It's Labor Day tomorrow, so do take a moment to realize that we have a weekend and OSHA and worker safety and a 40-hour week and any kind of class mobility because for a couple hundred years a lot of very brave people not only worked and protested, but actually fought and starved and were killed, with clubs and pistols and machine guns. We owe our lives to them as much as to the generation that fought World War 2. If you think business should be regulated less, give some meaning to thousands of deaths by carefully considering that when corporations were unregulated, they killed people; not through negligence, but cold-blooded murder of men, women, and children.

I finally had people over for dinner last night! I've been here for two years and almost no one I know has ever seen my house. Most of my friends are still up in San Francisco or Oakland, and I'm usually happy enough to make the drive, but didn't feel like it for yesterday. Also, my friends Laura and Michael have finally come to their senses and returned from DC, and since Michael is working in the South Bay, they're moving to San Mateo. They've discovered much of the cool stuff in their area, and I'm really happy to have some of the crew be a lot closer to me.

I got completely thrashed at aikido today. In honor of my upcoming test for 2nd kyu on Tuesday--at my dojo, a change to a brown belt and a signal that everyone should start throwing me more, and harder--I got worked over. I participated in a friend's randori, which was apparently a lot of fun to watch: he's a few inches and 40-60 muscular pounds bigger than me, and sometimes he neglects to get out of the way of an attack, since for the most part he doesn't really need to (unlike, say, a 120lb person, who just can't absorb a big attack safely). I'm a decent size and pretty centered, so I would charge in, he'd block whatever I was doing to attack with my hands, and then we'd just sort of stop at other, a really interesting phenomenon where you would normally flowing, constant movement.

A couple of weeks ago I ended up getting off the train with my bike at San Carlos, one stop north of Redwood City and an easy ride to my house. I stopped in at a thrift store, and the first thing I see is a copy of Bob On the Ceiling, a 1994 album by the relatively obscure Nields, consisting of my high school theater director and his wife and friends. Sure, they toured around nationwide, but the odds of that album appearing two miles from my house are not good. $2.99, I think, but where's my copy? I haven't seen it recently since I bought it last month, but I rarely listen to CDs directly. Huh.

Going home, I can't find my copy. Where might I have lost it that it ended up in a thrift store? Oh well, I'll consider the thrift store price to be a surcharge. But I'm in luck! It's half off, costing me $1.61.

Finally clearing off my dining room table to use it as a dining room table again...ah, there's my original copy. I'd love to know who gave that copy to the thrift store. Are they from New England? Was that the only album they had? Why did they give it away? (For the most part it's actually pretty good.) Maybe they encountered the Nields later in the timeline and thought they'd check out the early stuff and were disappointed? I understand the migration of people, and that makes sense to me, but the migration of things...so strange, that an artifact of my high school experience should show up down the street from my house..