Fascination Place

Yesterday we did something rather eccentric: We rode VTA light rail from downtown Mountain View to Downtown Campbell, just ’cause.

I’ve actually wanted to ride the light rail for a while, but haven’t gotten around to it because, well, light rail in the valley doesn’t really go places I want to go, and it’s a lot slower than driving (3-4 times slower). The big problem is that downtown San Jose just isn’t a destination for me; I go there maybe 3 times a year, usually for fairly random things. Otherwise light rail mostly goes through residential and office neighborhoods.

However, I do enjoy riding the train just for the experience, and also to see where it goes and what the neighborhoods are like. It goes through a lot of back-avenue areas in Mountain View before running down the middle of streets in Sunnyvale, Santa Clara and San Jose, so there was a lot to see that I hadn’t seen before, not to mention watching people getting on and off. A lot off teenagers ride the train and switch at the Tasman station, probably to go to the Great Mall in Milpitas (another non-destination for me).

Downtown Campbell has changed a lot since I lived there in 1999-2001: Aside from the light rail, they’ve built several new commercial buildings and a parking garage, so there are more stores and restaurants worth visiting. It’s no longer a depressing little avenue of antique stores with minimal foot traffic. We had lunch at Stacks and poked our heads into several stores and enjoyed the lovely weather. Then we headed back to the train and reversed our commute.

This probably sounds like a pretty weird day out, but I enjoyed it. Why did I enjoy it? That’s a good question. I think I’ve always enjoyed watching the ebb and flow of the city, seeing how things have been built up and torn down and looking for old things among the newer things. There’s a lot to see in this way when riding the T in Boston, and while there’s less out here there are still some interesting tidbits: The closed-and-abandoned building and parking lot that looks like it used to be an activity center, with basketball and volleyball nets in the parking lot. The older rail lines on which the light rail was built, whose remnants are still lying around. The vacant storefronts in downtown San Jose, just a block away from a fairly-busy dining district. And, just sitting on the train being taken somewhere is a lot more relaxing than driving. Slower, but more relaxing.

I think Debbi finds my interest in taking the light rail for no particular reason to be pretty odd, although she was the one to suggest indulging my weird desire a couple of days ago (though I’d talked about it a few times in the past). But I enjoy doing things with no particular aim in mind from time to time. And at least this one got us out of the house!

Leftfield.org is down right now. Ceej is apparently going to swap out the machine tomorrow, as the old machine was apparently on its last legs and frying hard drives left and right. Hopefully she’ll be able to retrieve all the old data - especially my e-mail.

Leftfield being down always stresses me out more than I feel it should.

Anyway, send me e-mail via this site in the meantime.

We’re experiencing another heat wave in the Bay Area this week, although it’s not as bad as the last two; highs in the low 90s where I am, and temperatures down to a bearable 80 degrees by 7 pm, and in the low 70s by bedtime. It should break on Friday and be a nice weekend.

I finally went out and bought a new garbage disposal for the kitchen sink, as the old one has been busticated for a couple of years. I hired a contractor through Sears to install it, as it seemed like a little more work than I wanted to put in. I’m willing to screw with the electrical system in my house for fun and education, but I don’t really want to mess with the water system, as I think I could really do some damage if I screw it up. Anyway, the contractor’s coming out tomorrow. Hopefully it will all go smoothly.

And that’s the news.

So tonight Debbi and I are playing some Gin Rummy when we hear Blackjack let out a frightened yowl. We turn around and see him in the kitchen, low to the ground, looking totally freaked out. He’s looking under the stove or fridge and crawling with his belly on the ground. I pick him up and he clings to me like Roulette does when she’s scared or upset. But Blackjack is rarely scared or upset. I give him to Debbi and she carries him to the couch, where he lies on her like a lump.

I look around in the kitchen but don’t see anything. I also go look around upstairs, with the other cats following my around. They’re also a little agitated and want to smell Blackjack when we put him back on the floor.

We were pretty baffled about what had gotten into him. My best guesses were that he was feeling sick, or that he was freaked out by the occasional day-after firecracker we heard, or (and here’s a pleasant thought) that there’s an intruder in the house. The last thought wasn’t made better by noticing that the dome light in my car was on for some reason, although it’s possible we either turned it on accidentally today, or that we turned it on last night while we were stuck in traffic coming back from fireworks (when we often turned off the engine and played some rummy since traffic was at a dead stop for minutes at a time).

However, we eventually heard another firecracker go off, and Blackjack quickly high-tailed it upstairs and hid in the closet. So I’m pretty sure he’s just scared to death of fireworks, while the other cats are a little agitated by them but not too freaked out. We’ve been out of town for the last two July Fourths so we haven’t recently seen what he thinks about the fireworks.

So that’s made for a rather creepy evening. But hopefully things will be back to normal tomorrow.

I feel really bad for Blackjack, though. Poor guy.

I’m not feeling too typative (ha) lately. I’ve been pretty busy with hobbies and such over the past week. For instance, tinkering with my Magic decks, playing some Magic with Subrata on Sunday, watching Battlestar Galactica, reading Dan Harrington’s two new books on poker cash games, finally finishing the first volume of Terry and the Pirates, cooking dinner rather often, etc. etc. On top of that we bought some new chairs for the upstairs porch and put them together, I planted some new flowers up there, and I’ve been doing some ongoing cleanup of the study (you wouldn’t believe how many old manuals and computer CDs and DVDs I have to throw out).

So my brain hasn’t been in a journalling place lately. But maybe soon.

I am looking forward to the upcoming long weekend, though!

The Bay Area is suffering through another brutal heat wave. It arrived on Thursday today it only lessened slightly; rather than hitting the high 90s, it peaked at around 92 and stayed there. The only respite has been the occasional cloud that passes over, but it’s still sweltering outside. I actually set ten pounds of ice in a big bowl and put it behind our box fan, and that helped a little bit, but even in our relatively-insulated downstairs it’s in the mid-80s. Upstairs it’s in the 90s, at least.

This would be bad enough, but on top of that Debbi’s still sick. She was laid low by a cold or something on Tuesday, missed two days of work, and although she’s got some of her energy back and her sore throat is gone, she’s now got a terrible cough along with some congestion. We’d though of going to see a movie today (to get their air conditioning), but Debbi was afraid she’d have a coughing fit in the theater. And she’s spent a chunk of the afternoon asleep on the couch.

To add insult to injury, I realized the Red Sox were on TV today, but Daisuke Matsuzaka melted down in the first two innings and the Sox lost to the Cardinals 9-3.

So, a pretty brutal Saturday. I’m hoping it will cool off a little earlier tonight, and that the heat wave will pass tomorrow. Of course, yesterday the weather report thought it would pass today, so I don’t know. Hopefully soon, though.

With Subrata busy being a new Dad, we haven’t had gaming for a few weeks. So Monday I sent e-mail to the gang offering to host, and tonight Josh, Ziggy and Valerie came by for our first post-baby gaming session. We played a game of Antike which Josh won, followed by a game of Res Publica which Josh and Ziggy tied at.

I realized as I was bringing down Res Publica that these two games are sort of the two halves of Civilization: Antike is the building-cities-and-moving-armies part, while Res Publica is the acquiring-cards-and-trading part. I find the trading to be the most interesting part of the game, so I have a preference for Res Publica; I think I’d like Antike a little more if it featured a little more conflict than it does. (For what it’s worth, I’ve never really cared for Civilization.)

Whump came by later in the evening to say hi since he was heading home after hitting the comic book store. And the cats came down and said hi to people, especially Josh, whom they know has fed them in the past. So a good time was had by all. I might try hosting every other week for a while, barring other commitments.

On the down side, Debbi has been hit with a nasty illness, with a sore throat and a bad cough, and has been laid up for a couple of days. It really sucks, she’s been miserable. (Though she did get a few hours of Roulette lying on her lap, which is a rarity indeed!) Hopefully another good night’s sleep and she’ll be just about back to normal, but unfortunately it might be a couple more days.

Here at Casa del Rawdon we have a nice patio out back with some pretty trees which shade the place in the late afternoon. They’re also home to numerous squirrels - seemingly more every year. We usually see them running on the fences and drinking out of the pond, and occasionally I find that they’ve buried a nut in one of the pots on the upstairs porch.

This year, though, we have Squirrels Gone Wild. More squirrels, chasing each other about, and making more noise than ever before. Sometimes one of them sits on the fence and looks at the house, making chitting noises, and driving poor Blackjack nuts. I suspect one of them also likes to run around on the upstairs porch, as I sometimes wake up to skittering noises and see fascinated kitties looking out the curtains to the porch.

Yesterday the squirrels were running all throughout the trees, and I heard something in one tree making cooing noises. At first I thought the squirrels and found and disturbed a bird nest, as we’ve also had a couple of birds (morning doves, maybe?) hanging around the fence this spring as well. But eventually I decided that it must be squirrel mating season. That’s right, Squirrels In Heat! No wonder they’re so rambunctious lately.

It’s all very amusing until Blackjack gets so worked up that he leaps through the screen door or something, I guess. Actually it’s probably going to be fine unless we end up with progressively more squirrels each year, as the ones we have now seem like plenty to keep everyone entertained. Hopefully this is just a banner year for squirrel production, and things will get back to normal next year.

Otherwise I may have to see if I can interest Animal Planet in filming a new series in our backyard.

The days have been just flying by, lately! I realized this weekend that I never wrote an entry about last weekend, partly because I’d been busy catching up on posting photos from my Dad’s visit!

The bittersweet part of last weekend was going to two Red Sox/Athletics games, which I’d been excited about since this is a rare year in which my Red Sox visited Oakland twice in the same season. Unfortunately, we ended up seeing two games of a three-game sweep by the A’s, with the Sox losing 8-3 on Friday, and then 3-0 on Saturday. The Saturday game was almost very exciting as Justin Duchscherer came two baserunners away from pitching a perfect game. But he hit Jason Varitek leading off the 6th, and David Ortiz singled in the 7th. Huston Street replaced Duchscherer for the 9th, and that was it. Bummer. On television we watched the A’s finish the sweep by winning 6-3 on Sunday. Alas.

On the bright side, the Sox have gone 4-2 since then, and they still have the second-best record in the American League (behind the Rays, who seem to finally be capitalizing on their substantial talent base).

Sunday we also had Subrata and Susan over for the day. We hadn’t heard from them for a few days and we’d figured they might be going stir crazy waiting for their child to arrive. (As I wrote over this past weekend, he arrived last Thursday.) We met at The Counter for lunch and then came back and played Magic (Subrata and me) and dominoes (all four of us) for the afternoon, winding up having dinner at Marie Callender’s.

The Magic session was interesting, my second time really playing Shadowmoor. We played a sealed deck game. Subrata had two viable builds from his cards, while I thought I had three or even four, but part-way through one game I realized I just didn’t have the right mix of stuff to make a white-blue deck work; it kept wanting to be write-green. So I did that instead and it worked quite well, better than the black-red deck did. The red-green version might have worked, too, but I didn’t try that. Anyway, it does feel like Shadowmoor is a slower format than Lorwyn or Time Spiral were. But since I enjoy creature-based decks, that’s not really a bad thing.

This weekend as I said we went to the hospital to visit Subrata, Susan and Ajay on Friday evening. Saturday we went out and did some shopping, including buying a new cat bush (half-height cat tree) for the downstairs. Even though it’s nearly identical to the old one, the cats still had to sniff it all over. But it seems to have passed muster!

I also went by a sale at Illusive Comics, an area store which I hadn’t visited before. (Well, I might have visited them years ago under their previous incarnation and previous owners, but I honestly don’t remember.) The owners are very enthusiastic, which is a great thing in anyone doing small retail! I’ll probably go back every so often, even though my I already have a regular shop I patronize (Comics Conspiracy). As most stores today do, Illusive seems to be focusing on new books and paperback collections. Unfortunately I’m an outlier among comics fans: the main thing that brings me back to a shop is a good and constantly-changing back issue selection, and the comics retailing biz has moved away from back issues over the last 15 years. And every store has pretty much the same set of paperback collections, so you don’t really need to go to multiple stores for those.

Anyway. Comics retailing is hard enough without listening to me moan about how comics shops aren’t like they were back when I was a teenager, so enough about that.

We spent a good chunk of Saturday doing chores around the house: We did a whole bunch of long-awaited cleaning, throwing away the little things which stack up on bookshelves and in the garage and in nooks and crannies elsewhere. I put up a bike hanger so we could reclaim some floor space by hanging Debbi’s bike above mine. Now Debbi wants to hang the step ladder and our spare folding chairs, so that may be another project soon! Debbi fixed up the shadowbox with my old Mardi Gras beads and coins, and it looks great!

Sunday we had a quieter day. I spent a lot of the afternoon and evening up in the study paying bills, putting together some Magic decks, and doing some cleaning up (though not nearly enough). We also cooked dinner and watched Sunday night baseball.

So that about covers it. We have some more projects to take care of around the house (for instance, replace the long-broken kitchen dispose-all), and I hope we can get a bunch of it taken care of this summer. It ought to keep us busy!

Meanwhile, happy June, everyone!

Subrata and Susan’s son Akash (Ajay, or maybe A.J.) arrived on Thursday. We visited them in the hospital last night and got the whole scoop; it sounds like things went quite smoothly, and I expect they’ve probably gone home already as I type this.

Ajay seemed surprisingly aware of things going on in the room around him, as he locked eyes with me and with Debbi, and watched the nurse avidly when she came in. I don’t know much about kids, but that seems pretty perceptive for a 24-hour-old kid! His parents would be bouncing off the walls if they weren’t as tired as they are; give ‘em a couple of days and they probably will be!

One room at the Conservatory of Flowers is filled with butterflies. Well, “filled” may be too strong a term; in fact, when we first walked in and I saw a butterfly flitting away from me, I was disappointed that it seemed to be the only one.

Then I noticed one on the windows.

And another one.

And then I realized there were dozens - maybe hundreds - of them in there, but only a few were in the air at any one time. And they were all different colors and sizes. Very impressive!

There’s also has a case in which butterflies in chrysalis were evolving from their caterpillar forms, some of them having already emerged.

A few of the many colorful butterflies we saw:

Naturally, I highly recommend visiting the Conservatory if you have the chance. It’s great!