Greetings from the Red Sox

My Tuesday morning was a bunch of chores I didn't do over the holiday weekend, followed by fresh bagels for lunch that Paul picked up, then some computer stuff before I talked to Chris for an hour and then Paul and I went for a walk (only four bunnies today but the frog was back). 

For Star Trek's 60th anniversary, my DS9 group watched "The Adversary" (the excellent end of the third season) which had the added benefit of making me miss most of the horrible Red Sox game. Carol told me to watch Younger, which is actually pretty fun. Adley Rutschman on the Red Sox for Kate:

Poem for Friday and MoPop Star Trek

Time Passes 

By Joy Ladin 

Time too is afraid of passing, is riddled with holes

through which time feels itself leaking.

Time sweats in the middle of the night

when all the other dimensions are sleeping.

Time has lost every picture of itself as a child.

Now time is old, leathery and slow.

Can’t sneak up on anyone anymore,

Can’t hide in the grass, can’t run, can’t catch.

Can’t figure out how not to trample

what it means to bless.

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Friday, like Thursday, was quite hot near Seattle, and again we could only run one air conditioner at a time. So I spent the morning sorting photos and watching the Olympics, then uploading the photos to Google Drive and backing them up on my hard drives. We walked to the beach in the afternoon, after which I had to take a shower because it was so hot. 

We saw the miserable end of the Orioles-Guardians game, then quite a bit of the glorious Mariners-Phillies game, around dinner and some chores. Now we're watching the last three episodes of A Good Girl's Guide to Murder, which has been pretty good but darker than I expected for a show based on a young adult novel. Some of the Star Trek collection at MoPop: 

Greetings from MoPop

Sunday was Daniel's birthday and we got to spend most of the day with him, a lot of it with his girlfriend as well except when she needed to walk her dog, though Adam and Katherine had to go to a clinic to get her checked out after an owl attack (I said I thought it was a sign that the goddess Minerva wants her attention but I'm not sure she was convinced). Here are photos from our day: 

 

 

Daniel finding out he's a villain on his 28th birthday... 

 

 

...at MoPop's Disney costume exhibit, where we went with our kids and their girlfriends Sunday morning 

 

 

We got to see Maleficent's horns...

 

  

...and all the maximalist A Wrinkle In Time dresses 

 

 

Also at MoPop, I got to see Nancy Wilson's guitar (and some Heart concert footage)... 

 

 

...and we all got to watch some Star Trek on the big auditorium screen... 

 

 

...and meet Daleks... 

 

 

...and study the history of fantasy 

 

  

We had lunch with Daniel and Cahaya at Mod Pizza in the Armory -- well, outside the Armory at a table not very well protected from the rain -- while Adam took Katherine to get a tetanus shot because an owl dug its talons into her while she was running in the park the night before 

 

 

After watching some football with Daniel at his apartment in Belltown, he drove us back to Redmond, where we all got Indian food from Kanishka and had a Pokemon cake for Daniel's birthday, plus SKyped with all his grandparents 

 

  

Then we all played Coup (I got exposed, assassinated, and overthrown every time)

Poem for Wednesday and Fair Babies

Quiet Calf
By Paul Casey

Wring us out, stretch us taut upon the gray bone frame
Scrape us down lunellum-thin as the wide moon blade

For we are codex and caesar, the offspring of mechanical gods
Inflections pressed in virtual folios we are to each cow its calf

Carry the jasmines; the saffrons of our time, calcite prophecies
emblazoned in the cockled ranges, gilded in continental divides

Under a fallen pejeng moon white buffalo spirits pound to crush
the hard harmonics of history in us, down to a form of raw time

They amplify the faded velleities that cling to its valley walls
as calligraphy the word (and true consort of vellum) - elegant

to pen as alfalfa - is all flair and flourish in the nourished nib's
unending congress. In streams of ink-song, tear-strewn tendrils

fall from the gyre-eye drumhead skies, the bodhrans and banjos,
timpanis weave, interleave our celebrations, the flint of our lives

Bear too the wildfire children tapping céilís on the counterhoop
absorbed in the patience of elm, loose-bound for gatherings yet

to come. Flexed, each breath is an age of song deep-stitched
into wrinkled silence, where cockleshells pucker from under

ancient sand. Outroam the Runicus quiet one, deliver whole
these few sweet heartbeats, these glimpses of humanity

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Tuesday, like Monday, was hot and uneventful, apart from a couple of Pokemon raids, some neighborhood bunnies and woodpeckers, and my Tuesday night Voyager group, which was missing Patti and Vicki but had Deborah join us this week, so that was lovely. Plus we watched "Flashback" -- the episode with Sulu and Rand set during the events of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country -- and that was quite fun too. 

We also watched the return of Supergirl, which was not enthralling, but knowing that this is the end of the final season makes me want to see it through, at least until Katie McGrath and Julie Gonzalo are on other shows. And that was about all the excitement. Here are some photos of the calves born at the county fair this year; the little brown one, Mr. Liberty, was born to Independence, who was also born at the county fair, in 2017! 

Poem for Thursday and Starfest 1996

Soliloquy
By Marguerite B. Thompson

My father gave no word of love to me.
My mother practiced laudable restraint.
My Vulcan childhood lessons logically
Prepared me to despise the human taint.

I could not blame T'Pring; I saw that she
Let flawless logic over pledge prevail
For she would stop at nothing to be free
Wisely to mate with a pure Vulcan male.

Human tormentors do not understand
Acknowledgment of feeling causes pain,
Cruelly subvert defenses I have planned,
Plot to anesthetize my watchful brain.

What will they find when I am ripped apart?
"I love you, Captain," written on my heart.

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The only thing that happened of note on Wednesday was that my oldest phone died. I have a Galaxy S4, S6, and S8, and I use the first two only for playing Pokemon, but it's harder to raid without that baby account, so I asked Adam whether I could have the old phone in his room and he said it was fine. So I spent an hour taking off his programs and installing mine, and now I can fail to catch Darkrais again.

Otherwise, my day involved a bunch of scanning, two walks in the woods because it was warm and beautiful out, an hour of The Masked Singer (I was on the phone with my college roommate during After the Mask), and this week's What We Do in the Shadows (funny but no Superb Owl). Since I said I would yesterday, here are some photos from Starfest Denver 1996 with several people who are still my very dear friends!

Poem for Friday, Downsizing, September 11 Museum

Full Flight
By Bob Hicok

I'm in a plane that will not be flown into a building.
It's a SAAB 340, seats 40, has two engines with propellers
is why I think of beanies, those hats that would spin
a young head into the clouds. The plane is red and loud
inside like it must be loud in the heart, red like fire
and fire engines and the woman two seats up and to the right
resembles one of the widows I saw on TV after the Towers
came down. It's her hair that I recognize, the fecundity of it
and the color and its obedience to an ideal, the shape
it was asked several hours ago to hold and has held, a kind
of wave that begins at the forehead and repeats with slight
variations all the way to the tips, as if she were water
and a pebble had been continuously dropped into the mouth
of her existence. We are eighteen thousand feet over America.
People are typing at their laps, blowing across the fog of coffee,
sleeping with their heads on the windows, on the pattern
of green fields and brown fields, streams and gas stations
and swimming pools, blue dots of aquamarine that suggest
we've domesticated the mirage. We had to kill someone,
I believe, when the metal bones burned and the top
fell through the bottom and a cloud made of dust and memos
and skin muscled across Manhattan. I remember feeling
I could finally touch a rifle, that some murders
are an illumination of ethics, that they act as a word,
a motion the brain requires for which there is
no syllable, no breath. The moment the planes had stopped,
when we were afraid of the sky, there was a pause
when we could have been perfectly American,
could have spent infinity dollars and thrown a million
bodies at finding the few, lasering our revenge
into a kind of love, the blood-hunger kept exact
and more convincing for its precision, an expression
of our belief that proximity is never the measure of guilt.
We've lived in the sky again for some years and today
on my lap these pictures from Iraq, naked bodies
stacked into a pyramid of ha-ha and the articles
about broomsticks up the ass and the limbs of children
turned into stubble, we are punch-drunk and getting even
with the sand, with the map, with oil, with ourselves
I think listening to the guys behind me. There's a problem
in Alpena with an inventory control system, some switches
are being counted twice, switches for what I don't know—
switches of humor, of faith—but the men are musical
in their jargon, both likely born in New Delhi
and probably Americans now, which is what the flesh
of this country has been, a grafted pulse, an inventory
of the world, and just as the idea of embrace
moves chemically into my blood, and I'm warmed
as if I've just taken a drink, a voice announces
we've begun our descent, and then I sense the falling.

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Adam goes back to College Park on Saturday for his final semester, so I am having a quiet week hanging out with him as he attempts to do work for NASA when just about every resource he needs is impacted by the shutdown. After lunch we watched Downsizing, which was not at all the comedy advertised after the first half hour; for a while it was really good, an allegorical drama about privilege, cultural arrogance, and impending environmental catastrophe, but then it kind of went off the rails with a badly written romance and an incredibly bizarre apocalypse scenario.

Paul made Ethiopian food for dinner, after which we watched The Orville (very original Star Trek even where bad science is concerned) and the women's short program at the US Figure Skating Championships (I'm sad Mirai and Gracie aren't there). Here are a few photos from last weekend from the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, which do not begin to do justice to the experience of being there. No photos are allowed in the In Memoriam gallery, nor in the enormous exhibit with the timeline of and artifacts from the attacks. May be triggering:


The South Pool memorializes the spot where the South Tower of the World Trade Center once stood. Names of victims are carved around it.


Trying To Remember the Color of the Sky on That September Morning by Spencer Finch (the letters of the quote from Virgil are made from WTC steel).


A pre-1968 street sign for a section of Greenwich Street eliminated by the World Trade Center complex, saved by an engineer who worked on the construction.


Steel from the North Tower floors 96-99 showing the impact of the plane.


A display of the sights and sounds from that morning.


Vesey Street "Survivor's Stairs" remnant.


A portion of the slurry wall beneath the World Trade Center, which did not collapse after the attack and thus stopped the Hudson River from flooding into subway tunnels beneath the city, and the "Last Column" which remained upright after the Towers collapsed.


The water in the memorial pools flows in sub-zero temperatures into the night.

Poem for Monday and Star Trek at Paramount

Garbage Truck
By Paul Martínez Pompa

After it lifts the army-green, stuffed
dumpster over its head and the trash
falls to the receptacle, it hulks
backward with a cadenced beep as if
to say, get out the fucking way, please.

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We had some excitement on our first day back from California, but not the good kind. We came back to find that the disposal in our kitchen sink was apparently not working -- water was backing up into the sink and spurting out of it when we turned it off after using it. The good news turned out to be that nothing was wrong with the disposal itself, but something plastic had become wedged inside the pipe connecting it to the sewer line below, which was also making the basement laundry sink back up. So several snakings later, everything is working, but between the emergency weekend fee and the lingering terrible smell in the house, it does not feel like much of a victory.

Otherwise, our day was about laundry, unpacking, sorting random items acquired while traveling (sea shells, wedding popcorn, Paramount Pictures guest passes), and trying to catch up on email and various computer chores. Adam went walking with a friend in the morning, napped till lunchtime, and worked on an NIH project that will continue into school year. My parents came over for pizza and to see trip photos, then son went out for milkshakes with a friend from high school and Paul and I watched the beginning of the fourth season of Endeavour. Speaking of trip photos, here are some of the Star Trek-connected places at Paramount Studios, which thankfully is not pushing Discovery at all:


The Roddenberry Building beside the tank where the end of Star Trek IV was filmed (whales added later).


The recently renamed Leonard Nimoy Way, adjacent to "Brooklyn" and "Greenwich Village" on the back lot.


Stage 32, where the original Star Trek filmed.


The Gower Theater, used in Voyager as the holodeck theater where Tom Paris watched old movies.


In the visitor center with props from the reboot Star Trek films...


...and in the props warehouse in the turbolift with Daniel.


Our tour guide showing us the construction on one of the sound stages of the USS Enterprise for Star Trek V.


The Star Trek tribute on the visitor center wall recounting Paramount's biggest achievements.