I had a great time with my sister the past 4 days. I can't believe she left her husband, three kids and home business behind to come out and see me. It would have been a helluva lot easier for me to go there.


My sister arriving at San Francisco airport, looking very happy to be kid-free.


We had to pick up a shipment of wine for Dad. It would have been rude not to buy a few bottles for ourselves, and accept the gracious offer of a free reserve wine tasting while we were there.

It was so funny to go shopping with my sister. We tried out a bunch of toys for her kids and she cracked up at every one, which made me crack up. She bought this puzzle for her youngest kid that makes the animal's sound when you put the right piece in. It kept going off in the back of the car. We took all the puzzle pieces out of it, but it still went off whenever I banked hard to the left. (Many of my passengers have complained of feeling like crash test dummies.) Mostly we ignored it, but every once in a while it seemed to punctuate the conversation at a particularly apt time.

I've been thinking about this lately, and I guess I don't need an excuse to work it into the conversation, since this is my journal and I can write whatever I want whenever I want. How liberating is that?

So my ex-ex-ex? roommate and I decided to take that trip to France[inlink]twisted,90[/inlink] inspired soley on seeing the movie Betty Blue . No shit. (Or I should say, pas de merde.) Did you ever see a movie that inspired you to move beyond the imagined confines of your perceived world? Ok, that sounded way more pretentious than I meant it. Anyway, crazy as it might sound, we walked out of the movie theatre vowing to go to France, and we did.

Which gives me the opportunity (even though I don't really need it -- my journal and all) to say I'm sorry I didn't chime in, (e:Soyeon), when you first brought up Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I thought that was a great movie too, and based on what I know of you, I thought you'd want to see it. I'm glad you liked it.

Back to my ex-ex-ex? roommate, Emily, and her boyfriend, Rob, who made the Skinny Puppy tape. When we lived together, Emily and I were into The Cure and Rob was into The Smiths. For some reason at that time, we all felt the two were mutually exclusive. I was trying to explain this to my new music bud Aaron (Morrissey no-show concert and Meat Is Murder dance club night) and he just couldn't believe it. I almost can't believe it now either, but at the time Emily and I thought The Smiths were too pop/mainstream for Cure fans like us. I guess distinctions like that don't always stand the test of time. Or maybe I'm not explaining it right. But that's the best I can do right now. It's weird.

When an old roommate and I went to France, her then-boyfriend (now husband) made her two tapes to get us through the two weeks traveling. One was Skinny Puppy [inlink]drchlorine,66[/inlink] (I'm guessing it was "Mind: The Perpetual Intercourse" - the tape had no cover art except the hand-written instructions 'PLAY LOUD!!!'), and the other was Hunters & Collectors, "Human Frailty/Living Daylight." Unfortunately the Peugeot Jr. we rented did not have a tape player, so we had to take turns taking hits off her walkman. That was fun though.

For me Skinny Puppy falls into the category of music I think I must have, but I actually don't (except some MP3s I scavanged from a shared music volume at work). Kind of like all the other music ex-roommates, ex-boyfriends, and ex-roommate's boyfriends had that was communal at the time. Keep thinking I should make a music DB so I know what I really do have, what I only have on vinyl, etc. I've bought two PDA software packages for that purpose alone (one for the Newton and one for the Palm), but I haven't done it yet. I keep hoping it will just become an extension of my iTunes library, which it probably already is if I just bothered to find a way to export it.

(e:Drchlorine) - have you checked out any of the Rough Trade collections? I picked up their 25 year boxed set just before my music budget got slashed due to being laid off. Been wanting to pick up some of their other collections ever since. My 'seek list' for used record stores keeps growing. Oh well, you appreciate it more when you work harder for it.

Sounds like a fun time at Allen Street Hardware last night. I hear the sausage was mighty tasty.

Power just went out for an hour, at least on my part of the island. Luckily I have my trusty non-electronic Lego phone for just such an emergency. I love my Lego phone.


It even has a handy drawer for pen and pad, or spare Legos.

Yeah, I guess I could have just used my cell phone to call Alameda Power & Telecom. That would have been boring.

Update 12/11/04 - turns out a squirrel was the culprit.

Sometimes it's fun living on an island.