panic

Crazy day. Went through some Panic when my beloved Eudora wouldn't open this afternoon, but it seemed to be okay after I rebooted a couple times. My 2-yr-old niece Brittany came to visit last night (she brought her mother and grandmother). Brittany liked our apartment so much that she immediately demanded to have all her clothes taken off. Then she bit the heads off half of my magic markers. She was fascinated by my guitar, especially my collection of picks (which she dumped on the floor and tried to eat). Jeff and I definitely don't have a child-proof apartment...many parents of young children have pointed this out to us.

momix

Went to Fune's with some friends for dinner last night. This time the waitress knew what I was going to order before I opened my mouth (salmon sashimi with steamed rice). I guess this means we're regulars? :-) Went to see MOMIX at the Princess Of Wales Theatre after dinner...great show! I'm not exactly sure how to describe it. A combination of great music, dance, theatre, and athletic prowess.
Short blather today because I'm going to try to catch up on some of my email. Allison is sick! :-( Please do send her sympathy email.

geeky photo

I'll be out of town this weekend, so no blatherings until Monday, sorry.
Today's photo is of my friend Reid, who called me this morning. I asked him to take a picture of himself with a digital camera at work and send it to me so I could post it on my blatherings and embarrass him. He said, "Sure!" You can check out his webpage at
http://www.interlog.com/~rae/.
Reid is a Quake Addict (see Fig.1.1), a technonerdboy, is married to my friend Luisa, has two extremely cute sons (one recently wrote his first book!).
Luisa has an unbelieveably humiliating geeky photo of Reid and me back when we were going out in university. No, I will not post it here.

UT practice was cancelled tonight because Allison was sick. :-( We're going to make up for it by having two practices next week.

Today's Site: Philip Greenspun's home page. Fascinating guy...writer, photographer, technonerdboy. I love his Share Article | Permalink

valentine's

Many thanks to my friend Michael Cecutti for the Valentine's Day card! The card contained some riddles, which I will share with you now:

Q: Why do firemen wear red suspenders on Valentine's Day?

A: To keep their pants up, same as always!



Q: What did the octopus say to his Valentine?

A: I want to hold your hand, hand, hand, hand, hand, hand, hand, hand!



Q: What did the light bulb say to her Valentine?

A: I love you watts and watts!

My snailmail today also contained Valentines from my nieces Sara and Annie (whose handwriting closely resembles their mother's), and a Florida postcard from an old piano student, Tracy Yeager (to Tracy, if by some chance you or your parents are reading this...I don't have your snailmail address so can't write to you! please send it!!! thanks). Don't forget to read Michael's book!

lump

The net is great. Here's my story: A few weeks ago, UT started working on covering another Indigo Girls song, "Prince Of Darkness". I'll be playing a second guitar part on this, and was immensely curious about what IG actually did, guitarwise. But there were no IG videos available in Toronto, and I was unlikely to be getting to a concert soon. So of course I checked the web. A ton of IG sites and FAQs, and one mentioned the Indigo Girls newsgroup. Hm, I thought. Maybe I could get some info from the newsgroup. So I subscribe to the newsgroup and peruse the current threads. One of them was, coincidentally, "guitarwork". In the thread, someone asked how they could find out more about IG guitarwork. Someone replied that they had learned a bunch from a particular video, Indigo Girls Live At The Uptown Lounge. Hm, I thought again. I already knew it wasn't available in Toronto. Did a search on the web for "Indigo Girls" and "video", found it at CDNow for $14.99. After only the briefest hesitation about entering my credit card number through the net, I ordered it. Anyway, I received a confirmation through email, and the video only took a couple weeks to arrive. Great video, too! :-)

Did some babysitting this afternoon. While my sister took S. to her first dance class, I took care of my 10-month old niece A.. She's well out of "lump" phase and into "adorable baby" phase, complete with gurgling and chubby cheeks, grabbing everything in sight. She tried to eat my harmony ball necklace but fortunately the string held. Quite the little power struggle there for a few minutes, though, me trying to convince her to open her mouth so I could shove some more pablum into it; her chomping down hard on my harmony ball and refusing to let go. I won, but only because I cleverly distracted her with a plastic Barney doll (which she was unable to fit into her mouth despite heroic efforts). Afterwards I "put her down" for a nap. Do you like that phrase? I've heard so many mothers use it, but to me it sounds too much like "putting down" a pet. Have you noticed that mothers have their own language? Today I gave A. her "solids", for example, which means "solid food" (as opposed to "goopy mush"), but to me it always sounds like I'm trying to feed her pyramids and cubes. Anyway, she fell asleep only moments after I put her down and fell asleep so soundly that I was compelled twice to poke her to make sure she was still alive (I'm absolutely serious...it didn't look like she was breathing!!!).

End of today's blather.