most excellent day

I spent the afternoon at the Physics Department picnic at Cordonices park.. I wasn't going to go, but then Diane called me up saying she wanted to go, so she and I and June all set out from campus to find this mysterious park. Toyoko said it was "kind of near the rose garden" and that I would probably find it if I "walked about ten minutes up Euclid," but that I should "consult a map." The only map I found was pretty vague on the matter, so we just set out Euclid.

The weather was super and it was quite nice just bounding out on Euclid Avenue, through all the tree-lined streets with nifty old houses and flowers blooming. Eventually we got to the Berkeley Rose Garden, and it was simply amazing! Oddly enough I've never been there when roses were actually in bloom. Instead of truncated rose stems, the whole place was a mass of color! I took quite a lot of pictures.

Across the street from the Rose Garden is Cordonices Park and a reservoir. The park has a baseball diamond and two picnic areas, which are situated in amongst a stand of redwoods with a stream running through the middle. And of course a throng of people from the physics department. I only recognized about three people, though, including Profs. Jacobsen and McKee. There was a scrumptious barbeque and we gorged ourselves appropriately.

--

Just a few minutes after I got back to the lab at Donner Hall I got a call from Billy who wanted to go check co-op rooftops for line-of-sight connections. You see, we want to network all the co-ops with rootftop-to-rooftop wireless network links, so we need to find out which co-ops can actually see each other. This proved tremendously entertaining. All the co-opers we spoke with were hugely enthusiastic about our plan, and we got to climb up on the roofs of many of the houses, only quitting when the light got too dim. It was a pretty fun project, though, and we made a lot of progress.

One highlight was getting to explore the Lothlorian tree house for the first time. Another was when a guy at Cloyne ran up to me saying, "I'm Saku! I'm Saku!" At first I had no idea what he was talking about, but then I realized he was talking about my shirt, which says "Saku Originaal" on the back (and "Elu hea õlu! Originaal!") It turns out he was Finnish, and, well, soon we were the best of friends. Another would be standing on top of Castro house, watching the sun set into the bay and the fog roll down the hills, or seeing Haley and having a delicious dinner at Davis.

I started jabbering on about some of the various ideas I'd had for other projects, and it turns out that Billy had some of the exact same ideas. So now there's no stopping us!

Wandering through all these co-ops, I can't help but resolve to return to Berkeley, after, well, let's just call it a short (or, more likely, rather long) sabbatical. (example conversational usage: "I hear Tobin's going to grad school at U of R" "Oh, no, he's just on sabbatical there.")

--

We walked into Wilde as the last stop on our co-op tour (after Kingman, Cloyne, Stebbins, Kidd, Davis, Loth, Castro) and immediately multiple people announced emphatically: "DON'T EAT THE DINNER!" -- a warning that it was full of peanuts and they really didn't want me to die.

In the living room I ran into Sarah who is taking a semester off from Berkeley to live and go to school in Santa Cruz. She gave me a big kiss!

Walking up the stairs I thought to myself, "my cheek feels all glowy from that kiss! how sweet!"

And then I thought, "no! it's the peanut juice!"

But then, "no, it was the kiss. how sweet."

And then, "no! it's the peanut juice on a sunburn!"

--

Diane found these amazing M&M-like candies that are actually flavored. This really is the 21st century now!

Also, this is pretty nifty: http://rum.csua.berkeley.edu/~tobin/1660.pdf

blast from the past: William Sleator

On thursday Diane took me to the end-of-the-semester wine and cheese event of the Psychology department. When we arrived there were only four or five people there, out of a department of something like 400! A few more trickled in gradually. There was good food. It was amusing to hear psychology professors discussing their colleagues, using descriptive phrases such as "anal retentive" and "obsessive/compulsive."

One of the guys that showed up was a cool co-oper named Aaron. He asked if I had read the book House of Stairs. I thought for a moment, and then, "By William Sleator?!" It was the first time I had heard that title since my mom came across that author in the Orange County Public Library while I was in middle school — and then I think we both read every book by him that was in the library. All of his books are pretty bizarre and I almost feel like reading them again; House of Stairs is a crazy psychodrama, and another, Intersteller Pig has the following rather odd description:

Barney is all set to spend two weeks doing nothing at his parents’ summer house. But then he meets the neighbors, and things start to get interesting. Zena, Manny, and Joe are not your average folks on vacation. In fact, Barney suspects they’re not from Earth at all. Not only are they physically perfect in every way, but they don’t seem to have jobs or permanent addresses, and they are addicted to a strange role-playing game called Interstellar Pig. As Barney finds himself sucked into their bizarre obsession, he begins to wonder if Interstellar Pig is just a game.

Anyway, if you know any middleschoolers (or "middleschoolers") who are into sci-fi psychodrama adventures worthy of the Outer Limits, William Sleator is your man.

While I'm at it, another book I enjoyed as a kid was My Side of the Mountain.

La Fiesta restaurant

The hot chocolate at La Fiesta is excellent. They also have $3 margaritas.