Chikuru

It's a gorgeous day in Austin. Perfect weather for rock climbing sizing conduits, conductors, and duct banks for a water treatment plant.

At rock climbing tonight, I managed to finish a route that Ramzi had put up that he hadn't conquered yet. This has never happened before. Then I tried the route I've never finished which involves one dyno move after another, jumping like a frog, from one hold to the next. Losing my grip on a hold, I fell and managed to slam my shin against my thumb, which got lightly crushed against the rock it had been holding onto. The thumb turned out to be OK, but then I noticed a golf-ball-sized-hail-sized bump on my shin. To my surprise, keeping the leg elevated and then applying ice (thanks, Ramzi), took care of the problem. So I will live to climb another day. Sunday, hopefully.

Friday night, I got to see Jenifer Thyssen perform with La Follia Austin Baroque. She has a crystal-pure voice that reminds me of the blue alien coloratura from The Fifth Element.

I highly recommend both.

On Monday Irvine Robbins, co-founder of Baskin-Robbins, died.^[1]

Today Baskin-Robbins announced it is going to start selling soft-serve.^[2]

I just found out that Austin will be doing more comprehensive recycling in October. They call it Single Stream Recycling. Finally, we'll be able to recycle all plastics marked #1 through #7, not just bottles marked #1 or #2. More types of cardboard will be recyclable including cereal boxes (used to be they would only accept corrugated cardboard).

This evening, Lyn and I went to see a belly dance performance featuring local instructors and their students. Our friend J was one of the students. She has natural dance ability and was one of the best in her class of nine. It was a little frustrating not being able to rewind, as I'm so used to doing with our DVR. I wanted to be able to watch all nine performers and to notice all the subtlety of the different movements. Belly dancing is all about movement isolation and it's fun to see it done well--to see the body move in ways it normally doesn't.

Highlights of the evening:

An eight-year old with a fan/veil thing that was bigger than she was.

A male belly dancer, Drakon, complete with makeup and earrings. He was one of the instructors, but in my opinion some of his students were better than he was.

A world-class belly dancer, Tamra Henna, who showed us what really good belly dancing looks like. I was very impressed with her precision, fluidity, and the speed at which she could vibrate.

I also enjoyed the music. It reminded me of Middle Eastern restaurants, of tabbouleh, hummus, and baba ghanoush.

What: Constellation, a site-specific aerial dance work from Blue Lapis Light
When: June 5-8, 12-15 2008
Where: Federal Buildings (J.J. Pickle Federal Building and the Homer Thornberry Judicial Building) in downtown Austin, 300 E. 8th St. (Entrance at Trinity St. between 8th and 9th Streets)
Times: June 5, 8, 12 & 15: 9pm
June 6-7 & 13-14: 9pm & 10pm (2 shows per night)

Please arrive 15 minutes prior to the show.

Tickets: $20 Prime Seating; $15 General Admission (Provide your own seating arrangement [blanket/chairs]); $12 Dance Umbrella members, students, seniors, and children.
Seating available at door. Advance purchase coming soon through AusTix – 474-TIXS (8497) or www.austix.com.

Blue Lapis Light presents Constellation, a reprise of our popular 2007 site-specific aerial dance work performed in downtown Austin at both of the Federal Courthouse buildings (one is 144 feet, the other 52 feet). Constellation features a large ensemble of dancers (including Laura Cannon and Nicole Whiteside), climbing experts, technical designers, and rigging experts.

In Constellation, the dancers will soar, ascend and descend across and between the faces of the buildings, reaching stunning heights (over 150 feet!). Don’t miss this chance to see one of Austin’s cultural highlights of the year!

View video from the 2007 performance here

Choreography: Blue Lapis Light
Light Design: Jason Amato
Sound Design: William Meadows
Costume Design: Laura Cannon

For more information please call 512.288.1929, email info@bluelapislight.org, or visit www.bluelapislight.org

“These women have become pioneers in a kind of aerial work that few others in Austin have ever attempted and only a handful of people in the country are doing. It's performance that is as physically demanding as it is daring, and yet they have managed not only to take it beyond stunt status to the level of true dance, they've made it look easy.” AUSTIN CHRONICLE

“(Artistic Director) Sally Jacques has perfected her own brand of artistic unity. She has united location with a rarefied form of modern dance. She has done so with impeccable taste and sentiment” AUSTIN AMERICAN STATESMAN

Blue Lapis Light, Inc. is funded in part by the City of Austin through the Cultural Arts Division, the Texas Commission on the Arts, Frost Bank, the James Dougherty Foundation, the Rachael & Ben Vaughan Foundation, the Alice Kleberg Foundation, Downtown Austin Alliance, the Southwest Strategies Group Inc., Schnurr, Inc., Gabrielle Sheshunoffand community support.

Yesterday, despite being near the nadir of a cold, I went to Eeyore's Birthday Party. Eeyore's birthday and I are almost twins (triplets?), so that makes it extra special. Every year I intend to go early and spend the day chilling out a picnic blanket watching people and friends come and go with a cooler of fun stuff to eat and drink and a good book to read. But every year something comes up and I let myself down. This year I blame the cold. (My cold. The weather was perfect.)

So, for the record: Next year, won't you join me at Eeyore's Birthday Party in Pease Park? And I don't want to hear any lame excuses like, "But I don't live in Austin!" or "But that's the weekend of NEFFA!" or "I'm really more of a Tigger person."

I promise to provide Eeyore's Birthday Bingo cards and to show up with a hammock, picnic blanket, food, drink, and a good book. (Raaga123 says that if we're allowed to bring books then she'll come too.) Meanwhile, perhaps you could help me come up with about items to populate bingo cards with. I'll start:

Leslie Cochran. That dude who wears nothing but a g-string and silver paint. A snake. A parrot. A dog wearing a confederate flag. Grieve juggling. Chikuru in a hammock. A couple in kilts (how cute would that be?). A man in a business suit (this I've never seen in all my years). A dog with wings.

Your turn (and I've left off some obvious ones to make it easy for you).

This morning, while still in Washington state, my folks, elder sister, Lyn, and I observed a tradition of my family--going out for pie. We like to go to Shari's restaurant where we can get Marionberry pie. Marionberries are a special breed of blackberry developed in Oregon by someone my folks used to know.

This evening I asked my dad about some of his engineering projects in the village of Kasheke where I grew up. He told a story of installing 40 feet of 6-inch pipe that he used to provide water from a spring down the side of a steep hill to a turbine that turned a 2 kilowatt generator. The pipe, which he purchased at a mine in Uganda, came in 20-foot lengths, which do not fit easily into a VW combi (what you probably know as a VW bus). So he had it cut into lengths that would fit in the combi, drove them to a tea plantation near our house where they had a welder, welded the pieces back together, put one end of the pieces in the combi as far as they would go, then dragged all the way from the plantation to our village.

The other day, our next-door neighbors told us a story about our house and its previous owners D and MJ.

One day, D noticed a cigarette butt in the swimming pool leaf skimmer. He passed it off as left over from a party. Later he noticed another one and began to wonder. MJ wasn't certain but it seemed to her the knick knacks on the kitchen window sill rearranged themselves once in a while. Then they noticed that the levels in their liquor bottles were going down when they shouldn't and that their cracker supply was dwindling.

One day the security alarm went off, which called in the police. While checking out the place, the police discovered a bedroll underneath the deck. A homeless person had taken up residence.

Somehow, D and MJ had forgotten to mention this when they sold us the house.

We do have locks on all of the gates to our back yard, but I'm making a point of checking the leaf skimmer more closely.

The one problem with rock climbing at the Main Event is that sometimes the gym is reserved by a private party. At least I didn't drive all the way from Georgetown like one of my friends did. They really should call us regulars to let us know when this is going to happen.

Yesterday I went to google.com to see if I could find any April Fool's pranks and failed. I did accidentally find one at google.com/calendar. I added an event to my calendar and noticed that the dialog box had an "I'm Feeling Lucky" button on it. I pressed the button and it added an entry for 8pm Saturday night labeled "Date with Matt Damon".

What was weird was that I didn't realize it was an April Fool's joke till the next day when raaga123 pointed it out to me. I just thought it was a wacky new feature.

Today Lyn and I started our twice-a-year tradition of celebrating each other's birthdays with a vacation day. We did San Antonio. Highlights:

• Karaoke last night at a cute, little, not-too-crowded, and not-too-loud bar with reasonably priced drinks.
• Breakfast this morning at Lulu's, home of the three-pound cinnamon roll.
• Meeting most of Lyn's coworkers.
• Doing the San Antonio River Walk.
• Doing the Tower of the Americas, including the 4-D Skies Over Texas theater ride.
• Visiting the River Center Mall on the River Walk.
• Relaxing with margarita and flan at a restaurant on the river walk.
  
• Visiting La Cantera, an upscale, outdoor, but pedestrian-friendly mall. It's similar to Austin's The Domain, but nicer.
  
• Watching Horton Hears a Who at the Rialto, a "theater bistro". Think of it as San Antonio's version of our Alamo Drafthouse. Nice movie, cool animation, good Mediterranean pizza.

I don't recommend the 4-D Skies Over Texas ride. Highlights of the "ride":

• A 3-D movie in which one image was so far out of registration with the other (in the vertical dimension) that it was best viewed by closing one eye.
• A vibrating seat that was more butt buzzer than vibrator.
• Rocking action in which each row of seats jerked forward, then back. Not unlike being on an airplane and having your seat kicked by the child behind you.
• A light spray of water. Be sure not to be carrying or wearing anything that could be damaged by water.
• Occasional blasts of air.
• There was supposed to be some sort of smellavision effect as well, but I don't think that was working.

Other than the 4-D experience, it was a wonderful mini vacation.

We had a pleasant little party with a few friends to celebrate Lyn's having cheated death for another year. I hope to have a similar celebration in two months. For a while the party degenerated into watching YouTube videos. I was thinking, "Shouldn't we be talking instead?" but then decided that watching YouTube videos is a good way to get caught up on pop culture and it's a lot more fun to watch these with a bunch of friends than by oneself in front of a computer. We also watched South Park's recent homage to the animated movie Heavy Metal. Not for the easily offended, but very clever in its own way.

I have got to get more aerobic exercise. One hour of ultimate with teams of four or five without subs and I'm pretty much shot for the day. But it was fun to get to play ultimate with grieve. I don't think I ever have before.

We went to Ruth's Chris Steak House with friends T&D this evening. They showed up at our house an hour early, which seemed a little overly punctual. Turns out they had a gift for Lyn, a really cool and very unusual dress they had picked up in Montpelier, France and were hoping she might wear this evening. She did and we both thanked them profusely for such a fine gift. She may be the only woman in Austin with a dress quite like it. I do know of one similar dress in the area, but it's in Round Rock (owned by D).

At book club we discussed Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar. Fifteen people attended. I think that's a record for our book club. Kudos to Jerry for recommending such an accessible book and thanks to Judy for hosting. The consensus was that the book is a good review if you've taken classes in philosophy, but that it is confusing as an introduction to the subject. Also, that most of the jokes are old, but that the book is still entertaining.

On the subject of jokes, Judy mentioned a person she once knew who wowed her with his seemingly supernatural ability to produce a relevant joke whenever the situation invited it. When she learned that this was the result of great effort and research on his part, she was disappointed. It meant he wasn't magically in tune with the universe. My reaction was, "That's like being disappointed to learn that Van Cliburn had to practice to play the piano as well as he did." But I guess I see her point. Also, her friend shows that if we want to be great joke tellers but aren't, that we are without excuse. It's not because we simply lack the gift, it's because we're too lazy to put in the required effort.

raaga123 and I have an annual tradition of observing April Fool's Day by receiving and giving presents, respectively. I spent some time this evening wrapping. They Might Be Giants helped by providing background music and video.

This evening we had a kräftskiva or "crayfish party" with a close friend, once removed, who will hopefully become a close friend. Highlights of this Swedish tradition are silly paper hats, which we made ourselves out of newspaper, bibs, paper lanterns, and crayfish cooked with dill. I like cajun-style crayfish, but I think I liked this even more. Our host also served homemade egg pie (which he called quiche), homemade bread, cheese, salad, homemade loquat wine, homemade peach wine, homemade jalapeño porter, and ice cream in homemade cones. Two or three times during the meal he favored us with a Swedish drinking song.

I felt honored to be a part of the celebration.