There and Back Again

Happy Birthday Dad!

2008-09-04T01:22:00.002-04:00

It's my dad's birthday today. In honor of this momentous occasion, I feel he should be recognized for a few things.
Life skills training, starting at age 6
Where life skills are defined as pool, poker, and fish gutting, among other things. Both my parents still outclass me in all three, but in college I showed up to a hold 'em tournament that I didn't know about until fifteen minutes before it started, lost all my money at the first table, and came back to win. It was the second time I'd played hold 'em, and I was able to buy a new hard drive with the profits.

Transfinite number theory, age 10
It was a master stroke, really. Instill in your daughter a penchant for the truly abstract and mentally vexing, thus ensuring that she's too nerdy to be popular, but too brainy to be a target on the playground. I'm not being sarcastic here; all the popular kids are in drug rehab now. And my birthday present was a DVD on string theory.
All the conversations that started with "Don't tell your mom, but..."
For example, "Don't tell your mom, but I think you should have your own computer." I think I was about 14 or 15, the internet was just becoming interesting, and I was just learning to be dangerous with the system settings on the family machine. This resulted in a G4 desktop that hung out under my desk in high school, went to college, served as a stand in machine for 3 housemates when their machines died, and is in perfect working condition to this day. There are more recent instances but they're protected under a statute of limitations, because my mom also reads this blog.

Predicting my career choice really early.
I think I was about 11 during this exchange, and very skeptical.
"You know, I think you'd really like learning how to program computers. You could learn a language and write applications."
"Learn a new language? That sounds really hard..."
The Burger Recipe
I get begged for this by name regularly. The name is "Your Dad's Burgers."

"You what?"
Every so often, he'll give me a story that's just completely out of left field and generally leaves me speechless.
"I used to hang out with a guy who did reloading, which is where you take empty bullet shells and repack them yourself with gun powder and a payload. This was when I was a teenager, and I used to go watch this guy as he reloaded all his shells. He had everything spread out on a table: the powder and the shells and the lead, and ya know I never thought about it at the time, but the whole time he was doing this he'd be smoking, right over the powder."

So, Happy Birthday Dad! You've done a good job.

Love,
Your daughter

Some people...

2008-08-23T14:27:00.003-04:00

There's nothing like uprooting yourself from your home of 20 years, moving 3000 miles away, and starting a new job to teach you a thing or two about preconceived notions. It has been a little over a year and I'm sure you'll all be shocked and amazed by the revelations I've had since I've moved here.

Some people just don't read.
The guy who sits next to me at work has been riding motorcycles for about ten years, and at one point he asked me if I had read a particular publication on the subject of maintaining a bike. He didn't quite remember the title, but he described the content sufficiently for me to realize that he was talking about the venerable Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. When I gave him the correct title, he was all set to go out and buy it until he realized that it was a book. A novel. With multiple hundreds of pages. And apparently that ruled it out. It was "too long."

I come from a literary household, and I've been spoiled by parents who wholeheartedly support the love of reading in their children. My neighbors also all read prodigiously. My mom was in a book club. And in college, my housemates traded books back and forth so often they were almost a form of currency. The only time before now that I ever encountered anyone who didn't read was when I was in high school and one of the football jocks who loved nothing more than making fun of me caught me reading a short novel and said he had never read something that long in his life. But he was pond scum anyway and I didn't really count his existence as part of the human race.

So to come across a highly successful, master's degree-holding professional who refuses to tackle books... it just doesn't bear thinking about. And yes I'm a snob, and I think less of him because of it.

Some people make it to adulthood without knowing how to use medical tape.
This one is probably just a product of my own childhood love affair with dangerous and punishing sports, but really... how on earth does anyone go through life without ever abusing themselves to the point-

...If I were to be completely honest with myself, I might admit that it is...unusual...to grow up with a father who has both a very strong first aid background and a penchant for creating situations in which he needs to take advantage of it (somewhere we have an unopened VHS of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It was a gift to my dad after a series of these "situations"). And maybe, just maybe, gymnastics isn't a normal childhood sport (although it was in my neighborhood). Critics might further submit that taking up track at the same time as competitive gymnastics might be unhealthy. Whatever.

One of my very good friends just got a scooter, and he recently mentioned that he's having a lot of wrist problems because of the angle of the handle bars. So one day I dropped off a roll of tape at his desk. And he sent me a very nice message thanking me and also confessing that he had no idea how to use this mystical roll of white sticky fabric. I schlepped back over to his desk, wrapped his wrist, showed him some wrist stretches, and marveled at the fact that he had heretofore kept his body in such pristine condition.

Some people write books that are only meant to be read once.
I've spoken before of my bookshelves. The reason they're so full is because I've still got books that I bought ten years ago, and the reason I still keep them is because I still read them from time to time. This is just the way it is with me and books. If it's good enough to read once, it's good enough to read again. And again. And maybe once or twice more for good measure. And then, you know how it is, you remember some point that Heinlein made about why we laugh at pain in Stranger in a Strange Land, but you don't remember what it was and you're pretty sure that the second half of that paragraph is really important, so you keep it on hand to reference from time to time, even though you've grown up a bit since the first time you read it and you realize your former literary hero was actually a rampant chauvinist and homophobe (and then you were in Italy and you had brought along his The Book of Job because, hey, it's Heinlein, and you were so disgusted you left it in the hotel).

This is why I have no problem sinking small fortunes into books. I make them work for their keep.

The point is that I read a lot of fiction, and typically it's fiction that is not set in the present. It's just as relevant (or irrelevant, I suppose) now as it was the day it was published. And it will continue to retain a constant level of relevance for the next ten years.

I've begun to tentatively stick a toe into the pool of non-fiction, and I have a really hard time with it. I'm reading things that are barely important now, and in two years will be kindling. One read sucks the book dry of any useful properties, and there's no reason to keep it around beyond that.

...although I secretly suspect that these books, so glutted with the here and now, will be amusingly instructive in about seven years time. I've got The New New Thing keeping company with a few other literary snapshots of the present, and I think I'm going to create a small book time capsule.

I don't know if anyone still reads this, but if you do, I really want to hear about what sort of eye opening experiences you had along these lines.

Ta-da!

2008-07-20T21:18:00.004-04:00

That is my new Ninja. It's a 2005 250cc. According to my coworker who drove it home for me, it was probably crashed at some point, the front blinkers are poor aftermarket jobs, the front fairing was replaced with a substandard imitation, the clutch is fairly soft, and overall he wasn't impressed. The seller said she was the third owner, and it had been a learning bike for all three. I took it for a ride today and the trip odometer has a stiff dial, the suspension seems jangly, and I need to tighten the mirrors a bit more. It needs a good once-over from a qualified mechanic, some routine maintenance and lubrication and the idling speed needs to be adjusted.

ANYWAY...

IlovethisbikeIlovethisbikeIlovethisbikeIlovethisbikeIlovethisbikeIlovethisbikeIlovethisbike

I got it yesterday after months of waiting to take the safety class, then rescheduling the class, then waiting another month, then getting the license, then trying to find the most popular starter bike in the country during the most popular riding season of the year, then finding one, then waiting for the title to be officially transferred to the seller from her roommate, then waiting for the seller to come back from vacation, and NOW IT'S MINE.

I took it out for a ride today. I think I went a grand total of 2 miles and never once made it above 20 mph. It's terrifying. It's like when I learned to drive and thought that speeds over 15 were suicidal. But it's also really fun. Really Fun. One might say, addictive.

That's the whole story, but there is a post script.

When I came back, I flipped on the TV to a program on MTV called "Made", in which teenagers decide they want to acquire some skill completely outside of their experience, such as a drama buff becoming a cheerleader. MTV hires a highly skilled coach, buys a bunch of high end gear, and tapes the 6 week transportation. It's reality TV at its worst (high school students don't have the most endearing personalities), but tonight's episode chronicled a self-proclaimed girly-girl who decided she wanted to get into motocross.

This girl is one of those teenagers that really make you question their contributions to the human race. Task one was riding a bicycle and giving up the car. She didn't even make it out of the parking lot before she'd thrown the chain, at which point she decided the bike was broken, called her mom for a pickup. When her mom got there, she wouldn't help load the bike into the truck. She threw a hissy fit instead.

The next step was to clean off a well used motocross bike, covered in mud. I'm pretty sure she'd never washed a car before. I think she managed to do the whole wash with the hose only, completely forgoing sponge and soap.

A solid hour of whining about doing hair, makeup, and being a spoiled little brat. It taught me that there are people in this world of voting age who:

have never washed a car by hand
refuse to touch mud
feel that sweating is uncouth and base
drive Mercedeses without knowing how to change the oil or possibly even put gas in the tank (unconfirmed. I'm just making guesses now. But she did drive a Mercedes.)

Thank you, Mom and Dad, for making sure I am not one of those people.

The more you know...

2008-06-06T01:07:00.003-04:00

Main Entry:: ¹pil·lion
Pronunciation:: \ˈpil-yən\
Function:: noun
Etymology:: Scottish Gaelic or Irish; Scottish Gaelic pillean, diminutive of peall covering, couch; Irish pillín, diminutive of peall covering, couch
Date:: 1503

1 a: a light saddle for women consisting chiefly of a cushion b: a pad or cushion put on behind a man's saddle chiefly for a woman to ride on 2 chiefly British : a motorcycle or bicycle saddle for a passenger

Main Entry:: ²pillion
Function:: adverb
Date:: 1926

chiefly British : on or as if on a pillion "ride pillion"

That's the whole post, right there. A dictionary definition. Your homework is to learn this word. Use this word. Love this word. Teach this word to other people. Because I am *sick* of being asked what it means when I use it in conversation. It's not a hard word. It's a great word, in fact. It's ever so much more convenient to say "She rode pillion" than "She was the other rider... you know... the seat behind the driver." And yet no one has ever heard it before. It got so bad that I had to look it up to make sure I wasn't just imagining a new term.

So there's the proof. The word exists and I'm going to keep using it. Be warned.

The YouTube Awards, part 2: The Bad

2008-05-25T14:09:00.007-04:00

I have a three day weekend, so I'm posting like crazy because otherwise I'd be cleaning.

A while back, I wrote a post about music videos I liked. I'd been meaning to do something like that again anyway, just because it's fun, and then I was reading Fark this morning and found this thread on bad song lyrics. First of all, you should read the thread. It's got some great examples of truly wretched poetic license, but the best parts are the posts where people explain just how angry they get when they hear some of this drivel.

This time around, the YouTube Awards looks through my music collection for the worst offenders of sub-par wordsmithy (yes, I'm being ironic by making up words), bad music, and bad everything, and links them to videos where ever possible. And last time, commenter Krista went above and beyond by submitting her own collections of YouTube nominations and it was awesome. So you should all do that.

Worst use of woefully incorrect speech pattern found in common parlance: Imogen Heap: Clear the Area

"But your eyes
Tell a whole nother story"

A whole nother? A whole nother? Are you kidding? That offends me on every level. That's right up there with irregardless*. And the sad thing is I really like the song. It's a gorgeous song. It's a beautiful song. It absolutely would not suffer at all if she sang "A whole other" instead. This isn't poetic license, this isn't flow, this is bad English at work. And even the people who transcribe the lyrics are annoyed, because they made the corrections themselves.

The video for this one is bad. The first verse is cut off and it's some guy with a camera at a concert so it sounds like it's being played through a tin can. Sorry.

*Pointless aside: In high school, I had a boyfriend who prided himself on being extremely smart, and most importantly, smarter than me. And then he used irregardless in a sentence one day. I called him on it, and he thought it was correct. And then I laughed at him. We don't speak anymore.

Worst pandering to the audience for undeserved applause: Art Garfunkel: A Heart In New York

Twice a week, I go to tumbling practice. My train starts underground, toils through the downtown stops, and then emerges victorious into the light in the Sunset district, where the first thing to greet my eyes is this. It's a really impressive mural, and I'd love it, except the artist decided to paint in a street sign referencing a nearby street. And it seems like every city mural I see does this. I hate this. There is no reason to put a street sign in this painting. None. And there are plenty of reasons no to. First of all, it's text. The eye is drawn to it, and away from the rest of the piece. Out of this whole painting spanning multiple hundreds of feet, the focal point is the single most boring bit. Also, it's a cheap, unskilled way to introduce context. It's like the artist is afraid that no one will recognize the area, even after all his hard work, so he puts in a street sign just to be sure. In this particular work, there is no danger of that. In a more general sense, if you're hiring a mural painter to do a context specific piece of work and he needs to put a street sign in so that people recognize the area, hire someone else. Because that guy has no business painting city murals.

The video I linked to is a clip from Simon & Garfunkel's Concert in the Park. This was a huge, landmark event. In Central Park. And they had the nerve to play this song, the lyrics of which are as follows:

New york, to that tall skyline I come, flyin in from london to your door
New york, lookin down on central park
Where they say you should not wander after dark

New york, like a scene from all those movies
But youre real enough to me, but theres a heart
A heart that lives in new york

A heart in new york, a rose on the street
I write my song to that city heartbeat
A heart in new york, love in her eye, an open door and a friend for the night

New york, you got money on your mind
And my words wont make a dimes worth a difference, so heres to you new york

There was no reason for this song to even have been written. Everyone writes songs about New York, and everyone has done it better than this. This looks like it belongs on a greeting card or a tombstone. That bolded bit is, predictably, where the audience bursts into applause. Why? Because it's about Central Park. Where the concert is. Where the audience is. It's not a good line. It looks like a filler line, actually. There is nothing in this song that hasn't been said thousands of times before, and if it's the instrumentation you're after, look no further than The Boxer. Same album, same concert, same general idea, but better.

Wikipedia says the blame for this waste of song writing effort belongs squarely at the door of Benny Gallagher and Graham Lyle. Guys, what were you thinking?

Worst "the band has failed me" moment I've ever experienced as a fan: "Metallica": St. Anger

Metallica was the first metal band I was ever into. I was introduced to them when I was about thirteen, and I really loved them. I bought all their albums and I wore out one of their tapes (yes, tape) and then I bought it again on CD. I was all about Metallica in my teen years and so I know a bit of fan trivia that is relevant here.

Firstly, this band was getting steadily better with every album they put out. They got better and better recording engineers and as a consequence they had three albums which encapsulated collections of great songs with amazing recording quality. The sound was heavy but clean and it showcased some pretty decent musicianship. Then something went wrong and the band stopped writing songs. They released an album of covers of other stuff, and then they released an album of a concert they did with the San Francisco symphony which was basically them covering themselves, and then they stopped for a while.

Secondly, this band has issues with bassists. They've had the same vocalist and drummer since the beginning, they swapped out one guitarist (who went on to form Megadeth, so I'm not complaining) and they're on their fourth bassist, who was brought in from Ozzy Osbourne's band after that symphony album.

So, to reiterate, things I used to love about Metallica:

lyrics. They were good. Not poetry quality, but they weren't always singing about women and I appreciated that. There was always a little bit of the Epic Metal writing in their work.
Sound. Like I said, clean. Easy on the ears. I could hear singing. I could pick out separate instruments.
Overall maturity. For a while it really was about the music. Not about putting fake heads on spikes for concerts or putting out albums just so they could say they were the loudest and fastest out there or (ahem) shooting an album in San Quentin prison just so they could look tough.

St. Anger was the first album they put out with the newest bassist, and I didn't buy it. I heard the title track and that was enough for me to give up on the band entirely. The song doesn't really have verses. It has three "choruses" that get repeated at random intervals for no particular reason. Oh, and those three bullet points up there? They're all gone. It sounds like people beating on garbage cans with baseball bats.

This is a band that I listened to nonstop for almost ten years. In that time I never got to see them live, and now I don't even want to. This isn't just bad music, this is flat out betrayal.

Worst unnecessary use of video animation to cover up band member aging: Dream Theater: Forsaken

I was recently asked what it would take for me to consider a guy gorgeous. And it's a pretty simple answer. For a guy to be gorgeous he needs to be generally good looking and at least as intelligent as I am. Looks aren't usually enough for me, but looks and brains are a lethal combination that will prompt me to do phenomenally stupid things like play Magic for 7 hours at a stretch just to watch someone else play and maybe have a chance to oppose him myself.

If we're going on looks alone, the bar gets set higher. I am firmly in the "tall, dark, and handsome" camp. I don't make any racial requirements, but long hair is a must. These traits are exemplified in this Dream Theater video by lead singer James LaBrie. (Sorry, I couldn't find photos). Sadly, this video shot in '92 or '93. Fifteen years later, James LaBrie looks like this, which isn't the same thing at all.

Now, about that Forsaken video. It's entirely animated, and the animation team decided to strip a good 4o or 50 pounds off James and give him a more lean muscled build than I ever saw him possess. What makes it really dumb, however, is that through the whole video, the James LaBrie character never speaks or sings along with the song. He doesn't open his mouth at all, other than to express a Keanu Reeves-esque confusion at life. I submit that there was no reason to make the main character resemble any member of the band. None. If they were looking for a dark, sickly figure, they might has well have modeled it off Trent Reznor, pre steriods.

Worst example of a band taking themselves far too seriously, allowing us to laugh at their expense: Kamelot: The Haunting

Good lord I wonder what this video design session sounded like.

"Our sound isn't goth enough. Our street cred is in danger. What ever shall we do?!"
"Let's shoot it in a church."
"Ooooh. Church. What will we do in a church?"
"Just walk up and down the aisles. That should be good enough."
"Really? Are you sure?"
"Fine, we'll make it blurry."
"What are we wearing?"
"Vinyl bodysuits, duh. This is a goth video, remember? Oh and that female guest vocalist has red hair. Let's put her in red vinyl."
"Oooooh."
"By the way, how long is this song?"
"At least five minutes. You want the singer to just walk up and down a church for five minutes?"
"Hrmm... Let's put a swing in. And four costume changes for the sexay female singer."
"Uhhh..."
"Oh, and lots of face lip-sync closeups. YEAH! "
"That still doesn't get us anywhere near five minutes."
"Your girl is good looking, we'll just shoot her on a white background and she can vamp like an idiot for three of them. No one will ever notice."
"Ok, but the girl is a guest singer. How about some focus on *our* singer?"
"Fine, closeups of him too. But only if he shaves his beard like Paul Jr. from Orange County Choppers."
"But...but... won't he look like a scrawny motorcycle guy singing dumb lyrics in a vinyl body suit in a blurry church?"

Yes. Yes he will. Oh my god.

2008-05-24T19:01:00.004-04:00

I do my housework in heels.

I have my reasons, and they're good ones. I should point out that when I say I do my housework in heels, I do mean just heels. No skirts and blouses and 1950's curled bob. Just heels, PJ bottoms, and a sweatshirt. But, the bottom line is that cleaning time is spent vacuuming in high heels, and I'm a bit disgusted with myself for it.

I don't actually wear high heels often. Never to work, and rarely out on Saturday nights. I'm not conditioned enough. Within two hours my feet are sore and I end up either limping with blisters or carrying my shoes while walking barefoot on the street. (I've decided that a great guy is one who, when I decide to forsake my shoes in favor of stocking feet in the rain, has nothing to say other than a concerned comment about how my pantyhose may not survive the night. I really didn't want to talk about how much my feet hurt. I just wanted to get where we were going.)

I didn't always do this. It all fell apart about two months ago. I sprained my ankle. Badly. There was crying and screaming and hysterics and shock, and then a lot of swelling and funny colors. It's still swollen and still weak and I desperately need to exercise it. So, along with the toe raises and the ice and the stretching and everything else, I've started putzing around the house in heels.

I mentioned this to The Coworker recently, and he immediately wanted pictures. He was envisioning me "all done up in Anne Taylor", Stepford-wife style, and he viewed it as photo-worthy. I explained about the PJs and sweats while at the same time doing an inner victory dance.

The Coworker couldn't have known this, but his comment hearkened back to high school, when I used to dress up in "normal" clothes for Halloween. I'd been worried lately that even with the carpet skates, I was viewed as mainstream and boring. Fortunately, those fears have now been allayed. No normal person in Anne Taylor is seen as a photo op. And these days, normal people probably don't clean their houses in high heels.

It's pronounced "wuddah"

2008-05-18T16:10:00.002-04:00

It was unseasonably hot last week, hitting a high of 95 on Thursday. It is also the beginning of tourist season, and the area right near my office is packed with people all day. The combination of the Ferry Building, the farmer's market, and the ferry port itself create a huge tourist draw all day every day. The Ferry building is also a favorite lunch spot of the people who work in the area, and it has a gelato shop.

Gelato appears to be the primary defense against heat in this city, and this week there have been gelato trips after lunch, gelato imported into meetings, meetings in the Ferry Building by the gelato stand, and so on. It's still a relatively new thing for me. I can remember one gelato shop in the Exton mall which I never went to. I didn't have gelato until I went to Italy last summer, and then I got spoiled on the stuff.

By Thursday, I had had my fill of gelato for the week. It was too rich for that kind of heat. So...

"Hey team, are there any water-ice shops around here?"
"What?"
"Water-ice."
"What?"

There were actually two things going on here. The first is that apparently my accent gets completely out of control when I say "water-ice" and I'm hard to understand if my listeners aren't used to the short-voweled, blue collar sound.

"Oh, wah-ter ice. I heard wuddah ice."

And then, once we got past that hurdle...

"What's water-ice?"

With some difficulty, I refrained from making comments about the uncultured heathens of the west.

"It's sort of like a snow-cone, only softer. Softer than gelato, no cream."

"So it's like sorbet, then?"

"No, softer than that."

"Like a slushie?"

"No, definitely not like a slushie. The flavor is better, you eat it with a spoon, it's a less homogeneous texture..." A lightbulb goes on in my head. "Slush! It's exactly like the slush you get on roadways when it's almost melted but not quite." A sea of polite but confused eyes stares back. I can almost hear the inner monologues. We must humor the crazy woman. She is talking about eating 'slush' off the road. It's the heat. She's lost it. "...except you don't have slush here, so you have no idea what I'm talking about." Ignorant, uncultured heathens.

"It sounds like sorbet. That's not that exciting."

"It's different than sorbet."

"Well it sounds boring."

Ignorant uncultured dirty hippy tree-hugging foodie-wannabe heathen savages....

I've had a few of these East-West culture clashes, and they always leave me wondering if I'm really just crazy. Fortunately, I do have one ally: my PM, who grew up in New Jersey, and who happened to be walking by at the right time.

"PM, do you know what water-ice is?"

"What, Italian ice? Sure."

"Is there any to be had around here?"

"Hmm.... no."

So if you were just waiting for the opportunity to move west and make millions, you've got it right here. Just open a Rita's next to the ferry port on the bay. You'll have no competition from anyone.

Epilogue: The next day was better. I found a real, honest-to-god, cheese steak place behind my office. They use Amaroso rolls and Cheez Whiz.

In defense of the mess

2008-04-10T03:57:00.002-04:00

I'm supposed to be in Vegas right now. I'm not there, and I won't be there in the foreseeable future, and there's a long story behind all of this which is too boring for words, but the point is that I was supposed to fly out tonight and not come back until Saturday and even though that is no longer in the cards, I still have tomorrow and Friday off.

I was also supposed to be taking motorcycle lessons next weekend. See that past tense back there? That insidious 'was', which until about 2pm today was an 'am'? Reader, you are smart and logical, and I have faith that you can see where this is going.

My parents, however, are still arriving a week from Saturday to visit me for a day or two before heading up to Yosemite. So it is, in fact, very good that all my plans for the next few weekends are wrecked and I have some unforeseen time off which will be spent at home cleaning in preparation for the arrival of my parents.

I have a bit of a history with cleaning, the way my dad has a bit of a history with Rubik's cubes and Oscar has a bit of a history with Felix (although my walls are spaghetti-free for the moment. Antipathy is a learned skill).

My room was never clean growing up. It just didn't seem like a useful way to spend my time. There was enough stuff in my room that even when it was clean, it was cluttered, and it never stayed clean anyway. On one particularly memorable occasion, a neighbor complimented me on the sculptural qualities of the clothing spilling out of my bureau. Occasionally, I'd reach the pile stage, in which the surface area of the stuff on the floor exceeded the surface area of the viable walking space. At this point, Words were exchanged.

I'm sure that my mom offered up more than a few arguments in favor of keeping my room clean, but the one that I remember was, "It's impossible to walk in here!" This was an interesting one because it wasn't entirely true. It was only impossible for anyone else to walk in my room. I managed it quite well because I always knew where everything was. Even at three in the morning in the dark, I could navigate quite well among the hazards that my bedroom floor held for the unwary.

(It occurs to me now that I should clarify the difference between messy, which I am, and dirty, which I am not. Mess equals clutter, and dirt equals life forms. There is no mildew in my bathroom and my kitchen is safe to cook in, although there might be a suspect tupperware in the fridge.)

The big difference between living in my parents' house and living in my own place is that I had basically one room back home. It was a constant wreck, but I kept the door closed, and I tried to keep my clutter out of the rest of the house. But now I've been allowed to spread out. I can't just close one door to hide my homemaking flaws, because all the stuff in this apartment belongs to me. It's all my mess.

In terms of severity, it's not at the pile stage. Not event close. Just cluttered. But you know how it is when the parents visit. You want to give them some sort of reassurance that you can take care of yourself at least adequately, if perhaps not as well as they did. So I will spend some of my long weekend with a vacuum and mop as I try to resolve my cleaning initiative with the other problem of living alone:

Strange noises.

Let me just say that I don't do well with the unknown. I give irrational, baseless fears a lot more credence than they really deserve and when it comes right down to it, I am absolutely spineless, especially in the dark. Strange noises at night will have me lying wide awake in bed, terrified of what might be going on just 2 rooms away. And getting up to go check on things is absolutely out of the question because I might find something. No good. I can tell myself all I want that that creak was just the house settling, or the random tapping is the bush being blown against the window, but I don't actually know this for sure because I just don't know the place well enough. And I live on a very quiet street. There isn't any ambient noise, so I hear everything. I've found the solution is, since my rational mind knows nothing is wrong, to put another pillow over my ears so that I stop hearing things and freaking myself out. But I'm pretty sure the only reason that works is because my apartment is cluttered enough that no actual trouble could happen without me knowing about it. It's like stacking cans in front of a door as an early warning alarm system, except that my defenses are *everywhere*. You might avoid crushing a game system or getting your ankles all tangled up in the laundry I was sorting in front of the TV, but that just means you'll stub your toe on the easel or go face first into my magic cards when you miss the step in the library.

In deference to my parents, and to any other guests who might show up, I'll clean this weekend. I'll do it well. Chemicals will be involved. But you best watch your step coming in the front door, because I probably left a shoe or three scattered around as a trap for the unwary.

That word... I do not think it means what you think it means

2008-04-03T00:22:00.003-04:00

A few weekends ago, I got invited to a... get ready for it... tea party. No joke. A friend from work is a member of a gossip blog which was having a gathering for its San Francisco chapter. They decided to have their event at a combined polo shop and tea house near my apartment. J and I had never been and didn't quite know where it was, but fortunately the shop owners had placed a fake life sized horse outside the door. It was a bit of a tip-off.

The party was enjoyable. We were in an enclosed outdoor garden in back with sun umbrellas, tea, wine, and tea sandwiches for a good 4 hours. And I met quite a few interesting people. The vast majority of the attendees were women and I got to talking with one in particular. I never caught her name, so we'll call her SciFi Sally, because she and I share a lot of tastes in books, scifi and fantasy in particular.

Sally was probably 40ish, which encompasses the range from 35 to 55, because I'm a terrible judge of age. She seemed fairly normal, other than her taste in books. She was a professional of some sort, she dressed well, she spoke with eloquence, and she could discuss literature with more than a modicum of intelligence.

It turns out that I have no patience for people who try to impress me without doing some research. Sally made this mistake. We were talking about restaurants. I love going out to eat at high end restaurants. It's not about pretending to be important or rich for a night; it's about the food. There are very few more satisfying ways to end a work week than by going to Boulevard for some braised short ribs and good wine.

I guess this didn't come across to Sally though. Or maybe it was the rock and roll jeans I was wearing. Or maybe she is really just like this all the time and it wasn't about me at all. Her contribution to this conversation was: "Oh yes, I love going to nice restaurants. I love going with my subversive friends and just being subversive in the upscale places." And I gotta say, I had some trouble with this. Her thought process seemed to be along the lines of "Ooooh young person. Must impress the young person with how cool and hip I am."

I'm not averse to being impressed. I love being swept off my feet, and never more than when someone blows me away with how smart they are. Her statement begs the question, "So, when you say you're subversive, what does that mean?" Unfortunately, the answer was, "Oh, we're just there. Just the act of us being there is subversive." Oh really?

(You know how you get to a point in a conversation where you're so disenchanted with what the other person is saying that you start needling them out of sheer boredom? "I gotta say, I'm not really into the subversive thing anymore. I mean, it was cool once, but I've outgrown it. It's a little immature, don't you think?" Sorry Mom, Dad, and Miss Manners.)

That's not subversive.

Getting a good chunk of your coworkers to equip themselves with Carpet Slides? That's subversive.

I was surfing the net on Monday and found this article and video. They amused me. I sent them to a coworker, saying "We need these." I was half kidding. Only half kidding, but there was a definite joke element there. I got back a "HELL YES!!"

Long story short, the video went around the office, and we bought all of Amazon's stock (they had next day delivery, and we needed them RIGHT NOW). And now, we have carpet skates.

I know you're all waiting for a video, but the time line looks like this: Monday -- order carpet skates. Tuesday -- carpet skates arrive. Monday night -- sustain horrible ankle sprain, severely limiting my ability to test the carpet slides. I'm getting better though. Hopefully by next week, I'll have some tricks worked out.

Unfortunately, there were not enough pairs at Amazon to satisfy the needs of the office, and I think one of the guys who couldn't get a pair was jealous. He's started a tally of Carpet Skate WipeOuts. We're up to 4, the most spectacular of which occurred when a Carpet Skate newbie (even newer than the rest of us) decided that for his first jump, he'd try to clear a trash can. I think he was going for 360 degree rotation as well. The resulting crash was amazingly dramatic.

Up until now, you've been thinking, "Yes Hal, this is cool, but this is what software developers do anyway. It's not subversive. It's just sort of dumb and cute." Firstly, I entreat the naysayers to trust me just a little bit. You've seen some of the more dramatic tricks, but you haven't seen the subtleties of movement that these suckers offer. With barely a push off one toe, you can do a casual sideways slide for about 3 feet. Now, you don't just go to meetings, you arrive at meetings, Arthur Fonzarelli style. You are just that cool.

Secondly, y'all don't know about the pocket bikes and the crazy PM with the toolkit.

One of the other teams has a pair of what they call pocket bikes. They are electric motorcycles, probably 1/4 scale, and they're actually ride-able indoors. They don't emit exhaust, as far as I can tell. Occasionally you'll see people zipping up and down aisles on the bikes.

Except that right now, the bikes are both broken. One was working up until a few days ago when someone got all macho with the throttle and broke the handle.

Also, we have this PM, who is, for lack of a better descriptor, an experience. He's very upbeat and happy and likes to get his hands dirty. He looked at the Carpet Skates and looked at the pocket bikes and immediately envisioned a motocross/waterski scenario. Upon hearing that the bikes were out of commission, he immediately vowed to bring in his own toolkit to fix them personally so that we can have carpet skiing competitions.

The lesson to take away here, obviously, is that if you're going to talk to me about being subversive in restaurants, then I want to hear stories about you not only carpet skiing through the dining area, but then subsequently convincing the wait staff that all meals should arrive via carpet skiing waiter.

From Merriam Webster:

subvert (transitive verb): to overturn or overthrow from the foundation

Balance Beams: Composure-shattering floor substitute or convenient unit of measurement?

2008-03-30T18:05:00.002-04:00

It was a big weekend in San Francisco for me. Yesterday I did battle on two fronts simultaneously, and I was victorious in both.

The first was the dreaded San Francisco driving. When it came time to find an apartment, my mom came out for a week and rented a car, and she and I spent a few days driving around all of San Francisco, visiting apartments and buying brooms and mops and a bed, and I very carefully refrained from posting about any of it.

The thing is, driving as a whole didn't go so well that week. Stop signs and traffic lights came out of nowhere. There was a lot to pay attention to, and a lot of new dynamics, such as cable cars and bicycle lanes, that just aren't part of driving in Malvern. San Franciscans also have a terrifying propensity for double parking, often for hours at a time. It took 2 of us paying full attention to everything in order to drive safely. We didn't get into any accidents but it was thrilling nevertheless.

The only reason I'm willing to bring this into the public light now is because it turns out it's not just us. A few months ago, an old housemate (who grew up in the Northeast) was out in SF for a few weeks, and he and his girlfriend and Chris and I spent a day in his Zipcar doing a scenic drive around the city. And it was like house hunting all over again. Stop signs were missed, wrong turns were made, and I'm pretty sure we went down at least one one-way street the wrong way.

All of this had me scared enough that I had no desire to drive in the city whatsoever. I didn't think I'd be able to do it. But Zipcar memberships are free, and oddly enough, I felt slightly more confident about my abilities after reflecting on the housemate driving experience. Because, from my vantage point in the back seat, I'd seen all the stoplights and signs miles away, even though no one else did.

This all brings us to yesterday, when I got invited to a party in Mountain View, which is about 40 - 50 minutes south by car, or 2 hours by public transit. I decided it was time to try out my Zipcar membership and dig up my navigation skills and drive down to the party rather than suffer through the public transit commute.

I am both old fashioned and minimalist when it comes to navigating while driving. I glare with disdain upon GPS navigation systems, and I have a well honed take-it-or-leave-it attitude towards maps if I'm not going more than an hour away. Armed with nothing more than a scrap of written directions, I set out.

(The car review: I was in a Mazda 3 automatic with that fake manual "Tiptronic" transmission, should I desire to shift "manually". Great car, corners beautifully, fast acceleration in automatic mode. However, the driver's seat is low and it did absolutely nothing for my back, and it doesn't have the anti-rollback feature that some automatics do. It started sliding backwards when I started from a stop sign on a steep hill, and then I gunned it and then there was tire screeching, but that only happened once. Also, it's really really quiet. Overall, quite a pleasant little sporty sedan.)

And the trip down was uneventful. After I'd gotten used to driving in general (it's been a while) and driving in SF (didn't take as long as I feared) I made it to the party with only one wrong turn and subsequent phone call to the host. I proclaimed victory over driving and enjoyed the party, until it came time to leave.

One of the other people at this party joked that Zipcar is an especially wonderful thing when visiting the in-laws, because the driver has a deadline by which the car must be returned, on penalty of $50/hr late fees and a membership suspension that could last months. "Oh we're so sorry, but we just can't stay any longer. Our Zipcar reservation is about to end." etc. So I had diligently studied the trip time and set my phone alarm accordingly.

The trip down only took about an hour, door to door, but I gave myself a luxurious 3 hours to make it back because I realized that right near the party location was...an IKEA. With bookshelves.

A short recap of the bookshelf scenario: when I moved out here, I brought all my books along with 2 sets of shelves to hold them all. I didn't have any extra shelf space, but it worked. Then one set of shelves collapsed, and then I went to a used book sale and went nuts and bought 30 books. I was in serious bookshelf debt, and it was getting slowly worse (well I'm not going to let a little thing like lack of storage space stop me from buying books. That would be wrong). Anyway, the problem has been growing since September, and yesterday I figured that as long as I had a car and I was going to be near the IKEA, I should really do something about it.

I knew exactly the shelf unit I wanted before I ever walked in. I'd had my eye on it for months. So many months that since I first glimpsed it, the price has dropped 20 percent. It's real wood, not particle board, and it's dark and masculine and gorgeous (and it looks like this: Markor).

I arrived at IKEA, wandered down to the self service furniture section, pulled the box onto my cart, and headed for the check out. And then I froze. I thought of the books lining the walls of my library. I'd put them in a neat little line against the baseboards when the rebellious shelving unit had collapsed. And then I thought of the box full of books in the library. I'd pulled some of the volumes that don't get read as often off the remaining functional shelves so I'd have room for some new additions. The anxiety steadily mounting, I recalled the books under my TV (which arrived after the big book sale). And when, finally, a vision, unbidden, arose of the pile of books next to my bed, which threatened to dwarf the bedside table*, I was faced with a heart stopping, rictus-of-terror inducing prospect: What is one set of shelves isn't enough?

I stood motionless with indecision for a full 5 minutes, contemplating the possibilities. I wasn't averse to owning more shelves, but buying more shelves was a little different. That was a far more expensive proposition, to say nothing of the dicey-ness of getting both sets of shelves in the car. I wasn't even positive the first would fit. And the more astute readers might have noticed that the unit I'd picked out came in a single 87 lb. box which would have to somehow be transported up a full flight of stairs to get to my apartment. (I'd known this going in. And I'd tried to recruit some grunt help at the last minute, but it didn't happen. I was trying to remember if I'd ever attempted to carry something so heavy. "Hmm... 87 pounds... Balance beams! I used to carry those around the gym, they're about that weight. Oooh, and canoes. Canoes are what, 75 pounds? I can handle those without too many problems. I'm tough, I can do it. RAR!" Yes, girls too can do the macho shithead thing when pressed.) Even the macho shithead in me wasn't at all jazzed about having to do the stair climb twice.

The economist in me wasn't too keen on dropping another 40 or 50 bucks to rent another Zipcar and drive back down to IKEA for another set of shelves if it could be avoided, however. So, figuring there was no real way I'd get these beasts in my car, but willing to try anyway, I grabbed the second set, checked out, and headed for the car.

Amazingly enough, both sets fit without problems. Even more astonishingly, my body lived up to my bravado and I got the stupid things up the stupid stairs and in through the stupid door with minimal issue.

I assembled one set last night and the other this morning. And yes, I needed both. There were only two hiccups in the shelf experience. One is that I haven't had to use a screw driver on real wood in years, and I'd forgotten how much more resistance solid birch offers than particle board. And these shelves have a ridiculous number of screws. At the end of the first set, my whole right arm below the elbow was sore. And now that I've done the second set, I'm worried I'll have blisters on my hands.

The other issue is that I'm missing a shelf. One of the sets was short a piece of wood that would normally form the bottom shelf in one of the shelf compartments. Fortunately, installing those is the last step of the shelves so when the replacement gets here in about a week, it will be easy enough to fix. I won't have to take apart the whole thing to do it.

The whole bookshelf experience gives me cause to reflect on living alone. It's strange, not being able to yell up the stairs for assembly assistance. And I was really concerned that I wouldn't be able to actually get the things in the house and put together without help. But I did nevertheless, and since I can't go out and kill a buffalo barehanded, this will have to stand as my testament to my ability to take care of myself. Be warned: my ego is back.

*My bedside table is cooler than yours. It is a Mongolian chafing dish, I think. I found it in a furniture store while I was solving the problem of the dining room table. It's copper and beautiful and it has gorgeous and ornate handles. So there.

He Never Returned

2008-01-26T03:06:00.000-05:00

I never did the bar thing in college. I couldn't stand them. I didn't like beer and I didn't like trying to have conversations that sounded like shouting matches. And the cigarette smoke. I really REALLY didn't like the smoke.

However, I am no longer in college. I can order non-beer drinks. San Francisco has a smoking ban. And last weekend, my fashion consultant taught me how to get around the volume problem.

I call her the Fashion Consultant because she makes me look good. She owns a consignment shop near my house, and I go in on the weekends and play dress-up, and she gives good advice. So I buy my clothes from her, and occasionally we go out.

Last weekend, we were bored. We were both in our own separate funks and sick of winter and restless. We decided to solve the problem with dinner at a mediterranean grill down the street. And then the Fashion Consultant suggested we go to a bar in the Castro. But not just any bar. A piano bar.

We walked in and it was pretty great. There was a grand piano covered in brass plate metal, with chairs all around it. The pianist was taking requests, and occasionally a spectator would sing. And this was not karaoke bar drunken warbling. This was practiced, well honed beauty.

The thing that sealed it for me though was the song being performed when we arrived. It's a song I hadn't heard in at least 20 years. I don't know who wrote it or who performed it or what the instrumentation was. I do know it's possibly called "MTA" and my dad used to sing me to sleep with it.

I will never be famous

2007-11-10T19:59:00.001-05:00

One of the best compliments I ever got was when I was about 18, in high school. A guy whom I sort of knew from classes was, for reasons I can no longer remember, motivated to say to me, "Someday, you're going to be famous and I'm going to be able to say I knew you." The compliment itself is pretty great, but what made it even more meaningful to me was the fact that it came from a guy who was pretty popular at the time. Because I definitely wasn't. I'm not going to get into specifics here, but I was not interested in earning the adulation of my classmates and made no effort to better my image in their eyes. I have no patience for drug-addled, empty-headed twits so it was unfortunate that they comprised most of my senior class. This guy Jay may or may not have been into weekend chemistry, but he certainly wasn't empty-headed.

So it is with great sadness that I must now make the following announcement. Jay, I'm sorry, but I will never be famous. Ever.

This is not a fear or a prediction. It is a vow.

The back story (yes there's a story, of course there's a story) goes like this. Last week, an outdoor ice skating rink opened right across the street from my office. It's great. It's about 60 degrees outside, which makes it perfect skating weather. I've been spending every possible lunch hour skating since it opened.

Either no one has figured out that it's open, or San Franciscans just don't skate because my blade-footed compatriots have topped out at a grand total of 5. There's nothing quite like having a rink pretty much all to myself to mess around in. It spoils me to no end, and I can't get enough of it.

The pesky downside of all this is that this rink is situated in a small park, next to a bunch of lunch spots and outdoor tables. And wouldn't you know it, my lunch hour coincides with everyone else's lunch hour. My skating time is a floor show for a bunch of tie-strangled yuppies shoveling bad pizza and worse teriyaki into their mouths in a manner reminiscent of a shop-vac attacking a pile of compost.

And they are not alone. Not even close. They are joined by the Dreaded Photo Students.

Let's back up a bit and lay down some small but crucial background information. I don't like being stared at. It makes me really uncomfortable, because for one thing, I never know why it happens. If I notice that I'm attracting undue attention, I'll do the usual inventory of teeth-checking and hair smoothing and clothes-examination and then I'll still have no answers. Of course the only reasonable response on my part is to delve deep into the bowels of the human psyche in a vaguely directed attempt to figure out what mental process would trigger this sort of unabashed ocular vulgarity, and that never leads anywhere good. My understanding of the human condition as it applies to the rest of the population is, at best, one step removed from popular consensus. (in a rare and ultimately doomed attempt to explain my outlook on life to one of my friends, I once said, "It's a real trip, being me." Basically, I meant that fairly often, and we're talking several times a day here, I'll reflect on something I've just said or done and go What the f...? Who DOES this? Like the time I hiked to the top of the really big and really sandy hill on Ocean Beach in my new black velvet trench coat. Or for that matter, the fact that I own a black velvet trench coat with a leopard print lining. What the f...?) Anyway. The point is that I start trying to deconstruct the mental states of random crazy people and that never goes anywhere good. I don't come up with healthy, normal lines of reasoning like, for example, the fact that I might be attractive to at least some of them. Or now, with the short and blue zebra striped hair, a bit distinctive. Oh no. No, I conjure up such searingly sensible hypotheses as...actually, no I don't. I never actually come up with a reason. I just wonder. And it creeps me out.

And now, back to the Dreaded Photo Students, whom, you'll recall, prompted this whole train of thought in the first place. As bad as the staring is, it is sickeningly amplified in conjunction with a telephoto camera lens. Because people with cameras pan. Panning, for those less literate in the intricacies of photography, is a technique employed in the photographing of a moving subject. If part of the frame are moving sufficiently fast, they will blur when captured on film. If you hold the camera still, your subject will blur. And this is no good. You will end up with a beautifully exposed background and a big smudge in the middle. So the alternative is to follow the subject with your camera, and you will get the opposite effect: your background will blur but your subject will be in focus.

Returning from the world of photo theory to real life, this means when I am skating, there are a bunch of very obvious camera lenses following my every move. And, let us not forget that I am a Student Of Art. (Real life was fun, wasn't it? Leave it behind, as you are about to violently catapulted into the World Of Art.) In case you have been negligent in your art theory studies in recent years, the current trend is to attribute a phallic subtext to everything. And not just everything in art. Nonono, absolutely everything. Neckties, the Washington Monument, umbrellas, wine bottles... clearly, clearly, these are artifacts of a misogynistic male-dominated society in which the number one aesthetic priority is to constantly assert the superiority and ubiquitousness of the male apparatus. Now, armed with your new knowledge of the number one guiding principle of product design for the last 300 years, reconsider my experience of being obviously panned by something like twenty very long and sizable camera lenses. Got it? Yeah. It's a real trip being me.

And this is just my experience. Now imagine what it must be like to be, say, Nancy Kerrigan. The camera lenses must number in the thousands. Celebrity is for other people. People who are more equipped to handle thousands of phallic camera lenses.

Shameless Gloating About My Friday Night

2007-10-28T13:22:00.000-04:00

Friday night, a coworker and I went out to see a movie after work. (Elizabeth: The Golden Age. Excellent stuff. I highly recommend it.) And after the movie, despite resolutions made earlier in the day of getting sleep that night, we went to a bar.

This particular coworker grew up in California, went to college at Berkeley, and as far as I know, except for a brief stint in New York, has stayed there since. He knows the area quite well, he's got a list of his favorite haunts a mile long, (and these are good haunts, by the way. Not the local-bowling-alley-that-everyone-knows-about type haunts, but the "go in and blow straight past the hostess and head down a small nondescript hallway to the left to the secret elevator which you take to the r0of to get to the rooftop restaurant with an unparalleled view of the city and by the way it's 68 degrees and there's just enough fog to make everything spectacularly beautiful and to top it all off you got there early enough to get a table and can mercilessly mock everyone who has to stand" type haunts.) and we share some interests. This puts him at the top of my List Of People To Get To Know For The Purposes Of Learning New Things.

I'm not completely without a conscience. First of all, like I said, The Coworker and I are into a lot of the same things. We do legitimately have fun when we hang out. So I'm pretty sure I'm not imposing an undue burden on him. And I've got something he wants. Bargaining chips, as it were. In this case, my desirable assets are my books, movies, music, and the people skills necessary to figure him out enough that I can introduce him to my multimedia paradise in a way that makes sense and will be enjoyable (if you have ever tried to get someone else hooked on Tool, you know how hard this can be).

The end result is that I spend a fair amount of time scheming ways to get him to show me more of the city. Though after Friday, I might just let events run their natural course.

Friday we went to a bar of The Coworker's choosing. And The Coworker has a flair for the dramatic, because all of the places we go involve navigating through secret entrances or back alleys and generally escaping the beaten path. This particular bar involved the requisite back alley in the middle of the financial district with the added bonus of carefully threading our way through a collection of large dumpsters and vehicles scattered all over the road and the sidewalk. So I honestly had no idea where we were headed, which meant that I was totally unprepared for what I saw when we actually arrived.

We turned a corner and I was in Greece. The bar was all lit up with outdoor tables and lights everywhere and full of people. It might even have been on a cobblestone side street, although I think I'm making that up. I've seen many such places in Greece and Italy and France, and never in the States. I couldn't believe it.

The bar is actually an Irish bar with...get ready for it... a confessional. They ripped it out of a church and put it in the bar with a few benches and a small table. It's the best place to sit because it's quite comfortable for 2 people and it isolates you from the rest of the bar, so you can actually hold a conversation and not worry about some idiot wildly gesturing into your drink.

But wait, it gets better.

At this point, it's probably about midnight. We're in the confessional, talking about random stuff, and we start talking about food and cooking and...something. I don't remember what something was. It might have been my cooking or a restaurant I'd been to or something else, but whatever it was, it wasn't as good as Alice Waters, and I said so.

"[something] isn't as good as Alice Waters, but it's passable."

"Alice...who?" And he asked this not as if he hadn't heard, but as if he hadn't quite believed what he'd heard.

"Alice Waters."

"You know who Alice Waters is?"

Yes, I do know who Alice Waters is. She's a very famous chef and restaurant owner who has been getting a lot of press lately. She's all about quality food, fresh and local, and I have read nothing but good things about her. She recently figured prominently in an interesting article in the New York Times, and so she's been on my mind a bit, which is probably why I picked her as my basis of comparison to whatever it was I was talking about about. Good thing I did.

I was running all this through my head, trying to figure out why it might be so important, why The Coworker would also know about Alice Waters, etc. And then it hit me. Her restaurant. Chez Panisse. It's in Berkeley. Where The Coworker currently resides.

Long story short, he's also into food in a big way. We're so going to Chez Panisse.

Will the Man With the Green Aliens Please Stand Up?

2007-10-03T02:02:00.000-04:00

As some of you are aware, I have a prints account on deviantArt. It's a blissful thing. A few years ago I paid a one time fee to start an account. In return, they handle every aspect of selling prints, from printing to shipping to collecting payment. I just sit back and wait for the money to come rolling in.

I've been waiting since 2004 with nothing much to show. I've sold a print here and there, but the profit margins are pretty low, so I haven't earned much. And I haven't actually been paid anything because dA will not mail you a check until you've earned at least $20. Like I said, the profit margins are slim.

Well that all changed today. I got an email saying that my check has been mailed. It turns out someone, or a few someones, bought prints recently, pushing my profits up to a check-mailing level.

This wouldn't be a blog post if that were the end of the story. The point here is that I am a moron. I forgot to update my mailing address when I moved. It didn't even cross my mind. So some CMU kid is going to get my check in his SMC. I have emailed dA so hopefully now that they have the correct address they will resend the check.

P.S. If you happened to be one of the buyers that triggered today's events, first of all, thanks! And secondly, please please please tell me how the print looks when it arrives. The prints that sold most recently are ones that I haven't seen before, so I want to know if they look good. If not, let me know and I'll make it right.

Glee!

2007-09-29T12:46:00.000-04:00

If the library post wasn't enough of a tip off, I have a problem with books. I like them too much. Bookstores make me weak in the knees. All sense is abandoned the moment I enter one. I buy books the way fashion victims buy ugly clothes. I like to think that my books are more meaningful than a polyester bubble skirt, but this is small consolation.

Compounding the problem is the bookshelf dilemma of which I've already spoken. I simply do not have the space to store books.

One might hope that, under the circumstances, I'd take appropriate precautions to avoid exacerbating either situation. And normally it's not hard. I don't live near any book stores. There are a few near work but they're not close enough to pose any real threat. I always forget they exist. Since I've moved here, my main monetary temptation has been not books at all, but the consignment shop that set itself down between my apartment and my bus stop.

However, today it all went wrong. I went to a book sale. And not just any book sale. It was The Big Book Sale, held annually in a gigantic warehouse by Fisherman's Wharf. The posters advertised upwards of 300,000 books to be sold. It was a three day sale and today was the last day, so all the books were less than $1.

The proprietors are smart. They don't mess around with baskets or bags for their patrons. You walk in and deck yourself out with a shopping cart. I suppose there's some sense in that. The warehouse was twice the size of my local grocery store. And the products were cheaper.

Having optimistically foregone even a backpack for transporting these suckers home, I tried to limit myself. I attempted a bit of triage. But the problem is simply that if you shove a book in my hands, almost any book, and ask me if I'd buy it for a dollar, the answer is probably yes. My friend J found this out today as she started shoving books into my arms which I absolutely had to read. She was forgiven for this; they look like good books, and she brought a car and was willing to drive me home.

I learned today that I do some strange things when books are available on the cheap. I've discovered that I am capable of homesick book acquisition syndrome: I buy books because they were in my parents' house. I offer up the following for your consideration:

The New York Times Cook Book - Having been an avid Times reader for quite some time, I am quite confident that the recipes contained herein are wonderful. I'm sure they're full of merit and no doubt will bring me much pleasure should I ever try to execute one. However, I have absolutely no idea what's in this book. I didn't even crack it open before I bought it. It landed in the cart because for as long as I can remember, it has occupied a coveted spot next to The Joy of Cooking in my parents' house. That spot is desirable not for its company but for the fact that it is in the kitchen, ready to be whipped out at a moment's notice if needed. My parents have plenty of cookbooks, and most of them sit pristine in the living room waiting to intimidate less culinarily inclined guests, 2 rooms away. I would suspect a certain quiet smugness on the part of my parents for this except that our neighbors all cook excellently as well (they have a club expressly for this purpose) and while three books of Indian cooking technique might bring terror to the hearts of mere mortals, the members of the Stonehenge Gourmet are not so easily unnerved*.

The New New Thing - This has been consistently lying around our house for the last few years. Or months. Whatever. It was published recently, and I know my dad has been talking about it to other people. I don't remember what my dad says about the book, or to whom he says it, but if it starts that many conversations, it's worth a read. My dad likes to read current writing on various industries of interest to him, such as the news industry or the tech sector. More often than not, our living room coffee tables** are covered with volumes delving into anything from the history of cryptography and code breaking to the study of internet search.

Martha Stewart's Christmas - Let it be noted that this book was published in 1989, well before Ms. Stewart became the embodiment of vilified perfection she is today (though I believe, even then, she was publicly hated and privately envied for her disgustingly perfect homemaking). For quite some time, this book also basked in limelight above the microwave. I think it has been relegated to the dark cabinets in the study with the cookie cutters, but it is reliably reintroduced to the glory of the kitchen every Christmas for The Great Gingerbread Event (which deserves its own post, so look for that closer to the holidays). I was quite excited to find it and I was gaily reliving many past Christmases as I showed J the Gingerbread House To End All Gingerbread Houses with the gold leafed roof. A woman next to me overheard this conversation and promptly started in with the typical Martha comments: "She probably mined the gold herself." etc. Ms. Stewart would be quite disappointed I'm sure, to hear that this woman was unaware that there is, in fact, more than one cook book by Martha Stewart. For though there were no others at the book sale, I know that in our house, the gingerbread undertaking requires not just Martha Stewart's Christmas, but Martha Stewart's Pies & Tarts as well. For whatever reason, the gingerbread formulas in each are different, and over the years my mom has added various footnotes and post-its with to both with invaluable information. So the yearly gingerbread ritual begins with the Retrieval Of The Recipes, followed immediately by the Deciphering Of The Margin Notes, occasionally accompanied by the Scraping Off Of The Old Gingerbread Dough, and finally the Argument About Which Recipe To Use. I think my mom actually has a set favorite, but I can never remember which one it is.

The photos above represent my haul. They also represent $31. So from a monetary perspective, I did more than alright. I just don't know where I'm going to put them.

*I had great hopes and dreams for the end of that sentence, but their realization relied on the presence of another book: The Smart People's Thesaurus. I discovered it hidden away on my bookshelves as I was packing to move. It was a gift to me years ago, and I had foolishly forgotten about it, instead spending many frustrated hours in the following years paging through other less exalted sources of synonyms. Its rediscovery a few months ago led to great rejoicing on my part and a fearsome vow to never let this unparalleled volume go neglected again. Well, now I can't find it. It's here somewhere because I remember packing it, but it must be in hiding to spite me.

**Yes, coffee tableS, plural. And they're all covered in books. Not coffee table books, but meaty, intelligent pieces of writing that will make you smarter for having read them. And that doesn't begin to address the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that cover one wall. I think the ceiling is twenty feet. The shelves aren't quite that high, but they're close. And there are plenty of overstuffed pieces of furniture and a working fireplace. I miss the living room.

Best. Bookcover. Ever

2007-08-28T00:04:00.000-04:00

I have made it a point to do at least one fun and adventurous thing every weekend. These aren't hugely exciting moments, but I'm new here and low level characters can't go around tackling turasks. We have to be content with field mice and rabid bats until we level up a few times.

Saturday's goal was the library. And, as an aside, in my world it is pronounced 'liiiiiiiiiiii-berry!' with all the kid-in-a-candy-store inflection implied in an impending visit to a 6 story monument to Free Books For All! I love libraries.

I had never been to the San Francisco Library, but I was running out of DVDs to watch and until I wise up enough to put the "Books" line item in my monthly budget, the library is much safer than Barnes and Noble. Also, as you may remember, I am already in bookshelf debt, and I'm fast running out of interim storage space on my floor. So I set off in search of free books and obscure art documentaries.

I grew up in a suburb. Our library was three rooms of books over the local police station. I remember going in there every few days and talking to the same librarian every time. Most of my elementary school existence was in the library. It was probably about a mile and a half from our house, and I'd walk down there armed with a backpack to carry the eight or twelve books I'd eventually check out. I went back last winter in anticipation of a 4 day beach New Year's, and my librarian is still there. And she looks exactly the same as she did fifteen years ago. Big glasses, gray hair, and pink sparkle lipstick.

I was completely unprepared for the monolith I arrived at when I got off the subway. The lobby reminded me of the Louvre. After a lengthy library card acquisition process, I headed up to the fourth(!) floor to browse the DVD selection. I've been avoiding Blockbuster and Netflix thus far, and after watching an amazing cuban guitar concert (Nights of Fire, by Benise. Check it out) I decided I was in the mood for some art documentaries. The library coughed up a fascinating Andy Goldsworthy video and a Cirque du Soleil performance.

As I was leaving, I noticed a small alcove just inside the door, filled with books. For Sale. The library was selling books, and like a fool, I bought one. I take comfort in the fact that it was only one. I left the physics book on the shelf, along with a lot of cookbooks and an astonishing assortment of trashy beach novels.

The book that came home with me is a collection of travel essays, a genre of writing that has lately become fascinating to me. And this particular volume has, in addition to great essays, the single best cover photograph I have ever seen. Unfortunately, the photo doesn't do it justice, but nevertheless, I give you I Should Have Stayed Home.

My new arch nemesis: book shelves

2007-08-18T15:05:00.000-04:00

First of all, this is really embarrassing. My arch nemesis is a class of inanimate objects. I've gone from being justifiably feared to being bested by ply wood. It's ignominious.

The book shelf conflict extends back as far as I remember, but it is only recently that the enemy has started actively fighting back.

Book shelves started out as nothing more than a hard problem. In middle school, I started reading a lot. I bought books. Other people bought books for me. And since I enjoy rereading novels, I didn't get rid of any. They started to accumulate. It was a gradual thing, and equally gradually, I started appropriating other sets of shelves in the house, as the ones in my room were inadequate.

Cut to college. I had a new problem, although I didn't realize it for years. My book collection had, up until college, been mostly limited to paperback novels. College text books are generally not paperback sized. Mostly, they're large, hardback beasts weighing multiple pounds. They're massive enough that carrying more than one at a time in a backpack is decidedly unpleasant. And by the end of my fourth year in college, I'd collected a lot of them. In addition, I'd also been slowly building up a respectable showing of art books. Art books showcase the work of particular artists or styles or movements, so they have to be large and full color.

I was justifiably proud of my book case by senior year (pt 1). It was small, but it boasted the texts of not one but two majors. The giantish presences of Dali and Raphael stood in company with the foundations of computer science. It was, in point of fact, a source of great pride.

The enemy must have sensed this, for it struck with calculated vengeance. It could not have picked a more inopportune time: this was the last night of my stay in Pittsburgh. Chris' parents and another housemate and his family had come up for graduation. Having abandoned all hope of eating at a restaurant, the college students were trying to coordinate the culinary efforts of two families in order to get dinner on the table. We did it, and I was relaxing after a good meal when I was prompted to grab something out of my room.

My room was a disaster zone. And for those of you who have seen my bedroom on a regular basis, I must stress that it was a lot worse than you're imagining. My book shelves had, in point of fact, collapsed. The shelving itself had been violently ripped off the legs and the whole unit had fallen forward, vomiting the masters of the Italian Renaissance across the room like so much bad Sri Lankan chicken. Some of the less hardy volumes were being irreparably mangled under the weight of their colossal counterparts.

You'll recall that this was the night before I had to leave, and we had company. The best I could do was to neatly pile the books and forget about it for the summer. When I returned in the fall, I went to Ikea and brought back a new set of shelves which have served me well ever since.

...until Yesterday. I noticed that Something Was Wrong. The books were not vertical, the shelves were far from horizontal, and the sides had come unpegged from everything. At this point, it was fixable. Ikea's famous peg system is fairly forgiving. I started removing the books with the intention of fitting the shelves back together. However, plywood was never meant to be a structural building material. The screws got torqued and ripped it to shreds, rendering the shelves useless.

So now, I must once again admit defeat. And furthermore, I am in the market for new shelves. And this time, they'll be made of real wood.

Oh, the shame

2007-07-22T23:24:00.000-04:00

For the last year or so, I've had an on-and-off online pen-pal. He's exotic and German. I can tell you're all jealous. Well you should be, because of that exotic German business.

I like this international pen-pal thing. I get to learn. I get to learn about Germany, about Europe, about the rest of the world across the pond. I'm learning about the German education system, and how everyone must go through job training before starting work, whether they're a computer scientist or a baker. I'm learning that German college is a real bargain at 500 Euros a semester, but you have to go to a specific type of high school to get in, and if you don't finish your last year, you have to repeat the final three to be eligible for college.

One of the most valuable part of this is getting a sense of what some of the rest of the world thinks of Americans and this country. Granted, my source is a bit too rational, and concedes that while many Germans protest the U.S. and everything it stands for, a lot of these same people leave protests and go home and listen to Eminem and other fine, upstanding pillars of our society. Regardless...

It turns out that we can't keep too many secrets from our German friends. I found out one other disturbing disturbing fact today: Germany knows about Fox News. Our national dirty underwear is a bastion of neo conservative alarmists with only a passing acquaintance with fact and the world knows about it. I'm getting hit with hard questions like, "It's so obviously false. None of this is true. I can't believe anyone would ever believe any of this. They don't, do they?"

It's time to step it up. The world is watching, people.

Find the Humans!

2007-07-07T03:24:00.000-04:00

No great thoughts today... just an AMAZING website that gives you the phone codes you need to get to an actual human being without navigating the automated menus. Here it is!

LiveJournal, You Suck

2007-07-05T03:32:00.000-04:00

A few days ago, completely by accident, I found out that this blog is being syndicated on LiveJournal, and people over there are leaving comments on the syndication. This is great. Pretty much anything can be syndicated through LJ and I know it makes many people's lives easier if they only have to worry about one RSS collection rather than paging through 12 different sites. Fine.

However. There is a problem with LJ's syndication. Only LJ members can leave comments on the syndicated posts. No one can log in anonymously, or with OpenID (which blogger doesn't support anyway). Fine, whatever, I'll create an account and log in so I can post comments. But wait, what's this? UserID meleemistress has been taken?! By whom?

Can you guess?

My userID here, 'meleemistress', was used as the owner of the LJ syndication. So now, I can't create that user because technically I already have it, but I can't log in using that name because it's a syndication account and therefore has no password. I honestly don't care how cool LJ is, or how many features it has. If they can't figure out that, regardless of where it's being printed, I might want control over my own damn content, they need to start over. This is just basic respect for the author of the blog. I know it would be hard to prove that I'm me, and I don't really care. That's their problem.

I sucked it up and made a different LJ account, so here's the pertinent info:

syndicated LJ feed: http://syndicated.livejournal.com/meleemistress/
my new userID: AttackTheGazebo *

I will not be actually posting entries with this account, just comments. So if you see anything under that name, it's me.

*And for those who don't get the reference, or who just want to reread for amusement value, I give you, straight from the annals of gamer legend, Eric and the Gazebo.

The Sofa Saga

2007-07-04T00:09:00.000-04:00

I've lived quite a few places since I started college. I had 3 different incarnations of college housing, as well as 2 places in Sri Lanka, and now I'm here in San Francisco. Every time I move, I have to spend time figuring out all the little intricacies of the new place, or I risk stumbling upon them by accident. The second place in Sri Lanka, for example, possessed the quaint little feature of a water tank on top of the building which had to be filled by pump every night. It also had a toilet that would, if not supervised, run indefinitely. The combination of these two factors caused me to run out of water in the middle of a shower, producing an explosion of profanity and incoherent yelling rivaled only when I stepped on a colony of fire ants a few days later.

Or take my most recent house in Pittsburgh which had cheap caulk around the shower. Fortunately we knew immediately when it had rotted through, because we'd discover a stream of water coming through the kitchen light fixture.

The lease started Sunday, and so far there really haven't been any issues. The space is huge, it was just remodeled, everything is new and in pristine condition. So there really haven't been any issues...except for one: the front door.

If you'll allow me to digress a bit, I'd like to talk about a job I had a few years ago as the chair of a campus production organization. We supplied lighting and sound for on campus concerts, fashion shows, culture nights, and anything else that other student organizations could dream up. As long as we had the time and the man power and no one felt the need to pulverize the potential client with the clue bat, we took the gigs. They were all over campus, and some locations off campus, and they ranged in size from a 1 hour long karaoke night with 1 speaker to a multi day multistage carnival involving all our gear, a good amount of rental gear, and all of the help we could scrape out of the alumni. If we were lucky, the alumni doubled the size of our crew and if we weren't so lucky, things didn't go so well.

As chair, my main job was to talk to potential clients and figure out if and how we could make their events happen. Because we work in so many places, we need to think of a lot of different things to make this all work. We need to make sure that the space has enough power, that we have enough set up and tear down time, that we have crew, that we can get the gear there and back, that we have food for the crew if the event is really long.... etc etc etc. Basically, we need to think of everything, because our clients rarely do. It is our job to know what we need, to figure out what the client needs, and how best to combine the two. Let me say that again. It is our job to figure out what we need to know and we must take direct responsibility for any oversights.

Now, I only held that position for a year, which wasn't really enough time to get good at it. Just when I felt like I was really starting to get the hang of things, it was time to elect the next people. But for all that, the chairs generally do a pretty good job of getting things done. So who the hell let an architect design a house that was so close to the adjacent structure that I now can't get any furniture into my apartment?!

This, folks, has been my discovery, and it is a sobering one. My main door (35 inches wide) opens into a narrow little alleyway (30 inches wide). Any furniture I bring in needs to fit both the alley and the door without turning, because there's no room to rotate anything.

I discovered all of this when the sofa delivery men showed up on Sunday to deliver a sofa, and they couldn't get it into the apartment. So, for now, I have 2 dining room chairs, a dining room table, a coffee table, and a bed. Fortunately, the chairs are fairly comfortable, because otherwise I'd have nowhere to type this.

Architects, this is your job. It is your stated duty to ensure, when designing a structure, that it will be usable by its inhabitants. And it is imperative that you get it right, because once the structure is built, it is not likely to be changed. This is a failure on your part, which is a shame because the rest of the unit is so nice. But for now, it will be nice and empty, until I find something that fits through the door.

(not) Driving in San Francisco

2007-07-02T21:58:00.000-04:00

My first draft of the Inquirer article included a segment regarding the standard Sri Lankan driving practices, which seemed to me to be mostly a motley collection of lawless vagaries committed in the spirit of artificially advancing entropy. The editor rejected that version on the basis of the fact that driving styles are inherently regional, and complaints on the matter make for uninteresting copy. It is therefore with some trepidation that I attempt to tackle the same subject matter a second time, albeit for different reasons.

I have been in San Francisco since Tuesday night. It is now Monday afternoon, and I have resolved never to own a car here. There are the expected differences in automotive piloting tradition, such as a disturbing tendency of the locals to double park anyone, anywhere, anytime, but those can be learned. The reasoning behind this decision comes from a condition that I have never before seen in any city, which is that private transportation is the lowest priority of the the local government.

Inklings of such a state appeared the moment my mom and I started driving. The parking fees, in particular, we felt to be particularly egregious. 25 cents buys 10 minutes on a good day. Various sidewalk colors indicated loading zones, drop off/pick up areas, and others, all of which equal no parking. Of course, this is all still just a system and therefore can be learned with a large investment of small change. My rebellion against the San Francisco driving institution was not cemented until two days ago, when I read an article in the local paper.

Driving discontent is not at all limited to out-of-towners. Not in the least. San Francisco locals are completely fed up with the lack of parking, the meter rates, and the high fines for breaking the rules. And it gets better. Discussions are in the works for meter rates and fees to be raised *again* for the purposes of....wait for it....subsidizing the public transit system here. Now, for all I know, it's the practice of every city to use parking money to support public transportation infrastructure. But here, I definitely get the feeling that drivers are being punished for driving.

The sentiment expressed in this newspaper article regarding subsidized public transit was mostly negative. Those interviewed felt that public transit should be self-sustaining, and if money is a problem, raise the ticket rates. Now that I've found out that a monthly MUNI pass is $45, I can understand the sentiment. That being said, I'm glad MUNI rates are cheap, and I'm glad I'm not driving.

A Divergence

2007-06-18T19:47:00.000-04:00

I swear, I promise, I make an oath that I will write about Europe soon. I am, however, in the middle of moving to San Francisco (I fly out tomorrow) and the blog posts are not high priorities at the moment.

The more immediate news is that finally, after years of trying, I feel like I can really talk shop with my guy friends. Before Wednesday, I hadn't felt that I was particularly weak in the skill of being "one of the guys" but I see now that I was completely misinformed and that certain areas of manhood were closed to me.

Wednesday, it all changed. The catalyst was a rather drastic hair cut resulting in a 14 inch donation to Locks of Love, a funky new hair style, and a morning routine that now requires a hair dryer and 2 styling products.

...It turns out that a lot of my male friends spend some of their morning preening in front of the mirror with wax or gel or some other sinister sculpting product. And now I do too, so we can talk about the benefits of a certain type of wax, or what alcohol-free products will still stand up to the "driving with the window open" test. This is all sorts of fun, and I can't talk to my girlfriends about it, because none of them use the sheer volume of junk required to make my hair look the way I want.

I have returned!

2007-06-18T19:45:00.000-04:00

I flew into Dulles on Saturday night and my dad picked me up from Chris' house Sunday morning. Over the next few posts, I'll recount various elements of the trip, because it was fun and it might even make interesting reading.

In Europe!

2007-06-08T09:43:00.001-04:00

Expect updates here after June 18th.

I'm Back!

2007-05-23T00:45:00.000-04:00

It's been a while, but this blog is back in business. For those just tuning in, I graduated on Sunday (whee!) and I got a job as a software developer in San Francisco. I start July 9th. Before that gets rolling, Chris and I are headed to Europe for about 3 weeks to kick around the U.K., France, and Italy.

We leave Monday, and right now I'm still in Pittsburgh, moving out. So I'm packing. I hate packing. Still. I think the most depressing thing about packing is seeing the bags of garbage and Good Will material and thinking, "Why on earth was I living with all of this stuff?" Most of it could have been trashed six months ago.

Actually, that's a lie. The most depressing part is knowing that I sent a full SUV of stuff home with my parents yesterday and not seeing any real difference in the way the house looks. Some of this can be attributed to the fact that it's a house, four people live here, and two of them aren't moving for another few weeks. Also, I'm not anywhere close to done packing.

And tonight is trash night so I'm trying to get the bulk of the trash dealt with, which means doing with the rest of the packing. It's going to be a long night.

Shopping! Continued

2007-02-08T21:34:00.000-05:00

You may or may not remember that I went on a shopping expedition last fall. There's more to the story.

It turns out that the phrase "40 dollar suit" strikes terror in the hearts of people who are older and wiser than me. I know this, because they read this blog. And because they are my parents, and they have a fairly direct manner when they think I'm making mistake.

If it was just them, I might argue back a bit. I find that the "machine washable" trait of the clothes I bought is priceless and therefore should boost the overall value of my clothes. Armed with this rebuttal, I came home for Thanksgiving, fully intending to be quite satisfied with my decisions.

My mom saw it coming a mile away.

And then she enlisted the neighbors. She fights dirty.

I don't actually know how this all went down. The version I got was that one of our neighbors offered to come on a shopping trip with me to help me pick out additional wardrobe elements. So this is how I found myself, the day before Thanksgiving, in Syms with my mom, my neighbor, and my neighbor's daughter.

In my last post on the subject, I impressed the importance of having a forthright, decisive, honest, and frank shopping companion. It turns out I didn't know the meaning of any of those words. We spent 3 hours in the store. My mother and my neighbor were handing me jackets at an alarming rate. I tried them on right on the sales floor, and I'd be able to wear one for all of 3 seconds before a verdict was reached. Most of the time it was "no."

We found a few suits that met with approval, and then we headed over to the separates section. Of particular note was a bright red wool blazer. I wasn't too certain about it. It had a weird 3 pocket thing going on. I was assured, however, that it fit perfectly and looked fabulous and that I should get it. So I did.

And I didn't get a chance to wear it until today, when I had a job fair. I was going to go with a suit, but I decided the blazer looked better, and it was warmer. After I got assurances from Chris that a blazer was plenty formal for the job fair, I headed out the door.

I won't go into details here, but it was the right decision. I've never had a job fair go as well as today's did. And I credit it at least partially to the red blazer, because everyone else was wearing black suits and I stood out really well.

New Blog

2007-02-07T09:41:00.000-05:00

I have some pretty serious kitchen plans coming up. Serious enough to warrant a new blog. And conveniently enough, there is, in fact, a new blog to handle it. From now on, all food related posts will be at Kitchen War. I'll still keep this one around for the more mundane stuff.

And the winners are...

2007-02-06T00:22:00.000-05:00

For those playing the home game, I ended up making the Pumpkin Mousse for the party. The recipe from Frog is really easy, and it turned out spectacularly. I substituted Buttershots for half of the rum.

I was getting sick of making chocolate, hence the mousse. Chris, however, has not gotten anywhere close to being sick of eating chocolate, so he felt compelled to make the flourless mocha fudge cake. He did it. Yes really. All on his own. We had an icing piping lesson, and then he decorated the cake, pastry bag and all. I think he has more fun in the kitchen than he lets on.

Now he wants a chef's hat. I think he's serious. He said he was willing to sacrifice his hair to wear one.

Baking Fairies

2007-02-04T12:12:00.000-05:00

When I was a freshman in high school, I had a group of friends who mostly liked to do stage crew and take apart computers. But sometimes, when we didn't have a show and computers got boring, they'd bake. And they called themselves the Baking Fairies.

Just so we are all agreed on the image, "fairy" is not the first thing one would think of upon meeting any of this group. Not the second, or the fifth, or the last. So I really don't know where the name came from. But they earned it, in my eyes, with their Bomb Cake.

My freshman year, we had a few bomb threats at our school. Not many, and nowhere near the numbers to which we would climb by my senior year, but a few. This was also pre-9/11 so the bomb threat procedure involved sending out a note to the parents explaining that a threat had been made, but police were fairly certain that there was nothing to worry about. Parents had the choice of keeping their kids home.

This was back in the days when we had snow, as well. And there was one February morning when we all trudged to school looking like lawn gnomes with our snow gear. It was snowing hard by the time I got to school. And I had gotten up at something like 6 am to wait for a bus in the snow and the cold, and it was never on time, and I was probably a little bit grumpy. I think this was before I drank coffee.

When I got to school, I had some time before homeroom, and I found some of the Baking Fairy contingent huddled around some sort of package in the lobby (not all of the Fairy folk were still in school). They were looking triumphant, and when I elbowed my way into the crowd, I was confronted with a chocolate sheet cake. It had bright green icing, and, carefully spelled out in multicolored sprinkles, the word "BOMB" on the top.

Right about then, the assistant principal noticed our small gathering and decided to investigate, so we invited him to cut the cake. Pieces were passed around, we had cake before homeroom, and then there was enough snow that we all got to go home early.

Superbowl Dessert Survey!

2007-01-29T17:24:00.000-05:00

I'm headed to a Superbowl party and I told people I'd bring a dessert. I don't know what to bring. Please send suggestions.

Possibilities include:

Killer Brownies
Carrot cake brownies with buttercream icing
Flourless Mocha Fudge Cake
Pumpkin Mousse (or vanilla sweet potato mousse)
Russian Cream and various toppings
Mesquite Chocolate Chip Cookies

Other suggestions will also be considered. Leave comments!

Living Dangerously: Butternut Squash Soup with Roasted Garlic, Cinnamon, and Coriander

2007-01-24T20:27:00.000-05:00

It's snowing here, finally. In fact, it has been snowing for the past few days. This is great news for me. My bedroom is in the very poorly insulated attic, and the snow helps keep the heat in. Cold weather is usually closely followed by soup, bread, or cookies. Tonight I made soup.

I've included the recipe, because I think it's pretty great stuff. But I feel that recipes are often lacking. They don't include any information about the thought process of the person who developed the recipe. There's no reasoning behind the ingredients or cooking times or anything else. I feel I would be remiss if I didn't include a full account of the development of this recipe. What follows is an exhaustive set of directions, should you feel that the recipe by itself is insufficient.

Go to a used book store. Browse the cooking section, and allow a garlic cookbook to catch your eye. Scan the book and immediately become suspicious when none of the recipes are more than 10 lines long.
Go back to the Garlic Roasted Butternut Squash and Pasta recipe. Decide that the recipe is boring, but the general garlic-and-squash concept has merit. Buy the book.
Arm yourself with the necessary ingredients.
Scoop out the icky bits of the squash. Chase the seeds around the kitchen floor. Briefly consider various uses for squash guts and despair when there's no one around to be victimized.
Cut up the rest of the squash and roast until fork tender. Throw in some unpeeled garlic cloves for good measure.
Unearth the blender.
As you wash years of greasy scuzz off the blender and your hands, mutter obscenities at whoever designed a kitchen without a ventilation system.
Peel the roasted squash. Start asking yourself if you really believe your mother when she told you that it's easier to peel a cooked squash than a raw one. Put the peeled squash in the blender.
Contemplate the fleeting nature of life and the inexorable march of entropy. Use your garlic cinders as a starting point. Extra credit: Recall bits and pieces of sophomore science class, specifically those bits concerning relative densities and heat transfer. Consider that maybe the fragile little garlics don't need to be roasted for quite as long as the squash slabs next time.
Set about salvaging the garlic. It turns out that there are squishy bits in the centers of the cloves. Painstakingly scrape out the soft stuff, and throw it in the blender with the squash.
Painstaking was never your style. Throw the last clove in whole, burnt bits and all. You've never minded burnt garlic before.
Add some olive oil, half and half, and chicken broth.
Blend.
Add more chicken broth.
Taste the soup.
Discover that burnt garlic is not nearly as palatable as you remember. Despair, and continue messing with the chicken broth to get the consistency right. Become somewhat optimistic. Everyone makes mistakes, and you were just about due for one. Decide that you'll do what you can for the soup, but if it doesn't work out, life will go on. Who's really going to care about one bad soup experience 5 years from now, anyway?
Recall the way that, 35 years after the fact, your parents still occasionally bring up "The Ketchup Incident." Plunge into a state of abject terror.
Rifle through your spice collection. Come up with cinnamon and coriander.
Pray.
Wait in quiet panic for your boyfriend to try the soup.
Celebrate a disaster narrowly averted.

The Recipe

2 butternut squashes, cleaned and cut into inch thick rings
5 cloves of garlic, unpeeled
approximately 1/3 cup half and half
approx 1/4 cup olive oil
14 oz low sodium chicken broth
1/2 stick Sri Lankan or Ceylon cinnamon (Do not use the standard American stuff. It's too strong. If you can't find Ceylon cinnamon, ask me or my mom. If you must use American, use extremely sparingly.)
1 tsp coriander

Roast the butternut squash until fork tender. Find someone else's directions on how to do this, because I'm bad at it. Same goes for the garlic. Roast it until... roasted. Peel the squash and garlic and put in a blender with about half of the half and half, the olive oil, and half of the chicken broth. Blend. Grind together the coriander and cinnamon, and add to the soup. Adjust half and half and chicken broth until desired consistency is achieved. Season with salt and pepper. Garnish with croutons.

Party +1

2007-01-21T14:02:00.000-05:00

This weekend marks the end of the first week of the school semester, and our house has a tradition of holding parties to celebrate. I'm just now waking up from last night's fete, and I feel that new ground has been forged.

This year, we decided for many reasons to stray from the typical food and (mostly) drink gathering. We added games. Lots of them. Board games, card games, video games, party games. We gamed for 8 hours. I went to bed at 5 am. And when I woke up this afternoon, I discovered something that my parents, former bridge club members, have probably figured out a long time ago. People playing games don't eat or drink all that much, and they don't make messes. We spent a grand total of 30 minutes cleaning up today, and that's without a dishwasher. And most importantly, I think people had more fun than normal. There will be more of these in the future.

More school

2007-01-16T21:42:00.000-05:00

My posting got a bit sparse over the last month because of winter break. I'm back though, and I found a bunch of things that I meant to post about but never did.

No one really talks about the cultural value of Pittsburgh. Mostly, there just isn't much to talk about, especially if you don't care much for Andy Warhol. People generally don't travel from distant parts to visit the museums here. And I'm not suggesting you should. However, if you're already stuck here for some reason, you should really be getting your money's worth from the local cultural stuff. This goes double for all the CMU students, because most of the good stuff is within walking distance of campus and it's largely free (with your ID).

I'm only bringing this up at all because I found some old photos that I took at the local garden conservatory, back when they had their mythological creatures exhibit. The one you're looking at now is a hydra. They also had a two headed dragon, Argus (with all the eyes), Cerberus, and a few others. The exhibit has changed now, but it was great fun while it lasted. They don't have anything up now, but in May, they're doing a Dale Chihuly exhibit.

Just in, from Fark

2006-12-24T12:38:00.000-05:00

Merry Christmas to all of you. To celebrate, I'm linking you to this year's fark thread of Holiday Traditions. Here are two of my favorites:

"heres a great one that started back in the 60's with my dads side of the family.

nobody likes doing dishes after a big christmas dinner with 25 people, so the way my family decides is by a little game we call "throwing the sock."

after dinner we all draw numbers from a hat for however many people there are over the age of 13 (thats when you are considered part of the grown ups). depending on what number you get thats your place in line to throw. we then start with an empty pot and a pair of socks. no paticular style, just whatever the host has in their sock drawer. the pot is placed on the floor about 15ft from a line on the floor.

starting with number one we take turns throwing the pair of socks at the pot. if you get the socks in the pot you are eliminated from the game and free to go back to drinking and relaxing. heres where it gets interesting...

the last three people left are guaranteed doing the dishes. they then proceed to throw for different tasks. the third place person has to clear the table, the second place has to dry the dishes and you guessed it..first place has to wash.

this whole process usually takes longer to do than it did to eat dinner. and the whole time everyone talks about past "throwing the sock" games and what tasks they have had to do in the past. the year my sister turned 13 she had to wash and pretty much cried the whole time. nobody is sparred. if you are a new bf or gf or a guest of someone you are included in the game. which generally means a guy like me is for sure not gonna make the bottom three...."

And this one:

"

A couple years ago at Christmas dinner, my dad out of the blue says, "well, I've got a new name for my penis."

We all tried to just not make eye contact and keep eating our dinner, to no avail.

He continued.. "I used to call him Gregory - Like Gregory Peck-er. Get it? Get it?"

yes dad, we get it.

"Well, I was watching a movie the other night about the Civil War, and decided his new name is General Cocksworth, Pride of South Carolina."

So now we get a yearly update on the nickname of my dad's junk.

Merry Christmas."

Ooooh burn!

2006-12-23T01:55:00.000-05:00

I'd always thought that Chris and I had gotten pretty good at bickering. We don't have too much experience but clearly we possess a gift for it. However, until I came home I hadn't fully appreciated that bickering occurs on many scales. The most ambitious I've ever gotten involved scribbling a purpose on a few 1 dollar bills. I had no idea what I had to look forward to. We'll start with exhibit A:

I got home a few days ago, stumbled downstairs, and found a rather sizable flatscreen LCD. This was something of a change from the CRT I'd helped install a year or two ago. This had "my dad" written all over it. He wasn't around though, so I sought out my mom for an explanation.

She said that Dad had given it to her as a birthday present. Riiiiiggghhhhhtttt. I'm sure that my mom asked for this. Uh-huh. I dug a bit deeper:

"He gave you a TV?!"
"Well yeah, I brought this up with the neighbors. They said they'd asked your dad about this and he pointed out that I'd gotten him a dishwasher for his birthday."

ZING!

aHA!

2006-12-15T22:40:00.000-05:00

I haven't had this stuff
in years. My mom gave away our last starter. It's really good though. I highly recommend it.

Plague!

2006-12-15T15:08:00.000-05:00

A bunch of out-of-towners were around last weekend. A friend of mine had successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis and was celebrating, and many alumni came in to help out with the fun. I'm good friends with most of the people who showed up and it was great to see them.

But now I'm sick. I've been sick for a week. And I know of 6 other people involved in the festivities who are also diseased, including the guy with the newly minted Ph.D. And we all know there's nothing better than being sick through finals week. Alumni, you are all in big trouble.

Coherency is not my strong suit at the moment, so this will be random.

Dethroner, the amusingly manly blog for men, is running a coffee theme this week with some excellent information on picking equipment and beans, as well as some great brewing tips. They have guest blogger Tonx supplying the cold hard facts, but what really amused me this morning was this entry about diner coffee and its deeper meaning. Great stuff.

I have decided that there is only one cure for being over-studied and chained to the tissue box, and it is Disney movies. They're silly and light hearted, and most importantly, they're short. Usually less than 90 minutes. So you won't feel too guilty about watching one if you've got a final the next day. I can highly recommend Robots after last night. Ignore all the reviews. It's great if you're an adult because you actually get the jokes.

Well what did you think was going to happen?!

2006-12-08T18:24:00.000-05:00

Chris and I went lamp shade shopping today. I was looking for hat material and he was tagging along. We were wandering around Home Depot and not having much luck. This particular Home Depot doesn't stock isolated lamp shades. You have to buy the whole lamp. This is an expensive proposition, but I was looking anyway in the hopes that I would find something useful. Chris was pointing out a few things that might have worked, but finally I called a halt.
"There's nothing here that's going to work."
"What about that one?"
"Eh... Maybe, but it's expensive and I can't try it on."
"...Try it on?! You want to try it on?"
"Well....yes. It's going to be a hat. It needs to balance right and it needs to look the way I want it to look."
"You expected me to come along with you while you tried on lamp shades?"
...etc.

In the "Questionable Timing" Category...

2006-11-24T11:58:00.000-05:00

Many people have been asking where I get my recipes. I have a stack of cookbooks, but I also read quite a few food blogs, and I find myself increasingly pulling from those sources. Now that Thanksgiving is over and no one wants to look at food, here are some of the sites I've found.

The Traveler's Lunchbox
This is the single best food blog I've found. It has great photography, wonderful writing, and excellent recipes. Author Melissa is an expat hobby chef who has no qualms about trying any sort of cuisine.
Recommended Humor: Seven Steps to Perfect Brioche
The very amusing story of Melissa's quest to make brioche, with a wonderful side quest of stalking a KitchenAide stand mixer.
Recommended: Banh Mi
Banh Mi is a type of Vietnamese sandwich. This version is made with glazed pork. Very easy, and much better than cold cuts.

Foodaholic
This one has a lot of things going for it. It's updated every 2 or 3 days, with great photos and recipes that I really want to try. The most interesting thing about it, though, is that it's written by someone who is currently enrolled in Le Cordon Bleu cooking school. Many of her posts cover whatever they did in class that day. The author is training for patisserie, so this is mostly dessert and bread recipes, though every so often she'll throw in a quick post about whatever she had for dinner. Bonus: She's Malaysian, and she has some Malay recipes on her site. I haven't tried anything though.

SlashFood
This site is very handy because it focuses on current events in the food world. If you want a quick overview of current food events, go here. They summarize several newspaper food sections, including the New York Times, and they regularly post interesting tidbits in other food blogs that you might not know about. They're also very regularly updated, with new posts several times each day. I haven't tried any recipes from here, but I'll assume they all know what they're doing, since one of the contributors found time on Thanksgiving to post regular Thanksgiving Dinner updates throughout the day, complete with photos.

Food Network
This isn't a food blog. It's the Food Network's website. It has all the recipes from all the TV shows, as well as some great informational content and demos. Very useful if you want to find many different variations on a single recipe, since multiple chefs will often cover the same content on their shows.
Recommended: Tyler Florence's Alfredo Sauce Extremely simple and easy. Ignore all the junk at the top about home made pasta and scroll down to the bottom of the page for alfredo. As long as you get some decent cheese, it will turn out perfect every time. I add 4-6 cloves of chopped garlic in with the cream, because I like garlic.

101 Cookbooks
I don't read this one regularly, but I should. It takes recipes from cookbooks and tests them, making adjustments as necessary. And we're not talking about your momma's Joy of Cooking either. The author lists all her cookbooks on the right side of the screen, and I haven't heard of most of them.
Recommended: Vanilla Sweet Potato Puree
The infamous Sweet Potatoes from a few posts ago. I made them yesterday for Thanksgiving and they're still good. I also made the spice oil this time. A little bit goes a very long way, so we have a bunch of extra now.

Cooking For Engineers
This is a really good site for people who aren't all that comfortable in the kitchen. It's written by an engineer who didn't know how to cook and was very frustrated by the standard recipe format so he made his own.

Pimp That Snack
This is just silly. People take small snacks and figure out how to make really gigantic ones. Check out this post about making a giant sized Cadbury Creme Egg.

"I'm thankful that we're not those people on Fark"

2006-11-23T12:17:00.002-05:00

I actually said this a few years ago during Thanksgiving grace. Why? Because fark.com had a thread on Thanksgiving Horror Stories. So if your day isn't going quite like it should, just be glad you aren't these people.

Happy Thanksgiving!

The YouTube Awards

2006-11-17T12:02:00.000-05:00

I don't generally go for media accretion sites. I don't have time, and most of the stuff that's on them is pure junk. I don't like sorting through it to find the good stuff. Recently, though, two things happened that have turned me into a YouTube devotee. First, I had to find some painting videos, which meant digging out the Bob Ross. Remember him? I was going for free and accessible, so I tried YouTube. Success! And secondly, I had vague memories of a friend showing me a video of a concert collaboration with two of my favorite musicians.

The vast breadth of the videos on this site means that suddenly, all the hard to find stuff is suddenly completely available. Specifically, music videos. I don't know why, but I've always liked music videos, and at the moment YouTube is my only source for them. Recently, my morning routine has started to include going through my iTunes library and searching the artists on YouTube to see what I find. I've also been digging up old videos of stuff that I never owned, most of which serves my completely irrational love of 80's metal hair bands. And occasionally I find some really incredible stuff that I never knew existed. Do not feel obligated to watch all of these. So without further ado, here are the best of what I've found in the last week or so:

Best Collaboration Between Legends: Bruce Springsteen and Sting: The River
This came from a concert in the 70's I think, so well before Born in the USA hit the streets. I love both artists and I'd never heard of this concert before. This is what turned me on to YouTube in the first place.
Honorable Mention: USA for Africa: We Are The World
Obviously quite important in music history. I used to listen to this growing up, but I never knew just how many artists participated. And now that I can see the video, I'm sort of embarrassed to admit how many of these singers I can name. Also, this is a crucial historical artifact for reminding us that there was a time when MJ was pretty respectable.

Best Hair: The Cult: Fire Woman
You can't see it so much in this clip, but lead singer Ian Astbury's hair is ridiculously long, thick, and shiny. I first saw this video on TV a while ago, in better resolution, and I was instantly jealous. And it's just the kind of bluesy metal that I really really like. And really, the dancing in cowboy boots is just funny. This might be my next music purchase.

Most Gratuitous Use of Music Video Cliches: Monster Magnet: Spacelord
After you watch a few music videos, you start noticing themes. And this one has them all: shots of band lip-syncing and playing along with the song, smoke, blurring, bling (the guy's suit has lights on it!), booty brigade, and pyro. A monument to the lesser moments of music video art. I'm pretty sure it's meant to be self-effacing (not positive, but something about this screams "JOKE!"). I actually like the song, too.

Best Band Sense of Humor: TIE! Paul Simon: You Can Call Me Al and Survivor: The Starbucks Commercial
I suppose the Survivor clip shouldn't really count because it's not a music video. It's a Starbucks commercial. But when I first saw it, I couldn't stop laughing. For some reason, the image of the drum kit being pushed down the street was just too much. And it's a great song, with pretty wonderful lyrics. And Paul Simon... I have lots of respect for anyone who can make a music video that makes fun of their height. The rumor is that Paul Simon is 5'2" and Chevy Chase is 6'4". And it's definitely noticeable in this video. Oh, and no the audio isn't off. Chevy Chase just doesn't know the song well.
Honorable Mention: Dire Straits: Walk of Life
Not much to say, other than we've all had one of those days...

Best Use of Puppets: Genesis: Land of Confusion
Well then... I dare you to find puppets anywhere else that have this much character. Wow. Though the Phil Collins figure bears a striking resemblance to Bill Murray. How many musicians can you recognize at the end? Disturbed covered this song and their video is interesting in it's own way. How many dirty politicians can you recognize? :)

Best Substitution of Body Jewelery for Facial Hair: Disturbed: Stricken
The lead singer, in a moment of sheer (shear) genius, decided to do away with goatees and soul patches and substitute two very thick silver hoops on his chin. I think they're great. And original.

Best Looking Lead Singer: Bon Jovi: Everyday
It's not just that he's gorgeous, it's that he's been gorgeous for as long as I've been alive. The band was formed in 1983. 'nuff said.

Best RedHead: TIE! Loreena McKennitt: Mummer's Dance and Tori Amos: Crucify
Probably the two most listenable songs in this whole post. Also known as the affirmative action category after I realized I didn't really represent any females at all.

Where It All Went Wrong: Nine Inch Nails: Closer NOT SAFE FOR WORK
Closer is a track on NIN's epic The Downward Spiral. The album, and consequently this video, were released in 1994, which means I was 11 when I first saw this on MTV. I saw the edited version, with no nudity and no language, but there was still plenty in there to make an impression. Still one of my favorite songs and videos. Directed by legend Mark Romanek.

Why I Can't Wait to be Done With College

2006-11-15T18:49:00.000-05:00

I discovered that the most useful thing about college housing is that I now have a fairly extensive list of things that I absolutely will not tolerate once I graduate and need to find my own housing. This is a result of extensive trial and error.

Housemates

In my experience, they very quickly become synonymous with 'scapegoats'. My housemates are nice enough. I've generally had good experiences. But eventually, the sink gets messy and the same person is taking out the trash every week and people start muttering things like, "Does he think the bathroom cleans itself?!"

No Dishwasher

ARRRGGGHHHH!!!! My next home will have a dishwasher. No joke. Cleaning takes twice as long as normal.

Bedroom in the Attic

Sweltering in the summer, freezing in the winter, and no damn light.

Unventilated Kitchen

This one wasn't as obvious until I tried to bake some sugar glazed pork and got some drippings on the bottom of the oven. In November, when all the windows were closed. I smoke boxed the house.

Apartment Complexes with College Students

Alright, look. You're all smart. You go to CMU. Is it really that hard to live your life without setting off the fire alarm at 6 in the morning? In January? Because standing around in PJ pants in the cold waiting for the fire department to arrive is NOT FUN. If you're going to fall asleep while you're cooking, maybe you shouldn't be cooking.

Friendly Storage Space

We have a basement. It's convenient for putting stuff in. It's a godsend for someone who needs to put things somewhere over the summer while they don't have any campus housing. The latest inventory of things that do not belong to any current housemates: 1 queen size mattress, 1 bureau, 1 TV stand, 1 futon mattress, 1 desk chair, 1 futon frame... Some of this stuff has been here for 2 years.

Pittsburgh Weather

I hate it.

Guide to Buying Books in Airports

2006-11-04T13:49:00.000-05:00

I was stuck in an airport last week with nothing to do. Normally, I have a handy paperback stashed away for just such emergencies, but since I started college, I haven't actually had time to read for pleasure, so it didn't occur to me to bring a book along.

I went to explore the selection at the one magazine stand in the whole place. It was tiny. I know airport book stores are not known for their selections, but this was abysmal even by those standards. And that's how I got stuck with John Grisham's "The Broker". It was either that or "The Devil Wears Prada."

I went with Grisham because I had vague memories of enjoying some of his work back in middle school. This in itself should have been a hint. My collection of middle school novels is sitting in a box gathering dust in my closet (Mom, stay away from my closet). I keep some on my bookshelf so that I can entertain the fantasy that I'll read them again, but with a few rare exceptions (anything by Madeleine L'Engle and C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia) they don't get touched. I keep them around because they all had really interesting ideas and so I want to be able to refer back to them if needed. And because I really like being surrounded by books. I have lots.

The Broker is a foray into the political thriller genre. I can understand why Grisham wanted to explore this area. Tom Clancy has made a lot of money with his spook stories about the NSA and friends, and he has also opened the door for other authors to get popular this way. People want to read about all the filthy things our government might be doing right under our nose, and an astute writer could conceivably capitalize on this trend.

An astute writer would start doing some research, both on all those spooky government agencies, and on the man who made them famous. Said writer would discover that Clancy is more than a little connected in Washington. It is said that Clancy gives talks at Fort Meade and Langley on a regular basis. He knows all the right people. He does all the research. The perceptive and aspiring writer might then discover that he could research for years and still not be able to match Clancy's knowledge base.

At this point, the writer has a choice. If he is a genuinely good writer, he might decide to find a co-conspirator who knows more about such things and work out a co-authorship. Neal Stephenson did this with great success when he recruited J. Frederick George for Cobweb and Interface. The writer might also decide that he is unqualified for this sort of writing and his efforts would be better spent elsewhere. If, however, the writer is neither skilled nor well-informed and decides to press on anyway, the end result is The Broker, a steaming pile of dreck not suitable for toilet paper, much less actual devotion of time.

The plot is overly simplistic, with no depth whatsoever. One gets the sense that the main character represents Grisham's aspirations in life, though even he is fairly one-dimensional. His treatment of the NSA is so trifling that one suspects him of limiting his research to Clancy novels, and occasionally, flat out fabrication. His descriptions of Italian fashion and culture are equally vapid. And we shall not even speak of the seduction by the main character of his Italian teacher.

I was trying to figure out why I felt the need to rip into this book in such a public and unprofessional manner. The answer is simple. People might actually buy this book. Some poor soul stuck in an airport somewhere might see this as a viable way to pass time in the terminal. And I can't let that happen.

Fun with Power Tools

2006-10-26T00:32:00.000-04:00

I'm getting up early tomorrow so I probably shouldn't be writing this, but I told some people that I'd be posting soon, so now I feel obligated.

First of all, the blog is all shiny and new. It may not look like it, but it is. Trust me on this. I've upgraded to blogger beta in the hopes that I can take advantage of some of its new features. I haven't explored yet. Anyway, on to the interesting stuff...

I'm taking only one computer science course this semester: Algorithm Design and Analysis, better known as 15-451 or Algo. It's a neat course that focuses on the problem solving aspects of computer science. It's also quite difficult, as 400 level classes tend to be. Fortunately, some of the assignments are designed to be group projects. In addition to the obvious benefit of extra brain power, this gives me the excuse to make something good for dinner and have a few friends over. My co-conspirators are M1 and M2 (not the Sri Lankan M's... different M's) and lucky me, M1 likes to cook as much as I do. Even better, he likes to cook meat, which means we get to fire up the grill. He's damn good at grilling. I don't have much practice in this area. My (dad's) burgers go unmatched, but beyond that I am inexperienced. M1 is getting into it though, and he's really having fun with rubs and marinades, both of which try my patience.

As you can probably guess, we had a group assignment due recently. Yesterday, in fact. So Saturday night became "Grilling and Algo" day. M1 brought over some gorgeous pork loin which he proceeded to massage with brown sugar, chili powder, and paprika. I was messing around with some sweet potatoes (recipe appears at the end of the post) and lighting the grill.

Through all of this, Chris had been upstairs plowing through work. All damn day, in fact. He is generally the go-to guy for fire, but he was busy. I didn't want to disturb him, so I embarked upon the task of actually lighting the grill.

Our grill is of the charcoal variety. Nothing fancy. Basically, a small enclosed fire pit that we keep on our front porch. It's great out there. We've got a really comfortable couch, and we've discovered (through exhaustive research, I assure you) that the height of the grill is perfect for someone sitting on the couch with their feet up on the makeshift foot rest. Don't you wish you were still in college?

We use match light charcoal because no one really wants to deal with anything else, and since the departure of our more alternative housemate, we haven't had a plumber's torch at our disposal. Now, I'd seen Chris do this many times, so I knew the theory behind lighting the charcoal. I diligently grabbed some old paper to use as starters, distributed them carefully within the briquets, and busted out the matches. Things were looking promising there for a while, but I hadn't counted on wind to make life difficult. It kept blowing out the fire.

I started messing around with the lid, trying to shield the coals well enough to get them lit. I didn't want to put the lid on all the way for fear of suffocating the fire, so I propped it up in front of the grill, hoping to protect my little sparks from the worst of the wind. Meanwhile, I grabbed a few more starters and repeated the fire distribution ritual. After 20 minutes of this, I had part of one side of the coals going, the rest were flat out refusing to consider ignition, and I reeked of smoke and lighter fluid. I gave up, moved around some of the more actively incendiary elements, and put the lid on.

I returned to my sweet potatoes. They had already baked for an hour and were destined to become a silky vanilla puree. Really, they were glorified mashed potatoes.

There's some back story here. I like to cook, and I have some practice at it. Chris is less experienced in the kitchen. I think he'd probably really like cooking, but the introductory process is difficult. I try to find recipes that involve something fun and interesting. The prime example that I use to describe "fun and interesting" was a mashed potato incident. I wasn't entirely clear on the definition of "fork tender" and when I went to mash them, they were... a bit firm. We didn't own a masher or an electric hand mixer, so I told Chris to get a hammer, cover it with a plastic bag, and mash up the potatoes. Which he did with great glee.

We both get a fair amount of mileage out of telling this story, and the best reactions came from our sets of parents.

My dad's immediate response was to look very pointedly at my mom and say, "So... you undercooked the potatoes, did you?" It seemed I'd unwittingly gotten myself in the middle of a 35 year debate about vegetable preparation. My mom treats cooking vegetables the way most people treat using vermouth in martinis (or so I've heard): whisper "fire" nearby and call it done. Maybe she'll wave a match nearby. If we're having company, she might even light it. Apparently my dad isn't the biggest fan.

I wasn't around to hear Chris tell the story to his parents, but after Christmas that year, he arrived back in Pittsburgh with a shiny new electric hand mixer.

I'm sure most of you are convinced that I've completely lost the thread of where ever I was going with this post, but I haven't. The important part is that last Saturday, approximately 2 years after the hammered potatoes, Chris had yet to use his hand mixer. He knew about my plan for the potatoes and had been very excited earlier in the day at the prospect of finally getting to try the thing out.

I decided it was time to drag Chris away from his work so he could wreak havoc in the kitchen. First, though, we had to have a conversation about the fire, which went approximately like this:
"Why do you smell like smoke?"
"...I had a little trouble lighting the coals. I've never done it before."
"Well why didn't you ask me for help?"
"You were busy studying. I didn't want to bother you."

...ahem... you may want to brace yourselves for the little beauty of a response he offered up....

"If there is ever a time when I can take 5 minutes to show you up and do something better than you, I'll do it. It doesn't matter how much work I have. Just ask." And just to clarify, he was joking, and we all had a good laugh.

Chris' parents were smart about the hand mixer. It's Black & Decker and 200 watts and does a fairly good job of masquerading as a power tool. I think they had guys in mind when they designed it. This thing is a beast. Chris was quite excited to plug it in for the first time.

For those unfamiliar with a hand mixer, this model had 3 controls, all within thumb range. There's a dial to control speed, a "turbo" button (not actually what it's called, but that's the idea), and a button to eject the mixer blades so that they can be cleaned.

There is a rookie mistake that everyone makes with these hand mixers. Proper use involves not turning the mixer on until it is fully immersed in whatever you're mixing, and turning the mixer off completely before removing the blades from the food. As anyone who has ever used a hand mixer knows, failure to comply results in food all over everything. It's almost tempting to dive right in to the beet mash and deliberately experiment with this property, just so you can get the experience of cleaning beets off the walls, the ceiling, out of the spice rack, and everywhere else you can think of. It's going to happen no matter what, so just get it over with.

I know you're all just aching with sadistic glee to hear about sweet potatoes in my hair and the exposed ceiling light fixture and the computer that was near by to provide the recipe. Sorry to disappoint. Potatoes did not, in fact, go everywhere, because Chris avoided the rookie mistake.

Instead, he made a different, and far more entertaining one. From a prudent, responsible perspective, Chris felt it necessary to methodically test all of the controls first, far away from the food. He wanted to get a feel for how to work it so that he could operate it in a safe, controlled manner. If you'd actually been there, you'd have understood immediately (the maniacal laughter was a good clue) that 200 watts is 200 watts and whether it comes in the form of a power drill, a circular saw, or a hand mixer, it's really fun to play with. His first order of business upon plugging the thing in was to turn the speed dial as high as it would go.

I was standing well back, watching him play. And then the laughing turned to panicked yelling as Chris, trying to eke out the last little bit of power, went blindly searching for the turbo and found "eject" instead. The folks at Black & Decker deserve praise for steadfastly avoiding the extreme temptation to model the mixer after a nail gun. And for that reason, the mixing blades did not go spinning into the wall. Instead, although they came unseated, they stayed in the mixer and continued to spin at an alarming rate. Chris quickly realized what happened and turned the mixer off, but there were about 2 seconds between hitting eject and regaining composure where I was watching the very odd tableau of my boyfriend yelling in abject terror at the spinning blades of death in his hand, all the while flailing and panicking and generally creating a spectacle.

Mercifully, after a second or two, he turned the thing off. I say mercifully, because at this point, I was on the floor laughing myself to tears. It had never occurred to me to fear a hand mixer. They've always seemed pretty benign. I used to use one at home to make whipped cream occasionally and I'd never felt threatened. The image of a full grown man being terrorized by a cream whipping piece of machinery is so ludicrous, I'd never considered it.

The rest of dinner progressed without incident. The pork was good, the potatoes were good, and we made s'mores over the leftover coals in the grill. And then we did a bunch of homework.

You can find the sweet potato puree recipe here: http://www.101cookbooks.com/archives/000589.html

Everyone loved it. And M1 had mentioned that he wanted more practice with non-meat recipes, so I sent him the link, along with the following annotations and notes. I swear, I didn't know I knew this much about potatoes:

OVERLY WORDY RECIPE NOTES (mistakes you don't have to make, because I've already done it):

When you're shopping for sweet potatoes, you'll probably be confronted with a choice between "sweet potatoes" and "yams". The correct, technical term for what you want is "sweet potato" but grocers can get confused. I bought the things labeled yams because all the sweet potatoes were plastic wrapped and seemed destined for a different purpose. The point is, you want the thing with the *orange* flesh. Bright orange. Pumpkin orange. Doesn't really matter what it's called as long as it sort of looks like a potato and fits the orange requirement. 2 small sweet potatoes are probably about a pound and a half.

Cleaning the potatoes means scrubbing off the skin with a vegetable brush or your hands or a paper towel. This removes excess dirt. Leave the skin on the potatoes for the baking part. It keeps the moisture in. (I don't know if you know how to clean vegetables or not. Not trying to insult you here, just being paranoid. I came back to school this year to find that people had been using my vegetable brush to scrub dishes...)

"Fork tender" means that if you stab the potato with a fork, it will slide off *immediately*. The flesh should be tender enough that you could do the whole mashing process with a fork. The real reason I had Chris beating on the potatoes with a hammer is because I didn't used to know all of this, and then the potatoes were undercooked. :P

Heavy cream (also called "whipping cream" or "heavy whipping cream") is used primarily for texture. It is the thickest of any milk type dairy product, even richer than half and half. The high fat content makes for a very smooth, silky puree. You would notice this more if you prepared it in a blender, instead of with a hand mixer the way we did. There's no chemical reaction going on, so if you want to use something with less fat, you probably can. You might be sacrificing a bit of richness and texture, but I doubt most people will notice. Don't use fake butter though. Stick to the real stuff.

If you don't have a vanilla bean (and I didn't), you can substitute a teaspoon of vanilla extract. If you use the extract, you can also skip the simmering step. The simmering is done specifically to leech the flavor out of the vanilla bean.

I left out the orange zest because I'm not an orange person. Your call. ...However, do *not* add any sort of acid to this. This means no vinegar, orange juice, lemon juice, etc. It will curdle the milk. (For great fun with intentional milk curdling, see the Joy of Cooking's Saag Paneer recipe).

I also left out the salt and pepper, although I added some later to my own portion. It's worth trying.

This is basically a recipe for mashed potatoes. If you decide you want a thinner or "looser" texture when you're mixing stuff, you can start adding more liquid, a few tablespoons at a time, until you get what you want. It can be more cream, or you could try some sort of broth, or gravy, or something else exotic if you want to play with flavoring. I added a bit of extra cream for texture reasons. Chances are, you'll find yourself adding less liquid if you're actually using a blender, and more liquid if you're using something else.

When mashing regular white potatoes with a hand mixture, there's danger of overmixing. You'll know when you've done it because the potatoes start to develop an elastic property. This is the result of the starches doing their thing. It's the same thing that happens when you knead pizza dough. I don't know if this is a property inherent in sweet potatoes, but if you notice it starting to happen, stop mixing. It takes a while for this to happen, and you only really need to worry if you spend a lot of time messing with liquid levels, because that usually results in a lot more mixing than normal.

Reheating: Ideally, this is served hot. You can reheat it in the microwave on medium heat, stirring every 90 seconds or so, until desired temp has been reached.

Beginner's Guide to Opera: Leoncavallo's Pagliacci

2006-10-21T12:24:00.000-04:00

Chris and I aren't serious opera buffs, but we do enjoy it occasionally, and if something interesting is playing, we'll usually try to make a night of it with opera and a really good dinner afterwards. This isn't precisely why we chose to go to Pagliacci. The Pagliacci decision was more along the lines of a "best of the worst" scenario, as the current opera season doesn't look too promising. Mozart's Magic Flute is playing in March, but that's a long time from now, and the other three shows aren't really piquing our interest.

For us, opera is always a very last minute decision, an attitude encouraged but not entirely inspired by the way the Pittsburgh Opera Company handles student tickets. They have a program called "Student Rush" which is basically a fire sale of every seat still available. Two hours before the show, college students can get any unfilled seat for 50% of the original ticket price. Since we generally don't know if we can go until about 2 hours before the show, this is quite convenient.

Last night was a near thing. Chris and I both have lots of school work to do, so we almost didn't go. Fortunately, we made it, and through some stroke of luck we got first row seats for about $40 each. Traditionally, we've been in the balcony somewhere.

We found our seats and indulged in a bit of unadulterated amazement at our good fortune: "You can see the harps! You can see the harps!" "I've got leg room!"

The actual show was quite nice. The plot is simple, and Pagliacci is mercifully short. The whole thing was about 1:35 including a 25 minute intermission. I do enjoy opera, but I've always felt it's supposed to be a mix of theatre and music, and often the composers will sacrifice the visual for the auditory, resulting in 10 minute death scenes and endings that add whole additional acts to the production. There are no surprises in opera. Not for the American opera crowd anyway. No one actually speaks enough Italian to be able to understand the actual dialogue, so everyone has read the plot beforehand and is diligently watching the subtitle screen. And even when there is supposed to be a genuine surprise, like when the husband storms in on his wife and her lover, the whole suspenseful vibe is lost because the soprano has to finish her aria before her husband can start yelling. So the point is that watching opera isn't like watching a play, and you shouldn't go into it expecting such.

After the show we headed down the street to ELEVEN, a classy American restaurant, for a late dinner. ELEVEN is a part of Big Burrito, a company that owns many restaurants including Mad Mex, a very popular chain of Mexican bars. And it's really really good. With excellent service. I highly recommend it.

2006-10-17T17:57:00.000-04:00

I've been playing poker for a good long while. I don't remember when I first learned to play, but I couldn't have been more than 5 or 6. I like to imagine that sometime in preschool (I was still in preschool at age 5) my parents sat me down to teach me some life skills, like not to draw to an inside straight. I suspect that the truth is much more boring. I probably got jealous of all the adults staying up late and decided to crash the party.

It should be noted that my whole family plays poker. Both my parents, my aunt and uncle, and my grandparents when they were still around. They used to have a pretty good tradition of starting up games at family gatherings after dinner, and sometimes they'd play for hours. My mom will tell stories of her mother yelling down the stairs to her father that it was dawn and he should stop playing cards and go to bed. So I know where my mom and my uncle get it from. I don't know what's going on with my dad, but he's got a very weird set of "bar skills" (poker, pool, and a really neat trick for opening up jars that he got from a bar tender somewhere). I suspect my mom had a hand in most of this.

My family taught me well enough that I could probably sit down to a game in the 1840's and not get shot. I might even win some money. And all of this might give the reader the impression that "we take cards seriously in this household, and don't you forget it!"

This is not, in fact, the case. We are not serious about poker. We are anti-serious about poker. And in the event that someone forgets and starts spouting out nonsense about 5 card draw nothing wild, we have an arsenal of obscure, arcane poker games that are generally pretty effective at defying any sort of real poker strategy that people might try to come up with.

I was very glad, then, to find out that I had a set of like-minded friends in Pittsburgh. Last Friday night, 6 of us got together and sat down to some of the strangest poker I've played in a while. At the table were myself, Chris, Big J, Little J, S, and B. The mood for the night was pretty much set when we realized that no one had anything resembling chips, so we made do with colored zip ties, which for mysterious reasons B had in abundance. Chris hasn't played much poker before and he was kind of afraid of it, so my first goal was to help Chris get over this fear with a game that is entirely out of the players' control, known as Night Baseball. 7 cards, face down, and no looking. And things went down hill from there. I don't remember all of the variants we played, but here are a few. Some are probably familiar to people reading this, and some...probably aren't.

Night Baseball (No peeky)

7 cards dealt face down to each player (9 in some variants). No one can look at their cards. This is a "roll-your-own" game, meaning that each person turns over cards until they've beat the highest hand on the table. If you run out of cards, you're out. Otherwise, you bet. 3's and 9's are wild, 4 up gets you another card face down. I love this game. For some reason, I do well at it.

High-Low Baseball

A 7-card stud variant. 3's and 9's are wild, 4 up gets you another card face up. After the last card has been dealt, there's the normal round of betting, and then all players declare, and then they bet again. Declaring means announcing whether you're playing high, low, or both. A perfect low is A 2 3 4 6 of different suits. High winner and low winner split the pot. If someone goes high-low, they have to win both ways, but then they get the whole pot, all to themselves.

Classic 5 card draw

Big J brought this one in, probably to balance out the dual bad influences of B and me. 5 card draw, a pair of jacks or better to start the betting, and if no one can bet, then the hand is re-dealt. This is an ante game and the pot rides until someone wins it. If there are multiple deals, there are multiple antes. A very traditional poker game, and it was probably the seminal example of poker before all of the Texas Hold'Em craziness.

Sign of the Cross

Very similar to Texas Hold'em. Each player gets 2 cards, and there are 5 cards in the center, face down, in the shape of a cross. Cards in the center are revealed 1 by 1. Players make the best hand they can using their two hold cards and 3 in the middle. In this game, each player must pick a row of cards from the cross.

Kinky 7-stud

You can do a lot of things with wild cards to change the flavor of the game. In this variant, there are pairs of wild cards: KJ QQ 69. You have to be holding both cards of a pair, but then both are wild.

Mark Foley 7-stud

Similar to kinky 7-stud. Any pair of cards that adds up to 16 is wild. J = 11, Q = 12, etc. A = 1.

Poker Jargon 7-stud

Wild: "Deuces, aces, one-eyed faces, suicide kings, candlestick queens."

Follow the Queen

A more well known 7-stud variant. Queens are wild, and if a queen is dealt face up, then the card dealt face up immediately after the queen is also wild. Until another queen is dealt... My dad hates this game. We pull it out at home when he has too much money.

Something I made up when it was really late

Sort of like a cross between Indian Poker and Night Baseball. Each player gets 1 card face down. Without looking, they bet. Then they look at their cards and bet again.
Variant 1 After the first round of betting, but before people look at their cards, they have the option to trade in their cards. Then they look and bet again.
Variant 2 The winner is the person with the highest total of their card + the value of the card to their right.

Fark Update

2006-10-02T19:43:00.000-04:00

I have someone to thank, and I don't know who. Either they read my blog, or they're just eerily psychic, but they posted the "brainless waste of life" comment to the fark thread. I checked out the profile, which indicated a home city (Pittsburgh) but no email.

So, FarkedInTheHead, I'm going to assume you'll see this. Thanks. :)

Nightmare Come True

2006-10-02T01:03:00.000-04:00

Well, that didn't take long. Someone on Fark got nasty and linked to the Study Abroad section in the Inquirer, using a hideous headline. The comments section is appalling. Appalling enough that I was tempted to say something about it on the forums. Like "Read the article, you brainless waste of life."

Fortunately the Fark admins have anticipated such blinding rage, so you need an account to post, and it takes 24 hours to create an account, by which point, in all likelihood, whatever you were going to flame about has no relevance. I don't have a Fark account and I decided not to create one, but if any farkers made it here, let the following be known, please:

I made no money. (The stipend was to cover living expenses, like food and laundry).
My expenses were covered. This was an internship. (My parents didn't pay for it).
I earned no class credit. Again, this was an internship.
I did not go to Europe. Sri Lanka is in Asia.
I did not drink. Sri Lanka is mostly Buddhist, and alcohol is highly discouraged.

That is all.

Welcome, Inquirer Readers!

2006-10-01T12:24:00.000-04:00

Glad to have you. The Sri Lanka archives are from May to August. Feel free to have a look around. Enjoy!

Do a Trick!

2006-09-29T12:11:00.000-04:00

First, a random announcement: my blog fell into the hands of a travel editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer and he liked it enough to have me write an article for the travel section as part of a Study Abroad feature. It will be appearing on Sunday, October 1, in the Travel section. Registration on the website is free.

And now, back to more interesting things.

I went salsa dancing last night! I'd been trying to figure out how to convince Chris to go for a year or so, and I finally just gave up and said, "We should go salsa dancing." And then he told me that he knew a guy from his lab who went a lot, and he really wanted to go. So that was a lot easier than I expected.

Neither Chris nor I has ever done couples salsa dancing. I have a bit of solo experience from a high school gym class, but I've never danced with a partner in any format, and Chris doesn't dance. Period. Fortunately, Chris's friend V. and his girlfriend K. offered to teach us a few things, and that's how we ended up in V.'s dining room last night making fools of ourselves and having a blast.

The weirdest part of couples dancing is that someone has to lead the dance. Usually the guy. The lead decides how the dance will progress and what moves to do. This is all done improvisationally, not at all planned beforehand. So in salsa (and presumably in other styles too), there is a system in place so that the guy can stealthily tell the girl what he wants her to do. And then the girl has to do it. And if she doesn't follow the guy's lead, the dance screws up and it's her fault. The girls also get all the flashy moves. As far as I can tell, the point of salsa is that the guys get to show off their girlfriends. The girls make the guys look good.

V. and K. taught us a few basic step patterns, and then they showed us how to incorporate some spins and flashy stuff. But as I said, this is all improv. So if you're the guy and you want to spin your partner, you lift up her arm above her head. And that's her signal to spin. As long as her arm is lifted, she spins. And maybe if you get bored, you push her so she spins the other way.

Salsa, by the way, is a curvy dance for curvy people. I have never in my life felt too skinny, but last night I was really wishing for an extra 20 lbs or so to flash around.

Last night's original plan had been for V. and K. to give us a few quick dancing lessons and then we'd all head out to a club. The lessons lasted longer than we planned, so we never actually made it out, but we had a lot fun.

I've been dancing for a long time, and I really enjoy it, but I don't have that first flush of excitement that new dancers get when they realize they're actually dancing. Chris may or may not have felt it last night, but he definitely felt the "hey, I'm in charge" vibe that comes with being a lead. And he has been having all sorts of fun with this. I think there may even be a bit of power tripping going on. Because ever since we got back last night, he has been endlessly liftin my arm and saying, "Do a trick!"

Let's go SHOPPING!!

2006-09-21T19:47:00.001-04:00

This is my fifth, and hopefully last, year of college, so I'm starting my job hunt in earnest. It's really not a pleasant prospect. My GPA is less than stellar, and my second major is in Art, of all things, so most employers aren't too sympathetic to my workload.

I decided I finally had to buckle down and buy a suit. I've never owned one before. And I really wasn't looking forward to the prospect of shopping for one. Because I am damn picky about my clothes.

Most people who know me will be very surprised by this. I have a fairly standard collection of nondescript jeans and gig t-shirts with a couple of hoodies thrown in. I don't dress up, and the tshirts are baggy and black and I don't wear make up or fuss with my hair. Basically, I appear to be pretty apathetic about the way I look. This is not entirely true, however.

My style could be (and has been) described as "roadie". There are two reasons for this. The first is that it's a very functional look. I can wear it pretty much everywhere I'm likely to be at college, in any season. I don't worry about things staining or getting ripped. And I don't really have to think about anything when I get dressed in the morning, which is really good because I get dressed before I've had coffee. The second reason is that people don't spend time noticing my looks which means they take me seriously that much more quickly. Translation: if I glare, people start running.

There's a third super sekrit reason that I dress the way I do, and it's because when I do decide to clean myself up, people don't recognize me. So I can keep my "street cred" and all that.

The natural assumption that most people make is that I spend no time on my looks. It averages out that way, but finding jeans is just painful. It takes hours. Days even. And formal wear is even worse. I know what I like, and I know what looks good, and I know how things should fit me. But nothing ever fits my requirements. Designers just don't make clothes for someone of my build.

Employers don't really care about what the designers do, so they expect me to be dressed up. I had to at least make an effort to find something to wear. The very thought was miserable.

There are a few tricks that I use when I go shopping. I think they're pretty standard across most of female-dom, but heck, maybe I'm wrong. So here's how I survive an afternoon at the mall:

1. Know what looks good on you. Don't be afraid to be brutally decisive. If you're not sure, it's not good enough. Put it back on the rack. Find something better. Yeah, it will take longer, but it will save time in the long run. Usually the items that cause the most indecision are this season's hottest trends. "This season's hottest trends" is fashion speak for "this is what the drugs told me this time". They don't look good on anyone but models, and they're generally ugly again within 6 months. Don't believe me? Remember the Uggs+miniskirt plague that was going around a while back? Yeah, well, people thought that looked good once. Fools, all of them.

2. Enlist a very honest friend (VHF). Honest enough to give you an honest answer to "Does this make me look fat?" In the unlikely event that your clothes rejection system has failed you, and you're considering something that has managed to sneak by your "bad buy" detection system but is still god-awful, this friend will immediately, and with extreme prejudice, remove the offending garment from your vicinity. She will then proceed to erase all thoughts of such a purchase from your mind and take steps to ensure said thoughts do not reassert themselves. Each VHF has her own methods. They may involve deception, baseball bats, Greek fire, or herds of ferrets. But it's not your job to know about those things. Remember, it's for your own good.

3. Find a good mall. And by good, I mean something with at least two department stores as well as at least a few designer "boutiques". You're picky, remember? So give yourself options. Lots and lots of options. Because you'll know the right thing when you see it, but more importantly, some piece of clothing that started out on the "rejected" list should, at no point, be reconsidered. It's not like it's going to look any better the second time around. Remember, the idea here is to find something good, not convince yourself that it's "not so bad."

4. Give yourself a lot of time. At least a few hours on a given day, and preferably, multiple days. You probably won't need all of it, but you're looking for the perfect thing. Perfection takes time. Shopping is already unpleasant and nothing makes it worse like knowing you're running out of time and not coming up with results. This leads to bad decisions, usually involving polyester. No good. Just resign yourself to the task.

So last Saturday, L. and I went to a mall looking for interview suits. It took about 10 minutes for both of us to break Rule 2 and split up. But the rules are for amateurs. I'm very experienced at being picky, and so is she. So she wandered around Express while I headed back to J.C. Penney's to go stalk some super cute separates I'd seen on the way in.

Separates are my way of cheating the system. The theory behind them is simple: buy a few jackets and a few pairs of pants or skirts and mix and match. The big downside here is that usually these combinations are blatantly not suits. But this set of separates was different. All black, all made of the same fabric, and all classically flattering with a trendy edge. 1 jacket + 2 skirts + 2 pairs of pants = 4 suits. Bonus points for the pants that came with suspenders. Extra bonus points for the 30% sale, bringing the total of all of this to about $130, including a blouse. And... wait for it... you'll never believe... ALL MACHINE WASHABLE!!! VICTORY FOR ZIM! ...errr ME!

Updates

2006-09-08T14:46:00.000-04:00

First of all, my sister is fine. I talked to her and apparently she's back on her surfboard. We'll see how long she stays out of the ER.

I've got 2 weeks of classes in the bag (13 more to go!) and so far my schedule is shaping up to be weird:

Algorithm Design and Analysis
Entrepreneurship for Computer Science
The Interactive Image
Painting: Materials and Techniques
Senior Project

The painting class is the most interesting so far. It covers pretty much everything about painting, starting with making your own paints from raw pigment.

So last week I found myself in an art store picking out jars of pigment and getting worried. There are no warning labels on this stuff. And yet:

Cadmium Red - cadmium
Cadmium Yellow - cadmium
Viridian - Chromium Oxide
Cinnabar - mercury

I think it's the art world's incarnation of natural selection.

How to be Stupid: Part 2

2006-08-21T20:05:00.000-04:00

I forgot to mention that all of my exploits were put in perspective last night when my sister called to say she was in the emergency room. Again. Something about a surfing injury involving deep cuts and stitches. Last night, it sounded like she was ok.

However, this is what I heard from her today:
So
Funny story
after the doctor stitched me up, he asked if the two nurses had put this antibiotic salve on my leg before he stitched it.
i said no
he said, "oh, okay, well, it's really important that we do that so that it doesn't get infected."
and then we both forgot
so today it's big and red and puffy
and infected
so i go to the health center, and explain the situation
and they give me these meds, and right as I'm leaving, they ask, "you're not allergic to penicillin, right?"
and i'm thinking... uh oh
"yeah, I am, it says so right on my chart"
so, they talk for a bit
and the doctor comes back
and she's like... well, these meds *might* not give you an allergic reaction
but we *know* that your leg's infected
ergo.... MATHMATHMATHMATH..... statistics say that you should take this medicine
so i'm taking medicine which will probably give me an allergic reaction to an infection on my leg which is present because the doctors forgot to clean out my cut
and they said that they would just put a salve over top of it and try to clean it out that way
but they forgot
and then i forgot
and tom forgot
until i came home and was thinking about it
and was like..... wait
damn

How to be Stupid

2006-08-21T17:17:00.000-04:00

I'm supposed to leave for Pittsburgh in 2 days and I can barely move. And it's all my own fault.

I've been complaining all summer about losing muscle due to lack of protein and exercise. So since I got back I've been trying to do something about it. Mostly, I've been renewing my acquaintance with weights and treadmills, which, while effective, aren't at all fun for me. Yesterday, though, I had a chance to do something that is fun: gymnastics.

I haven't practiced with any regularity in about 6 years, and lately I've been averaging about 1 session per year, so I'm not exactly taking myself seriously. But I like to remind myself how to tumble every so often, and gymnastics is a killer work out.

For starters, the practice session is 2 hours long. I practice during an open gym session, meaning I have complete freedom to do whatever I want, as long as I'm not being overtly stupid or unsafe. Covert stupidity is absolutely acceptable, and, one might argue, the whole basis behind a sport that involves throwing oneself headlong at the floor in the hopes of catapaulting up again in a safe, controlled manner.

So I was practicing covert stupidity yesterday as I threw tricks that I was in no shape to be trying. It should be noted that I completed most of them with resounding success, and I sustained no injuries. And I can still do back flips. So there.

Today I got to deal with the aftermath. Everything hurts. As I said, moving is painful. Walking is agony. Coughing is unthinkable. I'd rather just choke to death. Fortunately, my allergies aren't acting up, or I'd be sneezing right now.

And before you all ask, yes I stretched. Very thoroughly. Before and after.

Morph!

2006-08-21T01:24:00.000-04:00

Notes: The link in the BlogHer post to the Creating Passionate Users entry has been fixed. It should work now.

This blog is having something of an identity crisis at the moment. I've decided to continue it, at least for now, but it needs a new focus. Writing about Sri Lanka was great, but as I am no longer in Sri Lanka, that subject matter is getting less and less relevant. And the trials and tribulations of a college student bumming around Philadelphia suburbs don't make for good reading. Fortunately, I'll be leaving for Pittsburgh again in a few days, and then things should get more interesting.

In the mean time, I'll procrastinate and share a few Sri Lanka stories that didn't make the first cut.

The Great Tea Plantation Story

I alluded to this a few weeks back, but discretion and pity kept me from sharing it until now. It's a great story though, and I'm sure you'll all get a good laugh. Names have been changed to protect the innocent.

One of my colleagues at YEF, S., is in his last year of college and he was working on a capstone project all summer. He was studying tea refinement processes and he had close ties with a tea plantation. Early in the partnership, he had mentioned that he really wanted to arrange a visit to a tea plantation, and I thought that sounded great. So a few days later, we discussed potential dates. I thought the best time would be the weekend right before I was supposed to spend time with my parents. I was fairly sure we agreed on this.

And I didn't think anything more of it until one night when I was in CRC doing work. I was supposed to have a rather important meeting with a supervisor M., the next day, at CRC. This was a Saturday night, and although I was supposed to be at YPF on Sunday, the arrangement was that Meg and I would meet with M. Sunday morning at CRC and we would all travel to YPF together. M.'s orders supersede pretty much everyone's at both locations, so if he tells me I'm getting into work late, I don't question him.

So Saturday night, as I said, I was at CRC. I think G. was around, and everyone else had run off to other places. I received a call from S. that went something like this:
S. - "Where are you?"
Me - "Hambantota"
S. - "When will you be back in Weligama?"
Me - "Tomorrow afternoon. Meg and I are meeting M. in the morning, and then we'll all meet you."
S. - "I have made plans for us to go to the tea plantation tomorrow. We must leave very early."
Me - "Tomorrow? What happened to next week?"
S. - "The arrangements are for tomorrow."
"But I'm not around tomorrow."
"You can catch a bus at 6 a.m. and be here by 9."
"No. I meet with M. tomorrow. I can't get out of that."
"But I have made all of these arrangements."
"I'm sorry. We did not understand each other. But I can't go with you tomorrow. I have a meeting with your boss and mine."

...and so on. This sort of back-and-forth went on for 20 minutes and in the end, I agreed to call M. and ask if I could get out of my meeting in order to visit a tea plantation. I didn't want to do this, you understand, but otherwise I was never going to get off the phone.

I was now faced with the prospect of calling my boss to ask permission to leave a scheduled meeting in order to goof off at a tea plantation. M. is a super nice guy, but I really didn't want to make that call. However, I'd said that I would, so reluctantly I called M. and explained the situation.

"Well, Hallie, you can go if you want, but you should ask how many people are going on that trip. Because I'll bet it's just you and him walking through the tea fields, and you know it will probably be awkward. There will be...expectations. Bollywood and all that."

What?!?!?!

I can just picture the commentators now....
"Well Bob, three very important things happened in this exchange. Hallie got the permission to go on the trip, which she didn't think she would get, and M. is being really understanding about the whole thing, which she also wasn't expecting. But the real surprise here is that Hallie's employer, her boss is warning her about other employees of his. And he's laughing about it."

"Well that's right Jim. Hallie's in a tough situation here. I don't think she was ready to hear that this was a 2 person trip -- I think she was expecting Meg to come too. And she just came from a week in Colombo and a long bus ride, and she hasn't slept much recently. She's really not at the top of her game right now, and I... well, I just don't think she's really up to this kind of challenge."

"You're right there Bob. If she's going to go into this, she needs to be 100%. She can't hesitate, and she can't falter, and above all, she absolutely cannot allow a weak defense. In these situations, there's a huge risk of losing yardage, and there's really not much to gain."

Insert the bitter-Philadelphia-sports-fan joke here. Anyway, I wholeheartedly agreed with Jim and Bob's assessment, and so I declined the invitation.

It occurred to me after this series of conversations that Meg hadn't been mentioned much when plans for this trip were being formed. Five weeks later, I'm still floored that my boss would ever be that open with me regarding his employees. I'm glad he was, and I like that attitude. M. had a very frank, down-to-earth manner about the whole thing, and I appreciated that. And he still gives me grief about breaking all of his employees' hearts. Though I hear he still gives them grief for falling for me in the first place.

Hell on Wheels

2006-08-18T23:38:00.000-04:00

I've been home for about 2 weeks now, enjoying life immensely. I don't have a job and school hasn't started yet, so I've been spending my time in decadent hedonism, enjoying all of the things I've missed all summer.

High on the list has been driving. I missed driving all summer. The car I drive is nothing but fun: a sporty little 2 door black Civic with a manual transmission, a cd player, and a spoiler. You can't help but feel damn cool cruising around in the thing. For those of you wondering if I'm one of those punk kids who rides around with the windows down and the music blaring... Guilty as charged. And it's not nice music either. Driving is one of my guilty pleasures, and heavy metal is another.

Number three is my boyfriend, Chris. And he is a guilty pleasure. Looks like a model, is amazingly smart, has a great job, and is incredibly caring and sensitive. It just doesn't get better than that. And so last weekend, when I had a chance to indulge in all three of these vices, I just couldn't pass up the opportunity.

Chris spent the summer working in North Carolina, and his internship lasted longer than mine. He flew up for the party, and I decided to drive him back home and spend a few days in Raleigh.

The drive from Philadelphia to Raleigh is 7 hours on I-95. 7 of the most grueling, white knuckled, exhausting hours of driving I've ever experienced. I'm quite used to long drives. I commute between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh regularly, and generally I drive it alone. 5 hours on the PA turnpike is long, but it's not that bad. The trip is 2 lanes at most, and people fall into a groove around 70 or 75 mph. 70 is fast enough to make progress, but not so fast that you can't enjoy some tunes in the process. So I've found that once I resign myself to 5 hours on the turnpike, the whole experience isn't that bad.

I-95 is a bit different. 3 or 4 lanes of mass chaos at an average speed of 85 mph exhausting after about 30 minutes. It's hard to imagine that people commute on this road every day. And then, there were no rest stops south of Baltimore. There are little shacks with bathrooms and snack machines, but if you want gas or an actual restuarant, you have to get off the highway. I guess the turnpike has spoiled me, but I like eating actual food for lunch. Snickers bars don't cut it.

So I arrived back home, after 7 hours alone with the traffic, and promptly fell asleep. I was still asleep when my aunt, uncle, and cousin arrived for dinner. Hooray.

BlogHer:

2006-08-15T12:25:00.000-04:00

I thought I was all done posting today and then I came across this: BlogHer. A collection of blogs written by women. They cover any number of topics and I assume at least some of them are worth reading. I haven't had time to explore.

BlogHer recently held their annual conference, and the only reason I know about it is that it sparked something of a backlash on some other blogs that I read. Many female bloggers out there feel that drawing attention to the gender of the author at all is unnecessary. They don't want to be thought of as female technical writers or female marketing directors. They just want to be judged on the content of their blogs and the strength of their work. And while many support the idea of a conference based on women's issues, they don't want such a conference to pretend to speak for all women. Creating Passionate Users has a great entry on the subject, as well as a collection of links to other pieces on the matter, so I won't repeat what they've said.

I do agree with them though, and so I felt a bit guilty all summer when I wrote about being female in Sri Lanka. It's not really an issue I care to deal with. In the States, it's not really an issue at all, at least for me. I work in male dominated industries, but generally, if I don't make light of differences between my coworkers and myself, no one else will either. Conversely, if I start a job with something to prove and an attitude problem, everyone will notice.

In Sri Lanka, I was afforded the same luxuries. I was a tech consultant. Not a female tech consultant. More like the white American tech consultant, if we're going for labels. But ethnic diversity was half the point of going to Sri Lanka in the first place. And although there were times when my gender was an issue, it wasn't at work. And it didn't happen often. Most of it, I think, was in my head.

So the point is, I guess, that for all the women involved in BlogHer and similar organizations, more power to you. But leave the rest of us alone.

What were you thinking?

2006-08-15T10:23:00.000-04:00

That seems to be everyone's favorite question these days. Why did I decide to drop everything and spend 10 weeks in a developing country doing consulting of all things?

From a computer science perspective, my decision doesn't make a whole lot of sense. The work I did over the summer was not particularly difficult or involved as far as CS is concerned. If I were looking to really pad my resume, I'd be much better off spending my summer at some place like Nvidia or Microsoft doing development work.

But after spending three years as a computer science major, I've discovered that really, I have no desire to be a software developer. I don't want to be a computer scientist. I had inklings of a desire to go into project management instead. So, in the interest of exploring that side of my mind, I took a consulting class last spring. I had a lot of fun, and I really enjoyed the work. And when I saw an opportunity to go somewhere exotic and do more consulting, I did everything I could to take advantage of that chance.

Now that I've had some consulting experience, I've decided that I really like the field, but I'd probably enjoy the stability of project management a bit more. So, as I head into my last year of college, I'll be looking for those sorts of jobs in the tech sector.

Home...Where the music's playing

2006-08-07T13:31:00.000-04:00

I've had that song stuck in my head for 2 days now and I can't find the CD. So if you're hiding it, fess up. It's driving me nuts.

I'm HOME!!! Back in the States, back in my own room, in my own bed, with my books and my music and my food.

...and hot water, and chocolate and coffee and pizza and grass and... well anyway, it's good to be home.

I spent the last few days in Hambantota being sick and a bit miserable. I wasn't really sick, but I had an annoying combination of exhaustion, a sore throat, and a stuffed up nose that didn't do much for my disposition. I just wanted sleep, but it was not to be had. Friday night I had plans to stay up and finish up our projects for CRC and YEF (no they're not done. It's a long and bitter story).

So Friday night saw B., Meg, and myself burning through the night trying to get the website done. We had a plan to get our work done at the office and then Meg and I would head to G.'s house to sleep. Great plan in theory.

In practice, we modified it a bit. By about 2 in the morning, B. had passed out. Meg was doing photoshop stuff that required my laptop. Meanwhile, I was trying to finish up the YEF/YPF brochures, which meant I needed either my laptop or the desktop computers. So Meg decided she wanted to take my laptop and head to G.'s house to work there. I know myself pretty well, and at 2 am, it's not likely I'll get any work done if I'm curled up in bed with a laptop. We agreed that it would be best if Meg headed for G.'s and I stuck around the office.

G.'s house is a very pleasant walk from the office, and at 2 in the morning, the temperature is nice and there aren't many people around. So I was quite content to let Meg find her own way there. And neither of us felt it necessary to wake up B. to appraise him of events. Meg snuck out the front door and was almost out of sight when B. woke up and started shining the flashlight around, looking for Meg. He'd heard her leave and it had taken him a few minutes to wake up. I smiled as I saw her disappear into the trees. B. totally missed it. And so began a debate that, I feel, was fairly symbolic of all 10 weeks here. The following is a close approximation.

"She left?!"
"Yes, she went to G.'s house. She'll be fine."
"I must go find her."
"Don't worry about it. She's ok."
"But something might happen."
"If I thought something would happen, I wouldn't have let her go."
"She is a helpless American girl. She could get into trouble."
"A little trouble would do her good. Leave it alone."
...and so on. I finally convinced B. that the world would not end if Meg walked home by herself, and we spent the next 2 hours ostensibly doing work and mostly goofing off and talking. It was great. Until the phone rang.

Now at this point, just to set the scene, it was about 4 in the morning. There aren't many reasons to be calling an office at 4 in the morning. And there aren't many people who would bother. So I spent a precious few seconds trying to imagine why on earth Meg would feel the need to call at that hour.

I have to say that I had not considered the possibility that she hadn't made it to G.'s house. She had left hours ago. It's a 20 minute walk and we've both done it many times before. But it was dark, and although Meg had a flashlight, it wasn't doing a whole lot against Sri Lankan night. There aren't outside lights or street lights here, so it gets DARK.

It sounded to me like Meg was actually at the house and just didn't recognize it, so I told her to go back and check once more, and call back. She went off to explore, I hung up, and turned around to face B., who had heard my side of the conversation and was now terrified all over again.

"I should go find her."
"She'll call back in 10 minutes. She's at the house. Don't worry."
"I should call G."
"She already tried. G. isn't picking up."
"I'll try the house phone."
"GAH! What?! No, don't do that. Meg will call in 10 minutes. Just relax."

Fortunately, Meg did call back 10 minutes later to say that she'd found the house and everything was fine.

More later...

Vous parlez allemande?!

2006-08-04T00:10:00.000-04:00

It's Friday and I'm back in Hambantota for the last time, doing stacks of work. Tomorrow morning we leave for Colombo, and then Sunday my flight to Bombay departs at 12:01 AM.

I've spent the last 4 or 5 days with my parents in Sigirya and Kandy, and I'll write all about it when I get home, but for now all you'll get to hear about is the bus trip back from Kandy to Hambantota.

The problem with travelling from Kandy to Hambantota is the collection of mountains right in the middle of the route. And Sri Lankan roads being what they are, most people prefer to avoid that section of the country. So when I started asking around about buses, the suggestions I got all involved going first to Colombo, and then to Hambantota from there. This would have meant something like 11 or 12 hours on a bus. Ick.

Fortunately, my parents thought this plan was dumb, and they had the driver drop me off in Ratnapura on their way to Colombo. From Ratnapura, I could get a bus to Embilipitiya, and then transfer to the Hambantota bus for a grand total of 5 hours on buses. Way better. The driver wasn't too thrilled with this plan, and he was not entirely confident in my ability to handle the transfer in Embilipitiya, but it wasn't really his choice.

I stepped out of the van in Ratnapura directly into the Embilipitiya bus. Ratnapura is a fairly famous town in Sri Lanka. It is known for gemstones and so it attracts a lot of tourists. That day, however, they were nowhere to be found, and so it was quite obvious to everyone on the bus that I was a young woman travelling alone through Sri Lanka. This kind of thing just isn't done. I've decided I like that travel style though. Sri Lankans like to practice their English when they have the chance, so I get to meet all kinds of interesting and really nice people on the way. Such as Chaminda.

Chaminda found me about half way to Embilipitya. He offered up a polite pleasantry or two, and for a few miles that was it. But he asked me where I was from, and it was then that I noticed his accent. It wasn't entirely Sri Lankan. There was... Dutch?... in there as well. His English was also perfect. So was his French. He told me he spoke German as well, although I couldn't put that to the test.

So... a Sri Lankan who speaks fluent English, French, and German. There aren't many of those around. We ended up having a nice chat, during which it was revealed that he used to be a Buddhist monk.

I wasn't aware that there were ex-monks running around, although I suppose it makes sense. Apparently, Chaminda spent 2 years as a monk and decided he could get nothing more out of the experience, so he returned to society. At that point, I had to give him a bit of grief for even speaking to me. Monks generally do not socialize with women at all.

This actually turned into a fairly interesting cultural conversation. It seems Sri Lankan women are fairly silent on busses, and they won't talk to strange men. I tried to explain that it's the same in the States, but here I need to talk to locals so that I know what bus to get on. All in all, a very weird experience.

Chaminda lives near Uda Walawe, a very famous elephant park, and he invited me to go with him to see it. I didn't though. I had another bus to catch. So that was the end of that.

Reader Poll

2006-07-31T00:38:00.000-04:00

The last few days have been crazy, and life is going to stay that way until I get back home, I think. I'm with my parents now and we're up near Sigiriya, kicking around a bunch of ruins.

We spent the last few days at YEF doing serious work on the website. And then, on Saturday, I got up at 4 am and took a van to Colombo. I was going to meet my parents in Kandy. I took a bus to Kandy, and arrived at the hotel to the blissful realization that I have a room to myself for the first time in 9 weeks. Sri Lankans aren't really introverted -- they can't afford to be. Everyone lives too close together. I think I found the only other introvert in all of Sri Lanka.

Travelling with my parents is always an experience (heck, at this point, hot water is an experience. I love my showers now). They've hired a driver to take them around the country, and I think he has a crush on my mom. It's really funny. He won't really talk to me or my dad. I think he's afraid of us.

I come home in a little less than a week!!! It will be great, and I'm really excited. This may be my last post before I get home, so I'm sorry it's short. Anyway, this blog was created to cover my trip to and from Sri Lanka, so now that I'm pretty much done with that, I'm trying to figure out if I should keep up with my blog. The only reason I would is if other people still want to read it. So if you really care one way or another, let me know.

Still Alive

2006-07-26T07:12:00.000-04:00

My parents made it to Colombo, finally, and we're all doing well.

Anyway, just a quick update while we register a domain for YEF/YPF.

We're back in Weligama until the end of the week, and we're doing website stuff. I hate webdev. HATE. But nevertheless, that's what's on the table. Oh well.

There's some stuff that doesn't go in the blog, and so you should all remind me to tell you what it is when I get back. The key words here are tea plantations and bollywood. Think of the possibilities.

Thursday was weird. My parents got in and we drove down with them. I had Indian curry for the first time since I got here, and ohmigod it was good. I miss Indian. My parents were staying in Galle, which is before Weligama, so Meg and I were all set to catch a bus for the rest of the trip. Only problem was that by the time we got to Galle, the busses had stopped running.

We spent the night in my parents' hotel, which was absolutely gorgeous. It had hot water and A/C, quite a nice change from the guest house. And coffee. Actual, honest-to-god coffee.

Friday we went back to Weligama, grabbed some clean clothes, and met B. and G. in Mirissa. They were in Matara with W. and A. for a conference, and through some nefarious method, they had managed to lose their supervisors and come find us. We rode to Hambantota with them, where we spent the weekend.

I spent all weekend doing webdev for CRC, and as a result I didn't sleep much. I had told B. that during school, I don't go to bed until about 2:30 and for some reason he thought this was a really *good* idea. I don't know why. So he has apparently been practicing going to bed at 2:30 and waking up at 6:30. He's dumb.

...Though I'll admit that I got about 4 hours of sleep total, all weekend.

I got a really nice surprise though. My parents were supposed to stay in Unawatuna for a few nights, but they got to the town, checked out their hotel, and decided they would be happier in Hambantota with me. I got a phone call on Saturday night, grabbed G. and B., and we all went out to dinner at my parents hotel. I wasn't sure how well my parents would get along with my colleagues, but things seemed to go well. At the very least, we were a one family comedy routine.

That night, both B. and I were up really late. I was doing website junk, and he was busy creating cards for a scholarship ceremony the next day. We were the only ones up, so I got to ask him all the cultural questions I've been hoarding.

High on my list is the fact that Sri Lankans don't make eye contact. I hadn't experienced this much, but I'd read about it, so I was curious as to the reason. It turns out that Sri Lankans look at each other's mouths when they speak, rather than their eyes. I like this system. I hate eye contact, but I can deal with mouths. I was quite happy to hear that I had no eye contact obligations in this country.

...Until we picked up this conversation again later, and B. told me that when he talks to me, he looks at my eyes instead of my mouth. Apparently he thinks they say different things. And you all wonder why I hate eye contact. And wear my hair in front of my face.

Sunday, Ashan showed up with 2 of his brothers for a scholarship ceremony and staff meetings. It all seemed to go very well. Then we all piled into his van and headed back to Weligama. We had a nice lunch with the boys and the Weligama crew at a guest house. We stopped into the office for a half day to work with YEF's tech guy on their website. We've been working ever since.

Was it good for you too?

2006-07-19T13:37:00.000-04:00

Well hmmm... My parents were supposed to arrive in Colombo tonight, but they're stuck in the Bombay airport for about 27 hours. I am not a fan of Bombay (Mumbai), having spent a few hours there myself. My mom called today to tell me what was going on. Apparently they weren't issued boarding passes and their plane left without them. They were then stuck in the transit lounge for 15 hours before they finally got bumped to a different lounge. They're #20 on the waiting list for the next flight to Colombo, and the airline is swearing up and down that they'll get my parents on that flight. Riiight.

...except that I sort of believe them, because I know my dad. And my dad is one of those people who becomes...unpleasant...when other people screw up and waste his time. Words are exchanged. Promises are made. People's mothers are insulted. Verbal violence becomes imminent. And at about this point, I usually leave the house, because I start to feel really bad for the phone company (it's usually the phone company. They're legendary. Although after last summer's A/C fiasco, Sears is a close second). Right, so my dad, slow motion powder keg that he is, is stuck in Bombay for 27 hours with no way to leave and no guarantee that he'll even be on the next flight. If I were in Bombay, I'd want him out of the country as soon as possible.*

The other big story is that I am also in Colombo. Meg and I are developing a web site for YEF and their tech guy works in Colombo during the week. We really need to work with him, so on Monday we packed up and went to Colombo. We leave for Weligama tomorrow, and then Friday we head off to Hambantota to hand over their website and their database. Party!

Meanwhile, heat is no good for laptops, and mine is no exception. I pulled it out last Sunday for work and I couldn't figure out why my case was suddenly warped. Until, that is, I turned the thing over and found the battery doing a good impression of a balloon. One of the l-ion packs seems to be in the process of exploding, and it's screwing up everything. So now I have no laptop battery.

We briefly encountered an Australian woman at our guest house, and she's into food in a big way. Tracy had dinner with us one night, and Meg sat in gaping awe as Tracy and I went back and forth describing our favorite foods from home. The memories of pesto and apple pie and spanakopita evoked emotions that I haven't felt in weeks. Something awoke inside of me...It was sort of like porn. "You guys sort of almost had a cigarette after." -Meg

Tracy headed off to Unawatuna on Monday morning, so that was the end of the food fetishism.

*Sorry Dad. It's not a bad thing. It just is.

A begrudging thanks...

2006-07-15T00:34:00.001-04:00

...to my old West Chester friends (who probably aren't reading this) for their LAN parties. I didn't think that computer games were life skills, but people are definitely impressed when a girl can show up and start shooting things.

Meg and I are in Hambantota now (again) for the weekend. We have some things we want to finish up and we miss our old friends (and the internet) and so yesterday we hopped on a bus and showed up here. We had given everyone a heads up that we were coming, and so B. decided that this would be the perfect opportunity to reformat and reinstall all the computers. They had viruses, and since Friday there are no classes at the centre, we had a lot of time to get things done and get them done right.

We arrived around lunch yesterday to find B. and D. standing in the door waiting for us. We grabbed a quick lunch of fruit salad and ramen (and yes, I ate some fruit salad. It had banana, mango, pineapple, and some other stuff. Mom and Dad, you should be *really* proud right now.) and then B. and I settled in to the task of fixing the computers.

This was a somewhat time consuming process because we only had 2 windows CDs, and the installation takes a good bit of time. Additionally, there were a few issues that needed to be resolved. So we were just settling down for a long night of computer stuff when Meg ran into the room to say that we had to leave right then for G.'s house, to visit her. So much for formatting. We visited G., and had a nice chat. Then Meg and D. went off to town to grab food, and B. and I started walking back towards the centre to finish up the work on the machines. We had plans to visit Thushari later that night, but we ran into her early. I had a lot of tea yesterday.

We finally made it back and did some computer work. This is the kind of work day that I really like. Two friends (Meg and D. were elsewhere, doing other things), no boss, just relaxed and fixing computers. It's great. The only thing that would have made it better was pizza.

Meg and D. returned from parts unknown with food. They persuaded us to take a break and watch a movie. We threw in "Constantine", which may have been a mistake. D. didn't like it, so she and Meg left, but B. and I were suitably amused for a few hours. After that, back to formatting.

Meg and D. were really tired at this point, and they went to bed. We all stayed at the centre that night, racked out on the floor. B. and I weren't done with our work, so we stayed up.

The problem with formatting computers is that it can't really be done in parallel without many CDs. So it takes a lot longer than it should because each machine has to be fixed one at a time. And for most of that time, the user isn't doing anything. Add flaky power to this equation (yes, we have UPS's, and a generator, and sometimes it's still not enough) and we had a long night of waiting ahead of us. Finally we were left with one troublesome machine, which I was working on. B. didn't have a whole lot to do, so he started trying to get a working install of Mobile Force. This is a first person shooter (FPS. you run around with a gun and kill people), and it's amusing if nothing else.

I fixed the last machine, and then I fixed the cracked version of Mobile Force (I'm pretty sure you can't actually buy legal software in Sri Lanka), and then we started to play. I hate FPS games because I'm terrible at them, but this went pretty well. There was a series of 8 single player missions, and B. decided that we should beat all of them before going to bed. At this point it was about 11:30, and we get up at 6. Why not?

We succeeded, but it took us a few hours. We went to bed at 2:30. And there is no coffee here. This morning was grim.

Internet is much less convenient in Mirissa than it was in Hambantota, so my posts and emails will be less frequent. I'll try not to get too far behind though.

On a completely unrelated note, I found out on Thursday that all forms of pornography are illegal in Sri Lanka. Now there's a concept. Dinesh said that it's definitely still around, and still a problem, which doesn't surprise me. This doesn't affect me in any measurable way, but it does strengthen my belief that although it would be fairly difficult for a Sri Lankan to offend an American, I could get myself shunned within about 3 sentences. Hrm. I continue to be careful. People don't even make dirty jokes here, as far as I can tell. Or maybe they do and I just can't understand the Sinhala.

I decided not to learn Sinhala before I came here, because I was pretty sure I wouldn't need it, and most people want to practice their english anyway. As it turns out, this was the right decision. I've come to the conclusion that it is pretty much impossible to learn spoken Sinhala from a book. The pronunciation is just too different. There are many consonant sounds that I miss entirely when I'm listening to Sinhala. But I am picking up the odd word here and there. I can really appreciate the effectiveness of language immersion courses.

At this point, my biggest obstacle in learning Sinhala is my French. I'll try to compose a sentence in Sinhala, and I'll end up with something French instead. A friend of mine described the same problem when he went to Scandanavia, so I know it's not just me. But it's weird. It also doesn't help that I found a French novel in the hotel and so I'm reading that to clear out some of the mental cobwebs. It's going better than I expected. But very, very slowly.

ZZZZT!

2006-07-11T23:25:00.000-04:00

For a country that outlaws homosexuality, the guys here have eerily good taste in jewelry.

Saturday was my last day at the centre. After 6 weeks with my coworkers, I felt it was appropriate to come up with gifts, and so I spent a week drawing portraits of all the staff. Some came out better than others, but people seemed to like them. I hadn't expected the staff to come up with gifts for me, so I was floored when B. handed me what turned out to be a beautiful and funky necklace that I'll actually consider wearing. Meg got one too. They're small gifts, nothing too fancy, but he nailed my taste. I was amazed.

Many other staff members gave us small jewelry items as well. I think it's a hint. Meg and I don't wear much jewelry normally, and I didn't bring any beyond what I was wearing, so I was looking fairly unadorned for most of my stint in Hambantota.

M1 showed up to work to say that the children weren't coming because there was some large tsunami-related event going on that day. So nice of them to tell us. All the staff had already shown up to teach. It was ok though, because that meant we got to hang out with the staff more. The van to Weligama was supposed to arrive around noon, and then we would head to the Youth Environmental Foundation.

The van arrived. I won't get into the good byes, but they were rough. I'll really miss the folks at the centre.

Anyway, so the van showed up. I managed to drag myself into the office to meet my new group of coworkers, and ohmygod they're tall. I'm not even close to the tallest one anymore. I think that may have even been the first thing out of my mouth. Three guys, all about 5'10" or 6'. Good lord. They towered over all of us.

The guys were really nice. Their english was quite good, and they were very sympathetic to the fact that we weren't at our best. We piled into the van, swung by Thushari's house to grab her, the kids, and the grandmother, and set off. Thushari and the rest of the family were going to Matara for a school competition. Matara is right next to Mirissa, so they hitched a ride with us.

This brought the van population to 9 plus our luggage. I was crammed into the very back seat with Dinesh and a few bags. Dinesh is a college student and staff member at YEF, and his english is incredible. He's practically fluent. We spent a lot of time talking about YEF, my stay in Sri Lanka, and the States. Dinesh was (and continues to be) extremely curious about developed countries in general. He wanted pictures of everything (like nuclear power plants) and was dying to know how Americans were different from Sri Lankans.

About 45 minutes into the trip, we pulled over and stopped at a very odd stretch of land along the coast. The dirt was bright red, and almost no plants grew, save for some very small grass. Dinesh told me that this was a very famous beach because an asteroid struck. Hence the lack of plants and red soil. The beach itself was absolutely gorgeous. It was like something right out of a tour guide. I joked to Dinesh that all of my friends would be morbidly jealous, and it seems that this was the right thing to say. He is now obsessed with taking us places for the express purpose of luring all my friends to Sri Lanka. I tried to explain that you're all completely envious anyway, but my words fell on deaf ears.

The rest of the van ride was not particularly noteworthy. We dropped Thushari and the gang off in Matara and continued to Weligama and the office.

At this point, it was probably about 7pm or so, but it felt much later. The day had been exhausting. And when I walked in to meet the staff for the first time and saw no females, things got that much worse.

This requires background information. In the States, I am quite comfortable being a leader. People seem to fear me for some reason. They follow me. I am happy with that. But here, I don't speak the language, I'm female, and I'm foreign. I've gone from "tyrant" to "little sister." Hmph.

The staff were all quite nice. They're a really great group of young guys who put their heart and soul into the YEF. And they're very organized. It's actually wonderful. A consultant's dream come true. We met them, and then we went to our dwelling.

We are staying in a guest house, fairly close to the beach. It's like a tropical paradise. Palm trees are everywhere, as well as exotic flowers and animals (we found a scorpion yesterday). We have a room with a bed and a living area. The guest house overlooks a vegetable garden, and it's quiet and secluded. This is the off season, because of the monsoons, so we're the only ones staying here.

This is a huge change from Hambantota. Hambantota is in the dry zone, so there is very little rain and it's quite hot. It's also full of bugs. Mirissa is in the semi-monsoon zone, or something like that, so the temperature is much more reasonable, there's a lot of green, and there are very few mosquitos. We don't wear repellant here, and we don't sleep under mosquito netting. I love it.

That was all of Saturday. We crashed pretty hard, and then Sunday came.

We slept late Sunday morning, and we were still eating breakfast when Dinesh and Thusitha showed up to talk to us about the projects we would be doing. We hashed out a scope of work, and then they showed us the beach.

Mirissa is famous for its beaches, and with good reason. They're picturesque, very close, very clean, and very safe. The surf is calm and it stays shallow for a long time. I can tell we'll be spending a lot of time here. We went swimming later, and it was great. The water was warm, and it's one of the most pleasant beaches I've ever seen.

The really nice thing about staying in a tourist town is that the locals are fairly used to seeing white people. It's just not that uncommon. So although we still get honks and waves, it's not nearly as bad as it was in Hambantota. On the other hand, people here have learned that tourists will give out "bon-bons" if they ask, so we get requests from the kids.

Monday was a holiday, so we didn't go into the office. A good thing too. Meg got sick again, most likely because of the food. Fortunately, it wasn't serious and she was better later that day.

While Meg was curled up in bed, Dinesh and Harshana, the IT guy, showed up to talk about the web page. This was a bit frustrating. Harshana goes to college in Colombo, so he's only around on weekends, which is when we have our days off. But he really wants to work with us, both to practice his english and to learn from us. So our weekends are now Friday and Saturday.

Tuesday was our first actual day in the office. We arrived around 9 and immediately Dinesh set us up with a bunch of informational videos about YEF. It was a big help. YEF is basically a very organized network of volunteers who take on really ambitious projects, such as building relief housing for tsunami victims. And there's no website because we haven't developed it yet. But once it's done, we'll let you know.

The thing that really stands out about this staff is that they're super organized and really eager to help us get things done. I love it. I think this will go really well.

As previously mentioned, the staff is very intent on learning english. Although about half the staff can speak quite well, almost fluently, they're all dying to learn more, to the point where they want formal english lessons from us. We started out today with "favorites" and then moved on to slang, idioms, and finally epithets. What started out as a simple lesson in color ended with the staff members all cursing at each other in english and laughing until their sides ached. Dinesh told me later that it was the most fun he'd ever had at work.

Manoj, the executive director, was also hanging around for this. I was concerned about introducing this sort of material into any class (it was all Meg's idea), and when Manoj walked in, I figured I'd be on the next plane back to the States. But when he realized what we were doing, he sat down. Then he asked for a notebook. In fact, all of the staff were taking copious notes.

The last couple nights, the CRC people have been calling us. They want to know how we're doing, and they want to make sure we're ok. As far as I can tell, everyone in Sri Lanka is quite confident in their ability to host foreigners, but they don't trust anyone else to do it right. So there are many questions about how the food is, how the room is, if we're doing alright... it's really sweet.

And now for something completely different. Power has been a recurring issue for us all through this trip. For starters, Sri Lanka uses 2 different kinds of plugs. I'm not sure why; maybe there's an amperage difference or something. But it means we're always scrounging for connectors. And there just isn't the same amount of electronic support. There's usually 1 outlet per room. Only 1 socket. This put a strain on our laptops.

We bought what seemed to be a really nifty power strip. It can take any plug format, and each socket is individually switched. Then one day I plugged in my laptop. There was a spark, and the socket went dead. We pulled the strip apart to find some of the worst craftsmanship and soldering I've seen in a long time. We managed to fix the thing, but it wasn't pretty.

A few days later, Meg's laptop power supply died. There are 2 parts: the brick and the cable, and she wasn't sure which one was faulty. She decided to test by plugging in the cable and...can you guess? Because it was pretty dumb. She stuck a pair of scissors into the bare plug. She wanted to see if it sparked. Well it did. It also fused the scissors to the cable and tripped the circuit breaker on the room.

And then last night, there was a spark, and Meg found a break in the wire. So she cut off the offending cable and spliced the rest back. This seemed to work, until I got woken up very early this morning to hear Meg tell me that she'd just electrocuted herself on my laptop, and we had no power. ARRRGGHH!

The lack of power was the more worrying issue at that point. No power means no fans. We can't open the windows at night because the bugs will fly in, so we rely quite heavily on the fans to keep the room livable. Within minutes, it was stifling and miserably humid. And all the bugs came back anyway.

I tried to sleep, and Meg was wreaking general havoc trying to get the power back. The breakers were all fine, and so there wasn't much she could do. She contented herself with shining her LED flashlight in my eyes.

The power returned after some good while. Meg electrocuted herself again, and then it was shown that by wiggling the power strip, we can flicker the power in the room. I have some not-so-nice words for any ECE folk who didn't teach her enough to make this work. I am grumpy this morning. I am also not going within 10 feet of her power strip. There are enough outlets in the room that I don't need to.

We're going back to Hambantota this weekend. Partially, we want to hand over a database, but also we just want to see friends. I hear that W. has been asking after us a lot, and he wants to know why we haven't called the centre yet. So we'll do that today.

I think she's trying to tell us something

2006-07-07T22:45:00.000-04:00

My parents (

party

animals that they are) think it would be really fun to have a "Welcome Back"

party

when I get home, and I tend to agree. And P.S. all my friends are invited. Here's the rundown:

Date: Saturday, August 12 (if the 12 is not a Saturday, it's still Saturday)
Event:

Party!

Location: Hallie's House
Call: no
Show: TBA - afternoon sometime
Strike: no
Equipment: food, people, pool
TIC: hparry, hparry.parents

If you're interested, please email me (hparry@andrew.cmu.edu) so I can figure out how much food to make. There is probably some floor space if people are coming from parts far away (or just bring a tent and camp out in the back yard :) ). I can supply all directions, addresses, and other necessary info by email.

I'll be arriving home on August 6 or 7, so at that point I can start talking to people via phone and zephyr again.

Bye Bye Bitter

2006-07-07T11:25:00.000-04:00

If you've practiced enough, you can spot a CMU student from 50 feet. You just look for the bitter cloud hanging around them. As a rule, we tend to get really fed up with things that waste our time, and when we put time and effort into something, we expect big payouts. This leads to a lot of disappointment, and subsequently, an attitude problem worthy of Joe Pesci on steroids (remember the SNL skits? the really old ones? good.).

So the CMU types among you can imagine my surprise when we drove an hour to the hot springs to stay 20 minutes, and then an hour to Kataragama today to stay for about 20 in the temple, and another 30 minutes kicking around town. And the weirdest thing was, no one seemed to mind. Nobody thought this was a waste of time, or a morning ill-spent, or anything like that. I thought they'd all gone mad.

And then I got really jealous. Because they've got the time to travel 2 hours just for 20 minutes of amusement. Life is just that relaxed here. And I noticed today that I'm a lot less irritable and bitter than I was when I left CMU. It's just not worth it. I might get aggravated for an hour or two, but that's the end of it. Before I left, one of my friends predicted: "You will be so chill when you come back." I think I owe him 10 bucks now.

So Kataragama. Kataragama is town with a very noteworthy temple. And to get there, we travelled an hour each way with D. (the cook/housekeeper at the center) and her son. D. doesn't speak much English, but she's a lot of fun to be around, and she and Meg have really bonded.

I haven't been to too many temples here, but Kataragama is definitely in a class by itself. The site isn't a temple so much as a very benevolent compound. Visitors go in a gate at the entrance and are immediately surrounded by plants and statues of elephants and lions. There are various religious buildings with Hindu and Buddhist figures in them, and lots of plants. It's almost like a park, or a greenhouse exhibit.

We walked around for a bit (not long) and then wandered back into the town, stopping first at a small shop for a snack. I'm really liking the heat now. Walking was a little tough in the sun, but really it wasn't bad.

We caught the bus home, and that was pretty much the end of the trip. And it was a great trip. I had a lot of fun and though I wouldn't have minded spending more time at the temple, it was very satisfying.

Tomorrow is our true last day at the center. We're going in for half a day and then leaving at noon for Weligama. I learned of our plans this afternoon, and immediately hit the Packing Funk.

The Packing Funk

I don't like packing. I'm not convinced that anyone really does, but for me, it's like torture by tedium. And so whenever I have to pack for anything, I hit a sort of Zeno's paradox along the way. I'll get half way done and then I'll be suitably irritated that I'll take a break. I'll return and get half of the remaining task done, and then a good song will come on and I'll have to stop and air guitar for a while. Or the cat will come in and knock over my piles. Or I'll decide that now, right now is really the best time to sort my [collection of over 10,000] Magic cards. Maybe my ex from 5 years ago really didn't get what he deserved and his day of reckoning has come. Who knows. The point is, packing takes forever, and the whole time I am absolutely miserable.

So right now, for example, the packing is about 3/4 done, and I'm here typing my blog. And when I go back home, I'll draw some portraits for Thushari and her family as a good bye present. And then I'll probably think about packing the rest and decide it can be done tomorrow, before work. Fortunately, I don't have too much to pack.

This post really lacks in the comic relief department, so I'm going to talk about Zeno's Paradox some more, because it holds sentimental value to me.

Back when I was about 10, maybe 4th grade or so, my dad told me about this guy Zeno, and his little theory that you can't walk across a room (because first you'll have to walk half way, and then half of the remaining distance, and then half of that, etc...). This is quite a piece of knowledge for a 10 year old. It took me a little while to get my head around the idea of paradox. Longer, unfortunately, than it did for me to run into class the next day and excitedly tell my teacher that I couldn't get across the room. And then, I couldn't remember why. I couldn't remember what the paradox was. And my teacher had apparently never heard of it. I have never quite forgiven the educational system for hiring a 4th grade teacher who has no knowledge of arcane, useless bits of incorrect mathematical and philosophical theory. I mean, really.

I've since had time to reflect upon the whole incident. I feel like I had a really powerful weapon there, just for a little while, and I wish I'd known how to use it. So clearly, I must find a suitable 10 year old through which I can live vicariously. I'll teach him all the random junk I know and turn him into a philosophical terror.
"Clean your room."
"I can't get there."
...and so on. His crippling, yet innocent intellect will wreak havoc on all who dare stand in his path. He will rule legions of playground armies. And then I will never babysit for this child.

I really miss Pinky and the Brain. Because now I have to come up with these schemes on my own, just to amuse myself.

Happy F&*#$ing 4th

2006-07-06T10:29:00.000-04:00

First of all, I want to thank everyone who's reading my blog and especially those who leave comments. I can't respond to every single one, and I feel terrible, but you have no idea how great it is to hear from friends at home. I haven't been able to make international calls, so this and email are the only communication methods I have, and I really miss you guys!

Now, back to the good stuff, and the explanation of the really bitter title.

I miss home in general, but there aren't too many actual events that I was sorry to skip. Mostly this is because I very craftily avoided looking at concert listings. So really, the only big thing is the 4th of July. And I love the 4th. I love the food, I love the fireworks, and it's usually a pretty good excuse to see friends that I don't see often (or at least, often over the summer). I decided then, that I would have a small celebration here. Nothing fancy, nothing big, maybe just burning some brush. If marshmallows happened to appear, so much the better. I didn't even allow the thought of burgers to cross my mind.

I figured this wasn't too much to ask.

...so if someone would like to explain what wires got crossed which resulted in me getting food poisoning instead, I'd really love to know. God, that was a miserable day. Meg and I both got really really sick. All day. If you've ever had food poisoning, well, you know. And if you haven't, ignorance is bliss.

Popular opinion (guidebooks, friends, family, and doctor) suggested that I would, at some point, get sick here. Fortunately, my doctor gave me some contingency meds, and I was able to drag myself into work for a half day. This proved to be singularly unproductive since I fell asleep almost immediately upon arrival, but it did serve to get me out of the house and out of the sick room, where Meg was not faring quite so well.

Here, I must digress to remind the Stateside audience of some definitively American aspects of getting sick. The first is that food poisoning doesn't rank high on my list of serious illnesses. This probably isn't a universally American sentiment; it's just me being stubborn. But still... fever and nausea warrant at least 24 hours of study before I'm willing to seriously consider a doctor. This is largely because of American hospitals: the thought of spending 3 or 4 hours in a waiting room while I'm sick makes me feel even worse. So although I was entirely prepared to surrender multiple unborn children to whatever heathen gods would heal me, I was quite definitely against any and all efforts to take me to a physician. Now, back to reality...

As I said, I made it to work. I spent most of the afternoon curled up with my laptop, and I think I was productive for about 15 minutes. Part of the reason I went in the first place was to explain what had happened; our cell phone wasn't working and neither was the landline, so we had no way to get in touch with the center and let them know what was wrong.

And here is where that paragraph about American hospitals becomes important. Sri Lankans really like to help each other and visitors, and my coworkers were quite concerned that Meg and I were sick. B. walked me home, both to make sure I actually made it and to check on Meg.

Meg was, to put it lightly, not looking so great. And B. saw this, and immediately called W., who showed up 5 minutes later. Neither Meg nor I thought this was necessary, and I can't say I'd be thrilled if my boss showed up at my house while I was sick, but it was quite nice of him. More phone calls were made, all in Sinhala, and G. arrived as well. The point being that I couldn't protest at all, because I didn't know what was going on. This was probably for the best. We didn't know we were going to a doctor until the three-wheeler showed up. Otherwise, we would have dug our feet in a lot more- AUUGGHGHH! Feedback! There is a telecast going on in the next room and they've managed to ring on pretty much every frequency. It's like they're pink noising in really slo-o-o-o-o-w motion. I feel like Odysseus chained to the ship mast listening to the sirens sing, because I really want to run over and fix this.

Ok. So kicking and screaming (read: gurgling and wiggling a toe or two) we went to the doctor, which turned out to be pretty painless. We had to wait about 30 minutes, and we were able to sit in the three-wheeler outside, which was nice. The doctor sat us both down at once, listened to our symptoms, pronouced that we had food poisoning, and gave us some meds. I think the whole bill for both of us, medicine included, was $3.50.

We took the meds and now we're doing much better, and I can actually eat again. It is great. And that was my 4th of July.

At this point, those of you who know my work schedule are probably wondering what happened to Monday, my day off. I saved it, so I could end this post on a happier note.

G., the financial director, only works weekends, because during the week she is 3 hours away at college. This week, however, her grandmother was sick and the center was being audited (by Ernst & Young) so she stayed in town. The audit was Monday morning, and we wanted to see her afterwards, because she's really nice and a lot of fun to hang out with.

We all grabbed lunch at the Double N (don't eat here. food poisoning. bad.) and then G. rounded up her younger brother and 3 of his friends and we headed off to the hot springs. I was mystified as to why on earth 4 19 year old guys would want to drive their sister's friends around, but I gather there isn't really much to do in this town, even if you are Sri Lankan, so maybe they were bored.

We set out in a van for the hot springs, which were about an hour away. Very quickly, paved roads became just a memory, and we were on dirt. G. was quick to mention that all the dirt roads were government roads. I don't think she was joking. The van ride in itself was great fun. We went through the countryside and we saw peacocks, cows, buffalo, and the tree houses.

The tree houses aren't what you think. Here's how it works. Farmers have crops. Lots of them. Green, leafy things. One might even say elephant food. The elephants certainly do. And from a structural standpoint, there's not much a farmer can do to stop the elephants. Certainly not without wrecking his irrigation system, and not for a small enough amount of money that it's affordable (calling all mechE's... calling all mechE's....). So instead, the farmers build small huts in the trees that dot their fields. They sleep in the trees and when the elephants come, the farmers try to scare them away. Wow.

We arrived at the hot springs, which were a bit anticlimatic. You don't sit in them. You get a bucket and pour the water on top of yourself. But they were beautiful, and I have some neat photos for when I get home.

So then we drove around. We went to G.'s uncle's house and hung out for a bit, and we saw elephants at the garbage dump again, and we dropped people off and went home. It was a lot of fun. The boys, once they decided to talk, had a great time teaching us how to swear in Sinhala. One of them decided that Meg was a turtle, and I'm a fox. I'm pretty sure he doesn't know the American connotations of that word, especially since he said I looked 55 when he first met me. Little whippersnapper. My mom doesn't even look 55. I valiantly resisted the urge to bludgeon him with my walker.

Speaking of my parents, it just hit me yesterday that they're arriving in about a week or so. I can't wait!

Tomorrow is our next day off, and we're spending the morning in Kataragama, at the temple I think. The temple in Kataragama is significant because it is open to Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, and Christians. We're going with some people from work, and I think it will be a great time. After that, M2 is coming over to hang out. Maybe we'll dance some more.

Today (because I don't think in linear time) I was all set to get cracking on the website for the center, and I was doing pretty well right up until the point when W. told me that B. had called him. B. was running late with some personal matter, and he wanted me to teach his computer class. I was pretty sure this was all a joke, until it was time for class to start and there was no sign of B.

There was nothing for it. I grabbed G. to translate for me and started to teach computer skills to a group of Sri Lankan kids. Other than the language barrier, this wasn't actually too hard. I've spent a lot of time watching B. teach his class because of my role in curriculum development. I also wrote the lesson plan for today's lecture, so it's not like I didn't know the material. The problem is that with only 5 computers and 15 students, chaos is inevitable (hey you physics people, quit your mumbling. I can hear you). And I couldn't really say anything useful. Fortunately, G. was there to help with crowd control. Thank heavens. B. didn't ever make it in to work, so I taught all 3 sections, with G. by my side. Fun day.

The only reason that this bothers me at all is that it was supposed to be my last day at work, and B. is probably my closest friend there. As it turns out, I'll show up Saturday morning, so I'll get one last chance to say good bye to everyone.

The working theory is that Saturday, Meg and I will leave for Weligama. As some spam email once so wisely said, "In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they're not." I asked W. today what time we're supposed to leave, and he told me we'd discuss it on Saturday. Ok then. I just go where people tell me to, and it's quite nice. I left my inner control freak in the States (for the most part). So maybe I'll go to Weligama on Saturday. Maybe Sunday. Maybe not at all. I am quite content with all of those options.

"They disarm you." "They cut off my arms?!"

2006-07-01T12:00:00.000-04:00

I feel like my blog is becoming a brother to the tabloid newspapers, since my headlines seem to be so much more entertaining than my actual posts...

So I was typing just now and I realized that my arms are pretty much gone. I used to have all kinds of muscle built up in my forearms from lifting stuff and now... nothing. ::tear::

Part 2

2006-07-01T09:47:00.000-04:00

I meant to pick up the story days ago, but for some reason I'm not all that motivated to go near a computer. It's nice not having to check email every 10 minutes.

Sunday was a pretty dead day, all things considered. I showed up at work to find that the staff was involved in a 3 hour English lesson, after which there were classes, and then the rush to turn in final reports. Harith and Malmi also visited the center and checked out the classes. They both had a lot of fun and really wanted to go back.

Monday I went shopping with Maaike for lunch food. We had decided on spaghetti, roasted red peppers, and apple crisp. We grabbed our ingredients and took over Thushari's kitchen. Maaike was doing spaghetti sauce, and I was worrying about the crisp.

I'd asked my mom to email me a crisp recipe so that I had something to work off of, and it was a good idea in theory. In practice, everyone here uses the metric system, and my measurements were in English. Fortunately, apple crisp is a fairly ad hoc science to begin with, so I could guess for most of it. In order to bake it though, I had to convert between Fahrenheit and Celsius, which meant deriving the formula and then doing a bunch of math. The crisp turned out ok though.

After that was in the oven, I turned my attention to the peppers. I had intended to build a fire out back. Roasting peppers is a very aromatic endeavor, and they tend to drip. I didn't want to mess up Thushari's nice, clean stove, or waste her gas. She insisted though, so I put Meg in charge of the pepper problem.

I taught Chris to roast peppers with no problems, so I figured this was safe. But I hadn't counted on the staunch skepticism from the peanut gallery and kitchen mistress. Grilling isn't really in the vocabulary here (neither are bell peppers, for that matter. Non-spicy peppers don't make sense to most Sri Lankans), and I had a tough time convincing Thushari that yes, I really do want the things entirely black.

Once I'd cleared that hurdle, I turned my attention back to whatever I was doing. When I looked again 5 minutes later, there was a pepper roasting on a fork. The fork was glowing red. And then Thushari grabbed it without thinking and burned her hand. Ooops.

But the peppers finally got blackened, and it was then that I realized I'd made the offensively stupid mistake of cooking Italian and forgetting to buy olive oil. That's a hand-to-forehead moment if ever there was one. Olive oil isn't used much here, and the stuff we ended up getting was fairly weak. It is much more common to see vegetable oil or coconut oil.

Tuesday we schlepped all the stuff down to the center for lunch. Maaike's spaghetti was great, and I felt terrible for her because I don't think the staff liked it. Then I felt really bad because they liked my peppers and apple crisp and this was supposed to be her treat for the staff. Maaike, I'm sorry about that.

I had left the peppers at the center, and they appeared on the table for lunch the next day. Without bread. So I was a good sport and put some on my pumpkin curry. Oh. My. God. Heaven on a plate. I can't explain why it was so good, but it really, really was. I didn't think it would be. There were also some spicy green beans in there. Over all, a very good mix.

A couple more notes about food and eating: It took me a few weeks to really develop a taste for Sri Lankan food. The spices are subtle, and so when I got here, everything tasted the same. But now, it's better, and I can distinguish what I'm eating. Also, I like Sri Lankan papadum much better than Indian papadum. The Indian stuff has an herb or something that I'm not a fan of.

Finally, I was struck today by the realization that Sri Lankans don't use napkins. They eat with their hands, and yet there are no napkins in sight. The reason is because they don't need them. The right hand is used exclusively for eating. The left is not used for eating, and so it procures more food if needed. Hands are washed before and after meals. And eating rice with hands necessitates eating very close to the plate, so any food that falls, falls back to the plate. So, no napkins. My mouth and lips are generally cleaner at the end of a Sri Lankan meal than at the end of an American one. Very strange.

The week as a whole was not really noteworthy, although I did teach a few more gymnastics classes. And everything hurts. Dear the States: Please send a masseuse.

M2 has also been after me all week to dance every free minute she gets. This is fun, and I got her to teach me some Sri Lankan dancing. I'm really bad at it. But getting better.

Oh and finally... Meg has already used the filthy foreign diseases line, so I won't. There is a computer virus running rampant in the Hambantota area. It's fixable if you reinstall Windows, but it's completely insidious. Locks out the task manager, the folder view options, the command prompt, msconfig... IN SAFE MODE AS WELL. And it regenerates. This was a pain in the neck all week. The whole centre is infected, and we think the machines at the internet center are in trouble as well. So be careful with your laptop.

Today was quite a day at the centre. We had morning classes, during which time I frantically brushed up on my web design skillz in preparation for redesigning the centre's website. Then classes almost ended, and then everyone wanted me to dance. And do gymnastics and karate. So we did some of that, and I pulled another muscle. But it was fun, and the kids here really like to dance, which is great.

After lunch I finally got a chance to discuss the IT curriculum with B. Meg and I have long suspected that there is more to him than meets the eye. He asked us to teach him a fair amount about computer related topics, which we do. And, obviously, we're helping to develop the IT curriculum. But every so often he'll say or do something that suggests he knows a lot more than he's letting on. He also has another job somewhere.

So today I got sick of guessing and flat out asked him what his other job was. It turns out he was holding out on us big time. He teaches computer skills to adults. He produced the curriculum for that class, which includes 50 hours of theory and 50 hours of practice. It's a hugely scoped class, covering everything from "What is a computer" to MS Office to operating systems and even compilers and linkers. Good God.

Now, in the States, you wouldn't teach a class like that without having some sort of credentials. So then I had to ask him what his computer background was. I didn't get the whole story, but somewhere in there is a college degree in computer science. (!) At this point in the afternoon, I had to spend a good 5 minutes sitting with my tail between my legs. The really embarrassing part of all this is that I'm now more certain than ever that we told him a lot that he already knew, and yet he didn't say a word. I may have to go sit in on a class or two, since he knows xp far better than I do.

Once I'd been suitably whacked with the Humble bat, we finished up discussing the curriculum, and then M2 was after me to dance again. It was pretty late in the day, maybe 5pm. M2 and I started dancing as the rest of the staff finished up their jobs for the day. Then they all came in to watch us dance.

W. has been asking me all week to develop an exercise program for the staff, and I keep telling him I'm not qualified. So today, he, B., and M2 all started getting in on the dancing action. It was revealed that B. can break dance (and he calls himself a C.S. major). B. and W. took great pleasure in doing tricks to see if I could copy them (yes, I can also break dance. Vestiges of a misspent youth, I suppose), and I ended up doing head stands in the computer lab, with W. matching me. I felt it prudent to move things in to the main activity room where there was more space.

There, I had most of the staff trying hand stands and various gymnastic tricks. INCLUDING W., the executive director. Mass craziness ensued. Fortunately no injuries though, other than a small cut.

Some of you might remember that I did battle with lice, and then, with red dye all over my nice shirts. The problem with red dye specifically is that you can't use phrases like "red menace" because everyone gets the wrong idea. Anyway, I won. My shirts are now back to their original colors (white, and not quite white). Thank you, Chlorox.

Please to be hatingk the death metal

2006-06-26T05:02:00.000-04:00

I was in my room today listening to my laptop on headphones, and Harith walked in and wanted a piece of the action. I gave him the earbuds and turned on the iTunes visualizer and let him have fun for a while. I'd been listening to Cirque de Soleil, which I figured he'd like. And he did. He was completely enthralled by the visualizer and he sat still for 15 minutes. If you've ever known a 5 year old boy, you know what kind of achievement this is. But I wanted my music back after a while.

I decided that rather than just kick him off the computer, I'd just play some music that he didn't like. He'd get bored and leave, and life would be good. And, being fairly well versed in all forms of heavy metal, I figured I had more than adequate resources at my disposal.

I'm not a mean person by nature, so I started out with "Eye of the Tiger." Logic suggested that while it's a great song, it doesn't have any trace of a Sri Lankan beat to it, so it probably wouldn't appeal to most people here. Harith liked it though, so it was time to move on to bigger and louder things.

I ended up going through Skid Row, Godhead, Disturbed and Megadeth, among others. No curse words, and I made sure that the volume was at a very safe level, but I've found that people who aren't used to metal just find it unpleasant. That was not the case here. He liked them all. What kind of unholy witchery is that?! I finally had to resort to just taking the earbuds back and escorting him out of my room.

The last few days have been really busy at the center, so I dropped off the face of the earth for a while. I have a stack of emails to read, and I'll get to them all eventually.

Friday morning I didn't do a whole lot of anything, other than answer a few emails. Then, Trish picked us up in a tri-shaw and we went to the grocery store to shop for dinner. The grocery store in Hambantota is fairly small, and it has mostly Sri Lankan food. I've never seen so much cardamom in one place. The international section not quite non-existent, and we found some pasta, a few jars of sauce, spices, and chicken breast. We also grabbed a few ice cream popsicles for the road.

Some of you might remember that I'm allergic to cold temperatures (yes, really). This does, in fact, include food. But it doesn't bother me enough that I avoid ice cream. So I was sitting in the tri-shaw eating my ice cream and my mouth started to swell. A lot. Suddenly I was in the ring with Angelina Jolie and Natalie Imbruglia. I felt like the victim of a collagen bee sting. I think this may be a new area of cosmetic research.

We drove to a few other stores to get some errands done, and then we went to David and Trish's house. They live fairly close to us, down a dirt road and behind a pond. They've lived in Australia for the last 30 years or so, but they both grew up in England and they retain a delightful Britishness about them. We went out to the veranda for drinks (and they use words like "veranda." I never get to use words like that. In the States, it's "deck" or "porch". But here, veranda. Wow.) and talked for a bit.

Then we started dinner, which was an adventure in itself. The house is a typically Sri Lankan house, with a typical Sri Lankan kitchen: 2 gas burners, a hearth for building fires, and a sink. And some counter space. Things were a bit cramped. We didn't even attempt to build a fire, and instead restricted ourselves to the stove. It ended up working out fine. Trish is a bit like one of my grandmothers - very practical and very tolerant. Meanwhile, David and Meg were throwing on the radio in the living room and continuing their conversation. David had managed to find a radio station with American music, so occasionally I'd hear some Dire Straits or Paul Simon.

Dinner itself was heavenly: pasta with red sauce and Italian seasoned chicken breast. I ate more meat in one meal than I normally do in a week. Most protein in the Sri Lankan diet comes from fish. I've tried really, really hard to like fish since I've been here, and I just can't do it. I wish I could. Sorry, mom and dad.

The radio was still playing in the middle of dinner, and as some of you have probably been expecting, Meg and I suddenly burst into laughter for seemingly no reason at all. I have never been so happy to hear Sledgehammer in my life.

We spent all of Saturday and Sunday helping the staff get the monthly reports filled out. They were due last night and this is the first time they're using a new report format, so things were taking longer than normal. I ended up staying late a few nights, and I have to say it felt really good. I think it's the CMU work ethic. I feel like I haven't been doing enough.

Saturday, classes at the center start at 9 or 9:30 in the morning, and they end around 12:30, I think. This meant that the center was quite crowded, both with kids and the extra staff that come in on the weekends. I try to find a quiet corner to do my work, and that day it was proving particularly difficult. I finally went into the main activity room, which happened to be empty. I sat down in a straddle on the floor and bent over my notebook, intending to work more on the IT curriculum. It's a weird position to be in, but I like to stretch occasionally, and it keeps me more awake.

This was successful for about 5 minutes. Then, the kids finished whatever activities they were doing and started coming into the main room, where they found me. I found out much later that there are maybe 2 gymnastics centers in all of Sri Lanka, so this might have accounted for the number of kids who came up and stood in a circle, just staring at me like I had 3 heads. Then, they started to try to imitate me.

Well. Here's a game I just can't pass up. I slid into a split. The kids tried their best. And more came over. I stood up and went through a few simple jumps. My class got bigger. And then M2 told me I was going to teach that day, and before I could protest, she had all the kids (all ages) in a circle facing me.

Suddenly I had 40 students. I did the only thing I could do. I taught gymnastics. Very simple stuff, nothing dangerous. Just jumps and leaps, and a few tricks for them to watch, but not imitate. Of course, the rest of the staff thought this was just great, and now I think there are pictures somewhere.

I also managed to rip up something in my shoulder during all of this. If you ever have to describe a muscle injury to a Sri Lankan, don't say you pulled a muscle. It doesn't make sense to most people. Say you tore it. Then they'll understand.

The kids left, and I scrambled for the IBUprofen that I keep stashed away for just such emergencies. Treatment for a torn muscle is a combination of pain killers and stretching. To adhere to the second half of this regimen, I was in a corner somewhere adopting all sorts of weird poses, when M2 caught sight of me...and my navel ring.

Now before you get all up in arms, I don't generally go around showing my stomach. I'm not that kind of person. But I had to stretch, and when I pulled my arms over my head, my stupid little t-shirt rose a bit too much. And I guess navel rings aren't all that common here. M2 thought this was the greatest thing ever, all the time saying she could never get one herself because it would hurt too much. Giggling ensued.

She had pulled me into a more private room to check out my jewelry, and then she said she really liked my "belly." Err? Come again? "Belly dancing." Ohhhh. But I don't belly dance. I've never had a lesson in my life. I wouldn't know the first thing about it. But she was not to be deterred, and she wanted me to teach her.

After my last little recital, I'd had a suspicion that an encore performance would be requested, so I'd made a CD of a bunch of American songs that I like to dance to, and I keep it on me at all times while at work. I grabbed that and I asked M2 where I could play it.

And now I have to leave to go meet Maaike.

To be continued...

B++

2006-06-22T10:24:00.000-04:00

There was some stuff that went on at work that I'll get to in a minute, but the big story tonight is that my computer FINALLY dual boots into XP. It only took 3.5 weeks, an XP cd, 1 3 hour download, and 1 lost product key (many thanks to B. for his help in acquiring the necessary XP cd and getting the key again after the first went missing).

For those who care about these things, this is through boot camp. I wiped my XOM partition so I could do it "the right way." My version of boot camp has a very interesting quirk: if you partition your drive using disk utility, boot camp will recognize that there is a partition, but it will not let you install on it. So I had to unpartition the disk (read: back up everything onto my iPod), reinstall everything, reinstall boot camp, partition with boot camp, update my OS X installation, and then install windows. Sigh. But it works. It FINALLY works, and Star Craft and Heroes of Might and Magic III run beautifully. Life is goooood.

Back to work... Yesterday, we held a staff meeting to introduce the new monthly report format. I've never experienced a bilingual staff meeting before. It was a trip. I get the sense that not quite everything was translated for me, and the whole thing took 2 hours, but the bottom line is that the staff seemed happy, as did the administration. So I feel pretty good.

When I came home yesterday, Thushari and Malmi were curled up on one of the sofas looking absolutely miserable. It has been cool here (maybe 75 or 80), and it has rained the past few days. Apparently the change in temperature and pressure was enough to make Malmi's ears hurt to the point of tears, and both of them had headaches that laid them up all evening. They seemed much better today though.

Maaike has arranged to cook lunch for the staff members on Tuesday, and I'm helping. So I think buschetta, spaghetti (with red sauce!), and either Russian Creme or apple crisp. And lots of garlic. Everywhere. It's going to be great. Also, Trish invited Meg and me to her house tomorrow for dinner, so Trish and I will cook then. I don't know what we're doing. The plan is to go to the grocery store in the afternoon and figure it out there. This will also give me the opportunity to get bleach for my shirts. I'm so excited to cook again after so long. I hope I remember how.

Next week is my last week at the center, and I'm really sad to leave. I feel like I was just getting to know the staff and make friends, and now I have to start all over again. They're great people, and they seemed to tolerate me well enough. I'll miss them a lot. In the beginning, I was really excited to be working at 2 places. I felt it would keep me interested in work and prevent me from getting into too much of a routine. I still think this, but I'm less excited to leave Hambantota than I was. I'm just now starting to figure out how to live here, and I think people have finally gotten used to seeing me around town.

Mrs. Who?!

2006-06-20T23:27:00.000-04:00

My previous work experience includes several jobs that put me in close contact with many young children, so I had some relevant experience upon arrival at the center. Yesterday I confirmed a long held suspicion that kids will be kids, and they love nothing more than to imagine the soap opera lives of the adults who work with them.

I was standing in the computer room watching the children use the computers. One of my tasks is to help develop an IT curriculum for the center, so that children learn relevant skills that will help them get jobs. This is a hard problem to begin with, and it's made more difficult by the fact that the center only has 5 computers, and at any given time there are probably 15 or 20 students trying to use them all at once. So the curriculum needs to address the fact that even though not all of the kids can use computers at the same time, they all have to learn the material. Hence my time spent yesterday, watching the kids and trying to figure out how they split up the computer time.

There were 2 extra places to sit: a stack of plastic chairs, and a desk chair on castors. B. was sitting on the plastic chairs (it's his class) and I was standing, unsure of the protocol of taking a seat in a class that wasn't mine. B. invited me to sit, so I sat down in the desk chair for a few minutes until I was called away to do something else.

Upon my return, 3 or 4 young girls were clustered around the desk chair, saying that it belonged to B. There was a lot of smiling and giggling going on. I was immediately suspicious, the way I think most people are when they see a group of girls with a secret, but I also wasn't sitting in the chair. I told them that it was just fine, I'd stand, B. could keep his chair, and life would be good. This didn't seem to be the correct response, as they kept on telling me about this chair (and they called me "pimple face" in Sinhala...I don't know where that came from). So the chair. The legendary, mystical chair. The talking wouldn't stop. And gradually I realized that they weren't saying it was B.'s chair, but Mrs. B.'s chair, and the implication was that I was Mrs. B. I had a near heart attack imagining the ramifications of having those sorts of rumors flying around the office. Here I am, trying so hard to resprect cultural mores and the end result is that I'm the latest gossip, and probably in trouble.

I spent a good hour inwardly terrified of the consequences until I noticed that none of the other staff seemed to care. To them, it was a funny joke. I took a moment to think back to my days as a gymnastics coach, and things started to fall into place. Kids in the States do this all the time. They enjoy nothing more than to make up love affairs and tease the staff about them. It seems that kids here do the same. I was just so nervous about making a mistake that I didn't notice.

The other really interesting part of yesterday was the arrival of David and Trish, an older Australian couple who have spent their lives working with NGOs all over the world to manage rebuilding projects. They were in Africa during a coup, in India, 62 other countries that didn't get enumerated. It seems they want to help the center, which is great. They're here indefinitely.

I really envy David and Trish their travel experience. They seem completely at home with culture shock. They're a lot less uptight than I am. They've also been to Sri Lanka before, so that certainly helps.

You Might Have Mentioned...

2006-06-18T10:57:00.000-04:00

There are two long posts in very quick succession, and I blame this stupid software update. I was about 2/3 done downloading on Friday when we lost power and I wasn't able to get my post up in time. So today, I posted Friday's entry, and now I'm writing this one.

Yesterday was a big day for us at the center. We ran the final network cable, connecting the office computer to the rest. So now we can print from any computer in the center. I know this is not a big deal for most of my readers, but here it's huge. We're quite happy.

Overall it was a fairly weird day. I've taken to doing most of my work in one of the smaller, less used rooms of the center. The office gets crowded very quickly and there isn't much desk space, so I take my notebook and retreat to the psycho-social room down the hall (it has couches). I was there yesterday, trying to develop an IT curriculum for the young'uns (5-10 yrs) when Meg came tearing down the hall with a big grin on her face. She told me that she'd found out that B. is 20, and this means she has a younger brother (if you don't know Meg, this makes no sense and I'm not going to try to explain). I was skeptical. B. doesn't look old, maybe 25 or 27, but he certainly doesn't look 20. And if my Indian friends are any sort of guide, then he's probably older than he looks. Also, the office has taken to playing jokes on us.

So I told Meg that I was pretty sure she was wrong. In an effort to confirm her guess, she dragged B. back to me and asked him his age (apparently this is not impolite). "31." !? Whaaaa...? This guy is 31, and he has to sit and take lessons from 2 college girls? I have nothing but pity for him. He's been a great sport throughout, but I can't imagine he's got infinite patience for us.

To be fair, he doesn't act the way I would expect someone in his 30's to act. I don't know too many people of that age, but I know plenty of people who are mid-late 20's, and they act like B. So my guess was not totally unreasonable.

I have no idea how old B. thought we were. He asked me my age (like I said, apparently not impolite) and when I told him, his eyes bulged and he started laughing. I guess we look old here.

For the past 2 weeks or so, we've had about 16 guest counselors at the center. They're all about my age (I think...) and they do a lot of group activities with the kids. Games, sports, discussion...and dancing. There is a lot of dancing. Free form, rehearsed, with masks... It's really neat, and the children have a lot of fun. The conselors are also fairly good dancers, so when these dancing sessions occur, many of the staff will come out to watch, myself included.

Yesterday, after the age thing was sorted out, I was watching the dancing. I went to get lunch, and B. asked me if I liked to dance. I said that I did, but that I'm not good at it. I stressed that second point heavily. Well, after lunch, I was rushed by about 8 kids who all put in concerted efforts to drag me onto the dance floor. They were being encouraged by the guest counselors. I resisted mightily, but to no avail. So I eventually got dragged onto the floor, and the kids and counselors said they wanted to see me dance. I was almost ok with the idea of dancing with everyone else, in a group. But the music started and all the kids and counselors stayed seated against the wall. So they wanted me to dance. Alone. In front of them. Oh.

I didn't really have much choice. So I danced. Alone, in front of everyone. I think I'll try to avoid it in the future.

After a few minutes of dancing, I'd had about enough so I stopped. And then all the staff members, who'd just gotten the memo that the klutzy american girl was bustin' a move, ran out of their offices. There was a lot of encouragement for me to keep dancing. Nothin' doin' there, other than a few accusatory remarks directed towards B. about his involvement in the Hallie Dancing Conspiracy (he's denying everything and pretending he doesn't understand my English. riiiiiiight).

This Morning, or, Sri Lanka Health Education Needs Work
For the last week, I've seen Thushari performing tick checks on Malmi. I didn't think much of it, other than, "I didn't know there were ticks here."

This morning, as I was getting ready for work, Meg tramped into my room and ordered me to grab a comb and sit down. Apparently those tick checks were really lice removal expeditions. Not "checks", mind you, but actual efforts to eradicate organisms from Malmi's hair. Malmi and Harith both spend a fair amount of time in our room on our beds playing with the computers. And Thushari hadn't seen fit to mention that maybe we should be careful. It sounds like the myths about lice here are that they're not contagious, adults can't get them, and even if you are infected, don't worry about your clothes. The muttering that went on this morning... you can't imagine.

So Meg and I sat down to do lice checks. She found one on my head (f$%#&*@), as well as a few nits. I didn't find anything on her, but neither of us were really convinced that this meant anything. So we went to go find Thushari.

Meg had mentioned that the word "lice" doesn't really play a big role in the Sri Lankan English vocabulary, so we felt it would be necessary to present physical evidence of what we were talking about.

When we were doing the lice checks, we were faced with the problem of how to dispose of the critters without making the problem worse. Neither of us had any tape, but I mentioned that I had used the sticky side of Maxi Pads on ants with great success, and I had Maxi Pads in abundance.

Now I want you, the reader, to use your best imaginative skills to picture the following: Meg and I, in a part of the world where American girls are considered whores for using tampons, approach our... parent, for lack of a better word, with a Maxi Pad full of lice. Just think about it. The significance will hit you eventually.

Well. Party time. Thushari, fortunately, had some lice shampoo. Meg and I doused ourselves in some of the foulest smelling stuff since the Neutrogena T-Gel mess. Then we set about boiling our clothes.

And then I appreciated the full significance of the lack of water heater. Unfortunately, it wasn't until after both of my (white and eggshell) dress shirts got tie-dyed red. None of Thushari's clothes had ever been washed in hot water, and this included the threadbare red towel that bled all over my stuff. Tomorrow begins the Great Bleaching Project, with a possible encore supplied by the Dye The Damn Things Pink endeavor. And, because I'm trying to be courteous, this all has to be done without me swearing like a sailor.

Speaking of laundry. I cannot get my clothes clean. We have a washing machine, and I think the stains come out (I haven't had any to really test on), but my shirts in particular don't smell clean. I stress the smell. I really hope they have Febreze here.

The rest of the lice story is fairly boring. I called Ashan this morning to ask him to somehow find a lice comb. He's in the States right now, so I have no idea what time it was there (Ashan, I'm really sorry. Really). He told us that in a rural area like Hambantota, there's no stigma attached to getting lice, the way there is in the States. Good. After we washed the shampoo out of our hair, we went to work for a half day. We'll do some more checking over the next few days, because neither of us believe we've really solved the problem. Thushari said that many parents of lice-infected children won't actually do anything, so I can't image that Malmi won't be reinfected. School starts tomorrow, which will probably exacerbate the problem. <

Attn: Ex-HoTties
It is really amazing how easy it is to adopt a "hands-off" attitude when you don't have sufficient bandwidth to making checking the abtech inbox worthwhile. Amazing. I highly recommend it for all future Lame Ducks. Pure bliss.

Random
While I was at the Colombo airport waiting to be picked up, a couple of young kids started talking to me. They would ask me my name, and when I'd tell them, they'd run away laughing. That was the first time that I worried that my name met something in Sinhala. I didn't think any more of it until yesterday at work, when I got a new nickname: hali gemba. Or something close. It translates to "big frog." Hallie is "big". I don't know where the frog part came from. But now, I'm "Big Frog." I'm not too broken up about this. I like frogs. Even the biggest frogs are still small. And this nick name was derived from my name. I don't think it would have been created otherwise. Meg, on the other hand, is now "Elephant" and it has nothing to do with what her name sounds like. Nudge nudge wink wink say no more.

Don't Panic

2006-06-16T05:34:00.000-04:00

Dear the authors of the Rough Guide to Sri Lanka,

Please take your paranoid, xenophobic tendencies somewhere else, and stop using them to publish books. You're scaring the rest of us needlessly. If you really can't deal with the food, the accomodations, the people, the bugs, the heat, the humidity, the public transportation, or the stores, then JUST STAY HOME.

That is all.

-Hallie

This entry is really long because I have a 3 hour download to sit through. Sorry.

I bought 2 guide books in preparation for this trip: Lonely Planet and Rough Guide. I like using multiple sources and the most recent Lonely Planet was written before the tsunami, whereas the Rough Guide was published a few months after it hit. I'm living in areas that were very badly affected by the tsunami, so I felt it important to do some targeted research.

The Rough Guide authors have a very frank voice. Optimistically, they really want to be thorough about preparing travellers for all eventualaties, and they realize that the Sri Lanka life style is much different from those of their target audience. But the book lacks balance, and the warnings of crowds, bumpy roads, and scams far outnumber the good points. This, combined with my experiences of being a white female in Sri Lanka, made me more than a bit wary of trying to get anywhere beyond walking distance. So I spent a lot of time cooped up in the house, and finally I just couldn't take it any more.

This morning, Meg and I decided to brave the bus system so that we could get to Ambalantota, a near by town about 15 minutes away. The Rough Guide had few kind words about the buses, but really they're quite handy. The rates are extremely cheap ($.30/per person round trip) and as long as you're going to a town, it's pretty easy. There aren't many roads, so generally you get on the first bus you see that is going the way you are. A conductor will find you and take your money in exchange for a ticket, and they'll always have change, unlike the three wheelers that run around. The buses can be very crowded, but they'll get you where you want to go.

We walked through Ambalantota to the computer store where we picked up a flash drive, some blank CDs, and a power strip. Then we walked back through down, stopping in a few shops, and caught the bus home. No big deal, and now I feel a lot more confident about trying to travel further to some of the historic sights around. So maybe on Monday I'll be a bit more adventurous. So the moral of the story is that the Rough Guide people are wimps.

One of the really frustrating things about Sri Lanka is that although the heat is sweltering, there are very few places to get cold drinks. Most of the time, the bottles are room temp. No one seems to own ice trays either. I don't know why. Maybe they just don't like cold things. It's a pity. I've been craving a Thai iced tea ever since I got here, and even if I can find the tea, I don't know what I'm going to do about the ice.

Tangentially (Tim, if you're reading this, stop saying that word because it rubs off on the rest of us).... I haven't been able to find Thai tea in the States. The restaurants must get it from somewhere, but the biggest supermarkets don't seem to carry it. If you know where to get some, please tell me.

The frogs in the shower have gotten a bit voyeuristic lately. In particular, one of them likes to hang out on the shower knob at night, so when I go to shower, we have a bit of a negotiation. The frogs are very cute, but they're not doing a whole lot to reduce the mosquito population. And the lizards really need to get cracking on this fly issue. Clearly, they're not eating enough.

One of my coworkers, B., decided to start copying some DVDs for me, which is great. Meg and I have gotten into the habit of watching them when we get homesick. Trouble is, I wasn't able to get any blank DVDs today to return the favor. Yesterday, however, I brought in my USB game controller, and I showed it to B. in conjunction with my Street Fighter Alpha 3 ROM. I've never seen someone's eyes light up like that before. So then the whole office was playing Street Fighter and getting a kick out of it. I think that the way I'll repay B. is by downloading a few emulators and a bunch of roms so that he can play after I leave. The roms themselves are platform independent, and it's easy to find PC emulators. So now all that remains is the controller. I may have to ship one when I get home. I don't know where I would find it here.

Everything else is cheap, but hardware is jaw droppingly expensive. It all has to be imported, and there isn't much of a market beyond the business sector. People here have never seen Apples before. The IT guy at the e-learning center thought I was running Vista, and I don't think he ever really understood that it wasn't Windows. B. asked me if it was OS/2. How someone might hear about OS/2 and not OSX is somewhat puzzling to me, but hey...

I finally got to do some yoga last night. I used one of the upstairs rooms in the house. Yoga has never seemed that strenuous, but it takes on a whole new dimension in 85 degree heat and humidity. I imagine this is what bikram is like. It's...different. And concentration is very hard when you're carefully balanced on one leg and you have to keep swatting mosquitos. So this morning I woke up and was all sore. I didn't even do the full routine. I was supposed to do everything twice, and I only did it once. Tonight I'll try again.

The IT guy here just called us all in to a room where we had a video conference with a class of kids in Kandy. Full (if very compressed) video and full sound. It was really neat. They sang and danced and we watched. The internet connection is flaky here, so we kept getting disconnected, but overall it worked very well.

Blog Fixes

2006-06-13T01:45:00.000-04:00

I think I've got most things under control now (thank you, Adam!), so hopefully I'll go back to posting more regularly. If you were trying to leave comments before, sorry, my fault that it didn't work. But all the backlog is cleared now, so they're all posted, and new ones should show up immediately. Sorry for the mess. :)

Time to clear the blog backlog...

I'll go back to journaling in a minute, but I found out that my audience has extended further than the States (Hi Ashan, Swasha, and Mr. and Mrs. Dias!) which is really cool. Anyway, everyone reading should understand that this is a journal of random ramblings, and I may complain a bit, but don't worry. If there really is a problem, I'll get in touch with the right people. In the mean time I'm having fun being a stranger in a strange land with all that that entails.

Monday
I am a gallery of bug bites. During work yesterday, I noticed an odd redness on my foot. A closer inspection revealed oozing, swelling, and more discoloration. This worried me a bit, and later when I realized that the bite wasn't closing, I was concerned enough to seek out G., the financial director of the center, and the employee available with the best English. G. examined the bite and then sought out a few more poeple. Lots of pointing and Sinhala ensued, along with the physical repositioning of my foot (by them) to get it into the light. Meg thought all of this was absolutely hilarious and couln't looks at me without laughing hysterically. After much discussion, D. disappeared briefly and came back with a lime that she rubbed vigorously on the bite. G. explained that lime juice will neutralize the poison. !

When I woke up this morning, my foot was still swollen. So far, no one has been able to tell me what bit me, although the popular opinion is ants. I can believe that. There are red ants of all sizes here. I don't remember stepping on an anthill, but it might have happened.

Meg tells me that W. works 7 days every week and "invites" everyone else to do the same. I've been assured by MIjka through Meg that a 7 day work week is not the custom here and that I should be very firm about getting days off. So be it. I think we've come to an agreement with W. that Mondays and Fridays are our holidays, but the problem now seems to be enforcing the point that holiday means "no work." Today is one of my days off, but Meg and I are still leaving at 2:30 to go to a computer store with B., the IT supervisor, to pick up networking gear for the center. I'm not thrilled about this, but it means we'll get to see another part of town and it should be a short trip. Hopefully, after that, the beach.

Las night I was given a bit more insight into the lack of English here. I wandered into the kitchen to find Thushari studying a series of English instruction booklets. The booklets looked very nice and they were probably expensive. I peered over her shoulder. The book had sections of sentences, divided by verb usage. The english sentences were riddled with errors, both in spelling and grammar.

Tuesday
My mystery bug bites are getting better. They've turned an ugly purple, which in my experience means they're healing. I have about 4 of them on my feet and ankles, and they're each about .75" in diameter, so my feet are atrocious right now.

The visit to the computer store yesterday was unremarkable. The biggest difference between stores in the States and stores here is that here, people are much more devoted to customer service. The customer walks in and immediately sits down at a service counter. The employee behind the counter records everything the customer wants, then goes and retrieves it. This makes it a bit harder to browse the store, so I can't decide if I like it more or less than the States style of offering help only when asked.

Thushari made us macaroni for dinner last night. It had eggs, carrots, leeks, sausage, and chicken stock. Great stuff, reminded me of home. Very salty though, and after Sri Lankan food for a week, I'm not sued to it.

Blog Weirdness

2006-06-05T19:49:00.000-04:00

For some reason, blogspot isn't dating my posts properly, so they're appearing out of order. The most recent (before this one) is "She's Calling You Fat". Assume that I will post pretty much daily, and scroll down for new entries.

She's Calling You Fat

2006-06-04T05:49:00.000-04:00

Saturday
I've been working with Meg on a brochure for the center. They want some sort of publication to hand out to potential donors. It has been a struggle, not in the least because of the language barrier. In Colombo, most people speak a fair amount of English, but Hambantota is different. As Thushari put it (and I just found out that it's spelled Thushari, not Tushari), people in Hambantota know enough to communicate, but they don't know correct English. This has been hurdle all week, and it's a bit frustrating.

I may have mentioned before that Sri Lankans tend to say what they mean, and they don't mince words. I got a great example of it today at dinner, when Malmi, Thushari's daughter, called Meg fat. I forget what brought this on, but anyway, Malmi told Meg she was fat, in front of me, Harith (her brother), and Thushari. I figured she just didn't know better, until Thushari said the same thing. "You are fat! Hallie thin!" Apparently it's not so impolite to tell the truth, here. This had me in stitches, and Meg was quite confused. So ensued a series of tests in which Meg tried to prove that she is my size, and I argued with her. Thushari was laughing hysterically through the whole thing. Pretty much everyone who meets Meg calls her a baby, because she is always playing, and acts very young. They haven't said much of anything to me. Thushari really likes my clothes though (I wear a lot of skirts).

I've been here almost a week, and the food is really starting to exhaust me. I haven't been here long, so every day, everything is new. I didn't realize just how hard it would be to have every meal, every day be something I haven't ever seen before. It's very good, and very simple, but I miss American food. Especially pizza. So I started trying to make subtle inquiries about availability of pizza, or failing that, its ingredients. I haven't seen a pizza place since I've arrived, and I haven't seen any cheese, so I thought I might be out of luck. But one of the girls from the center told me that they love pizza here, but it is very expensive at restaurants. That gave me enough hope to very casually ask Thushari tonight at dinner if I could get cheese at the local grocery store. I said, verbatim, "Does Food City have cheese?" and immediately she said, "Yes. You are making pizza?" So much for subtle. Thushari described her version of pizza, which she really likes, and I think I'll stick to the Americanized version. So there may be a shopping trip in the near future. I really miss pizza.

Sunday
This morning, we found that a piece of siding had been ripped off the house and was lying in the yard. Apparently one of the monkeys was responsible. It had fallen when a monkey tried to jump onto it from a tree. So Thushari's mother took a rather large kitchen knife and set about cutting down all of the trees and branches near the house.

There is no way to be alone here. I share a room with Meg, the house is always full of people including 2 very rambunctious kids, work is full of people, and I'm not allowed to go anywhere by myself. This includes the beach out back. I had romantic visions of spending sunrise in front of the ocean, but to get there, I have to walk through some pine barrens. Maybe 50 feet or so. Thushari says it's jungle, and dangerous for someone alone. If this keeps up, I'll go nuts.

Today at work, Meg and I held a meeting with our boss, W., and the senior advisor of the center, A. As consultants, we are tasked with evaluating the center, coming up with a list of projects that we could do, and deciding which projects are most feasible and valuable to our clients. We wanted to present W. and A. with our project proposals, so we sat down with every intention of a quick, 30 minute talk about networking, databases, and curriculum development. We got as far as explaining our desire to network the computers in the class room, and W. was trying to figure out a schedule so that he knew when to buy equipment and when we would be finished. Then he and A. started talking about our days off. Specifically, they started making lists of sights we should see, and places we could go. This went for 20 minutes, and all the while Meg and I kept trying to turn the discussion back to work related matters. We were a bit irritated until it dawned on us that we have bosses who are more concerned about our vacations than our work. Whee!

I have to be very careful about what I say here. If I express interest in anything, even casually, people start trying to arrange it for me. Sri Lankans are very hospitable, and they are justifiably proud of this. But if I'm not careful, my vacation days get planned for me.

I may have mentioned previously that our work agreement included a personal chef. The purpose was twofold: to avoid getting cheated at markets, where most people speak only Sinhala; and to make sure that everything is safe to eat. I was confused as to how we were going to save money by hiring a personal chef. The mystery has been solved. Thushari cooks breakfast and dinner, and the center has a housekeeper who cooks lunch and tea for us during the day. This is a great arrangement, because we get to try all the native foods. It also works well because Thushari and her mother do their cooking over an open flame (coconut husks - kindling and hard wood all in one) and I'm not that skilled. I've never made curry before.

Note to the cooks traveling here: cardamom appears to be VERY cheap. Thushari puts it in everything, in large amounts. She made a fabulous crepe filled with shredded coconut, sugar, and cardamom. It was incredible. She also made a cake out of wheat flour, sugar, margarine, eggs, and milk. Simple and fantastic. It sounds terrible to say that it tasted just like Pillsbury vanilla cake mix, but it was great, and the first familiar food I'd had in a week.

I have a day off tomorrow, so I won't be posting anything for a few days.

To Colombo and Back

2006-06-02T05:49:00.000-04:00

Now that I finally have my laptop, my posts will get more thorough. I'll type them at home, at a reasonable pace, and then post them at work, when I get the chance. Prepare for some small novels.

I have adopted a manner that can only be described as meek. I think it comes from having to rely on everyone else for translation and not wanting to appear as a "typical" American tourist. Additionally, the less eye contact I make with others, especially men, the less I get honked at while walking down the street. So I spend the day looking at the ground trying not to get noticed. This is...alien.... to my nature and I will be quite happy to return to the States. People think I'm helpless here, and they tell me not to go out alone, not to walk anywhere. I wonder what they'd think if they saw me in my own environment.

The trip to Colombo yesterday was long, but informative. We went through the mountains, through Ratnapura and the center of the country. It's all jungle. There are no yards around houses here. No grass. Just trees and animals. And everything is wild: cats, dogs, cows (yes, cows. Wild cows. They hang out next to roads). Meg has been trying to pet every wild animal she sees, and so I spend my time babysitting. The last thing I need is for her to get rabies, a real threat here.

There are no highways in Sri Lanka. I haven't seen any roads wider than 2 lanes, actually, even in cities. The road system is not extensive, so there are a few main roads, named for the cities they go to (Galle, Tangalle, etc) and other streets in the cities. Outside the major towns, the roads are very bumpy. This all leads to two very odd consequences.

Sri Lankans have only a passing acquaintance with seat belts. Those in the front seat will usually wear them, but people in back will not. Vehicles rarely travel above 40 mph here, so it's not quite as terrifying as it sounds, but still it takes getting used to.

On long trips, it is rare that the car will stop. There are no cross roads, so we just keep going. I was surprised by this, since the business roads in the states all have stop signs, and more traffic than here, I think.

The first time I experienced Sri Lankan driving, I almost turned around and got on the first plane home. To someone from the States, the traffic looks like a a text book example of Brownian motion and mass chaos. People drive on the left, and though the roads are only 2 lane by our standards, people turn them into 4 and 5 lane roads. Passing is constant, both on the right and wrong sides of the road, and people will cross the median to pass into oncoming traffic far more than I am comfortable with. Horns are used almost constantly, and I spent my first car ride unwillingly trapped in a vision of a 40 car pile up as every driver had a heart attack all at once.

But my driver, though he was no stranger to the horn, was quite calm, and I noticed that most others were too. There is a definite system in place here; without one, there would be no driving. It seems that here, drivers use the horn the way we would use the turn signal or flashing head lights. If someone cuts you off, you honk, but only to let them know that you're there, not to express displeasure. If you're coming up behind someone, especially if your vehicle is bigger than theirs, you honk. If you're passing someone, you honk. The result of all this is that people here are actually much better drivers than we are. They are much more alert, and they are more prepared to make sudden stops and swerves than most American drivers would be. This hypothesis is strengthened by concrete evidence: I have seen very few dented cars here. No matter how old, their bodies are in pretty much perfect condition (I saw a body shop yesterday called Body Parts... I wonder if they have any idea).

I have been trying to pick up a little Sinhala, but I am having much more difficulty than I expected. In Greece, most street signs were written in both Greek and English, so I could learn the alphabet and pronunciation by reading the signs. Here, signs are also written in both Sinhala and English, but in a much different way. English is a national language here, and especially in Colombo, most people speak at least a little. So rather than having 2 full translations of one sign, shop owners will headline their storefronts in English and have subtext in Sinhala. So nothing is actually repeated. And this makes it much harder to pick up the alphabet. I noticed this in the airport in Bombay too. News programs had "BREAKING NEWS" at the top of their ticker tape, and then all the headlines were in Hindi.

Back to the trip...

We eventually arrived at Ashan's father's house. Ashan is in the States right now on business, and I had given him all of my luggage documentation so that he could forward it to his travel agent and she spent her time tracking it down. I needed it back in order to pick up my stuff, hence the stop.

Perhaps I spend too much time with my nose buried in books. There is a character that keeps reappearing in my literature. This character is typically, but not always, male, past 50, rich, and wise. Most importantly, he is old enough and rich enough to have the freedom to be frank and direct in his speech. This person is never malicious, but brutally honest. I have always liked and respected these characters, but I didn't think they actually existed in real life. Imagine my surprise then, when I realized that Ashan's father is just such a man. He invited my traveling companion and myself to have lunch with him and his family, and it was quite an experience. Ashan's father has a commanding presence, and he was not afraid to talk politics, or to ask me directly what I thought of our current president. I gather that most Sri Lankans would not speak of such things with foreigners. I think he was testing me. He also warned me never to go out alone.

We went to the airport and I managed to get into a few disagreements with the staff. I don't think these were entirely my fault. The first was at the baggage claim counter. The woman helping me asked for my local address, and then wrote down "Ambantota" when I gave her the town name. I tried to correct her spelling (Hambantota) and she told me my pronunciation was wrong, and that really there was no 'H' in the spelling. I was fairly sure she was misinformed, since I had just spent a week staring at all the signs here that say "Hambantota", but since I am foreign, she would have none of it. The first thing I did today, upon arriving at work, was to confirm the spelling of the town (I was right).

The second issue came up when I went through customs. My bag was opened and searched, so that the agents could confirm that I had declared the right things, and the customs agent going through my belongings came upon two religious texts that I had not intended to make public. Before I came, I tried to find information on Sri Lanka's religious laws and tolerance. My research turned up nothing, and these books could not be left at home, so I had resolved to keep them out of site. The official found them and immediately questioned me. I said that theology was a hobby of mine (true) and that those books were my research over the summer (also true, after a fashion). A bit more of this, and he put the books back, with a stern warning that extreme forms of this faith were dangerous. Thank you, Mr. Customs Official.

Finally, we were able to leave and start the drive back home. At that point, it was 4:30. The drive home was relatively uneventful, except for one thing: the road blocks. The Sri Lankan police have set up check points on the main roads. They will stop and search random vehicles, asking for drivers licenses, agendas, and occasionally my passport. This happened many times, and at one of the stops, I was told to open my luggage. I do not know the search and seizure laws here, but my personal convictions include not arguing with people holding assault rifles, so I complied. As soon as I'd shown that I was willing to open my bag, the guards desisted, and let us pass.

We stopped for dinner at a small Chinese takeout place and- wait, there is much to be said here about Chinese takeout places. I have seen A LOT of Chinese takeout restaurants here. They are especially numerous in Colombo, but even the smallest villages will usually have at least one. There are two traits common to every Chinese place that I've seen so far: All the signs look like Italian flags (red, white and green, every single one) and they are all run by Sri Lankans. I haven't seen any other ethnic food places, just Chinese, and I haven't seen any Chinese people at all. Anyway, as I was saying.

...we were at a Chinese takeout place for dinner. We had the Sri Lankan version of Chinese fried rice, which is probably about as authentically Chinese as the American versions I've had (but I like ours better). At the end of the meal, Madu asked me if I wanted to use the bathroom. I said yes, and she and the driver promptly disappeared. They came back a few minutes later, and Madu told me there was no... comma? comma'd? comet? Was I supposed to clean the bathroom? I decided that if she could handle whatever was there, then so could I. It wasn't until I arrived at the bathroom stall that I was finally able to translate her heavily accented english. Among the other elements missing from the bathroom (light, lock on the door, toilet paper) was the toilet. Madu had said "commode" and I had not understood. Instead, there was a hole in the floor. And ants. Ants everywhere. I dealt with it as quickly as I could, and we left.

On an unrelated note, I met my personal savior a few days ago, at work. Mijka, a Dutch woman, has worked at the CRC for 8 or 10 months and she speaks perfect English. She also has a good understanding of what it is like to be a foreign, white woman here, and she has steadily been feeding me bits of very useful information.

One such gem involves the LTTE and the north and east. I had suspected, before coming here, that the LTTE was wary of involving foreigners in this internal conflict. I was more right than I knew. Mijka told me that in the north and east, which are under Tamil control, there are very concerted efforts to keep tourists out of the conflict. When tourists arrive, representatives of the LTTE will come to their houses and record names, addresses, agendas, the places they'll shop, and so forth, and then there will be no bombings at those places.

Meg tells me that Mijka is also the one to thank for our 5 day work week. The people at the center mostly work 6 days (Tuesday - Sunday). When Mijka arrived, she tells me she was very firm about her work schedule and refused to work weekends, since that is when her husband is off. So I guess she explained to my boss that most people from Europe and the U.S. work 5 days per week.

As one might expect, Sri Lankans have some great secrets that they've learned over time. Occasionally, they share them with me, so I'll record them here.

Sri Lankan Wisdoms:
-If, in an attempt to commit suicide (or, presumably, for any other reason), someone ingests gasoline, give them coconut milk immediately to induce vomiting. Just FYI. (It seems that drinking gasoline is a common way to kill yourself, here).

-If you think you are getting sick, make tea with ginger and coriander. This will ward off illness.

-To clean a pillow (not the case, but the pillow itself), place it in the Sri Lankan sun for a day. The heat will kill the germs living there.

TEA
Sri Lanka, formerly Ceylon, has a very intimate relationship with tea. There are 3 tea times that I observe each day: before breakfast, mid morning, and mid afternoon. There are two types of tea: milk tea and plain tea. Milk tea is tea with cream and sugar (quite good, I love the stuff), and plain tea is tea with sugar only. I have not heard of tea without milk or sugar. It seems as though they do not drink it.

THE FOOD
Before I arrived here, I was warned, both by guide books and personal friends, that Sri Lankan food is very spicy, "some of the hottest in the world." After some research, I have not found anything even close to inedible, which is what I was expecting. In fact, everything is quite nice, and for those working on the Pittsburgh Indian scale, I have not had anything above a 5 or so. I don't know what everyone got so worked up about. Maybe I just haven't had the right food, or maybe those people who didn't grow up with a cabinet dedicated to hot sauce would find things a bit less palatable but I just don't see what everyone is whining about.

HOT WATER
There isn't any. Neither Tushari nor the center has a water heater. It makes some sense, since all water must be boiled before it is consumed. And the water that comes out of the tap isn't exactly cold. It's probably about 75 degrees or so. But this does mean that I take cold showers every night. It took me about a week to get used to it.

THE WEATHER
The temperature doesn't really change here. It is always in the mid 80s. But the humidity varies, and it makes a huge difference. Today it feels very nice because it's not very humid. Yesterday was miserable.

Luggage Party!

2006-06-01T05:49:00.000-04:00

I got word today that my luggage has been found and is now in Colombo. This is great, except that I am in Hambantota, and I'm the only one who can sign for my luggage. So, tomorrow I will travel back to Colombo to recover my luggage, eat a quick lunch, and then come back to Hambantota, all in the same day. It is frustrating, but well worth the trip to get my stuff back. I have spent every morning before work hand washing the clothes I wore the day before. It takes 2 days for clothes to dry, so I rotate among 3 shirts.

I have tried more new food than I can name so far, and it is only the third day at work. I am not usually so receptive to new foods, and I have found that the secret is to try everything first, before I ask what the ingrediants are. It keeps me unbiased. We eat with our hands here, and that in itself is odd. Right now, the most difficult part of eating is persuading a Sri Lankan to eat first, so that Meg and I can learn how it's done.

Some of the guide books I read recommended that single women pretend they were married, and that they should come armed with not only a ring, but also a photo of the husband that they could produce at a moment's notice. I brought the photo, but not the ring, and maybe that was a mistake. There are very few caucasions in Hambantota, and we get waved at and honked at a lot. Since we are American, we represent a way into the country and it took less than 2 days before someone suggested that they come to the U.S. with me.

Hambantota

2006-05-29T05:49:00.000-04:00

We got into Hambantota last night after a 6 hour drive from Colombo, down the coast. The entire coast line was hit by the tsunami, and every few hundred feet there was a grave site for the victims.

We arrived at the Children's Resource Center (CRC) at 8pm and met the staff. Mr. Wanni, the director, greeted us and fed us a great dinner of eggs, bread, and potato curry. We then went to our house, where we'll be staying for the next 5 weeks.

The house is beautiful, and quite large in comparison to most dwellings here. We have a room, and we share the rest of the house with a woman, her mother, and her 2 children. The woman lost her husband in the tsunami.

This morning we woke up around 5:30 or 6 (we are still jet lagged) and had a great breakfast of fruit, milk rice, and something spicy to put on the rice. I spent the morning drawing, reading, and writing, until we went to the CRC around noon for lunch.

We got to see the center a bit more, and we spent a lot of time talking to Mr. Wanni about the center and the goals he has for us. It sounds like we're going to be doing a lot of publicity development, including websites and pamphlets.

The mosquitos and heat attack with a vengeance, but overall this is a very pleasant place to be. The pace is much slower than at college, and I have a lot of time to relax and enjoy myself.
I believe the agenda for the rest of the day is to drive with Mr. Wanni to view the affected area, and then possibly visit some elephants. I'll take pictures.

The Trip and Day 1

2006-05-27T10:36:00.000-04:00

This is one of those horror story travel tales that should never happen, but did anyway.

My original travel itinerary had me going from Philadelphia to Frankfurt to Mumbai to Colombo. I was due to leave around 8pm on Thursday night. My sister was flying in from college that same day, so we had a master plan of picking up my sister, checking me in, having a family dinner, and then bringing me back to the airport for boarding. We did all of this with resounding success.

There was one little blip in the checkin process, however: I did not have a seat assignment at that time. Therefore, my seat would be assigned to me at the gate, at which time my luggage would be loaded onto the plane. Not before.

I got to the gate with a few hours to spare and waited around for the gate crew to show up so I could get my seat assignment. They arrived approximately 30 minutes before boarding and announced immediately that those people waiting for seat assignments should just sit tight, as the seating was still being worked out. So I sat and waited. I knew I was guaranteed *a* seat, I just didn't know which one. After about half the plane had boarded, I got my seat assignment. I then boarded the plane and waited for takeoff.

Takeoff was delayed by a few hours due to the following 3 elements: 1. We were waiting for a few more people whose connecting flight was late. 2. There was some sort of equipment malfunction in the stewards kitchen and it had to be fixed. 3. A fire earlier in the day had caused the airport to shut down completely. There was a good 50 plane line waiting for runway space to take off.

By the time we finally got ourselves off the ground, I was worried. I knew that my layover in Frankfurt approximately 2 hours, and I knew that our takeoff had been delayed by more than that. Missing my connection in Frankfurt might result in missing my next connection in Mumbai, which meant that Meg, the other student consultant, would be stuck waiting in the Colombo airport for some undetermined amount of time.

We landed in Frankfurt well after my connection had departed, so I made my way to the ticketing counter to see about alternative flights. The attendant found one to Mumbai that would allow me to make my original connection in Mumbai, thus preserving the total overall travel time. This flight was leaving in 30 minutes, so I had to hurry to catch it. It left on time though, and I arrived in Mumbai exhausted, but with 2 hours before my next flight to Sri Lanka.

As I exited the flight, I came upon an airline worker standing next to a whiteboard sign. Among other things on that sign was my name. I asked the worker about it and she told me to wait, that there may be more coming. Once it became clear that this was not the case, she explained the connection procedure in Mumbai. She had to get my luggage transferred first, and then me, all onto the plane. In order to transfer my luggage, she needed my baggage claim, my ticket, and my passport. She walked off with all of these, not to be seen or heard from in 20 minutes, until she came back with the news that my luggage was missing.

I wasn't too surprised. Given the unusual circumstances surrounding both previous departures, I considered it highly possible that my bag was no where near where I was. I filed a claim with her and boarded the flight to Colombo.

I arrived in Colombo at 6:00 AM local time. I found Meg easily and after updating the Colombo airport staff with my luggage woes, we set out to find Ashan, our contact who was supposed to meet us at the airport.

We wandered around for hours looking for him with no luck. Finally, around 10 or 11, a woman came out of the airport with a sign with our names on it. She escorted us back into the airport, into a small storefront owned by the Cinnamon Hotel. This room, no bigger than a walk-in closet, had a beautiful desk and an extraordinarily comfortable sofa. Best of all, it had air conditioning, something not very common in the Colombo airport. This woman was a staff member at the Cinnamon and she laughed as she told us that all of the airport security staff had been looking for us for the last 2 hours. However, since we were outside, waiting at the pickup curb, we had not heard ourselves paged. She called Ashan to let us know we had been found and to let me talk to him. Ashan proceeded to tell me that we would be taken to the Cinnamon, that we should eat, sleep, and then call him for the rest of the plans.

The drive to the Cinnamon was my first exposure to the Sri Lankan traffic system. It is far different from any style of driving found in the U.S. People drive on the left, and they drive aggressively. In addition to cars, there are many smaller vehicles on the road. Motorcycles and mopeds about, as well as a very interesting 3 wheeled contraption that has a small engine and a fabric top. There is room for a driver and the back seat can hold two passengers comfortably. I found out later that these are a very cheap, safe (?!) way to get around Sri Lanka, as they are for hire, and cheaper than taxis.

We got to the hotel and were immediately dumbstruck. This hotel is gorgeous. Marble everywhere, a fountain in the lobby, beautiful plants... The woman who escorted us to our rooms explained that this was Sri Lanka's first 5-star hotel.

I got to my room, took a much needed shower, and set up our meeting with Ashan. When he arrived with his extremely nice fiancee, he explained that we would leave the next day for a 5 hour drive along the South coast to reach Hambantota and the Children's Resource Center, our first work site. He and Swasha (sp?) answered our questions about life in Sri Lanka and told us where to find a mall for clothes. Additionally, he planned to follow up with the airlines to find my luggage. They were both wonderful people, and I felt much better after meeting them.

There was a very convenient mall right next to the hotel, and I was able to find clothes and shoes there. We then went to Unity Plaza to try to find some computer parts, and Majestic City for some movies. Majestic City is another mall, and it was there that I realized just how uncommon caucasians are in this city.

I was waiting for Meg outside of one of the stores when a family approached me. The father asked if I would be willing to take a picture with his son. I agreed, thinking he meant for me to operate the camera, but then his children gathered around me while the father stood back with the camera and I understood that I was meant to be in the photo. Either I look like someone famous, or I'm just an oddity here. I posed with his children, and then with his wife, and then Meg and I departed the mall to go back to the hotel. At this point, although it was only about 7 PM, we were exhausted. So exhausted that we grabbed a quick dinner and went to sleep immediately, forgetting completely that we were supposed to call Ashan that night. It's now about 3:30 AM and my sleep schedule is all confused, which is why I'm up typing this.

Travel Prep: Part 3

2006-05-24T12:21:00.000-04:00

Used book stores are up to no good. That is my recent conclusion after visiting one yesterday to make a donation and coming home with more than I started with. This particular store was trying to offload its hardcover volumes. They take up a lot of shelf space and apparently no one buys them. The store's solution to this is quite a deal: customers can fill up a paper grocery bag with hardcovers for $10. $10! That's less than $1/book. So now I have stacks of hardcover books that I don't really want to put in my luggage.

If, like me, you just couldn't wait for bootcamp and are stuck with a XOM install, you may have noticed that firmware updates don't work, which means you can't install bootcamp. It turns out that the cause of all these problems is that XOM changed the MBR. This site has instructions for replacing XOM with bootcamp, theoretically without loss of data to either your XP or your Mac partition. I haven't tried it out yet, but it looks promising.

I'm having a hard time finding the coffee maker. In Pittsburgh, where I go to school, I can grab them at the local grocery store. Here, outside of Philadelphia, the first store I tried didn't have them. I'll keep hunting today.

I'm not panicking about leaving tomorrow, which probably means that there's some monumental task I've forgotten about. My to-do list today consists of visiting a few people, buying the last couple things I need for my trip, mailing a rent check, and messing around with my computer. And finishing the packing.

Travel Prep: Part 2

2006-05-22T22:14:00.000-04:00

Status Update: It's Tuesday. I leave Thursday.

I was getting prescriptions filled today and I ran into an interesting problem. My insurance provider will only cover a month's worth of doses for any medication. So I had to pay full price for the rest of my malaria meds. That particular medication is cheap, so it wasn't an issue. If I had more time, I probably could have worked this out with my insurance company.

I've been drafting packing lists since the beginning of May and I keep asking myself how much I want to bring in the way of disposables (tissues, shampoo, etc). I am constantly reminding myself that I will be able to buy many such things there. So I am concentrating my efforts on acquiring things that I definitely won't be able to get in Sri Lanka. Such as:

Coffee
Rumor has it that Sri Lanka's coffee is only distantly related to the American version. I'm all for cultural immersion, but I'm also a miserable morning person. In the interests of international diplomacy, I'll be bringing a stash. And this Coffee Maker
Simple coffee.

Toilet Paper
Also a rarity in Sri Lanka. Travel tissue packs will be my friend.

Insect Repellant
To fight off those pesky disease carriers. Find the stuff with DEET.

Money Belt
I'm not actually convinced that this is necessary for a resident (as opposed to a tourist) but I'll bring one anyway. Losing my passport would be miserable.

Shampoo
Travel sized. Just enough to tide me over until I can get some real stuff.

Pepto Bismol
My doctor recommended this. He also gave me a few doses of something stronger if that doesn't work.

Suntan Lotion
As it turns out, my malaria meds make my skin even more sensitive to the sun than it already is. Curses.

Travel Prep: Part 1

2006-05-07T13:55:00.000-04:00

I'm knee deep in pre-travel prep. Most of the large administrative tasks, such as applying for a work visa and booking flights, are done by the program organizers, but that still leaves me to get vaccinations, power adaptors, proof of international insurance, etc.

Advice for students travelling out of Pittsburgh: STA Travel, on Meyran Avenue in Oakland, can dispense international student ID cards (ISIC). They won't do passport photos, but they'll give you business cards and send you down the street to the CVS. Show the business card to the photographer and you'll get a discount on your photos. I got 6 photos for about $7, and the whole photo process takes less than 10 minutes.

I've been wrestling with the issue of whether or not to bring my laptop. I don't expect to have steady or reliable internet access, and since I haven't been explicitly told that I need my own computer, I am fairly sure I don't need one to perform my job. But I want to take a lot of photos, and I shoot digital. So the laptop needs to be around for photo storage.

I also have to put serious thought into what else I want my laptop to do while I'm there. And the obvious answer is gaming. Cleary internet gaming is out. However, I have a box of old Playstation games sitting at home and I haven't actually finished any of them. I think it's time to find an emulator or two.

...which means my MacBook has to dual boot, because the PSX emulation options for OSX are pathetic, and they haven't been updated in 4 years. So I'll be installing boot camp sometime within the next 3 weeks. An XP partition will also give me easy access to other platform emulators and all my Blizzard games (Starcraft and Warcraft 3) that are too old for OSX.

Note to my parents (and anyone else who thinks, after reading this, that I'm going to spend all of my time playing video games): I won't.

Back Story

2006-05-04T14:47:00.000-04:00

For those who haven't heard, I'm headed to Sri Lanka this summer for a tech consulting internship. I'll be working with 2 organizations on the southern coast for a total of 10 weeks. I was able to get this internship through a tech consulting class that I'm finishing up, and my professor has asked that I keep a blog while I'm there.

FAQ

Where is Sri Lanka?
Off the southern tip of India. It used to be called Ceylon and it's famous for it's tea (Ceylon tea).

Didn't the tsunami hit Sri Lanka?
Yes, and one of the organizations I'll be working with is dedicated to tsunami relief. The south coast, where I'll be, is one of the most affected areas.

Isn't there a civil war going on?
Not as of this writing. It remains a possibility. The most dangerous areas are the north and east, far from where I'll be. In fact, I'll be about as far as possible from any conflict.

Did you really use an LOTR reference for your blog title? Are you THAT much of a dork?
Yes.