Our previous workshop was a big success and all the attendees did very practical, hands on work building their talks and making presentations to an audience. I highly recommend it.

Check out more details at the workshop website.

I hadn’t realized how long it’s been since I’ve updated around here. Image my surprise when I discovered the site was offline!

Well, that’s all been corrected, the software has been updated, and there are a few announcements I want to make, so watch for a few new blog entries.

This year, we have known for months that our vacation would be in Rwanda. We are travelling with a friend who has been doing volunteer work there for years. She started out doing therapy for survivors of the genocide and then went on to help with economic development. She’s been providing goats to various survivors’ collectives which gives them an immediate and tangible boost to their development.

This year may be her last travelling to Rwanda, so we said we’d join her to do what work and assistance that we can. So this trip may be more volunteer work than sightseeing. Rwanda is suppose to be beautiful, rolling hills and forests, and is where Dian Fossey did her work with the gorillas. There will be lovely sights to see as we are doing whatever volunteer work we can.

Now, I’ll try to address some of the obvious fears that people have expressed to us.  Mainly, the specter of Ebola. The most important fact to keep in mind is that Africa is HUGE. The outbreak is in three small countries on the western part of the continent. Rwanda is inland, but on the eastern side of the continent. Here in Santa Barbara, we are closer to an Ebola outbreak in Dallas than we will be in Rwanda. Here’s a map showing the outbreaks as well as the little country of Rwanda.

The irony is that because we are coming from a country with a known Ebola outbreak (the USA), we’ll need to go through a medical screening to get into Rwanda.

The second expressed concern is the Rwandan Genocide (as shown in movies like Hotel Rwanda). The genocide occurred in 1994, 20 years ago. There are still scars that the country is recovering from, but it isn’t an ongoing crisis, and is often discussed as a model of reconciliation. We’ll see what it looks like when we are there, but I don’t expect there to be any problems for us.

I’m sure we’ll be posting here at least as much as we have for our trip to Malaysia last year (that’s a sarcastic comment since I’m well aware that the only post was the initial “we’re going to Malaysia” announcement). As we discovered last year, posting to Facebook on an ongoing basis is much easier and a much more immediate form of communication, so watch for out updates, there.

Take care, everyone!

After much indecision, we’ve decided to travel to Malaysia this year. For those who remember that we traveled to Malaysia in 2006, this year we are traveling through the Peninsula. Malaysia is made up of two parts, and previously we’d traveled in the portion on the island of Borneo (the eastern half shown on the map).

For this trip, we are flying to Kuala Lumpur where we have a hotel room reserved for the first three nights. From there we are improvising. Malaysia is a very modern country with good transportation and convenient communication. We have a few connections in the country that we will give us some goals and points of interest. We expect to find interesting  sights, relaxing locations, and amazing food.

Last year, we discovered how easy it is to just rely on Facebook for posting photos and status. We didn’t really make any blog entries. This year we plan on continuing to post on Facebook, but to also go back to posting on the blog. I’ll be sending out an email to our mailing list to confirm those who’d like to get notices when we make blog entries. Add a comment to this post if you want to be added to that mailing list.

As before, I (Alan) will be making the Facebook posts, and Harriet will be writing the blog posts. All credit for the well written words should go to her.

Our house-sitter will be taking care of Karma (and watching old black and white movies with her), and we’ll be back in time for Thanksgiving.

On October 3, 2013 Harriet Eckstein and Alan Irwin officially got married. We’ve been in a relationship for 28 years, but this year DOMA, the federal Defense of Marriage Act, and Prop 8, the California marriage discrimination law, were both thrown out as the obviously discriminatory legislation that they were.

So that led us to the Santa Barbara Courthouse at 4:00 pm on October 3. Gayle, Harriet’s recently discovered sister (a long and wonderful story for another time) was in town visiting and served as our witness. No one else knew in advance, and so no one else could endow the marriage with more ceremony than we wanted. Half an hour later (and after leaving the county clerks laughing  from our “performance”)  we were married. It cost us $237 (Harriet was outraged).

I wanted a simple Facebook status change to be my announcement, but Facebook makes a “marriage” status change into some huge announcement, so I scrambled to get some sort of picture posted with it. Harriet put together an official announcement which I’ve posted, below (click on the Announcement).

We appreciate everyone’s congratulations.  I understand the motivation and desire to somehow express approval and appreciation of the relationship that Harriet and I have. And I want to make it clear that we are in a committed relationship to each other, it’s just that we’ve been in that committed relationship for 28 years. The marriage licences has in no way changed our commitment, our relationship, and our intents. It has just changed certain aspects of our legal and financial situation. Those aren’t insignificant, it’s just not the typical aspects of marriage that are assumed in social discussions (“hey, congratulations on taking advantage of tax laws covering inheritance of real property you crazy kids”).

Yay social contracts!

Announcement

]]> http://www.alanirwin.com/blog/2013/11/05/yes-we-finally-got-married/feed/ 0 http://www.alanirwin.com/blog/2013/09/28/cheesemaking-at-sol-food-festival/ http://www.alanirwin.com/blog/2013/09/28/cheesemaking-at-sol-food-festival/#comments Sat, 28 Sep 2013 15:51:33 +0000 http://www.alanirwin.com/blog/?p=1086 Continue reading Cheesemaking at Sol Food Festival →]]> I just added a new page (available from the top menu) with a few of my favorite cheesemaking related resources. My two favorite books are listed along with two of my favorite web sites and a forum I follow. I’ve also posted the recipe that I partially demonstrated at the festival.

I’m actually writing this before the festival, so I’ll try to make a longer post after the event.

Now, the important part of the story (which I’ve buried to the second paragraph), is that I know the guy who originated the show! Phillip Iscove is the stepson of Harriet’s recently discovered half-sister. And yes, I carefully crafted that sentence because calling him my nephew would be completely misleading. The story of Gayle coming into our lives is a long and amazing journey which is best told by she and Harriet, but we’ll keep things abbreviated and just say the experience has been beyond wonderful. Gayle and her husband Michael have been amazing additions to our lives, and their son Phillip is wonderful. For the last 10 years he’s been trying to break into Hollywood as a writer. He wrote a pilot for Sleepy Hollow that was picked up by Alex Kurtzman and Robert Orci (the guys involved with the Star Trek films, Transformers, Fringe, and a bunch of other genre products). They loved it, and we’ve been following (voyeuristically) his progress. Couldn’t happen to a nicer, more deserving guy.

So, when I was thinking about a costume for this year’s Comic-Con, I went right to the most bad-ass image I’ve seen all year: that revolutionary war themed headless horseman swinging an ax and firing a machine-gun. The character has a fantastic costume which includes an historic coat, all of those weapons, and the technical challenge of looking headless!

I spent months working on the costume including making the coat from a historic recreation pattern (and thanks go out to Harriet and her home ec training for constantly clarifying what the hell I was reading, e.g. facing is on the inside of the coat). I built the ax and shotgun shells from wood and paint, but the guns (toys and reproductions) and gun belt were purchased.

It was all unveiled at the SDCC 2013 and it was a hit! Lot’s of people wanting photos, a couple of interviews (Playboy video?), and I even won a Hall Costume Award from the Costume Designer’s Guild. I was the only home made headless horseman, but there were 10 others that Fox put together to promote the TV show. They were everywhere, and when folks say they may have seen me, it was most likely one of the Fox models. It would have been cool to be the only headless horseman, but I hadn’t really anticipated that and so it wasn’t really a disappointment. The whole thing was way cooler than I imagined, and I’m curious to see if there are more home made costumes next year, when the show’s a hit.

Here are a couple more pictures from the Con.

I am damn excited about this. Yesterday (Sept. 12, 2013), NASA announced that Voyager 1 has officially left the heliosphere and entered interstellar space. The crossover occurred August 25th, but it took this long for NASA to verify the finding, and make the announcement. The crossover occurs when the influence of sun is basically over, and so the probe is experiencing space as it exists between stars.

This is historic. This is the first human made object to enter interstellar space, and what’s even more exciting is that this 36 year old probe is still work, sending back data to Earth. We are actually exploring interstellar space. Below is a link to the NASA announcement.

I can’t express how amazing this is for us as a species. We are explorers, and this is a huge step in our accomplishments as explorers. It’s beyond words.

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-277

To interpret these sorts of thermal images, the dark parts are cold and the whiter parts are hot. The colder an object, the darker it appears. So, my balding head is hotter than my beard and glasses. Even better, you can see that the straw in my mouth is really cold because I’m sucking up some refreshing, ice cold diet coke.

Now some of you may be asking ‘What are you doing with an IR camera?’ At some future point, I’ll make a more complete post about the nature of my work – but for now I’ll just say that I develop test applications for the infrared industry.

That’s Nick Holmes and me performing a live bit of fencing at the Santa Barbara Historical Museum.  It was part of the live entertainment at a fundraising masquerade for the Santa Barbara International Film Festival.

First, let me say that Harriet is the real fencer in the family. She trains, she competes, and she’s serious. I have no interest in competing and am happy to be the fencing support, bearer, photographer, and occasional armorer. But, when I found out Tim, her instructor from Presidio Fencing, also teaches theatrical fencing, I was intrigued.

I will also admit that I’ve seen shows put on by the Saber Guild, a light saber combat troupe that performs for charity events in Southern California, and I’m very interested in doing something similar.

And so, several months ago I finally started taking lessons with Tim. I love it. And I’m surprised by how much improvisation can occur when performing theatrical combat. Choreography can also be part of the performance, but I was pleasantly surprised at the spontaneity that’s possible. It warms my improviser’s heart.

By lucky coincidence, Tim was contacted by the Santa Barbara International Film Festival about a fundraising event they had planned. To support several of their programs, they planned to show the 1920’s silent film “The Mark of Zorro” starring Douglas Fairbanks, and afterwards host a masquerade at the Santa Barbara Historical Museum. They asked if Tim could put on some sort of fencing performance as entertainment.

Let’s see, does Tim know someone who’d be willing to get in front of a large crowd and ham-up some sort of fencing performance? Oh yeah!

We originally planned that Tim and I would perform, but he had a conflict. So, we enlisted our friend Nick, who is a fencer and experienced at historic combat recreations (pictures from his Korean War event are amazing). He’s young, good looking, and by far the better fencer – so he was the obvious hero of our piece. I’m older, balding, and thug-like in my technique, so I’m the obvious bad guy. We practiced over several weeks, breaking one of his sabers, drawing blood (Nick’s), and developed blisters.

On August 25th we did our performances and they were quite the success! It was a lot of fun and well received. The YouTube videos from the movie and the masquerade are linked, below. My yammering at the beginning of the masquerade show was to give time for the staff to clear a space in the middle of the audience. You should also notice that we had to maneuver in such a way that we wouldn’t snag the light cords hanging overhead. That show was a particular challenge beyond the fencing.

So, in the future I’d love to do more of this. My private lessons are now over, but I’m going to arrange a special workshop with Tim for folks in the improv group. I’ll look for a chance to take other classes and see if I can connect with some sort of performing troupe or maybe put one together myself. We’ll see (as Harriet rolls her eyes).