Alright, a kinder, gentler log (lighter mood). Lena is home for the holidays, I expect to see pictures of the Australian beach arriving in my email any time now. She was just in time to miss the frigid tempratures all day yesterday. If there had been any precipitation yesterday, it would have definitely come in frozen form. I had a nice day yesterday, despite the cold, and the fact that I spent a chunk of it trying to make progress on a few of my tasks without any visible progress. So I am hoping I made invisible progress :-) I did have lots of time to hang out with friends though. Arsineh (Diaspora log) is here as you know, and I saw her and a bunch of others. I tortured Raffi and Lara's kids for a while at Alexs art exhibit, that was a lot of fun. In the evening I saw "Pirates of the Carribean" at Kino Nairi, which was really much more of a kids movie, and at night it was Fiesta Latina III. That was a fun party that the folks from Latin America have been organizing occasionally since the summer, and looks like it will continue. Everyone loves it, there were easily over a thousand people at Astral (if my crowd counting ability is worth anything - I should have asked the bouncers). It was my first time at Astral, since I am not a big night club person, and I was absolutely amazed at the size of the place. It is in the opera square, and was dug underground. So from above you just see some concrete, but it is so huge, and so massively deep inside that I was impressed. Now of course we all object to these places being built in our parks, but we can't really boycott them. Why? Because since they are being allowed to build in the parks, that is virtually the only place that for example cafes are being built, so there is no alternative. The government recently began to talk tough about preserving green space, and although I don't believe it, we can keep our fingers crossed.