Our friends Leonard and Sumana arrived yesterday to visit for the weekend, and as per usual the house is full of fast-paced, geek-reference-heavy conversation. They brought us bagels from New York, which was very exciting, and we somehow managed to spend the entirety of the breakfast hour analyzing "Love Potion No. 9"* (YouTube link). Group conclusion: this is a documentation problem. The narrator was meant to give the potion to others, not take it himself. I personally am not sure I agree. My dissenting opinion is that he told the woman he was a flop with chicks, so she gave him the potion that he might be more bold with them. The problem then becomes something else entirely. Perhaps in later releases she has patched the bugs....

Later I was feeling quite spry (for me in this dark time of the Kidney Stone, anyway), so I proposed a walk to Spy Pond. I hadn't been there in a month or more. Sumana and Moss elected to stay behind, but Leonard accompanied me, and it was excellent! We got to the pond to find that many others had the same idea. The afternoon was cold and clear and gloriously sunny, and the pond was terribly inviting. Leonard and I are both originally from Southern California, and having seen and read many things where people fall through icy pond surfaces, we were both a little uncertain, but we egged each other on until indeed we had walked right onto the middle of the ice. It was fantastic! Then we, like every other group out there, took pictures.


Here is Leonard, standing on the ice!


Here am I, supine on the ice! I have floated on bodies of water many a time in the past, but never on one so solid. Neat!

There are other photos on Flickr, including this one I took yesterday evening of snow flakes drifting like stars through the black night sky. Have I mentioned that I love winter? Because I do.

*Several years ago, my sister and I went to a friend's house to play with her karaoke TV thing. It was a microphone with karaoke songs preloaded in, and interfaced with the TV and judged singers based on how well they matched the lyrics. Basically it was a precursor to things like Rock Band. Anyway, it was a Korean product, and they'd apparently transcribed the lyrics as they heard them, which made for rather amusing songs, such as "Love Portion No. 9". The karaoke lyrics read:

"She bent down and sat around and gave me a wink,
she said I'm going to mix it up by smelling the scent.
It smelled like turpentine and looked like India ink
I held my nose, I closed my eyes, I took a drink.

I didn't know it was a day or night
I started kissing everything in sight,
but when I kissed that cow got a very potent mind
broke my bottle of love portion no. 9"

These lyrics are now canonical in my family.