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unimaginative children
Saturday, September 10 2005
Despite the storm cloud of uncertainty over my project, I continued working on the solar panel today, mostly soldering the pipe to the galvanized steel roofing material that will one day turn light energy into the kind that greatly improves the feeling of water when one is showering. At a certain point I actually ran some water through the nascent new panel and satisfied myself that it wasn't leaking. A wave of hot water passing through the pipes raised my excitement (and Gretchen's too), but it couldn't be sustained as more cold water was pumped through the panel. Of course, it's hardly a solar panel yet; it's still mostly an uninsulated reflective surface lying parallel to the ground. But I'll be continuing to test it at every stage of the process to see what change is most profound in terms of its ability to gather heat.
Late this afternoon Gretchen and I drove out to the Emerson to attend Linda and Adam's wedding. We've seen a lot of brides in the course of a lot of weddings, and few were as beautiful as Linda. Holy shit, she looked like some sort of angel. They were married by a federal judge whom Adam had clerked for. I saw him before the wedding and remembered thinking he had a lot of gravitas. During the wedding itself, though, he was actually kind of goofy, in an 83 year old man kind of way. "You may now share your first... legally sanctioned kiss," he told the newlyweds as the ceremony ended.
There's no need to go into the details; you know how these things go. The assigned seating, the buffet food, the collection of retro dance hits that brought those less than 40 to their feet. I should, however, draw attention to a few of the unusual things that happened. First of all, the wedding band was a bluegrass band, but they did a bang up job of playing Hava Nagila even though they didn't have a clarinet. (Adam is Jewish and this was one of several nods to Judaism throughout the night.) And though most of the dance tunes played at the end were standard for weddings among people of this age, there were several exceptions, including Britney Spears' "Toxic." That's such a good song, but normally people in their thirties wouldn't know it exists. (Bear in mind, I'm still convinced Britney herself is a vapid confection and this song owes all its glory to its producer.)
Much later I was hanging out in one of the Emerson's suites. I was with the guys in one room, drinking beer and watching college football (The University of Texas vs. Ohio State) while the girls were in the other, on the bed having a conversation. I know nothing about football, so I kept asking questions about what the rules where and how many points the plays were worth. Even from the other room the gaping maw of my ignorance gave Gretchen a chuckle. My interest in the game was mostly feigned; I find football tedious. Most of what seems to happen is the setting up of plays which take only a second or two. It's about as entertaining as watching an unimaginative child building something crude with Legos only to ruin it in an instant to begin again.
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