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James in words.  In Flanders Fields by Lt - Colonel John McCrae In Flanders fields the poppies blow Between the crosses, row on row, That mark our place; and in the sky The larks, still bravely singing, fly Scarce heard amid the guns below. We are the dead. Short days ago We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, Loved, and were loved, and now we lie In Flanders fields. Take up our quarrel with the foe: To you from failing hands we throw The torch; be yours to hold it high. If ye break faith with us who die We shall not sleep, though poppies grow In Flanders fields. --- America's Answer by R. W. Lilliard Rest ye in peace, ye Flanders dead, The fight that ye so bravely led, We've taken. ; And we will keep, True faith with you who lie asleep, With a cross to mark his bed, In Flanders fields. Fear not that ye have died for naught, The torch ye threw to us we caught, Ten million hands will hold it high, And freedom's light shall never die! We've learned the lesson that ye taught, In Flanders fields. We ran into some natives on our trip... last friday, we hosted the San Diego FanForce halloween party at our house. our club's main tradition for halloween is that since we do star wars the whole year, we don't do it for halloween, so we had lots of non-SW costumes... like Batman, and Ben 10, and from Final Fantasy and some fairies, and a pirate, and a road construction worker, and a bumblebee. two of us carved pumpkins, and rest of us enjoyed a lot of snack food. one chair went, but we have a history of losing those stupid old chairs during halloween parties. saturday midday, we went to a small wedding of my dad's cousin Pete. he and his new wife live in Los Alamos, but they picked to have their wedding in San Diego, down at the Marine Room in La Jolla. it was mostly family - i got to meet a lot of the bride's cousins and nieces and nephews and such, and a few friends from Los Alamos. we took some nice photos out on the beach. one of Naishing's nieces served as the country-deputized officiant, and they said their vows in the restaurant. nice food. in the evening, we went out to Mr. Dumpling to celebrate Booboo's birthday. my parents had been there before, as had whitney, but it was the first time for me and jennifer and darren and booboo. they somehow thought we wanted it spicy, and the chicken dish came covered in giant raked pile of dried red pepper bits. good dumplings, good lion's head, good tofu, i should go yelp it, although darren already beat me to it. because we were at dinner, we missed giving out treats to the trick-or-treaters, although Jon and Leah stopped by before we left for dinner so that Gabe and DanniLu could see some friends while all costumed up. sunday, we did a test run of the San Diego Rocket Race and skipped church. monday, i continued to prep for the rocket race, assembling some materials. in the mid afternoon, i received a UPS package.. hooray, it's the toilet seat that i had ordered from The Home Depot (because the store doesn't stock the color that matches our toilet). oh no! it's not a toilet seat... it's a kitchen faucet set, with sprayer hose and soap dispenser. lame. the packing slip says it's a toilet seat. so i call up home depot, and they want me to bring the faucet set back so they can re-order my toilet seat. i go in, and they re-order the seat... and it will take 2-3 weeks instead of the 4 days it was originally going to take, because they are now out of stock (likely because the one they had, they shipped to someone who wanted a kitchen faucet set). warehouse error not in my favor. meh. so whitney's parents were in town this past weekend, and we took them around town and ate lots. on friday night, we had dinner with them and my dad at Whisknladle, in La Jolla. seriously good food. Expensive, but quite enjoyable. they had been up to Julian during the day with some other friends, and had brought back 2 apple pies from the Julian Pie Company. so we also had a giant dessert and we showed them the photos from our trip up to Oregon and the redwoods. on saturday, we went to the USS Midway Museum. it was my first time, and it was pretty neat to check out the different parts of the aircraft carrier, and some of the different aircraft it carries. it is rather amazing that a ship commissioned just after the japanese surrender in WWII would be the same ship that was used in the first wave of Desert Storm's air sorties. a lot of the docents are former Navy, so they put their own experience aboard carriers into the tour guides of the "Island" (bridge, flight control, chart room). the audio tour also adds a lot of personal stories of sailors and pilots aboard the Midway. for an early dinner, we went to "On the Border", and got some margaritas and food, then came back to our place to play mah jong and eat more pie before bidding farewell. sunday, i went in search of some plumbing parts and learned... Dixieline is closed on Sundays... so i went to Home Depot instead and ordered a part that will come in a few days. after church, we went out to dinner with Anna and Andrea and Tom and Nancy and Anne and Margo and Andrea, and heard a first hand account of Andrea's flight to Minneapolis and being filmed for news bits the following day - using up some of her 15 minutes of fame, but being seen on the news by her relatives all over the world. then we came back and played some Dominion, with our shiny new card sleeves that finally arrived! can't wait to try out the new Seaside expansion with Jon and Leah later this week. today, my friend martha came over, and we checked out the exhaust vent on my furnace - i had believed that there was an obstruction in the pipe, and went up on the roof with a plumbing snake to see if i could knock it loose. after snaking the vent, and then blowing air back down it and dropping some objects down it, it seemed like there was nothing in the way. not sure why the gas company thought the pipe was obstructed. then we tried out a Peruvian place for lunch. pretty good and quite reasonable.  I just finished reading Death Troopers, the latest Star Wars novel, and first foray into novel-length horror in the Star Wars franchise. Not the first horror in SW, as we had the Goosebumps-inspired "Galaxy of Fear" series for kids some years back, and few comic tales that definitely were going for spooky. Overall, Joe Schreiber's first SW novel is a quick read, full of action as a small group of survivors on the Imperial prison barge Purge realize that everyone around them is dying of a sickness... and then the bodies disappear.(highlight to read spoilers): because they are now coming after them to eat them. yup, zombies. space zombies that eventually can learn, and use blasters. I was surprised by the appearance of the characters who were in solitary confinement, and while it was cool to have them, it also added that bubble effect that surround main characters and sometimes really cocky side characters (like Henchmen 21 and 24), and also any Jon Hamm character. I'm not a big fan of horror (in print or on the screen), although i do like a good zombie flick every now and then (and World War Z). not so big on vampires. actually not true, considering that i have enjoyed Mario Avecedo's works, and of course Buffy. just not the standard romancey vampire stuff. when i was young, i could read something by John Bellairs that would definitely give me chills. this book despite its great imagery really didn't bring those chills to my spine. maybe i'm beyond that. or maybe reading this book in the middle of the day keeps my senses grounded. (although i did entertain the notion that the sound of footsteps approaching my door was not the letter carrier but of doom-bringing monsters). or maybe sci-fi horror is outside my normal scare zone... it's not real cuz it's in space! Schreiber did throw in a few twists in the right places, so that the novel has a good level of the unpredictability thrown in. He also blends in some things that we don't always get in SW novels: droids just being regular droids, and getting inside the POV of ChewbaccaOverall, an enjoyable page-turner! Where does the time go? I got about half of the photos from our road trip captioned. All of them are up, and I've captioned all of the trip up and all of Oregon. Still need to caption the photos from Redwood National and State Parks and points south. Check it out here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jawaja Last week, we got to go see "Creditors" at the La Jolla Playhouse. This was the first play I've seen in the Potiker theatre, and we got pretty good seats. "Creditors" was a La Jolla Playhouse world premiere for their commission of Doug Wright's adaptation of the original August Strindberg play. Billed as a "compelling and savagely witty play" where "undercurrents of sexuality, language and economics explode into a tangled web of intrigue, suspicion and revenge in this gripping 19th century psychological thriller.", i felt a little underwhelmed. The acting was quite solid by the three cast members, who played off each other in 3 dialogues. While the revelation near the end might have been bold when Strindberg first wrote the play in 1885, a century of "revelations and twists" made it seem expected. Or perhpas the revelation was to be expected, but the resolution was the key. savagely witty? maybe the first part of it was, but i thought it got a little slow in the middle. one thing that did bug me was that in the program, it mentioned that one of the actors, T. Ryder Smith, was in The Venture Brothers, and i kept listening to his voice, and not his words, trying to figure out what voice he did on VB. (Baron Underbeit) over the weekend - played some broomball on saturday night with some friends. got a bit sore. played lots of Dominion. went to Emilie's baptism on sunday, and filmed it for Warren and Claire. been repairing the cracks in the sunroom floor and walls over the past week. at first i was just going to fill the new cracks, but now i am also repairing some of the gaps that i had filled years ago and need to add more to, which is annoying some of the ants who have found holes to get underground. Last month, Whitney and I went on a week-long roadtrip up to Northern California and Oregon. I had been itching to go on a road trip when I had realized that it was the ten-year anniversary of my solo road trip around the American Southwest. This trip wouldn't be as long however, since we had to work around work schedules and such. well, whitney's work schedule, anyway. We had originally had the idea of visiting Oregon, central Washington and going as far as Glacier National Park in Montana, visiting friends and family along the way, but as we started looking at time constraints, we chose to just stick with a few key places: - Corvallis, OR, where Whitney's cousin Amy would be starting a professorship at OSU, and my high school friend Tona also teaches. - Crater Lake in central Oregon - Redwood country in the northern tip of coastal California We decided to do some light camping as part of our trip, since we have the gear, and it would save on costs. The weather reports looked like it would be rather hot (90s) in the central parts of California and Oregon, and a little cooler in the coastal areas, so we weren't too worried about cold nights. Day 1: Sunday, Sept 20 San Diego, CA to Redding, CA ( driving in the Central Valley, Sunday night in Redding ) Mileage for the day: 715 miles. Counties crossed: San Diego, Orange, Los Angeles, Kern, Kings, Fresno, Stanislaus, San Joaquin, Alameda (oops!) back to San Joaquin, Sacramento, Yolo, Colusa, Glenn, Tehama, Shasta. Day 2: Monday, Sept 21 Redding, CA to Corvallis, OR ( Sundial Bridge, Ashland fire, Oregon Vortex, arriving in Corvallis ) Miles driven for the day: 383 miles. Counties: CA: Shasta, Siskiyou; OR: Jackson, Josephine, Douglas, Lane, Linn, Benton. it seems mother nature got the calendar change just right - October has started, and the weather is now overcast out, after weeks of hot sun. i had an interview earlier this week, and i felt pretty good about it. but then again, i've generally felt pretty good about every interview i've ever had, but they all didn't lead to job offers. this weekend promises to be busy - Pastoral Council formation day tomorrow, and a kid's birthday on sunday afternoon, with some other stuff going on as well. coming back from our road trip, i decided that after a week of ant-free life on the road, it was time to go full tilt against the ants at home and i bought a new thing of Terro and have been liberally leaving it out for the ants in the sunroom, in our bathroom, and around the perimeter of the house. a few places their numbers have dwindled. in other news, i narrowly lost re-election for the presidency of San Diego FanForce to miana_dude after a tie vote and trying to dredge up more members to vote. but i ended up as vice-president (since we were both running for both positions). i've been VP or president for the past 2 years... i do sort of wish that more people would step up to take on leadership roles, but i know that in our club we have quite a few members where FanForce comes second after their 501st or Rebel Legion stuff.haven't finished uploading the trip photos or yelping the places we went yet. stupid thing of the day: my printer is very low on black ink (so much that the printer was asking me to use the colors to approximate black to conserve black). i get an online coupon from staples to print out to save 10% next week. but i can't print it out since my printer now has officially declared it is empty on black, and won't let me print at all until i change cartridges. chicken, meet egg. Current mood: meh. so we got back from our road trip around midday on saturday - and i had a bunch of things to do over the weekend, so today is the cleaning-up-the-gear-and-putting-things-a here's where we went: The Sundial Bridge, Redding, CA The House of Mystery at the Oregon Vortex, Gold Hill, OR Corvallis, OR (visit friends and family) Silver Falls State Park, OR Crater Lake National Park, OR Redwood National & State Parks, CA "Old Faithful of California" Geyser, Calistoga, CA Thousand Oaks, CA (visit friends) lots of driving over the course of a week, especially on the first day (San Diego to Redding) and on Friday (Willits to Thousand Oaks). more to come on the adventure.. So StarWars.com does a little retrospective on the various posters associated with Star Tours http://www.starwars.com/vault/collectin (this is on the heels of the announcement that Star Tours will be closed in October 2010 so that Star Tours II can be installed in 2011 with super 3-d coolness). Anyway, their retrospective takes a look at some of my favorite Star Wars posters that i actually own: some of the Star Tours travel posters from the late 80s.  In 1989, I went to Disneyland with my 8th grade class and spent some of the scant money i had on 2 of the posters - the Endor and Tatooine ones. Even then, I wished I could afford the whole set (of 6). I even remember choosing the natural Endor poster over the Ewok village celebration poster. Years later, I'd go to disneyland, and they'd have jumbo versions of the poster in the ride exit area, but the store staff would confirm that they didn't sell the travel posters anymore. when i went off to college, i posted my Endor and Tatooine posters on the walls of my freshman dorm room, along with maps of Yosemite and Yellowstone. Years later, I've gotten the two posters framed. Still haven't figured out where to hang them in the house, but they are the only SW posters that meet with the wife's approval to hang in the public parts of the house. (Not even the SW: Magic of Myth exhibition from the Field Museum exhibition poster makes that cut). So for right now, they are resting on the ground at the end of the hall. maybe it's time to find some mounting hooks... |
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