Hey, the summer's not supposed to go by so quickly! July opened with a Friday Night Waltz where Joan Walton played enough John Philips Sousa marches to make me wonder if
76 trombones were about to stomp onto the dance floor, followed by the traditional post-waltz ice cream binge.
The little Altima I've been courting, it turns out, has major alignment problems, since its driver never seemed to think it was a problem that her car is predisposed to veering off the road. But nothing $140 can't fix... now I just need to convince the owner that she should help pay for it since she's been negligent in maintaining it. I think buying a car will be just the thing to knock me into the kind of poverty most other grad students find themselves in. But if I'm going to deal with this RCC job I better get
some perks out of it... (free Internet just doesn't quite cut it)
Sunday Kat and I went to a party at a gorgeous purple house in Mountain View. I was a little concerned it would turn out to be gaudy Yahoo! purple or fairytale pastel purple, but somehow it was a happy medium. I never thought there was a tactful shade of purple you could paint a house, but that was it. You'd never tell from the front yard, since middle-class MV homes are crammed together pretty tightly along the street, but they had a huge backyard with a sweet garden, where they were growing their own lettuce, herbs, fruits, and berries. I'd always assumed I'd just end up living in a ho-hum apartment somewhere in Silicon Valley suburbia, but living in a place like that with a few roommates who'd be willing to chip in to do housework and such would be pretty cool. Naturally, with Valley geeks in residence, they'd installed a projector in their living room (giving them a 91" screen, Deb kept telling everyone) and a home media server to stream TV shows and music all across the house. I'm not sure whether that or the garden is cooler, but something tells me most apartments wouldn't be too keen on letting you dig up their grass OR bolt things to the ceiling.
We bailed on the party early to get ready for our expedition to see
Big Bad Voodoo Daddy at Frost. Of course, only half our party was actually ready to leave on time, but we headed over, picnic dinner in tow, to stand in line for half an hour for what ended up being damn good chair seats. But it was well-worth the wait--the concert was awesome. I've never been up so close to any (relatively) famous band. BBVD started playing
in the middle of the crowd and marched up the aisle to the stage. We made our way to the mosh pit for some mosh--...er ,
swing dancing! We eventually got a spotlight circle going where Swingtime folk showed off and the rest of us stepped in tentatively for a few bars.
Afterward we had great seats for
fireworks, apparently being set off by
Candace and the Registrar.
On the 4th, we had a barbecue that went pretty well, despite its organizer bailing on it at the last minute. But we figured out how to grill stuff, the boys becoming men as it were. Then we ran around campus trying to sneak a peek at the dual fireworks shows in Redwood City and Mountain View from Mirrielees.
But Friday night we headed out "where the grass and the dirt and the gravel all meet": camping at Arroyo Seco with Guy, Helen, Dan, Laura, Andrew, and Nick. Google proved sadly impotent at locating this campsite, and the written directions we got were simple but they made me skeptical. Somehow even after having been let down by MSN Maps so many times, I still feel more comfortable having independent verification of where this place is, like a map. Especially because the exit listed in the directions didn't exist. So we didn't realize we'd gone past it until we got to a city that looked decidedly unlike the Ventana Wilderness. (Once again, a problem that would be solved if only California would number its bloody exits.) Fortunately Dan had old-fashioned paper maps in the car and we eventually found our way. But, despite our best efforts, not before dark.
