My whole family was in Orlando for part of this week, so we decided to hold a birthday celebration for my sister, my brother, and myself (our birthdays are all fairly close). This year, my mom organized a trip to Orlando’s Cirque Du Soleil production, La Nouba.
Don’t ask me how, but I recently received an as-yet-unreleased album of music from a very cool Icelandic band. If you know who I am talking about, good for you, and get excited for the official release! It is definitely going to be one of the most amazing albums of the year. Anyway, I just mention it because I listened to the album nonstop on repeat yesterday (imagine that I will today as well), and it is a perfect and moving example of the glorious beauty which, for me, causes sadness and even pain. ...
A few days ago, our community here in Palo Alto had a conference call with Millard Fuller, whom you may remember from my entry a while back on Koinonia Farms. Millard founded Habitat for Humanity after being at Koinonia, but was recently fired from the company he started for “philosophical” reasons. The way he tells it, he was trying to put more money back into housing projects, whereas the rest of the board was trying to become a Big Corporation. Anyway, the conference call was the result of some chance interactions that several in our community had with Millard (which, incidentally, were the reason I heard about Koinonia, etc…), and the purpose of it was to see if there were any good ways for us to partner with Millard’s new organization, the Fuller Center for Housing. This new company aims to help people who are “too poor” for Habitat to work with.
Google just released a special add-on for their maps service today, in honor of the anniversary of the first moon landing. I was looking at all the different landing sites, and I was surprised to see, as I looked very close, that the moon is actually made of yellow cheese! Who would have thought? Thanks, Google, for this huge contribution to modern astronomy.
For our celebration of America’s independence this year, a few in our community went up to an apartment in San Francisco to hang out and experience the fireworks shows. While waiting for these shows, we had the opportunity to watch the critically-acclaimed independent film, Aliens vs Predator. It was truly amazing; I’ve never seen the mix-two-sci-fi-thriller-worlds-and-everybody-dies genre so full of promise! After the fireworks, we watched a slightly different film.