Mohawks and Lemon Drops

Wow, it's been a while. No wonder I have exactly zero members of the Kitlab Club even though it sounds fun and porny (see left sidebar. Please.) Highlights of this weekend included going to a party (gulp) in Queens (gulp). Yes, I'm very proud to have again gotten not only out of my house but out of the borough. Typically, that involves effort and lots of money and a plane ride. This, however, was relatively easy. Jumped on the R train with E. and got off in Forest Hills (I think), walked for what seemed like forever to finally arrive at the wonderful Chinese New Year party of kooky R. and J. (that's them, pictured)

It involved lots of amazing and occasionally scary real Chinese food, a guy with an actual spiky FOOT-HIGH mohawk, a hookah (that happened after we left), some Rock Star game via video (way beyond me) and shots of tequila (how that's appropriate I don't know but it was fun). I do lament the last lemon drop we downed at the club we dropped by just because we couldn't get enough of Queens. At the Lighthouse this week I read aloud for two hours about Java and parallelism and object-oriented programming. Fun! And JUST the cure for a tequila-lemon drop hangover.

All this tech reading is going to my head and making me a bigger (and more annoying) nerd than I was. I'm not a geek (I'm just not that adept at the tech stuff or too lazy to really learn/apply), just a nerd. I love reading about technology, understand at least 5.3% of what I read, can use pretty much NONE of it except for cocktail party chatter or this blog... I even read tech blogs, but not even the cool ones that would stand me in good stead with my geeky friends and colleagues but the more obscure ones (today it was Life in the Startup Lane, stumbled upon through the vagaries of Web wandering). I like that the fellow is from my original hometown of Boulder. Oh, it's all so random. Goodbye, John Updike.

Happy MLK Day

Today is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Hey, and I live on King Street! How cool is that? Okay, kinda cool, once a year. Allow me to enjoy it.

I'm growing weary of winter. In my head, I'm in a sun-dappled garden planting peonies. It's 75 degrees and I can hear bees. In reality, I'm boiling eggs and preparing to tackle paperwork. Last week, I performed Step 1 in my new cleaning regimen: put all paper (everything) in a paper bag. Put the bag under the desk and leave it. Step 2 (which took a full week to get to) is actually going through all the paper in the bag. Brilliant. Painless. So far.

Redux

Okay, that last post was titled "Liquidity" because I had meant to mention the weirdness that was the occasion of me going into old standby National Wholesaler Liquidators on lower Broadway because I needed some cheap hand towels (cat-related; don't ask). That's right, folks, NWL is... liquidating. What do you do when your liquidator... liquidates?

Well, you buy a whole lot of things you really REALLY don't need (I'm talking questionable surge protectors and old lipstick) for really cheap. Note: sorry I had to link to consumeraffairs.com but I couldn't locate a better link. And it's funny, if you have time. Especially the guy who feels the need to use a portion of his obviously precious time to post:

unfornately it was night time so i could talk to any body so i had to impatiiently wait for dawn to broke so at 9;15am i called and explained to the manager who told me i must come to the store with the receipt unfortunately for my i had misplaced the receipt and 2ndly i had a very busy week-end so i had to take the entire saturday and sunday to look for the receipt and finally i found inside my trash can.

I have to go now. I succumbed to a nasty cold/flu/wtf that has me feverish and dizzy and achy and the only respite is bed. I hate this. I do have to say that the outpouring of offers from outer borough friends to bring me soup and stuff warmed my heart. Which I needed (at least during the cold, shivery phase of my ailment). Winter sucks, no? But friends make it all worthwhile.

Liquidity

Anticipating a morning of reading aloud at Lighthouse Int'l. from a third edition textbook on Java, I was apprehensive. However, even reading about an object oriented programming language can provide some poetry and some needed connecting of some of my lazier components of my own neural network. Java (from Sun Microsystems). From Wikipedia (since I can't exactly ask to take the textbook home):

Java uses an automatic garbage collector to manage memory in the object lifecycle. The programmer determines when objects are created, and the Java runtime is responsible for recovering the memory once objects are no longer in use. Once no references to an object remain, the unreachable becomes eligible to be freed automatically by the garbage collector. Something similar to a memory leak may still occur if a programmer's code holds a reference to an object that is no longer needed, typically when objects that are no longer needed are stored in containers that are still in use....

Now that's very nice for a computer program. But I'd like to see it applied non-theoretically to one's brain (or the brain of any aging relative). It just sounds cool ... and effective. The photo? My 74 year old dad shoveling snow of the roof of the little house he built for my grandmother. Wow. Just... wow.

In other news, I'm still recoving from a wonderful night in Brooklyn, celebrating A.'s birthday at Union Hall. Great to see old friends and just hang out. Naturally, since I was with S., we continued the convivery (is that a word? If not, it should be) at Oscar on MacDougal Street, where I met the owner, a wonderful, brilliant man who is going to hook me up with the architect I need to build my treehouse. Well, we'll see about that but hey. Good times...

Note: D. Leshem. Where ARE you?