T-Minus-Twenty Drive-By

Teacake reminds us what time it is. I wanna play too but my preparation consists of living life as usual and then starting to think about NaNoWriMo sometime the evening of November 1st. This year will be different because that day is a birthday for a friend of mine, and she's one of those new friends you wanna be nice to, iykwim, so that puts me off to the second.

Could I cheat and start on Halloween? That's a Monday so I won't be doing much else. The weekend preceding already has two overlapping costume parties on it which the friend previously mentioned seems to want to be invited to, but I demur, because I am in no condition to take anyone under my wing. I need to just go chillax as the kids say and worry about no one, not even myself. So we'll see how that goes.

All weekends prior to that are full of Burning Man Decom events, one the 22nd in Auburn, this weekend (the 15th) in Reno, and last weekend in San Francisco. Fun fun fun and not the sort of thing one takes dates to when one is trying to reinvent oneself as a party of one. I guess I'm sort of struggling with this single-but-dating thing and will probably say the wrong thing at some point. But what the hell, it's a fun struggle by and large.

(Wrong thing is probably what I told the woman I went out with in August. I don't think anyone really needs to know about the other woman I'm seeing whose other boyfriend's wife blah blah blah what? No, way too complicated for anyone but you smart peeps. I don't blame her for closing the door, really. I just need to get out of my logical engineering brain that wants everyone else to have a logical engineering brain too. Nope. Hate that shit. And I've been told by some people that they'd never know I'm an engineer and believe me, that's a compliment.)

I sat with my father on Sunday morning a bit. Neither of us is the chatty type. I sort of wanted to talk about death and dying, but only if he wanted to, and he seemed to prefer to stare at ESPN and doze off. His cousins had been there and (he said) asked an obscure family history question (i.e. who in the family was ever stationed on Angel Island) but I can't be sure they really asked about that. Dad sort of crossed his eyebrows and wondered if they meant an old friend who had come in as an immigrant (Angel Island was the Ellis Island of the West), but then, they wouldn't know about that. So a wee bit of confusion reigns, and we just sat and muttered small things. He did ask what I was up to these days but my brief preliminary answer satisfied him. He's never been one to ask about me much.

Decom was a blast but if I ever write about it, it will be some other time. This weekend's will be fun too but again, I am continuing to re-learn the important fact that a lot of activities really did take place in spite of not being shared on the internet.

Such as lunch, which I will now go get regardless of its mention in this paragraph, and then eat at my desk, trying to work, but probably thinking about historical epochs. My secondary computer cycles a number of images on its desktop, and I've inserted a crop of one below. It was taken above San Francisco five or six weeks after the earthquake, and the high-res scan is great fun for browsing, as you can see. This represents a fraction of the entire image. Could probably write fifty thousand words just from this.

For the whole thing do an image search on
"san francisco in ruins from lawrence captive airship"