stuff

I'm home for the holidays.   After a flurry of final cat-herding, I got a paper submitted and was able to leave town unencumbered by the usual obsessive thinking about work .    Cricket flew into BWI from Chi-town two Fridays ago; I picked her up, dropped her off at shopping-ville in WorkBurg, finished my workday, grabbed her, and went into the city.

Nam-Viet on Connecticut Ave. in Cleveland Park sucks.   The service sucks, the food is forgettable, even the difficult-to-fuck-up pho, and the people dining near us were douchebags.

There was puttering about the house, and packing.   Her parents gave me much-needed kitchen implements.   They're delighted that I cook, and surprisingly OK with the fact that I don't really have much by way of gear.   I guess the degree has perks.   Does getting presents from an SO's parents mean you are now truly committed?   In the morning we left for Mexico.  

I'll post about Mexico later, when I have pictures to link to. 

Friday I got into LAX and was picked up by high school friend Smith, who was on his way home from his perch in the Santa Cruz mountains.   He's scruffier than usual, and weighted down with the responsibilities of real job (with people under him!) which is difficult for me to wrap my head around.   But he's my oldest friend and seeing him after too long a time is like a cold compress on a fevered brow.

I'm in suburban San Diego now, with the parents.   They keep asking me about Cricket, which is cute and not yet annoying.

I bought all my Christmas presents in Mexico.   They are all nice gifts, but due to the vagaries of haggling and the third-world economy of rural Mexico, there's an order-of-magnitude difference in price between what I gave my Mom and what I gave my Dad.   I'm secretly guilty about this, but also secretly glad that I didn't spend too much money on gifts. 

I'm pondering the awkward mysteries of income right now, too: my friend who I caught up with the other day who is a business-manager type at a bustling youth camp that also does corporate/group team-building stuff, pulls in about $1200 a month net, after a small retirement socking-away.    I pull in more than  twice that, after about the same retirement sock.    But I have a car payment ($300) which he does not.   I have collision/comprehensive car insurance in the District, making my car insurance $950/6 mo to his $250/6 mo.   I pay $1300/mo for a small 1-bedroom apartment in DC, whereas he pays $100/mo for a place on the grounds of the camp where he works.    I have a student loan ($100/mo) which he does not.   And, finally, I have a elephantine credit card debt that I am aggressively paying down, springing from my PhD years and some youthful indiscretion, which he does not.   Neither of us has cable or internet (I steal it) and our cell bills are about the same, and we use about the same amount of gas.    I also have decadent habits like rotgut, book-buying, and a girlfriend, none of which he shares.

The upshot?  He has waaaay more disposable income than me, and certainly waaaay more savings.   It makes me feel glad for him and very sorry for myself.

obsessive archiving

I'm really excited about Gmail+IMAP.   I'm at a cafe with much higher bandwidth than the signal I usually steal from my apartment, downloading my Gmail archive for "offline use."   I've always been slightly perturbed that I don't have my own permanent archive of my e-mail; I don't think Gmail is ever going to vanish, but...you never know.   And it's nice to be somewhere without online access and be able to browse old e-mails. 

Ever since the fall of my junior year of college I've been archiving (mostly) everything.    For a long time this was some Pine, some Outlook POP, some Thunderbird POP, some (other) Pine...but I finally unified everything into three or four fake servers within Thunderbird.   It's a little buggy sometimes (the dreaded 12/13/1969 header fuckups) but it's nice to be able to find everything under the same standard.    And now my Gmail is under that aegis (although I'll still use the web interface 99% of the time).

What's even cooler is that I can contemplate integrating all this old e-mail into my G-mail IMAP server, so that I really can finally say I have everything in one place from 1996 on: work, school, and personal.   My initial attempts at this haven't really worked, though, as Gmail (web) isn't really recognizing that a sent-mail from 1996 put into the IMAP Gmail-sent folder corresponds to being in the Sent Mail label on the web.   It's also not recognizing the old date and putting today's date on it.

Oh well.   It's a step.

i'm not worthy

I simply cannot believe my eyes.  Human flying squirrels.

Grow up

I'm sick of seeing Ron Paul bumper stickers show up in my neighborhood.  I'm sick of people who think because he's different, he's better.   I'm sick of tech-savvy people who think that capital-L libertarianism is a reasonable philosophy.   You all can take your gold standard and your Ayn Rand and your shameful punting on abortion rights and fuck off.

anniversary

As of today I've been at my DC job a year, and in DC for a year-and-two-weeks.  Astounding.

Secret handshake, coming right up

My good friend M just defended her thesis.   I remember her first year in grad school: she and another girl her year came over and watched The Ring with roommate F and myself.   I had met her a few weeks earlier at some new student pub crawl and she immediately blew my mind by offering me a pull of the Glenlivet from her personal flask.   I'm not sure how the movie night was supposed to have worked out, as everyone in the room was single at the time (I think) and Ringu should have had us leaping on top of each other in fear.  

We did become fast friends, especially after I discovered that she was willing to put up with watching Pac-10 basketball in return for me favoring Duke, and she's put up with some pretty mopey moments over the years wherein I whined about Counterfly girls, without yelling at me too much.   She also put up with me damning her first homebrewing efforts with faint praise.   But that's all inside baseball.   At this moment, I couldn't be prouder of her.   Welcome to the club, M. 

My apartment stinks to high heaven of chili oil.   But the meal was so fucking good I don't care.

I'm watching my third ep of House in a row.  

I'm going to Prince/ton next weekend.    What bar should I go to?   The trashy undergrad one, the trashy grad student one, or the trashy townie one?   Or are they all the same bar?

Hard to shower when there's fire

Huge fire in my neighborhood last night: no water pressure this morning, either, due to incompetent city planning.