Bodyweight exercises for teenagers

Yamaraash-chan has been joining me in doing my exercises on those evenings when I do them. They're the fairly standand exercises for someone my age-- push-ups and crunches, and we're up to 60 of the first and 90 of the latter, and it's really been showing, at least on my gut. I was already pretty much in control of that, but it's been nice to really strengthen my cores.

And Yamaraashi-chan is doing them right beside me. It's pretty good father-daughter bonding, and even Kouryou-chan joins in although she has no bodyweight needed to make the exercise meaningful; the kid's still a stick.

Yamaraashi-chan and I have been having a much better relationship the past year. We've had heart-to-hearts about her growing up, becoming a strong and brave woman, about finding her power. She doesn't trust in it much, and I want her to. Having physical strength is part of the story, but not enough of one.

MayDay!

May Pole

Because of other obligations, the entire family, accompanied by LisaKit, didn't get to the annual MayDay celebrations until they were well underway. But we did get there and had a good time. Kouryou-chan romped with her friends, many of whom were there, although some significant regulars didn't show up. (Josh, Kaeli, where were you guys?) Ran into some excellent people I only ever see once a year, maybe twice if I'm very lucky.

Yamaarashi-chan and her sister.

Yamaraashi-chan's sisters were there, and she seemed to get along with them. Omaha encouraged her to get in touch with them more often, to make the effort to be a family with her sisters. That's one of Omaha's big things these days, making sure that Yamaraashi-chan stays in touch with her sisters and that I spend more time talking to my mother, since those are places where we have hopes for good family and we don't work hard enough at it.

Kouryou-chan had the best time, I suspect, between the chocolate fountain and the awesome

Cat-Face

face-paint job she got while she was there.

A good time was had by all and we headed home, peaceful and ready for Spring.

The Seattle Erotic Arts Festival

Omaha and I volunteered to run the photo booth at SEAF, where we were to man the computers. Apparently, we were the most computer-savvy people they could rope into the deal.

It was actually a lot of fun. We had the day-shift, which wasn't terribly busy, but was fine throughout the day. We had a lot of very beautiful people come through, in all ages from their anxious mid-20s to their self-assured late 60s. The rules didn't allow for nudity, sadly, but I saw several handsome young men with their shirts off. Apparently the big events happened at night-- performance art and fashion shows, and some demonstrations of the darker leather arts.

I picked up both volumes of The Virgin Project, an incredibly sweet and yet sometimes disturbing collection of interviews with how individuals lost their virginities, all rendered in exquisitely sensitive comic form. I suspect Scott McCloud would approve. They are a perfect representative of the comics as a way of communicating memoir stories clearly.

I can understand why some of my friends who submitted didn't get in. The art reached for the status of art and often reached pretention. If it didn't aspire to communicate something other than "sex is fun," it wasn't on display. Sam Cobb's collection of oil paintings embraced being kinky even into old age and decreptitude; Brian M's photographs of an armless woman with large artifical breast implants were a defiant stab at the idea that the handicapped are nonsexual. Some artworks were accepted simply due to scale: Nancy Peach had big, bold canvasses, but her work was casually heterosexist in theme, so much so that its inclusion was almost ironic. Michael Alm's "Furries Get Together," a tableau of statuettes in fursuits, tried to imply that furries were ordinary people under their clothing, but somehow also managed to say that ordinary people under their clothing can be unpleasant to look at-- the opposite from the values mouthed by SEAF's parent organization, the Center for Sex-Positive Culture.

I did like several pieces there. Christopher Carver's piece "Stephanie" was basically a giant wall-covering poster of a close-up of a rather ordinary vulva, but if you got close to the image you could see it was done in four-color with the "pixels" being silhouettes of bunnies and kittens. Jonathan Wakuda Fischer's "Midnight's Request" appealed to my crotch well, a woodcut rope bondage scene with an animesque feel to it done in woodcuts and paint. And Emily Steadman's oil paintings were sweet and wonderful outdoor love scenes without a touch of irony of desperation.

The best pieces there were the beds, constructions of wrought iron, one made of Gieger-like spines; another of beautiful stainless steel, technological but not gridded, not rigid, a nice place to have sex; and a third in dark steel, gorgeous machine-cut silhouettes of oak trees.

The theme of this SEAF was evocative of other emotions using the erotic as a vehicle, and not necessarily erotic works by themselves. It was certainly not the kind of bondage reportage photography that has been prevalent in the past. Some of it was good, and there was a lot of very skilled talent on display, especially in the constructions and installations.

One thing still blows my mind though: Norwescon was a sponsor (although their name was spelled wrong on one of the flyers, it's correct on the website). Okay, there's a lot of crossover between the pagan, kink, and SF communities in Seattle, but that much seems confessional and a bit over the top.

I'm a blind moron...

So, for the past month I've been trying to get my ATI 3D drivers back online. Supposedly, this is possible with my T-60 laptop. It would be nice to play Plants Vs. Zombies-- hell, it would be nice to play just about anything-- in accelerated 3D.

The first step, though, involved loading a kernel that did not have the Linux stock Direct Rendering Manager installed And every time I tried to boot it up, it would give me the weirdest error: "Could not find a bootable drive."

I couldn't imagine what the video driver had to do with the IDE media drivers, but this is Linux, sometimes things are a little weird. After a while I gave up.

Last night I tried again. And this time I paid attention to the error message and looked at what the boot loader had in its instruction. Sure enough, every boot line pointed to the root partition of my system, except for the one I had for the ATI drivers. It pointed at my swap partition.

Well, that's not gonna work.

I'm not sure how that happened, either. Because I didn't type it in by hand; I basically cut and paste an earlier line and pointed the boot handler at the ATI-ready kernel. I shouldn't have touched the root partition specification at all.

Verra strange. Maybe my subconsious doesn't want me playing Plants Vs. Zombies or Halo.

Kouryou-chan cooks!

Kouryou-chan made dinner this evening. She made her favorite, macaroni & cheese, but she made it with real white sauce and she did an amazing job. I mean she followed our grown-up instructions exactly-- she read the recipe all the way through, laid out all the ingredients before she started cooking, and ran the cheese through the food processor before she started browning the butter and flour.

And when it came out of the oven, we all agreed that it was probably some of the best macaroni & cheese we'd ever had.

Omaha and I are on a campaign to make sure the kids reach adulthood knowing how to make and feed themselves healthy, worthwhile food. We seem to be winning.