18 January 05
Dunkin’ Donuts girls
One of the added bonuses of spending so much of last weekend travelling by car was that I learned, via my math teacher birding friend, what is considered cool among teenagers in Massachusetts these days.
There are the obvious things—iPods, for instance, the newer and snazzier the better. He’s given up trying to regulate cellphone use in last period (it’s illegal to use your cellphone in class) and instead starts off telling everyone to check their messages now before the end of school so they can get the scoop on what’s happening afterwards—which siblings to pick up, where their parents are going to be. (They all have cars and they all drive them to work, which makes for interesting town hall meetings when a new $300,000 parking lot for the high school is being discussed; riding the bus is, you guessed, not cool.)
And then: there’s the distinction between Starbucks girls and Dunkin’ Donuts girls.
Teenage girls apparently all show up to school looking like their mothers these days, which is to say they’re holding the obligatory cup of coffee complete with handprotector and plastic lid. Coffee at Dunkin Donuts makes sense: it’s good, it’s cheap, it’s easy to park, and there’s no line.
But of course it’s not cool.
So the girls aspiring to coolness at Andover High have to get up earlier in order to park, stand in line for ages, and get their exorbitant latte, so that when the question gets asked “is she a Starbucks girl or a Dunkin Donuts girl?”, they will come out on the right side of a divide whose significance is known only to their peers and that will one day, soon if they’re lucky and way longer if they’re not, come to seem as absurd as it does to old farts like me who don’t like coffee, least of all the overpriced gunk that pours forth from Starbucks.
9 January 05
Abraham’s Tribes
A year ago September, we went to the first community Celebration of Abraham, an interfaith gathering among the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim communities here. Today there was the second such gathering, this time held in St. James Catholic Church in Davis (oddly, both St. James’ auditorium and the one in the Catholic Church in Woodland where we met for the first event do double duty as basketball gyms).
Again the event was packed. This time the organizers took up the theme of the Messiah among the three traditions, perhaps a little more divisive than last year’s focus on Abraham himself. It’s interesting that even in an event as innocuous as a good loaf of whole wheat bread as this one was cultural differences still come through. When Rabbi Wolfe spoke he told several stories that seemed prototypically Jewish, and I felt most at home there.
At the end we wrote down an action we’d do to help bring forth the messianic era. Mine was to look up and meditate upon the skies and heavens above at least twice a day. We’ve been having interesting skies lately, and there was a fine sunset after we got out of the event.
6 January 05
Getting Technical
Faithful readers might notice that there are almost no posts on Feathers of Hope about technical geeky things. This is because I have neither the knowledge nor the inclination to indulge in them, and Numenius, though he has plenty of knowledge, spends his days immersed in them and would rather post here about other things. Suffice to know that ours is a Microsoft-free household: I’m a Mac person, Numenius is a Unix/Linuxhead whose favorite editor is the command-line vi (which he tells me is not quite true, there are different editors for different tasks; none of them is made by Microsoft, though).
This may be about to change, as I gear up for some Linux lessons this weekend. Although I don’t strictly need it for my work or my play, there’s enough good stuff available in the way of open source software that I’m willing to dabble. In particular I want to get more proficient in Fontforge, a type design program.
For now, here’s a Microsoft columnists/gmsv/10581891.htm”>story that I’ll gleefully pass along: Bill Gates was addressing a crowd of thousands when the blue screen of death appeared behind him. Get a Mac, Bill.
5 January 05
On How Not To Prepare Tea
This study demonstrates why it is not a good idea to use a chocolate teapot to prepare a cup of Earl Grey. Happily, the principal investigators were able to make use of the remains.
2 January 05
Gourds and a One-eyed Santa
We drove to Berkeley today. Numenius has been trying to wean his father off Windows and onto Linux and for the week I was in Maine he had set him well on his way, but in geekery there’s always more to be done and so off we went to do it, well I did the driving part not the geekery.
But first we needed lunch, so we headed off to a fast-food Indian on Oxford and then decided we needed to go to Cody’s because that’s what you do when you go to Berkeley, you look at books. N’s Dad received a call on his cellphone in Cody’s from his wife, S, calling from Cape Cod, where she’s gone to give a recital, reminding him to make sure we took the GOURD home, a gourd she had presented to Numenius on Christmas Day (they’re Jewish, mind you) and which he couldn’t fit in his backpack on the train and his bike on account of its girth, so it was sitting on the dining room table waiting to be retrieved.
Sigh.
Some presents are useful, like socks and knickers. Some are fun, like the Herd Your Horses game my niece received last week, which featured mustangs named Dusty and Blaze and ranch horses of all breeds (did you know, for instance, that percherons only come in black and gray?). Others are gimmicks, silly and cheap and just for the sake of making sure someone’s got something in their stocking (these feature prominently in office holiday gift exchanges and their sales before Christmas in the United States amount to many times the GDP of most countries).
And then there’s the present that my friend T calls the crappy gift. Like the one-eyed Santa she received from someone at her office a couple of weeks ago no kidding cross my heart and hope to die, the office that used to be MY office, and if anyone ever gives me one I’ll hand it right back to them and smile and look blank and in fact closely resemble the one-eyed Santa. They called him Cyclops in Greece. I’m working on the LOOK, just in case. But crappy gifts can also be incredibly expensive: they’re just always OFF, by a little or a lot.
The gourd… let’s just say it’s a large spherical decorated object sorry objet originating in I believe Morocco to go with the other large arty-but-not-to-our-taste objects given by Numenius’ stepmother that don’t fit in our house either stylistically or physically owing to the fact that this is a 600-square-foot abode we share with two cats, a 7-inch dobsonian telescope, and a tandem bicycle. S has seen it. She’s been here. She knows what we have in the way of room.
We stopped off on the way home and deposited the giant gourd at N’s sister’s house, swapping it for yet another former large gift to us from S to give to T, with the solid assurance that if she considers this to be a crappy gift she can feel perfectly free to drop it in the back of someone’s pickup truck on the way to lunch sometime.
But we ain’t taking the cyclops Santa.
25 December 04
Pyjama Day
We DID venture out into the northern woods, still with icy snow in them. We DID walk across the lake onto Fibbers’ Island, where we made up fibs (like there’s a hot tub on here and pineapple trees). I did hear black-capped chickadees and tufted titmice. I didn’t fall on the ice except once. We did sort of stay in our pyjamas all day despite the walk in the woods. I did sing songs I haven’t thought about for over thirty years.
It’s REALLY cold here. It’s wonderful. The hairs in my nose froze.
13 December 04
Apple Hazelnut Mix
A recent addition to our traditional breakfast of nine-grain cereal, cooked with some sort of fruit and nut gorp, dried apricots, figs, and prunes. The hazelnuts make it very yummy.
12 December 04
Tajine
It’s been foggy here, the kind that sets in for days. Although we got out a little it’s the kind of weather that hunkering down was invented for. My outing last night to Rite Aid produced my first pair of reading glasses, probably two years after I should really have bought some—in preparation for lots of reading. About time: I have a stack of books by the bed.
Today I made my first tajine, a North African stew with dried fruit (ours featured apricots, prunes, and mangoes, which we had to hand). Although we don’t own the beautiful earthenware pot which gives the dish its name, it turned out quite well. Served over couscous with harissa. The house is full of tangerines, a splash of color in our now monochrome world…
30 November 04
Loss
A friend has just lost her guide dog, Bruno. He had cancer for a while and it finally caught up with him.
Losing a dog is awful. Losing a dog who helps you get around, is your eyes, your legs, who picks things up you can’t find, who gets you past those awkwardnesses when people don’t know how to respond because you’re in a wheelchair, so that even strangers come up to you and start conversations, who kisses you when you cry because let’s face it the world’s a pretty bleak place right now, who allows your partner to go to work without worrying—losing this, I can’t really imagine.
Bruno attended Code Pink rallies in a pink bandana, wagging his tail and smiling at everyone. He sat at the ACLU table at the Farmers’ Market, encouraging people to take literature, warning them about Ashcroft, grinning through his graying Labrador jowls. He was a true activist, a true friend. He was a Good Dog with a fondness for cookies.
He’ll be missed…
25 November 04
Mughlia Saag Thali
Pica’s Mum came up to see us today from Bodega Bay. After a walk in the Arboretum, we set out to find a lunch place, thinking at the very least the restaurant Great Wall of China would be open despite the holiday.
We did better than that, ending up at Kathmandu Kitchen, a Nepali place on G Street here in town. I had the thali plate mentioned in the title, Pica had beighan bharta, and Mum had palak tikka paneer. We all drank mango lassis too.
That meal was so much more tasty and wonderful than the traditional Thanksgiving turkey I can hardly believe it. No sticking one’s head in the oven staring at the fat-spitting giant fowl either. I think we’ve started a new tradition here.