I'm taking scuba lessons and I'm pretty darn excited about it.
While Dave's away in Germany this time, he signed me up to get certified so we can go diving together. He's already official, gear geeked up and ready to go and I'll be able to join him once I pass the test.
The class takes place in the pool, but our final exercise happens in the ocean waters off Monterey Bay.
I've got some homework to do, but I know lots about breathing calmly under pressure so I should do just fine!
¡Forward Russia! A political party formed by Yeltsin's finance minster Boris Fyodorov during 1993-94. It was still going as of 2003, but does not play a significant role in Russian politics. This Leeds, UK, dance rock band put an inverted exclamation point at the front of their name, so I'm sure their name is full of deep political significance.
The Walker puts together an artist-designed mini-golf course every year, and my friends and I checked it out last weekend. One hole was a huge water hazard, which consisted of dozens of plastic water bottles dangling from ropes.
Another had you hitting your ball up into Teddy Roosevelt's mouth via his 3-feet-long tongue/ramp, as long as you could get it past Paul Bunyan's swinging ax.
But the coolest, by far, was the People-Powered Penny Arcade. There was an old bike in the middle facing a giant pinball machine. To tee off, you had to pedal a bike backwards while dropping your ball into a big funnel.
The bike launched your ball into a giant pinball machine in front of you. Once in the pinball machine, you had to use the bike brakes to control the flippers. If you could hit into a hole in the middle, your ball would come out on the side of the hole. If you couldn't hit it into the hole, it would end up on the other side.
I love summer...
Here's a description of all the holes that I found on mnartists.org.
Walking on Nicollet Ave. Saturday night, I saw this little bit of grafitti on the sidewalk outside Christo's. Does anyone have an idea who it is? I'm thinking it's someone super famous I'm not recognizing, because a coworker saw a similar one of Martin Luther King Jr. near Lake of the Isles recently. Despite my fear of unknowingly participating in some obnoxious corporate graffadi campaign, I'd love to know what it's all about.
I've been feeling a wee bit sorry for myself, for no particular reason other than a confluence of life's regular up and down stresses and a need to remind myself to focus on what I have to be grateful for.
When I get like that I tend to make myself feel better by buying things and so last week I opened my Amazon Wishlist and one-clicked ordered a couple of new lens for the camera; a telephoto * and a macro **. I haven't played around much with the telephoto, but yesterday I took a few shots with the macro just to start to learn the settings.
I'm feeling better already.
* Canon EF 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6 IS
** the Canon EF-S 60mm f 2.8 Macro USM
All of the critical praise being heaped on Shearwater's recently-released Rook piqued my curiosity, even though the album cover gives me a seriously bad case of the creepy-crawlies. The 6 tracks they have up on their MySpace page were interesting enough, but I honestly couldn't decide if I liked them or not. So when I saw that they were playing the Entry with a local band I had wanted to catch, I had no choice but to go!
It was a fun show, both intentionally and unintentionally. The Austin band is full of skilled musicians, and they played a butt load of instruments: acoustic and electric guitar, acoustic and electric bass, banjo, melodica, whirligig, tambourine, trumpet, and keys (2 sets). And drummer Thor (yes, THOR!), who looks like an older buffer Garth, nearly doubles that number.
He jumped around from vibraphone (played both with mallets and by bowing the edges!), to xylophone, to clarinet, AND to homemade dulcimer, in addition to bass and keys. The lead singer's voice and the music's overall tone was really rich live.
Overall though, it was much too melodramatic and prog-rocky for me. Said melodrama and prog-rockiness was especially evident in the lead singer's phrasing and his trembly falsetto. He was clearly a drama kid in high school, as he even took two dramatic bows at the end of the set. Century Eyes is a good representative of the melodrama.
The fact that the only words I could make out during the set were "mother and child" in one and "God" in another were another tip that they might be taking themselves a little too seriously.
All that said, the lyrics are supposed to be about the destruction of the environment and love of nature, so if the library ever buys it or I'm ambitious enough to track down MP3s on the web, I'll probably give Rook a few listens. And more than a few members of the crowd seemed to be having a spiritual experience, so vive la difference!