I was in at SJSU yesterday. I saw my old student Gary Singh, I was his thesis adviser for a creative writing project about a pataphysical device called a Ridiculometer.

Gary wrote a nice article about me in the Metro newspaper last spring.

I went to the final demos of the game projects in Chris Pollett's CS 134 Game Programming class. They used my book, Software Engineering and Computer Games, and it was good to see my Pop framework software was working for them. (Sorry about the buggy wall-corner collisions, guys, maybe I'll fix them.)

I was impressed by this student's fashion sense, which is not a given among CS majors! She had cool running shoes too.

One of my best former students Leo Lee was there, checking the demos out. Leo just entered one of his games into the student contest held at the Independent Game Festival at the Game Developer's Conference in San Jose every March. I'm proud of him and I hope he can get a game programming job.

Leo's already finished Half-Life 2 twice, turning up the difficulty level for the second time through. Me, I'm still in the airboat.

Still raining, everything getting green, up in the morning it's lovely out the window, kitchen lamp reflected in the panes.

Robert Sheckley one wrote a story about a space explorer stranded on a world with no green. The only green color he could see came from the explosions of his blaster. He ran down its battery, firing it over and over to see the green. And then the yellow hyenas got him.

Closer in on the green leaves I remember the poem “The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams.

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens.

Hail Gaia.

Speaking of refrigerator magnets, daughter Isabel has a fresh crop of Isabel's Copper Refrigerator Magnets ready for the holiday season.

We have quite a few of them ourselves. In fact last year, Isabel gave me a set of her magnets with one for each of my book titles; they're mixed in with the others. These little guys are holding up the plot diagram of Mathematicians in Love formerly known as Crazy Mathematicians.

I'll be getting back to my novel that soon, but meanwhile I'm revising my Lifebox tome. Actually, revising is somewhat dull and stressful, so I'm in fact blogging, and now the sun's coming out, so maybe I'll go for a bike ride. When you're revising, you're facing the gap between what you dreamed of doing and what you actually ended up with.

Great wind and rain last night. When we first moved to California, I was surprised to hear people call this kind of weather a “storm”. The temperature drops to 50 and you get half an inch of rain. Whoah! Not like the twister suckin' the steeple right offen a church like in this newspaper photo hyar. The woman's hair is nicely gnarly, no? You're seeing her from the back, and a stray vortex is pulling the loose hair up. If we could see air currents, we'd be so amazed.

That sideways picture on the fridge is an image of a canvas by our friend Ronna Schulkin Pearce.

And, as long as I'm pitching things, surely your holiday gift list should include a copy of Frek and the Elixir, my best book ever? Here's a typical satisfied reader…

Yesterday we went to a tea party given by some of Sylvia's co-workers and friends. I dressed up like a professor — I'm thinking Alan Turing in the faculty locker-room here.

And I drank a lot of tea. (Picture from a Celestial Seasonings refrigerator magnet — every object is bloggable!)

I switched from coffee to tea about a year ago, and have come to really enjoy it. Hard to get a good cup in a restaurant, obviously Lipton's has nothing to do with it, but even if you get the good bags, its tricky having the right amount and temperature of water. Making tea is a somewhat alchemical process. But when you get it right you can kind of taste the caffeine. It tastes like electricity.

I get that line from a scene in William J. Craddock's 1960s San Jose novel, Be Not Content, where they're eating brownies with LSD in them and one of the characters named Baxter says he can taste the acid, it tastes like electricity, and the narrator remarks, “We should haver realized this was a bad sign,” and then Baxter goes into a hideous freakout. I can't find the book right now, it's somewhere in my house, I paid a pretty penny to get a used copy last year. Well, when it turns up, I'll blog it.

And now back to revising The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul.