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Monday, February 10, 2003

Monday night is TV night for me.

At 8 pm, I start with "Veritas, The Quest", the new show on ABC. It's about a group of scientists looking for ancient objects of power. I love stuff like this. It's an action adventure show, so they don't have the time to get too much into detail about the ancient power objects but they do enough where I find the show interesting and fascinating. It's like a modern Indiana Jones, only with a father and son and a group of scientists.

Then at 9 pm, there's "Joe Millionaire". Tonight's show was a teaser, and basically nothing new was revealed. Bummer. I'll have to wait till next week's finale. I can't wait.

Then there's "Miracles", at 10 pm again on ABC. Tonight's show was creepy. They didn't reveal till the end that the woman the main character fell in love with was actually a ghost. I was like, oh my god - the guy was kissing a ghost. God, I love that. I had no idea, and I wish now I had taped the show so I could go back to look for clues. I love "The Sixth Sense" touch. The ghost woman could use the phone and call and leave a message, but I don't think anyone ever saw her except for the main character.

I'm still marveling at tonight's "The Miracles" story line. I wish I could write a story like that.

The Art of Pacific Asia exhibit made me think about finishing a short story I started a few years ago, called "The Blue Haired Buddha on Union Street". When I used to hang out on Union Street, there was a giant blue haired buddha in the window of an asian antique store. I used to always stop by the window, and stare at the statue. I just loved the Buddha's blue hair. I don't know why, but the blue hair was so cool.

I like the blue haired buddha so much, I decided he needed to be in a story so I started writing one, but I never finished it. I knew how the story should end, but I could never figure out how to get from the beginning I wrote to the end I envisioned. Years later, a fun and fantastical way to get from the beginning to the end of my story came to me yesterday in the shower. It will make for a weird story, but I think that's okay because then I'll have finished the story finally after all these years, and sometimes that's the only important thing.
I'm reading this really interesting book called "God Talk: Travels in Spiritual America" by Brad Gooch. A friend in my Wednesday night bible class gave it to me to read, and I'm really enjoying it.

What's fascinating to me is I know about all the alternative religions he's talking about. I know people who are into the Urantia Book and the Aquarian Gospel of Jesus Christ. A good friend is a well known TM teacher in Berkeley, and whose boyfriend was meditating in India with Beatles. I know people who are into Gurumayi, Yogananda, Vivikenanda, Ramakrishna, and I know someone who even studied with Fred Lenz.

What's interesting is how many people are searching outside of mainstream christian religion for answers that they're not getting. I did the same, but ended coming back to Christianity because it was my first religion. I did find what these other spiritual seekers were looking for in the religion of my childhood, but I think only be exploring other alternatives and finding out that my childhood religion had all the answers all along. I just didn't know it at the time and needed to leave to find out.
I had the sniffles all day, and I couldn't tell if another cold or flu was coming on or if my allergies were acting up, so after church I came home and slept most of the day. When I sleep, my immune system kicks up and can kill any bug that's invading my system.

I took the bus on Saturday and spent alot of time outdoors, since I was going to three different places and didn't want to deal with the hassle of parking. It was a nice sunny day, although the temperature was in the 60's and it was quite chilly if you weren't in the sunshine. So, either I got too cold and picked up a chill, or being outdoors in the Presidio kicked up my allergies, or I was around too many people who might have been carrying cold germs and didn't know it.

I spent some time on Sunday, installing McAfee Virus Scan 7.0 on my computer. My Norton Anti-Virus software wasn't compatible with windows 2000. I'd also been getting way too many trojans on my computer, so I figured I'd better get a win2000 compatible virus software program right away and since McAfee was on sale at Costco for about $20 with a rebate, I bought it.

Right before I installed McAfee, Norton said I had another trojan virus on computer. I typed the virus name on the web, and I found out I had a variant of a worm virus called YAHA. It's a nasty little trojan virus that somehow attaches itself to your virus software. I tried to delete it, but every time I rebooted my system the YAHA worm virus would reinstall itself. The YAHA virus creates a directory on your system that says \microsoft\tcpsvs32, and had a program in there called die.exe. I ended up hacking into my registry and deleting the Norton virus line in my startup. Once I did that, I was able to delete and directory and the worm. What a pain!

When I installed McAfee and ran the virus scan, the program additionally picked up nine infected files with the virus trojan. So scary. The McAfee virus scan included a Firewall program, so I installed it as well. Hopefully, the new programs will keep trojans away. I got rid of the preview pane in my mail program too.

I don't know how I picked up the trojan either, but most likely it was from an email with an exe file or scr file attached to it.

Saturday, February 08, 2003

The Arts of Pacific Asia was a well heeled event, with exhibitors showing museum quality pieces. I saw a beautiful gold Buddha from Kashmir from the 9th/10th century CE for $120,000. The I saw chinese Han dynasty vases from 200 BCE, but there was no price. There was also an exibitor from New York who had some great Mughal Empire paintings, which I think are so beautiful, selling for $3,000 and up.

You could also purchse Meiji era Japanese prints, a favorite of mine, from a UK exhibitor for $1,100 and up. There were chinese snuff bottles galore, as well as those strange tiny chinese shoes going for $400 and up. There were also beautiful clothing and rugs, as well as ceramics, furniture and jewelry.

I think the most inexpensive thing I saw there, was a small but very pretty century japanese woodblock print from the early 1900's for $65. I was tempted to buy it, just to have something from the event, but settled on a book of Mount Fuji paintings and woodblock prints for $20.

It would so great to have money to collect beautiful art objects. There were several things I saw there that I would love to have, including the $120,000 gold Buddha, which was the best looking Buddha there. I mean it had to be right? It cost enough. I saw a beautiful japanese gold screen with cranes, price not shown, which probably meant it was unbelievably expensive. I would love to own it, but it's huge.

If I had money to spare to buy museum quality art, I'd probably have a big house to display all my art objects, because that's the other thing you need to collect art, the space to display it. There's a couple at church who collect museum quality christian/religous artwork, but they also own a 4-floor Queen Anne house in the Haight where they can display their collection proudly. Lucky people!