The Grand Tour

Geeks

What Christine carefully omitted from her log entry is the name we gave to the special gecko in the kitchen... You see, its tail has been chopped off yet it's still an effective bug hunter, so we (meaning it was all Christine's idea, honestly) thought of it as a great Klingon warrior: "Today is a good day to lose a tail". So we call him Tail-less. [For the non-trekkies, a great Klingon warrior was named Kahless.]

But there's more to our trekkie insanity...

At night, you can see the most beautiful starry sky: not only is the Milky way clearly visible, but you can even distinguish the denser (and brighter) sections of our galaxy from the sparsely populated ones. Incidentally, that's because air pollution is non-existent (whatever bad stuff goes up blows away into the ocean) and, due to the observatories on the mountains, there are strict ordinances limiting light pollution too. Anyway, I was staring into the night sky on a moonless night while swimming at the pool, and slowly the stars started disappearing --- a cloud was covering the sky, but at night you don't see a cloud: you just see the sky becoming black. And so I though of the Voyager episode "The Void" (season 7 ) where Voyager finds itself in a region of space without stars...

Thankfully, the crowd here mostly appreciates this oddity of ours. During a dinner, one of my maintenance co-volunteers said that his favorite Next Generation episode was The Picard (that's not the title, but that's not the point), and Christine responded with the year it was shown on TV. The next day, he told me that my wife was a keeper: not only is she beautiful, sweet, and smart, but she is also a trekkie.

One thing I've realized at Kalani is that I am hopelessly a geek. Some people are drawn to computers to make money --- a safe job. I just love computers, period. Here at Kalani, I'm setting up a security system based on a digital camera continually feeding photos onto a computer, and I'm writing the software to retain only useful photos (with people/cars in them). And I'm helping the IT guy set up a linux file server (which is free), thus saving Kalani $1,500 from buying a worthless piece of crap (the Windows server operating system). Both tasks are part of my regular work hours, not extra --- and I volunteered to do them, and I'm having a blast doing them. So computers and hi-tech will definitely be part of my life in the future.

We also had a funky guest come to Kalani --- her name was Ethel. Actually, it was Esther, but I kept confusing myself because I kept thinking of "Ethel the Aardvark goes Quantity Surveying" (that's from an odd Monty Python skit) for no really good reason. Ethel was a New York girl --- Asian family background, works for a cosmetics firm, paid over $200 a day to stay at Kalani, and loves fashion. What makes her funky is that, for some odd reason, others at Kalani confused her with Christine. To me, they were nothing alike, but because Christine was no longer the only Asian, people got confused. What's also odd is that she sort-of lives the life Christine might have lived if she had not met me and moved to New York after Austin. Funny how, 6 years later, the two of them are day and night --- the hippie chick I love and the city girl who is as strange to me as starfruit.

Finally, Christine had a tarot card reading the other day --- not the divination kind, but rather a reading focused on helping her understand her present self and her path in life. What was most funny about it was the card that came up to describe the goal of her personal journey. Contrary to her parents' wishes, it wasn't a doctor, it wasn't a lawyer, it was "The Rebel".

I'll go sleep with my wonderfully unique Che now... or will she be my sexy Dr. Crusher tonight?

Posted by Toli at September 19, 2004 02:59 AM