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top shelf birthday
Wednesday, February 16 2011
Today was my 43rd birthday ("Lordy lee, look who's forty three!") and Gretchen kicked things off by giving me a brand new pair of black Crocs. They're not the most fashionable shoes in the world, but they sure are handy. When I wear shoes at all and I'm not going into town, mostly the ones I wear are a pair of black Crocs Gretchen got for me back in the summer of 2005. Those are so worn down that they no longer have any treads on them whatsoever, though I will continue to wear them until there are holes through the soles.
On birthdays in the past, Gretchen has made me a breakfast birthday cake and served it to me in bed. Such "cakes" were always homemade pizzas, since I don't really eat cake. Today my birthday pizza came at around noon and featured slices of home grown jalapeño peppers I'd frozen this summer. These proved unexpectedly hot, making some of the bites of my pizza nearly as hot as the "done like they do in Bangladesh" jalfrezi I'd had this past weekend.
There is nothing I would rather do than work on my latest project, whatever that happens to be. For the past few days I've been working on my vastly improved Arduino solar controller, so being able to continue working on that without distraction was the way I decided to spend the daylight hours of my birthday. I spent most of this time organizing some of the control wires and an indicator panel of LEDs. Having learned from past mistakes, there will be no loose wires hanging from the controller board; everything has to connect to it through some form of connector. One connector is for the LCD display, another is for the LED indicator panel, and a big 25 pin D-shell contains the connectors for all the sensors and actuator signals.
Eventually I took a bath. I'd left myself a block of time an hour and a half long for that bath, which seemed sufficient, but when Gretchen hollered down the stairway that it was time for us to get ready and go to my birthday dinner, it felt like I was cutting my bath short. I should mention that these days when I wash my hair, I start out with a first rinse using Dr. Bronner's soap. Otherwise I have to use too much shampoo to just cut through the accumulated scalp oil.
The original plan had been to have dinner with friends at El Danzante, the cheerful authentically-Mexican restaurant on Broadway where it's possible, some of the time, to get vegan food. And it also has a bar it has dubbed "Tequila Town," which is simply adorable. But when we got to El Danzante, we found it was closed. It was, it seems, in the process of moving to a new location: 666 Broadway. I kid you not. Perhaps that commercial space gets a discount purely due to its satanic address.
Our friend Michæl (whom we know through Deborah and the KMOCA gallery) met us there and we managed to use modern communication technology to not only track down the phone number for the Armadillo in the Rondout (my second choice), but to also reach the others in our party and communicate this new destination. Those in attendance included Ray, Nancy, Sarah the Vegan, Michæl, and Deborah.
The chips and salsa that came to our table were the thing I'd been most looking forward to. A distant second was the margarita I would drink (the consumption of this beverage is one of my few persistent food or drink interests that come from my mother — via nurture, nature, or both). At first I wanted a personal margarita with top shelf tequila (so as not to taste so much like chemicals, which a normal Armadillo margarita often does), but we ended up ordering a whole carafe of margarita for the table. Ray, who almost never drinks these days, ordered a Michelob Ultra.
I ended up eating far too much, starting with the chips and salsa, followed by a huge bowl of black bean soup to which I added more corn chips. And then Deborah ordered french fries and I had to have some of those. I only managed to get about half way through my burrito, and by this point my gut was distended and in pain. I was so uncomfortable that the dinner patter did nothing but annoy me.
Michæl had made me one of his photos that is actually three pictures in one depending on the angle of view. (This is achieved somehow via tiny cones in plastic covering the photo.) Deborah had also got me a present: two enormous IPAs in paper bag she'd decorated amusingly with various pictures and expressions clipped from magazines.
Gretchen had brought an actual cake she'd baked. In keeping with the El Danzante theme (even if it was now in the Armadillo), it was Mexican chocolate, with cinnamon and perhaps hot pepper. Everybody loved it except me; I couldn't possibly eat even one bite. Gretchen even sent a plate of cake pieces back into the kitchen for the guys back there to enjoy.
After dinner, we all went a couple doors down to the KMOCA gallery, whose last opening we'd missed due to weather. Michæl had a key, so we went in and looked at the art. It wasn't especially great show, and the most compelling works were a series of what amounted to found art: chunks of concrete connected via rusty rebar or other iron scrap in a manner that vaguely suggested figures. Each had been meticulously signed with a piece of wire bent to form the signature of the artist, a professional (and very ernest) iron worker whom I've met in the past.
It smelled a little funny in the gallery and somehow this led Ray to tell us about a fun toilet trick I've heard him describe before: top shelf. Top shelf is when you crap in the tank behind the toilet instead of in the bowl. Supposedly that makes for all kinds of unexpected toilet behavior. Hearing about top shelf with a gut full of Mexican food was inopportune. I laughed so hard I thought I might tear something.
Back home, we watched the grand finale in the Jeopardy tournament that pitted its two all-time best players against a supercomputer made by IBM. Being into artificial intelligence (and having written algorithms to produce it), I'd assumed I would be rooting for the robot. But when the machine proved so freakishly able to answer questions, I actually felt unnerved and rooted instead for my fellow carbon-based lifeforms, a change of heart that pleasantly surprised Gretchen. Our fellow humans, of course, and that will probably make this day an important milestone on the road to computers that really can simulate human intelligence. Ken Jenning's final jeopardy response where he wrote "I for one welcome our new computer overlords," though a bit cliché in a nerdy memey way, might go down alongside Neil Armstrong's first words spoken from the moon.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?110216 feedback
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