| Lifestyles of the funemployed |
[Jul. 7th, 2008|09:35 pm]
Lindsey Kuper
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- Four days until ICFP! Alex
 oniugnip and I are stretching our Scheme muscles, getting ready. It's almost time to find out if I've learned anything. Alex's roommate Martin samarin and his future roommate Mark are doing the contest, too, as a different team. (The trash talking has already begun in earnest.) These guys are all programmers not to be trifled with, and I'm probably about to get my ass handed to me, if not by them, then by the Jesse jes5199/Josh j3h/Kim boojum/Paul stereotype441 juggernaut. Or the Andrew pixelherder juggernaut. Regardless, I think I'll have fun and learn stuff.
- Alex and I are taking a two-week tai chi class. So far, I'm terrible! But I'm learning. And I can check "study a martial art" off the lifetime to-do list.
- We went down to just-north-of-Miami to hang out with some of Alex's family for the weekend. I went swimming in the Atlantic Ocean for the first time -- with his great-great-uncle Sid. We're sitting around in a living room with Alex's older relatives, all of whom are pretty sedentary, and suddenly an 80-year-old man comes bounding into the room wearing a triathlon T-shirt and announces that he's going to the beach and whoever wants to come with had better hurry. So we head off to the beach with him and on the way (as we walk past the gigantic American flag that hangs over downtown Delray Beach, Florida on July 4) he tells us that he goes to a weekly political discussion group and that the topic he suggested for this week was "Is Patriotism A Virtue?" and he's irked that they watered it down to "What Does Patriotism Mean To You?" Then we jumped into the ocean and swam for a while. When it was time to go home, Sid was like "Follow me. We might have to jump a fence", and cut through a hotel courtyard. Hotel employees were asking if we had wristbands, and he summarily ignored them and kept walking and we just followed and nobody gave us a hard time. I think this man is my new standard for how cool I want to be when I'm eighty years old. Also the ocean is really warm, and we saw a tiny crab swim by.
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