Areas of Unrest

1 April 2001 - In Which I Win a Door Prize and Witness a Felony

QOTD: "Certain gardens are described as retreats when they are really attacks." - Ian Hamilton Finlay

Reading: Lilian Jackson Braun, The Cat Who Robbed a Bank

Listening to: Eddie From Ohio, Portable EFO Show

I forgot to mention that when I was down at the Music Center last weekend I saw two of our angels. These are giant fiberglass sculptures, akin to the huge cows that they had in Chicago. It's a clever idea and the two I saw were interesting enough, though neither was anything I'd want to have in my backyard.

My trip to Boulder this week went quite smoothly, with just a slightly sloppy drive up from the airport on Monday as there had been six inches of snow on Sunday night. The weather stayed decent enough while I was there, despite predictions of rain and/or snow showers. The meetings went well enough, too. I have to admit that I am remarkably impressed by the stamina of one of our contractor leads. He briefed the system architecture in excruciating detail for something like six hours. When I was an undergraduate, I used to pick up pocket change by reading sentences into tape recorders for people doing research on natural language processing. (It was a great gig as you got six bucks an hour and the only requirement was being a native speaker of English. Contrary to all common sense, they thought New Yorkers qualified.) Anyway, I mention this because nobody was able to do more than two hours at a time. So the idea of standing up and talking for six hours - whew!

They also livened up the procedures by giving out door prizes at the breaks. Everybody got a plastic Easter egg with two chocolates and a piece of paper with one of the system requirements. Some of the requirements were marked as winners and were redeemable for a door prize. I drew a requirement that had to do with satellite state of health and my corresponding prize was a first aid kit. Which is remarkably practical, particularly since all of the other prizes I saw were toys. I also got a prize from our Air Force lead for asking the most questions. That one was a yo-yo.

One night had a reception, so the only food pornography report is one dinner at the Boulder Dushanbe Teahouse. The food is always good there, with the most notable item being the Persian appetizer platter that we split. It featured an amazingly good cucumber salad. And the atmosphere is always interesting, too, with lots of new architectural features of the building to discover. This time, we had a newcomer with us, who read the description of features on the back of the menu and had the waitress point out where the artisans had carved their names into the ceiling.

The trip home had a minor flurry of excitement. Just after we landed, while we were still on the runway, a guy got up and walked from business class back to coach. The flight attendants admonished him and told him to return to his seat. I'm not sure exactly what happened but they ended up asking to see his boarding pass - and it turned out he wasn't supposed to be in business class at all. I later heard that he had just strolled up there in the middle of the flight and, presumably, he got up to walk back because he'd forgotten something. The crew slapped on handcuffs and he had a nice little official escort waiting when we did get to the gate. The really stupid part is, of course, that if he'd just waited until we were at the gate, he'd probably not have been caught, as everyone would have just assumed he hadn't been able to find room for all his luggage up front.

Back at home, I took advantage of all day meetings in Azusa on Friday to go to a storytelling show at the Red Cross headquarters in Pasadena. (I stopped off at Vroman's on the way there and managed to keep my book spending to a minimum as I'd indulged in a mystery buying binge at High Crimes in Boulder on Wednesday afternoon, before driving back to the airport.) The highlight of the show was Nick's version of a Greek folk tale involving pirates and pigs. It was also neat to see the building, which is part of a 1920's mansion. But it meant a late night and I was exhausted by the time I got home. So I've spent most of the weekend napping, with just a touch here and there of housework.