Winter's Peak

That was a lovely weekend. The sun was shining bright throughout, leading to much water consumption (and homemade maple ice cream on returns from various excursions), and I found plenty of excuses to get out of the house. Saturday some Reed students were advertising their garage sale, and I got some more coat hangers, some kitchenware, and a couple miscellaneous items. On getting back home, I went to local Mt. Tabor (apparently an extinct volcano, but now a lake on top of a hill) to watch Portland's annual Adult Soapbox Derby for about an hour. I guess the track was pretty long, since the cars tended to drive by with pretty significant time gaps, although they'd often be in hotly contested groups of two or three, so really I don't know what was going on. One of the cars had a giant bear head on top made of smaller teddy bears sewn together, one resembled a dog with a wagging tails, one particularly large car had two of its occupants spraying the audience with hoses to help them keep cool under the sun, and of course the fastest cars were very aerodynamic and not particularly decorated. On the way back down the mountain, I smelled the familiar scent of fresh, sundrenched blackberries and eventually found several plants by the side of the road, obviously not well-tended but not too picked over, either. Bliss! After resting up at home for a little while, I set out again a few blocks down Woodstock to the Laughing Planet burrito restaurant, which was hosting "Chimpfest 2010," a fundraiser festival for chimpanzees, and I listened to some live music and drank a cold drink to guard against the possibilities of incurring another headache like I did while writing my last update over here.

I learned Sunday morning of another annual event called "Sunday Parkways," in which certain parks -- on that day, Colonel Summers, Laurelhurst, Sunnyside, and apparently Mt. Tabor again but I didn't make it out there -- were connected by several miles of residential streets blocked off from car entry and restricted to travel by pedestrians, cyclists, unicyclists, skateboarders, etc. In addition, the parks themselves were home to many organizations promoting themselves and/or various aspects of green and healthy lifestyles, plus some free prizes and many, many food vendors. (There were also various households selling lemonade, ice cream, etc. along the streets in-between.) At one of the parks I spotted the first person I knew I'd seen at any of the events all weekend, Devin the former student body president, for whom I signed a petition calling on the EPA to regulate coal ash (which at first I heard as "polash"). Despite two different booths offering free biking maps of Portland, I passed (and would have even if I'd had somewhere to carry them) -- my old one is falling apart from water damage and potentially itself a bit outdated in content, but it covers all of Portland, whereas the ones being offered only covered individual quadrants. In more detail, certainly, and with greater coverage of walking paths, but still just not as useful overall.

Still, it was a nice event overall... it took me a while to get into riding on the roads that are recommended for biking, instead of the most direct route possible (usually car-infested major streets), moved not a little by that time someone threw something at me out of their car window on 39th, but it's definitely an interesting feeling being surrounded by other bicycles on a street with no cars to worry about anywhere. The only downside was that events like Sunday Parkways bring out plenty of less regular cyclists who are even slower than I am, and it's harder to tell when a bike is going to come to a stop than when a car is, which can be a problem when you're stuck behind them because there's not quite room enough to pass just yet. I wouldn't have minded some friends somewhere in all that weekend noise, though I did run into camille_c for the first time this summer a little later on, at Safeway, where our dietary and thus purchasing preferences/restrictions are on pretty much opposite sides of the aisle, but there was a lot of biking and interesting Portland eventwerk, so I can't really complain.

I've been holding off on posting anything here until the semester had stabilized and I had a good sense of how things were going to go and where I'd be spending my time, but so much of that is still kind of in flux (but stabilizing, I think) that I decided to post something now rather than waiting several weeks longer.

( Lots of paragraphs below the cut. )

the rules (from cacahuate:

take a picture of yourself right now.
don't change your clothes, don't fix your hair... just take a picture.
post that picture with NO editing.
post these instructions with your picture.


Ordinarily my hair is a bit tidier, but there was no hot water today to shower with.

I'm taking Directing I this semester, and during the first quarter we auditioned, cast, rehearsed, and presented short scenes from various plays. We were assigned to write 5-6 page reviews of our scenes and getting to the point of performance, and I thought I might as well cross-post my assignment to LJ in lieu of any other sort of update. All mentions of "you" refer to my teacher, who sat in on part of one rehearsal.

( Also I snipped a brief passage which might have been too personal, who knows. )

Pretty! Just pretend that the indents were preserved into LJ. The first line looks a bit clunky yet but it does seem to work. (contributions is an intermediate manytomany model with null=True on author_id.)

ETA: I replaced the anteantepenultimate line with the simpler {{ contributions.author }}. It's such a common request that I thought it might as well be the __unicode__.

Month-Late Blogging Part the Sixth:

( The Future )

Month-Late Blogging Part the Fourth:

( Nicola and Emily S )

Month-Late Blogging Part the Second:

( Extracurriculars )

Humankind. Mankind. Womankind. Okay, not bad. Ratkind? Childkind? That would be funny given German haha Kindkind? Perhaps languages should not be merged in such a way. Merge! Like minimalism! Minimalismkind? What would that even mean? "All those things that are instances of minimalism"? Which I guess according to some would be, umm, every sentence in every language ever? Perhaps I am misunderstanding the concept. Perhaps I just really like the prefix mis- and how it carries over into German too unlike perhaps Kindkind. Oh! So I realized the other day that misbegotten, in addition to being a scathing insult, is an incredibly logical word deriving from mis- and beget. I suppose that's not worth pointing out when you see it in print like that but I'd never put two and two together before about it. Languages (or some languages) are so full of those crazy little affixes! Unfortunately Word's spellcheck is not too fond of my attempt to talk about misbegetting people. What if I want to misbeget? I can beget, can't I? "Can" of course is not the same thing as "should" and I'm really not in a good position to go around begetting, even if I had someone to beget with. College does that to you, yes it's summer break but that's nowhere near nine months, not that that's the only time to be worried about, perhaps the least. What month is it right now, anyway? May? So that would make February the time of final begettance – not practical at all. Let's not have any babies, whomever I'm talking to. Adoption kind of works. Look, kind. Are we ever to get away from children? And kinder? And kindkinder? Kind of?