What a Weekend!

Had a great Saturday: got up early, had a fun day, got some good news. In the evening we saw Romeo & Juliet at the Pacific Northwest Ballet, which was just amazing. ...Oh, and we went shopping & got some back-to-school (?) clothes. So that's always fun. Pictures (maybe) soon.

We'd heard and read good things about the ballet, but I never expected it to be this awesome.

A video that won't come close to doing it justice?
Sure:



Nice Sunday too:

Enjoyed the beautiful fall weather while walking through the park near the Dahlia Garden...


Oh, the good news? So one of the great things about my schedule is that we have time to visit lots of friends and family during the summer. And one of the questions that lots of those friends and family like to ask is: What do you do during the summer, anyway?

This past summer, or for at least two-thirds of it, I read nearly everything I could find having to do with the Symposium, by Plato. I must have read at least five or six full-length books, along with well over 30 articles and essays. My goal: to try to understand things a little better, and try to see if there were areas where I might make some contribution of my own. Nothing helps you understand a book or an argument like writing and working your way through it.

And now the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association (the big time!) has accepted my paper on the Symposium for the upcoming April 2010 meeting!

My paper has to do with the tension between what Socrates says about the ideal lover and what a jealous, drunken young man named Alcibiades has to say about being in love with Socrates.

If you'd like to take a look, the APA will post it online in January. Can't wait? Okay, I've posted a draft--feel free to give it a read! Let me know if you'd like to talk about it!

Pretty Pictures

Guess the start of the school year's got me a bit distracted from the blog. But here are two quick things to savor...

Some very encouraging numbers from Charles M. Blow's recent column about Obama's slow and steady pace on health care:


And Chris pointed us to this great video of Al Franken on Letterman many years ago:

All quite entertaining, but as I mentioned on Twitter, the real fun starts at about 6:30.

Cheers!

Dogs and Crows

Mentioned this on Twiiter, but it really deserves a blog post, no?

Mike bought Coney Island! Awesome!

So happy to see him succeed! And to know that those hot dogs & gyros will be there next time we're in town!


In other news, I heard about this video recently:

Birds on the Wires from Jarbas Agnelli on Vimeo.

Pretty fun use of the crows-on-wires imagery! Compare: the CHS logo.

Out in the Cascades

Spent my last weekend of summer hiking and camping with Jon & Sara--former neighbors & current friends--in and around North Cascades National Park, a couple of hours north and east of Seattle.

Sara, enjoying the view from above Ross Lake

Sara and Emily, eying the trail over Ross Lake Dam:


We hiked down to the dam:


And then over to Ross Lake Resort, a wonderfully strange, even surreal grouping of cabins and boat houses, all floating on logs in the lake.

Only accessible, of course, by boat or by hiking trail.


Jon and Sara, waiting for the water taxi back to the other side of the lake.

On the water taxi:

Really just a motorboat, but "water taxi" is fun to say.






We couldn't stay, since we had reserved a campsite at nearby Rasar State Park.

Sadly, we took no photos (partly because it was dark by the time we were settled in & fed), but the Washington State Parks system has an awesome website, that has things like maps of the parks:


And even photos of individual campsites, like ours, good old #47:

Beautiful weather, beautiful scenery, good company. A great way to end the summer.

Speaking of, I have a syllabus to finish...
Cheers, reader.