Cravings

I have bottles of beer brought by attendees to my 2006 Academy Awards party that are sitting, unconsumed, in my refrigerator. Because I just don't really care about alcohol in general, or beer in particular, enough to drink them.

How I wish I that I reacted the same way to Girl Scout Cookies.

(Munch)

A PSA from George Takei

Spring is Coming

A couple of weeks ago, we had a brief warm spell here in California. Warm enough for me to put the top down on my car as I drove to a superbowl party. And after a couple of weeks of cold and rain, today is another warm day. Again I'm driving around with the top down.

But it feels different.

I don't know exactly why. Something in the air. Maybe a faint odor of pollen or chlorophyll that I can only sense subconsciously. But two weeks ago, what we had was a warm day in winter. Today, what we have feels like the very first sign of spring.

It's a good day.

Brought to you from the Bad Ass Coffee shop, in Santa Cruz, CA, where it's 77 degrees.

Lost Update

Well, I've done it. I've now watched the entire first two seasons of Lost in two months, thanks to Netflix.

Jimmi was right: I love this show. And I really love that I was able to watch it in one big run (I would not have enjoyed waiting for the start of season 2, after seeing the season 1 cliffhanger). I think it will be a little tough for me to transition to seeing one episode at a time, once per week.

It holds together really well, BTW: were it not for Walt's obvious aging, I could believe that they filmed the first two seasons over the course of a few months.

The next step is to watch the first six episodes of this season, downloaded from iTunes. My TiVo is recording the episodes that just started showing last week. By the end of this month, I should be caught up to "real time".

Squirrel Update

Last October, I wrote about some aggressive squirrels at a local park here in Mountain View. Now, after months of debate, I'm happy to report that the city has settled on a solution. Apparently there are only five of these aggressive squirrels, so the city will trap them, take them away, and euthanize them with chloroform gas (as opposed to killing them with squirrel-crushing traps, which was the original plan).

My favorite part of the article is in the second-to-last paragraph:

No such attacks have been reported anywhere else in the city — or, for that matter, anywhere else in any city.

In other words, Mountain View has the most aggressive squirrels in the known world.

Maybe I should lock myself in my house until these squirrels have been dealt with. Just in case.

Mardi Gras Vient

Avant...

Après...

Laissez les bons temps rouler!

(Cliquez ici pour la recette (en anglais))

I Don't Care

Well, despite my time being split between a baking project and a minor work crisis that kept me on my company leashlaptop until far too late, I did manage to read the first completed draft of Enlightenment (my play). I found a variety of problems, including one really big one:

I didn't care.

The basic story is there. It works. But I finished reading it and realized the play had absolutely no emotional impact on me at all. The most sympathetic character dies at the end, and I was thinking "eh".

What this means is that I need to do more character work. Let me illustrate this. Here are the five characters in the play:

1. Carter: An alien with amnesia who is disguised as a human and who has founded a cult.
2. Bobby: Another alien (also disguised as human) who is looking for alien #1.
3. Charles: A follower of alien #1's cult (this is the guy who dies).
4. Rose: #3's crazy ex-wife and anti-cult activist.
5. Tucker: The son of #3 and #4, boyfriend of alien #2.

Tucker is the main character. Note that he also is the least interesting character.

Moreover, he doesn't drive the play: things happen to him, and around him, but he doesn't really initiate much.

So, I think next steps are:

1. Do some serious character work on Tucker.
2. Make him more active.
3. Give him a plan from fairly early in the play that will carry him through to the end (this will help with #2).

If the play doesn't get more interesting after doing that, I'm going to have to seriously consider making Charles the main character.