No... not my dad...
June 2005 Archives
Tue 06.28.05 - As seen on the sidewalk in front of an antique store in Orange.
File Under : Extraordinary or a Blessing...
Back when I was a young and idealistic college student, I decided to sign up with Compassion International and support a child's education. My Compassion child was a bright, engaging 9 year old girl from the Tamil Nadu state of India. She wrote regular letters me about her school, her studies, her hopes and her family for nine years and I wrote back telling her of college and a bit of my life.
When Esther turned 18, Compassion cut me off and switched, with no notice, my monthly support to a 7 year old boy in the Philipines. I was very upset, as I had encouraged Esther to go to university and continue her studies. I had written Compassion asking if I could send Esther money for college. No go. They only supported children until they were 18.
I called Compassion to vent my frustration and told them that I would like to write a goodbye letter, they said that they would pass it on. I didn't hear from Esther again.
Until today. I opened my gmail account that I use to funnel emails from this site and found the following email:
Hello Jenifer,
I am looking for a Ms. Jenifer Hanen. I know that her birthday is on the 24th of April and that she loves painting. I browsed the net with this info and found this link http://www.blackphoebe.com/. I am hoping you are the person I have been trying to look for.
Let me tell you about myself. I am Esther from India.
The one and same Esther. Thank God. The one and same Esther is now working for a large company and has a Bachelors in Computer Science. Yeah!
Idealism pays off in the long run.
Sat. 06.26.05 - Views from the patio at Alex's.
Sun 06.26.05 - View from the patio, looking up, at Alex's.
Sat 06.25.05 - Yola and Zack outside.
It is Alex's night tonight (read : noisecoregrungemetalsludge) and I am sitting at the door taking money, trying to make a multiple page php form that I coded last night work.
While Alex and I's musically tastes do overlap about 70% of the time, there is the other 30% that has no overlap. As a team who brings bands into the venue it makes for some interesting debates during office hours and more interesting complaints the night of.
Tonight I am not complaining of the music (blech) but of my lack of ability to find a good tutorial or a post on how to take a php form and make it print (echo) the screen first for viewing/approval and then hit another button to submit it to email. I am finding tutorials on simple how to email forms (got that working) and really complex arrays (don't need that) but nothing in the beginning to intermediate level of stringing two forms together.... bugger. (If you know of a tutorial or info on this, let me know.)
Whilst perusing Webdesign-L for php help, I found a post by a designer who did this site for Flamenco dancers (Producciones Sonakay), and the design made me gasp. Most XHTML/CSS sites are very boxy and a bit boring, but I love the big S that breaks up the form and the images for navigation. Christoph, thank you for the delightful eye candy!
Wed 06.22.05 - DeEyed, DeCrotchitated, and DeStuffed - compliments of a bored Scruffy McDoglet.
Tue 06.21.05 - ... rising in the east over the Tustin hills.
Tue 06.21.05 - And so begins the season when heat & smog reigns. Wake me up on Oct. 1st.
Fri. 06.17.05 - The setting sun as seen on the trunk of a tree in Seal Beach.
It is June 20th. Summer starts late tonight (June 21, 2005 at 6:46 UT or 6:46am GMT, which is 11:46pm PDT on Mon. June 20th).
And... There is still a snow cap on Mt. Baldy!!!! It is been very clear and warm the last couple of days and that little hat of snow that Mt. Baldy is wearing is standing out on the northern horizon!
Usually the snow cap is history in mid-April or at the very latest early May! Late June! Hello! Go, snow, go!
Mon. 05.30.05 - Memorial Day BBQ featuring rainer cherries and apricots bought at a farm stand on the way home from San Francisco.
Sat. 06.11.05 - The Sport of the Champions, Hot Laps, Scruffy and Saide.
Sport action photo taken with Ms. Jen's Nokia 7610 cameraphone.
Ever since Big Zoo went kaput I have been searching for a new cheap answer to long distance phone calls that don't involve my cell phone or to make international calls at all, as I don't want to pay AT&T $10 for ten minutes.
Instead, I paid Skype $.94 to dial out VOI / talk for nearly an hour long distance today and I will be making a phone call to Europe tonight for $.025 cents. Not 25 cents but 2 and a half cents a minute. All I did was get a Skype account, pay ten Euros for an account, plug in my ear plugs and microphone to my computer and dial the numbers that I wanted to call. The connection was better than the service Erika uses for calls.
I like Skype. Now I particularily like the fact Niklas Zennström, the brain behind Skype and Kazaa is more than a bit an an anarchist.
Best of all, Skype is free between Skype members. Friends and Family who are not in the SoCal region, sign up so we can talk for free...
;o)
Just in... my National Geographic Genographic results... I am a "K" (Southern and Western Europe) and yes, I know, I am a geek. With all due respect to Nat Geo and their use of Flash, I have typed out the info that they provided with my results (Please forgive any typing errors on my part and all links found via Google):
Your mtDNA results identify you as a member of halogroup K. This haplogroup is the final destination of a genetic journey that begam some 150,000 years ago with an ancient mtDNA haplogroup called L3.Haplogroup L3 occurs only in Africa, but on that continent its derivatives are found nearly everywhere. L3's subclades are most prevalent in East Africa."
Continue reading I am a "K".
LA Times Calendar feature article today, A witch with a new twitch, but it is director Nora Ephron's quote about idenity that struck me more than the motivations of the actors:
While today, girl-empowerment (formerly known as feminism) seems as natural as Hillary Clinton's presidential ambitions, Ephron, for one, remembers the dark days. "If you grow up in America when I did, you always have moments of forgetting that your career might be just as important as his, until you learn that," she says.She muses about another well-known Hollywood figure who's just made her screen comeback. "I was fascinated reading the Jane Fonda book because she's just such a parody of a certain kind of woman of my generation who keeps marrying her identity and keeps becoming the person she married. It's flabbergasting. I would have never married a Republican or anything, but I certainly remember when I went to college, most of my classmates were going to marry their politics and marry their lives and their geographic destinations, and that's when 'Bewitched' was a show on television."
Life isn't like that anymore. Says Ephron: "It's getting better."
But has it really gotten much better in the minds of women in America? How about the expectations of women?
Happy Birthday to Ms. Erika G! Happy Bloomsday to everyone else!
Mon. 06.13.05 - During the dead bird crisis, I realized that I a patch of my desk is/was quite lovely in the morning light, even if cluttered.
Mon 06.13.05 - I walked out of my room this morning to find a dead female house finch right in the middle of the narrow walk way between my room / the bathroom and the living room / rest of the house.
Very odd. No cat. Scruffy is at Joe's. No doors open or widows without screens. Odd.
Opie Ortiz, the singer for the Long Beach Dub All Stars (the Sublime sequel band), is currently at Alex's and he is muy loco. He keeps walking up and showing me the new tattoo on his ass (indecipherable asian dragon outline) and putting his tongue through his missing two front teeth. He vacilliates between being mean and attempting to be nice. The nice doesn't work.
As I was typing this Opie came up and asked if I was on MySpace.
"No, I am blogging."
"Oh. I am not a bad guy."
"No, but can I take a picture of you?"
"Sure. Natural."
Gotta love Opie.
I have been known to find the White Stripes boring. Yes, both live and on cd. Heresy, I know.
Either SXSW 2000 or 2001, The White Stripes played an afternoon party and lots of folk raved them up and I watched them play nonplussed. Then I looked for another margarita. When all the critics like a band, I automatically revert into skeptical mode. I have been in skeptical mode since that showcase.
I dropped my guard a bit with the release of Loretta Lynn's excellent Van Lear Rose, of which Jack White produced, played and sang on.
Today, Jack White further surprised me with an excellent interview on Terry Gross' Fresh Air. Yes, I have raved up Terry in the past and her interviewing skills are cream of the crop. Today she drew out the best in Jack and Meg. The interview got me passed my skepticism and I just might check out the new White Stripes.
..and dyed my hair black, wore lots of black (unlike now... hah!), wore lots of eyeliner ala ancient egypt, and cultivated no suntan whatsever, I would occasionally get mistaken for a half Japanese girl. This made me very proud.
When you live in SoCal, it takes work to not be blonde and not be sunkissed.
Today, I submitted my photo to FaceAnalyzer.com (link via Metafilter), and was determined by their "Only Automated Face Reader in the World" to be 76% South Asian and 24% Japanese. Good thing it also determined that I was female...
And to think my family and the U.S. census records claim we are from Ireland... hrmph!
As those of you who know me in person and actually have my cellphone number know, I don't have voicemail on my cell.
For those of you who don't know the above, yep, I hate voicemail. I hate it. Should I reiterate in the imperative?
From my first cell to the fabulous 7610, I dislike the way that folks assume that one will always pick up the cell number if they call. I don't like being on call 24 hours a day. It is hard enough to be a nocturnal freelance designer and rock'n'roll consultant AND to be always attached to multiple methods of communication. Email me or text me... grrr... Cranky, I tell you, cranky.
Ok, I admit it. I am a woman of the book. I love to read and write. I talk on the phone when I have something to say. But I love the way that I can save emails and have a written record. Voicemail, be it on my cell or on my land line's answering machine is just plain annoying.
Previous to my Nokia 7610, I was using up to 1/3 of my cell minutes checking my voicemail. In the fall of 2004, a booking agent who I work with at Alex's got my cell number and passed it freely around Hollywood. All these phone calls to my cell rather than to the venue's booking land line burned through my minutes and my good will in no time. I changed my number, gave it out only to my immediate family, best friends and Alex. I made everyone double dog pinkie swear to not give my new cell number out.
Then I got the 7610 and I had lots more minutes. But the voicemail was buggin' me as the new number was getting lots of calls for the old owner. So, I called up Cingular and asked my Voicemail to be disconnected. The poor Cingular fellow in Seattle was shocked, "You REALLLY want me to disconnect your voicemail?" Yes, really.
Just before Bowling this year, I emailed all my compadres with my new number and told them that I did NOT have voicemail and to text me. For some (JuWa) this worked, for others it was confusing.
Thus for 4 months, I had no voicemail on my cell and to be a further pain, I rarely pick up the calls. Cranky, I tell you, cranky.
Until the other day... I was having fun further exploring the settings on my Nokia 7610, when I discovered, deep in a settings menu that I could forward any and all calls to any number I wanted to directly from the cellphone. So, now all my cellphone calls, if they don't get picked up in 4 rings go to my LAND LINE answering machine. Yep, the 1995 answering machine. Yep, old school.
Busy. Silence. Over 4 rings. Yes, they all go to my Land Line now. So, if you think you are being tricky and leaving me a message on my cell, you aren't. You are leaving a message on my land line. And on my land line, I am guaranteed to email you back in 24 - 48 hours.
Cranky, I tell you, cranky.
Wed. 06.08.05 - As seen in front of a open garage on Almond St. today in Orange.
Sat. 05.28.05 - Rabbits running around a cornice at the top of Noe Valley, San Francisco, CA.
My nextdoor neighbor, Diane, has the best garden in town and a super fabulous, exceptionally well groomed dog named Gypsy. When I need gardening or dog care advice, I go to Diane. Today, I beseeched the Oracle of the Olde Towne on how to proceed with Scruffy's OCD.
Yes, my lovely little puppy has a fetish with chewing his feet, to the point of red, raw, sore-y paws and top of feet.
This evening, around dusk, at the Northeast corner, Diane pronounced Scruffy's future, "He needs to be doing hard cone time."
Not hours, more than days, maybe a week of long, hard, collared time.
Photo of St. Brigit's dog by Ms. Jen, Nov. 2004.
I love a good internet black hole on a Sunday afternoon. Start with an idea or site one wants to find (Today: info on the Ballad of the Lady of Walsingham) and end two hours later up at a great academic resource page (USC's Matrix Home) whilst looking for the historical St. Brigit, opposed to the mythic St. Brigit.
I am currently reading Robert Graves' The White Goddess : A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth, and his breakdown of the ancient Indo-European-Greco-Celtic-Biblical myths on the Goddess, The Muse, Poetry, and Myth is is engaging and a good read, if not more than a bit confusing for those of us who are not scholars of Greek and Indo-European gods. While Graves does not address, at least so far, his contemporary Jung's theories on myth - the concepts dovetail nicely.
I have been googling names of books and ballads that Graves' references to build his case, and thus found myself in the Martrix. Scruffy is chasing spiders along the top of the couch. Welcome to a June gloomy afternoon in Orange...
Sat. 06.04.05 - Sandra and Scruffy at the June Geek Party.
Wed 06.01.05 - ... but she's not. Now Sugar Plum and I are driving to my brother's with the nice fellows from Expertow.