Read Letter Day
A week or two ago, I happily came upon a collection of letters written by James Thurber at a used book store in downtown Mt. View. Never heard of the guy before buying the book, but the cartoon illustration on the cover caught my eye and a random sampling of his correspondences made the book feel too good to put down. Guess you’d have to expect a certain degree of wit if the man wrote for the New Yorker. I should like to travel back in time to the 1930s and become his friend, just so I could then move far away and have him write fantastic and funny letters to me. Then while I waited for their arrival, I could also put on bias-cut gowns and dark red lipstick and run off to catch Cole Porter musicals. Wouldn’t that be the bee’s knees?

Dome, Dome on the Range
Seems with all the time that’s passed, the previous November eulogy could have been a proclamation of the end of blogging. If you were to ask me how the past four months have been, I would have spewed a string of theoretically self-descriptive if not entirely interesting-sounding nouns like “Work, school, traffic, work. You know… (throwing in a rhetorical pronoun and verb combo),” though trying not to forget about some substantial changes during that time, then wondering if those changes carried enough substance and impersonality to make them worth mentioning to an internet at large and normally running out of time before I could write any of it down.

When you start second guessing your freedom to blabber at no one in particular and to have those words immortalized forever within the hallowed logs of Google, that, my friends, is when you realize you’ve hit a rut. Time to once again dig or swim or symbolically struggle your way out before it’s too late. So goes the cycle and the circular arm motions, frantic and sometimes months long in length.

Wherever you are out there, you who are ever patient regarding my refusal to keep you updated with Facebook stats or to bombard you with tweets and other means of internet socializing deemed appropriate for our time period and for the quality of my news, let’s quickly back slap and hug one another, grab two imaginary beers of our choice, and start talking. Or… I’ll do all the blabbing this time, and you’ll listen through the entire thing, and I’ll make like I’m having the greatest conversation of my life. I can even try to be as entertaining as James Thurber, though not as famous or blind.

I am mostly employed these days. School has led to work, and work happens at a large galaxy wayfaring government institution with enough hours and a pay rate to provide me just enough funds to travel to and from my own rented space unshared by the ‘rents. So, yes, I still maintain residence in San Jose, though now escape to a hideaway up on the foothills of Mt. Hamilton, forty minutes away from Lick Observatory. The house I live in has a similar geometry to Lick, and has been dubbed, without my renter’s consent,”The Dome.”

To avoid disclosing too many details to any unsavory types who might be reading, I can provide a link to instructions for building your own similarly shaped structure. Simply enlarge the pattern according to your own body proportions and personal space needs, and voila! Home sweet dome. The rest of that website is a pretty nifty collection of other easily assembled shapes and geometrically obsessive (geobsessive?) ideas for shelters, chairs, and playground equipment. Not that you should add up shapes and tents and assume that I live in a tiny yurt with four other people, two cats, and a dog; The Dome is more on the side of a proper house. Inside, I stay in a bright yellow room on the 1st floor where I can stare out at foliage and have my bed alighted by aforementioned cats and dog (usually accompanied by loud wheezing, hacking, and general breathing sounds from all three. Must be rough being a domestic animal out in the countryside). Sometimes I also stand outside and look down at the other farms and city lights of San Jose below.

Why did the turkey cross the road?
Good question, and one I get to ask on my occasional treks up the mountain. Sadly my reflexes aren’t enough to catch it on camera while driving along the curves of the road, but I did manage this one shot after a mass crossing.

Crappy non-iPhone cell camera. Ah well.