replaced by every day

So, this time last year, I was participating in National Blog Posting Month, attempting to write a post every day. That was a fun exercise, but these days I feel like I need better reasons to post. Granted, I've gone through a lot of transition these past couple months:

(quick summary, for those of you who don't follow along with me on my Flickr stream, or my LiveJournal, or wherever else I play around on the internet these days)

June: left the Bay Area, moved back to Georgia
August: got married (!!!), went on our honeymoon to Costa Rica
September: moved to Washington, DC

I guess my excuse is that I'm too busy "transitioning" to post anything here, but at the same time, aren't transitions usually GOOD reasons to post? I'm sad I never wrote a sentimental "Goodbye, Bay Area" post, because certainly, there are things I miss about it -- the weather and accessible farmers' markets are only the first things that spring to mind.

And getting married, of all things, definitely should have deserved some reflection. Although, I must tell you, being married is pretty much a non-event. The wedding itself was, and I remember it as a happy blur, a joyous celebration, a relief (I didn't sleep a wink the night before). But if you asked me how life has changed since Alan and I got married, I would be hard put to give you an answer. In fact, when Alan and I went on a weekend trip to New Orleans a couple weeks ago with some friends of his from Georgia, at first I would introduce myself as Jennifer and then qualify that with "Alan's wife" -- but that always felt rather strange, and I stopped doing it after a while. I suppose one day I'll get used to it.

I feel like there should be more, a reflective thought, a clever conclusion, but I think this'll have to be it for now. Baby steps, I guess.

Posted by Jennifer at 02:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We can hear cheering and celebration outside our apartment, people screaming, "OBAMA!!!! OBAMA!!!" It is truly awesome and amazing.

Posted by Jennifer at 08:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I just found out that Carl Kasell's (of NPR's Wait Wait Don't Tell Me) name is spelled... well, "Carl Kasell." I always thought it was spelled "Karl Castle." The radio is weird.

Also, in the process of googling him, I found that Carl is on Facebook. Who knew?

Posted by Jennifer at 08:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The last week in March was Alan's spring break, and we spent it by driving up to Portland and Seattle. We spent one day in Portland, three days in Seattle, and the rest of the time in transit. It was a lot of driving, and it was pretty rainy most of the time we were there, but despite both of those things, the trip was pretty fun.

I finally finished posting pictures from the trip on Flickr: view the set or slideshow (I just discovered the slideshow option recently, and very much like the way they display your pictures -- just make sure to activate the photo captions by clicking on the "i" button in the middle).

There are a lot of pictures (more than I've taken in a while, anyway), so I wanted to list some "highlights"...

Portland:
-catching a free classical concert at The Old Church
-the Classical Chinese Garden

Seattle:
-Pike Place Market, of course (I liked the fish best)
-eating lunch at the Uwajimaya Grocery's food court in Chinatown
-braving the wind at Gas Works Park
-the view from the top of the Space Needle (the sky cleared up for this!)
-the gorgeous Seattle Public Library
-our rather unsuccessful day trip to Olympic National Park
-taking the ferry from Bainbridge Island to Seattle downtown
-seeing locks (the water kind) in motion
-the Experience Music Project

Posted by Jennifer at 09:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sometime in high school, when I really started getting into the internet, I started using "absentmindedprof" as an alias/username, derived from the fact that "absentminded professor" was my dad's occasional nickname for me. Those who have been visiting this weblog since its early days probably remember that the byline used to be "posted by absentmindedprof" instead of "posted by Jennifer." It's still my username on Flickr, Yahoo!, del.icio.us, and other websites that I use for recreational purposes.

I think the reason I haven't grown out of using "absentmindedprof" as an alias is because, almost ten years later, I can still be pretty absentminded at times. I was reminded of this on Monday evening when, rummaging through my backpack at the library, I realized I had left my keys at home again. Lately I've been biking to the train station and taking light rail to work, since the weather's been warming up, so when I leave in the morning I no longer need my keys to start the car. I'd actually done the same thing a couple nights before, but that time Alan had gotten home before me, so I actually didn't even notice that I was missing my keys until I opened the front door and saw them staring me in the face, sitting on the table in the front hallway.

Monday evening I wasn't as lucky -- I got off work relatively early and I knew Alan had class until 7pm. I left him a voicemail around 6:30 while I was at the library picking up some books I had on hold; I would have hung out at the library longer had I not been worried that someone might steal my bike (which was leaning against the bike racks outside, untethered, since I didn't have my bike lock key either!). Then I went home and sat on my front steps for a while, killing time on my laptop, until Alan finally called me back around 7:30 to say he wouldn't be home for another two hours.

In the end, I actually didn't mind much, since it gave me an excuse to seek shelter at my favorite neighborhood bubble tea cafe. Verde is kind of awesome -- not only do they serve bubble tea, but also various Taiwanese-style snacks. It took me 15 minutes to walk there, 45 minutes to leisurely eat my order of minced pork with rice, and then the rest of the time I spent chatting with Tom online and surfing the internet. When Alan came to pick me up, I was pleasantly surprised that the last two hours had passed so quickly, and happy that I'd had an unexpected opportunity to get out of the house a bit.

When we got home I found my keys, hidden under the bananas in the kitchen. Don't ask me how they got there.

Posted by Jennifer at 06:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

From Poetry 180, a book I've owned for probably 2+ years now, but haven't managed to finish yet. Although I recently started keeping it in the bathroom along with the magazines, and I think this is a promising place for it!

Advice from the Experts
by Bill Knott

I lay down in the empty street and parked
My feet against the gutter's curb while from
The building above a bunch of gawkers perched
Along its ledges urged me don't, don't jump.

Posted by Jennifer at 09:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So my friend Ethan, who's generously been hosting me (and some other folks) for a couple years, just got himself a dedicated server to host his site. (Check it out: the new Hydrous is pretty freaking awesome.) In doing so he moved things around a bit on his old server, and my Movable Type backend was broken for a little while, not allowing me to post. But it's been fixed, and you may also notice that this weblog is now located at jlee.hydrous.net instead of www.hydrous.net/~jlee. Update your bookmarks, please!

Anyway, I said in my last post that I might talk about politics, so now I feel like I have to. I voted for Hillary Clinton last month, and that decision wasn't really based on hard beliefs or positions -- although at various points in my decision-making process I told myself I was voting for her because 1) she's a woman, 2) I like her health care plan, 3) she's a mother, and 4) my sister and Maggie Mason like her too. (Yes, I actually called my sister the night before the primaries to ask who she liked better, even though she wasn't planning on voting. No, I have no connection to Maggie Mason, I just read her weblog).

Alan had refused to tell me who he had voted for because he said he didn't want to influence my decision, so of course that was the first thing I asked him after I'd finished filling out my ballot. He'd voted for Obama because "for reasons I don't quite understand," he said, Obama has a strange way of bringing people into the Democratic party, people who normally wouldn't have cared before.

In my heart I probably agree with Alan on the whole electability thing (even though I really think all the Hillary vitriol is utterly and totally unfounded), but when it came down to my primary vote I decided to vote for the candidate I liked better rather than the candidate I thought everyone else might like the best. In the end I guess it didn't really matter, since Hillary won California (and Santa Clara County) by a pretty wide margin. Now it's a month later, and I'm still happy with my vote, but the weird and stupid part is that when Obama was winning his streak of primaries, I actually felt a little relieved at the possibility that he'd be the nominee, like... at least the primary system will make up for the fact that I voted based on my desires instead of my conscience!

Even now, despite Hillary's victories in Ohio and Texas, that one part of me still wants Obama to win. I'm tired of being superficially conflicted! I just want this whole nomination process to be over so that we can GET A DEMOCRAT IN THE WHITE HOUSE ALREADY.

Posted by Jennifer at 06:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)