For the next seven nights (and four nights of the following week), Lyn and I will be spending our evenings on Lady Bird Lake rehearsing and then performing with Blue Lapis Light. Check out an interview by KUT here: http://kut.org/2011/06/devotion/.

KXAN also did an article on the performance: http://www.kxan.com/dpp/news/local/aerial-dance-company-flies-again.

Our contribution this time is canoeing (along with Frank and Brad who rappelled with us for the Impermanence show a couple years ago on the Federal building).

Check it out. Details here: http://bluelapislight.org/

Since I last posted about the Odin / Runes performance, we have presented various versions of the piece at the FronteraFest Short Fringe (Hyde Park Theatre) and FronteraFest Long Fringe (Salvage Vanguard Theater) and are now going to do a final, complete version at the original site. I say "complete" because the piece really isn't complete without the pecan tree.

For those that saw the original version, what we've added are five duets that, in my opinion, are the best part of the performance.
Here are the details:

Where: Komo Danceworks Studio at Ashby & Oxford Avenues.

When: Friday, Saturday, March 25, 26, 8pm

How much: Suggested Donation $15 (includes wine and cheese afterward)

My experience has been that those who enjoy watching dance performances enjoy the show. If watching dance performances isn't your cup of tea--did I mention the wine and cheese afterward?

About a month ago, I ran into a friend from my distant past who, I knew, was a dancer. I asked if she had any performances coming up and she said she did. She then mentioned that they needed an Odin for this piece--theirs had recently disappeared or flaked out. Specifically, they needed someone who was both male and willing to be suspended upsidedown from a tree. I met both criteria so I volunteered (after asking myself, "What would Feynman do?").

The group has been working on this for months. As of tonight, I've been involved for less than two weeks. The performances are this Friday and Saturday nights. It's billed as a work in progress and will be performed at the choreographer's home studio. (If anyone's interested in attending, she's asking for a $15 donation to help with the cost of a longer version of the piece at FronteraFest. Ask me for details.)

Highlights of the experience so far:

Rigging up a large pecan tree so it's suitable for rappelling. Thanks for the loan of the rope, Travis! Trying to rescuscitate the right side of my brain (needed in order to make sense of instructions from choreographers). A visit from Sally Jacques Wednesday night. She was concerned about the safety of the rigging (how sweet) and came by to offer advice at Sumi Komo's request (Sumi being the choreographer). Her advice was very helpful--she worked with me on moving into and down from the tree like a dancer rather than a monkey. A visit from Brenda Ladd Thursday night. Brenda (another friend of the evidently well-connected Sumi) is an excellent photographer that Lyn hired years ago. She took pictures of the whole affair and I'm hoping that some of them will be make me look more like dancer than monkey. (If anyone can do this, she can.)

I wanted to refer a friend to a picture of Tuppence and realized I didn't have one anywhere online.

Now I do.

Project Update Starting last Friday, my sleep schedule has been, typically: 0000-0400 (sometimes 0500), 0630-0700, 1230-1300, and 1830-1900. I am usually able to fall asleep by the end of each nap and feel refreshed afterward. After a week, we're not yet enjoying the dream of 3.5 hours of alert, happy wakefulness added to our lives every morning. And the added hours from 2200 to midnight are filled with wistful thoughts of slumber. On the other hand, I have actually been happier and more productive than usual at work this week despite feeling a little foggy during those hours. And I have been productive, if grudgingly, during the 1.5 - 2.5 hours in the early morning. I've really been enjoying my 1230 and 1830 naps and I like having four hours of up time to look forward to after supper instead of two. At this point, I have no intention of terminating the experiment any time soon, though I will do so if it's clear that my brain is suffering as a result of it. One other thing: that cot from REI is really comfortable!

Today, I finally figured out what has been causing our hot tub to intermittently become a tepid tub. It wasn't the pressure sensor or the heat sensor as I'd suspected, it was the little doo-hickey pictured at the left, part of a removable terminal block that was making a poor connection. The solution was to replace said doo-hickey with an unused one next to it.

At a party last night, I met Lori who introduced me to the concept of polyphasic sleeping, which she has been successfully doing for a whole 10 days now. She says it's working for her so far--that she has more energy and time. Ideally, she has three 20-minute naps during the day and sleeps just three hours at night, from 3am to 6am. Her husband enjoys sleeping too much and isn't willing to give up any of it. Besides, unlike her, he has a regular 8-5 job. She works at home and takes her naps at 10am, 4pm, and 10pm. I enjoyed talking to her about this at the party while coming up with a schedule that might work for me and give me more time to think. Below is a proposed schedule converted from scratch paper to an Excel chart:

Theoretically, with this schedule, after the initial, painful adaptation period, you really only need three hours of core sleep. We'll see how that works out. I put 30 minutes for naps on the schedule, figuring that it probably takes about ten minutes of overhead per nap. The first problem to solve was to figure out how to get in the lunch-time nap. Since the hour from 12:00 to 13:00 is sacred at work as lunch hour, this shouldn't be a problem if I can find a place to sleep. I came up with a solution that I think will work by searching on "cot" at the REI store (to which Lyn's sister gave me a gift certificate for Christmas (Thanks, sis!)). Here's what I found: According to the reviews, it's bulky, but very comfortable and good on backs. I went ahead and ordered one--it should arrive at our local store on the 26th. That gives me some time to work on weaning myself from caffeine (reported to have a half-life of over 5 hours) and potentially problematic for someone trying to nap efficiently. I'll have to let the folks at work know to hold all calls during nap time. I already often take the 18:30 - 19:00 nap. They say that if you get bored easily, this probably wouldn't work for you--it would be too hard to stay up when you're supposed to. My response: I fantasize about being bored! They also say that days 3 and 4 may be the hardest, so it's good to start on a Thursday. I suppose another possibility would be to take a longer core sleep (say, 11:00 to 03:30) and skip the nooner. References: http://dustincurtis.com/sleep.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyphasic_sleep

http://everything2.com/index.pl?node=Everyman%20Sleep%20Schedule

http://ohgodthechicken.com/

http://ohgodthechicken.com/sleep-discipline-experiment/

http://www.poly-phasers.com/enter.php

http://polyphasicsleep.info/index.php?title=Main_Page

http://sleepsask.blogspot.com/2007/08/summary.html He switched from a 04:00-07:00 core to an 23:00-02:00 core by mistake and discovered it worked a lot better for him. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-michael-j-breus/why-you-cant-hack-sleep_b_52047.html Looks like his very short post is just a critique of the Uberman or Dymaxion, not the Everyman. http://www.supermemo.com/articles/polyphasic.htm An attack on polyphasic sleep (or maybe just the Uberman schedule), rebutted by this article: http://www.puredoxyk.com/index.php/2006/11/01/an-attack-on-polyphasic-sleep/ I wonder if it works to alternate patterns, between Siesta, 2-nap Everyman, and 3-nap Everyman? On some days, the lunch-time nap won't be an option.

A very quick summary of our Halloween Party:

Three-year-old Owen in a lion costume won most adorable. Who can resist someone who says, "Tickle me faster!"? And I was the clear winner for most creepy. I was going for goth and ended up looking like Ozzie Osborne.

The fake tattoos worked well. I hope the eyeliner comes off before work on Monday.

I flew to Portland this morning, sleeping from Austin to SLC, breakfasting at the American Bandstand restaurant, and doing crossword puzzles from SLC to PDX. I had purchased a copy of Will Shortz's Greatest Hits: 150 Crossword Puzzles Personally Picked by the Puzzlemaster yesterday for the trip. I started with the first crossword in the book, a Monday puzzle, and am still stuck on part of it. I thought, "Wow, these are much harder than the ones in the Statesman." But then I did a few other Monday puzzles and they've all proved to be easy peasy. When I finish the Mondays, I go on to the Tuesdays. I've only started doing crosswords recently have have some catching up to do.

This evening I discovered that doing a crossword puzzle with family can be a lot of fun and a good way to remind people of stories. I did two puzzles this evening with Mom, Dad, Joy, and Bill A. I'd read out a clue and we'd work on the answer together.

Do try this at home.

This evening I heard a story I'd never heard before. Once, during the depression, 1934 I think it was, Uncle Bud killed a bear in the woods. From the experience my dad learned two things. 1) Bear meat tastes good. 2) Bear fat makes great doughnuts.

A final foodnote: Supper was tilapia ("samaki" in Swahili), potato salad, canteloupe, watermelon, banana bread with cream cheese, and tomatoes.

I spent the day with Sheena and her friends Rob & Cheryl at The Hundred Acre Wood (99.6, actually) building a yurt. Most of the work had already been done: drilling eight holes in a bunch of 9-foot 2x4s, ripping them into 1.5x0.3s (for the wall), ripping 8-foot 2x4s into 3.5x0.75s (for the rafters--I'm guessing on the dimensions), preparing a canvas wall and canvas roof, and mostly preparing a compression ring for the roof, made of two rings of plywood separated by thin blocks of wood to hold the rafters in place. The pictures below should make all of this clear.

We bolted together 66 1.5x0.3s into a lattice, stretched the lattice so that the slats met at 90-degree angles, pulled it around into a cylinder, connected the ends of the lattice to a simple door frame with dry-wall screws, tied three nylon ropes around the cylinder for strength (using a bowline at one end and a taught-line hitch at the other), built the roof by inserting the rafters into the compression ring (temporarily held up by two guys with 4x4 poles), and finally added the canvas wall and roof.

These folks at the Hundred Acre Wood are hoping to develop a self-sustaining community on the property over the next few years. It's an ambitious goal and I wish them the best of luck. They are building the yurts for some of the people who will be living on the property. The idea is that by living in a yurt rather than a house with electricity and running water, they will have to live "off the grid" in a more sustainable fashion.

Highlights from the Blue Lapis Light Impermanence performance:

Hanging out in the LBJ suite before the rehearsals and performances, doing a little yoga and watching Jason come up with new ways to balance people on his body (If you've seen the dance troupe Pilobolus, you know what I'm talking about.)

Rappelling off the 10-story, 140-foot J.J. "Jake" Pickle Federal building. That never gets old, though going over the edge has lost its scariness. I was able to capture a bit of the old fear by standing up on one of the columns that juts out from the windows. At the very top of the building, it's possible to stand on top of the column so that you are no longer suspended by the rope. If you fell, it would only be a few feet, but it's enough to kick the ol' reptile brain into gear, saying, "Hey, there's nothing between you and a concrete plaza besides 140 feet of air." Thanks to Lynn H. for getting me to try that.

The climb. Halfway through the performance, Frank and I get to climb four floors, which puts us halfway up the building. We use a technique called "stemming" to ascend between the columns that separate the windows and another technique called "mantling" to climb from one level to the next. Mantling is what you do to get out of a swimming pool that doesn't have steps or a ladder. After three floors, I was always pretty well winded (as was Frank, by his reports) and wondered whether it wouldn't have sufficed to just do three floors. But there was the satisfying sense of accomplishment that came with making it to the fourth floor, after which we turned upside down and let our belayers slowly lower us to the ground while we tried to avoid scrapes from the very sharp quartz aggregate of which the building was made.

The climb was the one part of the show that was able to give me a case of nerves. One reason for this was that it was possible to slip while climbing, which is disconcerting even though there is a rope to catch you (this happened to me once). By the end of the show, most of the fear went away, but even then, I really enjoyed being finished and then going over the side one last time to watch the dancers on the wall before joining them for the finale.

Talking to friends and others after the show. By the way, if you ever go to a show where a friend is performing, please take time to talk to them afterwards, even if you didn't enjoy the show. It will mean a lot to them that you came.

Pretending to be dancers during the last two pre-show practices. The last two days of performance, after rehearsing our first descent, we rappellers decided to try some of the moves the dancers were making--forward and backward flips, runs, and so forth. The feeling is (I assume) like being in close-to-zero gravity. We discovered that it isn't that hard to avoid crashing into the wall after jumping out. You have time to maneuver to get either a hand or foot into position to connect with the wall (rather than a head or a back). It was great fun and I hope to get the opportunity to try it again. While we were playing, I asked Amber, one of the dancers, if watching us made her think of monkeys trying to ride bicycles.She said no, but did suggest that we'd look more graceful if we pointed our toes.

A note on the latest Blue Lapis Light show, Impermanence: If you're thinking you've seen it all before because you've seen Requiem or Constellation, you'll be happy to know that this show features some completely new material, including

Five cloth performers at once Four performers on two cloths (two per cloth) in a piece that impresses me every time I see it and gives some people the willies (for fear the performers will lose their grip and splat on the concrete 20 feet below) A duet on the ropes that is incorporates a lot of new moves, some of which make me think of kittens playing in zero gravity

Actual climbing. Another climber and yours truly climb about half way up the building (using a technique called "stemming") before being lowered down.

The show continues through Sunday night. If you come, please say "Hi" after the show.

This is tech week for Blue Lapis Light's Impermanence, which means we'll be rehearsing or performing every night this week starting Monday. This show is in the same location as Constellation, but is a different show (and will have quite a few new elements). I recommend it.

Below are the details (Notice that this Thursday night's show (June 18) is a fundraiser and thus much more expensive than the other nights).




What: Impermanence, a new site-specific aerial dance work from Blue Lapis Light

When: June 19-21 and 24-28

Where: J.J. Pickle Federal Building

300 E. 8th St. (Enter on the west side of Trinity St., 800 block)

Time: 9:15pm

Tickets: $20 general admission, $15 seniors and students

ABOUT IMPERMANENCE

Presented June 18-21 and 24-28, 2009, Blue Lapis Light's latest site specific work transforms the J.J. Pickle Federal Building in downtown Austin into a brilliant yet meditational stage. Performers dance over the buildings' 150 foot side and bound through the air, floating, flying, bringing splendor and unconventional beauty to spaces no longer merely utilitarian. Featuring dancers, rappellers, lighting/sound designers and riggers, this awe-inspiring performance speaks to the fragility of our times: the need to be aware of the significance and beauty of each moment.

JUNE 18TH FUNDRAISERThe Premier Performance of Impermanence will preview on Thursday, June 18th as a Blue Lapis Light fundraiser. Before the performance at 7:30 PM patrons will have an opportunity to enjoy hors d'oeuvres, wine, live music and a silent auction. Guests purchasing tickets at the platinum level are invited to enjoy desert in the historic LBJ Suite after the performance. Tickets: $75 Gold and $100 Platinum for one and $175 for two.

I share a birthday with Bob Hope, JFK, and (thanks fraeuleinchen for pointing this out) Danny Elfman (he did the theme to the Simpsons, has done movie scores, and used to be with the band Oingo Boingo). And chidorho. And John Hinckley, Jr.

I celebrated by taking the day off and doing a little 4.5-mile walkabout down Barton Creek after which I met raaga123 for hearty breakfast at La Madeleine. During the walk, I listened to John Aielli's program Eklektikos on KUT. This was a treat because I used to listen to it all the time and don't now because it distracts from concentrating on work. His love of music is infectious.

Because of a cold, I spent a fair bit of the day napping. I wouldn't have been much good at work today. We did fit in a viewing of The Brothers Bloom. Fun, but flawed in my opinion. I think it could have been a much stronger ending with a different ending.

We also fit in a little rappelling down the Federal building. Our show is coming up starting June 18th. It was a beautiful day for it. I never get tired of hanging from a rope 130 off the ground and enjoying the Austin skyline.

Every year we go to the Adult Spelling Bee (thanks fraeuleinchen for keeping us apprised of the schedule) and every year I learn a new word whose spelling will be forever etched in my brain. Words like feuilleton and syllepsis.

In the first-round written test I made 19 out of 20 (having been inoculated as many times as I have, you'd think I'd know how to spell "inoculate" by now). This was enough to advance to the second round. In the second-round written test, I also made 19 out of 20 (misspelling "scleroderma"). This was enough to make it onto the stage with 22 others, including Lyn.

In the on-stage competition, unless you know most of the words in the dictionary (as perennial winner Geoff seems to), there is a lot of luck involved. If I'd been given "aficionado", I'm sorry to admit that I would have overdone it with the effs. My first word was "spongiform" (as in "bovine spongiform encephalopathy") and I doubt there was anyone on the stage who would have missed it. My next word was "zori". Having grown up in a house were we called sandals zoris, this was another gimme.

On my next round, the word was the name of a type of music indigenous to Congo (sounds like "Sue coose"). Of all the people at Threadgill's that night, it seems like more than concidence that this word should have gone to probably the only person there born in the Congo. Another gimme, right? Alas, while I had heard the word many times, I hadn't seen it spelled out (at least not often enough). My answer was close, but wrong.

I was happy to take fifth place--that's the best I've done at these things. (raaga123 has placed 4th and 3rd in past competitions.)

We dropped by the the Town Lake Animal Center when they first opened (11:30 AM) and found a lovely pair of litter mates, tabbies, one silver and one gold. Their assigned names were Molly and Erica, but I don't think those are going to stick. Suggestions? What we are considering so far:

Cat One and Cat Two Kitty and Kitty Kitty Yin and Yang Penny and Nickel (Nicky or Nicole for short) Lisa and Maggie Sasha and Malia

Laura and Nicole Felicia and Dolores (Lecia and Dolly)

Ginger and Adele Kathy and Katie Okay, when I say "we" are considering these names, I may be exaggerating. Lyn has already nixed several of these.

They are proving to be as cute as kittens and to have fine personalities. I think we'll keep them.

We had an hour to kill before the animal shelter opened so I consulted YPMobile on my iPhone, asking it for nearby vendors of "breakfast". Flip Happy Crêpes showed up in the list, just 0.6 miles away. And so here we are. It's an Airstream trailer with picnic tables in front of it. Open for brunch/lunch Wednesday through Saturday. They have both sweet and savory crêpes. I don't know what they taste like but they look good. (The service isn't super fast.)This just in--they taste good.

The latest Star Trek movie may well be one of the best action movies I've ever seen. Or is that just the Imax talking?

I spent a very pleasant day in at Eeyore's Birthday Party yesterday, hanging out (literally, in a hammock), reading a book, and watching people pretend to be hippies for a day. If you haven't been, I recommend the experience. Highlights:

Running into friends (fraeuleinchen and siodhe, sheenaqotj and Brian, Jack and Sandy, Gillian and family) Many dogs, one cat, one burro, and one pig (others reported a snake or two) Many drums Exotic and unauthorized smells Having half a dozen people tell me how comfortable I looked. (It is a very nice hammock, hand imported from Honduras, and one of my prized possessions and I hope that sheenaqotj returns it soon.) Triplets in a triple-wide perambulator A few Waldos. These were harder to find than I'd expected. I think they were hoping for a bigger turnout. Next year's is scheduled for the last Saturday in April.

Saturday is Eeyore's Birthday Party at Pease Park here in Austin. I'm planning to show up near the beginning and see if I can find a place to set up a hammock. Don't know if I'll dress up. There are supposed to be a bunch of Waldos there, so if you come and want to blend in, dress up like this guy.

This week's puzzler from Will Shortz on NPR (Sunday morning at 7:40 on KUT in these parts) was, "Rearrange the letters in MORE CORRUPTNESS to produce the name of a popular magazine".

This puzzle has proven to be remarkably viral at work and I've been impressed at how much harder it can be to unscramble 15 letters than the 5 or 6 you get in the daily jumble. I did figure out the answer today (finally!) while staring at the fifteen Scrabble tiles I'd taken in to work. The answer jumped out at me while I was on a teleconference call. (raaga123, by the way, figured this one out in ten minutes.)

Anyway, the answer is...

(drum roll, please)

...not as interesting as the following non-answers:

Computer Snorers

Errs on Computers

Mo's Current Prose

Corner Post Muser

Me Proust Scorner

No R.E.M. Procrustes and my personal favorite:

U R Corpse Monster

HBO has just started a new series, The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. If you haven't read the books, you should. The HBO series seems, so far at least, to be faithful to the books (or at least to the spirit of the books), has beautiful images from Botswana, and has great African music to boot. Lots of thumb piano.

Check it out.

Here's a picture of Lyn holding three golf-ball-sized-hail-sized hailstones. We picked these off the ground about an hour after they landed so there may have been some shrinkage.

Our cars were both safely at work when the storm hit. I saw several on the ride home that weren't as lucky. At the library there were several cars with rear windows completely crashed in. The rear window of one of the cars of one of our neighbors had three holes punched in it.

Our plants and cat seemed to have survived nicely.

I'll take a look at our roof tomorrow.

One cool thing about performing in an aerial dance troupe is getting to see the tops of buildings. I'm not saying it's the best part, but it is part of the experience. This is the first building I've seen that has eye hooks built in for anchoring window washers' platforms. These eye hooks are just the thing for suspending aerial dancers. Each of the three ropes we're using in this piece are connected to two hooks.

There performance is Wednesday evening (weather permitting) as part of the Hyatt's Grand Reopening Gala to celebrate its recent renovations. We'll be performing on the side facing the parking lot and the Palmer auditorium.

I went with raaga123 to the Dionysium this evening. It's hard to explain what this is, so you may as well just check out their web site.

There was a short lecture on the history of spam. There was a debate on gun control. There was a short lecture on Darwin. There was a short film, Muto, by Blu--very cool. It's a stop-motion animation made completely out of grafitti.

The lectures and debate were teases--you could tell that they could have been really good if the "performers" had had the time to prepare them as proper performances. Since they have one of these each month, I'm guessing that the performances/lectures are often thrown together at the last minute. But that's part of the fun.

The reason we went was to see Bill Meadows's "Loose Atoms". This was definitely a proper performance and one that Bill had carefully prepared and has performed before. He uses a Wacom tablet connected to his Macbook to turn a sketchbook into a synthesizer. It looks like he's writing, but he's doing much more--using the many degrees of freedom of the stylus (position, angle, pressure, etc.) to control the audio so that you hear words of a poem or music or percussion. Very hard to describe (without staying up past my bedtime)--you'll just have to hope to get the chance to see it for yourself. And you're in luck. He'll be performing as part of Fuse Box '09. In addition to "Loose Atoms", he is working up something that uses Wii controllers.

Another place you can witness Bill's wizardry is at Blue Lapis Light performances.

The other day a friend asked me, "Why is it that when I'm looking for something, I always find it in the last place I look?"

I said, "Lack of perseverance."

Question: When is a picture of a quarter worth 25 cents?

Answer: When you owe your blog buddy $0.25 for each week in which you don't post at least one picture.

Question: What kind of horse is pictured here?

Answer

If you are a Josh Whedon fan and missed his interview on NPR's Fresh Air on Thursday (and if you have a regular job, you probably did), you can catch it as a free podcast here or on iTunes. From this I learned:

Josh's dad wrote for Benson and Golden Girls. Josh's granddad wrote for The Dick Van Dyke Show. Josh wrote Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog with two brothers and a future sister-in-law. The Dr. Horrible DVD comes with a musical commentary. Not a commentary on the music, but a completely new set of songs about the show, including one sung by Josh himself. He's not a terrible singer, it turns out.

I also learned, while listening to this podcast, that I need to run more. This was my first run since snow boarding last weekend and I could still feel sore snow-boarding muscles.

It's not necessary to go out to a restaurant to have a great Valentine's Day dinner. Tonight we celebrated with the following lineup:

Filet Mignon Lobster Hacklefish Caviar (a decent made-in-America alternative to the really expensive stuff)

Green Beans Barley Bread fresh from the bread maker Cheese 14 Hands Cabernet Sauvignon from Washington State We rounded out the evening with Desperado, one of our favorite movies--great music, beautiful actors, wonderful directing. We interrupted the movie for dessert:

Chocolate Pot de Crème Blueberry Dessert Wine Decaf Espresso Thanks, raaga123!

I'm celebrating Darwin Day (it's his 200th birthday today) by watching a recording of Nova's Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial. Fascinating stuff--I recommend the program.

At Barnes & Noble on Sunday, I heard someone call out, "Is this anybody's baby?".

I turned to see that this came from a young woman holding a two- or three-year old.

The mother did show up after less than a minute. She didn't seem particularly distressed, but did apologize for inconveniencing the woman.

After telling the story to Lyn, we speculated about what the woman would have said if the mother hadn't shown up as quickly as she did:

"I have a perfectly good baby here at the 50%-off table. Anybody want to claim him? Cuz if not, I'm taking him home. Anyone? Going once...."

I normally do new-year resolutions on my birthday, but I don't want to wait until May to start on this one. I resolve to make my house greener this year. Here's a list of potential projects:

Put solar panels on the roof and an inverter in the garage so that I can sell electricity to the city during the day and buy it back in the evening. Austin is one of those cities that not only allows this, but encourages it with a rebate of up to $4.50 per watt (capped at 80% of the cost or $13,500, whichever is less). Since a typical system costs from $6 to $10 per watt, this could be as much as a 75% subsidy. More information here. Make the sprinkler system more intelligent. I had a few very expensive water bills last year because of leaks in the sprinkler system. A master solenoid valve would have eliminated leaks due to faulty zone control valves. And if I wanted to get really fancy, I could add a flow meter and monitor water usage so that if there were a leak I could find out right away. Put in rain barrels. The city sometimes subsidizes these. I wonder if I could use the swimming pool as cistern. I'd guess there is at least 500 gallons storage between the low and high levels of the pool. Replace toilets with water-saving models. Replace washer & dryer with modern, water / energy-efficient models. Replace refrigerator with modern, energy-efficient model. Replace air conditioner / heater with modern, energy-efficient model. (It might already be that.) Use compact fluorescent or LED bulbs. Plant a garden.

I do plan to continue to invest in the stock market, but in case it has even further to drop, I like the idea of investing some money in a more energy-efficient house. Besides, if the world as we know it collapses, it would be nice to have an efficient refrigerator and the means to power it.

After rock climbing, I went next door to an inauguration party. The food was excellent, though I didn't try the dish that looked like grilled spam on blocks of rice wrapped in sea weed. It turns out it was grilled spam on blocks of rice wrapped in sea weed. The hostess explained that it was Spam Sushi, a favorite in Hawaii.

"Oh, I get it--because our president is Hawaiian."

Well, born in Hawaii, anyway.

After all the other good food, I wasn't hungry enough to try the spam sushi, but I did take some home for tomorrow's lunch.

Here's a particularly fine example of the results of one my pet peeves: people refusing to take the top Chronicle because it's a little dogeared.

At work, I lent a flash drive to a coworker and made him promise not to use it for evil.

He said, "I never use my powers for evil."

I said, "Me neither. That's what my weaknesses are for."

A week ago, someone in our rock climbing group said he'd seen someone try to climb one of the easy routes using only his hands. We tried this, of course, but only made it about halfway to the top of the 30-foot climb. We resolved to try it again the following week at the beginning of the evening when our arms would be fresh.

So last night we gave it a go and did much better. Eric, who has only just started climbing, made it an impressive third of the way. Michael and Brad made it almost to the top. I went last and by climbing really fast was able to make it all the way to the top before my arms gave out. Now that one person has shown that it's possible, I'm pretty certain that next time both Michael and Brad will also succeed. They're better climbers than I, but I may have them beat on strength-to-weight ratio. Eric is a natural and once he gets up to speed, I think he'll be able to do it too.

On the next climb (a different route, a class 5.10), only Brad made it to the top. On the climb after that (another 5.10), only Michael made it past the dyno move that requires leaping like a gecko and grabbing a hold with one hand.

It's good to take turns.

Another highlight of the evening was talking a little girl down from the top of the bouldering wall. She discovered that down climbing is much harder than up climbing. She'd make a downward move or two, but then instinctively climb back up to where she could rest an arm over the top of the wall. She eventually made it down far enough that I could reach her and she felt comfortable letting go.

I wasn't worried. I figured that if nothing else worked, we could put a bowl of food on the floor and she would come down when she got hungry.

I reached in through the little door of Raaga's cat house to pet her and was surprised at how scruffy her fur felt. Normally she is soft as a bunny rabbit. I pulled my hand out and looked around and saw Raaga looking at me.I lifted the roof off the cat house to reveal an oppossum just as ugly as you please. This explained why Raaga wasn't in her house on such a cold night.I dispatched the possum with a broom and brought both cat and house inside for the night.This isn't the first time our deck has provided a temporary home for the homeless.

Decadence is ignoring the sunny, 63-degree January weather to stay inside and watch three Harry Potter Movies (we watched the first two last weekend). Last year we watched the Lord of the Rings trilogy. The next movie starts at 5pm and will be accompanied by roasted chestnuts and drinking chocolate.

I'm filling in the spaces between installments by playing a computer game called "Write a program to generate a hydraulic model from GIS data." I've tried to play this game at work, but other stuff keep getting in the way.

Lately, the Astronomy Picture of the Day folks have been posting spooky images from space. I especially like the one at the left. What do you see, a bat or giant space muppet?

Last week I bought a new laptop, an ASUS X83VM-X1, from Best Buy. It was $900 when I bought it and that seemed like a very good deal. Evidently Best Buy agrees--the same laptop is now going for $1050. It features 64-bit Windows Vista Home Premium, 1066 MHz bus speed, 4 GB RAM, 1 GB nVidia GeForce 9600M GS (100+ GFLOPS) video card, 5 USB ports, built-in video camera, microphone, Altec Lansing speakers, Intel Core Duo 2.26 GHz CPUs, 350 GB 5400 RPM HDD. The disk drive is slower than I might have liked, but that makes it greener and makes the batteries last longer. The only drawbacks: it's kind of ugly, the shift key is a little flakey, and Windows Vista is a little annoying in places. I've spent hours this weekend moving into it and I'm starting to bend Vista to my will. It think it will be a keeper.

Friday I took the Principles and Practices of Engineering exam in Electrical Engineering, specifically Power engineering. I believe I passed, but it will be about 12 weeks before I get the results. There were a few surprises on the afternoon (Power) exam, but I was able to work almost all of the problems. The morning exam was straightforward and I had a couple hours (out of the four) to check my answers and then study for the afternoon exam. In both the morning and afternoon sessions I discovered that on one of the problems I had selected answer D when working the problem but then inexplicably filled in the bubble for C on the answer sheet. Weird.

I'm in the market for a laptop again. I'll be working remotely for a while and need something that will be powerful enough to run AutoCAD, Visual Studio, and ArcGIS. The catch is that I don't have time to order it online unless it can be built and delivered within a week. So I may be limited to what's available at Fry's. Any suggestions?

It's been a while, but today the weather was so beautiful I gave up studying and went out with Michael, Mike, Annette, Lynn, and a couple babies to do a little rock climbing at the Seismic Wall near 360 and Mopac.

It's a lovely place, especially with the temperature in the 80s. I do love Octobers in Austin.

The climbs seemed easier than the last time I was out there. The Tuesday evening indoor climbing at the rock gym have paid off.

Those pictured at left weren't in our party. They are just representative of the nice people and dogs you run into whenever you visit a rock-climbing wall. Today I met a Portuguese water dog--like a full-size poodle, but less prissy. As a rule, climbers are a friendly bunch, happy to share ropes and belay each other. If you don't have a rope, that's no excuse not to climb. Just show up with shoes and harness and join in.

I've heard climbers talk of starting their kids climbing at 18 months. These two still have a few months to go. Today they practiced being well-behaved around other climbers and succeeded quite well I'm happy to report.

Yesterday we saw Burn After Reading. It's classic Cohen brothers, but much lighter than No Country for Old Men. This is a fine vehicle movie for Malkovich, Clooney, Pitt, Swinton, and McDormand. I recommend it.

For dinner, we visited Manuel's next door to the theater where I got to experience Cactus Paddle salad (the name in Spanish was much more lyrical: "Ensalada de Nopales Con Camarón"). Fascinating stuff, cactus paddle. It looked like green beans, only thinner and without the actual beans. It tasted like nothing else I've ever had and revisited itself on me every time I burped for the next two hours.

Yesterday I renewed my TexShare card at the local library. Today I used it to get a Courtesy Borrow card for the UT libraries. I used to the card to check out a few text books and handbooks on electrical engineering including power engineering in preparation for the upcoming professional engineering exam.

If you missed the vice-presidential debate, SNL was kind enough to reprise it (sort of). Check it out here.

This morning at work, a supplier bidding on one of our projects asked where I'd gotten my electrical engineering degree. When I said Oregon State, he said, "Wow, you must have loved the game last night!"

I said, "What game?"

He told me about it and I felt sorry I hadn't seen it. But--happy ending--our neighbors, with whom we happy-houred this evening, had recorded but not yet watched the second half and I got to watch it with them and enjoy seeing unranked OSU clobber #1-ranked USC.

Go Beavers! Tch-tch-tch-tch-tch-tch-tch-tch-tch! (That's the sound an angry beaver makes. Make a shape of a set of buckteeth with your hand and you have a fine gesture for fans to taunt the opposing team with. Don't know why that never caught on, but we enjoyed doing it this evening every time the beavers scored.)

I like traditions. One of my current favorites is Tuesday night rock climbing at the Main Event (and you're welcome to join us). It's just a bunch of regular guys with a climbing addiction. (Yes, it's only guys right now, but we're hoping to get Annette back one of these days). The main attractions for me are the fellowship, friendly competition, and the satisfaction that comes with overcoming challenges, but it's also good exercise, especially now that we've instituted "The Ten", the speed climbing of ten simple climbs to get the heart and lungs pumping at the end of the evening. At some point, we might have to upgrade it to The Twenty.

Another tradition within the tradition is "Add On", a game in which each person does the climbing moves done by the previous players and then adds another move to the sequence.

We often hit a local restaurant afterward to make up for any inadvertent weight loss that might have occurred during the evening.

At work, the guys have gotten into the habit of watching King of the Hill over the lunch break. I had never really got into the show before, but am enjoying it more now that I have a bunch of reg'lar Texan folks to watch it with. I also enjoy the fact, as Johnny pointed out, that Peggy Hill looks a lot like Sarah Palin.