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a crazy mink for a severely lazy fall of not much writing |
11/21/2000: The wind is blowing and it's a nipply 14F outside, but it's wonderfully sunny. There is still bits of the powdery snow in the cracks of the sidewalk, but overall it's just one of those dry bright blue days. The students got an entire week off for Thanksgiving as "fall break" (Peeve: WE don't!) so there's nobody around for the most part when I walk into work, sort of like I own the place. The leaf vacuum guys were out by the library sucking up leaves into that big composting chopper tank thingy but that was about it. I've got a good casserole for lunch today (made with TVP!) and some mikan and it's just generally a happy satisfied sort of day.
I will be going to St. Louis this Friday in the morning and then I'm taking Monday off, so I'll be back Monday night. I am going to visit Ilya, another former Hillcrest resident whom I last visited on my vacation summer before last. Should be some good talking/thinking/musing involved... I will be taking Greyhound out there, and I'm also looking forward to just gazing out the window at the sky and the harvested fields, the tan grey on blue thing, shining highway signs, and music. I like to listen to my walkman while looking upwards out a window while stuff is moving. I suppose I like moving in general, looking at the changing perspectives of stuff and just thinking about random things and planning Things To Do.
Thanks to Bill for helping me wrestle my RPM into submission. The linux machine is finally up and happy to the point where I'm doing the vast majority of my work on it now. Yes, at work I have two computers, one of which runs Linux (Redhat 6.2 in particular) and the other of which runs Windows NT. These sit at opposite ends of my long desk. I prefer working on the Linux box but I'm really appreciating the NT box too as it can run all those nice commercial software packages like Windows Media Player and its ilk, so I am able to do things like listen to the radio from San Diego and Japan. Generally you'll find me typing at the Linux box these days with a pair of headphones snaking over to the NT machine and some audio application happening.
11/20/2000: It is 22F this morning, with the wind whipping around at 25MPH or so with higher gusts, leading to a wind chill of -5F. Mmmm. It's also flurrying with abandon with grey skies, but showing the merest hint of blue where the clouds are thinning up a bit. When it's just the really light fluffy dry snow and cold, it collects in the curb, and blows across the street in the wind like sand. It's definitely a two pants day.
In general I am enjoying greatly the late autumn weather, most of the leaves are now gone, and I've finished the raking for the year, got the gutters cleaned out. This weekend I'll need to put my storm windows on. The ones in front (in the big sunny front room) have separate storm windows that hang onto the tops of the window frames and then latch on to the bottom of the window frames. Those I can hang with a small bit of assistance (mainly just someone to stand behind me and catch the window in case I lose control of it, since I have to be on my tippy tippy tip toes to reach up and hang it) or maybe just a step stool. The others, though, have these newfangled (well, newfangled back in the 60's) screen/glass combos, so you have to just slide the glass pane down over the screen part, it's all one deal. Thing is, they are tight tight, so I need to go get some WD-40 or the like to grease 'em up.
This weekend was largely clear. It's getting toward those clear wintry days already, with the blue blue skies and wisps of frosty white clouds, grey/tan/smudgy trees. It's still autumn and so there are a few leaves left, all yellow or going toward brown now, and the sun was out, so there was blue sky and sun and tan ground and harvested fields and the pinkish-reddish-greyish of brick buildings in the sun. Mmmm. In some ways it reminds me of being in Korea or in Japan in 1991 and I was listening to some old music from then on the bus and generally being happy. Just riding around looking out the window at yellow street signs and the shining streelight poles and being extremely satisfied.
Saturday I went to the party for Herbert who died November 6th in the morning. It was a wonderful, massive reunion of School people and School hangers-on and music department people and neighborhood people and previous neighborhood people and just generally all sorts of people connected to Herbert, and there was art, and performances of his compositions and reading of notebooks lying around with notes from his talks and lots of food and stories about time with Herbert and people laughing and remembering and just being home. Looked at the plots of compositions and we all had a shot of scotch that he was always drinking all the time, and I sat and talked to Joe Futrelle about earthquakes and big bridges and tunnels.
After that was Gina's birthday party at Aunt Barbara's House with lots of yummy cake and Paulie K. playing music and chatting. Most people there came from Herbert's and so we were completely, completely, stuffed with food of various yummy sorts. There were two huge yummy chocolate cakes, one vegan.
Thursday is Thanksgiving and I will be making some cheesecakes and maybe more dumplings and going over to the Barn House, otherwise known as the house at Broadway and Illinois in Urbana, where 6 friends live, and it will be a huge smorgasbord of food all the day long and much laughing and talking and eating and generally having an all day party. Also Leigh is having open house for Thanksgiving too so I'll probably stop by there too.
Then Friday I'm thinking of taking a bus to St. Louis to go visit Ilya. I might then take Monday off.
Other stuff: I got a Japanese input thing for Windows NT so I can now type in Japanese to various Microsoft applications. This means I can type Japanese into text fields in my browser, so I can actually search (using google or the like) for Japanese pages on the net rather than relying on Japanese Yahoo. Also, Japanese Amazon is now open for business, and I can search on books in there. Yep, I can now browse and buy Japanese books on line. This is amazing. I can feel my money burning some serious holes in my pocket.
11/13/2000: It is 32F this afternoon, we are in the usual weather now. Supposedly we might see some snow Friday. Today's really great news is I found a Japanese input program for my NT machine and so now I can search around the web in Japanese, actually typing in stuff to search for, and I found some Japanese pages about speaking Vietnamese, complete with audio sounds. I can also type Japanese word documents now too so I can make little quizzes and stuff for my neighbors.
11/7/2000: It is 52F this afternoon, starting to clear up. In fact, it's a great day to go VOTE. Polls in Illinois are open until 7PM, so there's still time. Go to it!
11/4/2000: It is 57F this afternoon, another sunny akibare day. Almost one month has gone by since I last updated this page, yow. Thing is, while I'm quite thankful for tcp.com, it's rather pokey for me to edit things there, and so I really need to ftp the page to a faster site (generally staff.uiuc.edu), edit it, and ftp it back. A bit more of a pain, but I must just do it, rather than thinking I'll just edit on tcp and then getting annoyed at slowness...
As for the weather, we had a throwback to summer in this intervening month. Things were getting up into the mid 70sF and even a few days breaking 80F, although with thankfully dry air. There were a coupla days when things felt a mite humid over the lunch hour, but in general, it was more the feel of that late summer, "the humidity is gone but the cool off hasn't happened yet" time. This is despite the fact that we actually had an early freeze this year. Tomorrow the forecast is for a high of 60F, and then it's supposed to rain until Tuesday, when our highs will be in the 50sF. Leaves are mostly gone from the trees. I've raked most of 'em into giant piles and am waiting for the Permaculture People to pick 'em up. Gutter Cleanin' Guy (this guy who rides around on his bicycle and offers to clean my gutters every season) showed up and so the gutters were also cleaned out and renailed to the house in back where one was falling off.
Yes, permaculture. People (mainly affiliated with School for Designing a Society, but also some plain neighborhood folks too) are putting in a permaculture garden in the empty lot on Oregon St between Race and Broadway. This is maybe a block from my house and so I hope to have some veggies in next year. This is much more convenient for me than the city plots at Meadowbrook Park, which are a good thing but just far away.
I just finished reading In a sunburned country by Bill Bryson about a visit to Australia. In there he mentions going to SW Australia and seeing some Karri trees. These are eucalypts, but HUUUUUUGE. Now, I know eucalypts of various sorts as they grow all over the San Diego area (seeing as its climate resembles that of parts of Australia, they just took off when introduced there) and there are some large types, particularly some nice ones out front the Catholic Church in downtown La Jolla. But these Karri, they are like redwoods in size, but eucalypts. So, they have the height (3rd tallest trees in the world) but they also have the nice spreading tops of a deciduous tree. Awesome. You can see a picture of some, showing the trunk parts mainly, with some little people, to get a sense of the size. Wow. I'd love to go there sometime, now! There's a walkway there, where you can walk way high in the air up among the crowns. Someone has made a web page about it showing some scenes from their vacation, it's pretty good. Bryson went on the tree walk and he loved it. Also I found a picture showing the entire tree (so, top and all - you gotta scroll the page). Mmmm.
Tomorrow at 7:30 PM at the Highdive (51 E. Main, Champaign) is a benefit for the local Greens and the newly formed Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center. The Poster Children will be there as well as Paul K. and some other good music, and a bunch of people (including myself) will be talking about a lot of political topics. It should be a good energizing time.
Work is going well. My Unix machine finally arrived, I'm starting to do more concrete programmin' tasks. We got a new computer support person there to replace our outgoing one, and it's I guy I know from CSL days, who is really awesome, so that's looking good as well. Lotsa learning happening, that's a good thing.
10/6/2000: It is 46F this afternoon and has been in the 40s all day. Things started out all rainy/cloudy, but now they've pretty much cleared up, and it's looking like this weekend is going to be sunny and cool, leaves are changing, it's gonna be an akibare weekend. Ii na. I just might have to take a holiday on Monday, if the weather is really good. This kind of day is my absolutely favorite thing.
My huge expensive subscription to Shuukan Asahi magazine started arriving and with it came junk mail I want, namely a big list of all the new books coming out from the major Japanese publishers. And of course they can all be ordered from where I got the 'zine, with the ISBN... drool drool. The Mink is generally in a really good mood.
Sunday is a meeting for the planned Champaign Urbana Independent Media Center.
9/28/2000: It is 52F this morning and again sunny. It's Friday Eve...
9/27/2000: I apologize for being rather lax in updating this page of late; I'm hosting it on tcp.com, which while an excellent resource and overall great place to host, is somewhat pokey while editing. I've worked up a system to do the editing elsewhere, hopefully I will be less lazy.
It's currently 55F and sunny, the start to a good akibare day. For more details about the weather than probably anyone could possibly need, you might like to check out the Illinois Weather Page from the UIUC department of atmospheric sciences. It has the current temperature, all sorts of maps, the forecast, and even a WebCam that looks out over Beckhenge (the astronomically related sculpture that is in the courtyard in front of the building where I used to work). At any rate, it's definitely entering my favorite time of year. After the cold day last week (see entry below this one) it warmed up again and even reached the low 80s F for the football game against Michigan, but later that Saturday, a cold front came through, we hit the 50s, and had a generally crappy day of rain and 45F on Monday. Since then, we're having cool, clear days - my utter favorite. I've seen a few trees changing too. The barest traces of bright yellow are starting to come out in the intersection of heaven otherwise known as the intersection of California and Busey in Urbana. That place is overarched with maple trees really high up that turn completely, blazing, yellow, the deep bright happy yellow, so when you look up the entire roof over your head is gold, and then of course the sky is blue purple blue... usually the ground under your feet is a carpet of yellow too, so bright. Definitely not to be missed. I always try to take pictures but pictures just cannot do it justice.
This past Saturday was the Midwest Peevefest in Mundelein (at Atkinson's house). Much tasty beer was consumed, much scintillating conversation was had. A smallish follow-up fest will be had this evening locally.
After the fest, on Sunday, I spent some time taking some ivy out of my garden in front. I have ivy and vinca (periwinkles) in there as a carpeting ground cover. I want a mix, but the ivy grows much faster than the vinca, and needed to be cut back a bit to show more of the dark green vinca and let that get thicker. It seems to be happening, under the ivy I cut back, was lots of vinca and now that's exposed to the sun and some good rain we've been having. I'm happy that it's all a carpet of green now, it's really looking solid. Next steps are (1) when the bulb plants come up this year, moving the bulbs around artfully, and (2) putting in some bushes and summer flowers. My neighbor said he liked the ground cover and that it's coming along great, which is nice to hear since he has a really manicured designed professional yard and I sorta just winged it, good to know people aren't cringing in horror and wondering at the wildness that is my front garden.
Last night I talked about the World Bank and the IMF at a forum held at the McKinley Foundation basement. It went well, I think. There were lots of good speakers on the panel...
I'm still waiting on the Linux machine.
9/21/2000: After a warm day with a high of 89F on Tuesday, things cooled off with a nicely rainy day yesterday, and now we have a high of 65F. Ah, autumn weather... it's really clear too. Yesterday after work the sky was really interesting, just starting to clear out, with mammatus clouds but wispiness too, it looked like some mottled .gif wallpaper I have, purple and grey and every so slightly pinkish, and the sun was coming in at an angle, with gold/pink light. I took some pictures, we'll see how they turn out. The temperature was around 50F when I went home and I was wearing a really thin sweater, so it was deliciously cold too...
I actually got paid on time. Wow. Although, I didn't get paid for the involuntary week off I had in between jobs, of course. Still, 'tis cool.
9/18/2000: Things were nice and crisp this weekend, particularly on Saturday morning, when the wake-up temperature was 42F. It's warmed up since, however, with today's high forecast to hit 85F. At this point, I'm preferring the cooler days, and I'm looking forward to things cooling back down later in the week. Of course, it's always chilly sweater weather in the office, which is of course windowless, so I can sort of pretend the weather is anything I like while I'm in here. I do miss my window...
As a pale substitute for said opening on the outside world, I do have lots of nice leaf pictures up on the walls of my cube. I sorted a bunch of old pictures by season and have posted some of the autumn ones. I'm working in a standard cube (just like all the rest of my friends, now!), two walls are cinderblock (with cream-colored paint), the other two "walls" are your general cube walls, metal with blue (thank goodness) burlap-y covering. I have my usual assortment of maps stuck to the cinderblock walls. So far there's the world, USA, Illinois, and Champaign-Urbana. Nice nice. On the cube dividers, I have my photographs and an old postcard that says "Greetings from Champaign, Ill" in glitter from 1909 or thereabouts. These items are stuck to the cloth with some little stickers which are sticky on one side (the side that goes on the object) and then have little hooks, like the scratchy side of velcro, on the other other side. The little velcro-like stuff sticks perfectly to the cloth, and the items are thereby infinitely movable AND have no obvious tape or push pins on them. Quite nice. I've found that hanging a panorama print of local scenery just to the left or right of my computer allows me to rest my eyes on scenery that has a distance feel to it, so that it's almost like looking out a window, albeit one in which the scene doesn't change. I'm rather surprised by how well this works, actually. I've got a picture of Oregon St. by the Espresso Royale before they cut the honey locust trees down, and it's in the fall so the honey locusts are all yellow leaves, and it's clearly morning. Around it are other bright leaf pictures. Mmmm. The first panorama picture I ever took was of my old street in the snow, and looking at that in my hands I was really impressed by how it gives you some sort of peripheral vision, looking at it. I think that's the secret, really, you can turn your head to see different parts of the photograph and so it really feels like you're there. So, in order to allow myself to acquire more of these, I blew some bucks on a new camera this weekend. Some of you might recall that I stupidly lost my old camera on vacation in Japan this summer. Oops. At any rate, this new one I got is another APS camera with 2X zoom (at some point I'd like to learn to take artsy pictures with a totally manual 35mm, but that's not what I'm after right now). The best part of this thing is that it's extremely small. Really small. I can toss it in my pocket when I go wandering around and not even be inconvenienced, so it's easy to have it there when I see something that needs a picture taken.
Other than camera shoppin', I also helped friends paint a room this weekend. The room in question was dark hunter green, including the ceiling, so that even with full 160 watts of bright light, it would only reach what might charitably be termed mood lighting. This room was repainted flat white, again including the ceiling, and things are much bigger, brighter, and happier. The scary part is the condition of the walls - at this point they're pretty much rotten plaster held up by the old wallpaper and the five or six coats of paint on top of that. Yeah, it's a rental. Behind the radiator the wallpaper is peeling off and you can't paint all the way behind it anyway and the plaster is coming out. Eeeewwwww. Having things unstable and crumbly and thereby always dirty, where you can't ever have it all clean and sealed and wiped off, is the most disturbing thing. Anyway... they also built some spiffy kitchen cabinets and I got to help some and get a taste of what I'll be doing with shelves soon. I'm thinking of starting to paint my own living room in two weeks, so, September 30.
This upcoming Saturday, September 23rd, is a big PeeveFest in Chicago. I'll be driving up with Peggy as usual...
Computer Update: New Unix box still hasn't arrived. The windows machine is pretty much set up now, so I can start Doing Programming Stuff. It's got perl, webservers, that kinda thing. My cube is all set up, except for the not-yet-arrived computer. Peeve: This lame cube furniture that we have has the cube walls (the burlap on metal deals) attached so tightly to the back of the desks that I will pretty much need to take my desk apart to install the new machine in order to get the cables behind there. Now, this stuff is pretty new. Are there really still offices these days that don't need to run any cords at all?
I must say that I'm enjoying having the NT machine (in addition to my eventual Unix machine, that is) just so that I finally have access to the various programs that are pushed only at the Windows/Mac market that everyone else seems to have. Things like the latest versions of RealPlayer, for instance. I can actually listen to the radio over the net now, which is a good thing considering that this office gets next to no radio reception whatsoever (for those in the know, it's in the Armory).
In other news, CLAM starts up today. I'll be teaching the CGI programming class on Tuesdays as usual, but this week I am also substituting teaching Perl for Ben, who is up in Isle Royale. That means clamming tonight, as well.
9/5/2000: Things are delightfully cool today, with that "the first harbinger of autumn" feel. We went from utter pit-drippers last week to having a high of 75F today. The change actually happened yesterday, just in time for my birthday and also my annual Labor Day Picnic at Crystal Lake Park. It was 52F and sunny on my way in to work. Ah, wonderful!
Hopefully I can move into my cube today. The guy who owned it up to now is back, so something has to happen.
8/27/2000: It is 80F today, the sun finally coming out (albeit rather hazily) after a somewhat foggy morning. Yesterday was the Urbana Sweetcorn Festival and I spent most of the day there, sitting at the living wage booth and eating lots of corn. On Friday I finally got The Email, meaning that I start work tomorrow (Monday). Thing is, I'm not sure what I'll be doing right away. The new boss Ain't In tomorrow. Now, I'd like to (1) set up my cube and (2) set up my computer, but (1) the old guy hasn't moved stuff out yet and (2) my computer ain't in. We ordered one computer that will likely be the linux box (at least, it's monitor will be!) and I'm supposed to get some sorta NT box too, but since that wasn't ordered we should be able to scare one of those up out of the closet full of them and get that installed. Maybe I can do that. Maybe I can get permission to start moving the other guy out (to his new cube), dunno. It's kinda weird, because having the same job for the last 5 years, I'm not used to going into work and not knowing what I'm supposed to do. I just want to get things all settled in. Tuesday we have a meeting with the new CIO (Siegel) which should be interesting, at 1:30 PM. Also I imagine in the meantime I can help with support stuff and figure out the wonders and mysteries of Outlook Email, so should be something to do tomorrow...
8/24/2000: It is 83F this afternoon, and quite a bit less humid than it has been of late. Today has actually been quite pleasant, spent some time mid-morning sitting outside the Espresso Royale in Urbana with Ann reading scavenged newspapers.
The Big News, of course, is that I finally Quit My Job. Yes, that job that I'd been endlessly peeving about for some time now, is now over. Whee. I've found another, still working for UIUC, better group but suckier physical office (I'll be in a windowless cube, alas). I'm looking forward to starting that any day now, as soon as I get the official e-mail telling me I start. Like a normal office, they are actually not making me work before I start, amazing concept that it is. At any rate, that should happen Monday or so, perhaps - the paperwork is apparently on the last desk it needs to traverse before I can start working. Despite these final details, I've already gotten keys to the new offices, ordered my new computer (I will have two - one Linux, one NT), and dropped all the junk from my old office off in the new cube. I'm looking forward to starting, I should be able to learn quite a bit here. In the meantime, I've been wandering around, reading, that sort of thing. Feels decidedly odd to be out in the sun during the afternoon on a weekday!
I've finally read "On the Beach" by Nevil Shute now. I've wanted to read it for years, as I'm sort of into "end of the world tales," and it turns out they had a copy at the Urbana Free Library. Definitely a depressing book! I recommend it though - if you read it, you should keep a map of Australia handy, as it is important where various things happen during the story, and the entire thing is set in Australia. I was reading at Espresso, and got lucky - they have some ancient 1936 battered copy of an old enclopedia in there, and looking up Australia resulted in a beautiful colored map of the place. I just kept it open to that page all afternoon, making me wonder if I was the first person to actually USE those books in how long?
Hopefully I'll have information about the Japan trip soon - I've just been in sort of an upheaval of late...
