2006-04-17 03:00 UTC Keeping busy, once more with feeling
I bought some stools from IKEA after failing to find any stools at Crate and Barrel. That wasn't originally intended as a metaphor.
I bought some lamps at the same time. I've been living in my flat so long I've had to renew the lease, yet this is the first time I've had actual lamps in my bedroom here.
A side-effect of getting lamps was that now, all the light switches actually do something. Two of them didn't do anything when I moved in, because they are each simply wired up to a random socket in the wall. Now one of them controls my 6001/6021/6051 setup and the other one controls one of the aforementioned lamps.
Kerz and I went to the Hiller Aviation Museum in San Carlos to see some of the Bay Area ETE's modules. All had impressive modelling work, and one in particular had hand-built dual-gauge track, which was quite impressive. However, all the layouts were clearly designed for automated block operation in a loop, there weren't any operations going on. Boring. We're considering joining some sort of club so that we can exchange our extensive layout design experience for some modelling ability, to make our layout look fancy.
I bought seasons 1 and 2 of Drawn Together from iTunes. It wasn't as good as everyone (Ben) was making out. Fart jokes aren't funny, even if the characters comment on the fact that fart jokes aren't funny. Still, the parts that used intelligent writing rather than crass attempts at shocking the viewer were worth watching.
I saw V for Vendetta with Jaimi a few weeks ago. Highly recommended. I saw Thank You for Smoking with treaster. The main character in this movie joins Bernard Woolley as one of my heroes.
Other things I've seen recently include Cidade de Deus (awesome), Conan the Barbarian (aweful), and On Her Majesty's Secret Service (ok).
I went rock climbing at Planet Granite. I haven't quite worked out how I feel about rock climbing yet. It's hard work, but getting to the top is nice. I don't know if I'd call it fun per se, but it is definitely good.
I went to Eric's Villa Vineyards party several weeks ago, and Andrés and Theresa's housewarming more recently (mmmm... chocolate fondue with fruit...), and have been going to Bab5 whenever it's within cycling distance (and once when it was in the city, thanks to Nori).
I read Orlando and am reading The Master and Margarita, as part of widening of my cultural horizons.
I went to buy some apple juice at Trader Joe's the other day. All they had were 3.8 liter bottles. It's like someone took Europe and applied a scale transformation. Crazy.
I ████████████████████████ at work, saw Al Gore give a talk on the global climate crisis (see Simon's commentary, Piaw's commentary, and the movie when it comes out next month), have ████████████████████████████████████████████ (indeed, I am ██████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████, which is quite confusing), and have been regularly going to games night on Wednesdays. I've set up two Games Nights so far, one at Opera and one at Google, and in both places they've taken on a life of their own. It makes me happy.
I hope it stops raining soon.