I'm up in vancouver, having a long weekend. They have a shakespeare thing called Bard on the Beach here, in tents by one of the many, many ocean fronts. Vancouver is a city built around harbours - half a dozen of them, as far as I can tell, on peninsulas which inexplicably all occupy the same space like an Escher painting.

We went to see Twelfth Night (charitably referred to by my friend JH as "plebian shakespeare") which was on the main stage, in front of the ocean, in the middle of a beautiful summer afternoon. They both serve alcohol and let you pre-order drinks for intermission, which makes everything even more awesome - even including the part where a boat came up the inlet playing aerosmith's sweet child of mine very loudly. (I'm guessing that "And turn down that music!" isn't from the original play, but worked in context.) And perhaps it doesn't quite go without saying that the production is excellent.

Today we went on a trail ride up by Whistler, which was fun and completely uneventful. Most of my trail riding experiences to date have involved some sort of threat of imminent death, so a quiet ride through a meadow to a river was kind of surprising. (I once knew how to trot a horse with some sort of grace, but now I apparently just bounce around like a sack of flour; I'm going to have awesome bruises tomorrow.) We had dinner in Whistler Village afterward, at a first-floor restaurant staffed entirely by Australians. They opened the floor-to-ceiling window beside our table for us, and it was light and warm until 10pm. British Columbia is really extraordinarily beautiful.

And now, two songs worth hearing, both by Santogold:
Santogold - I'm a lady
Santogold - Lights out

The fact that you probably haven't heard these already is proof of the heat death of the music industry. Because you should have. You really should.

Tags: music, santogold, shakespeare, the land of canadia, vancouver

Continuing a vague central american theme: Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, and A House for Mr Biswas by VS Naipaul. Both good enough to provoke some thought, which I now wish to inflict upon the wider internets. I should probably just join a book club.

( Wide Sargasso Sea )

( a house for mr biswas )

Tags: a house for mr biswas, books, jane eyre, wide sargasso sea

I spent part of yesterday repairing my neglected fountain, 'repairs' consisting mostly of picking all the rocks out and dusting them off, hosing the spiders out of the base, and getting the pump working again.

My fountain is built of two large ceramic pots, a small marine pump with some hosing that goes up inside the smaller pot, and a pile of river rocks. I built it to trickle and splatter water over the rocks rather than to actually gush, fountain-style, and most of the setup involves moving small rocks around to make minor changes in how the water flows. It's actually pretty instructive - you move this rock a quarter inch that way, and now there's a clear stream of water going precisely where you don't want it, backwards into the upper pot. A quarter inch the other way, and now the water clings to the surfaces, and forms a steady trickle right down onto the base stones.

The end goal being, of course, getting the maximum number of pretty rocks wet for any given amount of water flow.

Pictures below the cut...
( pictures )

I don't recall if I ever mentioned it here, but this is indeed the same fountain with which I had a black caulk related incident during the initial construction phase.

After I finished playing with my rocks, we went climbing, which was also awesome because I climbed an overhang 5.10a, with much huffing and puffing, and eventual supreme victory.

Tags: art projects, black caulk

sleipnirrr wrote a pretty good manifesto on the basics of accessible web design, which you should go read if you ever make websites. Go here.

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This has been a remarkably bad month for highway accidents. This morning's was particularly bad - I pulled over right before a blind corner to let a motorcycle and a couple of cars pass, and when I came around the corner, wham, motorcyclist face-down in the middle of the road, with cars piled up in front of him where they'd scattered in an attempt to not run him over.

I turned right around to go flag traffic so that they wouldn't come racing around the corner and squish the motorcyclist, since there were two other cars already there, and those people were taking care of the rider.

One of the first people to come by was a doctor, which was good. The rider was talking and wiggling his extremities when I saw him, but I'm pretty sure he was going into shock. When the paramedics arrived they closed the road and asked me to keep flagging traffic, so I did. When they eventually let me go from the accident site, I got just as far as the next turnout, where the road was also closed because they were about to land the helicopter. :-/

I had a very good view of the helicopter while the transport medical folks moved the rider from the ambulance to the helicopter - they'd cut all his clothes off, and he was on an IV by then. I couldn't see if he was okay, because he was strapped to a board, but I hope he was.

This is the second motorcycle accident I've assisted with this month (there were also two car accidents, which did not need my help). But it was by far the most serious I've seen, with the exception of the one time I came by the scene while a guy was dying on the corner where I later crashed my own motorcycle (with far less serious consequences).

Still, I think they must not airlift people out very often, because the helicopter pilot got out while he was waiting, and took pictures of the fire engines and the ambulances.

Tags: driving, mountains
mood: unsettled

In my lazy trawl back through all the books I would have read if I'd lived someone else's life - born American, SATs, good school, bachelors in English, etc - I've come to the belated realization that a lot of well-respected books are actually rather good. But I'm not sure how I feel about One hundred years of solitude. I find it an uncomfortable book, crammed wall to wall with the clinically relayed intimacies of lives which come and go so quickly that it's hard to get attached. It's the sort of book which catalogs (maybe "mythologizes" would be a better term) the myriad sins and excesses of the human condition, beginning somewhere near the start of time in a small world which still has room for flying carpets and walking ghosts, and comes tumbling head over heels into a broader, matter of fact modern world of railways and movie theatres, recognizable through the other side of the colonial glass as a more familiar present.

( Read more... )

Tags: books, one hundred years of solitude
mood: thoughtful

(It's been a million years since I posted. Hi, everybody!)

We spent Saturday and Sunday at a track day at the Reno-Fernley race track in Nevada, driving really fast. I have a lovely new car, so new that I put the plates on it right before leaving work to head up to Reno on Friday night. (It's a convertible Nissan 350Z, bright blue. I realized after I bought it that it's the sort of car driven by the female love interest in a racing movie - the kind of car owned by a driver who's introduced by a leg shot, starting at the ankle and panning up. I don't care; I love it madly, even if I do have to drive it really slowly because of all the tickets I got in my Mazda).

( more stuff about driving fast, quite a lot about weather, and a bit about facial hair )

Tags: 350z, driving, track day

in fact, I'm in San Francisco this fine Sunday morning, in our friends' living room, using a borrowed Macbook Air, which is in fact very thin and slick, but not tiny enough to endanger my avaricious consumerist heart. Although I have to say that it does have a very nice screen.

Before leaving London, we were lucky enough to meet up with the lovely the_royal_anna, who made the trek into town to see us, and hang out at the bar on the 23rd floor of one of London's many Hiltons (where, incidentally, they were hosting some sort of awards show - the Espirit awards? - which resulted in a lot of people milling around the lobby in unflattering evening wear, and left the top-floor restaurant utterly deserted). Anna, it was so good to meet you!

Between London and London, we were in Spain for eight days, mostly in the south - in Toledo, Granada, and Cordoba, and then in Madrid. If you ever go to spain you should go to Granada and stay in the Albaicin district, which is the medieval Muslim quarter, covering the hill which sits opposite the Alhambra palace. The streets are too narrow to drive through, and the walls of the buildings are high and white, with enormous dark wooden doors that open unexpectedly onto courtyards full of orange trees. People live there and work there, and despite the throngs of tourists even in the low season, it's a peaceful, thriving place.

Photo spam:

londonspain

Last night we saw the Mountain Goats play at the Independent on Divisadero, which brought me joy.

Hello from London!

I find myself on vacation, which is as much a surprise to me as it is to anyone else. We're in London for four days, and off to Spain for a week or so.

London is... surprising. It's the background for half the stories of the western world (a slight exaggeration maybe, but not that much of one) and I've read about it all my life. It wasn't a major life goal to visit this place, though I surely wanted to come, maybe because somewhere in the back of my head it was always just there, one of the pillars of the world. I have to admit that I never gave it much thought. It just sits there, underneath Dickens and Gaiman, under Paddington Bear and the Chronicles of Narnia, under tabloids and period dramas, waltzing around on the sidelines in Austen and leaking verisimilitude into China Mievelle. Constantine lives here and there are secrets in the subway tunnels. The Queen also lives here, and Henry the Eighth executed wives here, and people drink tea.

So it's a bit of a shock to come to a London which is a bright, modern city, full of people hurrying to get places, full of fliers for musicals (like Las Vegas!) and bright lights and a lot of pubs but a lot more fast food kebab places.

It's not even raining. It's sunny.

( In the past week I saw both disneyland and the rosetta stone. This is not the life I expected to be leading. )

Tags: british museum, disneyland, london, stars in my pocket like grains of sand
Current Location: marylebone, london
mood: lucky

One of the downsides of living in a coastal rainforest is that from time to time, we have very special weather. When big storms come through, as happened this weekend, you can usually find my house on the doppler radar map by searching for the tiny dot of "oh my god the world is ending" rain. It's not unusual to get storms that dump more than an inch of rain an hour, and when there are high winds, the trees whip around very alarmingly, and drop enormous branches all over the place, and sometimes fall over.

On thursday morning it was very dark when I woke up, and through the bedroom window I could see the leafy bits around the bottoms of the trees moving as if in a light wind. This is a very bad sign, since the trees are hundreds of feet tall, and wind that ruffles the leaves in the undergrowth usually makes the tops sway like upside-down pendulums. (We have a lovely wind chime, which I've come to think of as an early warning system.) By friday morning, when the storm actually hit, I was woken up very early by the enormous crashes of shit falling from trees and hitting my house.

As I lay there (in the dark, because the power was already out) imagining redwood trees crushing all my stuff, and contemplating which of my possessions I wanted to save, I decided that it would be much nicer if we and our cars were someplace less tree-adjacent. So we gathered up two of every animal (me: laptop and camera; R: laptop and spare laptop) and fled the mountains.

( Read more... )

ETA: Casualties from the storm:
- a series of dents on the roof and down one side of rob's car
- one of the heavy-duty wrought-iron patio chairs. After we removed the giant branch which was covering the open section of the deck and the entire set of patio furniture, and marvelled at the fact that it hadn't gone straight through the deck and taken a chunk of decking with it, we discovered the reason why - it landed on the chair and crushed that instead.

Tags: mountains, the sky is falling, welcome to the west bank
Current Location: home
mood: cowardly

Ok. If you are a user of iTunes, and you keep some or all of your music outside of the iTunes folder, moving your music to a new location (a differently-lettered drive, or another folder) or upgrading to Vista will seriously bork your iTunes library.

I figured out how to update iTunes with the new file locations, so I thought I'd share.

( Moving a non-itunes managed music collection to a new home )

Now is one of the few times when I wish that my LJ was indexed by search engines, since it took a long time to get even half of these instructions via Googling. Please feel free to post links, or send along to any friends who might benefit from this info.

Tags: repair itunes library