Recently on the Sk8J forum, there's been a nostalgia thread for people to post old photos of themselves. This prompted me to finally pull out my photo album and shoebox of photos and to start scanning them. Instead of keeping them in the shoebox in my closet, unseen by anyone for years and years, I can put them up in Flickr, or at least have them available to email or display on my computer.

This is one of the photos I scanned for the thread:

It was taken some time in the summer of 1973, making me about 3.5 years old. My parents had gone to see a Red Sox game the night before, and they brought home a couple kiddie batting helmets for me and my older sister Liz. One of my oldest memories is of finding the helmets on the couch that morning. By now it's barely more than an impression, but I do remember being surprised at the helmets and wondering where they'd come from - I don't recall if I'd been told that Mom and Dad had gone to the baseball game, but if I had then I didn't make the connection for some reason (i.e., I was three and a half).

Another one of my oldest memories also dates from that summer, although I don't have a photo to go with it: the day my dad almost drowned. My cousins had an in-ground swimming pool, and we'd go visit them a few times every summer for a cookout and swimming, always a treat. My dad never learned how to swim, and would just wade in the shallow end of the pool. Apparently on this particular visit he stepped into a deeper part of the pool without realizing he was doing so - there was a steeper slope that he hadn't noticed - and fell under, swallowing a lot of water.

What I recall - and I'm not sure how much this is real memory and how much just reconstructed - is that I was out of the pool, eating a hamburger or something, and suddenly there was a lot of fuss and alarm. I really don't have any clear memory of the accident itself or the immediate aftermath. I know that Dad was fished out of the pool and he was taken to the hospital in an ambulance, although I don't remember any of that either. What I do remember is being back at home and asking my mom about what had happened: where was Dad, what was wrong, was he going to be all right, and most importantly why did we have to leave the pool? Obviously I was too uncomprehending to be that upset, but it's only in thinking back on this that I wonder whether this event was partly responsible for my later reluctance to take swimming lessons and in particular to put my face underwater.

I feel that I ought to finish on a cheerier note, so here's an older photo of me, taken the previous autumn:

I do remember the jacket I'm wearing, although again as no more than a vague impression of really liking it - you can't quite tell, but the design on the upper left is from Winnie-the-Pooh, though I can't recall whether it's Pooh, Piglet or Tigger. The house in the background is the neighbor's, our house is behind and to the left of me. We'd actually just moved in to the house that August, either right before or right after my younger sister was born. I believe my older sister remembers the trailer home that my family first lived in, but for me that's the yard of the only childhood home I ever had.

I've been on vacation in New Hampshire all week, visiting my family for Christmas. It's been pretty good so far; my flights home went smoothly and were early, I've had a good time with my family, I've been hanging out with Doug and have also managed to get up to Maine to visit Jay (parkbenchzine) for an afternoon, and hopefully I'll be heading up to the Hanover area tomorrow to visit my high school friend Jeff, whom I haven't seen since I moved. There's still never enough time to do everything, but I'm pretty happy with what I've got.

Apparently I've adjusted a lot to the Seattle area, because driving up to Maine reminded me that East Coast drivers are fucking insane assholes. The slow drivers are going 70, everyone gets up real close behind you before passing, and they're a lot more aggressive about cutting in and out between cars. It was strange to find myself being regularly passed, rather than being the one generally passing others. I had one guy come along who wasn't going a lot faster than I was, but the idiot waited until I moved to pass a tractor-trailer and then jumped right behind me and put on his headlights to signal me to get out of his way. Once I did pass the truck and got back into that lane, the jerk took his time passing me. Then I ended up passing him because he'd gotten into a slower lane, and when I moved to the far left again to pass another van, the jerk got behind me again with his lights on. That time I just slowed down and matched the speed of the car I had been going to pass and stayed there a couple minutes, until the jerk cut back two or three lanes and passed us on the right and then kept going at a faster speed, cutting his way forward, so I didn't have to deal with him again. I'll have to remember to not complain about Seattle drivers for a while - oh, a week or so - because for all that their passive, over-cautious, slow driving can be irritating, it's not so bad after all.

I'm supposed to be flying home on Sunday (which happens to be my birthday as well as New Year's Eve), but I'm scheduled to go through Denver, which has been getting buried with snow, so I'm not sure what's going to happen with that. Hopefully I can get a good answer tomorrow about whether my flight's still happening. Although I am enjoying my time here, I really do want to get back home to Seattle.

Yesterday was the anniversary of my closing date, when I officially purchased my condo. I didn't actually move in for another week, but as far as anniversaries go, that's no matter. I had a party to celebrate; the response was good, though unfortunately fewer people than I'd hoped were able to make it. I borrowed TonyD's speakers to use with my Mini, and that's really brought home to me how inadequate the Mini's built-in speaker is. I'm going to have to get some proper speakers soon, though it seems like I suddenly have quite a list of inessentials that I'm keen to get, and Christmas expenses are coming up.

Speaking of buying things, I bought a couple lemons and a couple small limes for the party, thinking people might want those for their drinks. Then I didn't remember to tell anyone or put them out. So, now I have a couple lemons and limes; what can I do with them before they go bad on me?

Nimiel was a lot more skittish than usual for the party. It may have been partly due to having her nails trimmed earlier that afternoon, which makes her a little sulky; it probably had more to do with the Dowlers' daughter attending the party, though she was as afraid of the cat as the cat was of her. Still, it was after the Dowlers had left that Nimiel stepped up onto Elizabeth's lap, but then hissed at her and John's attempts to pet her, finally making a not-playful jump and bite at Elizabeth's hand. I felt rather bad about that, it makes me feel I haven't done a good job of socializing her and teaching her how to play nicely, and of course I don't want my friends to be unable to approach her. I'm not sure what I can or should do about that.

My other friend John asked what I liked the most about having the condo, and what had surprised me about the condo after living here a month (or something to that effect). I'm really happy to have my own laundry machines, a dishwasher, and a garbage disposal; of those things, I believe the luxury of being able to do laundry any time and not have to leave my place was the most surprisingly enjoyable thing. But then, I intended to have those things with any condo I bought (I'd damn well have installed a garbage disposal if it hadn't had one, I never liked throwing food waste in the trash), so I don't feel like those are the most representative things for this condo.

I think what I like most about this condo is the layout, in particular the large open living space. I like that the living room's large enough to have two couches comfortably, with room to spare to use both of them in bed mode if need be. I like having the kitchen area open to the living room, so I can be doing stuff there without being cut off from guests. And I like that I can have all that and still have a separate bedroom to myself, making it easier for me to stay up later than guests sleeping over. As for what surprised me the most after I'd been living here for a bit, I think it's how much I like the location. I enjoy being able to walk to Fremont a lot more than I'd expected, and although I miss the ease of walking to Broadway on Capitol Hill or walking downtown, I've still found the area very walkable with a lot of interesting stuff nearby, and I'm not too far from downtown or Capitol Hill either. Thinking about this recently after getting yet another postcard promoting a new condo development on Capitol Hill, I decided that while I'd be happy to move back to the Hill if I found just the right place, I'm definitely happy where I am now and will gladly stay here for a long time.

It's felt like a weekend of staying at home and not doing anything. Friday night I went grocery shopping and went home; yesterday I had a haircut, went clothes shopping, took a walk, and went home; today I did household chores. I didn't see any friends (except the hairstylist, who I almost never see elsewhere), I didn't go out for the evening, I didn't do anything special. And yet I had a fairly full weekend.

Certainly Friday night if I'd really wanted to I could've gone to see Telefon Tel Aviv at Neumos, or Mission of Burma and 50 Ft. Wave at the Crocodile, as I mentioned in my previous post. However, I just didn't feel like bothering with trying to rush home through traffic in order to make dinner before rushing out to one of the clubs. Instead, I waited for traffic to subside, then went to the grocery store on the way home, and once at home I was so disinterested in making dinner that I ended up just having Lipton chicken noodle soup with some frozen vegetables added. So I think that set the overall mood for the weekend.

Yesterday I took the bus downtown to get my hair cut; my last haircut was four months ago, so I really needed it, and it felt good to take care of that. Then I went to Macy's to look for some new pullover long-sleeve shirts. Last weekend I'd stopped in The Gap and Old Navy to look for shirts, and I hadn't liked a single thing I saw at either store. This wasn't the first time in the past year or two that I'd had the same reaction, either. The Gap looked like it'd taken all its clothes from Urban Outfitters, another store that just isn't my style, and that made its difference to Old Navy even less than usual. Maybe I'm just aging out of their demographics? Meanwhile, Macy's had sent me a 15% discount card for purchases made with my Macy's card this month, so I figured I might as well take a look there. They had more stuff I liked - Kenneth Cole in particular - but that's outside my price range, and also generally looked a little too stylish for my everyday wear at work. However, I did manage to find some shirts I liked at a decent price, and bought a few. The discount ended up not applying because "everyday value" items were excluded, but they were still relatively cheap, and I can afford to pay off the Macy's card over a few months, particularly since buying clothes is practically a once-a-year event. I've found that I'm inordinately pleased about the new shirts, which tells me that I've been more tired of wearing the same old ones than I'd realized.

After the haircut and clothes shopping, I decided to walk home as the weather's still fairly nice. I walked up the waterfront through the Myrtle Edwards/Elliott Bay Parks, which I've done before, but then I continued to follow the bike path around the Terminal 91 industrial area to Smith Cove, the southeastern tip of Magnolia. It turned out that it's a long walk around Terminal 91, which is not particularly attractive nor interesting. Smith Cove's a nice little waterfront park with a good view of downtown, but not worth visiting on foot; and there's nowhere to go from there, as the road dead-ends at the private Elliott Bay Marina. (You might actually be able to walk down the street past the Marina and then continue on the shoreline, but that's something to investigate another time.) So I made my way back around the west side of Terminal 91 to the north, where I was able to pick up a regular Magnolia side street and get to the Dravus Street bridge to head home. It was a good "short" walk, only three hours, though once again, I found myself wishing I had a bicycle.

Today I had to clean the catbox and my bathroom, which I always do together. I also finally got around to fixing my leaking sink, which in the end turned out to be as simple as getting a new O-ring to seal the pipe properly. I also finally bothered to change the light bulb in the overhead light/fan fixture. It felt really good to get those small things taken care of. I do have a new problem, which is that there doesn't seem to be any way to slide the ceramic pedestal back underneath the sink - the underside of the sink has a downward curve, matched by the top of the pedestal, but it's such a tight fit that I can't get the raised corners of the pedestal underneath the lowest part of the sink. I might be able to do it if I have someone to help pull up on the sink, although I'm afraid of damaging things by trying to force the pedestal back underneath. Maybe I can sand down the bottom of the pedestal... Anyhow, cleaning, fixing, and organizing things always makes me feel good, so I'm ending the weekend feeling pretty good about it.

So, what about my Christmas vacation, when I wasn't falling sick? It was pretty good, actually.

I've just realized that I didn't write about last Christmas (2004) at all. (I'm just going to call it "last year" even though it was 2004.) Because I had recently started paying for braces, I ended up deciding not to go home to my parents'. That was my first Christmas away from home, ever, and I ended up feeling depressed about it. I didn't actually spend it sitting at home alone (well, alone with my new cat), as I went with the Dowlers to one of their friends' for dinner; that was nice and I'm glad I was invited. Still, it just wasn't the same as the noisy LaRose family Christmas that I'm used to, and I really missed that.

So this year I decided I wasn't going to miss that again, even though I'm arguably worse off with about the same amount of credit card debt outstanding and a condo to pay for as well. Because I didn't buy my airplane tickets until Thanksgiving weekend, I spent a lot more than I wanted to. I'd already decided I couldn't afford a rental car, and I knew the transit strike in NYC was likely to happen, so I was also anticipating travel hassles; that plus the expensive flight made me grumbly before I left and second-guess whether I should be going. But I'm very glad I made the decision to go, because I really enjoyed myself.

The transit strike and jet lag meant that I didn't do much in NYC before Christmas, but it was good to visit with Andrea and Jen (my younger sister and her girlfriend) and see their new place. I wanted to check out the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Company, but we didn't have a chance to go by there until after Christmas, at which time we determined it seemed to be closed for school vacation. (It fronts for 826NYC, a nonprofit organization for teaching writing skills to students. Rather annoyingly they don't simply list any kind of store hours anywhere on the site as far as we could tell; we had to piece together that it was closed for vacation from how the latest news was written.)

Up in Boston, I got to have some of my favorite pizza in the world, sausage pizza at the original Pizzeria Regina in the North End. I was arguably more disappointed the last time I was home for Christmas two years ago by missing out on that than I was by being miserable and sick all that week, so I was particularly pleased that it worked out this time. I also had pizza at Bob's in Nashua, my favorite local place, and that was good too. Ah how I miss good sausage pizza! It's just not the same out here.

My plans to hang out with my friends mostly worked out. Unfortunately, I managed to pass on the cold I'd picked up from Andrea to my friend Doug, so that he was sick on Christmas and wasn't able to come hang out with Scott and his family that night. I did have a good short visit with Scott and Lissa and Scott's parents and aunt, though it would've been nice to have some more time. Fortunately Doug was recovered enough on Monday evening to come over for a family game and little birthday celebration for me; and we also hung out on Friday and Saturday evenings, so I got to spend some good time with him. There was good family time too, mainly Christmas day itself, a family game of dominoes on Monday afternoon, and family breakfast on Tuesday before Andrea and I returned to NYC (driven by my younger brother bandtechiegeek, who stayed overnight).

Back in NYC, Andrea, Jeremy and I had dinner at a hipster place in hipster central, Williamsburg, Brooklyn. We didn't see any famous Williamsburg residents like John and John of TMBG, but I swear the attractive hipster at the next table (with the birthday party group) kept checking our table out. The next day after Jeremy left, we walked across the Brooklyn Bridge to meet a few of Andrea's friends for a dim sum lunch - and now that I've been I can say I have tried it and it's just not something I care for. Then Andrea and I went to the Museum of Modern Art for their Pixar exhibit, which was cool.

I had hoped to meet some of my VHive (ex-Delphi) forum friends for drinks while in NYC, but there was minimal response the first week when I talked about meeting after Christmas, and no response that Wednesday. I felt snubbed, but it was a very busy time for everyone, and I know at least one other person's party plans were being turned down on account of general tiredness, so I figure I shouldn't take it personally. Anyhow it's probably for the best, as spending the last evening quietly at my sister's place, reading a book (All Tomorrow's Parties by William Gibson) and repacking my luggage, was a good thing to do. Still, I realized that since my sister moved to NYC, I haven't spent an evening out on the town in Manhattan, and I'd like to do that.

That's about it for the trip. As I mentioned in the previous entry, my flight home took much longer than it was supposed to - first there was a delay leaving because of the weather, then a passenger with diabetes fell ill and we landed in Minneapolis to let him off, and it took about two hours to get back in the air - so I got home very tired, which may have contributed to my illness over the weekend. I also didn't get to see all the friends I would've liked to; I really need a trip with more time, and a rental car so I have the freedom to travel around to my friends' scattered homes. Overall though it was a very good Christmas holiday.

It turned out that parkbenchzine was on the right track about my car after all. The appraiser determined that the body work required to completely repair the car was more expensive than the car was actually worth. My mechanic, on the other hand, determined that what the car actually needed was a replacement marker light, removal of the plastic in front that's occasionally grazing my tire, and sealing the hole in the trunk; and that work could be done for around $500. So with the settlement the insurance company's offering if I keep the car, I should end up with a net gain of around $2,000. That will be quite helpful, either in reducing my credit card debt, or as reserve funds to cover a month's mortgage payments, just in case. Most likely I'll put it toward the larger credit card debt, as otherwise I'm unlikely to make any real progress there. The car will still look beat-up, but I can live with that; after all the money I've already dumped into repairing the car in the past year, I would really hate to toss it before I've even managed to pay off those repairs, just because of the body work. I've been expecting to drive this car into the ground anyhow, I just didn't expect someone to help drive it there.

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I spent most of my evenings last week, when I wasn't having distracted guys in Porsches careen into the side of my car, boxing and moving the bulk of my non-furniture stuff. That made a big difference on Saturday, when it was time to move the furniture, though as it turned out it might've been better to have some of those boxes around to fill out the truck and reduce the risk of things sliding and falling. Still, with the help of five friends, the move went very smoothly; particularly helpful was my friend Amy's work to pack up the kitchen stuff - food, dinnerware, and appliances - into boxes, which would've taken me much longer if I'd done it on my own afterward, as I had thought I would.

The Sunday after I closed was when I brought the first few belongings over to the condo, as an afterthought to going over there with the vacuum to clean. This past Sunday, after having moved almost all the rest of my stuff the day before, I went to the old apartment to clean and also picked up the few remaining belongings. Because I'd forgotten a screwdriver, I actually still had to go back Monday night to remove the child safety gate that I'd installed to keep Nimiel out from under the kitchen sink; and because it'll take two weeks or so for my DSL to be set up and transferred to my condo, I've left the modem and wireless router set up in the old apartment for the other people to keep using. However, I met the landlord last night for him to inspect the place and to turn over my keys, and he refunded my security deposit. So with the exception of one last trip to pick up my modem and router, and drop off the spare keys, I'm officially moved out and done with the first apartment.

I'm sure I'll occasionally miss living in that area, and I'll miss living so close to my downstairs neighbor and now friend Marie, but all in all I'm quite happy with my new home and not really sad at all to leave. It was a good apartment and I was lucky to get it, but I'm glad to move on.

Last Friday I went to a "bonus" concert, to see my friend Tony Sacco's band Library Science, who played along with Matt Corwine (opening) and Kanda (headlining). I was feeling somewhat mopey and tired again, thinking that I was faced with another whole weekend in the apartment by myself, and I almost didn't go to the show, but fortunately I overcame that. The show was downtown in the "Jewel Box Theater" at Rendezvous.

It was a pretty good show. Matt Corwine was a guy with a laptop doing a continuous mix of electronic dance music. It made me want to go out dancing. Library Science, who play dub-based instrumentals, played a new song, but embarrassingly I failed to pick it out from the rest of the songs. Some of the songs I'm really familiar with by now (though I'm still shaky on the names), the rest tend to blur together. Tony tells me they'll have more new songs at their next show in June, I'd still like to see their sound branch out a little more. Finally, Kanda were new to me - a trio on guitars and bass, with a drum machine, some miscellaneous percussion including a glockenspiel and a toy xylophone, and melodica. Apparently the band is actually a duo - cute Asian girl and nerdy white guy - and the third guy was just a backing musician for the show. Anyhow, their set had some problems with sound and generally things seeming to be not quite together, but they won me over by the end with their very catchy pop. I suspected that they would be better recorded than live, and bought a CD, which I was pleased to discover proved me right. Actually I'm sure they can be just as good live, just this show was somewhat ragged.

The rest of the weekend turned out fairly well. Saturday I slept really late, then went for a walk downtown to pick up a couple tickets for Sarah Vowell's book reading at Elliott Bay Books next Friday (the 29th that is). Though I've been here three years now, this was my first time going to Elliott Bay Books and I was quite impressed, it's very big and cool. That night I went out to dinner with the Saccos - we tried going to the new fancy pizzeria, Via Tribunali, over on Pike, but it had an hour wait so we ended up down Broadway at Charlie's - and that was a very good evening. So, in a much better frame of mind, I was content to spend Sunday basically doing laundry and reading, and also hanging out with TonyD for a while.

I also picked up some garden stones to put into the flowerpot my tree is in, as Nimiel recently took an interest in gardening and has been digging at the soil. The pot was covered with aluminium foil for a week or so, which did keep her from digging, but she kept pawing and biting at the foil instead, and even nibbled off a bit. Now she just goes over and paws at the rocks, but at least that means there won't be soil all over the floor. Next I have to get a bigger pot and transfer the tree - not that that will keep Nimiel away, just that the tree needs that.

This weekend is my board game night for April. Also, I did decide to redo my media center, so it's back to IKEA tomorrow night. Fortunately I don't need much and it's not expensive, because money's been getting pretty tight. Next week, I've got plans to watch The Incredibles with a couple friends (one who hasn't seen it yet), and then Sarah Vowell on Friday. And The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy film opens next weekend. And it's John Harper's birthday mid-week.

A couple Fridays ago, I went to IKEA with a couple friends, to (in my case) get a couple more shelves for my bookshelf. Last Sunday (as I mentioned in the previous post) I spent time rearranging the shelves, but didn't have time to finish properly, and wasn't really happy with the arrangement. Today I pulled all the books down again and rearranged the shelves. I'm happier with it now, but still not quite satisfied. Things aren't quite grouped how I want them, the board games are currently on a high visible shelf when I'd rather have books in that prominent position, and so forth. Books come in all different sizes, and that makes it tricky to maximize the use of space but still group all the books how I want them.

On a whim, I bought a wire rack for holding CDs and DVDs that fits into the shelves, because I thought it was neat and could be useful. One problem is, if I fit it into my existing bookshelves, I lose shelf space that I need for random things like the board games. Another problem is that my CDs and DVDs are all already shelved in my living room. Now, the CD shelves are just about full, but there's still a lot of unused shelf space on the video side. Also, although I don't actually need to keep the CDs in the living room, as the CD player doesn't work anyhow and all the CDs have been loaded into iTunes on my Mac, I still feel like they belong in the "media center" instead of on the bookshelf in my bedroom. So it seems as if I have no use for this media rack, but I don't want to return it, I want to find a use for it.

Trying to figure out what to do with the media rack got me thinking about rearranging the media center entirely. I could buy a new set of shelf sides that the media rack fits into, buy several more media racks and create a media shelf unit, and put that over next to the TV cart. Then the current side shelves of the media center could be moved into my hallway, where I have a corner space that I've wanted to put shelves in for a while. Of course, I really don't have a need for all that much extra shelving right now, I'd just have a lot of empty shelves. But it is very tempting.

On another note, among the books I pulled down and reshelved were three by Edward Tufte, who is a Yale professor of statistics and information/interface design. That reminded me of the most recent woman to contact me through Salon (as I mentioned in this entry). My profile at the time listed Tufte's book Visual Explanations in the "last great book I read" section. Her message had as its subject, "Hey, I have that Edward Tufte book too," and the message's first line was "I love that book." It struck me again how unexpected it was to make a connection with someone because I listed a fairly obscure book in that section. I'm still surprised and disappointed that she ignored both of my replies, but the important thing to hold on to is that she did contact me because of mutual interests. There are others out there.

Well, Easter went well. Yesterday (= Saturday), Pam helped me prepare the chicken cordon bleu. Surprisingly, it took nearly 3 hours to do, and that was with two people and using my neighbor's kitchen so that we wouldn't have to deal with Nimiel getting in the way. Of course, we did prepare 27 of them, but still it was a bit surprising to be reminded how labor-intensive it is, for something fairly simple.

Because we didn't get started until around 5, I didn't go to the Easter Vigil Mass this year, but that was okay. I was just as happy really not to have to sit through the 3-hour service. Instead I went to the 11 AM Mass this morning. I didn't manage to get up early, in fact I skipped breakfast and only just made it in time to get a seat and a lot of people had to stand through Mass. So when I got home at 12:30, I still had to vacuum the apartment, spruce up the bathroom, wash dishes, and wash up a bit and change - and I hadn't eaten yet so I wanted a little breakfast. I had told everyone they could come over any time after 2 PM, and fortunately everyone reliably followed the normal practice of not showing up until at least a half-hour after the time I tell them they can arrive.

Nimiel was a good kitty all day, even though we had a couple toddlers along with the dozen or so noisy adults. My friend Clara brought a new toy mouse for Nimiel, as well as a bag of cat treats, which was very cool of her. Everyone enjoyed the chicken cordon bleu (well, except the vegetarian, who brought a veggie dish that some other people ate as well) and the other dishes, we had birthday cake for Orkgrrrl, and lots of good conversation.

After everyone left, I did all the cleanup, then I thought about eating something but I wasn't really hungry yet, so I caught up on my checkbook as I knew I had to mail payment for a couple bills tomorrow. And then it was after midnight, and I was hungry, but I didn't really want to make anything at that point. But Brandon had made mini corn muffins and there were a couple left, and I thought, well, I can just eat those, I guess. I went to get a drink out of the fridge and saw that I still had a lot of strawberries, which both Brandon and Donna&Chris brought, and I thought well, I should have some strawberries with the muffins. And then I remembered the vanilla ice cream that I'd bought to go with the cake, and thought ooooh, vanilla ice cream AND strawberries AND corn muffins in a bowl! Excellent!

And that's how you end a good holiday.

Oh, almost forgot: Orkgrrrl took some good pictures both of Nimiel and of the chicken, but I think I want to move them off Shutterfly before linking to them.