Mambo Taxi

Today was a pretty great day, weather notwithstanding.  (Seriously: cold snap in Florida. We got here on the 24th; It dropped 20 degrees F on Christmas day. It's going up 20 degrees tomorrow, just in time for us to leave.)

We spent three nights in Tom's very comfy guest-house in Tampa, hung out with him and had some really great food [1] and drink [2] and basically had a laid-back Christmas.

Yesterday, he drove us down to Sarasota, to our beach-front hotel, where we're spending two nights.  Two gorgeous sunsets in a row. Wonderful white sand beach. Mid-40s temperature. 

No kidding, it's going to be upper 70s Thursday and Friday. OK, I'm done complaining about the weather. (Except that: dan notes that the nightly lows aren't really different from home right now. Sigh. OK, now I'm really done).

Today we had breakfast at a Cafe recommended by Tom, packed with locals as well as tourists; I watched the  waitress flirting with a regular as I tried to finish my home-fries. Then we caught a bus downtown to Sarasota; and decided to press onward to the  Barnum and Bailey Museum, which was well recommended.  

Sarasota used to be the wintering grounds for the Barnums, on a 28-acre homestead. Huge museum. There's a building just for the 1:30 scale model circus (covering some 2,000 square feet); also a building for life-size ephemera including Barnum's custom Pullman railcar (very pretty), and a truck/cannon for a Human Cannonball act; which might be the coolest thing we saw. There was the Barnum museum, which includes some great Renaissance works, and also a sculpture-garden with a replica bronze David (which just looked out of place).  There were gardens with some great Banyan trees; There was also Barnum's house, which was so overwhelmingly big we didn't even go into it.

Back to the hotel for naps and relaxing; dinner was in Sarasota at a surprisingly cheap and tasty tex-mex restaurant. Then we wandered and got desert at a busy bar/cafe, where dan had a tart and I got a chocolate/nut meringue that made me happy.

Just now we took a taxi from downtown Sarasota back to Lido Key. The driver sounded like your basic laid-back Floridian; he was chilling with Voyage of the Dawn Treader when we showed up, and told us the story of how he inherited his ex's copy of the Narnia series and Bun-Bun the Rabbit. 

Tomorrow, we have until mid-afternoon before we have to catch our flight from Sarasota airport. I'm curious how tiny this airport will be... and I'm looking forward to the rest of my vacation, at home, through the next week...

This, my friends, does not suck.

[1] Food: SideBerns restaurant; 7-course tasting menu. Yum. Details to follow, I hope, when I get around to looking at my photo of the menu.  Favorite course: the deconstructed Creme Brûlée, based around a cold creamy layer that definitely wasn't ice-cream, and definitely wasn't Creme Brûlée.  Also: dan cooked us a whole chicken and cranberry sauce and Tom grilled asparagus. Also: tapas at a local Spanish restaurant, which was just a little too much heavy stuff, but we persevered!

[2] Drink: this was a good holiday to not be driving.  Cocktails and wine-pairings at SideBerns, followed by a chaser of Pine Liquour, tasting amazingly like a Christmas tree in a glass... We had egg-nog and wine at his place for Christmas day dinner; then a big pitcher of sangria at the tapas place. We've kept the drinking more low-key in Sarasota. :)

December 24, 2pm: Somewhere over northern Florida-

dan and I on our way for three days in Tampa with our friend Tom, then two in Sarasota. As usual, the University is closed between Christmas and New Years, so we're taking the time for vacation. Somewhere warm(ish): Tampa temperatures are mid-teens Celsius (60ish F) for the next few days, but it's due to go down to freezing overnight on Saturday through Wednesday. Ah well; It will be warmish.

I just watched an episode from Treme, season one, which I've been hoping to check out for a while. It's gritty and depressing, and makes me want to visit New Orleans. Some other vacation.

It's been a while since I've had energy for writing. I might say I've been too busy living life, to record it; or I might say I've felt too boring to write. It sort of feels like both.

I'm curious if this week will find me less busy and/or less boring-feeling.

I went to a potluck on Sunday that was hosted by a variety of grassroots organizations: a Local Foods vendor, barter group, and the local car-share. I happen to be members of none of these, but nobodyhere was.

I had more fun than I expected to. I ran into friends I don't see much (pnijjar ) as well as a coworker and his spouse, who I enjoyed talking with; and also someone who used to come to Quaker Meeting and was wondering about whether she should come with her 2.5-year-old (yes!)

Also, nobodyhere and I brought our dogs; and many outdoor events are better with dogs.

The potluck pot was surprisingly lucky. Among 50 or so participants, I brought the only fruit salad; there were lots singleton main courses, finger foods, and deserts, and all but one dish I tasted was yummy (the non-tasty one was some sort of cheese pie that tasted old). Someone made skor bars. I should try that some time.

Later on Sunday, I finished my Canadian passport application, which included figuring out when I had met my two references. The last five years have been good for me socially.

Tonight, I watched melted_snowball give a 30-minute talk to high-school students; he did an excellent job connecting with them and giving them a positive model for an academic path.

My bike odometer rolled over another 1,000km on my commute home from work. Just before some sort of stinging insect made impact with my nose. Which is still swollen, but by now it doesn't hurt as long as I don't poke at it.

City of Glass was the first Paul Auster I was introduced to, in college. I loved it; he packed so much into such a short novel.

Last month (or was it March! Yikes!) I borrowed this from amarylliss: City of Glass, the Graphic Novel.

I was intrigued and even slightly horrified at how could someone do such a thing? But amarylliss gave it a thumbs-up, and sent it home with me, and I have to say, it is successful.

The Guardian does an excellent job reviewing it. I am lazy and it is late, so I will let you read that.

I liked it; I liked the visual motifs (the childhood drawings do indeed pack more of a punch with each repetition) and Quinn's story was adapted to visuals quite well.

But when I finished, it felt... lacking something.

The novel is told by a nameless narrator, telling the story of Daniel Quinn, a writer, who is mistaken for a private eye named Paul Auster, whose identity he takes. He proceeds to meet the real novelist Paul Auster in the novel, discussing Auster's work on reinterpreting Cervantes' Don Juan to find out who the real narrator of the story was. This layering could feel trite, and fortunately neither version of the novel feel this way for me; but there was a quality to the text-only version, where the only way to untangle the layers was through mentally visualizing them, that is different when you see Daniel Quinn sitting across from Paul Auster (who looks just like his dust-jacket).

The project was conceived by Art Spiegelman, who also wrote the introduction. I'm curious whether the "Neon Lit" project stalled out at two books; the #2 in the series didn't really appeal to me.

What with current weather (mid 80s) and the wonderful lilac smell in the air, Ithaca is reminding me of Key West. All it needs is fewer Volvos and more chickens. Any chickens, come to think of it.

I saw the brand new Quaker meeting house-to-be. It's an abandoned restaurant in the middle of a downtown residential neighborhood. It looks great from the outside. It will need many hundreds of thousand dollars of work inside. The Meeting had a work party as soon as they got possession. 50 adults and 20 kids. The general contractor says they did approximately five thousand dollars of cleanout work. In a day.

Ithaca's traffic is just as much a mess as ever. Wegmans is just as awesome a food store as ever.

There was a May Day concert on the Commons, with pretty good music, but which looked almost unmoored enough to become a protest march led by the socialists, judging by the signs against the racist immigration stupidity in Arizona and a few other worthy causes around the country. (which as always, have zero connection to things that a local protest could expect to affect). Am I cynical? Maybe a bit. I lived here eight years.

The conversation in the coffee shop at the old used bookstore today was about how in the old days, we didn't call them glass shops, they were head shops. And did the town need quite so many, after all? I did not weigh in.

Spent a lot of time catching up with my hosts. We went to Viva Taqueria for lunch (super basic burrito with black beans and mole sauce), which gave us the strength to start an evening Settlers of Catan game, and nearly finish before we were hungry for dinner. Plus I was teaching them the game at the same time.

This won't mean anything to anyone but melted_snowball , but I walked right by Unemployed Community Activist Fay Gaugacis at Wegmans.

Tomorrow: Quaker meeting, followed by goodbyes as I head home with Rover, while one of my hosts heads north... To my parents' house. Yeah. Weird. :) But very much good weird.

... On the drive down I listened to the TAL episode about Michael Poyzner, who made fairly exaggerated reporting errors writing a book which became the basis for his California governor's election platform. About the grim urban schools. Which were possibly much less exciting in real life than his story. With an eye to that, I consider and conclude that everything I wrote here was at least as exciting before the retelling.