This AM, pre-gym, I stopped in at the Mountain View Farmers' Market, held with profane indifference on Sunday mornings. The sun was shining and, at that hour anyway, the sky was blue. This is the first such market I've known which sometimes has live musical entertainment, and today's band was one of those Peruvian ensembles with the flutes, drums, & etc - very pleasant. (As I recall the only other time there's been music was my first visit, when it was a dorky he-and-she folk guitar & vocal duo.) I got some organic raisins, asian pears, individual-sized British pies (a beef & mushroom and a sweet rhubarb/strawberry, from the truculent English woman), and kiwis (the big mutant kind that look like two or three grown together). And this time (unlike my last visit) their booth was occupied, so I could fulfill my mission objective: I acquired a bottle of Sukhi's curry paste <1> from the two nice Indian ladies. Sometime I'm going to have to try the novel pommelo - one of the citrus booths always has a whole table full of these enormous cousins to the grapefruit - they must be eight inches in diameter, at least. But since I don't like grapefruit they're easy to pass up.

Then I drove on to the base, which I described before, a bit. The project I work on used to be housed in a regular building, which is actually quite conveniently located right next to the military gym; but it's being renovated so they're all banished for a year or two to a complex of trailers <2> linked together with covered plywood walkways. (It's actually much nicer than it sounds; the word "plush" has been used in descriptions.) The location is way out on the fringe, adjacent to the end of the huge airstrips which run between Moffett Field's distinctive airship hangers. Being located out in the bush we have lots of wildlife about, I've seen swans or storks (not sure which) outside the windows occaisionally, and one hears a chorus of chirping birds and croaking frogs if one arrives early or stays late enough. The windows are the best part of trailer life, because for the first time in my long computer career I have windows that I can open! But the downside are the ants. Many methods have been tried to control them; none are working. There's always a few of the colony's scouts moving around our work surfaces, which we've all learned to keep very clean. Unfortunately the plastic wrap on that darn rhubarb/strawberry pie was not secure, and when I glanced over at it the thing was alive with ants! I was able to unwrap it (only a small percentage had actually reached their sugary goal) and flick off all the offenders; I was not going to let them win this battle, it was my pie and by gum I was going to enjoy it! (Actually it wasn't that good a pie - the beef & mushroom was pretty tasty, however.)

I did accomplish some real work today, but I'd been playing with graphic images also (the PhotoShop software I use is installed on just one of the PCs in our trailer) however the big deal now is the disk I ordered from Alchemy Mindworks just arrived, so I can now make legitimate animated GIFs. Today I was routing around the Internet looking for info on transparent GIFs, even located a utility to make them; when I got home and installed this new stuff I found it can do that too.

After creating a small pulsating GIF or two I pedaled over to Tung Kee for my evening noodle-bowl. Somebody there had an electronic music device; I could hear a spray of notes now and then but I couldn't pinpoint the source. Today has not been a Zone meal <3> day, too much pie-dough and noodles, but tomorrow will be better.