More IKEA shenannigans

If any of you have wondered about the names of all your IKEA stuff, check out this site. It has some answers and a link in the commentary to a Swedish-English translation site :)

The funniest furniture name so far is Fartful - a children's desk... ha ha... if they only knew how apropos that was!

Neighborly TV

Back in the day when TVs were exclusively tubes, you knew someone was watching TV in their living room by the faint flicker of a bluish glow coming from the window. Now that TVs are flat, GIANT, and hung on walls, I can totally watch TV right along with my neighbors as I walk by (or from a hidden spot in the bushes). Not that there's anything wrong with that. I'm just disappointed I've never caught someone watching naked people humping to funky music or something.

In other random news, yesterday I found myself suddenly thinking about and craving Salisbury steak. Not Salisbury steak proper, mind you. I speak of the Salisbury steak meal that Nutri-System made way back in 1988 when I worked there part time. Oh man, that was pure, microwaved goodness I tell ya!

In other random news still, today I managed to put together the bed frame Cathryn got for the guest room. Combined with her air mattress, it's superfragalistic comfortable. And when I say put together, I means it! The parts were many, the tools were small, and at one point I think I had to fend off pirates. Also, the metal mid-beam was so freakin' sharp, I'm positive it's made from razor blades and guillotines (there's even an info graphic warning sticker showing a cut finger bleeding). But I took my time and emerged unscathed, and the whole process was well worth the fun surprise for my schmoopy :P

I wish I was gellin'

Thanks to Julienne, I was introduced to a site called Woot! years ago. I recently visited the site again and decided to try my hand at an RSS feed. Hopefully it's paid off in my first ever Woot! purchase. I got H&R Block's Tax Cut Premium Federal + State for $24.95 (includes shipping) and I'll get a nifty 256mb thumb drive out of it after I'm done :)

It continues to be scary to attempt to handle my own finances, but if I do my own taxes this year (with a big software assist), it should save me over $200 in preparation fees plus force me to be more familiar with what I'm writing off and where money is going, etc. Pray for me!

Witness the firepower of this fully operational blog!

Last night I went to bed at 2:30. I'm now up on a Sunday morning at 9 and I feel rested and hungry for cereal. Weird! Maybe reading about the Uberman sleep schedule helped me slumber more deeply.

A work weekend is just plain wrong!

I think working during the weekend must be catchy, because now Cathryn is doing it too! Sigh... there just isn't enough hours during the day or week, is there?

In more uplifting, fun news, we have finally joined the ranks of Netflix subscribers. In fact, I have to stop myself from spending hours picking out and rating movies. With our current plan, I think we'll have stuff to watch for the next two years!

During this past week, for no reason at all, I decided to capture the dichotomy of food in my life. I put some grapes on one of our Zazen plates and thought they looked like they'd make a great food shot. Later that lunch, I pulled some leftover pizza out of the fridge and ate it with the same fervor that I had for the grapes (mmmm...foooood). I found it curious how I could enjoy both foods so much, and yet they have almost a complete opposite effect on the health of my diet. Just between you, me, and the plate though, I think I enjoyed the pizza more (big surprise, huh?).

And for the latest completely random tangent, I just wanted to let everyone know that starting a few months ago (eh, probably many, many months and moons ago), if you're signed into your Google account, all your Google searches are indexed and saved. I'm all for targeted ads and all, but this type of tracking was just a bit too much for me, so I turned that option off (I would not like my searches for porn, work stuff, fun stuff, shopping stuff, and porn all mixed together, thank you very much). It's kind of hidden, so you'll have to hunt for it if you want to do the same (hint: look for the 'search history' link next to your sign in name).

di·chot·o·my /daɪˈkɒtəmi/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[dahy-kot-uh-mee] ~ noun
1. division into two parts, kinds, etc.; subdivision into halves or pairs.
2. division into two mutually exclusive, opposed, or contradictory groups: a dichotomy between thought and action.
3. Botany. a mode of branching by constant forking, as in some stems, in veins of leaves, etc.
4. Astronomy. the phase of the moon or of an inferior planet when half of its disk is visible.
5. A fancy word one uses to sound smart.

Happy Chinese New Year!

Yep, it's the year of the pig. And in honor of this year, I'm recommending that everyone go out and purchase Pass the Pigs – an enormously enjoyable travel game that I recently introduced to Cathryn. I own the older version that I picked up from Longs Drugs a long time ago, but the link takes you to a fancier "new and improved" (I'm sure) version of the game (mine is better) sold on Amazon.com (an online retailer that sells lots of things).

I also would like to pass along some free advice when talking to someone about "Year of the Pig". Especially if you're talking to someone you care a great deal for. If you say the phrase too quickly and kind of under your breath, it sounds like, "You're the pig", which really isn't such a good thing to be misunderstood as saying. Not that I have any personal experience with making such a linguistic lapse, but it could happen. It just didn't happen to me. Really. It didn't. I'm speaking hypothetically.

Just sayin'

It's commentary through design. Yeah, it's a gift. Not that I'm saying that I don't like their furniture, because I do. But buying and especially returning the Swedish swag is akin to being in purgatory. But the word purgatory, while more apt, doesn't fit nearly as well as H-E-double hockey sticks.

A tale of red zone parking

I forgot to write about our wait for a table at Louis' Diner. If you go there during the weekend, expect to wait about 30-40 minutes for a table! Anyway, while we huddled together in an attempt to shield ourselves from the crazy windy day (the wind is filled with sand, which ends up in your mouth and eyes – yuck), I noticed that a car was parked right in front in a red zone AND a bus zone. I kept saying, "No way! How can that person not have gotten ticket yet???!!! I get a ticket for parking illegally for 5 minutes!". But it was a Sunday, on a steep, heavily trafficked street, so I figured parking enforcement would not want to deal with possibly getting killed to give someone a ticket (although I imagine it would be a juicy one).

So the entire time we waited for our table, I was also waiting for the car to get a ticket. When our name was finally called, still no ticket, but we went inside and I moved on to thinking about food. When our friendly waitress arrived, we started talking about parking in the area. She then proceeds to tell us how she parks in the red zone out front until a close parking space opens up for her to move her car into. The reason is because her shift ends late, and it's scary to walk in that area at 9pm when she gets to leave. I then found myself hoping that she wouldn't get a ticket and felt kinda bad for wishing that she would. I'm just glad I didn't blurt out "There's a car out front that should be TOWED!!!".

Anyway, all this is just another reminder for me that having compassion and understanding is the better way to go through life. That being said, I still think some people deserve what they get >:)

ps. Is it just me, or has there been nothing to buy at Target lately?

I had a bacon, mushroom, onion, and cheese omelet :)

The Cliff House and Sutro Baths.

Our view from the best booth in Louis' Diner :)

Ocean Avenue.

On Sunday Cathryn and I had a lunch outing with my friends Ali and Jed to meet their new daughter (who happily tried to eat the table) and to catch up. We couldn't have asked for a better day weather wise – though it was gusty, it was beautiful, sunny, and very clear. It was great to be outisde and in some sun. I know I'll sound wimpy especially compared to my East Coast counterparts, but it's been a long, dark, cold, wet, miserable winter!

For those interested in what a camera obscura looks like, here's a short clip. It really doesn't do any justice to the real thing, but at least you'll get an idea of what it's like.

A blog down memory lane

Ahhhhh... SO much better than the hostel.

Central Park West about 9am.

I finally meet a guy who has thicker eyebrows than I.
I bought from him Khlav Kalash and some refreshing crab juice.

As some of you may or may not already know, Cathryn and I are planning on doing some traveling in May. Part of the trip is a stop over in New York so we can visit a good friend as well as break up the long flight to Italy. I wanted to stay at the hotel that I stayed at during my previous (and only) visit to NY, but couldn't for the life of me remember what it was. After searching through several years of credit card receipts, I finally found the place! It's call the Ameritania and boy howdy is it fancy!

Strategically located on 54th & Broadway, it's right around the corner from where they tape the Late Show. I thought I was getting some sort of deal through Amex for $100 a night, but there was a minimum stay and I didn't make it. I got to say hello to $250 a night! But it was worth it. The place was awesome and located near all kinds of things (besides the Ed Sullivan Theater, Times Square, Penn Station, Central Park, NY MOMA, numerous main subway stations, and a pom frites shop downstairs).

The trip was a crossroads of sorts for me... I suddenly decided to go to New York to escape my life, burnout from work, and to visit the twin towers site; two weeks later I was eating an apple at 11pm in a hostel off of Central Park West.

I've gone through and scanned some NYC pics from five years ago (!) and hope you enjoy. In the meantime, here's a really tangential tangent about going through my credit card statements... What you buy really does in a way, show a snap shot of your life. I regularly purchased lunch from the Boardwalk deli in Tiburon because the Questus office was still located there, Miller's Outpost was still in business (I don't even want to know what possessed me to buy something from that fashionless establishment), there was a charge for Sushi House in Alameda that marked a horrible date, a charge for Dave & Buster's where I celebrated my 30th birthday, and a general lack of charges which marked me not getting out of the house nearly enough.

A few months after that seminal trip, I joined the now storied 20's-30's Yahoo! group and you can see charges from Thallasa, Lanesplitters, The Left Bank, Bellagio, Sushi California, etc. that show that I finally began socializing. I met a lot of new people, made many good friends that are still good friends to this day, and grew exponentially (compared to where I was) as a person in every way that's important :)

Happy commercialization of love day!

Yeah, I could rant about $90 roses, but I wont (besides, they're covered in toxic pesticides anyway). After getting a simple, but very nice note from Haydee, I thought, let's just go with it an take a moment to appreciate those in our lives that we care about and whom care about us. Happy Valentine's day, all! Love, Walt.

hossenfeffahhhhhh!!!

Once again, the internet has bequeathed its vast storehouse of knowledge upon me to answer any query I might dream up. This time around, it was "I wonder what would happen if you ate one of those silica packets that are clearly marked DO NOT EAT all over them?" The answer was but a Google search away. The short of it is, nothing much, as long as you're not an infant or some small furry pet.

The printed warnings, like most printed warnings, are to avoid litigation. Do we REALLY need to know not to use the microwave in the bath? Or not to use an iron while wearing the clothes we're ironing? Or place our brand new 60" projection TV on the ledge of a window? Not really. But some idiot out there probably does.

Rockstar + Pepsi = Insomnia

Yeah I'm a freakin' idiot. Right before a big trip into snow country, what do I do? I doth partake in the two fisted fiery fiend of the fantastic fury of full fledged wakefulness that is the consumption of a veritable volley of volumes of vitalizing elixir contained in cans of Rockstar and Pepsi! So it is now 4am and I find that my mind will not allow me to slumber. Thoughts race round my consciousness disallowing a peaceful path for me to walk upon to the land of dreams. Three more hours before I'm supposed to wake up to pack for a 4-5 hour drive on windy, slippery, rain and snow covered roads. Not to worry though, I'll have with me two stout companions whom I can entrust to scream loudly if the car starts to go where it's not supposed to.

Also, I plan to drink a Rockstar and a Pepsi :D

a hill of beans is slowly crushing me

Yeah I know my problems don't really amount to a hill of beans, but dang it if I can't help but to feel a little down. I don't think it's anything in particular, just lots of little things jabbing at me. Like all my clothes are inhabited by lilliputian spear people and they randomly and mercilessly jab me whenever they feel like it.

Perhaps I look too much into the future these days and need some perspective on the present as well as the past. While I think that a widescreen LCD TV from Samsung would do wonders to help me visualize that perspective, a more practical approach is probably in order. How do you get away from yourself? Because wherever I go, there I am – and I can be REALLY annoying. I think I'm going to have to go get metaphysical on myself.

Yeeearrrrgggg!!!

I just had a major tune up for my Passat at Fritz & Peters. $840 later, it's done. Sigh... I had a nice dutch crunch sandwich at Genova's, though. It's like eating delicious razor blades with salami and provolone.

The war continues

No, I'm not talking about THAT war, but my personal war against spiders. I used to love them. They ate bugs that I detested. They made cool webs for me to look at. Then, starting about a year or two ago, for whatever reason, they started biting me. Why? I haven't a clue what has changed. I even convinced my dad of this fact (he's the epitome of a non-believer) by showing him my slightly bleeding bite from two tiny puncture wounds that I must of gotten while gardening one day.

But what happened over the weekend has really pissed me off!!! It's not nearly as bad as a bite from a recluse spider (don't click on the link unless you have a strong stomach), but the bite has definitely caused some necrosis of a few layers of skin about the size of a dime on my FACE. My face! My beautiful face! I'm *SO* going to start killing every spider I see from now on and will look into spider control chemical traps.

I actually probably killed the culprit in the computer room this morning. It was a spider like I've never seen before. Including its legs, it was a little bigger than a quarter. It's body was about the size of a grain of rice that was a light tan color and slightly translucent, and topping that grain of rice was a tiny reddish head. If anyone can tell me what spider that is based on the description, please write in!

SUNDAY SUNDAY SUNDAY FOOTBALL FOOTBALL FOOTBALL

I haven't been this excited about a superbowl since the last one (I'm a big Pittsburg Steelers fan – it was very gratifying to see Cower and Bettis get their rings). My psychic brain says the Chicago Bears will win in a close one, 27-24. My football brain says that the Colts will wipe the floor with the Bears 42-21. Since I'm probably neither psychic nor a football expert, I will lose on both counts, but it's always fun to guess!

UPDATE: Ha ha! Like Bev commented, the only thing I was right about was how wrong I'd be (but it *was* still fun to guess!). For those of you who live like Ted Kazinski, the final score was Colts 29, Bears 17 (at least I got the hat right). People will blame the loss on Rex, but really, the Colts were simply better prepared and a better team. I will always be grateful for a thoroughly entertaining game due in part to all the shenanigans the rain caused.

Rain did not mire only the game yesterday, though. If you listened closely, you could hear the anguished cries of all those poor sods who invested in hi-def TVs. I'm going to start an email chain letter imploring people to send squeegees to CBS. Besides simply AWFUL coverage (at one point I swear they were transmitting the game over someone's cell phone), most of every shot was speckled with rain drops on the camera lens. WE GET IT, IT'S RAINING IN FLORIDA. Now can someone go to CVS and buy and umbrella or something???

Blogging about my blog

An escaped crab leg flipped into the sweet and sour bowl. Hole in one! (ewww...)

My blog now features labels which conveniently kinda sorts my blog entries into categories you might find interesting to read all at once! Think of it as any product which is repackaged as "New and Improved!!!", but it really isn't all that new nor improved, but it IS more expensive. So, if you consider yourself a true American, you must compel yourself to re-consume my blog!

During the labeling process, I noticed that there were very few restaurant entries. Hmmmm... maybe I missed some mentions in other entries, but I can't believe I forgot to mention that Cathryn and I had lunch at The Slanted Door in the Ferry Building in the cracker post. Excellent food, excellent service, expect to wait.

Speaking of restaurants (god that word is hard to spell!), last night I joined my family and my sister's in-laws for her husband's father's nephew's sister's brother's cousin's mom's 90th birthday (you can actually stop at "father"). We ate at the same place that we had Nazli's farewell dinner at. I can't recall the name, but it's on 25th and Franklin. The farewell dinner was SO good, I vowed to return one day. And yesterday was that day, but this time around, I saw the cook use the restroom, and before he left, he rinsed his hands. Why didn't I say 'washed his hands' you ask? Because washing requires the use of SOAP, which he skipped, which is also what I'll be doing when thinking about this place when I go to eat in Chinatown (sorry, Naz!). Also, I'm pretty sure the rinsing was just for show. He probably would've just walked out if I wasn't there.

It's rabbit season, not duck season after all

Apparently, Bugs shouldn't have been worrying about Elmer or Daffy. He should look over his shoulder for hungry North Koreans. In an odd twist to the tragic plight of starving North Koreans, they might be plating lots of giant rabbit in the near future that were bred in Germany. I'm sure this interesting article is making the internet rounds – I read it off of my Google homepage :) The picture still looks like a hoax, doesn't it?

Give me a good, blurry photo...

If you look closely, you can see Bigfoot's elbow and the top of Robert Smith's head. It was one heck of a party I tell you!

I fixed up my Feedburner account today so that now all 3 of my devoted readers can resubscribe correctly to the glory and wonder that is my feed! The service is actually pretty cool, and it was all that I could do to avoid the temptation of filling the right column with *all* of the available feed chicklets that they had to offer (nothing screams "cool", "cutting-edge", and "popular" like a big column of chicklets, I say).

Another thing I've done that's blog related was to sign up for Google Analytics. It's a fantastic tool to show you all kinds of fun, superfluous stats (at least for me) about who's reading your blog. I must admit I'm a stats junkie (as long as I'm not the one who has to gather and index them) and it was truly thrilling to find out that people from as far and away as China, Belgium, India, and Argentina were all somehow finding their way to my little blog and then immediately leaving :D

U-S-A! ... U-S-A! ... U-S-A! [repeat obnoxiously]

It feels like forever, but I finally got my passport application sent off via my local post office. So after a trip to the recorder office for my birth certificate, two trips to Costco to develop varying sizes of my own passport photo (on the second trip I noticed they offer passport photos for a mere $4.99 – d'oh!), three trips to the post office's passport room, a sworn statement (I had to raise my right hand and everything! Too bad there wasn't a Koran lying around, eh?), and two checks totaling $97.00, I have the pleasure of waiting at least 6 weeks for processing (that's only IF they don't find my huge cache of WMDs, enriched uranium, and cocaine which I hide underneath my global warming machine). Who knew leaving the country would be so involved? I actually would've preferred that they give me a Canadian passport all things considered. I wonder if I could convince the State Department to add a check box on the application...

On a completely unrelated but rant-lite note, I finally heard one of the more popular songs at the moment from some guy/band named Daughtry. Is it just me, or do we have enough bands that sound like Nickelback already?