Wayne and Rebecca Madsen

Sunshine, by Robin McKinley

I read this over Christmas, being biased from the moment I picked it up because it was written by one of my favorite authors. I started to worry about 80 pages into the book when I felt I could take or leave the book and not be concerned about what happened; I just wasn't very into the book like I had been with other McKinley books. I didn't like the main character, Sunshine. At all. I was bored with her, I disliked being "in her head", and she didn't "do" anything - things just "happened" to her. She discovers her powers, but they seem like something she has no control over. I usually like McKinley's female characters because of their spunk - Sunshine was just a self-centered brat.

The book picked up a bit when we got to know one of the vampires. I was intrigued by the character development of the vampires, even though I was disturbed that I wasn't supposed to like them. I would have liked to see more of Constantine. He had strength of character, going against what most other vampires' natures are. He did things on purpose. He was...interesting.

I think one of the things that bothered me was that it felt a lot like a retelling of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I rather enjoy McKinley's retelling of fairy tales. But I didn't like Buffy in the original, and I liked it even less in this retelling. I advised Wayne against reading this one. Which is sad, because he likes Robin McKinley books. :)

P.S. I found this in the "youth fiction" section, but there was a part that I myself skipped. A little too much detail in one part for my taste....which was unexpected for a McKinley book. Plus all the violence....

Over Sea, Under Stone
by Susan Cooper

This is definitely not a good book for reading aloud. We struggled through about a third of it, where Wayne kept complaining that "nothing was happening." He was right, of course, but I decided to finish the rest of it by myself, so I could skim. There was just too much...detail...and not enough character development or plot development.

Once I was free to skim because I stopped reading aloud, the book became more interesting. (I feel a little bad that I encouraged Wayne to give up on it so I could skim!) Whether the pace picked up because I could skim, or whether it would have anyway, I'm not sure. I think it was because I could skim though. The children in the book weren't the sharpest crayons in the box, and they spent much of the book talking amongst themselves (or falling into traps) about the things they were discovering, instead of...well...doing things. It seemed like an adventure book without much adventure until the very end of the book. I do admit not skimming at all when they came to the last step of their treasure hunt!

I hope the rest of the Dark is Rising series isn't as slow as the first book. There's gotta be a reason it's the "Dark is Rising" series, and not the "Over Sea, Under Stone" series. Here's hoping.

Bums don't carry cardboard signs anymore. That's what we learned yesterday. We wandered around San Jose and Santa Cruz looking for someone with a sign so we could buy it off them. Wayne and his classmates are becoming art collectors for a bit here. If we can find any panhandlers carrying a sign, that is -- and convince them to sell it [a long explanation to this one... so only ask if you want to hear it. -wayne]. Didn't they used to stand on medians before freeway entrances?

We had a graduate student potluck to go to on Friday night. Wayne wasn't excited about going, because they combined "first semester review" with the "potluck social" this semester. That meant we weren't just going to eat and socialize, but he had to give a presentation as well. Fortunately he was able to present fairly early so he could relax and enjoy the rest of the evening. It was a very informal "review" process. The first-year graduate students got feedback from whoever just happened to "feel" like saying something to them afterwards. [and i wasn't so lucky.]

Wayne started having homework to work on in the evenings this week, so several nights he worked on homework and class readings while I worked on other things. I finished sewing my skirt this week, and I get to wear it today. I'll take a picture and post it later (after we get ready for church...). Wayne also has an 8am class to be at, so I made it in to work a lot earlier than usual Tuesday and Thursday. A lot. I'm not so much an...early bird...it won't be easy for me to do this the whole semester.

One of my co-workers based in the India office arrived in this area Wednesday. She's going to spend a couple of weeks in our headquarters before returning to India. We struggled at lunch time to think of "American" food we could introduce her to. Most of the places we normally go are Greek, Italian, Mexican, Brazilian...we finally came up with hamburgers (she was okay with eating beef). But what else is genuinely "American" cuisine? We decided philly cheesesteaks are an American invention, as well as southern BBQ. Are sandwiches? What else?

We also had a chance to try Vietnamese pho (pronounced FA, as in "a long long way to go") this week. It's a soup, apparently. Maybe I've had it before when Karl introduced me to some Vietnamese food, I don't remember. One of the couples Wayne home teaches introduced us to this Vietnamese restaurant [Paul is Vietnamese], and it was pretty good. It's nice to try food you don't have very often.

And for kicks and giggles this week...Wayne made me a blanket tent early Saturday morning and we had quite a relaxing silly morning. And during the week I hid "treasures" (aka bags of gummy worms) around the house when Wayne worked from home and would periodically design a "treasure map" that Wayne could follow to find a nice treat. Yay for silly fun!

This doesn't bode well!

-Rebecca, after the bodywash bottle fell on her head in the shower

Raspberry and lemon pinwheels and whirlybirds
---------------------------------------------------
1 cup defrosted or fresh raspberries
1 cup plus 3 TBS flour
1/4 tsp baking powder
1/8 tsp salt
9 TBS (1 stick) butter
1/2 cup sugar
1 egg
1/2 tsp vanilla
3/4 tsp almond extract
1 tsp lemon zest

Puree raspberries in food processor. Use the back of a spoon to press them through a strainer to remove seeds. Separate 2 TBS of puree.

Mix 1 cup flour, baking powder, and salt.

Put butter in large mixing bowl and beat with electric mixer on medium speed for 15 seconds. Add sugar and beat until blended, approx. 1 minute. Mix in egg yolk, vanilla and almond extract. Add flour mixture and mix until smooth dough.

Remove half the dough to a medium bowl and stir in lemon zest. On low speed, mix 2 TBS of raspberry puree and the remaining 3TBS of flour into the dough. Form each piece of dough into a five inch disk. Wrap each in plastic wrap and refrigerate until firm, about an hour.

Roll each piece of dough out between two sheets of wax paper into a rectangle about nine by six inches, about 1/8 inch thick. Use a pastry brush to brush egg white lightly on the lemon dough. Wax paper side up, press the raspberry dough on top. Trim the edges and discard the top piece of wax paper.

To form pinwheels, roll the two layers of dough into a tight cylinder, starting on a long side and removing the remaining piece of wax paper as you roll. Gently press the seam along the length of the roll to seal it and trim any ragged edge. You will have to roll about nine inches long. To form whirlybirds, roll the stacked dough from the long sides from each end ot the center, forming two thin rolls that are attached. Remove the wax paper as you roll.,. roll will be about nine inches long. Freeze either roll unbacked or refrigerator for about one hour until cold and firm then slice and back the cookies……

350 DEGREES, slice into 1/4 slices. Cookies about ten minutes
Makes 36 cookies.

Goat Cheese and Fennel on Sourdough
------------------------------

1 Fennel bulb
1/4 cup olive oil
1/2 medium red onion, chopped
1 TBS pernod
salt and pepper
4 slices sourdough bread
1 garlic clove, minced
8 oz. goat cheese
1/8 tsp cayenne pepper
pinch of thyme

Cut off stalks of fennel bulb and remove sprigs from the stalks. Throw the stalks away. Cut bulb heart into 1/4 inch squares. Heat oil in pan and add fennel bulb pieces and red onion pieces. Cook for 10 minutes until tender. Stir in Pernod and salt and pepper. In a separate bowl, mix goat cheese with fennel sprigs and cayenne pepper. Cover each sliced of bread with 1/4 of the goat cheese mixture. Top with the onion and fennel. Put sandwich together. Best served with thick bread slices.

Makes 2 sandwiches.

"Trinkets such as key chains which come as free bonuses with the purchase of some luxury product, but which end up being traded back and forth as valued collectibles in their own right, reflect a mystical self-abandonment to commodity transcendence. Those who collect the trinkets that have been manufactured for the sole purpose of being collected are accumulating commodity indulgences — glorious tokens of the commodity’s real presence among the faithful. Reified people proudly display the proofs of their intimacy with the commodity. Like the old religious fetishism, with its convulsionary raptures and miraculous cures, the fetishism of commodities generates its own moments of fervent exaltation. All this is useful for only one purpose: producing habitual submission."

That, my friends, is beautiful.

Some good words from our friend Guy Debord.

"Cyclical time is already dominant among the nomadic peoples because they find the same conditions repeated at each stage of their journey. As Hegel notes, “the wandering of nomads is only nominal because it is limited to uniform spaces.” When a society settles in a particular location and gives space a content by developing distinctive areas within it, it finds itself confined within that locality. The periodic return to similar places now becomes the pure return of time in the same place, the repetition of a sequence of activities. The transition from pastoral nomadism to sedentary agriculture marks the end of an idle and contentless freedom and the beginning of labor. The agrarian mode of production, governed by the rhythm of the seasons, is the basis for fully developed cyclical time. Eternity is within this time, it is the return of the same here on earth. Myth is the unitary mental construct which guarantees that the cosmic order conforms with the order that this society has in fact already established within its frontiers.

"The social appropriation of time and the production of man by human labor develop within a society divided into classes. The power that establishes itself above the poverty of the society of cyclical time, the class that organizes this social labor and appropriates its limited surplus value, simultaneously appropriates the temporal surplus value resulting from its organization of social time: it alone possesses the irreversible time of the living. The wealth that can only be concentrated in the hands of the rulers and spent in extravagant festivities amounts to a squandering of historical time at the surface of society. The owners of this historical surplus value are the only ones in a position to know and enjoy real events. Separated from the collective organization of time associated with the repetitive production at the base of social life, this historical time flows independently above its own static community."

More words by Guy Debord from his The Society of the Spectacle, although I agree less with these paragraphs than the last entry I made. I have been trying understand what I think about time and it's relationship to my work over the past while after someone pointed out that one of the principle factors in everything created is the creator's perception of time. This thread of thought can only be grasped when you consider what would change about your work if your perception of time were to change. I know my work would change dramatically. Maybe that is only because my work so dependently works with time. Yet, I don't even understand clearly how I view time.

Time, for me, ultimately doesn't exist. Call me quaint, but I've always believed that time is a referential creation by man which is terribly superficial. It only exists as a counting system which purports to give us a reference point for history. Time and history are two separate entities which are often confused, but must be kept separate. History relates better to memory and symbolic representations than to a numbering system, like time. Sometimes the two cross over: usually in the present tense, which can't actual be measured, calculated or captured which has lead many to claim that it doesn't exist. Time is fictional. Memory and history are put into a different category.

I view memory and history as being a rhizomatous archive which is recategorized and reorganized according to the present experience of memories. In my recent studies, I have been fascinated with how data holds no intrinsic value, but is given value through collection and categorization. Often people talk about how "you can make the numbers speak" in anyway you want. I'm not sure about that, but what I do know is that the "numbers," as they stand, are numbers only. Memory works in the same vein: erratic and shifting, creating new structures in accordance with our contemporary purposes. Last week my professor cited Walter Benjamin that "you can only understand a point in history at some other point in history." I'm bothered by the idea of points in time and "clearly" understanding, but I do think that historical repossession happens all the time. We give meaning to the past, the past does not give us meaning.

Returning to Guy Debord, I don't know if I believe the Marxist concept of wealth-power and it's control over historical time.

I resumed training in java this week, requesting that Rebecca teach me some things about reading and writing to external files. Now that I have a rough beginning in programming java, I have decided that I want to learn how to access database files and mine the information. So after I have the groundwork laid for understanding IO interfaces, I will soon learn about algorithms.

I keep calling java "javascript." Rebecca explained that javascript is for web pages; she doesn't know javascript. I think it is a remnant of calling the code for flash design "actionscripting." This problem, along with many other communication problems, reveals that my language isn't entrenched into the world of java. Let's review the process of what I learned this past week.

Initially, I explained to Rebecca that I wanted to learn how to create, access, write and read to external files. Eventually, I would like to learn some good data mining skills, but for now I need to get the basics down. She then referred me to several sites which went over some of the basic principles of the IO interface java uses. What does IO interface mean? I have no idea. Possible I I[n] - O[ut], but your guess is as good as mine. Rebecca is pressuring me to get used to the "Java API," which is the online database of java commands and an explanation of what each class/method does; however, since it reads worse than stereo instructions, I haven't been able to figure out how to make sense of what the Java API says. I have come to the understanding that the Java API is a real semiotic threshold for making sense of the community of programmers who use java.

This first group of code follows very accurately to the examples given to me. Mostly, I copied the code directly from the websites and then posthumously figuring out what the code had done. Rebecca has convinced me (another threshold, in my opinion) that much of learning how to use code revolves around the copying of other code posted on the internet and then deciphering the language meaning afterwards. This teaching method, not through understanding first and then correct usage afterwards but through mimicking, creates an interesting parallel for language development in children: adoption and then comprehension.

package fileReader

public class MainCode {
public static void main (String[] args) throws IOException {
File file = new File ("myData.txt");
Scanner scan = new Scanner (file);
int num, square;

while (scan.hasNextInt()){
num = scan.nextInt();
square = num * num;
System.out.println("The square of " + num + " is equal to "+ square);
}
}

}

The previous block of code accesses the external file, myData.txt, which had been created on my computer prior to running the code. This code would not create the file, to my knowledge, but only read it for integers. Many of the features used in this block of code I had already used in my earlier lessons, such as printing to the console and creating a scanner. In fact, the only two new symbols of language I "learned" from java in this block was the class object File and the parsing method hasNext, both of which are immeasurably important in reading information. I had to verify with Rebecca if I understood correctly about File objects and hasNext methods. I'm still a bit hazy on when something is an object and when I am calling a method.

The following block of code is a simple file writing program which introduced me to the printStream class.

package fileWriter;

public class MainCodeWrite {
public static void main (String[] args) throws IOException{
File file = new File ("myData.txt");
PrintStream print = new PrintStream (file);

Scanner user = new Scanner(System.in);
System.out.print("Enter your text here: ");
String finaltext;
finaltext = user.nextLine().trim();
print.println (finaltext);

}

}

package filereader;

import java.util.*;
import java.io.*;
import java.text.*;
import java.lang.*;

public class MainCode {
public static void main (String[] args) throws IOException {
int num, square;
Scanner user = new Scanner (System.in);
String fileName;
System.out.print("Please type file name to access: ");
fileName = user.nextLine().trim() + ".txt";
File file = new File(fileName);
Scanner scan = new Scanner (file);

while (scan.hasNext()){
if (scan.hasNextInt()){
num = scan.nextInt();
square = num * num;
System.out.println("The square of " + num + " is " + square);
}
else{
scan.next();
}
}
}
}

package readWrite;

import java.util.*;
import java.io.*;

public class MainCode {
public static void main (String[] args)throws IOException{
// this is where I declare my little variables
double num, square;
String user;

//this is the first declaration of the scanner, also determining the name for the file to be created
Scanner scan = new Scanner(System.in);
System.out.print("Enter the name of the file you wish to create: ");
user = scan.nextLine().trim() + ".txt";

//the file is then created by using the data in the string, user
File myFile = new File (user);
myFile.createNewFile();

//I then open a printstream IO interface to write to the file, using the data now put in the string, user
PrintStream myPrintStream = new PrintStream (myFile);
System.out.print("Enter data to process: ");
user = scan.nextLine().trim();
myPrintStream.println(user);
myPrintStream.close();

//redefine the scanner, scan, to read information from the external file, myFile
scan = new Scanner (myFile);

//loop, to read each clump of data, see if it is a number and then do some math with it
while(scan.hasNext()){
if(scan.hasNextDouble()){
num = scan.nextDouble();
square = num * num;
System.out.println("The square of " + num + " is " + square);
}
else{
scan.next();
}
}
scan.close();
}
}

Last night, we had another fancy dinner cook-off with some friends (with nice seared duck and some pork/gouda open faced sandwich things) and our friend, Chris, told this joke:

A man went into a pet store one day. He said to the clerk “I want a parrot, and it better be able to talk.”

The clerk replied “We have one talking parrot, but we’ve had some trouble selling it.”

“I’ll take it.”

“But…”

“I don’t care, I just want a talking parrot.”

When the man brought the parrot home, he placed it on its perch. Immediately, the bird let loose with a string of expletives. Cursing and squawking, it paced back and forth on its perch. Hours passed, and the bird still wouldn’t say anything but curse words. Finally, late that night, the man burst out of his bedroom in frustration. “Shut Up! Shut UP!”

“*bleep* up! *bleep* UP!”

In a frenzy, the man grabbed the raucous bird, and thrust it into the freezer. Immediately, the bird let out a string of expletives. After 5 minutes of squawking and cursing, the freezer suddenly fell silent. Worried, the man cautiously opened the freezer door. The parrot calmly walked out onto the man’s finger. “Sir, I am most sorry for subjecting you to such language today. I solemnly promise not to curse in your presence again. I will do my best to be a kind and humble pet to you from this moment forward.”

Puzzled, the man placed the parrot back on its perch, expecting another outburst. Instead, the bird turned to him “Sir, may I ask… what did the chicken do?”

It's an oldy but goody, and now, on with the show.

Monday evening I had class until late, which seems to be the theme of this semester: wake up early and get home late. I'm amazed I still manage to get my bike home so late so I can ride it to my 8am class. Rebecca, in the meantime, tries to go in early when I go in early and goes in later when I'm coming home later. During the day, on Monday, I drove down to Santa Cruz to find a pan-handler's sign. Although I found a good one, my professor apparently has different tastes than me in what he considers "authentic pan-handling signs." He wants them used, I care for the content. I found a kid who couldn't have been much older than 18 requesting money because he family was kidnapped by ninjas and he needed to take karate lessons. While this pan-handling text has been passed around the internet for several years, it shows the astute business sense of the kid I bought the sign off of to have gone online, found the most active sign and used it to his advantage to get money from passer-bys. I'm still planning on entering this sign into the show, but I'm also attempting to get another one.

So, Tuesday evening the head of my area (digital media) gave me a good scare. Although some fantastic things are happening in this area (expanding to integrate the facilities and students with a prestigious residency program), this puts enormous pressure on the graduate students to take their work up a few notches as well as being more visible to the outside community. All of which, I'm not certain how to do. So I was in quite the panic Tuesday evening, but Rebecca was there to comfort me, so it all turned out fine.

Most of the second half of the week it has been raining here, so it is a good thing we decided against going camping up at Lehi park. In California, because there is no snow, people drive really slow in the rain to make up for not having ice to drive on. Rebecca and I decided Thursday morning that we would drive up to the city that afternoon to listen to a lecture/open forum with Manuel de Landa at the SFMoMA. We were hoping to hear more about his projects (especially his more recent projects on genetic algorithms), but instead he talked more theoretically about the notion of fingerprinting on artwork and singularities. Reminding Rebecca of projects she had worked on at UCSD.

But we hung out with some of the CADRE people afterwards and I was able to figure out how most people go about deciding who to put on their committee. I need to have a committee for my thesis decided soon, but I wasn't clear how to choose my professors (since there are only three in my area of concentration). [Apparently most people only have one or two professors from their area on their committee, and then go to professors in other concentrations. Reminds me of how they chose the third committee member for my thesis -- the graduate coordinator just thought a bit and said "so-and-so. He doesn't have too many students right now." -beck]

Saturday morning, after cleaning house, we again tried to find some good signs in downtown Santa Cruz, to no avail. We did, however, stop by the UCSC campus and that is a beautiful place. I can't imagine going to school in someplace so distracting. The entire campus is a huge redwoods forest and, especially on a foggy and rainy day like Saturday, the place has a very old growth feel to it. But I'm not going to school for the campus, I'm going for the connections? At least I should keep telling myself that.

Saturday evening, we invited some friends over for a cheese cook-off (with a center piece of duck). Unfortunately, some people couldn't make it, but the food was still really good and we chatted for a while after dinner. I'll be sure to post the recipe because it was well worth making again.

Pork Tenderloin Cubano
---------------------------
[This recipe has been adjusted to make it more fruity]

Marinade:
1 bunch green onions, chopped
1/4 cup finely chopped cilantro
3 cloves garlic minced
Juice of 1 orange
Juice of 1 lime
2 tablespoons honey
2 tablespoons black pepper
1 teaspoon ground curry
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon dried oregano

Pork Tenderloin:
1 pound 3/4 inch-thick pork tenderloin, trimmed & sliced into four pieces
1 tablespoon butter
4 ounces smoked Gouda cheese, sliced
baguette, sliced in 6 inch segments, sliced again in half
1/4 small red onion, thinly sliced

Pineapple Salsa:
2/3 cup chipotle based salsa (we tried a raspberry chipotle and it worked great)
1/3 cup finely diced pineapple

Cut pork tenderloin into eight pieces. Pound pork pieces with meat mallet between two sheets of waxed paper or plastic wrap until thin, approximately 1/2" inch thick. You want your fillets to be thin enough that when they cook, they will still sit on the sandwich rolls.

For marinade, combine green onion, cilantro, garlic, orange and lime juice, honey, pepper, curry, salt and oregano in a bowl and mix well. Put marinade and pork slices into plastic storage bags and seal tightly, allowing to sit for 2 to 24 hours. This lets the marinade really soak in.

For salsa, combine salsa and pineapple. Let stand at least 1 hour to allow flavors to blend.

When ready to eat, heat butter in large skillet over medium heat. Remove pork from marinade; discard marinade. Cook pork 5 to 6 minutes per side on high heat or until temperature reaches 155 to 160ºF and pork is juicy and barely pink inside. (Pork should be cooked in single layer in skillet; cook in two batches if necessary.) Top pork with cheese immediately after flipping the first time, to allow maximum time for melting. Gouda is NOT a good melting cheese (it mostly sweats), so you will need to cover the skillet to help the melting process. Place pork on baguette rolls; top with onion slices and salsa. Serve open-faced.

Serves 4 people.

We invited the Rock's over for a tasty cook-off. They made duck, we made some sort of pork and gouda cheese open-faced sandwich. The food was delicious and the next time we will try to get more people to show up. The most excellent cook-offs always involve many chefs competing for the best items on the menu.

• View album

Well, we finally made it down to the Monterey Aquarium. Our friends, the Rocks, got us some cheap(er) tickets and we went down this Saturday to see all the nice fish. The aquarium wasn't as large as I had expected it to be (with all the hype surrounding this being one of the nation's premiere aquariums), but what it might have lacked in expected size, it more than compensated with a large number of fish.
This aquarium was amazing and the exhibits were well designed. Especially amazing were the jellyfish exhibits and the tuna exhibits. When you're staring a massive tuna down the face, it really is quite a stunning experience.
We had a great time and we officially recommend people who appreciate the beauty of the ocean to go check it out.

• View album

We had stake conference today, so we're already home from Church before we would have even left home on a normal week. It's nice to have the rest of the day available to us. We'll see what mischief we can come up with later this afternoon. :)

Our successes this week include visiting a fun aquarium and finding a very tempting used bookstore nearby. We spent a couple of hours there Friday (since I had the day off) and had several large piles of books we were interested in. We narrowed it down by making a "to check out from the library" list, and ended up with a more reasonable selection. Unfortunately, the bookstore is en route between campus and our apartment; fortunately, the time of day I normally pick Wayne up instead of him biking home is late enough that they aren't open. But I'm sure there will be exceptions to that! [If it weren't for online reservations for libraries, we would be much naughtier at used book stores. - Wayne]

The Monterey Bay aquarium was a lot of fun yesterday. We went with our friends Chris and Alyssa and had a fabulous time. We got some nice pictures; my favorite part of the aquarium was seeing all the jellies dancing around. They were quite captivating. The otters were fun and playful, but not as stunning as the jellies were. Also, I had no idea how large tuna are. Really. No clue. And to think: they fit in such tiny cans in our cupboards! Tee hee.

Failures this week include a dessert auction and finding food to eat on valentine's day. We had no real plans on Valentine's day. Neither of us particularly care for the holiday. But I got home from work a little later than usual and it was a bit too easy to convince both of us that a holiday was a good enough reason to let someone else cook for us. Silly us. The first place we went to sat us immediately, but we quickly noticed how many people were waiting around with no food and overheard conversations between waitresses about how long the wait for food and checks was [the people next to us had been waiting a LONG time for ordering and the waiters were talking about just trying to get some water to some people]...so we left without ordering and thought to go to Outback. It was 8:30 at night by the time we got there, and we were told there would be over an hour wait for a table [why are there so many people in this world?! :P ]. We were about to leave when we were told "but the wait at the take-out is only twenty minutes." Ahh. There was our solution. We ordered an appetizer and some bread, and went home to enjoy the food. But mental note: our usual efforts to make a nice meal at home on the v-day are probably right on.

The dessert auction is a fundraiser the young women in our ward were doing to raise money for girl's camp. We decided we could help out with that, so we planned our schedules to show up for the auction. We had, oh, probably twenty dollars in cash on us; we thought that would be plenty to get something good. It didn't take long to see the bids were well over thirty, and sometimes over forty for each dessert. Wow. I don't think the young women really needed our help after all. It was fun to watch the bidding though, with kids egging their parents on ("come on Dad! you can beat that!") and whatnot. We didn't manage to come home with a dessert though. Who knew the desserts would be so popular [or at least the competitive auctioning]?

The weather here has been lovely this week - highs into the 70s. We even saw some kids jumping in the pool yesterday. It makes for nice walks to the park. Spring comes early here, I guess!

Cats and monkeys; monkeys and cats; all human life is there.

-Henry James (1843-1916)

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency is one of Douglas Adams' best books. A highly overlooked novel, due to the Hitchhiker stardom, it surpasses many of the books in this famous series in wit, charm and Adams' brilliant humor. But this review isn't about Holistic. Nope. It's about the sequel.

This book is not a horrible piece of rubbish. I never read Holistic until I was in my late teens because my parents/siblings read Long Dark Tea-Time and pronounced it unfit to be opened. By the time I had opened Holistic, I had long forgiven Douglas Adams for writing So Long and Thanks for all the Fish and gotten over the unfunny parts of Universe. But only now could I read Tea-Time and believe in the story...more importantly, believe it was written by Adams.

The problem is that this is a good story, a good fantasy story, without the usual heart that Douglas Adams wrote with. I did enjoy the read. I found the story interesting, even the conclusion of the mystery (who ever thought Adams would be good at the genre?) to be fulfilling, but Holistic is definitely the superior of the two novels.

Oh. And another thing. Some authors, like Douglas Adams, are VERY good with the way they phrase the experiences of the world in the book. Often times, Adams is over-the-top creative in his descriptions, leading you to a better understanding of the confused world. But an author should never use this literary device when explaining important complicated action sequences. It requires the reader to re-read a passage several times and still not clearly understand what happened.

Alas.

We've spent the past two nights trying to coax our newest visitor, Lux, out of hiding. Lux is Rebecca's sister Suzie's cat and is spending a few days with us (mostly hiding deep in our spare bedroom) while Suzie is on her way north to Seattle. More on this trip later, but trying to get Lux to befriend us has been a tricky situation. Sometimes that's the way house guests are. Even if they're cats.

Last Sunday night, we went with the Rocks to the Snell's house (does this constitute some sort of triple date?) to play a game called Munchkin. [fun game, fun people, fun time]

Monday morning was President's Day, so Rebecca's work kicked her out and required her to take a holiday. I, however, did not have a free day as SJSU doesn't believe in President's Day (although I guess they believe in Caesar Chavez day). So instead of running errands or getting personal projects done, Rebecca decided to skip the holiday and work remotely. That's good because it means we are able to save another day off for later. Sadly, though, we learned that the school sponsored trip to NYC was (probably) canceled, leaving our trip plans a little more open. We have been playing with going to various different locations. Anyone want to come with us to Germany over the fourth of July week? [or Scotland? or Jerusalem?]

Tuesday evening, I had a forum/panel with Steve Dietz, the curator of Zero One festival as well as many other projects. Most of the panel centered on Zero One and the potential reflection of this festival's content onto the city of San Jose. Currently in San Jose city planning committees, the theory for vitalizing San Jose's culture scene is a bottom up approach, with the city offering reasons for that bottom group of artists to start coming here. How this translates in my mind is that the Zero One festival and other activities like it are art festivals for artists only. Although little discussion centered on this dilemma (because it involves a discussion of many of the flaws and cracks in the bedrock of art history), the forum panel was good and as a curator, Steve Dietz is in the top of his class.

After my meeting, Rebecca and I drove up to our local IHOP to get some free pancakes. Tuesday was national pancake day and IHOP was offering a free stack of pancakes [significantly on fat Tuesday]. So we got some and had a very late (or early) breakfast.

Friday night Rebecca's sisters pulled into town. They had planned on spending the weekend in San Francisco but didn't want to drag the cat everywhere with them. Since they will be joining us for Sunday through Tuesday (Suzie's birthday), they made a pitstop in San Jose to leave Lux with us. Star has been very interested in getting to know Lux, but sadly Lux is too confused to want to get to know anyone else. It will be fun to have Suzie and Amy here for the next few days.

I had a long talk with one of my professors this week about my studio environment and difficulty I've had in working there. Or anywhere. We decided together that I really needed to clear out my studio of all my paintings in order to free up some mental space for working. Saturday, my studio mate and I filled up his truck and took my paintings home. This should be a great step in clearing out the mess my current working state is in. Then that evening, Rebecca and I played some games at Kate and Robi's house. We introduced them to Killer Bunnies and they really enjoyed playing Slapagories.

"Who's General Failure and why's he reading my disk?"

-Anon.