In which I am at two with California

I may have mentioned how excited I am, to have SETI and NASA in walking distance?

Hah!

It is still technically true, these distances are walkable. Just, walking requires at the least some ground to walk upon, and the City of Sunnyvale is doing its very utmost to deny it to me.

Yes, we're back to sidewalks, absence of. Today I have committed the crimes of trespass and jaywalking in my efforts to get from A to B, or specifically from here to SETI. It's only a couple of miles, for cryin' out loud, in deeply suburban territory; and twice the sidewalk just vanished under me. A person could get discouraged. Except of course that these days a person has Twitter, and actually I'm conducting quite a cheerful exchange of compliments with the City of Sunnyvale on this very subject.

The good news is that I did actually get to SETI, and on time too (having budgeted extra, for reasons you may very well guess). Usually the Wednesday colloquium is one expert talking on their field; this week, it was a dozen research students having three minutes each to describe their summer's work. Three minutes and three slides. With a gong for overrunning. It wasn't so much useful as just plain fun. I liked the boy who was superproud of his coding, and I loved the girl who was using surveillance cameras to track meteor showers, pinpoint their origin and thus discover new and potentially hazardous comets. (And if you're in the Bay Area, you too could have a surveillance camera on your roof...)

Also, I am just sayin', but young scientists do like their graphs. Even when they don't have time to talk you through 'em. Actually I remember that, being excited by graphs when I was young. It's like any display of metrics, I guess: a quick visual way of saying we did this. These days I prefer 'graphs (and actually I still tend to say paras, to avoid confusion and stay resolutely uncool), but hey.

Didn't I just fucking ask you not to fucking do that?

I only opened the bloody freezer to get some bloody ice. There was a ... shifting ... among the stacks of stuff. I frowned, I spoke to it severely: I said, "Stuff, please don't cascade all over the kitchen floor. You know I won't like it if you do."

And then I turned my back, to take an ice-tray to the sink, and - yeah. You know what happened.

And now all the ice is in flinders and half my tupperware is trashed and the kitchen floor is lethal with skiddyness and I am very, very unamused. I may resort to gin. Actually I was planning to resort to gin anyway, that's what the ice was for, but now I have a reason. I should like to flounce to my daybed and come over all artistic, but I have too much to do...

The things you miss by not being us

Oh, internets. I am so sorry you were not here and did not see.

Katherine was sitting on the floor playing a game with Barry, whereby she covered him with a sheet of newspaper and he attacked her fingers through the paper. It was very funny.

Mac came by, attracted by laughter and people and sounds of rustling. He approached, smelling - we must assume - nothing but newspaper.

The newspaper attacked him viciously, and Mac -

Mac turned into a VTOL.

From a standing start, he leapt three feet into the air - his back higher than Katherine's head - and three feet backwards. It was the most spectacular thing I have ever seen a small fuzzbutt achieve, and the pity of it is? No instant replay, no video. YouTube will never know. It could've made him famous and us rich, but alas...