Weblog Entry - 10/05/2001: "summer ends, and fall begins"

10/05/2001 Entry: summer ends, and fall begins

burning man pictures. thoughts on online media. cats. progress on house-buying. online shopping. the weather.

Burning Man was a blast. As a group, we got significantly more bang for our buck this year -- specifically, we got a Big Tall Cool Structure, taller and cooler than last year, without having to spend a week putting it up. We put up an 80-foot radio tower with aqua-christmas-lights on the guy wires, and then set up sound-reactive lights up the center pole. Every night, people would gather around the base of the tower and *scream* at it, and the louder they screamed, the taller the column of lights would go, until they screamed loud enough to light the red flashing light at the top. My group also contributed two other art installations -- The Motherboard, a sculpture of styrofoam and recycled computer parts, complete with several racks of styrofoam heads with LED eyes and glowing horns and halos, and Workers Ahead, Ethan's interactive art piece consisting of a metal plate, a sledgehammer, a dozen or so traffic cones, and two big orange signs. And I took lots of pictures (as usual).

I gave $100 to Salon.com yesterday. They are, as far as I've been able to tell, the only decent independant news around. I'm having trouble taking the anti-trust suit against microsoft seriously...I've got operating systems from three different places running in my house, but all the news I find ends up coming from the time/warner/aol/cnn/etc. conglomerate!

Molly got a new kitten, that I haven't seen yet. She's making better progress on becoming The Scary Old Lady Down The Street With All The Cats than I am. :)

Back in early spring, Ethan and I fell in love with an empty lot. It may very well be the *only* empty residential lot in our neighborhood; it's very much what I'd like to build a house on (its only flaw is that it's a little small). There was a house there, once, but it burned down in the '50s, and was never rebuilt. It wasn't technically for sale, but our real estate agent contacted the owner anyway, who said she was open to an offer. So we made an offer. And waited, and waited, and waited, and every time the real estate agent talked to her, she said she wasn't ready to make a decision yet; we suspect she's not fully living in the here-and-now. As summer turned into fall, Ethan decided that it couldn't hurt to get directly involved, so he called her himself. On his second phone call, he reached the owner's daughter, instead of the owner, who sounds more likely to actually give us an *answer* -- and whether that answer is yes or no, it'll be better than this waiting and wondering, I think. Okay, I'd be terribly disappointed if it were no. But at least I'd have more enthusiasm for futher looking, without this great big hope I'm holding for that lot.

I love the convenience of online shopping, but some companies just haven't quite figured out how it works, yet. I ordered cheese and other luxuries from iGourmet.com a few days ago. The package arrived as expected (though they didn't send me any shipment-confirmation), minus one cheese. They included a note indicating that they were temporarily out of stock of the cheese I'd ordered, and that they'd ship it when they had it...but they *charged* my credit card for the cheese they didn't ship! Sheesh. Reliable merchants who know what they're doing don't charge their customers' credit cards until the item's actually ready to ship. Everything they did ship was *wonderfully* tasty, though. Devon cream mixed with raw honey over homemade zucchini bread made for a lovely breakfast this morning.

We're definitely in Seattle's two-weeks-of-fall. It's bright and sunny and until today, quite chilly. I'm not looking forward to the wet season, which I expect to start any minute now.

Posted by sev @ 11:37 AM PST |

insert witty comment here