Rock you like a hurricane

I feel bad that I haven't blogged in a while. Part of it is that my usual internet connection at home has become flakier and I have to perch my computer in a very uncomfortable place (the back of a Volkswagen?) to get signal, which is amenable to checking other people's blogs, but not really updating my own. Also, worky worky, etcetera. The panic about needing to have enough juju to sell myself on the job market come next winter is beginning to set in.

You may recall Cricket spent Thanksgiving with my family, which went well. Certainly not the disaster foretold by stage and screen. She found them agreeable and charming, and they were of course smitten with her, and I'd like to think it was due to her qualities beyond being the first girlfriend I've brought home for the holidays, or even the first girlfriend my parents have met.

Being a long-distance type thing, we'd been planning a serious vacation for some time, and being poor but curious we opted for our NAFTA partner, and flew into Cancun on December 15. I had no desire to spend any time in Cancun proper, mostly because (like the Caribbean) it seems it's only worthwhile if you chuck a few thousand at the vacation and stay in one of the inclusive resorts. I've also just had waaay too many drunken all-night parties with topless Spring Breakin' (or snowbirding) hotties hanging on my every word; that scene just gets old, you know? Cricket of course understood this completely, so we rented a car as soon as we got out of the airport and headed south along the Caribbean coast. When she signed the rental agreement it said "manual" and I of course don't drive stick, so she (fatefully) signed up to be the only driver. We of course ended up with an automatic, leaving me the perplexing choice of being perpetual navigator and sleeping while she drove, or being a terrible boyfriend who doesn't want to risk trouble even if it means letting his girlfriend drive 1000 km or so herself.

Fact about Mexico: gas is nationalized and costs the same everywhere! Even in middle-of-nowhere places where you'd totally get gouged in the States. Sure, the attends try to screw you occasionally by starting the meter at a nonzero value, but hey- it keeps you on your toes!

We pulled into Tulum's hotel zone in the late afternoon. Tulum is home to some fancy ruins and really pretty beaches. Everyone who comes to the Yucatan goes to Cancun; of those people, probably half see Chichen Itza, and probably 5% go to Tulum as well, with essentially nobody doing anything else. So already we felt like members of a secret elite. Unlike my boss who recommended the town, we didn't stay in the all-inclusive extravaganza north of town, but in a cute 10-room or so hotel right on the beach. The rates hadn't yet tripled for the Christmas high season, which was nice.

Our room had saltwater faucets and showers, a brand-new mosquito net on the bed, and you could fall asleep with the crashing of waves. While we unloaded our stuff, Cricket pointed out one minor problem:




The view from near our room:



More to come. Novel-lenth blog-posts, so gauche.

worthy loot

The Joy of Cooking.  The new awesome edition.

Luggage, to replace my thirty-year-old duct-taped monstrosity with the Nashville Pussy sticker that gets me so many awesome looks when I travel.

Raymond Chandler: Trouble is my Business, The Simple Art of Murder.

I don't get Cricket's gifts until we have couple-Christmas in a few days in DC.   I can't wait to get loot from her.   Her family is very loot-centric so hopefully the apple won't fall far from the tree.   I'd say what I got her, but if she read this and had the surprise ruined I'd never hear the end of it.  

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.