want to pull everyone I know aside and interview them individually, but I honestly wonder if things wouldn't make more sense once I was growing rhubarb in Iceland.

More babies

So, major highlight of my week: I got to play with Hajera's nephew Zaid for a few hours last night. I helped him wipe the ricotta off his lasagne noodles, flew him around the dining room, slid him across the hardwood floors, got him to sit quietly on my lap when he was running around and screaming with this noise-making toy, played trains, tickled him senseless, you know, fun stuff. The girls were also impressed with my nonchallant diaper changing skills. I've still got it.

Is it uncool for someone my age to admit that they adore little kids? I think the rule is that you're not supposed to mention it until like the third year of marriage. Which, unfortunately for me, appears to be a long way off.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Reading that piece by Jane Jacobs. I heard her on the radio a while back and she seemed like an all around cool lady, so I instructed my mom to collect this book from the Strand when she was in NY last winter. Finally getting around to it now.

And it's interesting when you read one of those earth shattering, paradigm shifting books written a couple decades ago, you're pretty much sure that the world must have ended at some point between publication and now - only you're still around to read the book. Cadillac Desert was like that. How can there still be water coming out of the faucets?? How are we still alive? Only now the questions are more like - how is it that Mosswood Park isn't an abandoned den of sin? Are we still building Garden Cities? Is there not a way for city people to meet each other that also includes trees?

I heart that the shuttle gets me reading in the mornings, but I still wonder if there's not some middle ground between impoverished unemployment and a 45 mile commute. How does one go about translating that wonder into an alternative source of income?

hitting the books

Have you noticed that everyone is doing their fashion shoots in Iceland now?

I really do want to learn up Icelandic good and proper as best as you can with no other human instructing you, but I have some tapes and a book and I just discovered that the University of Iceland offers two free online courses (!) bless them.

I even put a reminder on my calendar to work on my language skills every Saturday morning for two-ish hours and Wednesday on the way in to work.

I will get there, I will.

baby quilt - check

So this is the reason I have been getting rusty on the banjo and taking a long time to return emails:


From the back:



And here's the man himself:


After a November of renting vids from Reel and hunkering down in my few hours at home, it is finally done! I have now outed myself as a "quilter" to my extended family as I worked on it between dinner and dessert on Thanksgiving. It's hard to tell whether people are being polite or whether they actually might want one of these things. If there's actually a demand for them, I might even be able to use a machine to make them.

Usually by the time I'm about half way through, I think of how I could do it better next time, or I think about how I'm making it simpler than I'd originally planned, so it's nice to have somewhere for these things to go since I already have a bunch on my bed and in the closet.

Now I'm in that lull that comes after the completion of some big project, fantasizing about other big blanket-shaped projects I could start, but I want to try to work on this banjo thing. And learning Icelandic. And clearing my apt of anything I don't like enough to keep in storage when I make it to Iceland.

You're no fun anymore

I have developed the bad habit of regularly checking the Google stock price. And even when I peek occasionally at my Vanguard 401k and whatever else it is I have in there, all I see is red, red, red. It wouldn't be so bad if I was at least breaking even, but no.

Boo, you're no fun anymore, stocks. You are making people tell me I should keep my job.

But I want to grow vegetables and play banjo and sew things. I want to compost and bake and meet people.

Were you aware of it? vol. 12: The Mayor of Rabbit Hash, KY

Rabbit Hash, KY (pop. 40) is a small community in Boone County. In 1998 and again in 2004, Junior the Dog was elected mayor, in an unofficial election. The 2004 mayor died earlier this year, and the town brought the vote for a new mayor online. For a $1 donation to the Rabbit Hash Historical Society, you too could have voted.

Here are a few words, from mayoral candidate, Travis the Cat:

Travis chose Rabbit Hash and you should choose this cat to be the new Mayor of Rabbit Hash. He is the ONLY candidate that actually resides in Rabbit Hash. This gives Travis an advantage because he sees the needs of the town and is always there to greet and meet the needs of the people. He is a hard working cat and he is non-discriminating, but most important he is not intimidated by the other candidates. He is not afraid to stand alone or to be the Top Cat in the Top Hat Vote now, vote often, vote for change, vote Travis!!

Lucy Lou the dog pulled ahead in the polls on election day, though, and now serves as mayor.

Visit the official Rabbit Hash website.

The beginning of the bluegrass band

So these home schooled 18 year old boys are really good. And they are adorable.

Tim (the banjo/mandolin teacher/band coordinator) told me and Anna (his gf/our guitar player) to be nice to them because they're shy. Aww how cute is that?? They are absolute sweethearts.

I really need to practice though. These kids learned in about 15 minutes the song I still can't play right even though I've been trying it for months. And they can play it faster and with out messing up as much - granted they've been playing their instruments for way longer. I'm just pleased to be playing bluegrass with other people, esp. people who are better than me.

I also need to learn how to play with a capo since all the fiddle versions of these songs are written in A instead of G, so I get lost when I have to make that giant leap in the B part of Salt Creek. And I need to practice chords and try to relearn some more interesting way of vamping behind other people's solos.

I did nail Cripple Creek, though, thankfully, since it's probably the easiest song I know.

Now that this quilt/monster is done and given away (more on that later), I'll have plenty of time to practice.