I have been starting a business with my girlfriend, Charlotte. We are tentatively calling it Safe and Secure. It is an earthquake preparedness business where we go to people’s homes and institutions and ready them for the kinds of earthquakes that we inevitably have here in northern California. It’s turning out to be quite interesting and fun. We are becoming experts in the field. :-)
In my personal/art life, I have been working on several projects getting ready for Burning Man. One is called Swarm. You can take a peek here: http://www.orbswarm.com/. I am also helping to rework the Serpent Mother… that is the giant snake that we worked on last year. You saw pictures of that, yes? Take a peek: http://lee.org/blog/2006/10/03/serpent-links/
What we did this morning:
1 woke up
2 lazed
3 enjoyed the feel of the sheets on our skin
4 lazed in that eyes half-open perfectly comfy manner
5 mmmmmmmm
6 talked about what we might have for breakfast
7 snuggled
7b felt at one with… something
8 lazed
9 snuggled
10 started making the scones
11 started making the bacon
12 fresh orange juice, REALLY fresh, like nectar
13 started the fluffly scrambled eggs
14 steaming chocolate mocha!
15 everything steaming on the table at the same moment (except the orange juice of course)
16 yum bliss
Phew, we’ve had a busy day! Where’s my pillow? And it’s only 1:30pm!
If you use the Safari web browser and wouldn’t mind giving me a little hand with something, could you email me? I’m trying to figure out what’s up with a problem on my site.
C
harlotte and I rushed to Fort Funston to catch the sunset. We both needed the rays. Unfortunately, we missed the sun by 5 minutes. But there were a bunch of folks with fancy camera gear. I kept overhearing them talking about something moving really fast and such. Charlotte finally asked what they were doing. They were looking at Comet McNaught!
It was discovered just last year and it’s orbit isn’t known precicely, though it is extremely eccentric. It won’t be back for hundreds, thousands or maybe tens of thousands of years. NASA site on it’s orbit
I’ve only ever seen a glimpse of another comet, and that was on a hazy night. With my own eyes, I could make out the comet, streaking along just 15 million miles from the sun. And through binoculars, it looked “just like they do in the movies” :-)
So it’s a good thing we showed up when we did!
We’re going to go out just after sunset Sunday night to try and catch it. But it might already be gone.
Last night Charlotte and I went to Poetry & Pizza: Murray Silvestein & David Shaddock. Charlotte immediately noticed Murray Silvestein as the author of the important A Pattern Language. The readings were quite a lot of fun. I found David Shaddock’s readings to be tremendous! Afterward, we spoke with him for a few minutes and he gave us a copy of his “Dreams are another set of muscles”. I’m looking forward to reading it!
It was hel at Escape from NY Pizza downtown. The pizza was excellent. :-)
Afterwords, Charlotte was a bit tired and I was energized so I made my way to a meeting about the Serpent Mother proposal. Worked on it (having a lot of lively and fun discussion :-) til 2am.
The Flaming Lotus Girls are taking the Hand of God to Australia. No, I’m not going :-(. But a groovy Flaming Lotus Girls Blog was created around it :-). Take a look.
(note: I disabled the plugin. See the comments for more info)
To try and keep the 100+ comment spams per day out of my life (and even my ‘moderated’ pile), I’ve installed Math Comment Spam Protection. I’ve tried several “makes you add two numbers” plugins and this one seems to work best with what I have. If it makes posting comments too terrible, please tell me…. in a comment… or…. whatever.
Here’s 2 good ways to keep spam at bay:
Route your email through Google Mail
1- forward all your mail to a Gmail account that you set up
2- Tell Gmail to forward all your mail to a private email address of yours
Or
I pay $1.95/month for the Cloudmark Desktop service (http://www.cloudmark.com/) and it works very well. I think it costs $4/month for new subscribers or you can use my referal code to get it cheaper (http://www.cloudmark.com/?rc=hze4hl). It’s only for MS Outlook or Outlook Express.
Good luck.
O
n New Year’s Eve, Charlotte and I went over to Shani and Aaron’s place. A couple of Shani’s friends were there. We played some games… Taboo and Guillotine… with lots of screaming fun. Ion and Sherri came over and we went off to the beach! We worried that it would be cold and windy and… well, whatever an ocean beach might deliver on December 31st.
It was beautiful. There were about 20 other groups with bonfires. As we started our fire, the glistening of the moon off the waves a hundred yards away looked like there was a bright light shining up from under the water. The sky was clear, the waves beautiful, the water tranquil, the company exceptional, the s’mores wonderful!
At Burning Man 2006, Nate Smith created an art piece called 2BLEVE. BLEVE is short for “boiling liquid expanding vapor explosion”. It was an astonishing 15 seconds. I saw it from about 1/4′ mile away.
