What a wonderful Thanksgiving it was, in spite of the fact that my son Jaemon and I practically crossed planes in mid-air as corporate values at Intel obviously don't include family values! Rather than wait a day to fire up and test a new chip, they sent Jaemon down to San Jose so that he missed Thanksgiving with his family. Perhaps someone at Intel could tell me why that couldn't wait for a day. One day to spend with family. They could easily have postponed for one day and fired the chip up on friday, even letting Jaemon fly down on Thanksgiving evening so they could get an early start on Friday. What kind of respect do they have for employees and their families? So much for the heart of corporations in America today.

 

Ah, well. I got to spend a wonderful time with Tana and Jennalise, and Tana's folks Mike and Rose Marie, and Tana's sister Linda. They made me feel like a wonderful part of their family. I also got to see Tim and Wendy. Tim was Jaemon's stepfather many years ago. We did a lot of laughing about the time I stayed with them and was arrested for the WTO demonstrations in Seattle. I remembered my office called them and told them I wouldn't be coming back to their house for a few days until I was let out of jail! (The city of Seattle just settled a wrongful arrest suit around my arrest!)

 

Jennalise is trying to speak these days and she's doing a really good job of trying to repeat the words you use with her. When she gets it right her face lights up with a big smile and she laughs. She's obviously a people person. It was such a relief to not have to go through a reaquaintance period with her this time. She warmed up right away. What joy she was, but she's given me a present to take home with me. I'm taking home her cold, which appears to be settling in my chest. UGH. Can you say "cold" Jennalise? 

 

Limping toward the end of the semester in two weeks...

The end of the semester is fast approaching, a time when both students and teacher have to work their ass off! Giving the third mid-terms today and tomorrow and will try to get them graded over the holiday. When we return from Thanksgiving there's only two weeks before the final exams. Those are still left for me to make up. I will also need to grade the first projects and hand them back quickly so students will have some idea what I want on the second projects, which are due the day students take their finals.

 

So lots of work to do before vacation!

Spent all of weekend before last doing the catering for SCQM and this weekend I was up in Arrowhead at the UCLA conference center working with 14 of my friends and colleagues working out the outline and marketing for a new math course. I'm thankful that today I can just relax, go to my banjo lessson, and then have to do just a little bit of work tonight during a conference call for PYM.

 

For the last couple of months my iPhone has become increasingly difficult to sync, as has my iPod. I figured that the latest Microsoft updates were responsible. Then I started having my printer go offline for no reason at all and soon I couldn't print anything. Then my removable storage hard disk started giving me errors. Had I not been working so hard I probably would have put two and two together sooner. They all are USB devices. This morning I replaced the USB card in my computer with a card I bought on the way up to Arrowhead and it solved all the problems. The reason I didn't think of it sooner was that the problems on all the devices were intermittent, so nothing would consistenly be a problem. UGH! This morning I have my printer back, the diagnostics on my removable hard drive came out perfectly, and my iPod and iPhone synced without a problem.

 

What a joy to diagnose and finally fix something!

 

I treated myself yesterday and went to a matinee movie. I've been wanting to see "Into the Wild" for a long time. I remember reading the original article by Jon Krakauer in Outside magazine. It was a riveting article. When the book of the same name came out, I found it as engrossing as a novel. So when it was announced that Sean Penn had finally gotten the family to agree to making a movie, I was a little concerned. Sean Penn? Would he do justice to the spirit of the book?

 

It certainly is true that the parents come off the worse for it in the movie. Krakauer was much more sympathetic to the parents. And the movie starts off slowly, but eventually builds to the fierce vision that led Christopher McCandless to walk into the Alaskan wilderness with not much more than a backpack. Obviously Alexander Supertramp (Chris) and I have more in common than I'd like to admit. I was taken aback when I heard Carine, Chris' sister, say in the movie, "Chris was always an adventurerer. When he was six he took off at three am to wander the neighborhood!" My sister, Anna, has in fact said the same thing about me! She would remind me of the time when I was 7 years old and got into trouble for sneaking down to the El in Queens, NYC, to ride the rails. My father was so angry he knocked a tooth out when he hit me. Years later, I was thirteen, I also took off one day and walked 50 miles without telling my folks. By that time my father had become reconciled to my wandering and merely ignored my return!

 

So there's obviously lots of empathy here for Chris.

 

I believe that there are some men (it doesn't appear much in women, though there are some women who have it) who have a need to push the envelop in spite of the odds, to think outside the box, unconcerned with death that lurks close by, and to follow the spirit of adventure regardless of the need that other's have to be cautious. I believe that they carry humanity's need to explore, to live an adventure beyond the ken of ordinary folks. Most folks will not understand that need to go off into the wilderness alone, or up in a space ship, to explore new dimensions of the world.

 

Chris died in the wild. There are many who wrote into Outside magazine when the original article came out and talked about how ill-prepared and foolish Chris was. Many folks believed his death could have been avoided through preparation and training. That's probably true, yet many explorers face death and are pushed beyond their fear by an irrational desire to experience something new, something no one else has experienced. I believe that in spite of the risks and the death that might ensue for them, they carry the torch for all human kind.

 

One of the jobs I had to put myself through school at Iowa State University was as a cook at Tony's Little Italy. I started out as a pizza delivery boy, worked my way up to dishwasher, and finally to occassional cook in the kitchen when the regular cook was out. I loved cooking. That love has stayed with me and so has a dream I've had since then to really cook for a large group. In the years since then, I have cooked for friends at Thanksgiving and for family at Christmas, but they were one meal and the largest was a group of thrity friends at Thanksgiving. But the dream was to cater food for a large group.

 

Every year Southern California Quarterly Meeting (SCQM) meets in November for fall fellowship. Around 100 Friends gather to spend the weekend at a camp in Temescal Canyon in Pacific Palasades, north of Santa Monica. It lasts for three days and usually the first two days are catered, while to save SCQM money the last breakfast and lunch on the third day have usually been done by Quaker groups who want to raise money. The caterer last year was terrible. Lots of complaints about the quality of the food. Lots of complaints about the money.

 

So I saw my opportunity to fulfill a dream. At SCQM last spring I offered to cater the entire event. I was convinced they would turn me down. They didn't. So last month I began to work on the menu for Friday night dinner, and Saturday breakfast, lunch and dinner. I thought at first I would cook Italian food, the food I know best. Lots could be done before the weekend and I am confident in my abilities as an Italian cook. But Lance Schaina, a friend and colleague at work, suggested Indian food, especially when I began to have problems modifying my proposed Italian menu to account for glucen allergies, diabetics, and vegetarians. Here's the menu Lance helped me come up with:

 

Friday -- a light dinner.

Coffee, tea, milk, sugar, honey and soy milk

Green salad (tomatoes, green peppers, mushrooms, radishes)

Salad dressing (Italian, green-goddess, ranch, oil and vinegar)

Bread (whole wheat loaf, white loaf, kalamata olive loaf, gluten free loaf), peanut butter, butter, and jellies

Soup (Italian black bean soup and miso soup -- both vegetarian)

Fruit (apples, pears, oranges and bananas)

 

Saturday -- a west-side breakfast

Coffee, tea, milk, orange juice, sugar, honey and soy milk

Bread (whole wheat loaf, white loaf, kalamata olive loaf, gluten free loaf), peanut butter, butter, and jellies

Rigotta stuffed crepes (blintzes)

Oatmeal with raisins, brown sugar and cut-up fruit

Yoghurt

 

Saturday -- a kids lunch (easy to do so I could concentrate on making dinner)

Coffee, tea, milk, apple juice, sugar, honey and soy milk

Bread (whole wheat loaf, white loaf,  walnut loaf, black pepper corn loaf, gluten free loaf), peanut butter, butter, and jellies

Mixed spinich, endive salad with tomatoes, carrots, jicama

Left-over soup from Friday night

Sandwich meats and cheeses