wshaffer

Apparently, we are on the very last plane to be allowed to land at Minneapolis tonight due to a thunderstorm. We're on the tarmac and may be stuck here for a while. I feel a lot luckier than most on this plane who are making connections - we just need to make it over to the Doubletree hotel for the 4th Street Fantasy con. We must have some good travel karma!

I'm posting this from the lobby of the LAX Marriott using my Kindle. Mostly just to prove that I can.

Had a grand old time at Gallifrey this weekend. More to follow when I get home to a keyboard that is not sized for elves.

Well, I arrived back from New York on Sunday night. I find that when I come back from a big trip, I feel like I shouldn't post anything until I've written a giant huge trip summary. Which I rarely have time to do in the hustle and bustle of returning from a trip. So, here's an abbreviated trip summary, which is probably better anyway.

Spent a lot of time just hanging out with my sister and my niece. Niece is 9 months old now, getting ready to walk imminently, and is the cutest thing ever. She loves books, and my iPod, which should prove, if there was any doubt, that she is my niece.

Got together for dinner and chat with brewsternorth, which was fun. I think I've convinced my family that I'm part of an organized international cabal of Doctor Who fans, and that in any major city in the world, there's someone I can call on for a cup of tea and a bit of gossip about when the next special is airing. This is actually not too far from true, except that I'm not quite so energetic a networker as to have every major city covered.

Visited three musuems: The Frick Collection, the Morgan Library, and the Natural History Museum. The Frick is really wonderful for portrait painting and 18th century French stuff. It also features an unintentionally (?) hilarious audio commentary on the paintings - I just about lost it when the commentator said that Holbein's painting of the drapery of Thomas More's velvet sleeves "makes one go weak in the knees". It was nice drapery, but my knees were solid. Art historian kink, I guess?

The Morgan Library has an amazing collection of illuminated manuscripts, and other interesting oddities like copies of letters from T.S. Eliot to old school friends. But really, I think the illuminated manuscripts are the draw.

The Natural History Museum is too big a place to see all of in one visit. The dinosaurs and early mammals were my favorite of the stuff we saw.

Visited a lot of bookstores - Books of Wonder was my new discovery this trip. A selection of children's books that will satisfy the kid in everyone. Plus cupcakes.

Hi all. I'm back from New York city. I regret that I was far too disorganized to hook up with various friends I know in the area while I was there. However, I did manage to spend lots of time with my sister and my new niece, sample a wide range of the theater scene by seeing both Women Beware Women (a Jacobean tragicomedy) and Spamalot, and visit the largest used bookstore in the city.

I also managed to be stricken by a rather nasty stomach virus after checking in for my flight home at JFK airport, which resulted in us postponing our flight home by a day. I'm very grateful to JetBlue for rebooking us without hassle and for not losing our checked luggage, which went on to San Jose on our original flight and was waiting for us when we arrived. (Actually, I have to say that of all the airlines that I've flown long distances on in the past year or so, JetBlue was far and away the most pleasant. It's a pity that the only place they fly to out of the Bay Area is New York, though I expect I'll be visiting New York a lot in the near future.)

Anyway, I'm up stupidly early this morning because I forgot to reset my watch from New York time, and thought I'd slept in until after 11. Duh. Today's agenda is to do laundry and finish recuperating from the stomach virus.

Happy new year, all!

Thank you, everyone, for all the birthday well-wishes!
( My birthday trip to San Francisco, for the curious... )

One of my oldest and best friends is visiting this week. We have been to five bookstores in the past 24 hours. I got a fairly good haul. I picked up The Rough Guide to Yosemite (we're headed there tomorrow), One Spice, Two Spice (a cookbook), Justina Robson's Living Next Door to the God of Love, M. John Harrison's Nova Swing, Graeme Harper's Calling the Shots, She Hulk: Laws of Attraction, and She Hulk: Planet Without a Hulk. And a copy of Doctor Who Magazine that came bundled with a Target novelization of Galaxy Four.

Don't think I'll be short on reading matter anytime soon.

We have also played Once Upon a Time, watched 2 stories' worth of The Tomorrow People, and visited my favorite coffee shop in Berkeley.

Tomorrow, as I said, we head for Yosemite. Assuming that it isn't burning down.

So, I flew down to L.A. on Saturday morning, went to a seder, visited the Getty Villa in Malibu, and flew back on Sunday evening.

The seder was fun. This year's innovation was that instead of reading the whole story of the exodus from Egypt out of the Haggaddah, we went around the table and everyone got to tell bits of it from memory. I was a little disappointed, because I was mentally working out a whole subplot about how Tzipporah dealt with her husband's peculiar habit of conversing with flaming shrubbery, but the folks ahead of me covered more ground than I expected, and I ended up having to talk about unleavened bread.

Maybe next year I'll prepare a discourse on the biochemistry of leavening. Or maybe not.

Things did go off the rails a bit after we finished the bulk of the meal - us "kids" (a category that presently includes everyone under 35) spontaneously decided that we had had enough, and were going to prod the seder along to its conclusion regardless of the intent of poor uncle Bruce, who was leading the darn thing. I think we did technically all fulfill the various ritual requirements, but there was a bit where one half of the table was singing "Who Knows One?" while the other half was singing "Adir Hu".

In short, we had hilarity, chaos, blatant disrespect for one's elders, and gefilte fish with green sauce. Everything one needs for a successful seder.

On Sunday morning, Daniel and his parents and I went to visit the Getty Villa. It was quite fun - well worth a visit. In addition to getting to actually see a large number of the statues whose photos used to grace my Latin text books when I was younger, I was particularly intrigued by the exhibits which attempted to reconstruct the painting with which many of these marble statues were decorated. It looks, as my father-in-law said, rather like something out of Marvel comics, and it's still hard to believe that the ancient Romans would have preferred the rather garish painted statues to the plain marble.

Also interesting was seeing the rather controversial kouros (a Greek statue of a young man) purchased by the Getty a few years ago. I read about it in Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink: the short version is that many experts believe that the Getty was snookered into buying a very expensive fake. (The sign accompanying the statue at the Getty merely says that "some doubts have been raised about its authenticity".) I am no kind of expert on ancient art. About the only thing that I can say is that it looks in much better shape than most of the other stuff of its alleged age in the Getty collection. If it is genuine, I'd like to know what circumstances led to its extraordinary state of preservation.

...more importantly, so does Southwest Airlines, though our flight was delayed a bit. I finished the book I was reading while waiting to board. (The Looking Glass War by Frank Beddor. I wanted to like it more than I did, but to be fair, the book was in a bit of a Catch-22 with me as a reader. I had to read it because I'm such a long-time fan of Alice in Wonderland, but because I am such a fan, it was almost certain that the book wouldn't live up to its source material. My favorite character by far was Hatter Madigan, the head of the Millinery, the elite bodyguard of the queen of Wonderland. With a top hat that collapses into a fearsome throwing weapon. Yeah. I will probably pick up the sequel just to see how things play out.)

I spent Christmas hiking in Torrey Pines State Park and reading Irrational Exuberance by Robert Shiller. Today my legs are sore, and I still don't understand the stock market. (The primary lesson I'm tempted to draw from Shiller is that no one else understands the stock market either. Except maybe my father-in-law.)

I arrived home to discover a package containing much audio drama goodness: Blake's 7: Traitor, Blake's 7: Liberator, The Adventures of Luther Arkwright, Judge Dredd: Wanted: Dredd or Alive, and Strontium Dog: Down to Earth. Now I just have to decide what to listen to first.

So, we're doing the whirlwind tour of Southern California here. Yesterday, Daniel and I flew from San Jose to Burbank. Ross and Susan (Daniel's parents) picked us up, and we attended a dinner in honor of Daniel's cousin Naomi and her fiance Seth, who will be getting married on Sunday. Then we drove down to San Diego. Today's plans include dim sum with Ross and Susan, and hopefully coffee or something with geoffrey_z. Then we drive to west L.A. tomorrow for the wedding, spend the night in Burbank, and fly back to San Jose Monday morning. Arriving, most likely, just in time for Daniel's sister, Diana, to enter induced labor and present us with a niece or nephew!

I need a scorecard to keep track of all my new relatives.