harpojaeger.com

I am in New Jersey right now at my grandmother’s house, having just come from Long Island from another family member’s house following the graveside service, which we were unable to get to, as it was at ten-thirty this morning.  We didn’t want to catch all of the rush hour traffic, so we left at about ten and got in at one-thirty.  We were there until about eight.  There was a very nice evening service at about seven.

Throughout the afternoon and evening, I spent a lot of time with a lot of different people.  Some of them I knew and had seen recently (in exemplum my grandfather [most recently sighted at my aunt's wedding in L.A.]).  Some of them I knew and had not seen for a long time (in exemplum my grandfather’s cousin, the widow of the deceased [most recently sighted at her apartment several years ago]).  Some of them I had never met before in my life (in exemplum her sister).  Anyway, I had a really good time, or as much of a good time as one should have at a post-funeral Shiva session.

Everyone has their own way of mourning.  Some people cry a lot, some people are solid and stoic and then cry a lot in private, some are solid and stoic and never cry.  Some are somewhere in between, defying categorization.  It is weird.  It is hard to predict how people will act.  I try not to stop trying though, because I think that if you just sit back and accept the way people feel, it can be easy to get caught up in emotions and not understand what’s actually happening around you.  It is important to be sympathetic and comforting while still trying to understand your feelings.

I am pretty sick and did not go to school today.  I spent the day at home recuperating, running some errands, and I had a rehearsal this evening.

Last night I had a conversation with my mom about transgender health care, and, after reading articles today about the Pope’s anti-condom remarks en route to Cameroon, I am pissed off.  People need to realize that some things supersede religion or personal belief.  Human life and health is always more important.  Always.  Whether or not you think people should be having sex-changing surgery, the fact is that they do, and if you are a health care provider of any kind, you have a duty to those people that supersedes your beliefs about the morality of what they are doing.  The same holds for religious figures.  If you want to preach abstinence, that’s fine, but the fact is that condoms save lives, and to tell people in Africa, the continent worst-hit by AIDS, that condoms are “part of the problem” (yes, he actually said that), is just plain lying.  That is outside of the realm of belief.  That is false, and it should not be tolerated.

Our new baby chicks arrived at the post office this morning.  There are about twenty.  We only ordered nine hens, but they have a certain amount they have to send in each box to keep them warm, so they just give you extra roosters, because no one wants roosters.  So once they get old enough to crow we will get rid of them, but for now they are pretty cute.

Also, we have eggs arriving pretty soon that we will be hatching.  We opted not to use an incubator and just to let some of the more broody hens sit on the eggs, which will be pretty awesome.

I picked up two more books for the honors project that I am doing with a friend for Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.  The project is on eighteenth-century European finance and economic policy, and these two books look pretty interesting.  Apparently there was something called the Dutch Tulip  Mania, and there was an economic group called the Loco-Focos.  Both sound pretty weird.  The Dutch Tulip Mania involved bulb futures, a rather odd concept, and the Loco-Focos appear to be some kind of group that advocated a no-paper-money policy.  We will see.

Our opponent for our next trial has been revealed: Massachusetts Academy of Mathematics and Science from Worcester, who beat Lowell Catholic High School.  We will face them in Springfield on Monday.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I am probably going to switch to a different web host sometime soon.  Currently, I use GoDaddy to host this site, and the harpojaeger.com domain is also registered with them.  renaissanceboy.org, my first domain, which now redirects here, is registered with DirectNic, the company I was using at the time.

The reasons I want to switch are complicated.  For a while, I’ve been impressed by GoDaddy’s low prices but dismayed by their site’s operation in a technical sense; it is confusing and slow.  In addition, I have never been fully supportive of their marketing techniques, which are frequently subtly, sometimes blatantly, sexist, base, and calculative.  I have never really devoted much thought to it, but my father mentioned to me that there was a movement afoot to ditch GoDaddy because of these tactics, and he directed me to this article.  It sums up the issues at play very well.

I was already aware of DreamHost, having worked for a client who used it, and the other hosting service the article linked to, LunarPages, looks excellent as well.  I am going to spend some time in the near future researching different services, and will probably make the switch soon.  I think I will also consolidate all of my domain names to the same registrar, ideally the same company that’s doing the hosting.  This should make stuff a lot easier.

WE PLAYED A REAL GAME!  ON A REAL FIELD!  WITH GRASS!

It was awesome.  I have not played a legitimate game since August.  I am SO out of shape, and SO looking forward to this season.

My father is taking tomorrow off of school, so I am going in late.  Sleeping until nine.  WAHOO!

Today was an odd day.  My sister is fifteen.  This is a rather advanced age.  I am still grappling with its implications.

The day did not begin well, however.  My sister (yes, the same one whose birthday it is) was very sick, and was up early in the morning.  I was woken at about four, and was able to fall back asleep, but other members of my family were not so lucky.  My sister did not go to school today.  Then, when my youngest sister went out to let the chickens out of their coop this morning, she discovered that one had been locked out last night, and had been killed by a predator.  This is the first time we have had a chicken killed in the almost two years we’ve been raising them, and it was rather shocking.  My sister was rather traumatized, having just been presented face-to-face with the mangled carcass of a bird she thought she was letting out, and she came back inside sobbing.  My father and I had to clean up, and as the poor thing had been out all night, it was frozen solid.  It was quite a job, and I thus had a very sad start to the day.

School went well after that, except that I did not have enough food, and was thus rather headache-ish and grumpy all day.  We had a rather cold ultimate practice outside, and I managed to go the entire day without eating the four cupcakes I was entrusted with by a classmate of my sister’s who had baked them for her birthday and asked me to transmit them to her.  This was no mean, feat, but I got one after dinner, so I am happy.

Our plans for Watchmen are solidified.  A few members of our extended group have been their since a bit before five PM, and I will be meeting them there within a few hours, along with some other friends arriving from elsewhere.  I will be picking up one other on the way.  The movie is two hours and forty-three minutes long, so it’s going to be a late night.  But it will be worth it.

We won our trial today, and will thus be moving on to the first round of the playoffs on Monday.  We will be playing the winner of Region #16, the Berkshires, which will be either Lennox or Longmeadow; they have a tiebreaker trial.

My plans for tomorrow night are almost completely formed.  I am getting PUMPED!  I am going to go to Ultimate practice before returning home, having dinner with my family, and going back out to the movie.

I am pretty tired from practice today.  We are postponing tryouts until all of this DAMN SNOW has melted and we can actually get to the field.  Until then, we are running outside, and doing workouts inside.  Speaking of workouts, I came up with the most AWESOME workout today.  To begin, I must explain my school’s building.  There are three floors, and there are three staircases, one at each end, and one about 2/5 of the way down the hall.  The workout is that you run up and down a single staircase about ten times to warm up, and then, when you reach the bottom, you open the door, and sprint down the hall to the next stairway.  You run up and down that one, and then sprint to the next one.  Then you run up and down that one, and work your way back and forth again.  It is great because it combines light jogging (down stairs), heavy jogging (up stairs), and sprinting, which are all important in ultimate.  Better still, it gets you used to changing which one you are doing and then going back to another; endurance and explosiveness.  It is FABULOUSLY tiring.  After, we joined up with the people who had been running outside, and had an excellent workout inside.

We have a trial tomorrow afternoon; a tiebreaker in our region.  We are playing Tantasqua.  We have never faced this school before, so we don’t know what to expect.  Also, since we are up to the tiebreaker level now, this trial and all after it are coin flips.  That is, we arrive, and the two teams flip a coin.  The winner of the coin flip determines which side their team will present.  We know which side we will call if we win, but we have to be ready to do either one.  Thus, I will run my closing through a couple times tonight, and then get a lot of sleep.

Having trials on Wednesdays is great for me because it means I have no classes.  Thus, I do not need to do any homework.

I am solidifying plans for Watchmen.  We have an extra ticket because one friend backed out on us, so I will try to sell it to someone beforehand, or at the show, which I imagine will be pretty easy.  The question I am dealing with now relates to the fact that I have discovered that another group of my friends is going to the theater right after school to get on line.  I would go with them, but it is my sister’s birthday, so I will need to be at home.  I am therefore debating the morality of having them save us spots on line.  It would only be four people, so it is not as if we will be doing a huge disservice to the people behind them, but it could result in some pretty serious anger from the rest of the people on line.  I have to consult with my friends tomorrow before making a decision.

This has been an exhausting weekend, and it is not over yet.  Yesterday I was at work all day, and was fortunate enough to have someone bring in a computer that had been dropped repeatedly, and, I kid you not, had port spilled over the keyboard.  Last night we cooked a sumptuous Valentine’s Day meal, which included steak, sweet potatoes, and other such awesome things.  Then we watched The Truman Show, with Jim Carrey, which is officially one of the best movies ever.  It is transcendently beautiful and astute, especially because it was made before the era of reality TV.

I discovered a fabulous article on the BBC.  My first name is Rafael.

Today I went to Costco in the morning to pick up my new glasses, which are very subtle.  Then I worked from 12-4.  Now I am home.  My family is on their way back from a show at my school (M. Butterfly [which I was REALLY bummed to miss (they sold out of tickets to last night's show [we got tickets to the matinee today (which I couldn't go to [because I was at work (but last night my friend told me that there were in fact seats available at last night's show [so I could have gone (which makes me pretty angry)])])])]), and we are going to go to dinner at our friends’ house in Conway.  I have not seen this family for a long time, so I am looking forward to it immensely.

As I got my requisite slice of pizza for lunch it occurred to me that I have been eating junk food all day.  I had pie when I woke up, a hot dog at Costco, and then pizza for lunch.

Pizzazz (Gonna Give It To Ya!) is a video made by two of my coworkers when they were in college.  It is one of the funniest things I have seen in a long time.

We are having a Mock Trial meeting at my house tomorrow.  I will be bedinnering the team.  Pesto.

Over and out.

Our car broke down on the way home from school today.  It had been making strange noises since yesterday, starting with a loud squealing, which I determined to be a bad belt yesterday.  On the way home today very odd things began to happen.  The radio turned off and then on again, started to sound fuzzy and crackly, the lights flickered, and then all electrical power cut out entirely.  When I tried to turn on the heat and my father tried the headlights, the car lurched and started to lose power.  Then, about five blocks from the house, the engine shut off entirely.  We are pretty sure that the belt that I noted as bad is the one that drives the alternator.  If the belt stopped working (when I opened the hood this afternoon it seemed very loose), the alternator would have stopped, and we were thus running only on battery power.  As the voltage drained, we lost electrical systems, before the entire engine shut off altogether.  My father is on his way home from the garage now.  We will find out about the car tomorrow I suppose.

Meanwhile, I have a trial tomorrow.  We’re leaving at twelve-thirty, and as it’s Wednesday, I have no classes whatsoever in the morning.  I will spend my time relaxing, eating, and doing homework.  I am not sure how we’re going to get to school without a car.  I suppose we will figure it out.

Also, Will Szal’s site is up and running now.  Check it out; there’s some pretty awesome stuff up, and more in the works.