March 2004 Archives

We saw Wagner's The Flying Dutchman at the ALO last night. This was my second Wagner opera and I must say that I enjoyed Die Walküre much better -- it's way more "Wagner" and much more "opera". Still the music was cool and most of the voices were pretty decent. I did not like Senta's voice (Mary Jane Johnson). At times she sounded fine, but half the time I wanted to tell her to open her mouth and give us some more head voice. Maybe it was her interpretation of German or something, but it was bugging me.

The plot in the Dutchman consists of a mélange of dysfunctional characters:

• There is the Flying Dutchman himself, cursed by Satan for eternity to wander the seas until he finds true love on one of his land breaks which happen once every seven years. What did he do to deserve this? One little oath about keeping going while trying to get around the Cape during a storm -- a sort of Little Dutchman that Could.
• Then there is the captain Daland. All happy to be arriving home to see his precious and beloved daughter, right? Yet as soon as he meets the ghostly Dutchman and sees his treasure chest he's all over himself pimping out his daughter to marry her to him.
• Then we have Senta, the "lovely" daughter. She's heard the legend of the Flying Dutchman and has fallen obsessively in love with him and convinced herself that she's the one to release him from his curse -- and all this before her dad arrives with the suitor. Worst sort of groupie, if you ask me.
• Then we have Erik the hunter who's in love with Senta in a weirdly possessive and co-dependent way. He whines and whines about his heart being broken, etc. kind of what you'd expect from a tenor.

To make a long story short, the abusive ex-boyfriend screws it up for Denta, she kills herself (in a very impressive short amount of time, too), the Dutchman's ship goes under and he gets released from the curse by dying (whoopee!) and I suppose the father lives happily ever after with his chest of treasures.

I give kudos to Wagner for the music and for the fact that he can kill off his major characters and wrap up an opera in under five minutes -- you hear that Puccini?

We got another letter from the LCRA, this one informing us that "LCRA and residents from the Gracywoods area have agreed to work together to address tree maintenance in LCRA's right of way in Gracywoods Park."

Well, that's one way of putting it, I guess. And I'm too big a person to gloat (on my blog, anyway). The tone of this letter is quite different from the original one, and this one's CCed to our government reps, too. So we're happy with the outcome and I think the neighborhood is better off for the whole ordeal.

For my birthday, Jennifer -- whom I like to think of as my favorite wife -- gave me my very own Revolution 1.5 SLE quad-line kite. How she comes up with her fabulous gifts I do not know, but this thing is a sweet piece of engineering -- it even comes with an instructional video.

On Sunday, after a nice coffee with the McHargs, we took advantage of a fairly steady breeze and went to test it out. The kite takes some getting used to -- I have the tendency to try to control it like a two-line kite which does not work at all. If you do it right -- rotating the handles instead of pulling them -- the kite responds like a puppet on a string. Well, a puppet that slamms into the ground a lot, but still. The really nice thing is that you can more often than not simply re-launch the kite from where it crash landed.

Next weekend if there is a nice wind I'm going to spend some quality time practicing with the kite. And I'll make sure that Jfer has something else to do so that I don't have to share :-)

Jfer's workout partners had been slacking this week so she made me exercise-walk with her a couple of times this week before work. We go into Walnut Creek Park and briskly walk for some 30-40 minutes. I don't know if it really counts as exercise (and I accuse her of lollygagging), but Homer seems to enjoy it.

It's neat seeing the spring arriving, though. The trees and bushes are budding and blooming. Each time we walk, we get to hear and see a little wood pecker hammering away. I wonder how the people who live a few yards away from his tree feel about his ruckus. This morning on the way home we saw an armadillo (in full daylight!) running across the front lawn of one of the houses in the neighborhood. I think that's the first time I'd seen a live 'dillo up close in the town. Homer was very interested, but luckily he was on leash (and resenting it).

Last night while walking him in our park, two big shadows flew over our heads. It seems that our Yellow-crowned Night-Heron has returned -- and he brought a girlfriend with him. I hope they settle in the park and have some chicks.

We have yet to see any of the turtles or crawfish that we so numerous last spring.

I had to mess with my RSS Feed(*) template and plugin no fewer than three times recently:

First, Kat starts posting title-less entries and those showed up as blanks. I fixed it by using the feed title if the item title is empty.

Then I added Jason's blog. He uses the ancient RSS 0.9 feed which does not include dates -- thus his entries did not show up in my date-based listing. I fixed this by hacking my RSS Feed Date plugin to try to figure out the date from the item's URL -- this works but his times shows up as 12:00AM

And now Rita posted an entry with a link in its title which messed up the navigation for me. That once was easy to fix, by using my trusty excerpt_words filter.

(*)RSS Feeds is what displays the recent links from other people's blogs in the right column on my main blog page.

I scored 5 out of 10 on this Programming Language Inventor or Serial Killer? test. As a developer myself, I agree that there definitely are some creepy types in our ranks. Luckily they seem to be mostly contained in the dungeons of academia, game development and in the Open Source community.

I'd like to think that people who develop(ed) on the Mac were all beautiful and suave, alas it ain't so, either.

The pundits are at it again, calling the recent election results in Spain and the new government's plan to withdraw troops from Iraq a win for terror, Al Quaeda's electoral victory and appeasement of terrorist.

I guess if you still buy into the myth that Iraq was somehow linked with 9/11 and Al Quaeda, which has been often stated by the administration with significant success, the yes, you might view the Spaniards repudiation of the war in Iraq as a sell out. The thing is, there was no connection between Iraq an Al Quaeda before the war. Heck, even Fox will say so. Sadam's secular regime in Iraq was as anathema to Osama and his philosophy as us infidels in the west. Is Al Quaeda active in Iraq now? Quite possibly so, which may suggest an answer to the question as to whether we're safer now than we were before the war...

The way I see it, the Spanish voters used their ballots to tell the Popular Party to shove it. The outgoing Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar supported the war in Iraq against the overwhelming opposition of the Spanish population -- 90% of Spaniards were against the war last spring. For political reasons, the ruling party also tried to cover up links to Islamist terrorists in the 3/11 bombings, which then severely back-fired.

I guess the idea of citizens voting a government out of office for misleading them about terrorism and waging an unpopular war might be a scary and ominous thing to some people.

Happy St. Patrick's day and all that. For me March 17 means another year gone by, another year older. This year is a middle-of-the decade one. Half way between 30 and 40, half way to 70. Oy!

But it's going to be an exciting year, so I am not complaining...

There was a meeting at two this afternoon between LCRA, neighborhood leaders, Todd Baxter, someone from Sen. Barrientos' office and some other utility-related government officials. Lo and behold, the meeting was short and LCRA relented. They agreed for now to trim the trees as they had in the past (8-10' away from the lines) and to set up meetings with a neighborhood committee to discus future plans for the lines.

We learned this news at a 6:30 meeting in the park where there were many cheers and quite a bit of champagne (probably in violation of park rules). So it turns out that the squeeky wheel actually does get the oil. I'm sure it didn't hurt that our representative is on the committe that regulates utilites.

So thank you Tom, Danny, Jamie, Maria, Cathy, Ilona and all those other people that put so much effort into saving the trees. Thank you LCRA for changing your mind and listening to us. Thanks to the media that publicized the issue, including the Austin Chronicle, News 8 and KVUE. No thanks to the Austin American Statesman and KTBC where were conspicuously not interested. Corporate toadies, both of them.

As expected, at the meeting on Thursday the neighborhood was "informed" about what was going to happen in the park and no input was sought. It had the air of a science fair air to it (without the proud parents) -- the LCRA brought a bunch of easels with posters explaining the dangers of trees, regulations, schematics of EM fields around wires, satellite photos (a couple of years out of date) with trees marked for removal or "trimming" and a blowup of the contract (form the 1930s) that granted them the easement (for $200!) The opposition (i.e. a neighborhood activists) had a simple wooden model of some poles and wires and a table with a petition.

LCRA had a bunch of people at the meeting with whom we could talk. I kind of felt bad for most of them, since they were just poor shmucks doing their job after hours (and referring any but the most trivial questions to their supervisors). I did not feel much sympathy for the suits, though. They had absolutely no interest in accommodating the concerned neighbors. They wouldn't consider alternative approaches (like trimming every couple of years like they've been doing in the past). They said they would work with the park's department to try to provide other type of shade -- like a little awning over a bench is going to have much of an impact in August in Texas. I’m not really holding my breath.

The good news for us is that they're not cutting down any of the oaks, which is what's mostly in our part of the park. They will only be "trimmed" (I don't know if that means 6' off the ground or what). The western part of the park, though, is going to get decimated. They're taking out most of the shade trees along the path.

I went by and took some pictures since I plan plan to do some before-and-after comparisons. Someone had hammered a little white cross next to each tree marked for the chainsaw. It’s a veritable cemetery.

I spent a couple of hours in the park at the "Save the Trees" meeting. I'm not sure how many signatures were collected, by while I was there, TV crews from KEYE and KVUE shoot some footage and did interviews. We missed the 10 o'clock news, so I don't know how well it was covered. We did see one of those "News Live" vans packing up as we got home around 10:15pm.

In the park, I learned that the big towers are owned by Austin Energy and the smaller ones (which had been there since the '30s) by LCRA. LCRA is planning the current work in our park, but it's been Austin Energy who did the heavy duty clearing in Wallnut Creek park -- and apparently they wouldn't mind doing the same thing in all of their ROWs. It's kind of ironic, considering that they sponsor the tree planting program that strives to add shade trees to the city to lower summer temperatures.

The rumors have been flying around the neighborhood about the pending demise of the trees in our park. Apparently it's finally supposed to happen. Yesterday I received this letter from the LCRA. Actually, I received two identical letters -- in one they misspelled my first name and in the other my last name.

It seems that LCRA has gotten tired of trimming the trees that are in its transmission lines' right-of-way and plans to chop them down. Having seen the scorched earth approach they've taken when they did this sort of thing in the Wallnut Creek Park (imagine the path of destruction left by a 100 yard wide category 5 tornado and you get the idea) I'm dreading what's in store.

Northwest District Park a.k.a. Gracy Woods Park is a lovely oasis in our neighborhood and one of the reasons why I bought my house here. The dog-walking neighbors get together about twice a year and trim the lower branches of the trees and clear away dead wood. The city hauls it away, but most of the work falls on us.

A big portion of the park is in LCRA's right of way and yes, there are some fast growing trees underneath the transmission lines that need to be trimmed every couple of years. There are also full grown live oaks that don't really change in size very much. I'm curious to see what exactly they have planned and into how much detail they'll go at the meeting.

This Sunday afternoon there'll be a gathering in the park and we're trying to get some media and city councel members out there. We're trying to change LCRA's mind about chopping down our trees. We'd like for them to raise their powerlines (supposedly they are lower than regulation height) and/or to first plant and establish shade trees outside their ROW before cutting down any of the offending trees.