Soundtrack...

A friend of mine gave me the responsibility for putting together a playlist for a party she was throwing this weekend. I don't think she expected me to take it quite so seriously. I tried to analyze the music for Beats per Minute and creating ~40-minute long sine wave-following patterns, the kind of thing Muzak does to make people want to do more of whatever it is they're doing. Anyway, here's the music list. ( Wide and Long )

How in the heck did he get that thing all the way up there?

That's a big fish

Omaha spotted the eagle this morning, and he had this huge fish up with him on his usual perch. How in the heck did he get that thing up there? It must weigh almost as much as he does.

A trip to Wild Waves

The girls contemplate the Timberhawk

Saturday, I had my final chance to take Yamaraashi-chan out to Wild Waves, the local water theme park, so we packed up the kids and Lisa and drove out that way. I started the day out in something of a snit; I just had that feeling that I was going to be spending most of the day running interference between the big sister and the little one. Omaha, sadly, couldn't make it as she had something official to attend that afternoon.

And indeed, the moment we got there Kouryou-chan disappeared. We found her in the arcade. She'd run off to look at the Oooh, shiny, leaving the rest of us to freak out and wonder when we were gonna get the phone call from lost & found. Fortunately, she did show up.

We did the dry rides first, as the weather was still cool, and the wet rides afterwards. Kouryou-chan and Lisa went to the more sedate rides while Yamaraashi-chan and I went upside-down.

This was supposed to have been Yamaraashi-chan's big get together with her friends before school started, but plans fell through and only one boy made it. I had made it clear to her that I would not be chaperoning or taking responsibility for any of her friends if they did show up and they would need their own chaperones. I swear, that kid doesn't have a conniving bone in her body; Wild Waves doesn't have an age limit and there's nothing I could do to stop any of her friends' parents from just dropping off their kid, if they were so inclined. It took her forever to understand out that "My dad says it's okay" and "My dad says he can't stop you from coming" are two different conditions.

I would have thought that the most remarkable sight of the day was the college-aged man I encountered on my way toward the lockers with a huge Invisible Pink Unicorn tattoo across one pectoral. I may have gotten subculture points for that one, but the most remarkable sight was two men from completely different subcultures: one, a man in his late 20s to early 30s with a huge tattoo across his chest, from shoulder to shoulder, right below the line where it would have been covered up with clothing, in a pseudo-medieval type, reading "Only God Can Judge Me." Right behind him, in another line waiting for a different water slide, was a young man with two companions, college-aged, whose tattoo had the same layout and type, reading, "There Is No God."

Eventually, I mellowed out. It's hard to stay grumpy with warm water and giggly children, and soon I was enjoying my day just as much as the rest of them. To our pleasant surprise, Omaha showed up; her event had been cancelled, and a friend had said, "You look stressed out. Let me drive you down and give you a chance to be with you family." Her friend was very perceptive.

All good things, yadda yadda. We were done. We'd had our day. After we got dressed, the girls insisted on one more ride on the roller-coaster, so while Omaha and Lisa waited, I walked the girls up the hill all the way back to the other end of the park for one last ride, then back. We ate elephant ears (or was that funnel cake?), and headed out.

I was mostly baked by the time we got back to the car; the spray-on sunscreen we'd had just doesn't work very well.

I'm a grumpy old man...

It's trips like the one to Wild Waves that remind me of how beautiful all human beings are, and how ignorant and blithe we are with that beauty, and how mindlessly we let nature have her brutal way with us in the passage of time.

I heard someone today say that the phrase, "the pursuit of happiness," as it appears in the Declaration of Independence, was a remarkable statement because prior to that, nobody had through of happiness (or even its pursuit) as a viable goal; most people woke up and spent the day just trying not to die. Nowadays, though, we are mired in pursuits that bring us little happiness, and overindulge in the momentary at the expense of the sublime. There are beautiful young men and women in their teens and 20s, and then there is the vast, sad array of angry, sunwasted, out of shape 40 and 50 year olds, and I can't help but wonder what happened, how did they all lose sight of who they were, how strong, how beautiful, how brilliantly they burned once upon a time, and just let it go?

But I'm not a wimpy old man!

While we were at Wild Waves, Omaha made a snarky comment about how all the muscles in my arms had disappeared. Sure enough, she was right-- they had, and I was back to the scrawny biceps I had had back in high school. Ever since getting laid off, I have not had access to the gym, and it was showing.

That was not good. This evening, I took up the mantle once again of building my arms and shoulders with that most ancient and appropriate of exercises, the push-up.

I was able to do 30.

On to 100!

Outed from the closet!

So, I'm "working" with a cadre of three other guys, and we're trying to get to minimum viable product to show to potential investors and/or clients, so I've been doing full time sucking up every last dollop of data I can about the Facebook API, especially Facebook Connect, and proper Django development. It turns out that Rails and Django, when it comes to mindset, are lightyears apart. Django has no notion of a "has many" relationship, and once you understand why, you'll understand why that's a good thing.

I was talking to the project lead (I guess), the guy who owns the trademark and had the Big Idea that we've all bought into, over lunch. Since our product involves Facebook profiles and semantic scraping, we were discussing stemming and stopwords and such. I'm not sure how the conversation got around to cooking, but it did, and I mentioned that my recent experiment with freezable had revealed that risotto was not freezable.

"Why not?" he said.

"Because rice has a certain fiber content, and when you freeze it, the ice crystals break through the fiber. The mouthfeel's not quite the same."

"You really are a foody, aren't you?" he said. "You just used the word 'mouthfeel' in a sentence!"