It's a boy

Here is my still-unnamed nephew:

Update: His name is Samari Julian (unless my mom typed it incorrectly, which is possible; I'm in Stockholm and I don't have good phone access so I can't confirm anything). Until I hear otherwise, I'm assuming he is named after Samari Rolle, who plays for the Ravens.

Not bad, little guy!

On the upswing

The days are finally getting longer! It still gets dark around 3pm, but at least now we have a *little* more daylight than the day before.

Espoo at 4pm in October:

The Soundtrack of Our Lives

I saw The Soundtrack of Our Lives perform at Tavastia on Monday.

It was a great show! They were very enthusiastic. They are a Swedish band, and they claim to like performing in Helsinki. The lead singer was lively. His performance reminded me of the way I would expect a drunk uncle to perform when he grabs the mic at someone's wedding: attention-hungry but lovable. This was only enhanced by his appearance (my friend described it as an 'obese Jesus').

A Finnish band called Underwater Sleeping Society was the opener, and they were pretty fun too.

Rickrolled in Helsinki

As I walked past the Helsinki club Millenium last Friday with a Finnish friend, I heard 'Never Gonna Give You Up' playing. I launched into a poor explanation of what rickrolling is, but I think my friend is still mystified by my delight.

Silence

hi everyone -- i haven't been writing much, i know. i have been absolutely swamped with work, and also not that much new has happened!

let's see...last week was teradata's pikkujoulu, which is the fancy finnish way of saying 'office christmas party'. it was pretty fun. we went curling, then had dinner at a german restaurant. curling was interesting. there are special curling shoes (you pick from a selection of battered moist shoes, kind of like picking roller skates on skate day). you choose based on your dominant foot. since i am right-handed, i guessed that i am also right-footed. the dominant foot gets a 'sticky' shoe that doesn't slide on the ice, and the other foot gets a slippery shoe that slides very well on the ice. so basically you use your dominant foot to push yourself along the ice on the slippery shoe. this works pretty well right up until you are thinking about something else (like where to throw your stone) and try to move normally and then you fall on the ice. i fell hard about five times and i have some impressive bruises.

after dinner, a few of us went to a club. i had salmiakkikossu, which is a finnish licorice-flavored vodka drink.

Troy! Troy! Troy!

Thanksgiving was not the first American holiday I have spent in Finland, but for some reason this one bothered me more than Halloween. Don't get me wrong, I missed dressing up in a costume and eating lots of candy, but I missed Thanksgiving more. In Burkina, the holidays didn't really bother me, but I think that's because it was different enough to recalibrate my feelings about what 'should' be happening at different times of the year. Here, everything looks and feels pretty similar to what I'm used to in America (excepting the cold and dark of course), and there are Christmas decorations everywhere, but I missed that milestone of the start of 'The Holidays' which Thanksgiving gives us in the US.

But! On the weekend of my first major bout of homesickness in Finland, I got a package from my brother. It contained two discs full of interesting and new (at least to me) music. Among the ear candy: James, Art Brut, Margot and the Nuclear So and So's, and a bunch of Bowie. So thank you, Troy! In your honor, I just watched the terrible 2004 film that shares your name.

Greg Oden eats a lot

from Greg Oden's thanksgiving blog post:

To everyone whos (sic) reading have a Happy Thanksgiving and know that today is about giving thanks, not turkey, but i will eat a full turkey myself.

bon appetit!

Well done dad

This made me laugh quite a bit.

My friend: 16:26:25: my cousins had one [Commodore VIC-20]
My friend: 16:26:44: they also had the first vcr system that i ever saw
My friend: 16:26:56: and really strange dad
My friend: 16:27:17: when we were visiting and watching tv ..
My friend: 16:27:44: he always switched the channel if there was couple kissing,
My friend: 16:28:13: my mother asked if the tv was broken .. because it kept changing the channel ..
Me: 16:30:23: that's great
Me: 16:30:52: so did he save his kids from ever knowing what kissing is?
My friend: 16:31:52: kids are 32 and 34 now , i have never heard about any gf's
My friend: 16:32:00: well done dad

Well, I'm ready.

Good thing someone keeps us grounded:

"I think it's sort of stupid to talk about it (going undefeated). I did say `sort of' so if you talk about it, you don't have to say I said you were stupid but I'll say you're sort of stupid." -Roy Williams

Porobaari

Here is me outside my neighborhood bar:

I call it Porobaari, which means 'reindeer bar' simply because it has no real name.

I just went for a swim in a public pool. Naked.

That's right -- Helsinki has nude public swimming pools. Today was the first time I gathered the courage to go. It was surprisingly relaxing to move through the water without clothes hindering me. I went to Yrjönkatu, which is a beautiful building built in 1928 with a nice big pool. Here is a photo I found online (because clearly snapping photos with my personal camera would not be okay):


There are separate times for men and women, so you just go in to the pool area, strip down, rinse off in the shower, then dive in. There are three lanes: one for water running (which was full of people -- I had no idea it was so popular), one for slow swimmers, and one for fast swimmers. I never felt fast at the pool in Hartford, but that was definitely the lane for me today. Anyway, there was one woman who was much slower than everyone else, and we all had to pass her. The only time I felt awkward during the whole experience was when I needed to pass her. First of all, coming up behind someone who is swimming naked and doing the breast stroke gives one a pretty intimate view, so I was already blushing. Then I had to negotiate getting by her without touching her or touching the person coming in the opposite direction on the other side of the lane. I pulled it off, but I was very nervous.

After my swim I rinsed off and went to the sauna. It was my first time experiencing sauna and it's a large part of Finnish culture, and I think I may have fallen in love with Finland. It was wonderful! If I can get in the sauna at least a couple times a week, I may make it through the winter without killing myself from depression.

Hello Chicago

i'm sitting at my desk at nokia in espoo, finland. i got here before 7:00am to go to the gym, but then i stopped to see if the virginia results are in. i'm watching obama's acceptance speech and crying.

Showtime at the Apollo

Saturday night I went to a club in Helsinki called Apollo (this is pronounced similarly to how French people pronounce it, which means that every time I hear the name, I think of the conjunctivitis breakout in Bobo-Dioulasso in 2003 (for some reason, there are a lot of people in the world who refer to pink eye as 'apollo', and Burkinabe are among those people)). Anyway, Apollo is an old theater that has been converted into a club. Like many of the popular clubs in Helsinki, there are a lot of little rooms, each with its own bar and music. At Apollo, however, the room that clearly used to house the movie screen is the main gathering place. It's gorgeous:


When I arrived in the main room, there were lots of people on the dance floor and I was expecting to hear the DJ continue to play current rock all night. Instead, a band came onstage, and began to play 'Living on a Prayer'. The band is apparently called Bad Influence and they are a Swedish cover band. They played 80s rock covers all night! Their performance was high-energy -- I'll give them that. Also, the crowd was totally loving it.

I found this clip on youtube. It's not from Apollo, but you can get the idea. Watch the singer throw up the sign of the goat at 0:26, and you'll see what I saw about a million times that night.

Sähly

for a team event, we have been playing floorball (sähly in finnish) on thursday afternoons. it's sort of like hockey, only it's not on ice and you use a wiffle ball instead of a puck. oh, and you can't check.

it's a lot of fun. we have had good participation, and everyone plays hard. i'm terrible with the ball, but i think i'm the only one who gets regular cardiovascular exercise, so by the end of the game when everyone else is panting i'm the only one who can still run around comfortably, which means i can play defense somewhat effectively.

Finns think Midnight Madness is crazy

Yesterday at lunch we were discussing sports, and I informed everyone that the college basketball season is starting soon. Then I mentioned that Midnight Madness, held at midnight on the first day the teams are allowed to practice together, is next Friday. I explained that at many schools the fans can come watch and it's usually a time to hear from the coach and see the new players and so on. This did not go over well. There were protests:

"That's what the games are for!"

"On a Friday night? No one has anything better to do?"

"You just watch them run laps and try to shoot the ball in the hoop?"

I tried to explain how it was half practice, half performance and how the coaches and players goof around and interact with the students in a different way, but I was not able to convince anyone of its value.

The best remark came later on, when one of the Pakistani guys was telling us about an interaction he had with a woman last week. He was telling us that she was anti-American because of our current foreign policy, and how he had told her that he thought that though the American government was horrific and made most people of the world unsafe, most Americans didn't really agree with the government's actions and therefore it was fun to visit the US, and how she had replied with "oh yeah? then where were these people when he was being elected?" At this point one of the Finns jumped in to say disgustedly "they were watching their sports teams practice."

Autumn in Helsinki

Some more church photos:



And the park around a beautiful cemetery:






Also, I see these signs a lot. Apparently Finns hate Scottie dogs.

Wienercoffee

There's a coffee machine at my work that is made for an office environment: you put your cup on the little platform, push a button, and it fills your cup with the kind of coffee you selected. The choices are things like coffee, coffee with milk, cafe au lait (no, i haven't figured out what the difference between 'coffee with milk' and 'cafe au lait' is), espresso, choc-espresso, hot chocolate, and so on.

One of the choices is wienercoffee. There is no space between the words 'wiener' and 'coffee'. It took a few days before I was comfortable enough to ask someone about it (he giggled too). Of course, a brief internet search revealed that this is vienna-style coffee, which is essentially whipped cream and coffee.

Anyway, yesterday I was brave enough to try it. And it's delicious. Suspiciously similar to both the coffee with milk and the cafe au lait produced by the machine, but I'm comfortable with that.

Touring Helsinki

this weekend had beautiful weather, and i finally took some photos.

here is the beautiful helsinki cathedral, first at dusk and second in the wonderful sunshine on sunday (see the ice cream truck? ice cream! at church!):



the esplanadi is a beautiful walkway in the touristy area of town.


here is vanha kirkkopuisto, a little park near where i live.


some transport: outside the main bus station in helsinki, a city tram, and a metro train.




i have been going running along the water in the mornings, and i go by a lot of the ferry docks. one of the lines that goes to tallinn (estonia) is called SuperSeaCat.

take a closer look at the logo.

it's a fluffy kitty! not a fish. not a dolphin. not a dog or a member of any other species that likes to swim. what better way to reassure your customers of the seaworthiness of your vessel than to name it after an animal who hates even shallow sinks?

and here's a smurf-related soft drink i got the other day called smurffi. it smurfed my thirst quite well, and i got to keep the smurfy bottle.

Raukkauta & Anarkia

Love & Anarchy is the Helsinki film festival, and it took place last week. Here are the entries I got to see:

White Night Wedding directed by Baltasar Kormákur: an Icelandic film about a professor getting married for the second time. It's set on Flatey Island, which is off northern Iceland, and the wedding is on the longest day of the year, so the sun shines brightly the entire night. In Scandinavian style, it's a dark movie, but quite funny.


The King of Ping Pong directed by Jens Jonsson: the setting is a small Swedish town during spring break (snow is *everywhere*), where a fat kid and his skinny little brother deal with life together. I had assumed that it was a dark comedy, and there were definitely a lot of humorous points, but the sadness almost overwhelmed those.

City of Men directed by Paolo Morelli: I had seen City of God and loved it. This is not really a sequel, but the style and themes are similar. It's a wonderful and moving story about two friends who grew up together, fatherless, in the slum, who now find themselves in the middle of a gang war. One is a relatively new father and is trying to be better than his own father was. The other is trying to find a name to put in the 'father' box on his ID.

A Christmas Tale directed by Arnaud Desplechin: a long, emotionally intense and dialogue-heavy film. The Raukkauta & Anarkia site listed the showing as French with English subtitles. Though I have seen some African French-language movies and have had no trouble understanding all the dialogue, my experience with French movies is that I can make out some of the dialogue, but it general the vocabulary exceeds my own Burkina-learned French and the accent, plus the elisions, makes it difficult for me to understand. Unfortunately, the listing was incorrect here: it was in French with Finnish and Swedish subtitles. I went to see it with my coworker Gerald and his wife Laurie. Laurie speaks more Finnish than Gerald and I do, so she was picking up some of the plot. I was picking up most of the plot due to my French skills, but I missed some crucial information. Gerald was simply annoyed. Like I said, it is long (150 minutes) and dialogue-heavy. With the exception of the scene above (as you may imagine, the next couple of frames have this man smacking his nose spectacularly on the pavement), there is little physical comedy to get the viewer through. Anyway, I liked the movie, but wish the experience had involved less work.

Entre Les Murs directed by Laurent Cantet: another French film. It follows the book by François Bégaudeau, a teacher in an ethnically diverse quartier in Paris. Bégaudeau himself plays the role of the teacher and many of the students play versions of themselves. This won the palme d'or at Cannes and apparently is France's official submission for the Foreign Language Oscar this year. Also? It was much easier for me to understand than the above movie. Like A Christmas Tale, it was in French with Finnish and Swedish subtitles. However, Bégaudeau speaks much more clearly than any of the murmuring family members in the other film. Another factor here is that the students were in quatrième (the equivalent of eighth grade), and I taught in a french-language middle school for two years. The eighth-grade-class set of French vocabulary is much more familiar to me than the family-with-multiple-victims-of-leukemia-who-blames-family-members-for-not-being-marrow-donors set of French vocabulary.

The festival was a nice experience. I got to see a few of Helsinki's theaters (among the things I learned: lines for the women's restroom are ridiculously long right before the movie, but not because people are particularly slow -- ladies like movies and there are too few restrooms) and I got to see some enjoyable movies.

At the office

i'm finally getting down to work! my 'knowledge transfer' sessions are over, and now i'm a contributing member of the team.

my team has two americans (including myself), a kiwi, two danes, an indian, a few pakistani guys, and a bunch of finns. everyone is nice and most people are a lot of fun. i think they will be moving me soon to sit near others in my specific project, but right now i sit by a small window (which i don't want to give up even though it's a bit colder than other areas of the office). also, i kind of like the company in my current location. in my little area, there are eight of us:
1. me (by the window! with the little bit of sunlight sometimes!)
2. the two danes, vagn and peter: both are a bit older and are quite experienced with teradata and have taken me under their wings. they have high expectations of their colleagues and since i have yet to disappoint them (to my knowledge) they still like me. they have extensive english vocabularies. they also have that wry complain-about-work humor, but it's clear that they both enjoy their work and are good at it.
3. the two pakistani guys, usman and imran: both are also quite friendly, and since they are in the same living situation as i am, we hang out socially. usman is very enthusiastic about the few months he spent in the united states last year, and that was in detroit. in the winter. they are observing ramadan right now, so they don't join us for lunch.
4. the three finns, jaakko, risto and kimmo: all are friendly and helpful. kimmo has assumed the role of my english-finnish dictionary and cultural guide, and he has a good sense of humor. risto is boisterous, but we haven't seen him this week because his wife had a baby last friday. i haven't spent much time with jaakko yet.

sorry, no photos yet. other things:

1. finns eat lunch at 11:00am
2. the only women-only bathroom on my floor smells awful.
3. in the last 24 hours, three people have approached me to ask for directions. i was able to help two of them!

You can also just raise the pole. You can raise the pole to like twice its original height.

david foster wallace is dead. he was an extraordinarily talented writer and apparently a gifted teacher. his books are challenging yet delightful. i'm sure that as this news creeps across the literary world he will be lauded much more appropriately than i can do here, but i liked these two quotes. the first hints at what makes his work so special, and the second just struck me as funny.

dfw on Infinite Jest, from his 1996 Salon interview:

I think it makes at least an in-good-faith attempt to be fun and riveting enough on a page-by-page level so I don't feel like I'm hitting the reader with a mallet, you know, "Hey, here's this really hard impossibly smart thing. Fuck you. See if you can read it." I know books like that and they piss me off.

a comment on the LA Times obit:

A suicide note, running some 300-odd pages and heavily footnoted, was found.
Submitted by: Zarp
11:39 PM PDT, Sep 13, 2008

Suomi!

well, i'm in finland. in finnish, finland is called 'suomi'. where someone got 'finland' from that is beyond me. anyway, it's been about four days now, and i think i've adjusted to the time change (+7 from the east coast, and i was actually on mountain time when i left the u.s.).

it's cold here! it rained the first two days, which was pretty unpleasant, but the last two it's been clear and cold. this morning you could see people's breath as they waited for the tram. nonetheless, i have gone out running twice and enjoyed it.

i take a tram and a bus or a tram and a train or just a bus or just a train to work. the commute is about an hour if i walk to the train station, but i think when winter comes i'll probably stick to the tram. my coworkers are hard-working yet quite cheerful and so far i'm enjoying it.

things i wish i had brought:
several pairs of my shoes (my rain boots, my keen shoes, my new balance classics, etc.)
more casual clothes (people don't dress so fancy at my office and i feel sort of weird in what i have)
a well-fitting black zip-up fleece (this would be good to wear to the office)
a network cable (i had to buy one and shit is pricey for an american)

things i wish i hadn't brought:
my phone (international roaming is ridiculous for a long-term gig)
a couple of my thinner pairs of pants

i'm staying in helsinki, in a hotel set up for long-term stays. here is my bed:

and my bathroom:

and my kitchen:


oh! those of you who were in burkina will understand my delight at finding both Omo and Lotus in the grocery store. the lotus package has an elephant on it, and my finnish isn't good enough (yet?) to understand why. now if only i could get a biiga to do all my labor for me...

Friends

when i was in new york a couple weeks ago, i was with some friends from my peace corps service. at one point, we were discussing why we remain good friends and so close, despite having very little in common and living far from one another. here are some of the theories:
1. during the development of our friendships, since we were in different villages, we were accustomed to not seeing each other for long periods of time, so from the beginning we were used to 'catching up' every few months and sharing what was important, and our day-to-day lives were never part of the balance
2. we accept each others' faults and annoying habits because we were forced to because there were so few of us PCVs there
3. the act of adjusting to a very different environment and dealing with horrific GI issues bonded us
4. we were told to just listen to each other without projecting or trying to solve any problems because sometimes PCVs just need to vent, so we are able to share things with each other without fear of misinterpretation or judgment

i think that 3 and 4 are not as likely to be the reason, because 3 happens to a lot of groups and we all had different adjustment issues and we all had different GI problems (though i think everyone had diarrhea often) and 4 seems like it would happen among a lot of people other than our PCV friends. i think that it must be a combination of 1 and 2.

just look at these lovely people:

I'm Not There

i watched todd haynes' _i'm not there_ last weekend. a dylan biopic, the film uses six actors to portray bob dylan at different stages of his life. the wikipedia entry is fairly thorough if you want to check it out. to my knowledge, this is the only dylan-approved film about him. it is poetic, which i imagine he likes.

cate blanchett's performance blew me away. she plays the mid- to late-sixties version, when he was going electric. if you've ever seen _don't look back_, you know that the dylan of this era was hard to love. he was proving himself internationally as a true artist and a pioneer. he was also proving himself to be a real asshole. when he saw potential hurt on the horizon for himself, he chose to deflect questions with what's-life-all-about-i-can't-believe-you're-focusing-on-me-'cause-i'm-just-another-human-being rhetoric. while his arguments may have been valid, but he also wielded them consistently when confronted with any criticism, and the effect is that the dylan of that era seems liked a spoiled child. a brilliant artist and a spoiled child. cate blanchett does a great job of showing how maybe it made him unpleasant as a companion, but maybe it's also that demeanor that allowed dylan to wear that houndstooth jacket on the stage in manchester after the intermission and withstand boos and jeers and still respond to someone calling 'i'll never listen to you again!' with 'i don't believe you.'

heath ledger was also great, and his character's wife (played by the eventual love interest from _science of sleep_) was also impressive.

Cedar Point

yesterday i went to cedar point. it's generally considered to be the best coaster-lovin' park in the country. maybe the world! we rode ten of the seventeen coasters in the park. the ones we missed were mostly kiddie ones, but i'm sorry we missed the blue streak and wicked twister.

here are my thoughts, in the order that we rode them:

magnum xl-200: good times! it's quick and fun. eric was very fired up about it, because apparently it was the 'big coaster' when he first started going to cedar point as a youth. we rode this first, so honestly my memory of it isn't perfect.
millenium force: this was also disappointing to me. the first hill is huge, but otherwise it was just a bunch of fast ups and downs and not too much else. it broke down twice while we were in line, which didn't help my mood. i think i am in the minority here, though: most people love this coaster.
mean streak: a classic rough woodie. i thought it was fun, but it does make the head hurt a bit.
gemini: a 'racing' coaster, meaning there are two trains that go at the same time on tracks that stay side-by-side most of the time. we were on the red train. i thought the racing thing was stupid until people in the other train started talking smack during the ride. to total strangers! granted, some parties divided themselves among the two trains to spice it up, but mostly it was total strangers talking smack about something they had no control over. so anyway, though the blue train was ahead for most of the ride, our train pulled ahead at the end, and it was very satisfying.
top thrill dragster: holy god! 120 miles per hour. 420 feet up in the air. then back down. there is one twist on the way up and one twist on the way down. simple, yet terrifying. it towers above the park. just look at this:


iron dragon: really lame, actually. it's a suspended coaster and had it been faster, it would have been a lot of fun. also sort of kid-heavy.
mantis: a stand-up coaster! very hard on the ears, though - it knocks your head side to side right into the harness (and there is no hilarious kitsch value like flight of fear in kings dominion, which i only rode because my friend matt introduced it to me with 'if anyone can enjoy this roller coaster, it's you' and i can't resist that). and the line was as long, if not longer, than the line for millenium force. as seemed to be standard for coasters in the park, as each train came back, the ride operator asked 'HOW WAS YOUR RIDE?!', but for this ride, the response was usually sort of a group 'meh.' for the few train returns i witnessed, the operator responded to this with 'man, if i just waited two hours for a ride, i'd be more enthusiastic than that'. um, doesn't that just make it worse? if the ride isn't as great as some others (hint: maverick), then reminding the user that they just wasted 2+ hours on it is sort of mean.
corkscrew: mostly loops, and fucking fun. the ride is short but so is the wait, mostly because it's near some other big ones, like top thrill dragster. for the time investment, this was a good one. for added fun, it goes right over some of the park walking paths. honestly, the worst part is that the height requirement is lower than some of the other comparable coasters, so the line is full of eager, sugar-filled adolescents who don't seem to understand that touching the person in front of you in line is crossing a personal space barrier.
maverick: fantastic. easily the best ride in the park. it's got a great first drop (you actually curve under the hill). it's smooth. the curves throw you around. at one point you go into a tunnel, which is dark so it's scary, but more importantly, it is hidden from those not on the ride, so a first-time rider hasn't been watching it over and over again from the line so s/he doesn't know what to expect. in the tunnel, the ride slows down, and then uses an LSM launch to catapult the train out again into the second part of the ride.
raptor: lots of fun! it's a suspended coaster. we rode it at night, just before the park closed, and i enjoyed it immensely. we were near the back of the train, and i think that plus nighttime meant that you couldn't see what was happening, which made every turn a surprise. there were a couple of fun loops and corkscrews that probably would be tame if you were in a standard car, but with the dangling feet the sensation was delightful.


it was a great day. i had a lot of fun. i even ate at a chick-fil-a! and i got to see lots of obnoxious t-shirts and lots of very fat americans.

I'm going to Finland

i just got the news on thursday that the teradata team at nokia is expecting me in september. i'm very excited.

check this site for some pictures of nokia hq.

i'll be in the town of espoo.

Delightful Maps

yesterday josh and i were playing around on google maps and found this wonderful user-created map. the author is named eddy van mourik (at least that's what i'm guessing from his handle) and he had worked as a mailman for four years on the southern side of rotterdam. the map shows highlights of his route labeled with little personal memories.

there are gems like Herkingenstraat 36: "The people that lived here would have their heating on really high. When I would stick my hand in their mailbox it would be warm.
Warm and hairy."

also Dirkslandhof 58: "A very very pretty girl lived here. One day she was not there anymore. Her mail kept coming for over a year."

if you're there, i also recommend checking out his map called 'Empowering bikeride #1' that shows a 95km bike ride he took.

It's not like envy, or even hungry

yesterday josh and i broke up. there is relief on both sides and i think we're closer because of it. we always got along really well, but our expectations of a significant other are significantly incongruous.

today i'm a little bummed out. i feel like i failed at something. plus i'm not sure what implications this has about my hanging out with my girlcrush and her husband and other people josh works with whose company i have come to enjoy immensely.

on the other hand, josh and i are back to being buddies, and we're much better at that. we hung out all day yesterday and it was really enjoyable.

Mom Comes To Visit

my mom came for a visit last week. she came with our neighbor susie, who has two sons. one of her sons, ian, lives in the city with his girlfriend ellen. it was great to see everybody.

friday night we went to PPQ for crab.


then we went to ocean beach.


it was a beautiful sunset!



saturday we went to the musee mecanique. it was really fun for all of us. here's mom and susie with a 'game' that references marietta.


saturday night susie, mom, and i went on a sunset cruise in the bay.



and to complete our weekend of touristy things, sunday afternoon we went to the muir woods.

afterward, i headed to the airport, and then my mom and susie got locked out of my apartment. i was on a layover in LAX when it all went down, and it required some frantic phone calls to my roommate and then back to my mom, but eventually my roommate came back to the place to let them in. phew.

Wedding Season

i'm at the end of a string of 3 weddings in 4 weekends. all were fun. click the links for photos!

the first was in the abacos (a group of bahamian islands). here's me and josh a few hours before i went skinny dipping:


the second was in d.c. here's the couple listening to speeches about themselves:


the third was in napa. here's me and my girlcrush:


and bonus! here's dre showing her outrage at the lack of variety in her fruit cup:

Bay to Breakers

i didn't run in bay to breakers. but i dressed my ass up and drank a little and celebrated the one thing that really sets san francisco apart: costume enthusiasts.

princess and i like to do the bee outfits. here's us in gorilla costumes in bee costumes (bee-rillas!) last year:



for b2b2008, princess went with the classic bee with the following adjustments: no wings, no antennae, kitty ears, and sandals (which i later carried while she limped home). i went with the ladybug outfit with ladybug wings, but i also added a sweet bee-striped hoodie that my mom made for me. thank you, darcy!



here's us with some bee-dudes we met.



here's princess with their bee socks that we decided were essential for the bee outfits next time.



here's me with the bee-dudes.



and here's a bonus shot of someone's arrested development shoutout. i was impressed.