1 month

I wanted to note that it has been one month since I got back to the US. Things have changed a bit since I was last here. Some construction projects on campus have been finished, and some buildings have been replaced by gaping holes. There's been a surprising amount of turnover in the cheap restaurant scene in Berkeley, and Cody's Books is gone for good. There is a neighborhood controversy over the Thai Temple (Wat Mongkulratanaram), about which I was interviewed by the Oakland Tribune a few weeks ago. I had craved the Thai Temple for 13 months, and upon returning, I was a bit dismayed to hear it may be shut down!

I went hiking in Redwood Regional Park last Sunday with Craig. As I expected, I was struck by how most of what we call "trails" in the US are perfectly drivable dirt roads.

I have spent most of my free time the past week working on a draft grant application (for $15,000!). This is the Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant, during the writing of which last year my computer decided to die. I was in French Polynesia at the time, and I ended up learning that the Dell rep in Papeete is incompetent, and then sent my dead hard drive home to my brother Daniel, who recovered all the data in about an hour. For that and numerous other reasons, I didn't get the grant that time around. This evening I decided I can't get any farther with the draft in its current state (5 1/2 of 8 pages) without reading more of the literature. I learn more things about myself as I get older. One of these is that once I have written crap, I find it very hard to delete the crap and start over from scratch. The important thing is to avoid writing crap in the first place.

I'll blog about Easter Island this weekend. Thanks for your patience.