Credit: NASA/JHU APL/CIW

I've been supporting MESSENGER's third flyby of Mercury last week. I've got a description of how it went in a friends-locked entry. The contact-heavy work schedule has scrambled my circadian rhythm from day to day, so that one of the reasons I'm looking forward to my upcoming vacation is because I'll have the opportunity to resume a consistent sleep schedule. Since I've been subjected to a simulated sort of jet lag practically every day for the past few weeks, I don't expected to be fazed at all by the real thing.

Credit: DP

Last week I gave a HacDC Lightning Talk on Kōdō, the Japanese Way of Incense, in which I'm by no means an expert. But I know a little, enough to give a five-minute overview and demo. When I go to Kyoto later this month I'm going to attend a Kōdō demo by a genuine expert, and next month I'll be making kneaded incense (nerikō) at a Tankokai DC workshop. So in the near future I'll know a lot more. Let me know if you're interested in an informal demo of the wood-chip incense that's heated by charcoal in an ash-filled censer; I'm happy to share it. The Lightning Talks event was a great success, with a stimulating variety of topics and speakers.

Credit: Mackenzie

On Saturday I led the DC LinuxChix contingent of a group outing (along with AWC Maryland and GWU Women in Computer Science) to the National Cryptologic Museum. We tagged along with a docent-led tour and learned quite a bit, though we only scratched the surface of the museum's fascinating collection.

Credit: Mackenzie

On Saturday evening I joined seelevarcuzzo and Mackenzie at the Japan-America Society's Otsukimi, a traditional moon-viewing event held in this case at the National Arboretum. It was great fun, with a bento dinner, sake, haiku composition, some slightly-unseasonal-feeling bon odori dancing, and even a little practice of our Japanese. I brought a borrowed telescope and set it up to have a good look at the moon; we were lucky to have a clear sky with only a few thin clouds occasionally floating artistically in front of the moon. I wish the event had lasted longer, as we missed our chance to wander around the Bonsai & Penjing Museum and it felt like we were just getting started as it was announced that it was time to pack up and leave.

Credit: Indy

On Sunday I went climbing at White Rocks, a spur from the temporarily-closed Sugarloaf Mountain. The weather was fantastic. I attempted Sugar & Spice (a 5.2 on the Yosemite Decimal System) and Lucifer (a 5.10/5.11), summiting neither but enjoying the climbs nonetheless. I'd be tempted to buy my own climbing shoes and harness but I'm a little discouraged that the local climbing gym has discontinued their auto belay system that would have allowed me to practice on my own.

And now to prepare for Tankokai DC's Autumn Chakai this weekend and my upcoming Japan trip that starts next week. Ack! I don't quite feel prepared for either.

If you're in the DC metropolitan area or will be on Sunday, October 11, and interested in experiencing a Japanese tea ceremony, let me know. Chado Urasenke Tankokai Washington DC Association, the local tea ceremony interest group, will be holding a tea ceremony event—our Fall Chakai—that day at the Hillwood Museum and Gardens.

A chakai is a relatively informal kind of tea ceremony gathering where usucha (thin tea) and a small sweet are served. At these chakai that the association holds, guests include association members and non-members, and none of the guests has to know anything about tea ceremony in order to attend. Each of the three sessions lasts around 30-40 minutes. I'm tentatively slated to host one of the sessions for our Fall Chakai, but we haven't yet figured out which one, and I can't guarantee that I'd be hosting the session you attend, though I'll be helping in some capacity with all sessions. I'm happy to answer any more questions or explain in more detail what happens in a chakai.

You're invited to a tea ceremony event hosted by the Chado Urasenke Tankokai Washington DC Association:

Autumn Chakai
Sunday, 12 October 2008 at 1:00 p.m. (lasts about an hour)
Hillwood Museum & Gardens, 4155 Linnean Avenue NW, Washington, DC
If you'd like to come, just let me know—you'll be my guest. (While it's open to the public, space is limited.)

By way of explanation, a chakai is a relatively informal tea ceremony event where guests are served a small sweet and a bowl of matcha. For this event we'll probably have someone explaining what's going on, and guests can choose whether to sit seiza(-ish) on the tatami or to sit on a chair outside the tatami area. I won't be hosting the ceremony per se—my role will be mostly behind the scenes, but we'd get a chance to chat before and after the tea ceremony part. There will probably be at least fifteen to twenty other guests, I'd expect, so while it won't be an intimate tea ceremony experience, you definitely wouldn't have cause for anxiety about not knowing exact points of etiquette, which our guests generally aren't assumed to know anyway. A chakai is a fun, social, educational kind of event that doesn't require a whole afternoon, and you could bring a friend and wander Hillwood's lovely gardens too.

Since this past weekend wasn't terribly exciting, I'll offer a past-due recap of my weekend from several weeks ago, which was quite busy.

That Friday night I attended the charter membership meeting at HacDC, a new "hacker space" in the Columbia Heights neighborhood of DC. I haven't been able to visit the space very often with my busy schedule and distance from it, but it's an exciting effort nonetheless. At last night's organizational meeting, a bunch of new members who weren't present (including me) were approved, which had the weird effect of suddenly meaning that a quorum was no longer present, and so the meeting adjourned. :) I'm just amused by that.

On Saturday morning I attended a taiko workshop held by Nen Daiko. Being totally new not just to taiko but to drums in general, I had some trouble understanding what forces to apply to the drumsticks at what point in striking the drum. Nen Daiko is holding a series of beginner taiko classes on Sunday afternoons in June, but even if I had an accommodating schedule, Fairfax Station is awfully far for me to drive on a regular basis. It's too bad, because they seem like really friendly, fun people, and of course taiko's a blast.

Next was tea ceremony class, just a normal lesson, although it was the last time I got to see one of my classmates before he began his year off to care for his soon-to-be-newborn baby. As a congratulatory gift I made him a chenille-backed baby blanket with a temple festival motif. And I just learned that the baby was born yesterday evening!

From there I joined a group of Japanese-language learners at a noraebang (a predominantly Korean karaoke box) for an evening of singing. The idea is fun, but I recognized very few of the songs in their catalog, which included some Japanese and English-language songs along with many Korean songs. The other people I was with found Japanese songs they knew, whether from anime or from a familiarity with J-pop, I don't know. They also introduced me to the Numa Numa song, bringing to four the number of languages sung in that night. If I go again, I'd want to find a Japanese song that I know will be in the catalog and study it beforehand.

On Sunday I visited a home in Chevy Chase where a Kyoto-based kimono retailer, Sōjuan (双樹庵), had set up a showing. Nearly all of my kimono are secondhand, and even when I've visited Japan I've felt unsure about being able to assess the condition (for used ones), seasonality, and appropriateness for tea ceremony of a given kimono. But when I showed up to this house, I was happy to see a senior fellow tea ceremony student who's a professional kimono dresser open the door. She was like a fairy godmother for this situation! I tried on a number of gorgeous kimono and eventually decided on two: a relatively cheap, washable komon with a contemporary sakura motif; and the pièce de résistance, a light-green silk homongi with an ivy motif. Since their silk kimono were in karinui (仮縫い) form (just basted together), I'll be receiving that second kimono after they tailor it, sometime next month.

Having rung up possibly the highest single charge on my credit card to date, I took the metro over to Artomatic, on the other side of the city, for my second visit this season. There's so much interesting art there that I wouldn't know where to begin writing about it. I could spend hours and hours wandering around there, and I did, but eventually I grew hungry, and since none of the venue's food vendors showed any signs of being open, I wandered around the neighborhood. That's how I learned just how deserted the NoMa neighborhood is on Sundays. It's a ghost town. The few eateries I passed were all closed. So I kept walking, eventually wandering all the way to Chinatown and dining at Zengo before heading home.

My weekend was tea, tea, and more tea.

Tea the First: regular chanoyu class. I practiced a thin-tea ceremony using this shelf. We'll continue using the sunken hearth to heat water for another month or so, when we'll make the seasonal switch to a portable brazier.

Tea the Second: tea at Punitha's place as part of elwing2000's multi-stage bachelorette party, which also included dinner at The Melting Pot and drinks at Cafe Citron. With so many of my friends getting married, buying houses, having kids, and traveling around the world, I feel like the only one with nothing in particular to look forward to. Foreseeing those friendships dying away as the years go on and the friends with new families insulate themselves—not to mention looking back to my party-less wedding and the friends I've lost since then—is frankly depressing. So I'm trying to concentrate on celebrating elwing2000's marriage.

Tea the Third, a Cherry Blossom River Tea along with my parents, my brother's mother-in-law, seelevarcuzzo, Justin, and Eli. It had seemed like a good idea, but in practice, the cruise was overbooked, the service was poor, the view (through sheets of plastic because the air was too chilly for true al fresco dining) blurry, and the diesel fumes nearly sickening. On a different day, it might have been a completely different experience. We did see lots of gorgeous flowers blooming around the National Mall area, though, and we saw "the Castle" and a little of the Hirshhorn.

The Chado Urasenke Tankokai Washington D.C. Association—of which I'm a board member—will be holding a public tea ceremony open house on Sunday, 16 March 2008 from 2:30-4:30 p.m. at the McLean Community Center in McLean, Virginia. If you are curious as to what Japanese tea ceremony is about, please come and enjoy a bowl of tea and sweet with us! If you plan to come, we ask that you please e-mail Aiko to let her know, so we can plan for the appropriate number of attendees.

Today I joined fellow members of the Chado Urasenke Tankokai Washington, DC Association in holding an autumn tea ceremony event (chakai) at a private home in Washington, DC. We had three seatings throughout the day, with around eight guests at each seating.

We typically hold two such events each year, one in the spring and one in the fall. Guests include other Association members and acquaintances, which encompasses a wide circle of people from personal friends to our tea ceremony instructor to the occasional dignitary.

Here are my pictures, many of them behind the scenes, and none of them taken during the tea ceremony itself inside the tea room. I did get to act as a guest during the first seating, but for the most part I helped out in the preparation area and in the foyer, where I directed guests to the waiting area. I can't yet put on a kimono by myself, so I had major help with that beforehand, to the extent that I'm probably a net drain on our volunteer resources. But I try to be appreciative, make myself useful, and soak up logistical wisdom so that I'll be able to help carry on the tradition.

I don't remember whether I've recounted how a chakai goes, but anyway, I'll try to give you an idea what it's like. As a guest, you arrive and sit for a short time with the other guests in a waiting area, where you're served some small non-tea beverage. This time it was a hot kelp infusion; other times it might be apple cider or a cherry blossom petal infusion. You'd then be collectively ushered into the tea room, taking off your shoes just outside of it. (Hopefully you're wearing either tabi or thick white socks, too, for walking on the tea room's tatami floor. Speaking of attire, if you don't happened to have a kimono, you'll be wearing informal but "nice" Western clothing—dress trousers or below-the-knee skirt topped with a dress shirt or blouse and maybe a blazer.) In the tea room you'll be invited to have a look at the alcove containing a calligraphed wall scroll and a seasonal flower arrangement. Once you and the other guests are seated, the host and assistant will greet everyone before bringing in a tray of sweets to be passed around among the guests. Unless you're bid otherwise, you take one sweet and eat it on a small, folded piece of thick white paper that's provided to you. Sometimes treats are served on individual plates instead of together on a tray. If you have any doubt about whether to eat the sweet right away, it's fine to wait: the host or assistant will certainly invite you to do so at the right time. If you have any food allergies, your host will appreciate knowing about that as soon as you accept the invitation to the event; among the more common allergens, chestnuts and sesame seeds come to mind as potential ingredients in traditional Japanese sweets.

Unless you have leg or foot problems, you'll be expected to at least try sitting seiza. You won't be expected to be able to endure it very long, and indeed, you should relax into a more comfortable position when you start to experience pain or numbness. If you're wearing trousers, you can sit cross-legged; regardless, you can try a dignified slouch with your legs to one side or the other.

When you're served your bowl of tea, it's nice to briefly express your appreciation to the host, but if she's already engaged in conversation with another guest, I'd avoid interrupting and just go ahead. Full guest etiquette includes some sentiments expressed to the guest who drank before you (along the lines of "I'm pleased to join you") and the guest who will drink immediately after you (along the lines of "Please excuse me for going before you"), but those lines sound a little awkward in English, and you would not be expected to know that kind of etiquette unless you're studying tea ceremony. Ideally you'll rotate the bowl 180 degrees before you drink so that you're drinking from the "back" of the bowl rather than the "front", and rotate it back when you're finished drinking. The assistant will remove the bowl when you're done. Feel free to ask the host or assistant questions about the tea, sweets, utensils, wall scroll, or flowers. Once all the guests have drunk, the host will finish the tea ceremony, leave, and re-enter one last time with some parting words. And that's it.

I keep meaning to write a general update on stuff I've been up to, but I keep procrastinating. I can no longer complain that the weather's too hot, as it finally cooled back down to seasonal autumnal temperatures. And I can no longer say that DC LinuxChix "just" had its quasi-monthly meeting—indeed I'm overdue to schedule the next one.

I'm not taking a Japanese language class this term, but only because the intermediate one I signed up for was canceled due to low enrollment. :( I do have plenty of study materials of my own, but the discipline and conversation practice of a weekly class would help. Maybe it's time to look for a language-exchange conversation partner.

Tea ceremony lessons are going well. A few weeks ago our class went on an after-class junket to the Glenfiddich Farm Pottery store. The potter has been influenced by Japanese techniques and styles, and some of his pieces are suitable for tea ceremony, like the tea bowl I bought there. Aside from tea bowls, places in a Japanese tea ceremony where you might see ceramic items include the cold-water jar, the flower vase, the wastewater bowl, the sweets tray, the thick tea container, and the incense container.

You may have seen mention of New Horizons in the news recently with regard to results of science observations it made when it was close to Jupiter earlier this year. Mission news that I'm closer to is the maneuver from a few weeks ago where some thrusters were fired to tweak the spacecraft's trajectory toward Pluto. One of these days I'll write a "Day in the Life of a Deep Space Spacecraft Flight Controller" entry to share what it is that I do these days, since many people have expressed curiosity about it. I imagine that'll be a friends-locked LJ post.

As part of my ongoing interest in sewn circuits, I've ordered a set of LilyPad modules that were designed by Leah Buechley as part of an e-textile construction kit. Along with a main board and power supply, I've ordered an accelerometer, vibe board, and tri-color LED module. I don't know exactly what I'm going to make with them, but I will be careful not to wear it around any airports.

I've started using gubb to manage my (shopping, to-do, etc.) lists lately, and so far I'm favorably impressed with the site's features, like retrieving and updating lists via SMS or e-mail, sharing of lists, and all-around intuitive user interface. I recommend it if you're looking for a place to keep your lists.

Tornado Kitty is doing well. A recent veterinary checkup found her weight had decreased to 14 pounds, which is great considering how heavy she was a few years ago. Her teeth and gums aren't so great, though, so she'll be going in for a teeth-cleaning in a couple of days. Here's a picture of her enjoying the sunshine on my deck.

Yesterday I joined some friends for a day at the Maryland Renaissance Festival. I don't remember whether this is the fourth or fifth year I've gone. We watched glass-blowing and some aerial silks performers, ate cookies in a cone, and watched as one of our group dipped her hand in wax for a plaster cast. We took in shows by The Interpreters and The Rogues. I was mesmerized by the blacksmith's forge, as usual, and as I was walking toward it from downwind I noticed there's a distinct smell to it that I've come to like. I bought a mysterious-looking iron key from the forge, and from other artisans I bought a sack of Blood Orange flavored black tea, a packet of frankincense tears, a sturdy belt from Potomac Leather (I'm thinking of sewing a pouch that would snap onto it), and a difficult-to-describe "hair slide" consisting of a leather cord with beads attached at intervals. We didn't spot any stormtroopers or Klingons this time; in fact I don't remember seeing any boldly incongruous costumes yesterday, to my slight disappointment.

This past weekend, I drove up to Philadelphia to enjoy Shofuso's "Day of Relaxation" with Kathy, a friend I met on my trip to Kyoto this past May. The day's events included a tea ceremony, a shiatsu massage, a bento lunch, and general strolling about the house and gardens (and feeding the koi). My pictures are here. The tea ceremony was hosted by Morgan Beard of Urasenke La Salle in the house's intimate tea room. Of particular interest to me was the tea container's setsugekka (snow, moon, and cherry blossoms) motif. Afterwards, our shiatsu massages took place on futons on the floor of the house's largest rooms, open to the breeze from the garden. My massage was great.

After Shofuso, Kathy and I visited the Philadelphia Museum of Art. A special Renoir exhibit was going on, but we took the path of less resistance by wandering around the rest of the museum, mostly the Asian art collection and the European 1500-1850 art collection. I was impressed by the museum's display of room-sized structures; it's one thing to look at a painting on a wall or a sculpture on a pedestal, but it's another to step into a 13th-century French cloister, an Indian temple, or a Ming Dynasty reception hall. They have an entire tea ceremony complex in one of the exhibit halls. One of the most amusing items we saw was this extravagant Qing Dynasty dog cage that prefigures today's market for luxury dog accessories. Kudos to the museum for having a good web site, too, with plenty of information on their collections and a navigation-by-floor-plan page that makes it possible for me to recall just exactly what it was that I saw in such-and-such hall.

On Sunday I drove up to Bethlehem to visit my great-aunt and -uncle. We caught up on family news over lunch, and they showed me around the first-rate retirement community where they live. Among many other reminiscences, Aunt Freda pulled out a travel journal from a trip she took to Japan and Hong Kong in April of 1963. I'm so glad she saved it; it sounds like she had a blast. I showed them pictures from my trip to Kyoto, and they showed me pictures of their wedding decades ago, the building of their A-frame house at Ganoga Lake nearly as long ago, and—more recently—a trip to Provence.

As weekends go, this past one was good preparation for my imminent Kyoto vacation: on Saturday I helped set up for my tea circle's Sunday tea ceremony event, and I dined with a local English/Japanese language club in between.

Here are my pictures from the tea ceremony event, which was held at the lovely Hillwood Museum and Gardens. I served as an all-around helper, doing things like wiping clean the tatami mats beforehand and things like serving the guests their sweets and tea during the three tea ceremony seatings. I'd definitely like to return to the Hillwood sometime to see their dacha and more of their gardens, but it would be hard to beat a day as pleasant and efflorescent as yesterday.