The Mosh Pit: These provincial victories

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These provincial victories

Tuesday, 04 October 2005 at 12:43AM

Having schlepped up to San Francisco for various funtimes every weekend of the past month, I decided to stay home and accomplish these provincial victories:

Made artichoke-garlic bread for Susie's birthday. Ate artichoke-garlic bread for Susie's birthday.
Looking for something different, I went running southwest along Stanford Ave, entered the gates of the Dish, and did haphazard hill repeats. Discoveries:
1. I've lost all control of core muscles, since biking lets you slack here quite a bit. I've gotta start daily situps, or start running more.
2. Saturday afternoon is when the mom, the dad, the baby in the rackety stroller, and the recalcitrant toddler in the rackety-er wagon come out to play.
I was complaining to someone about the small children and realized I sounded like a total curmudgeon, so I'm going to stop now. Instead I'm going to talk about how glorious it was to speed downhill after I'd really earned it — fueling my lungs with sharp inhalations of air that alternated hot-and-cold as I came and out of the great manzanita tree shadows, fueling my eyes with the view of the valley below, the bay beyond, and the Concord foothills across.
Saw March of the Penguins, since I finally found a buddy to watch it with — all of you guys either rushed to opening weekend, or called me a dork for wanting to see it at all. I left with the impression that it was alternately sensual and ridiculous: sensual in its beautiful cinematography, particularly the slow-motion of the penguins' mating dance and ritual, and ridiculous in that at times all you could see was thousands of ovoid animals flopping about.

I think the directors missed a huge opportunity here, though. They ought to have anticipated that their audience, having already self-selected to pay $9 for footage of melting glaciers, would have loved to geek out on Emperor penguin arcania. They've obviously put so much heart and soul into capturing the up-close, on-location footage that they couldn't have gotten without first learning a whole lot about these animals. Why didn't they pass on some of those amazing learnings to us? I guess at heart I'm a rationalist and can only be seduced by incredible but substantiated facts.
Obtained library card! Checked out five books, read two.
Went out with some work friends on Friday to sushi and a half-pint. This time it wasn't the Capp Street kids, but rather a band of newbies who met during a series of engineering orientation seminars after all having started on the same date.

That's right — I've just hit the 4-week mark in my new job. The projects have kept me entertained if very, very busy, and the design group in particular is a great bunch of folk. The banter and discussion on our group mailing list is way more interesting than any design blog out there. I'm going slightly nuts on the tight schedule, but slightly more nuts geeking out on all of the awesome things that get invented, implemented, and pushed out the door all the time.

Filed under: The Space Between: Miscellany.

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