Dear everyone,
After about three weeks and maybe 1000 hours of free labor
(and some supplies), our aikido dojo reopened.
We had our annual Toyoda Memorial service yesterday (he died July 4th)
- - it was the first time I had been on the mat in 16 months. It was good to actually feel a grip on my
wrist or shoulder, and the satisfaction of moving someone else’s weight and
momentum around (or vice versa). Sensei
Garza kept things pretty basic, and I don’t feel at all sore today; although, I
am going to have to put some colored tape on the left shoulder of my uniform to
make sure I don’t get overhandled.
The afternoon directly afterwards, Jasper and Vivian came
out from Hyde Park to go to Jami’s July 4 celebration. Vivian is in town for
about a week. It sounds like the major
project she was supposed to work on (something like training an AI simulation
of squad level combat for the Army) has some kind of data bottleneck (I hope I
am not giving away any DOD secrets), and so she has been working on a minor
project on an education module at the La Brea
tar pits. She has pictures of her
holding a dire wolf jaw! Meanwhile,
Jasper has been reading papers on the use of azobenzenes in photosensitive liquid
crystals. They were happy to see Robbie,
freshly bathed and patriotically gussied up.
Then we went to Jami’s, where we ate typical BBQ food of hamburgers,
hotdogs, beer, etc., and settled in to watch the firework display. I joked that we should take bets on injury or
property damage. It was humid so the
fireworks did not go as high as they should have, and we were dusted with
shrapnel, but no one was burned. I was
genuinely a little afraid during some portions of the show. On the way home along route 83 we saw a lot
of other local firework displays.
Saturday afternoon Cindy and I went to 1261. Cindy and Gail have been busy cataloguing and
organizing all of the stuff in the house to make things easier to distribute in
the coming months. There is a lot! Among some interesting finds is a file drawer
in the attic full of Roger’s college (and maybe business school?) assignments, boxes
in Roger’s study with letters to and from Roger during the forties and fifties,
trip diaries, etc. Afterwards we went
out to Tapas Gitana for tapas
(duh). It was pretty good.
I finally went out to get a new ‘smart’ TV. I had to do this because we could no longer
use our old WiiU controller to watch Netflix (after all, the Cowboy
Bebop live action series is starting this fall). I got a small 32” Roku TV, because we really
have no place in our family room for a larger TV. It was very easy to set up, and now we have
set up our own Netflix account (we used to pay Lucas a nominal sum for the use
of his password and DVD rentals) - - Not that there is really that much to
watch. I did finish the second season of
Lupin, and
now I am watching another French serial called Call My Agent! that I
am only lukewarm on. I haven’t read anything
spectacular lately, although I am looking forward to next week’s Ariana Book
Club discussion of Carl Hiaasin’s Squeeze Me
Last week we had some terrible storms. One blew through with an EF3 tornado that took out some
homes just a few miles from us, and over the weekend we had drenching rain that
caused flash flooding. Parts of our town
were navigable only via canoe or kayak. I made pickles.
Love, H
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