Lesson 02/04/04

Once again, I feel like I’m just not making much progress despite practicing as much as I always have. I played a couple things for Fred, but am not moving on from any of the pieces I’ve been working on.

He did mention that I should think about joining a city band, perhaps after the wedding when things calm down a bit. I was shocked to hear this, considering the slump I’ve been in, but he said that I was good enough for it — I may not be able to play everything, but I would be able to play some of the pieces.

Site Scouting II

We visited two places today and talked over their sites with the banquet managers. One was the Stardust, where we ate Saturday night. The other was the Waterford banquet center at Fair Oaks. I think we had already made up our minds to go with the Stardust when we went to the Waterford, but though we should at least see one other place. The Waterford had a nice all-inclusive package that originally attracted us. It’s quite a good deal, however, the center really didn’t have the personality of the Stardust.

We had visited Marco Polo last week to see if we liked it as a reception site. The food was good, if out of our normal eating-out price range, so I arranged to meet with the banquet manager today. However, after seeing the Stardust Restaurant last weekend, we decided to cancel that meeting, and meet with the Stardust manager instead.

A few points we talked about:

• They’ve been in business almost 6 years, and last year did about 10 receptions and closed down the restaurant for other meetings several times.
• They were available Sept 19 or Oct 2; sadly, not Sept 26, which is the date I was shooting for. Oh well…it’s not like I was set on that date; it just seemed like a good compromise between having the wedding late enough that Dave and Jen’s baby will hopefully be old enough to travel and early enough that it doesn’t run into the Minnesota reception.
• Our party would probably have 3 servers plus, maybe, one more for the bar or to just help out where needed.
• Parking is usually not a problem on Sundays. In fact, she described that part of town as a ghost town on Sundays.
• They don’t require a deposit, though neither do they have a contract. In some ways this is a little worrisome, since we have no guarantee that they will hold the restaurant for us. On the other hand, they don’t have any hidden fees — no cake-cutting fee or corking fee, etc.
• We’ll choose 4 entrees from the menu, and guests will be able to choose what they want when they reach the reception — there will be no foisting entrees on guests that they had to choose a month earlier.
• We can choose to have a few appetizers out for the guests for the time before Andrew and I arrive.

Overall, I think we quite liked the manager. When I asked her to tell me about something that’s gone wrong, she admitted that sometimes there is a delay in getting the appetizers out, since they don’t want to have them just sitting out when only one or two people has arrived. They are working to solve this by hiring a sous chef who is better at managing people than the chef.

Paper Published!

Check out the Table of Contents for the February 1, 2004 issue of ApJ!

If you scroll down to the article on page 771, you’ll see why I’m so excited.

American Movie: The Making of Northwestern

3/5 stars

I honestly don’t know how to rate this film.

It is a documentary following Mark Borchardt, an amateur filmmaker, who is trying to make a feature length film. This has been his dream. Though he can’t find the funding for the movie, so he decides to first finish a short film he had started a few years earlier (Coven, pronounced coe-ven). In the process we meet his friends who have starred in some of his teenaged efforts and his family who have financed some of his film efforts. (Though after $10k, his father was done supporting him at all). He still lives at home with his mother. He has three children, though he is not still seeing the mother. He has a girlfriend who looks old enough to be his mother (though we suspect that he’s older than he comes across). His uncle Bill is a sad old man living in a trailer with nothing in his life. It is finally Uncle Bill who comes through with the money to finish Coven.

Andrew’s comment was that this movie was like watching a very long episode of Judge Judy. Almost true, though we don’t actually have to see the white trash surroundings on Judge Judy — just the people who come out of such circumstances.

It’s hard to rate because on the one hand, it was a well-done documentary. But on the other hand, it was just so depressing that I couldn’t recommend the film to my friends.

Coven itself was a confused mish-mash of potentially scary images that never really comes together into a coherent story.

Scouting Reception Sites

We checked out four places today:

• Tivoli Restaurant in Arlington — We’ve been to the bakery before, but didn’t know that the site had banquet rooms. The banquet coordinators were not in, of course, since it was Saturday, but we were able to get a look at the room through the glass doors. It looked nice, though not much personality, and the view wasn’t great (a view of tall hotels and squat businesses around the mall).
• Potowmack Landing Restaurant along the Potomac in Alexandria — The web site made it look like the restaurant had a great view of the Potomac, so even though it was a “fish house”, I thought we should take a look. The restaurant, indeed, did have a great view. However, the Chart Room, where the reception would likely take place, had a great view of the parking lot. I didn’t actually smell fish, which was a plus, but it seems unlikely that we’ll do the reception here since I’m not a fish person at all.
• Il Porto Ristorante in Old Town Alexandria — We’d never eaten here, so we went for lunch. It’s a nice Italian restaurant, and the food was quite good. We also noticed that they had a room upstairs, which is were the reception would probably be. I think we would seriously consider this place, if it wasn’t in Old Town. The main problem is that there is that our guests would either need to find a nearby parking garage (we parked 5 blocks away) or try their luck with street parking (which is metered).
• Stardust Restaurant in Alexandria — I wasn’t impressed with the pictures on the web page, but they had several vegetarian entrees on the menu and were reasonably priced, provided we have the wedding on a Sunday. So, we decided to visit. I’m so glad we did. The Stardust is a quirky, fun restaurant that really matches our personalities. The food was quite good, and as we were eating, I was already picturing the reception.

Sky Coyote

by Kage Baker

I had actually sworn off this series after reading the first, In the Garden of Iden. However, Andrew enjoyed the first book, and so this one was lying around the house and I decided to try it. How odd that the style of this novel is so much different from Iden. I quite liked this one, whereas Andrew did not.

In this novel, Mendoza’s presence is secondary, and instead we focus on Joseph, a facilitator who has been with the company for thousands of years (he was also the one who recruited Mendoza, and was there on her disastrous first mission). His job is to impersonate the coyote god of the Chumash, a native North American tribe that the Company has decided to preserve.

At first I was bothered by the dialog. The Chumash talk like modern-day teens, but I can imagine that Baker decided that making up a dialect could be tricky and potentially more jarring than using a more modern style. In the end, I quite liked this novel, and may seek out more.

Planetarium Call

We’ve been making plans for the wedding around holding the ceremony at the Arlington Planetarium. It seemed like a good idea to call the planetarium director to see if we could really do this.

A few things we discussed:

• If the public shows are running, we would need to be out an hour before the evening show (Saturday), or couldn’t schedule the wedding for an hour after the second afternoon show (Sunday). However, the public shows usually don’t start until October, so if we have the wedding in September, the schedule should be fairly open.
• The fire marshall says that no more than 70 people can be in the room, so we will have to honor that.
• We should visit the planetarium before the end of the school year to determine if there is anything special that we will need to make the wedding work. Classes are out by 2:15 PM, so after that would be best.
• Caveat: The seats are supposed to be replaced by the end of the summer. However, this is a government operation, which are notorious for slipping. The director doesn’t think this will be a problem, since he will insist that the work be done before the school year starts, but thought he should mention it lest Murphy’s Law kick in.

Interestingly enough, two other couples have, in the past, asked about holding their weddings a the planetarium. In one case the wedding was postponed, and in the other, the couple ran off to Las Vegas to get married. That means that ours will be the first. Cool!

NASA and the Moon

I saw this article on Salon today:

Senators skeptical about Bush’s NASA vision

Skeptical senators grilled NASA administrator Sean O’Keefe on Wednesday on whether President Bush’s vision of returning astronauts to the Moon and exploring Mars is feasible in light of strained federal budgets. … To pay for the project, Bush plans to request a 5-year, $1 billion increase in NASA’s budget with an additional $11 billion diverted from other NASA projects.

Since I work at NASA, it might be bad for my career, politically, to say much about the Bush moon-plan. Let me just point out two things: 1) I do not work for the human space flight division; and 2) Note that in the text I included above that part of the plan is to take $11 billion from other NASA projects.

‘Nuff said.

Snow Day!

I didn’t realize that adults got just as excited about snow days as the kids do. Today’s reprieve felt as good as a snow day on a day when I hadn’t done my homework, even though there wasn’t anything pressing due at work today!

Andrew and I started the day by watching The Guru, then I wrote for several hours (it feels so good to write creatively again!), and I made soaps in the evening. Translation: I didn’t do much of anything today. And that’s the way a snow day should be!

The Guru

3/5 stars

This was a fun, fluffy movie about Ramu, an Indian (the country, not a Native American), comes to New York to become a movie star. Instead, he finds success as a sex guru, spreading his philosophy (borrowed from a porn star) to the masses. The random scenes mirroring an Indian movie (seen at the beginning of the film) with a big dance number are hilarious. Lots of fun, but likely soon forgotten.