Bill turned 40 yesterday, and celebrated with a smashing party in his front yard. Unfortunately the police showed up at about 2am. The DJ was a little loud, and the uplighted palm trees must have tipped them off. But we all looked smashing in our costumes. I was a priest, with long black cassock. Jason was a monk. Not sure what prompted the religious theme, but it worked.

I normally object to costumes, since they get out of hand quickly. There's nothing sadder than costume deterioration after a long night of drinking. I don't do makeup very well (despite several years of theater in high school). So the trick for me is a simple costume with no rigamarole on my face. I also like like the outfit to be somewhat realistic.... And no drag. I can't walk in heels.

But the best moment of the evening was the quick visit by a score of geisha, in full kimono. Whiteface, yards of silk, and little polite shoes.

We're doing the Magic Kingdom for my birthday in December. Mouse ears for me!

I got white.

I'm really having to fight my inner gadget geek. Should I get black, or white?

I agree with Paul Ford. The web is a distraction too readily at hand. Time has been frittered away before this bright screen, flitting from shiny thing to shiny thing. There has been more trivia and less substance, and I feel the less for it.

The ability to type a few words into a carefully crafted search box and be presented with an ordered list of possibly relevant results is a blessing bestowed by Google, and a curse. Detours off into the weeds beside the information superhighway have killed many a sunny afternoon. My hope for genuine writing, photography, or web design is quickly overtaken by tangents, trivia, and shopping.

Not that I'll be shutting down my computer in the near future. But my ancien PowerBook purchase was, I think, a vague desire to recapture my college days, when all my writing was done in black and white. Printing required fishing out a LocalTalk cable and sussing out an empty port in the Mac lab. Email barely existed.

Friend Brian once dismissed weblogs as instant loquacity, yet here we still are, five years on. My own webbish ramblings are a fairly cringeworthy document in places, but a document nonetheless. It's just time to focus on adding words with substance rather than just words.

It's finally cool enough to cook. Yesterday was chicken and leek pie, made from the Naked Chef's "Jamie's Dinners" book. Much better (and easier) than the version from James Martin's "Great British Dinners" book.

Breakfast this morning was bangers, eggs, beans, tomatoes, and toast. Our local grocery finally brought back proper bangers. We've been going without for months.

As you can tell, I have a thing for English food. Rather hard to pull off in the middle of Arizona. Britain is a cold country, with lots of dishes well suited to long days in front of a warm stove. Arizona does not lend itself to spending a great deal of time in a hot kitchen.

Well, my enthusiasm for my new toy diminishes with time. I'm trying to get the damn thing on the network, but the previous owner (who left all her files on the hard disk, strangely) left it in a curiously un-networkable state. And my patience with pre-OSX macintosh system software is somewhat limited.

I have spent more money than is probably wise on eBay and Amazon.... a SCSI to Ethernet adapter, a 3.5 USB floppy drive (!) to plug in to my desktop mac, random power adapters at Radio Shack, etc. etc. I think I'll be happy with being able to type into SimpleText while laying in bed and copying text files to my main PC via SneakerNet.

Jimmy Eat World and Green Day tonight. I'm going for Jimmy Eat World and couldn't care less about Green Day, but I suppose it would be rude to walk out early. Especially since we're taking two friends who are more interested in Green Day. Sigh.

Look at my new old toy.

We checked out the Downtown Phoenix Public Market this morning. It's set up in the parking lot at Central near Filmore, across from the Fancy Block containing Amsterdam and Club Miami. I've been wanting a good farmer's market in Phoenix. Every time I'm in Boise, I stop by the Boise Downtown Farmer's Market, which is three blocks of local produce, local restaurants, art, and really yummy local game, sausage, etc.

Alas, the Phoenix edition is trying very hard, but not so much. To combat the heat, the market is set up under awnings with green shade tarps hung at about 5'11", which makes walking through the market really annoying. They also have huge outdoor evap air coolers going, so it's rather like shopping in a claustrophobic wind tunnel.

But I got some nice local apple butter for my morning toast.