What drives people to such inexplicable depths of unhappiness and hopelessness?
Why are we so useless in driving away those insecurities and sadness?
Today was, in a word, fabulous. Bbq at Oxford Circle Park with a whole bunch of CS dept folk and a few straggling electrical engineers on an absolutely gorgeous day - sooo awesome. Food was excellent once they got the grill going. (Hahahhaha… Tony was sticking his hand into the grill moving the charcoal around, and we must have seemed pretty clueless because finally the couple who was watching us finally took pity and came over and told the guys how to do it.) Company was even better. (Oh no, do I detect sentimentality creeping into this??)
Tons of pictures will be uploaded. I’d say the highlight of the bbq was everyone’s eventual migration to the playground, which featured climbing opportunities & swings & a spinning contraption. A few people brought their kids. Watching Jim’s son play w/Chris’ daughter (they’re both uber-tiny and young) was adorable, because … well, it’s cute to see two little kids of about the size of dolls playing together. Chris’ daughter liked to share a lot. She’d point to food she wanted, and once she got it, would hand it to someone else. Jim’s son was really into the quail eggs. Heheheh. Jim’s daughter was fearless, reckless, and sooo full of energy. She liked the pics of my dog, and of course it makes her THAT much cooler.
As for the CS folk… well, ^^;; it was amusing to see how the four (five?) EE people stood off to one side and didn’t really interact w/us, except maybe much later when the food got cooked. Tons of fun moments… Tony was crawling in every which way through the monkey bars. There were a few times when it seemed like he’d plunge headfirst, but he held on. Jim’s kids were huuuge fans of the spinning thing… I went on it myself. The first time wasn’t so bad, but the 2nd time I started to slip off, and panic, panic, panic!!! Heheheh.
I’ve come to the conclusion that I far too easily amused. No decision as to whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing. One the one hand, it makes it easy for me to smile constantly. On the other hand, people who smile too much are creepy.
Do NOT see the Silent Hill movie. It’s such a disappointment. So sooo bad. Not scary at all, but plenty gross - especially if you like flesh eating giant bugs with little human faces that scream. Ok. I admit I thought the coal/zombie babies were cute. But they’re present in only one scene.
V for Vendetta was much better. But some of it really felt cheesy. So… save your money to see V!
Apartment hunting has begun ^^;;
Farmer’s market is, without a doubt, my favorite event of Wednesdays and Saturdays. Yesterday there was a middle school band playing in the park. Pretty neat… it reminded me of Pops in high school, hehehe… only our Pops was always indoors, in a gym.
“Discovered” Watermelon Music today. Found out that they do re-string bows. Wee! Got a mute, which kinda works well… (I wonder what happened to my old one?) so now I can screech all I want and my neighbors won’t be THAT annoyed. I also perused through the selection of moooosic (paltry). Actually, the selection wasn’t too bad, but they didn’t have the piece I was looking for. I wonder why mooosic is so expensive? I mean, seriously, $14.95 for one concerto/sonata? it’s like… one dollar per page, and that’s if they give you the piano accompaniment.
Potluck yesterday was fun. Electronic taboo is even more fun than taboo w/cards largely because of the agitated beeping that makes you paaaanic!
You know how we had those creepy squirrels in wellesley? Here, their equivalent (besides more creepy squirrels) are bluejays. Seriously, those birds are not afraid to come up to you as you’re having lunch and eye your food and approach closer and closer until you have to shoo them away. As Francis says, “don’t feed them meat, or they’ll develop a taste for flesh. And don’t give them tofu, or they’ll develop a taste for vegetarians.” You know if there was ever a zombie attack, those bluejays would be dangerous little buggers.
And speaking of creepy critters (ok. i know this is a bad pun. but has that ever stopped me before??) goooooos is coming to visit in June!!! <3
Happy birthday to my dog, Sarabi, who’s SIX!!! (She’s not a creepy critter.)
Or, perhaps Conny’s sister and her husband do, as they are reputedly always followed by rain. But I won’t gloat about how it turned rain into sun - hubris always leads to bad results. Like bloody deaths and floods.
In any case, the weather was unexpectly (but pleasantly) sunny and warm. I wish I had more time to walk around. The weather report says it’s supposed to be high 60s and sunny all next week. *crossing fingers for Saturday (Farmer’s Market)* I’ve decided that I’m going to take photos of all the eggheads, just because they’re such extraordinary looking things. And I’m going to hunt down (as in photograph) the fearless bluejays who keep hanging around our tables when we’re having lunch.
Oh, photos from spring break are up, by the way. (If you know where to look :))
Rain rain go away, come again when I’m not in town.
It was absolutely GORGEOUS on Saturday. I walked to Farmer’s Market, and it was so packed. There was a small group of musicians (string inst. and an accordion player) who’ve been showing up regularly to do eastern european type fiddling music. Really really neat to watch. Of course I got bread from Village Bakery… And since then, every day has been rainy. Bah. And the stupid rain’s not even keeping away the allergies.
In other news, oh - I lie. There is nothing significant, actually. I’ve been increasingly amused by the Hollywood Computing Capabilities in shows like CSI. One example that had me laughing was the IP address that looked like 3xx.xxx.xxx.xxx (’x’ being replaced by some number.) And another scene, where the IPs were something like xxx.xxx.xxx.xx09 and xxx.xxx.xxx.xx08 and the guy remarks on the 2nd IP, “You can tell it’s forged because it’s off by one number!” And the oh-so-fancy interface to do a reverse DNS lookup. Maybe HCI people need to watch these shows and movies to plan out user interfaces for future software projects…