Reading (For Dummies)

Exploring South

I never really spent much time exploring the areas souther and wester of Syracuse. Most of my travels lately take me into the Adirondacks -- the Finger Lakes have almost ceased to exist. So of course I changed things up a bit...

Diving to be deeper at Upper Falls

I got a guided tour of the insanity that is Skaneateles. It's a town on crystal meth, and I might mean that literally. Six-story mansions sprawl along the lakefront, with well-manicured lawns that cry to be overgrown. Cookie-cutter shops line the lone lakefront road in a move reminiscent of Medford's historic downtown lone city block. Straggle a half a block from the lake the houses more American: broken windows, peeling paint, shutters hanging off their hinges. The town screams front lines of the class war.

Symphony on the lake, anyone?

My date and I headed deep into the thick of the upper echelon of society, getting cheaply discounted tickets to a symphony set in a mansion-owners backyard. The expensive tickets put you five feet from the music, the cheap seats put you low in the yard, behind a fence, where the music could be heard but the musicians remained invisible. We enjoyed it more, I think, when the rain spat at us and the old millionaires left. Mozart and Dvorak's Serenades are best left to the poor and young.

Garden of Plenty

I'm officially hooked on gardens. I moved into Polar's just after he planted, and had to keep up with watering and weeding while he went on vacation for just over a month. I thought it was a lot of work and seemed like an entirely silly hobby.

Three weeks and 500 tomatoes later, I stand corrected...

Our small 8x8 garden has been overflowing with tomatoes, peppers, spinach, ocra, and other edibles. I hardly even go to the co-op anymore.

They can be pretty, too

The real test will come with the hops...if we can gather up enough off the vine for a few half-kegs, the winter will be oh-so-much nicer.

Flinging out into the world, yet again

Work is kind of neat in that it sends me all over the place. It can be kind of a drag when it begins taxing friendships and budding relationships, but in all I'm having a good time with it.

I got sent to Cocoa Beach, Florida for my latest Temporary Duty, to attend a user's conference for some neat government software. The off-hours are all I'll mention, of course...

I got down on Saturday evening, was issued my first speeding ticket ever about an hour after my flight. Odd, I've never had any sort of criminal record (aside from parking tickets) until *after* I started working for the government. Now I've got this and a trespass violation to my name.

Checked in, unpacked, got ready for the next day: hiking up around Cape Canaveral, and maybe a little snorkeling up there, too. The snorkeling turned up as a bummer -- waterskiiers had been through the bay and churched things up too much to see more than a few feet. Hiking proved a little more fruitful.

For example, this little brown tortoise

After that, I met and went out to dinner with a bunch of coworkers...a crude bunch of government cronies that didn't get the Frasier-esque style to some of my jokes. I guess I just listen to NPR too much.

Weekdays were full of Conference. I've learned a lot, to say the least...at least I've learned a lot about the state of affairs now. In a dream world, I'd run a commission to design a secure partitioning microkernel and base all of our security products on it. In a less perfect world, I'd run a commission that defined an open API for said security kernel. Sadly, in the real world, we have a million companies doing things their own way, doing it wrong, and wasting a lot of money. But I digress...

Evenings were nice, at least. The whole gang jumped in the ocean on loaned boogie boards. My childhood experiences with my grandparents made me the best body surfer in the bunch, though everyone tried, to be fair.

Tuesday evening promised to be especially interesting, with the Mars Orbiter rescheduled to launch around dinnertime. So we swam a while, then set up on the beach and waited. There were a lot of us, given that we were all government, mostly Air Force. These people dig this stuff. So do I.

We waited. And waited. And waited. And the launch window closed...

After a bummer of a launch, I went out to dinner with a coworker who is a tad on the uber-religious-neo-conservative side. We were having a perfectly rational discussion on the tenets of national socialism until he brought god into the mix, and then it became a night of asking me why I won't accept some mexican named Jesús into my life. Pointing out biblical inconsistencies didn't matter much to this person, he was brainwashed. I don't often think about religion at all these days...it doesn't annoy me as much as it used to, and I've been happy to not be bothered by prosyltizers, so I grew to be passively accepting. That night kind of pushed me back into a rabid anti-religious frenzy. I bought another Vonnegut novel.

Ill will aside, I've had a blast in the southern regions. I could never live down here, that's for sure...any tourist town that has more churches than bars is hardly giving a second glance to. Still, the sun and the surf can be nice now and again. And it looks like again is going to come all too soon, but that will be a story for a different trip.

Me and a mullet and a hat on my head

Ghandi Speaks Out

I saw Arun Ghandi last night (the 75th anniversity of the first day of Mohandas' Salt March), speaking at a "Peace Gathering" in Bath.

The PeaceWeavers are a "hippie" commune located on Thunder Mountain just outside of Bath. As if needing to be taken seriously, they are a drug-free, alchohol free, mostly vegan group that practice green construction, advocate off-grid living, and run their gardens from "human" fertilizer. I'm now helping their graden grow. You can probably figure out how that works.

Prior to heading out to the gathering, Laura and I went to Letchworth, a sort of castrated state park (at least, compared to the 'dacks), which featured mowed lawns, a gift shop, and coin-drop binoculars.

We wandered around on one of the trails, which disappeared to nothing (no trail maintenance...nobody that visit there seems to want to get out of their car to go for a walk, not that I mind). I half-considered acting like an ignoramous and complaining to the rangers about how we almost died, but we thought we should just get on to the night's festivities to the East.

I wasn't expecting much from Mr. Ghandi's presentation. I don't know much about the Mahatma, even less about his children and grandchildren. So the conference was a bit of a mystery. I went along partly from knowing Laura and mostly from intense curiosity about the Weaver extended family and their seminars and outings, which have some notoriety in Central New York.

Mr. Ghandi opened his lecture with an experiment: pair up, and have one person in the pair to make a tight fist. The other's job was to open the fist. Only one person in the audience of several hundred asked the fisted person to open theirs...the rest of us tried prying. In my defense, I tried tickling, although I won't claim that that was necessarily a less agressive move...

Arun Ghandi is an exceptionally charismatic man who shared with us his childhood memories of his grandfather. He preached understanding at the family level as his grandfather did, and a lot of those anecdotes will stick with me. He is all too human, though, and like the rest of us is puzzled about what it is that we as Americans should do to bring about peace. As for myself, those political ideals spring back to mind after recent civil service petrification. I wonder how to strike a balance...

More High Peaks

Laura, and I did a few more high peaks over the weekend with a newcomer, Shad. It was the classic tight-bonding trip in which we shared relationship woe and devoured the sights that the Adirondacks have to offer. We also managed to keep off of AMR land thus preventing another arrest. I'm still miffed that the Adirondacks is not the wild area I thought it to be.

We completed Lower Wolfjaw, Upper Wolfjaw, Armstrong, and Gothics, camped out between Gothics and Sawteeth, and then hiked through AMR on Sunday. Not a bad trip, a lot less crowded than I thought it would be, and oh-so-good in ways that will probably be expounded upon another day...