2000 News about David Leppik

Saturday, October 14, 2000

First things first. Reviews of the videos mentioned last time. Red Sorgum we saw with Seebs, who spent a year (10th grade) in China. Jordan and I thought it was okay, but it was slow and often confusing. Seebs loved it. It's definitely not typical Hollywood fare, and requires some interpretation. The same can be said of The Mirror, which is a Russian "picture poem." In that case, I spent the first 15 minutes assuming that a lot was lost int the translation, but soon realized that that wasn't the case. The back of the movie package described how the director doesn't intentionally confuse people, he just does. Lesson learned: just because everyone who's seen a movie loves it doesn't mean you will.

Jordan's mom, Catherine Hanson, came to visit last week. She lives in Petersburg, AK, so she doesn't visit often. She went to Windom to visit her mother during the middle of the week, so we only saw her at the beginning and last weekend. We watched a few DVDs, went out to dinner with my parents, and played Settlers of Katan. Oh, and she had her eyebrows waxed. I was at church when that happened.

I've started volunteering at church for the high school youth. It's fun so far. It makes me aware of how much I've matured since then, and given me a sense of what maturity is. It's familiarity. More than anything else it's familiarity with how things work and what your own limitations and expectations are.

My 10th high school reunion was the weekend of September 15. When I heard it was coming up last year I had to count the years: I don't feel that old. I'm just a wiser, more mature teenager. It wasn't until I got to the reunion that I realized that Jordan and I have been together for seven of those ten years. Many stories were shared and much was learned about these people. Many people looked the same. Most people looked different, some completely different.

Jordan's grandmother (Grandma Wood) died in early September and the funeral was on the 9th. Jordan and I met up with Jordan's dad and brother to go to her funeral in northern Iowa at the cemetary where her ancestors are buried. It was windy. The minister was a local guy who had never met her. Lunch was served for us in the nearby Baptist church. Afterward we visited the house on Lake Okoboji that Grandma Wood had lived in for many years and which Jordan's dad had designed. (The owners weren't there so we just walked around it and took pictures.)

Monday, September 4, 2000

Jordan and I have two videos to watch: The Mirror and Red Sorghum. These were recommended as among the best movies ever for us to watch according to MovieLens. We had to find a video rental place that specializes in obscure movies. When I was involved with MovieLens, there were problems with everyone getting high ratings on obscure movies that one person rated five stars, but the rating system was modified to take confidence into consideration. These movies might still have high ratings because only the people who really love foreign movies have searched them out, but we'll see. The computer can't tell the difference between new (or newly popular) movies which everyone loves and controversial movies which are only seen by people who know they'll like them. In my research, I stumbled over the fact that Pulp Fiction is the most-loved movie ever: nearly all the ratings were five stars.

Other news from the summer:

• Jordan starts school at the U tomorrow. She has decided to get a Master's Degree in Computer Science with a minor in Biology. She really wanted an advanced biology degree, but she didn't want to throw away her last four years at Spanlink and she doesn't want a Ph.D. They only offer a Ph.D. She decided all of this too late to apply, so she's going the night school route (what used to be called Extension, but I don't know what they call it now). In theory she could get a Master's just through this, but it's better to be treated as an on-campus student.
• Net Perceptions has moved to 7700 France Ave. in Edina, just a few blocks north of I-494. This is an improvement over the overcrowded situation at the previous building. They (like Gage and Imaginet) have hired wacky architects to remodel into something that looks trendy. As usual, the results are mixed. I really wanted sunlight and didn't get it. On the other hand, I'm now an hour's bike ride from work, just barely close enough to be feasible. I've biked several times so far (once the first week, twice last week.) They have showers there. The area is great for shopping and there are a number of good restaurants, though it's a very yuppie area so you have to go out of your way (like back to the old neighborhood) to find good Vietnamese food. (Big Bowl isn't bad, but any place that serves "authentic Asian cuisine" isn't authentic.)
• The back yard is really shaping up! I'd say it looks great, but it's got huge dirt mounds and is clearly a work in progress. We have a new patio, half a dozen new small trees, and lots of new plants and bushes. Jordan has been out there nearly every day this summer planting or weeding or digging.
• Gypsy moved again. This time to Austin, TX. She left Toby behind with us, but will send Toby to her mother when she gets enough money. Toby is doing well, though he's an indoor cat among outdoor cats. He escaped a few days ago and was out for two nights, one of them was a really bad thunderstorm. He came by around 5:30, and fortunately I woke up to hear him.
• I went to Opus/ConCentric again. This is my 10th Opus. The C*UUYAN Steering Committee gave me a special chalice to commemorate. (Thanks, Justice!) ConCentric was really awesome. Opus wasn't; there was a general inattention to community building with all the other novel things going on. (C*UUYAN just went from being an independent grassroots shoestring organization to being a funded part of the UUA. Also it's the second year of a combined Opus/ConCentric.) In any case, ConCentric was really amazing in many ways too numerous to list here.
• My first PSD Board meeting was a week or two ago. It was pretty exciting. In most committees I'm on I'm pretty mousy, but I was charged up from ConCentric and the icebreakers were helpful. I even got the Board to try consensus instead of Robert's Rules. This is a great group of people to work with, and I look forward to the next meeting.

Sunday, April 30, 2000

It's been a long time since I've updated this page. I've been too busy doing stuff to write about it. To wit:

• Gypsy moved to a new apartment yesterday. Jordan, Ben, and I helped her move. Right now Jordan and Gypsy are moving the last sundries, which turned out to be a full car load. That makes about four car loads plus one U-Haul. (Mind you, we could have fit everything into the U-Haul if we'd been packing carefully and tightly, but the only truck we could get was free from 6:00pm Saturday to 9:00am Sunday. Ben had a commitment Saturday night, so the limiting factor was people.) I, for one, am sore from moving furniture up and down lots of flights of stairs.
• Jordan's last day at Spanlink was yesterday. She'll take two weeks off and then get on the hard job of figuring out what to do with the rest of her life. She wasn't planning to stay at SPLK longer than she was at Grinnell, but these things happen. She wasn't planning to be a computer programmer, but that happened to be in demand. She finds it hard to make radical changes in her life when she's busy with the day-to-day grind. This will help. I have no idea what she'll be up to next. Maybe gardening.
• On the Unitarian Universalist front, I've been especially busy. I've joined the Prairie Star District Board of Directors, the youngest member anyone can remember. I've been busy doing Young Adult things, and I've (at long last) joined a congregation, First Universalist Church of Mineapolis. At the PSD annual meeting a few weeks ago I hung out with some youth (14-18 year olds) and decided to be one of the "responsible adults" at Boone, their annual conference. My last Boone was a decade ago, so I'm sure things have changed. Last year I was more burned out than energized. This year I'm more energized than burned out, largely because for the first time in many years I'm branching out in new directions, rather than just trying to hold the fort. One side effect: I've hardly had a free weekend in months.
• We now have a master plan for the back yard. Mom's birthday gift to Jordan this year was to get us a back yard master plan from Elane Brubaker, the person who designed their yard plan. This is a good news/bad news thing. The good news is we have a master plan, and we're really excited about it. The bad news is it's going to be a lot of work to get it implemented. We've done the easy parts: removing the buckthorn (not really easy, but we did it in a day) and a bit of other cleanup. Building the new sidewalk and patio will be harder.
• Hilary, Jordan's sister, visited us in February. While she was here we went to a play (The Crucible at Theatre in the Round) and visited Jordan's relatives in Windom, MN. Hilary was in the midwest for a few weeks, during which she visited lots of relatives throughout Minnesota and Iowa.
• Jordan is getting serious about a new hobby: wine tasting. While Hilary was here Jordan got a large shipment from Wine.com, including a two pairs of bottles that had been paired to contrast particular aspects of wines, e.g. complexity. Many of the ones we've started out with are Australian, since the flavors are so bold even newbies like ourselves have no difficulty discriminating between them.
• New toy alert: I got me a new Apple PowerBook laptop. The low end of the high end. That is, the cheapest one that isn't in translucent candy colors. But it's got the three things I wanted in a laptop: respectable sized display, DVD, and wireless networking. As I type, I'm in the back yard with no wires attached, and my internet access is as fast as at work. Unfortunately, modern displays depend entirely on their backlighting to illuminate the display, so it's not usable in direct sunlight. Also unfortunately, the firewall to work requires Windows to get through, and so far even with VMware on my Linux box I haven't been able to get in. So it may be a while before I can telecommute from my back yard.
• Our weekly activities are starting to fill up. On top of Tuesday Cleaning Night, we now have Dinner with Gypsy on Monday. Gypsy is learning to cook something better than her usual diet of instant meals and snack food. We enjoy the company and the help with dinner. Sunday afternoons/evenings are spent in a D&D campaign. Seebs is the DM.