Today I finished reading Sean McMullen's book Glass Dragons. I had enjoyed the Voyage of the Shadowmoon and hadn't realized there was a sequel until stumbled across it in the new book section at the library. I found the book a bit hard to get into at first. There are a long series of short rather disconnected sections at the beginning, but eventually stuff starts to fit together and, by the end, most things are wrapped up quite satisfactorily. An enjoyable read.
We celebrated Charlie's birthday yesterday -- mostly this involved playing Mario Party 6 for much of the day. But we also went to see the movie Robots and I made pizza. Since reducing carbohydrates in my diet, I don't make pizza much anymore, so it was nice to have an excuse. I made one "meat" pizza, with summer sausage and pepperoni and another "everything" pizza with the meats plus roasted red peppers, black olives, and mushrooms.
I got an email from a recent transplant to Amherst who's interested in Esperanto! We're planning to meet tomorrow for lunch. He had come to the Thursday meeting at Barts, but Lucy and I weren't there. Alisa had asked me to attend a public debate on the proposed charter and afterwards we went out for dinner.
The debate didn't really offer much in the way of new information. It was mostly the same people who always attend these things who had already staked out entrenched positions on the charter. The guy who chaired the charter commission, and who has been the public face of the charter, has a hard time maintaining patience with the people who ask questions. People ask questions like "But the charter doesn't specify 'X', which we do now" and he replies, "But our current charter doesn't specify 'X' either -- that's something we've decided to do and which we would probably continue to do under the new charter". That part of his reply is fine. But then he has a tendency to say something a bit patronizing -- to chastise people for asking questions that impugn the motives of the people who wrote the charter, or being suspicious about how things would change under the new system. I think their argument would be more effective if he could avoid adding that little twist to the knife, but I think that's just his personality.
After the meeting, we went to dinner at All Fired Up -- a new restaurant in Hadley. It is what I think of as a Mongolian barbeque. You select meat and vegetables from a bar and then take it to a large circular grill where a cook fries it for you and adds the sauce you selected. We got a pitcher of the sangria, which was a fun change. I made a few different dishes: one with beef and scallops (where the beef overpowered the scallops) and another with the kung-po sauce (which overpowered the scallops too). But it was all tasty. The restaurant is a bit pricey, but its good and with good service.
I noticed this evening that folks have been looking through my weblog for my previous writings about the charter, for example this one, where I provided the Amherst Bulletin letter I wrote the last time the charter was proposed. Interesting.
StevenBrewer