nosrednayduj

I spent the weekend at the Tech Squares annual square dance weekend, where I had a blast. There was dancing on ice skates, dancing to pre-recorded stuff from the 1950s, dancing to silly hacks that people invented, just regular plus dancing, higher level dancing, board gaming, jigsaw puzzles, chatting with people I only see once a year, chatting with people I see more often than that, decent food, and not enough sleep.

Somebody had brought a Rubik's 4x4 cube, and I learned that I have forgotten everything I knew about what to do with the centers. At some point I had edges and corners solved and was making progress on the centers, but slowly, because the thing I was doing did more than I wanted it to, so I tried to figure out what I needed to do to be more restrictive in what changes my moves made, and of course ended up messing it up completely. Then I repeated that situation, and then I got into a mess where I couldn't solve the edges, and the centers were still a mess. Then I gave the cube back. Maybe I will get mine out and spend some of my retirement re-deriving how to do this.

The new car went 220 miles and returned with 24% left in the batteries. It's "guess-o-meter" is moderately accurate.

I found out about the whole bombing Iran thing while I was away, but mostly was not looking at any news sources and stuck my head in the sand about it til I got home. Today I clicked around for protests, and I found one, this evening in Boston. I would say there were 200-300 people there. This one was also put on by the socialists, like a previous one. Some decent speakers. The MC was pretty good at getting everybody to cheer at the right times and he led us in a number of chants. After an hour of rallying we started marching. I don't know what the destination was, because after 40 minutes of walking, it seemed we were getting further away from the train station, and when it was 15 minutes away and there was a train in 20 minutes, I got my phone to give me walking directions and, like a dork, I just stuck it in my pocket and had it announce things like "your next turn is in 1000 feet". Walking is often faster than taking public transit, and more reliable (assuming your feet work, which surprisingly, after dancing them off all weekend, mine did). I'm sure I would've missed the train if I'd taken transit, even though I walked past a couple of T stations.

Yesterday was supposed to be some "work stoppage walkout between 2 and 3" protest. That was easy; my work was stopped already.

Separately, there was a rally in Boston at 5 PM. So I decided to go to the square dance on Tuesday (which I rarely attend) and go to the rally beforehand. It was pretty well attended for being 20° and dropping; I would guess 500-1000? They had a bunch of speakers, two of whom were high school students who had participated in the walkout. Apparently hundreds of high school students walked out. The school administration was not supportive, and they were irritated about that fact. One of them spoke quite well. At 6 PM we marched from Copley Place to Boston Common shouting various slogans as usual. Then I took the T to MIT for the dance and had a good time.

Best sign: "the wrong ice is melting; the wrong Amazon is burning"

Rode my 1000th mile for the year today. In fact, ended at 1001. Just about halfway through the year so that's about right; fortunately summer is longer than winter (that pesky February), so I shouldn't be concerned about making 2000, even though I'm about to have 8 days with no bicycling due to travel.

Getting ready for my trip to the International Gay Square Dance Convention in San Francisco on July 3. Which means that I will miss fireworks here. I vaguely clicked on fireworks in San Francisco and it looks like I will have to travel some distance to see them. I'll have to look at the schedule and decide whether or not I would prefer to see fireworks or dance at 9:30 on the fourth. (They don't have the caller schedule on the website yet.)

Annoyingly, I have to get some money back from Dollar rent a car; they weren't able to just add my loyalty number on the website, so they canceled my reservation and remade it with the loyalty number. And they said they would refund it. It's now been like six weeks, and I've made like three calls. It's like ridiculous but I guess I have to call them again.

Check it out!

https://www.olum.org/yduj/garage/

I’m in nyc for a memorial service for a square dancer who died suddenly a few months ago. http://patrickross.life/

Drove down with friends last night. They got an expensive hotel room (tho they were proud it was less than $300), but I have a coworker who lives in manhattan who said I could crash there, so I took him up on that.

It’s really tiny; 3 guys, 3 bedrooms, tiny bathroom, small kitchen/laundry/living space. They have a futon-like object that folds (mostly) flat. It was surprisingly comfortable despite having a ridge where it folds; you just have to arrange yourself carefully. There’s also only window A/C in the bedrooms so it was kind of warm. Helpfully I’m fairly resistant to heat, and I actually slept really well!

It’s a little odd because all 3 of them are terribly introverted so they (even my host) disappeared into their rooms all evening (I arrived at 9pm) so it was a little like being in my own hotel room, reading my book till I was sleepy, then this morning eating the random food I’d brought after asking if they were the sort that never had any food in the fridge. I mean, they were polite in the 3 sentences I exchanged but that was it.

Off to explore Central Park for the morning (which is only a couple blocks away) and then figure out how to ride the subway to the memorial.

Here I am at the International Gay Square Dance Convention in Durham NC, where the dancing is fun and the weather is obnoxiously hot. I am reminded that I am terrible at small talk. I can chat for hours about a particular topic or with people I know well but it’s a little random if I have to hold up a conversation with a stranger. Some guy who I had just encountered in a square came over to sit next to me while I changed my shoes just kind of talking about how he’d lived in the Boston area years ago (my location is on my badge) and I had a hard time caring. And it caused me to not get lunch with people I did care about!

It’s all good, I’m having a good time.

So before the square dance that we had last weekend, we were supposed to covid test. Ken had a cold earlier, for which he had rapid tested and gotten a negative result. And then he felt better, but just in case he did the Cue test, which is one of those molecular tests, in addition to rapid test. Well, it was positive! Dang. So I tested with Cue, and I was negative, and also negative on rapid test, so I went to the dance. He did not go. He tested with Cue again the next day and was negative. He's been negative rapid test all along. So we think we might have had a false positive. Which is sad, because he missed a great dance.

Square dance is over. It was OK, but mixed. Multi-level dances have the problem that people "rise to their level of incompetence", because rather than dancing well at a particular level they get excited about moving on, and when that level is harder than they can actually achieve, well, they stay anyway... Callers are not motivated to tell them they're not ready to move on or that they should drop back. So it's kind of a problem. I'm lucky that I'm fairly competent at the highest level there is; there aren't really enough people to sustain a higher level. Anyway, there were also a lot of good dancers, and I was very happy to meet and dance with people I'd only seen on zoom. And it was fun to dance to callers I didn't know.

Dance ended at 1pm, so we scarfed some lunch in the hotel and took the train in to the city. First we stopped in at St. Bartholomew's Imperial cathedral, which was pretty impressive. Then we looked for a potty, and found a 50 cent potty. Sexism at work: men were free if they just wanted to pee.

Then we went down to the river and watched boats go by for 45 minutes before our scheduled boat. It was a nice hour boat ride, with descriptions in German and English of the sights we were seeing and some random history of the city. Which is exactly what I had in mind. Street food for dinner, and a trip up the Frankfurt Main Tower (note: Main is the name of the river, pronounced "mine", not meaning the essential item).

Then we wanted to improve our food supply in the room so we clicked on grocery near me, and walked towards it. It was kind of a "bad part of town"; lots of broken bottles on the street and sidewalks, graffiti, neer-do-well's hanging around, bars, casinos, and girlie shows. It seemed to me that there was a drug deal going on; I could see a guy cutting something up with a razor blade over by a closed storefront. After all that, the actual grocery store was closed because it's Sunday! But it was near the main train station, so we got ourselves tickets back towards the hotel. A little confusion on where the right platform was, because it's such a big station, but we managed. Hopefully tomorrow we'll manage to refill our supplies; we have enough food for a breakfast and we'll have lunch out being tourists.

Our hotel is right near the Frankfurt Stadium, and apparently there was a soccer game today. When we left at 2pm there was an enormous police presence at the train station, and also when we returned. There was a lot of shouting and cheering going on when we returned. We managed to walk a way that didn't involve swimming upstream against all the revelers leaving the game.

My feet are tired!

I'm in California.

After the delayed flight finally arrived, I had very late (for me) dinner and went to bed at my host's house. In the morning I did morning things, including a walk around their neighborhood with a stop at a convenience store to acquire Mountain Dew. Enjoyed this art, and also did not take a photo but there was a driveway which was covered in sidewalk chalk, and they'd had stencils, so it looked like a stained glass window.



There was a square dance at my host's house, which was supposedly a one square dance, but we had 16 people for C2, and preceding that we had 14 for plus, so it was quite a crowd. We did intro to hex with the plus dancers for part of it. Some of them are small children (okay, 10-year-olds), which is great. Perhaps there is hope for the activity after all. And we crammed a second square into their kitchen during a few of the C2 tips. A great time was had by all. Well, by me anyway.

And there was some gameplaying. I surprisingly came in second in Dominion, I had thought I was way further behind, and we also played some game whose name I've already forgotten, about path building, which was pretty good, and that one I won, which didn't completely surprise me; I think my planning-ahead skills are superior to 10-year-olds'.

Today I drove to Golden Gate Park where my mom's ashes are and walked around the tree in question, didn't see any sign of them, which is probably best. Said "goodbye mom" and admired some other nearby foliage. Then I headed to Sausalito where Jocelyn is performing with Flynn Creek Circus.

I got there early, and offered to "do stuff", since one of the problems with the traveling circus is that, because she has no car, it's hard to get stuff done when you are set up in a random park that is at least a mile walk from anything. So she gave me a shopping list, and I fulfilled it with two different stores. Then I picked up subway sandwiches for me, her, and her boyfriend, so they didn't have to worry about feeding themselves lunch. Unfortunately, the whole shopping expedition took a little longer than I had hoped, and so they only had 10 minutes to inhale before they needed to do show things.

I invited some of Clyde's relatives, and they thought it was great. Some other friends also came (I let them buy their own tickets), and they also thought it was great.

I did a little clandestine videoing of Jocelyn's main act, which she does not do every show. Every show she has a few acrobatic/clown sequences, but those were difficult to video without disturbing people behind me.

The rest of the show was also good: they have an amazing juggler, and a guy who does "card tricks" – it was really a whole magician act, but it was based on doing amazing things with playing cards in your hand. I hope they make a professional video of this show, because it would be great to see it again. I'm not really a fan of contortion, but their contortionists were very good.

The theme was a little odd: it was about finding water in the desert, so there was some clowning, including people dressed up as cacti. There was a bunch of stuff about aliens visiting Earth, and I guess that might have something to do with area 51 being in the desert. The intro to the juggler was people being dressed up as Men in Black (or maybe from The Matrix? Men in Black is kind of a spoof on The Matrix, right? I have seen them both, but it was a while ago.) And there was a bunch of other random stuff about mysterious things happening, and then they would segue into some circus act. They had Chinese Pole, in the guise of a coconut tree which our hero was trying to get water from, and had to climb and so forth. He did an excellent job.

And there were a lot of other things that I'm not remembering, since I didn't video them and I didn't take notes, I just said "wow man".

During the second show (I had gone to the first show), I did laundry for Jocelyn and her boyfriend. Laundry is expensive when you use a laundromat! It cost about seven dollars for one fairly large load.

Then I drove to Chico, where I am now. It was lovely in Sausalito, and it was still 101 degrees at 9 PM in Chico. On the drive up, I was treated to a stellar sunset. I stopped and took a picture of an early portion of it, and it just got better and better, but I did not pull over again, and by the time I actually got to my hotel it had faded.



I took a lot of pictures of Jocelyn's abode, and the outside of the circus tent, but I had the stupid "live" option selected, so it is a minor headache to extract the photos for posting. I guess I must select that option in my pocket or something, because I always turn it off when I notice it's on, and it comes back.

I just came back from a complicated California trip!

I started out by having a day in San Francisco, where we (me and the friends I was visiting) walked around and did touristy things down on the waterfront, walking from the hotel to fisherman's wharf and all the way to the ferry dock, and then taking the cable car back to the vicinity of our hotel, eating sourdough (nevermind the fact that I occasionally whine about wheat sensitivity) among other yummy food, watching boats and other waterfront sights.

We spent the evening playing boardgames – pandemic! Like my previous pandemic play during the pandemic, we lost. So, I guess the pandemic will last longer or something. Maybe I should go play the "easy" version :-)

Sunday I went square dancing with the California group, which was only 11 people for this day. We had live callers for the morning and tapes for the afternoon, dancing outside some of the time and inside with masks the rest of the time. I had two drive by visits, one on the way from San Francisco down to the dance, and the other on the way from the dance to Chico. Spent about half an hour with the first and an hour with the second, just kind of catching up and showing videos of Jocelyn (which I guess I should find where we're storing them online and point to them sometime.)

My parents seem to be about the same as last time; it wasn't all that exciting; I just accompanied my mom to a few appointments, and went to the store and bought her some more clothes, some of which I then accidentally brought home with me (oops). Wednesday evening, Jocelyn flew into Sacramento. At some point we had the idea maybe we could use transit, thinking that maybe there should be a $25 airport shuttle thing to get to Chico Center or something. But no, they have limos for $200, or the city bus, which due to connections, takes four hours. So I went to get her.

Jocelyn had a nice visit, doing random things with my mom, including lunch and walking around in the gardens at the assisted living place, and in the afternoon, we all visited my cousin, who lives in Chico and I haven't seen in any of my recent visits. So it was nice to see them.

Then we drove back to Sacramento to have our stay near the airport for an early flight. When I originally planned my trip, it was very complicated because I was staying in four different places, getting two different rental cars, taking flights on three different airlines (four, if you count Jocelyn's Wednesday flight that I met). So, it's not surprising that I screwed up. The way I screwed up was to have one extra day of the Chico hotel (which I prepaid). It turned out to be pretty useful, though, because there were several times in which my mom needed to nap or whatever and it was very convenient to walk back to the hotel and hang out a little bit, rather than having to have packed up all of our stuff in the morning, including random food that we planned to eat at later points in the trip, which might not have been happy in a car in the 95° weather. Since I prepaid, I was saving $20 per day, and therefore the total cost of the mistake wasn't that large.

Off to Portland! We arrived around 10 AM, and since I was leaving 23 hours later, I checked into my next flight at the little kiosk on the way to rental cars. They rented me a Camry hybrid. It thinks it gets 58mpg. Maybe so, I could only get about a gallon of gas into it at the end of the trip. Wish I had had that on my earlier trip, where I drove all over creation. We successfully picked up Jocelyn's stored gear, which was at a friend of mine's house. I hadn't known this at the time when I asked them to please store Jocelyn's gear last April, but one of them's grandfather had a big part in establishing pieces of Reed College, so it was kind of fun to learn that.

We had lunch in a sidewalk café all day breakfast kind of place, and it was very Portland to be able to get gluten-free French toast with marion berries. Then off to college to check in, find her dorm, move all of the stuff in, including all of my stuff because I had a bunch of her stuff in my suitcase and it was easier to take in the suitcase and dig around and unpack there than to dig around and unpack in the car. Her dorm room is spectacular. Not only is it a single, but it has a loft! Unfortunately the loft does not have any window, so it will get kind of stuffy up there, so it might end up just being for storage. But it has carpeting and electric outlets, so you could have your bed up there or something.

I walked around the campus while Jocelyn worked on unpacking. There is a ravine down the center of campus. The river that goes through the ravine is kind of stagnant and there were a lot of snags and fallen trees and the water part wasn't very pretty, but the trees and bushes and stuff growing up the side of the ravine were pretty. There was one particular tree that looked very climbable. Also, there weren't any bugs, despite being right next to a bunch of stagnant water. In New England I would've been batting away mosquitoes the entire time.

Jocelyn's dorm has a fully functional kitchen, so she took advantage of the fact that we had a car to stock up on food things she might like to cook, and also a trip to the thrift store to replace blankets and pillows and things that she had abandoned back in April.

We also checked up on whether her bicycle had been stolen (no) and moved it to the new dorm. Apparently there's a lot of bicycle theft, and a lot of bike racks had "do not store overnight" signs over them (warning about theft, not a rule). Unfortunately her room is on the second floor, with a narrow winding staircase, so there is not going to be any getting it up the steps. And there's not a lot of space on the first floor, so there's not really a lot a choice about where to store it. So, it is currently locked to a bike rack. While she was in San Diego she stored it in a bicycle lock up, but that is only accessible by calling the campus police to be let in. So, your bicycle is more likely to be there, but it also is much less convenient. And, on the opposite side of campus from her dorm room. Really inconvenient. She's thinking about learning to skateboard as a "faster than walking" transportation plan. I asked her not to do all the things they were doing in the Olympics!

For dinner, we went back to my friend's house, because Jocelyn was feeling a little shy about socializing with her brand-new dorm mates. I had told her that she could come if she wanted to, and if she was just going to mope in her room, I would recommend coming. She said that probably she would just be moping in her room if she stayed. We had another boardgame event, where we played seven wonders. I didn't do very well; I've never played with as many as six people before, the dynamic is a little different.

I dropped her off with a hug and headed to my motel, which was a bit of an adventure because apparently I dropped my phone in Chico and the GPS antenna stopped being connected or something – no GPS works for me. I ran a little "where are my satellites" app and it said zero satellites at all times. I am sad. So, I had it give me directions by typing in my location, and studying them, and driving for a while, and then pulling over, and studying the next leg. I did eventually get to my motel and all was well. Flight was nearly uneventful – it took off 20 minutes late due to crew issues, but my connection was plenty long and there wasn't this nonsense where every 20 minutes they say "well actually it will be an additional 20 minutes, sorry about that", which is so stressful.