California is awesome. I'm in Santa Cruz working with Karsten at his place, so work ceased for a while as Karsten taught me about cooking, and then I drank tea, ate pie (with plums his daughter and I got from the tree in the backyard), got a little bottle of fromage blanc and some kraut from one of the mini-farmers-market women. That'll be for snacking on when I watch the World Cup with my brother on Sunday. I may or may not join them to wander around San Fransisco's Chinatown on Saturday depending on timing, whether I rent a car, and so forth. I dunno... rental cars are expensive, and it's not like I don't have things to do here. Or perhaps a bus. I'll have to check my transit options.

There was a basket of biscuits out front, and I got them when they were just out of the oven and hot, so you butter them and the butter immediately melts. Then I went on the swing (which is really a blanket tied to the rafters of the porch next door with rope on both ends, so like a small hammock) and swung while munching on the biscuit, so the hot melted butter was dripping all over my hand. Potato curry with blue, red, pink, orange... all sorts of multicolored potatoes from Karsten's garden, and then I sat on the hay bales outside by the fire pit and played guitar.

Later that night Karsten and I sat up and I braindumped on education stuff. There's so much of it wrapped up in my brain, so much context I've been immersed in over the past month (really, the past 4 months) that it feels good to just get it out to someone, into a form that's understandable in a shorter format (i.e. "does not take 4 months to realize all this"). Still working on it. Today it's his turn, and I get braindumps on TOSW and the TOS Textbook. We're trying to push what we know as publicly as possible, so notes from both braindumps should go out... well, tonight, I hope.

I hadn't realized how much I've learned about education (and how much I am utterly unable to express it - Karsten is helping me work on that) in the past few months, just like I didn't realize how much I'd learned about working in open source communities until I went back to my Olin friends and started explaining and teaching it. I love teaching; it makes you realize what you understand. I need to learn how to be in both cultures fluently, and also to be able
to step back and explain my fluency in each one to the other. Mmm, metacognition.

Today: figure out my Chinese visa, and SLOBs at some point. More edu braindumping with Karsten, and my poor, poor inbox, plus a business plan to Matt Ritter.