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So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.


The Profile


Zanzibar
Age. 39
Gender. Female
Ethnicity. that of my father and his father before him
Location Altadena, CA
School. Other
» More info.
The World









The Link To Zanzibar's Past
This is my page in the beloved art community that my sister got me into:

Samarinda

Extra points for people who know what Samarinda is.
The Phases of the Moon Module
CURRENT MOON
Croc Hunter/Combat Wombat
My hero(s)
Only My Favorite Baseball Player EVER


Aw, Larry Walker, how I loved thee.
The Schedule
M: Science and Exploration
T: Cook a nice dinner
W: PARKOUR!
Th: Parties, movies, dinners
F: Picnics, the Louvre
S: Read books, go for walks, PARKOUR
Su: Philosophy, Religion
The Reading List
This list starts Summer 2006
A Crocodile on the Sandbank
Looking Backwards
Wild Swans
Exodus
1984
Tales of the Alhambra (in progress)
Dark Lord of Derkholm
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
The Lost Years of Merlin
Harry Potter a l'ecole des sorciers (in progress)
Atlas Shrugged (in progress)
Uglies
Pretties
Specials
A Long Way Gone (story of a boy soldier in Sierra Leone- met the author! w00t!)
The Eye of the World: Book One of the Wheel of Time
From Magma to Tephra (in progress)
Lady Chatterley's Lover
Harry Potter 7
The No. 1 Lady's Detective Agency
Introduction to Planetary Volcanism
A Child Called "It"
Pompeii
Is Multi-Culturalism Bad for Women?
Americans in Southeast Asia: Roots of Commitment (in progress)
What's So Great About Christianity?
Aeolian Geomorphology
Aeolian Dust and Dust Deposits
The City of Ember
The People of Sparks
Cube Route
When I was in Cuba, I was a German Shepard
Bound
The Golden Compass
Clan of the Cave Bear
The 9/11 Commission Report (2nd time through, graphic novel format this time, ip)
The Incredible Shrinking Man
Twilight
Eclipse
New Moon
Breaking Dawn
Armageddon's Children
The Elves of Cintra
The Gypsy Morph
Animorphs #23: The Pretender
Animorphs #25: The Extreme
Animorphs #26: The Attack
Crucial Conversations
A Journey to the Center of the Earth
A Great and Terrible Beauty
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
Dandelion Wine
To Sir, With Love
London Calling
Watership Down
The Invisible
Alice in Wonderland
Through the Looking Glass
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
The Host
The Hunger Games
Catching Fire
Shadows and Strongholds
The Jungle Book
Beatrice and Virgil
Infidel
Neuromancer
The Help
Flip
Zion Andrews
The Unit
Princess
Quantum Brain
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
No One Ever Told Us We Were Defeated
Delirium
Memento Nora
Robopocalypse
The Name of the Wind
The Terror
Sister
Tao Te Ching
What Paul Meant
Lao Tzu and Taoism
Libyan Sands
Sand and Sandstones
Lost Christianites: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew
The Science of God
Calculating God
Great Contemporaries, by Winston Churchill
City of Bones
Around the World in 80 Days, by Jules Verne
Divergent
Stranger in a Strange Land
The Old Man and the Sea
Flowers for Algernon
Au Bonheur des Ogres
The Martian
The Road to Serfdom
De La Terre � la Lune (ip)
In the Light of What We Know
Devil in the White City
2312
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August
Red Mars
How to Be a Good Wife
A Mote in God's Eye
A Gentleman in Russia
The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism
Seneca: Letters from a Stoic
The Juanes Module


Juanes just needed his own mod. Who can disagree.
One-Hundred Things for Di-Di
Thursday. 8.5.10 11:07 pm
1. The main reason I like math is because I like drawing little symbols and vector arrows.

2. I like drawing flowers because usually if you screw up a little bit it still looks like a flower.

3. I really don't like walking past construction workers on the street because I feel very vulnerable.

4. If I were a doctor, I would probably be a dermatologist because I have great pity for people with skin problems. I would still be grossed out by their skin problems, though, which is why I am not a doctor.

5. I am left-handed, and pretty ambidexterous.

6. I used to love playing Riven and Myst because I had to copy foreign-looking schematic diagrams and symbols and vectors (see #1)

7. I used to go into Petz chatrooms and tell people that I abused my Petz just to get them riled up. I would always pretend I had no idea what their problem was.
I guess I was a troll before trolls existed.

8. When I went online in the late 90s I always pretended I was a seventeen-year-old male, 5'10 with sandy hair and green eyes.

9. My favorite flower is the snapdragon, because I like squeezing the back of the flower and saying "MAHMAHMAHMAHMAH".

10. I love learning languages.

11. I think my main asset as a PhD student is the ability to do extremely tedious tasks for long periods of time.

12. When I was in Antarctica, my recurrent fantasy involved waking up in the middle of the night, putting my bare feet on a warm wooden floor, and walking to the bathroom. I guess that's what happens when your bathroom consists of a bucket located on the other side of a steep hill in sub-freezing temperatures.

13. I never write about people who I think might read my blog, even if I might think about them a lot.

14. I only like doing things that lead to me gaining lasting skills. This is why I prefer to play video games over watching TV (I didn't say the skills had to be important). This is also why I think long-distance running is pointless, because you're only in shape as long as you keep running.

15. If I could always repair and refurbish my current Toyota Camry, I would never desire another car.

16. I hardly even answer my phone because I hate it when other people answer their phones when I'm hanging out with them.

17. One of my main talents is my ability to fall asleep like a brick the moment my head hits the pillow.

18. I think of my friends as plants in a garden and I have to go around the garden every day tending to them, checking the soil, and touching their leaves so that they know I still care about them.

19. When I am thinking, I like to run my fingers through a box of tacks.

20. I have always been one of those people who thinks that this world might be a dream and when you die you'll just wake up.

21. I am very proud of Di-Di for all of his many successes. I am always telling people about him, beaming with pride, and hoping people don't ask me how we met.

22. My favorite teacher of all time was my 8th grade history teacher Mr. Edwards because he was so kind.

23. I love baking things.

24. I can't help but subconsciously imitate whomever I'm talking to, especially if they have an accent.

25. In high school I used to secretly hope that my parents would turn out to be sleeper spies and one day we would suddenly have to leave the country forever without telling anyone.

26. I am not afraid of falling from great heights; I am afraid I will jump.

27. I wish all obituaries and headstones would tell you how the person died.

28. I used to hate Mars until I found out that it had clouds.

29. As I've gotten older I've come to realize that being nice is more important than being funny.

30. I decided to become a geologist after a chance encounter with an upperclassman geologist who had just returned from two conferences in Mexico and Hawaii.

31. I have to know a guy for a least six months before the idea of kissing him even enters my head. Which makes dating in modern America difficult.

32. I think almost all beverages are a waste of calories except milk.

33. I have a magic oven that cooks everything 10-15 minutes faster than it should.

34. I owe my knowledge of the french language almost completely to my high school french teacher Monsieur Cronin.

35. In high school I played softball and soccer, ran track, and did Tae Kwon Doe.

36. In elementary/middle school I played soccer, basketball, and softball.

37. In college I took archery, rock climbing, track, sabre fencing, three levels of latin dance, two levels of social ballroom dance, fly fishing, break dancing, fire dancing, and weight lifting as gym classes. I took so many gym classes that they stopped giving me credit for them.

38. My goal in college was to graduate with a degree in "general adventuring".

39. I love throwing theme parties.

40. I still carry around a card with Maxwell's Equations on it in my wallet that my AP Physics teacher gave our class during high school.

41. I have been Open Water Scuba Certified for 11 years, but I have only been diving twice.

42. When I talk about Ranor to any of my groups of friends, I only refer to him as "Ranor" because they all know who I'm talking about, even if they've never met him.

43. I want to visit Norway, Finland, Morocco and Egypt.

44. I have taken classes in French, German, Spanish, Chinese and Arabic.

45. My little sister has the largest and deepest imagination of anyone I have ever encountered.

46. I have always wanted to dress as a Tetris piece for Halloween.

47. 47 is my college's special number. I see it everywhere I go.

48. My Tae Kwon Doe master said that you should always walk around with your abs flexed, so I do.

49. The two things for which I judge people most unforgivingly are stealing and cheating on their s/os.

50. One time I kissed a guy who had a girlfriend. Every day I wish I could find the girl, grovel at her feet, and beg her forgiveness for being such a heinous bitch.

51. One of my least favorite activities is coming up with a "group mission statement".

52. I hate the taste of alcohol. It makes me feel like I'm pouring poison down my throat.

53. Sometimes when I'm at the dentist I pretend that I'm being tortured at a POW camp. "They didn't... even... ask me... any questions...."

54. One of my favorite activities is mini-golf.

55. One of my favorite places in the world is Ocean City, Maryland.

56. I'm from Denver, and I'm always representing.

57. I like humidity because I associate it with being on vacation.

58. Nothing makes me feel more free than a big sky and an open road.

59. I am a INTJ on the Myers Briggs personality test.

60. My least favorite chore is taking out the trash.

61. My favorite ninja turtle has always been Donatello. I guess that makes me a science nerd, eh Di-di?

62. I was the 2004-2005 Pomona College DDR Champion, for title for which I received a $25 gift certificate to the local record store.

63. I don't like fruit pies, cinnamon rolls, pastries, tarts, or almost any other dessert that doesn't have chocolate in it.

64. I love cinnamon toast. I will probably make some today. That counts as a breakfast and not a dessert.

65. One time a guy cheated on me with another girl but he hadn't actually bothered to tell me that we were going out, so I wasn't particularly upset. The girl and I laughed about it quite heartily later on.

66. I wish I could be a famous writer. Then I would hang around with my famous writer sisters and we could have writing retreats in the mountains.

67. I am always comparing myself to catalog and internet t-shirt models, because of all models they seem the closest to ordinary people.

68. It never occurred to me that black people were any different than white people until my various schools drilled into my head that they were different and that I was automatically a racist just because I was white. I used to just think that they were really tan.

69. Getting to this number just sent me off on a 15-minute internet search about Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.

70. I am the designated cake-baker at the office.

71. Whenever I imagine my future husband, he has short brown hair, is wearing sunglasses, smiling, and sitting at a table on a veranda with his back to the sea. I can't really tell what his face looks like except that he has a strong jaw.

72. Whenever I am moving apartments I open the window and play Andante Sostenuto From The Violin Sonata In C Major, by Mozart while I am packing boxes.

73. I am not easily irritated. Except by computer mice that have slow tracking. That makes me want to throw something through a window in a violent rage.

74. When I'm driving, I see everything as an impersonal "hazard" that I must avoid. I think of this as the "video game" mentality of driving. This mentality greatly reduces road rage because you can't get mad about a computer-generated car cutting you off, it is merely another challenge of the game.

75. When I went to camp for the first time, my parents gave me a pocket knife even though they didn't want to because they said I would cut myself. I fancied myself a whittler and I tried to whittle faces into old sticks whenever I had free time. I eventually cut myself pretty badly with the knife, but I didn't tell anyone because I didn't want my parents to find out that they were right and end my burgeoning career as a whittler.

76. In seventh grade I wore a Bob Dole hat to school on hat day and my teacher told me I had to take it off. I protested that it was hat day, so she told me that I could keep it on as long as I wore it backwards so she didn't have to see it. This was the first, but not the last instance of The Institution trying to curtail my freedom of speech.

77. I really want to go to the Lop Nor in China to see the yardangs.

78. One of the reasons I don't want to be a professor is because all of my professors ignore their grad students and make their lives miserable, and I don't want to follow in their footsteps.

79. I love the sound of the wind through the leaves.

80. I like people who always accept things that I offer them, like rides or food.

81. I believe every person can understand every concept, the difference is only in how many times they would have to have it explained to them and how long it would take for them to grasp it. Thus most knowledge comes through persistence, not intelligence.

82. I think the greatest happiness comes from a feeling of usefulness and independence.

83. One of my favorite German words is "Wagonstandanzeiger", which means "Sign that indicates where the train car is located".

84. I am a Christian.

85. One of my proudest moments was when my paper about Mercury was featured in the Nature "Research Highlights" section.

86. In seventh grade I had to give an impromptu speech about dogs. I pretended like I worked for an animal rights organization that was against ear-cropping and I begged the people in my class to the point of tears to stop cropping their dogs' ears. I have no idea what the people in my class thought of me.

87. I tend to be friends with a lot of "un-cool" people, which seems to make my "cool" friends uncomfortable.

88. One of the worst speeches I have ever given was also in 7th grade, when I gave a speech about Angkor Wat. We were supposed to only memorize talking points and not whole sentences, but I ended up getting really nervous and repeating myself a lot. I was really mad at myself because I was very passionate about Angkor Wat and I didn't want my poor performance to bias my classmates' opinions about it.

89. I used to pronounce cerulean "soo-ler-an", and when I later heard people talking about "cer-eel-ian" I thought it was a similar but slightly different color.

90. Whenever I think about how my older sister has inspired me, I think about her reading "Lafcadio: The Lion who Shot Back".

91. For someone who loves the wind as an object of study, I rather dislike it as a meteorological phenomenon.



92. I love people and think that they are inherently good.

93. Everytime I put on sunglasses I sing that line from Jack Mannequin's "Holiday from Real": "Put my glasses on so no one sees me."

94. Right before I go abroad, I always imagine myself getting kidnapped by guerillas and held in a prison for many years. When I finally return to civilization I have a 1000-yard stare and I hardly ever speak to anyone. People whisper about me behind closed doors and wonder what it was that happened to me out there in that jungle, but they never ask and I never tell them.

95. I go out of my way to avoid shopping at Whole Foods and Trader Joe's because I think they are pretentious.

96. When I was in elementary school I saw a Young Indiana Jones TV episode where some archaeologists broke into the tomb of a mummy despite the curse that was written over the door. They left a random Egyptian man to guard the tomb overnight and when they returned his entire body was burned so that the only thing that was left was melted flesh. For about ten years after that, I could not close my eyes to sleep without seeing the image of that burnt corpse on the insides of my eyelids.

97. I did not see the Man in the Moon until I was in college. I'd seen "Moulin Rouge" and the man in the moon was singing a song and I thought to myself, "IT'S SUPPOSED TO BE JUST HIS FACE????"

98. Someday I'd like to have a Bernese Mountain Dog or a Golden Retriever.

99. I've never had any desire to go ice-climbing, though everyone who knows me always says that they think I'd be the kind of person who would do that sort of thing.

100. I got stuck on this after #15.

I challenge ranor, Helena, elessar, and middaymoon

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Hubble Gotchu
Friday. 8.6.10 11:13 am

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Doppelganger Mind
Sunday. 8.1.10 8:04 am
I think I might have met a male version of myself.

Me: And when you walk down the street at night?
Him: I think of all the ways that I would fight a mugger if he attacked me.
Me: And when you get on an airplane?
Him: I identify the people I think I can count on in the event of a terrorist attack, or the people I think I'm capable of saving if the plane goes down.
Me: And when you're driving down the highway next to a semi truck?
Him: I think that with a single twitch of a muscle, I could send the car crashing into the semi....
Me: eerie....

We spent several hours on Friday night sitting beneath my umbrella tree and talking about the Universe.

Yesterday we went to the beach and built a massive sand castle with a death star on the top and talked about string theory.

Him: Oh no! This pile of rocks is so much better than the one over there! Why didn't we decide to come over here?
Me: We chose....
Him: ...poorly.

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Lightning and Gamma Ray Bursts
Wednesday. 7.21.10 9:14 pm
Have you heard of gamma-ray bursts?

They're a mysterious phenomenon where a burst of extremely high energy photons (gamma rays) emerge from a point in space. Nobody knows why, but it is hypothesized that gamma ray bursts occur with the collapse of a high mass star into a black hole. Most occur in distant galaxies and last for several seconds.

In the 90s a telescope was chillin' out in space looking for gamma ray bursts when it detected one nearby. Where was the gamma ray burst coming from?

THE EARTH.

In the subsequent years it was discovered that terrestrial gamma ray flashes occur in the Earth's atmosphere associated with lightning storms, at a rate of about 50 per day. Lightning itself is still a relatively mysterious phenomenon, as it is difficult to see how the relatively low electric fields in thunderstorms give rise to a bolt of such incredible magnitude, and how this electrical channel propagates through air, which is generally a pretty bad conductor.

There was a hypothesis that showers of cosmic particles initiated lightning, since that would be a way to give it enough energy to begin, but it seemed as if lightning was much more common than these showers of cosmic particles, and that the cosmic particle showers alone were still insufficient to initiate lightning. The discovery of terrestrial gamma ray bursts has further complicated the issue, as thunder clouds are certainly not distant exploding stars, and making gamma rays requires a great deal of energy to be released (gamma rays are so high in frequency that their wavelenths are about the radius of an atom). Perhaps terrestrial gamma ray bursts could provide the energy needed for lightning, but then why does there appear to be many, many times as much lightning as there are bursts?

On the other hand, could whatever extremely high energy event that forms lightning also be powerful enough at times to create the gamma ray bursts?

Researchers have flown lightning planes through thunderstorms in order to study lightning, and storm chasers chase storms across Florida and Colorado (the two top-ranked states for lightning deaths) hoping their vehicles will get struck by lightning, or that the lightning will come close enough for their instruments to be analyzed. Researchers at the University of Florida, in cooperation with Florida Tech, have created an outdoor lightning lab, where instead of chasing lightning, they bring it to their instruments. There they have a rocket launcher which launches rockets into storm clouds. The rocket is attached to a coil of copper wire. As the rocket travels into the cloud, it attracts lightning. The lightning travels down the length of the copper wire, effectively vaporizing it into a glowing green gas as at it makes its way to the instuments.

By directing the lightning, the scientists can capture it with a high-frame rate camera, as well as photographing it with spectrometers and measuring the electrical and magnetic fields.

Lightning is an incredibly common phenomenon which is still not very well understood. It is perhaps ironic that we had to build a telescope to study events in distant galaxies in order to discover a fundamental clue to a process that was so close to home.

Moral: Lightning is wicked-cool.

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Germany for a Weekend
Thursday. 7.15.10 7:12 pm
So I'm going to Germany for the weekend. (NBD).

I'm going to my old Heimatland of Bremen!!! Remember when I lived in Bremen? It would be impressive if you did remember, because that would mean you've been reading my blog for >4 years.

I have to give a 30 minute talk about the entire geologic history of Mercury in front of a crowd of... well, I don't know how many people will be there... but probably a lot.

It was an invited talk... only I wasn't invited to give it. My advisor was. He can't go for whatever reason, so I'm going instead. w000000T. I just spent the last couple of days up to my eyeballs in Mercury trying to figure out what its geologic history was.

It would be much cooler if I could get there by teleportation, as it is I will probably spend more time traveling than I will spend in Germany, as I have to fly tomorrow Providence-->Baltimore-->Norfolk-->Philadelphia-->Frankfurt-->Bremen. I leave Providence at 6:20 am tomorrow and arrive in Bremen at 2:00 Saturday afternoon. While I'm on the plane I have to read about this grant I'm thinking about applying for and develop an action plan.

Things on my list to do in Bremen:

1) See if they still have cheap tents for sale at the discount store near my old place
2) Eat potato salad
3) Buy some German world cup paraphernalia (likely ON SALE!)
4) Walk through the park
5) Buy the most delicious ice cream ever invented at the flea market!!!
6) Shopping at H & M????

On Monday morning I fly back Bremen-->Frankfurt-->Norfolk, where I have to give a talk at NASA to my funding agents about Martian volcanoes. On Wednesday they take us to tour the National Transonic Facility, the Composite Model Development Building, and the Flight Test Article and Development and Integration Lab.

I don't know. It has something to do with really sweet airplanes.

Really early Thursday morning I'm on a plane again, Norfolk-->Baltimore-->Providence.

Livin' the life.

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An Epic American Weekend
Monday. 7.5.10 1:09 am
This weekend was pretty epic, so I thought I should probably record it.

It began on Thursday when my friend and I went to see Eclipse. I sent out this email:

SCIENCE NEWS AND INFORMATION

INCREDIBLE ECLIPSE TO BE SEEN ALL OVER NATION

PROVIDENCE, RI-- An incredible ECLIPSE will soon be visible all over the continental U.S., beginning tonight, June 30th, 2010.

The Eclipse, visible after twilight, will feature stunning visual effects, amazing acting skills, and the white-hot talent of many of the galaxy's hottest stars.

On THURSDAY, July 1st, 2010, members of the Geology Department will be traveling down in the afternoon to the Providence Place Mall, where the eclipse will be visible almost every hour, on the hour.

If you would like to be a part of the Eclipse-viewing, please contact mission P.I.s Bronny or Zanzibar for more information. The eclipse gallery contains many must-see images. Start browsing here.



NOTE: DO NOT LOOK DIRECTLY AT THE ECLIPSE. Because of the expected blinding brilliance of the event, special glasses are advised.


-----

So naturally the only one who came was Bronny, but I got lots of responses to my amazing email and how it actually tricked a bunch of people into thinking there was a real eclipse.

After viewing the incredible Eclipse, we went to Hot Club for a goodbye party for the french postdoc M, who is going back to France, and Rhodes, who is moving to France tomorrow for a year. The Hot Club is great because it has an outside area that is right on a dock looking out over the river and the power plant. Weird to say that the Providence power plant is beautiful, but it really is.

We stayed really really late, and M was pretending that it was his 21st birthday so he was soooo excited to be able to drink. It's a little joke among the foreign post-docs because they all think not drinking until you're 21 is ridiculous. M started smoking and blowing smoke into people's faces and trying to get them to smoke. When they declined he would say, "You don't smoke? Of course you don't smoke... you are PERFECT." Every time the Welshman or his English friend would say anything M would turn to me and ask, "Was he just speaking in English? Was that English? What language is he speaking?" He kept asking if the English bloke was from Germany and if he was speaking German. It was excellent because M is usually very reserved and quiet, but by the end of the night he was tussling with the Welshman over rugby, wars, and which country's men were the gayest. I was DD as usual, so we invited everyone to drive with us back to our place, because hey, why not, and they all came and drank all of our beers that have been in the fridge for almost a year and a bottle of wine and stayed til near three in the morning. I wish they'd stayed longer, but eventually M was sick and they had to take him home.

On Friday morning I went to the bar around 10 and watched the Brazil vs. Netherlands game with some Brazilian friends of mine while eating nachos (they weren't happy). I spent the rest of the day running around doing errands and cleaning my office and was only occasionally seen in my place of work. Friday night our friend Scott called us up and wanted to go out, so we went to McDonald's to get McFlurries. I got a sundae and the woman gave me a pitiful amount of fudge so I asked if I could have some more and she charged me like 30 cents for it. Then we went Graduate Center Bar and met up with our Brazilian friend again and he entertained us with his adventures from Brazil. We had to leave around 1 but we still somehow managed to stay up til 3.

On Saturday we decided to have a 4th of July party, despite the evil "no-party" clause in our lease, so we drove around all day shopping for supplies and decorations. At night we went out to a place called Local 121 to do some serious dancing. We wore Uncle Sam hats and red, white and blue beads and 4th of July outfits and glitter. It was awkward for the first two hours because it was apparently "fancy night' at 121 (it said on the chalkboard outside) and everyone was dressed up. I was trying to drink my water really r-e-a-l-l-y slowly so I wouldn't have to bother the bartender too much. Then the DJ started playing and the crowd changed and we became quick crowd favorites with our festiveness. I decided to practice trapping men... turns out all you have to do is make eye contact with them. For some reason wearing a silly hat does tend to help. We finally left when the place closed, gave our hats to random guys who were cat-calling us on the street, and went to bed at 3 again.

On Sunday we got up and got ready for our epic party. This is the email that went with the party:

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, a BBQing attitude to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the time and place and details pertaining to said BBQ.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, the pursuit of Happiness, and the right to Peaceful Assembly. � That to secure these rights, BBQs are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the party-people, � That whenever any Landlord's Anti-Party Policy becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Party-Policy, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety, Happiness and Kick-Assity.

As for the BBQ, let Facts be submitted to a candid world:

The BBQ will begin at 3:00pm.

Prior to the BBQ, let's say, 2:30pm, Miss Rhodes could really use any and all help that you would be willing to provide in moving boxes from her apartment to her basement, in order to help her fulfill the patriotic cause of Moving to France [!?!?!!?!?]
Her apartment is only a block or two from ours.

There is a fairly high possibility that you will get wet, seeing as we bought a metric shit-ton of water balloons. So BE PREPARED. This may happen following the moving of boxes.

There will be an amazing prize for the winners of a water balloon toss.

You can bring anything you want, or just yourself. We will be cooking up some hamburgers and BBQ chicken upon my brand new grill that replaced the one that was unpatriotically stolen from my house. FIREWORKS would be especially appreciated.

Feel free to come dressed as Uncle Sam, Wonder Woman, or Apollo Creed from ROCKY IV. We have Uncle Sam hats for those who are unprepared.


Whenever anyone says the word "America", it is appropriate to respond, "FUCK YEAH".


After the BBQ we will mosey on down the India Point Park for fireworks.
For the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.

---------------

So the party people came to the BBQ, they ate the BBQ chicken which I had made, they raved about how incredibly delicious it was (thanks, Dad!), they fought with water balloons, they moved boxes, they ate ice cream from the ice cream sundae bar, they shot each other with water pistols (thanks, Mom!). Everyone wore Uncle Sam hats and beads and American flag shirts and we ate potato salad, baked beans, and watermelon. Then we went to the park to watch the fireworks over the bay. While we were waiting my two friends and I gave an impromptu performance of the 'Star Spangled Banner' to the assembled crowd, him singing in his italian vibratto and the two of us in our best operatic voices. We didn't really think anyone was really listening, but they erupted into applause when we attempted and nailed the high note in "land of the free" and continued their applause well after we finished out "home of the brave". The fireworks were excellent, with several new innovations in firework technology making an appearance. After the show we went to my friend's house for drinks. She lives on the hill overlooking Providence so we could see the whole city skyline and watch all of the other fireworks shows across the area. I choked down half my drink (nasty!) and then we were ready to hit the road, we got a ride back and now it's almost 2 in the morning.




I guess I actually have to go back to working next week.


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A California Bakery
Tuesday. 6.22.10 11:55 am
I am sitting in a bakery by the beach in California. It's kind of a weird bakery, as the shelves are always only half-full when I come (around 9 am), and what is on them is highly dependent on the day, since the owner just makes whatever she wants whenever she wants to make them. So sometimes there are cookies, sometimes croissants, always only a half a dozen or less of each thing, and you never had any idea how much anything costs. It's usually reasonable though. Today I came for a chocolate cookies and a banana, but she didn't feel like making cookies and she plum forgot to buy bananas, so I ended up with a cocoa and a croissant. The people that enter the store just shrug and buy whatever is in front of them.

This sure isn't the East Coast.

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Last Love Letters
Thursday. 6.17.10 1:27 am
Be it extremely emotional, controversial, messed up, or whatever, this entry has been password protected.

If you know it, enter it; or, ask me for it.

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