Independence Day Weekend

listening to: Tour De France Coverage on Vs.
reading: Manifold Space by Stephen Baxter

It’s good to be back in the blogging saddle again. It was hard work to put together all of those previous vacation entries, believe it or not

The Independence Day weekend was rather busy, surprisingly busy, actually. I did not have the rest and relaxation I wanted. I had plenty of fun, just not all that much relaxing. In my book, there is a huge difference!

I started out Friday morning with a little bit of landscaping. Heather was the recipient of some free plants, and she wanted to plant them in between the driveway and the house. I spent some time figuring out that I am not in shape for manual labor like that. It’s not as fun if I have to rest more than I work. Well, we will get it done someday.

Much of the afternoon we spent preparing for our party the following evening. Heather and I worked on pasta salad mostly. We made about fifty pounds of it, it seemed. We then got ready to attend a party nearby with some friends. After some marvelous food (ramen salad, grilled quesadillas, cranberry roast, brownies, and tons of extras), we had plenty of fun talking out on the deck, and then enjoyed a neighborhood Independence Day fireworks show.

On Saturday, we finished preparations for our party later that night: homemade barbeque, fruit salad, and hamburgers. We also cleaned out the garage and set up the tables and chairs. Twelve different people in all came over at one point or another. We enjoyed games of PIG and HORSE, the kids and some of the young-at-heart adults bounced on the trampoline, and we finished off the night with some euchre in the garage as we had a fire in the metal pit. It was a great time, and we reaffirmed just how much we enjoy having people over to visit.

I will share pictures of this fun in an entry later this week.

Heather and I were pretty tired on Sunday, and had to take a little nap after church. However, we got to take Katelyn to see WALL-E , a movie that Katelyn had been begging us to go see. The movie started out a little bit dark, since it is a post-apocalyptic story set seven hundred years in the future. It was above Katelyn’s head, but she got what she wanted: cute robots running around with an adventure in mind.

Pixar did a marvelous job with the physical details in this movie, especially the desolated city where the first part of the movie takes place. The movie made use of distant horizon pans with sudden zooms on a main subject, reminding me of the camerawork techniques utilized in Battlestar Galactica. I enjoyed the movie, but was glad to get home finally so I could rest. We watched some US Olympic Swimming Trials, and called it a night not long thereafter.

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Speaking of Olympics, my alma mater, Purdue University, will be represented in Beijing in a month. Kara Patterson, who will be a senior at Purdue this fall, won the women’s Olympic Track and Field Trials javelin competition. Purdue celebrates their Olympians, and I found this page with the total list. For schools like Michigan and Stanford, stockpiling swimming Olympians is no big deal to them. However, we are grateful for the occasional special athelete who comes along.

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I forgot to tell you that while coming home from vacation, I finished Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars. It’s a story based in hard science of the colonization and terraforming of Mars. The only good hard science fiction is well researched by the author. Cutting edge science and research makes for a very contemporary and believable story. Terraforming, geology, intra-solar system space travel, and building a world from scratch form the foundation of the novel, but the politics and psychology of human beings wanting a piece of the Martian pie build the tower of the novel

He has two sequels that I will eventually read because they are also Nebula and/or Hugo award-winning. Honestly, I think I might have read them anyway. Red Mars ends not so much with a cliffhanger, but at a logical break in a longer story.

Which leads me to my current book, Manifold Space by Stephen Baxter. It’s another novel of hard science fiction, and it coincidentally has elements of terraforming in it as well. However, the novel encompasses quite a variety of scientific disciplines, ranging from the Fermi Paradox, to interstellar travel, to the nature of alien life and its proliferation in the universe. I’m about 75 percent through the novel, and I suspect there are more scientific surprises to come.

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I want to thank my family for the Bearclaw coffee gift certificate they got me for Father’s Day. I am still using it, and it has about fife dollars left on it. I had been getting large coffees, which are the cheapest drinks on the menu. That way I could milk the thing for all it is worth. I don’t really need the more expensive flavored drinks.

However, I really wanted to try something different today. After all, why not take a risk with a gift certificate? I bought a frozen latté, and found it to be delicious. Drinking hot coffee in the mornings of hot summer days is probably not the greatest idea, especially since I am so hot by nature anyway. However, I love my morning java.

I need to start making my own iced coffee somehow to get rid of the hot drink factor. I’ve researched some recipes on the Net, but I just need to put action to ideas and make it happen.

buck on 07.08.08 @ 09:56 PM EST [link]