Since Jason and I live half an hour away from each other in Chicago, it seemed only natural to hang out by both flying to Denver at different times and overlapping for a day. So that is what we did. Welcome to Colorado!
Misty mountains
At the (real) summit
Once reunited in Denver, we drove (by which I mean ‘Jason drove’) to Boulder on Saturday morning and then selected a ‘medium+’ hike up Mount Sanitas for a decent morning walk. (The city of Boulder bothered me for a bit because I couldn’t work out why I would have heard of it before, until I realised it is the same Boulder which rhymes with ‘shoulder’ in the Chainsmokers song.)
Once Mount Sanitas had been suitably ascended we moved on to the Red Rock Amphitheatre, which seems like a nice place to see a concert, before enjoying some of Denver’s craft beer and the company of Jason’s friend Raj. Had I wanted to enjoy some of Denver’s other highlights (bad cannabis puns are obligatory!) then that would have been very easy too, as weed shops are just about everywhere. (And for fans of intricate local tax policies, fear not, they cater for you too.)
The stage at the Red Rock Amphitheatre
On Sunday I roamed the city by myself taking in the semi-pedestrianised downtown LoDo area, a great creole breakfast place, the Coors Field baseball stadium, a nice city park and a full three branches of the Tattered Cover bookshop. This makes a truly excellent place to sit with a cup of tea, amongst all of the beautiful books, and read a Kindle.
I also went to the Botanic Gardens, where I learnt all about trichomes (i.e. hairy leaves) from a patient woman at the Science Chats table within the Science Pyramid. Full credit to the Botanic Gardens for being enthusiastic about their Science, but I couldn’t help feeling a little sorry for the person who ends up taking the Sunday morning slot on the Science Chats rota. So that her teaching doesn’t go to waste, let me assure you that most plants have surprisingly hairy leaves, and that looking at them under a microscope is cool.
I wouldn’t say the Botantical Gardens was ‘in season’, but this was pretty
LoDo, Denver
Travel by train! Admittedly only a train to the airport, but still.
Finally, I wanted to lavish praise on the city of Denver for connecting their faraway airport to the centre of the city via a fast and frequent train ride costing $9. Good job!
I made it to Florida!
Blending in
OK, so I made it to Florida in 1993. But that doesn’t count for the purpose of my scratch map since I wasn’t blogging anything at the time, and my main memory is getting yelled at by my parents just because I tried to stick my hairbush into the electrical socket. So last week I tried again, visiting Randi’s cousins in the Miami area. Special thanks to Sandy, Corey, Logan and Landon for hosting us, especially as their back garden looks like this:
Not too shabby
Also pretty nice at sunset
As always, places which are luxurious to visit do not always make for practical living. On the first day we lazed by the pool until lunchtime when we decided to pop out for a bite. The nearest restaurant was an hour’s walk away, during which we saw precisely zero other people on the pavement. (To be fair, at least there was pavement the whole way… I’m looking at you, Skokie.) On the way back, the security guard at the entrance to the estate looked astonished that anyone might turn up on foot, waving us through the gate built for cars with the uncertain salutation to “walk safely, I guess…?”.
I call it the milk test: never live anywhere which isn’t a 10 minute walk away from a shop selling milk.
At the beach
The next day we hung out in Miami Beach, which is technically a different ‘city’ to Miami but is (a) just over the bridge (b) probably what most tourists think is Miami anyway. Unsurprising it is warm, sunny and wonderful to walk down the public beach, admire the historic art deco hotels and wash down Cuban food with a pitcher of sangria. Much more surprisingly, but somehow even better, is the fact that the city is dotted with free public suncream dispensers! Suddenly this seems like the most obvious thing in the world, and I am surprised I have never seen it before.
Miami, you’ve impressed me with your public health programme.
Free suncream!
The Holocaust Memorial in Miami Beach
More soberingly, we also visited the city’s Holocaust Memorial. There isn’t much to say abut this other than it’s worth seeing if you are ever in the area. (Especially if you have a job in the Trump administration.)
Later, we briefly stopped by Miami-proper to visit the Wynwood Walls before going home. On Saturday, it was time for a brand new American experience: the high school ‘track meet’. I’m starting to doubt myself, but I’m pretty sure this is not the norm for the UK. I mean, sure, there was a low-key school football team and I’m sure some of their parents and friends turned up for matches. But this is a different level of school pride, which is both kinda nice and rather strange. (Doesn’t school stop at the weekends?) Either way, we got to see Landon’s relay team triumph in their race (go Sharks!) before recuperating from all of this vicarious exercise at the beach club.
Automation in action
Sportz
More sportz
The Cat in the Hat
Wait, who is that adorable child up above? She is Randi’s newest cousin, and reason enough to visit. As a bonus we got to spend our final day with her and her dad Greg at a free Dr. Seuss festival, hanging out with the Cat in the Hat, Thing 1 and Thing 2. I’ll be honest: as a child, I wasn’t a fan of their anarchic ways, and was very much on the side of the law-abiding fish instead. But I suspect we have both mellowed over time, especially now that the Cat in the Hat has all of these public appearances to make.
Florida = done. Again.
Hamilton
I know you read this blog for its hip cultural commentary, so let me take you to the very cutting edge of 2015 and tell you about this musical Hamilton…
Yes, OK, I’m not breaking new ground here. But after picking up some spare tickets from Jason back in August (thanks!) I finally got to see it for myself tonight, and it was totally worth the wait. It’s enormous fun, full of life and takes aim at (highly overrated) Thomas Jefferson… what more do you want from a night out? I highly recommend extending some Hamilton-style credit to secure a ticket and then passing the following months by reading up on The Federalist before you go. (Or you could just listen to the songs like everyone else does.)
Oh, and George III has great dress sense.
Last Friday night I also saw A Disappearing Number, a play about the (entirely self-taught) Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan and his collaboration with G.H. Hardy at Cambridge in the 1910s. I haven’t seen such a celebration of pure mathematics since Mr. Bauer jumped on the table of our GCSE class, and it was wonderful. Ramanujan’s most famous equation demonstrates that the infinite sum of 1+2+3… etc. is ‘equal’ to –1⁄12, and I found this baffling enough to do some extensive research ask Katie for help. She pointed me to a controversial Numberphile video, and naturally I shared this with Jason and Carrie the next day (poor things had no idea what they were letting themselves in for). Jason took offence at some of the mathematical slights of hand, and before you know it I had to summon Katie onto Skype and hold up bits of paper with equations written out for her to judge.
Katie tries to bring peace
If you’re out there, theatre people, you should feel very proud of the reaction you caused.
Finally, on Saturday night it was a pleasure to watch The Godfather at Todd and Carolyn’s in a much overdue Salon with Robert and Julie plus the much-missed Shelby and Benno. Todd served us up a delicious meal beforehand, as we sat around a proper table drinking proper wine and talking about proper adult things. And while my main memory of The Godfather from six years ago (I checked) is that it’s a bloody long film, Randi and I both enjoyed it much more than we expected this time around, and we’re already agitating for the sequel.
Addendum
Starved Rock
Some late-night blogging was necessary yesterday in order to jot this all down before flying off to <mystery destination> tonight. Unfortunately, this also introduced a few errors. Not only did I misstate the sum of Ramanujan’s infinite series (now corrected) but I also neglected our weekend trip with Randi’s mum to the Starved Rock state park. We stayed overnight at an AirBnB in the ‘city’ of Henry, Illinois… you can tell it’s not a real city because the owner told us that we were free to lock the front door at night if we wanted to, as if it were a foreign superstition she was happy to indulge but didn’t really understand. Oh, and the park was sunny! Sunny and warm and full of people, only a few of whom choosing to play music out loud from speakers as they walked around.
Donald Trump isn’t good for much, but he has undoubtedly improved Second City. It’s been a few years since I last saw a show there (and yes, that’s a strange thing to write) but I went back earlier this month and the whole thing is much tighter, angrier and more coherent than it used to be. I found it funnier as a result, too, though I’m sure it’s more polarising than the grab bag assortment of sketches which it used to be. Randi and I went with Villy (last seen in London) and her mother, both of whom belong to the comforting class of people who understand visa rules and immigration law in casual conversation.
Randi and Villy and books
In the past few weeks I also made two important introductions which have been a long time in the making. Firstly, at long last, Todd has sat down and watched an episode of Doctor Who. In an attempt to appeal to him as a television connoisseur I opted for the very first one, in all of its magnificent black and white glory from 1963. It’s just so good! While at Todd and Carolyn’s I also fulfilled my completionist desire to finish off the Indiana Jones films with Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, even though everyone warned me beforehand that it wasn’t worth it. Everyone was right.
The second introduction needs only this photo:
We finally got Robert to play Carcassonne!
Otherwise I’ve just been catching up on Sherlock with Catherine, booking exciting trips so that future posts can benefit from more interesting photos and celebrating Valentine’s Day at La Scarola, which needs no improvement whatsoever. In a romantic gesture, I muted the ‘glamily’ for the duration of the meal. This is a giant family WhatsApp chat which has also sprung up in recent weeks: 35 somehow-connected cousins around the world draining each others’ battery lives at all hours. It’s great. It’s absurd. This is how cults start. Clearly we need another wedding.
Cross-checking Article V
Did you know that there are two things which cannot be amended in the US Constitution via the usual amendment process? I did, because it came up in The Federalist Papers, and now Todd does too, because I quizzed him on it after he presented me with a pocket copy sometime after Shake Shack on a classy Friday night. One is that the importation of slaves cannot be banned until 1808, which should give pause to anyone trusting in its timeless wisdom. The other is that states cannot be deprived of equal representation in the Senate without their consent.
As far as I can see, there’s nothing to stop you just amending the amendment process itself to remove these restrictions, although at that point it might be quicker and cheaper to just invoke the ‘self-evident’ right of ‘the People’ to ‘alter or abolish’ any government which becomes destructive to their life, liberty or ‘pursuit of happiness’.
If you think this reads a bit silly, and leaves out important practical questions like “well does the government have a lot of tanks at its disposal to crush me with?” and “wait, which people exactly count as the People and who decides that?” then congratulations, you have successfully problematised the Declaration of Independence. You also might be the kind of person who enjoys playing Secret Hitler, an excellent bluffing game which Jason funded way back when on Kickstarter and has finally arrived in our lives in a fancy wooden box. Most players are liberals but some are secretly fascists, and their aim is to manipulate the others into enacting fascist policies and electing Hitler as Chancellor. As I say, it’s great, and their website also has an appropriate level of snark:
Hah.
Commuting life: the Caltrain to Palo Alto
Anyway…. apart from playing board games (7 Wonders! Dominion! Carcassonne, obviously!) and setting up a special mailbox in Germany to forward limited-edition Carcassonne tiles from eBay.de to myself (the less said about this the better) I also spent a week this month working out of the Palo Alto office. Rather than staying in Palo Alto itself, which does have a certain logic behind it, I decided to commute on the Caltrain from San Francisco each day. This came at the cost of early mornings but was otherwise a great move, both because it made an excellent reading time and because I could hang out in San Francisco with both Nolan and Jamie on various evenings after work. (And to see Nolan convene a deputation to the office’s ever-changing frozen yoghurt selection is to watch real leadership in action.)
Jamie kindly shared the last jelly doughnut
Finally, in Chicago I had a good night out with new colleagues Arpan, Pedro, Ibs and Joey and also saw Psychonaut Librarians with Randi at our favourite theatre. It’s about… a group of librarians who must venture into the magical Anyverse, defeat the Sandman and bring a girl and a sort-of-boy-but-not-really-a-person together? Yes, this one was a little too absurdist to be one of my favourites (years and years ago I read a review of a particularly surreal episode of The Prisoner on this topic which stuck with me), but the characters were engaging and it was enjoyable to whizz through.
Last word to the jelly doughnut.
Beth E . Dubowe-Lawrence on China, Part 3: Chongqing & Chengdu: “Again an awesome adventure to share this with you” Apr 21, 19:13
