Days of Summer >> 7/16/16

1. 7/16/16
1. Quick entry for today!
2. Wake up late, hauled off to Bagels. Good conversation--get in the spirit of people analysis. And a great butter day--for those uninitiated, this is when the Bagelry capriciously bestows us with larger sides of butter than average.
3. Boffing! People show up who I haven’t seen in a year, and everyone is in a buoyant and social mood. The clan battles are really spirited, like they were when I first started to show up, and Taco Laser cleans up :)
4. Hang out and play until nearly 5.
5. Return home, read and mess around with guitar.
6. Chef salad for dinner, yum!
7. More reading, short bike ride, watch Simpsons and browse Kottke with family. Take a contemplative walk, whereupon I try to figure out how to stop being annoyed at myself for little inefficiencies, and how to avoid seeing opportunity as a duty of action.
8. I settle on Johan’s light, detached, carve-out-a-space-for-me-to-do-this-fun-thing attitude--at least for those lesser things where I can afford not to go the full desperate headlong scramble after truth and neutral sharp clarity. Analogous to my resolution not to eschew anger entirely, but to reserve it for deserving circumstances, analogous to a resolution I made in math not to worry about justifying small logical steps as a means to avoid thinking hard about how to justify the more complicated ones… I call this general pattern the Creed of Low-Hanging Fruit.
9. Return, put on some jammin’ tunes, and fold laundry. Then write this log. Then crash in preparation for family trip tomorrow. Night!

Days of Summer >> 7/15/16

1. 7/15/16
1. Hard to wake up. I can sleep in tonight!
2. Last day of windsurfing goes well. I’m riding like a boss, a colossus astride the waves. (I mean, I still get dunked on a few times, but I ride into Lakewood with perfect control :) Say goodbye to the teachers and head out.
3. Grandma gives me a ride to the Alpha BBQ, which is almost over. I snag two enormous burgers and eat with Ross and his buddy (aargh!) Adam. Adam. Hear about an ex-military Alpha dude, an awesome guy, who spends almost half his working hours (somehow) chatting in the break room.
4. Frustrating couple of hours talking with Ross, who (in my opinion) is looking too far ahead, versus doing research and hacking stuff together to see if everything will mesh. Worse, he’s not even looking ahead all the way--he’s taking the worst of all possible middle roads and making a bash script command line interface.
5. Head back, read HPMOR for a good hour. Incredibly intense raid on Azkaban. Some of the best plot-driven writing I’ve read… gosh, ever :)
6. Take a quick bike ride. The world is so beautiful, the sun so warm, the paths so inviting.
7. Return, grab I and Mom, drive to Nevada and pick up Dad. Go to Fiamma Pizza for the first time in years. The atmosphere is beautiful, crafted, and the pizza is delicious. Good conversation with I about the stories in her head.
8. Back home, toss the football with Dad until the mosquitoes come out. Then send email, check Facebook stream. Take this goofy vocabulary test. Top 0.12% :D
9. Read more, write this log.

Days of Summer >> 7/14/16

1. 7/14/16
1. Windsurfing. Try the giant 6.3 m^3 sail. It’s a struggle and I get dunked on a lot, and I freeze because I thought we were paddleboarding and didn’t wear a wetsuit. Lunch witnesses me flopping on the ground in exhaustion. But it also rejuvenates me, I toss on a wetsuit and hop back on.
2. Work! Find a neat command line interface for ssh, after wasting a lot of time researching some bizarre serial port configuration, to control a virtual box from the host machine.
3. Lots of reading HPMOR.
4. Get Chipotle with Mom.
5. M goes a little bonkers about not being able to get photos off our camera. I eat my dinner immersed in Heart of Stone--every once in a while I try to help, but it’s tricky.
6. Hang out with I! She’s been reticent lately--I think windsurfing taxes her--but when I offer to volunteer myself for some relaxation training, she perks up. Basically, relaxation training consists of me getting poked in the stomach and tickled, and fighting really hard to just relax, not tense up at all. My sis can just lie there (she calls it flopping) and get poked and tickled in the stomach without offering the slightest resistance or even notice. It’s really impressive. We end up talking about the complex story she works on whenever her brain isn’t occupied elsewhere, the characters that represent herself, but also the many others. She’s reached a level where all the characters think about each other, so that in effect, she has many different views on herself. I never got there back when I constructed stories rather than argued about math with myself--I just had one really sentient character, always exactly as I hoped I would be, a general or apocalypse rebuilder or inventor...

Days of Summer >> 7/13/16

1. 7/13/16
1. Windsurfing! But no wind. So paddleboarding. We go along the coast, and a beautiful coast it is. Like something from a story, the branches reaching across the water, the sandy beach at the end…
2. Park day! I try to relax my organizing reflex. It works, Sean steps in to run a game of Banana Flag. Lots of random goofing around with the balls I bring. End the day shooting hoops with a few of the little kids and a bunch of Hispanic kids on the court. Good day!
3. Dinner, reading, stuff I don’t remember right now. Parents struggling with trying to find a place we can go for the weekend.
4. Watch Deathnote. Very scary psychological episode where Light must convince the widow of an agent he killed to give him her name so he can kill her as well, before she solves the crime and unmasks him. Brutal. Vindicates my parents’ judgment of Light. After that, we try for some levity with a Firefly episode, but we’re getting into the phase of the show that corresponds with network executives trying to mainstreamize the filming, etc. It’s still a rousing adventure, but has less of the characteristic Firefly warmth. I crash with coldness seeping through my veins, the dark diffusion halted only by the void’s darker embrace.

Days of Summer >> 7/12/16

1. 7/12/16
1. Windsurfing!
2. Work--a lot of research. Mike tried to show us how to configure a piece of hardware and got bogged down :)
3. Walk at BTC and then dinner with Dan and Stephanie. Mentally taxing b/c many degrees of uncertainty (how should I comport myself? How much do I even care?) and even more when discussing actual things (does the thing matter, compared to the social hospitality quotient of the conversation?) I feel like a morose teenager, flowered too late from an eagerly growing green stem of youth and naivete.
4. That sounds a bit dramatic :D The food was really good. And I recovered real quick just reading a couple chapters of HPMOR. Then I watched Deathnote with the family. Super fun. Almost started The Conversation again (Light of Deathnote is a great character to argue over) but instead, picked up the guitar and started humming along to the few chords I know (Spencer in E Minor). This lightened everything dramatically. Sang along with Dad for a few songs, laughed at the absurdity of Dad’s facebook stream. Parents retired smiling.
5. I stayed up for HPMOR. Read perhaps one of the greatest goofy, complicated, gamified battle scenes ever written (think Ender’s Game or perhaps Canadian Milk Burglar, if you are familiar with this game, which permits players to place a piece only if this leaves some possibility of all players reaching the prizes, resulting in incredible constraints and hilarity).
6. Overrode the annoying objections of my psyche’s babysitter and tuned in to Alex’s Song of the Day playlist for the first time in months. Perfect journal writing-music. And composed this log, sitting outside in the light rain and sweet fresh air under an umbrella.
7. May the joys of this world ever answer thy search and light thy path, and a very good night!

Days of Summer >> 7/11/16

1. 7/11/16
1. Staggered forth from the void at 9, packed frantically, read HPMOR over breakfast, and headed out to windsurfing with sisters.
2. The lake was just windy enough to sail on and we all remembered what we were doing pretty quickly. Fun feelings of competence :)
3. Afterwards, quickly changed into work attire and went to Alpha. One of the more productive 3 hours I’ve had there--we got a license for a tool we needed, figured out how to do a few things automatedly we were doing by hand, and most importantly, figured out how the system we were using was merging the two firmware images. We did it wrong the first time but cleverly noticed and did it right the next time :D
4. Back from Alpha, thought was going to meet with Dan and Stephanie (visiting uncle/aunt) for dinner. But worked out that we got to go out for dinner to celebrate Mom’s birthday instead, yay!
5. I got to go to Ultimate first, which was a blast. Again somehow managed to relax and stifle feelings of competition and optimization. Two games were running at the same time so I got plenty of play time.
6. Quick shower, and off to D’ Anna’s with Mom, Dad and Izzy. The food was amazing as always (that salad, man… such a blank-slate, simple-delicious kind of food) and we had a lot of good conversation. Course we got sidetracked into the ongoing utilitarianism/millennials/localityVsHuntingLowHangingScalableFruitInTheDarknessOfUnfamiliarity/congruentRetributivityVsTheAbstractArroganceOfCharity
7. Discussion.
8. But I think we made some progress, explored some new angles. Dad made an argument for quasi-utilitarian millennials being too naive (free-riders don’t exist) or shortsighted (free-riders can’t change and others won’t change their positive attitudes toward them, so we have to work around them) to punish and negatively incent free-riders. He argued (my paraphrase) that a) sweeping world-improvement schemes under discussion often ignored free-riders, and that b) the local, self-interested morality of pure capitalism or libertarianism is the best hope of dealing with them. I think that a) is a reasonable statement of near-fact, but I still think there might be more systematic ways of dealing with free-riders than b), which has problems (like the vanishing trick that productive work is playing on the lower part of the bell curve in developed countries).
9. Headed back home, continued the discussion, which turned to the congruence between reason and feeling (particularly “justified” anger) which I often sense is assumed by my dad. I realize I get his perspective much more when I think in terms of my actual experiences at school and the particular problems I’ve grappled with, and I think my rejection of emotion as driver is maybe a bit overblown. I got to a point in math where I told myself to stop arguing endlessly over the precise logical justification of the simple steps, since this often served as excuse to use fuzzier arguments on the more complicated ones. I think that I must reach this enlightenment when it comes to emotion, that I should accept and resonate with the simplest and most natural emotions, which also fall into congruence with my world-models (such as being angry at free-riders), so that I can put my real effort into rejecting and modifying emotion in the more complicated and interesting cases (such as why, in the name of fwqhgads, do I get annoyed at competent fighters at boffing who are just fighting, but seem to my battle-addled mind as radiating a small amount of judgment or hostility when I cheerfully head over to attack them again and try something different.)
10. Ugh, these sentences are worse than Dickens :) Apologies!
11. Finished up and hit the hay :D

Aaah! What's this! I have 15 days to catch up on?? Well here you go:

1. Chilling and analyzing my Facebook friend graph
1. I finally decided I had to see the data. Did some research and found Facebook had killed their social graph API (which allows programs to grab the social graph and do things with it). 
2. No problem, some German researchers wrote a web scraper to get the graph anyway. I tried their app (at lostcircles.com) and the results were really neat. Plus I was able to export the graph for future tinkering.
2. Boffing and Drafting
3. Soccer and Lasagna
4. Cutting coax, labeling, taking I to hang with Koepps and Coopers, M to Agility
5. Hung out with Coopers, then Park Day at Birchwood
1. Drove in with Coopers, little kids all gathered to watch me park
2. Chaos trying to organize everybody. Everyone had fun anyway.
6. Lots of screwing in coax cables at Alpha, relaxing work. Eat dinner with J&N, Dad and M and play smash. Julie and Ken are gone (farm business, medical issues) so I'm hanging with the Cooper boys this week. Overall a great time, get insight into their strange, relaxed, one-game-to-the-next lifestyle. Play lots of Smash, Black Ops Zombies and Rayman, cook food, oversee the construction of a birdhouse, crush Noah about 20 times at Horse, Pig, and the one-letter version Grace calls A, et-cetera!
7. Homeschool 4th of July! Party is impoverished (no Hailey, Claire b/c reenactment, no Monica cuz illness, Blair abandons us to watch netflix...) But still a lot of fun. William and Peter both make it and it is great catching up with them. Plus I pwn at 2on2 hoops, which is surprising since I haven't really played in nearly 9 months.
8. It's an M day!
1. Dog park
2. Learn kanji
3. Hike (find new Whatcom Falls trail)
4. Makeup
5. Dog park again :D
9. It's a Xin day!
1. That is, after I get back from Seattle. And meet Alex for breakfast, which is fun. We go to a vegan restaurant--my mushroom quiche is really good, but Alex shells out $16 for the french toast and coconut hot chocolate (!). 
2. And I almost give Eleanor a ride back to Bham.
3. Get back to Bellingham, go to boffing, then drive to Xin's place.
4. Kayak to Larrabee :)
5. Eat dinner--Ricardo grills drumsticks and Ping makes delicious pork ribs--a feast!
6. Play Gokumo (5-in-a-row tic-tac-toe) with Xin. He crushes me the first three games with a clever strategy I can't believe I've never seen before. Turns out he's played against a computer bot, etc...
7. I figure it out and win the fourth game, after which we adjourn to a ping-pong match, which Xin wins handily. Very fun visit.
10. Soccer, gameday at the Coopers, then drive to Seattle for the special big-band Friday night dance!
1. Driving is a bit stressful, but fun. Hit craziness outside of Seattle and survive a trying lane change. Park uneventfully outside the SPS.
2. Eleanor, whose blond-haired visage I at first don't recognize (she's going for silver after several rounds of dyeing) and Brandon give me a super warm welcome at their apartment. Immediately get into an intense conversation with Eleanor about the merits of subcontractors (what else?). 
3. Brandon tries to make tofu and fails. I get food at Guanaco's. We eat, and then it's off to dance!
4. Ride with Eleonore and Alex plus Taylor in Spencer Pease's car. Good catching up with them all--Eleonore sounds excited, though a bit sad, to head back to France for grad school.
5. Dancing is awesome. Eleanor is there (confusing right?) and I get in a couple good dances with her.
6. However, she bails to get food with the people she drove with
7. and Brandon and I are left alone. Not! Brandon's younger sister Emily is there. Late-night conversation and shenanigans ensue. I hit the hay around 2.
8. Wake up bright and early, brisk walk along the Ave to meet Alex for breakfast.
11. Work at Alpha. Figure out that we're missing a backslash in our PATH (a Linux environment variable, kill me now). Facepalms to infinity, but hey, it *almost* builds now. 
1. Then Henry Banks's graduation. Very different from Monica's--we play board games the whole time.
2. I get to roast Henry with stories of the old Wheeler-Dealer days over pie, which is great.
3. He likes my card commemorating all the ventures that we founded back in the day--Quirky Quenchers, Hcards, Stufflibrary...
12. My memories here are failing. Noooo! A few days forever lost to the void. Whatever. My brain is hitting the void pretty soon. To all a good night!

Days of Summer Backlog >> 6/26/16 (A Walk along the Water)

a.     Sunday (today!! Well, not anymore; I’m burning the 1:19am oil)

                                                 i.     Sleep in, cook bacon. Delicious brunch. Family scheduling.

                                               ii.     Get dropped off at Public Market to hang with Grace. We take the long walk to Fairhaven, then to Fairhaven Park, stopping to visit my old house 812 Wilson. It is a beautiful day—we play some Frisbee at fairhaven, dunk ourselves in the sprinklers, then loop back to downtown Fairhaven for some delicious gelato.

                                              iii.     We mostly talk about our various romantic exploits and struggles—a conversation that I’ve only had once before with Grace despite our long history of multifarious conversations. It’s just fun to hear Grace’s subjective experience of everything—her descriptions of different types of crushes, her personal ethos and decision making process; a fresh perspective J We were planning to get back to Bham by 4:30 so Grace could pack for her family’s upcoming trip to England. But Grace has some extra time so we get back late. Dad picks us up, we drop Dad off at home, then I drive Grace back to her house in the Lynden area countryside. What a beautiful drive! Indescribable. End up picking cherries with Grace to take home, since their amazingly fruitful tree has more berries than they could process even were they not going to England.

                                              iv.     Say goodbye, hand Grace a book I’d got her for the trip (the Armageddon Rag if you’ll recall from the stuff I may have not posted yet). Then south on Hannegan to pick Izzy and Dad up at a driving range near Barkley. We pick up some pizza and mushu pork in Sunset square, then book it home and eat.

                                               v.     After that—it’s pretty late—the folks and I have another good conversation about Grace’s perspective on romance. They eschew the decisive and bald direct-asking-out strategy in favor of indirect but clear signaling methods and a drawn-out courtship phase where everything is still up in the air. I think I understand the perspective, but resist it since only recently have I summoned up the courage to apply the naïve strategy, let alone the fortitude and skill and uncertainty tolerance for courtship. (I mean, I’ll learn, but struggles ._. )In true GoebelPeters fashion, they proceed to back up their arguments with clips from Pride and Prejudice and Lost. Much edifying time is spent this way.

                                              vi.     Then we watch an episode of Deathnote, a beautiful anime about a high-schooler drunk on the power of judgment and death. (The first episode reveals a lot.)

                                            vii.     Sing Fallout Boy songs with Izzy. Then show emails to Mom and spend a good hour finally catching up on this log.

                                           viii.     Post and hit the hay. Night all!

Days of Summer Backlog >> 6/25/16 (Return to Boffing and the Graduation of an Old Friend)

a.     Saturday:

                                                 i.     Bagels! Get banner paper to give to Monica for her graduation later in the evening, to cover the blank walls of her new life out of the house J

                                               ii.     Boffing! Red Mage (/Alex, my chess buddy) is actually running things. Doing a great job as far as I can tell, keeping everything organized without pissing anyone off. There are some new recruits as well as some old faces. We do Valhalla, then Clans, then Sprout. Highlight of the day is almost (read: actually) winning Sprout. To win Sprout, you have to kill everyone on the field. Thing was, when I’d slain the 10 people actually playing Sprout, more contestants who had just been watching kept jumping in. I’d put to rest about 5 of them, when this little dude came up (I thought the last). So I lay down my monster spear and advance on him with my sword. At this point, veteran fighter Sovvos whirls out onto the field with two daggers. Bereft of one of my legs, I cannot hustle back and reclaim my spear. So I one-leggedly trip backwards, killing Sovvos, but landing flat on my back (since if I dodge backwards onto my dead leg I have to fall over). At this point, the bold little feller stabs me in the chest :D

                                              iii.     Great game of CTF to finish. Then get picked up, shower, make some little posters for Monica as part of my gift, and head to the graduation, a bit breathless.

                                              iv.     Graduation is great. I manage to throttle my social speed back to “Bham chill”. Which means I actually can take the time to talk to each long-forgotten friend comfortably. I realized I’d been bouncing around frenetically ever since school ended, not really believing that when I settled down that I would return to solidity.

                                               v.     Hang out a lot with Grace, but also talk with Sean, Heidi, Henry Banks, Ken, … , Monica’s boyfriend Demyan, and Monica’s friends from Whatcom Rihanna and Dory. Rihanna has a bit of a crazy life—she’s co-raising a child with a best friend-but-no longer-significant other, working long hours at WalMart... crazy story.

                                              vi.     At the end, give Monica my banner paper. Think she liked it. She wants to organize some hangouts with me and Demyan this summer—we’ll see what happens with that.

                                            vii.     Return home, take a walk with Mom, read some Street Fighting Mathematics (which is disappointingly basic) and hit the hay. Get to chat with folks a bit about the road trip goofballs’ take on the Alex thing—they agree it’s a blatant oversimplification.