Sunday morning, in a somewhat ironic turn of events, our hosts left for the Bay Area in their nice red Prius. We packed up, and headed out to visit a Titan missile (sans its warhead). I was rather dubious about it, but in fact found it fascinating. When all the Titan missiles were decommissioned in 1982, this one was saved as a museum. Since ( Read more... )

We met our hosts for breakfast at a truck stop in Wilcox, before they headed back to Tucson. Our plan was to go to Katchner Caverns. However, we missed the tiny sign when we got off the highway by about 30 miles, and wound up in the little, unremarkable town of Sierra Vista, where we found tourist literature that alerted us to our mistake. By ( Read more... )

On the Fourth of July, we got out of town and went to jikme and tsennyipa’s retreat center in Bowie. It of course was just as brutally hot, but we enjoyed being outside and took lots of pictures of the beautiful scenery.


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This year’s vacation with gomijacogeo was to visit jikme and tsennyipa in Tucson, where I had been in '05 and '06. We flew Southwest into Phoenix (paying extra for Group A seats is a good deal; we were nearly the first on the plane in both directions). Everything went extremely smoothly upon landing, and we were quickly on our way to Tucson. The evening sun was bright ( Read more... )

Three years ago, it took three geeks to help me with a computer problem. But times change, life gets more complicated, and now it takes five ( Read more... )

[When I started this: We’re currently sitting on the runway at Logan, all neatly packed into the plane for an indefinite period before take-off ( Read more... )

So, it's "Christingle", not "Christicle". This has a pretty accurate picture. You can see why I called it a satellite ( Read more... )

Okay, it's official: everyone I know is melting down around me. I just want to turn into a puddle, but whom do I get to melt down around, hm?

And no, this is so not just about you, whoever you are!

Yesterday, I had my birthday party, three-and-a-half weeks delayed. I was joined by my sister, the kid, her best friend K, gomijacogeo, generalist, sfo2lhr, r_wolfcastle and cosmiquemuffin, old friends J and J, and mtnvwpilot and his lovely fiancee Janet. Various subsets played croquet (or chatted) in the park, dined at Pasta Pomodoro, and hung out after the kid was put to bed. Croquet was won by the team of ( Read more... )

I had a great Mother's Day. The kid decided to make a cake (red velvet, with meyer lemon filling and meyer lemon icing) and persuaded gomijacogeo to help her, while I got a massage. generalist, jymdyer, and andybeals met us at Pasta Pomodoro for dinner and came back for cake. The kid part of the party was successful, and the adults hung out for quite a while afterwards, which was ( Read more... )