red echo

The last month's jet-set life shows no sign of slowing down. I'm leaving tonight for a quick trip to New York. Saturday afternoon, I'll fly on to California, meet up with my brother Andrew, and drive up to Lake Tahoe for some skiing. Sunday night, it's back to Seattle; Monday morning, I'll re-pack my suitcase and fly to Austin. Five days later, March ends and I fly back home. Then it's April, and time for a whole new set of surprises...

I had a new passport photo taken today. It feels like a little milestone: ten years since I first got my passport, and ten years, roughly, since I left my parents' house and set out to see the world. Almost nothing went according to plan, of course, and I saw rather a smaller fraction of the world than I had expected to cover. Perhaps I will make up for that with this next passport. I think I have a chance at getting some real travel under my belt this year; I'm not entirely sure where or when, yet, but the stars are tantalizingly close to alignment.

Comparing this year's photo with the one from '96, my eyes look the same, and my nose looks the same, but my mouth is all different. How did that happen? And when did I start parting my hair on the opposite side of my head? I have no recollection of that change at all.

From Sahara, a Natural History:

In the mud-built towns of the Western Desert, each family compound has a high-walled stable, in which the camels are kept when they are not being used. The doors to these stables are narrow, and oddly low. They make it difficult for the camels to wander out, or to be easily stolen, for to enter or exit the camel must drop to its knees and shuffle awkwardly through. Since antiquity these doors have been called “needle's eyes,” which is why “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of God.”

It was a busy night, full of of roaming. I started out over at Barça, where a large crowd of people wearing mostly black were gathered to wish Chris a happy birthday. We talked about music, of course, and alcohol, and Duran Duran bass lines, and other things I can't quite remember.

Next stop was a rendezvous with the Kaos kids down at Jules Maes in Georgetown, where the Bad Things were booked to play. Alas, none of us had considered the fact that this plan put us in an Irish bar on St. Patrick's Day: only four or five of the group made it in before the place was sold out and packed solid. Ah, well. We had no backup plan, so back home to Capitol Hill I went.

The night was yet young, and the Pantheogenic party was in full swing over at Michael Holden's place, so I threw together a costume and headed over. Given my name, lack of preparation, and the party's mythological theme, the only possible option was to go dressed as Mars, Bringer of War; so I scrabbled together everything I could find that might have once come from a military surplus store, loaded up my bandoliers, laced up my boots, and took off. It turned out to be a really excellent party. The dance floor was very crowded, since it was basically just Michael's dining room, but people were friendly and the music was great. I spent the night flitting about, dancing for a few songs, wandering around the house chatting with old friends, trying to make new ones, and then hitting the dance floor again. Life feels good on a night like this.

Dawn came over this evening with her theremin kit, and we spent a few hours sorting through components and soldering them to a circuit board. We've been trying to set this up for some four or five months now, and it was nice to finally get it underway. The project is considerably more complex than I had expected, and I'm a little nervous about that - what happens if we finish building it, and it doesn't work? Oh noes!

It's always more fun building things with company. Dawn had no prior experience with electronics work, so we spent a few minutes going over basic soldering technique and the concepts behind the various parts we were working with. Then we set to it, with coffee and music and glee; the forest of little silvery component-legs yielded to the tin tips of our soldering irons with gratifying speed. We didn't have enough time to finish everything, so we'll have to come back to it next week and attach the circuit board to the rest of the hardware, but it was a surprisingly satisfying way to while through an evening.

I went to a presentation over at REI about adventure racing, which caught my attention years ago when the Discovery Channel was covering the Eco-Challenge race. The presenters were a team of local racers with an endearing enthusiasm for their sport, trying hard not to scare us all off with tales of miserable, difficult, hair-raising challenges. Of course the challenge is exactly what I was curious about; instead, it was all the talk of long-distance running and mountain biking that scared me off. I had thought it was more of a hiking-based sport, with occasional forays into paddling, climbing, riding, rappelling, and so on, but this team seems to spend most of their time on wheels. Oh, well. Adventure racing is what originally inspired me to take up kayaking, and I've always had the idea that someday I might look into it further... but it doesn't sound like it's my sort of thing after all.

Well, that was strange; I somehow managed to overwrite March with the contents of February. The pictures are still there, so I've put them back up, but the couple paragraphs of text I'd written are gone. Oh well...