60 posts from 2006

Well, Christmas week has been a lot busier than I thought it would be, so there's been no thoughtful reflections on the holidays, their meaning, or the Eagles complete drubbing of the Cowboys on Christmas Day -- with the feelgood story of the year (if you discount the Saints), Jeff Garcia.  I also was excited to tell Angelanoel and Sdede2 that I got a moleskin notebook in my stocking.  It's going with me on the East Coast swing we're leaving for the airport for right now -- which also means little or no chance at updates.

So, Farewell 2006 -- for me, it was a year in waiting.  A year of waiting for a number of things to come together, which oddly enough (I hope I hope) started coming together the penultimate week of the year.  Here's looking forward to 2007!

One good thing that started in 2006 was Vox -- and this has been an experiment that I have enjoyed immensely! 

Happy New Year to you all!

 

Oh and the Top 5 TV shows of 2006 are:

1. Battlestar Galactica (I'm looking at you: blogmonicablog)

2. Veronica Mars

3. Heroes

4. LOST

5. The Daily Show

If you like a winter wonderland, San Diego isn't the first place many people think of (rightfully so!).  So, whenever I'm wistful for snow, I open this picture.  We had a storm last winter that dropped pretty significant snow to about the 1000 - 1500 foot level.  Not quite enough to get the city, but a photographer from the Union Tribune (local paper) got this great shot of downtown with the snow in the hills east of town.

So, folks that poke around here know that I have a fondness for astronomy, and since yesterday was the Winter Solstice, I'd been meaning to post all day.

Nearly every culture of humans that has figured out the movement of the sun and the moon has noted (and usually with a pretty important festival) the arrival of the shortest day of the year.  The soon-to-be-gradually lengthening days becoming an indication of new life and re-birth.

 

It's no secret that when the early-Church was looking for a time to commemorate the Birth of Christ, they chose this week.  Many of the traditions that Pagans they were trying to convert had are still with us today: trees (with lights and decorations), mistletoe, yule log, and holly are all still pretty popular.

I generally don't post about work (and I won't leave many details here), but its been a rough year for the company that I work for, and yesterday there was an announcement of a re-organization that my co-workers and I all thought of as immensely positive.  So, yesterday there was an impromptu party with beer, wine and champagne and there was a sense of cameraderie that I hadn't felt in a long time and it was great.  Sentiments like "turned the corner", "right direction" and "looking forward to 2007" were prominent in the conversation.

 

So as we were raising our glasses at 4:30, I recalled that the Winter Solstice came to California at 4:22 p.m. PST. 

Coincidence?

In a verrry gratifying departure from the trauma that was my Piano Class mid-term, tonight I had my final.  Again it was two pieces, each which had to be memorized.

Much like the last time, I had chosen a Beethoven piece (Fur Elise) and a seasonal piece (Auld Lang Syne).  But tonight was different in a lot of ways.  The first thing is that there were only FIVE students left in the class by this point.  Last time, there were maybe 15-17 students left, and we didn't really know each other.  After the mid-term, the class really cleared out, leaving us to know each other better, become fond for one another, and cling to each other like a life raft!  So the audience was even more encouraging.

I started by playing the Beethoven, and naturally as I sat down and faced this big baby grand, the right hand starts to twitter.  Good lord, not again.  But one false start and a couple of deep breaths and I was going pretty well.  Not as well as I had in practice not 20 minutes before mind you, but whatareyougonnado?  Auld Lang Syne came out fine after that, and just like that, I was done.

So ends my first semester as a student in oh -- I don't know -- 18 years??  Best $50 I ever spent, I think.  Thanks to everyone that's been so encouraging of this experiment!

 

So, I think it was more than two weeks ago when my washing machine stopped working.  It's three years old.  Front loader.  Reasonably quiet.  It's nice.  Then, after I returned from a weekend of being good in Las Vegas, in the middle of washing a load of whites, it just sort of stopped.

I'm a scientist -- so I did what any good scientist does -- I unplugged it and plugged it back in.  Nothing.  I checked the fuse box.  It was okay.  Sadly, that reached the upper limit of my plumbing and home repair capacity.  I removed the wet load from the washer and finished them off by hand in the tub -- I tried to imagine that I was like Laura Ingalls Wilder's older brother.  Fortunately, the dryer was still working.

I got a repairman out several days later, and they determined that it was the pump, said that it would take "a few days" to get a replacement.  They quoted me a price for the entire repair.  Of course that price was just below the tipping point of where I would say, "Screw it, I'll just get a new one".  Good job by them.

So, I'm here at home at lunchtime while they do the repair -- anxiously anticipating the joy of doing many many loads of wash over the next few days. Though for the last couple of weeks, I've been asking myself one question: "How many times can you wear a pair of jeans between washings?"

 

Over the past few years we've gotten into the habit of adding one new Christmas CD to the collection.  This year, we got Sarah McLachlan's "Wintersong" which is a really interesting collection of a few standards, a few "knowns" and some new songs.

After initially listening this weekend, I think my favorite is a different rendition of "Greensleeves".  I think its a really beautiful version.

Here's a headline I would have put good money against less than a month ago.

"Eagles Control Playoff Destiny With Win Against Giants"

I'm sorry -- I must now be in some strange sort of alternative universe, but its one I kinda like.  A consistently balanced offense lead by Jeff Garcia and Brian Westbrook, and an opportunistic defense with Brian Dawkins leading the way upended the NYG in a back-and-forth and occasionally ugly game at the Meadowlands 36-22.

The Eagles took advantage of four Giants turnovers, including a end-of-the-game deflection-INT-TD to get a little revenge for their abominable loss in Week 2.  I was really pleased to see some good ball control (something the team seemed unable to consistently do with McNabb --- have they changed the play calling that much for Garcia?).  Perhaps more importantly, they held the Giants to under 100 yards rushing, which given recent performances seemed unlikely at best.

Eli Manning and the Giants continued to confound.  At times looking completely "together" and at others completely out of sync.  Previously 6-2 and looking like contenders, the G-men have two games to figure out what ails them.  I still think that when they're playing on all cylinders this team is top-notch, but they haven't seemed capable of putting that together very well.

It will be interesting to see how the Eagles respond to playing now as "favorites".  I think mentally they've been playing with the house's money since no one expected anything from them after McNabb went down with a torn ACL last month.  Now with "expectations" beginning to be placed on them (again), I'm very curious to see how they'll react.

In recent years, I've taken to the habit of taking a day off from work in the middle of the week to dash around and do Christmas shopping.  I don't really want to be out there on a weekend because the crowds the parking can be horrid (that, and my weekends haven't seemed to have had the necessary allotment of free time to give over to shopping).  Actually, I don't really mind shopping all that much if I can: a) find a place to park, b) not wait in terribly long lines, c) not sit in stand-still traffic.

So today was the day to take care of it and I feel like it was spectacularly successful.  There is something fun about browsing for stuff in person that you just can't do on the internet -- and with all day I feel like I have time so that I can browse.  Even the constant hemorrhaging of money doesn't seem that bad if you do it in one big concentrated orgy of spending... :)

So, that was pretty much me (above)..... well, minus the coat.  And the hat. And the scarf.  It was like 77 degrees here in San Diego -- so actually donned my vox apparel (t-shirt from the SanDVox meet-up) when I headed out.

Fine fine fine -- I got tagged by Liz to post five things that most people don't know about me:

1.  As a child, I was hit by a car.  Twice.

2.  I used to read in church when I was in school -- even when I was pretty young -- 3rd or 4th grade -- and once I read the word "brazier" (which is a container for fire), but pronounced it as you would "brassiere" (which, of course, is a container for something else entirely).  I was curious as to why the priest and congregation were snickering.

3.  I was accepted to the Naval Acadamy at Annapolis, but chose not to attend.

4.  I once drank 23 shots of vodka in an evening with two friends (he had 16; she had 11) because the people we wanted to go to the sophomore Winter Ball with chose to go with other individuals.  Boy -- that was a long day the next day.

5.  I've worked for DuPont twice -- once in the building where nylon was invented, the second time in the building where teflon was invented.

There!

I now tag hapalove, mndoci, joie, rick, and blogmonicablog.

What books did you love as a child? 
Submitted by hearts. 

This was a great question as it made me recall an interest (ok, my mom might have said an obsession) that I had back in grade school and hadn't thought of in a long time.  My sister had read Nancy Drew books, and my brother tended towards the Hardy Boys books.  I, too, read my fair share of the Hardy Boys, but the first series of books I really got into was a series called "Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators".

The series premise was there were these three teenage boys that would solve mysterious crimes.  There was the brainy Sherlock type (his name was Jupiter), the action guy (his name was Pete) and Bob (he was the library-researcher smart guy).  Jupiter had been a child-TV star and so knew Hitchcock, who would "write" the introduction and an epilogue.  AF would sometimes lead them to the mystery, and he would always share a debriefing session with the three lads at the end -- good exposition just to make sure their young readers got all the plot points.

I think I liked them more than the Hardy Boys because these guys were younger (like me at the time) -- they were 12-14 years old.  They couldn't drive -- and they always had to sift through clues to get to the bottom of the mystery.  Of course, in classic Scooby-doo-esque stylings, they played up the mystery as "supernatural" and through their investigation would figure out what was really going on.  I probably had ~25 or more of these before moving on to more "serious" reading.  I bet those three could have figured out what's been happening on the LOST island by now!

Wow, do I ever wish that I'd saved those old hardbacks, or what?