So I come back from the high desert mountains of Colorado, where the weather was a balmy 50 degrees to Georgia and the worst ice storm in about 15 years. Something’s wacky about all that. Athens was hit pretty hard. Trees came down all over, and much of the city was out of power. Parts still are, including most of my apartment complex. Somehow my building stayed energized, but outside my windows, all was dark. I took advantage of the cold weather to stay inside, make a batch of sourdough pancakes, and fill a videotape with movies from the Independent Film Channel: Monster in a Box and _Gray’s Anatomy_, both monologues by Spalding Gray, Slacker, and The Pesky Suitor , a 30-minute short with Claire Danes.

Back in October, I linked to a page written by a person who claimed to have built a fission warhead out of radioactive material from discarded smoke detectors, and also planned to launch it on a model rocket on April 1, 2000. The page has since gone 404, but I’ve snagged a copy from google’s cache. My referrer logs show that this is a popular search topic now for some reason, so… here you go.

Is there a better movie soundtrack than the one for Until the End of the World? If so, I’d sure like to know about it. This CD is easily one of the best in my collection. Other Until the End of the World links: the not-quite-official-but-pretty-close site and The Strange Case of Until the End of the World. If you haven’t seen this movie yet, find it and watch it. It’s nearly three hours (unless you somehow find the 5 1/2 hour version) of beautiful cerebral cinema.

There are currently 16 weblogs linking to me, more than ever before, but that’s still not enough to get me listed on the beebo weblog popularity contest. Rather than illustrating my unpopularness, this really shows the explosion of weblogs in the last few months. Shoot, even my parents (hi mom!) are fixin’ to use Blogger to start one of their own.

“Hi mom” just reminded me of my college roommate Phil “de cat with Grape Jelly” Jones. Our freshman year we both had weekly physics lab writeups, and for some reason I can’t remember we found it funny to embed “Hi Mom!” somewhere in each writeup – in the text, in a graph, hidden in an equation, somewhere terribly clever. Now, ten years later, I don’t think my mom’s ever even seen one of my lab writeups.

I’ve found a new term that describes me and my current obsession pretty well: Ecopoet. This is from Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy. I’m nearly done with the set, and I’ll write about the work when I’m done, but in the third book he introduces the term ecopoet. Like a poet does with words, an ecopoet takes bits and pieces of ecology and turns them into something beautiful. Just as there are many types of poems, an ecopoet can create many sorts of things. Gardens. Landscaping. Buildings. And not just plants, but animals are included in the mix as well. A combination of Little House on the Prairie and art. The Art of the Kitchen Garden has some nice photos illustrating the point, though these are more on the side of art than I picture things. For me, living in my apartment of concrete on asphalt, food has been my creation. I grew what I could in pots (tomatoes, basil, oregano), but I have this overwhelming need to dig in the dirt, to nuture living things, and to use them to make other things. My lease expires late this spring, and so I’ll find a place in town with a large enough yard to get me going for now. Eventually, though, I’d love country land to play in. Mike Gunderloy, a fellow blogger that I mention more than most, has an array of pages devoted to his small farm. There, look in the “around the farm” section in the navigation bar on the left.

I’m now in Pueblo, Colorado. My belly is full from the best stack of enchiladas I’ve had in a long time, courtesy of The Cactus Flower. Yeah… I said stack. The best way to prepare (and consume) enchiladas is stacked flat like pancakes rather than rolled and placed side-to-side. Don’t forget the eggs over easy on top! This trip has been wildly successful. Other than knowing there were enchiladas waiting for me, I wasn’t looking forward to this trip much. But, the work could not have been better. Of course, I’ve got a day and a half to go, all at a new place, so I’m not out of the woods yet. Enchilada links: a recipe, a restaurant, and an article on art museums that mentions them in passing.

I’m staying at a Hampton Inn in Colorado Springs. Hanging above my bed is a signed original print from one of my favorite artists, Socorro resident Doug West. You couldn’t have suprised me more with a da Vinci. Here’s many more on-line West prints. They are silk-screening at its best. His gallery and studio is on the plaza in Socorro, and is open to the public. There are usually several pieces in various stages of completion lying about.

Apathy has a wonderful ASCII art weblog portal at the bottom of each page. January 17th’s the Cheshire cat, topping off more links on Lewis Carroll than you could ever use.

Kestrel’s Nest is now Bobby Approved for accessibility for peole with disabilities. Thanks to Brig at Eatonweb for pointing to wetlog who pointed this out.

I’m leaving tomorrow for a week-long work-related trip to southern Colorado. Colorado Srings and Pueblo, to be exact. I’ll have access while I’m gone, but my posts probably won’t be as verbose and certainly won’t be as frequent this week. Thanks for reading!