We went with (e:yesthatcasey) and David down to Byrnecliff in Warsaw. I loved being able to go down ridiculously fast on the Corkscrew trail. At one point I had to slide over and fall because I was out of control.

Afterwards we went to go eat mexican food at this restaurant called Arriba Tortilla in East Aurora. I thought there was no way they could make regular tex-mex expensive but they found a way by making portions huge but ridiculously overpriced.

Serious props to my brother, who organized a drive to furnish an apartment for a Syrian refugee family. He managed to furnish the entire apartment with donated furniture, a full kitchen, bedrooms, pantry, living room and electronics.

The furniture and rest of the donated stuff was nice quality and even matched. I know it seems silly but I have to think moving into a complete apartment like that has to make it slightly easier to adjust to a new county thousands of miles away from home.

I was stuck on thinking of new things to program or try out today. So instead I fired up the open source blender on my laptop and ran a tutorial to make a 3d render of a mug.

(e:paul) helped me run through the basics of compositing and using blender. So I ended up making these purple velvety metaballs to go alongside the mug, cushioned on a field of stiff AstroTurf (and with the obligatory "hello world" text).

I watched him play with a trial of Cinema 4D and he made a model of a vase in about a minute.

The output here is dumb but it was ridiculously fun to do something new on the computer. Scripting something here with Python could be interesting. The interface in Blender is confusing but I also don't know the language of 3d compositing.

I'd like to try animating it, on Terry's mega Warcraft machine.

We took (e:terry)'s mom down to the tropical temperatures of the botanical gardens last Monday. I have more pictures of the plants there than I'll ever need. Here are a few that I probably haven't posted before, besides the orchids.

Full of turkish coffee and the obligatory drunk dancing (e:mike) show.