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?
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
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.
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.
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.
I really have no good explanation for why it's been... (counting)... more than six months since I've posted anything. Christine stayed with me over the summer, which made the months of June through August pretty eventful since it was a new experience for her being in California, and a new experience for me having my sister as a roommate. After she left to go back to school and Alan came back from his internships in D.C. and Atlanta, I sort of settled into a pretty uneventful (but not unpleasant) routine, both at work and at home.
I've posted only slightly more frequently in my LiveJournal in the past six months, but if you read through my posts there you'd get pretty much the same idea -- most of the entries I post on LJ, aside from the occasional "what happened to me today" post, is either about food/cooking or my newly-acquired appreciation for anime.
Speaking of food and cooking, the other day I bought Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything. I bought it at the Borders in downtown Palo Alto, but only because I had an American Express gift card that was going to expire at the end of the month. I'm not sure if all credit-card-sponsored gift cards are like this, but this one was an "options points" card or something, which basically meant that you could only use it at a limited number of retail/catalog/online vendors. Amazon was one of them, but I could not figure out how to redeem the card during the checkout process, and according to the gift card website, the card had to cover the entire Amazon purchase -- you couldn't cover any overages with your own money. So, people, the moral of this story is, gift cards are stupid, especially ones that have an expiration date.
Anyway, so Mark Bittman's book! I've started to amass a little collection of cookbooks, and whenever I get a new one, I peruse it pretty thoroughly before attempting to cook any recipes from it (seriously, I find cookbooks make for very relaxing before-bed reading). Bittman's book contains quite a few tips and tricks that I've never read or heard anywhere else, like throwing your kitchen sponge into a dishwasher or laundry load, to keep it disinfected (so simple! how come I've never thought of this?). And apparently you can make biscuits with sour milk! I didn't think sour milk was good for anything! There's a lot of practical advice for the home cook, written in a friendly, down-to-earth tone, which I like.
Here's a funny excerpt from the chapter on pasta: "If there are leftovers, by all means refrigerate them. You can reheat pasta in a microwave, oven, or non-stick skillet, without additional fat (you can eat it cold, too). All of these methods are frowned upon by the pasta police, but I'd wager that even three out of four of them are closet eaters of leftover pasta. Yes, it will become overcooked and somewhat mushy, but you're hungry, right? It's fine; enjoy it. The pasta police are busy elsewhere, hassling people for using spaghetti where tradition calls for capellini."
I found that paragraph hilarious, enough to make Alan listen to me read it aloud later (even though he didn't really find it as amusing). If you didn't really find it funny either, well, stay tuned for my next post. Maybe I will talk about something more meaningful, like who I voted for in the primaries and why!
Wednesday evening, my sister (who is interning in the Bay Area and living with me this summer while Alan is away interning at law firms on the East Coast) and I went out jogging. I took my house key off my keychain so that I wouldn't have to carry the keychain around with me while I ran. When we got back from jogging, I put my house key on my desk. After resting a bit, we decided that we needed groceries in order to make dinner, so we went out again. I grabbed my keychain, and we were off.
You can see where this is going, right? We got back from grocery shopping around 8:30, hungry and excited about trying this recipe for basil chicken, and I realized that I had left the house key on my desk and thus locked ourselves out of the apartment. Unfortunately, Christine hadn't thought to bring her set of keys with her, so we were out of luck there. I called our apartment complex's emergency line, and the person who answered said she would page the on-call person who would hopefully arrive with a spare set of keys.
While we waited, we attempted to gain access to our apartment through alternate methods. Christine tried to climb up onto the balcony (I had left the balcony door unlocked), using the car as a makeshift ladder. Unfortunately, the car and Christine were both too short, and this attempt was unsuccessful. Since we didn't want to dent the car roof, we looked around the complex for something that might support our weight better, so that I could climb on it and then Christine could get on my shoulders, but this was also unsuccessful. We tried doing the credit card trick with the front door lock -- no luck. 45 minutes later, the on-call person hadn't come yet, and we were still locked out of our apartment.
Around that time we noticed some commotion outside the apartment two doors down from mine. A couple who had been doing their laundry was talking to a guy with long hair dressed in biking clothes. Since we were sitting outside with not much to do, we wandered over and asked them what was going on. The guy with long hair, whose name was Adam, told us that the apartment above his was flooding, and water was leaking through the ceiling and into his bedroom. The upstairs apartment was being renovated, he said, so no one was there, and apparently the workers had left the kitchen faucet running. The couple, whose names were Ian and Emily, had noticed the water running in streams down the outside of his window, and had helped him call the emergency line to report the problem.
In comparison to Adam's problem, of course, our being locked out didn't seem like such a big deal. We stood outside with him, Ian, and Emily, evaluating the situation and how to fix it. Ultimately we decided that we needed to get into the upstairs apartment somehow so we could shut off the water. Ian called his friend, who he said knew how to pick locks, but his friend, ironically, was busy with a flat tire. Ian and Emily ended up recruiting another neighbor (whose name, I learned later, was Ben) who according to Emily was "a monkey." Ben was able to climb up on Adam's front stoop railing, pull himself up onto the upstairs apartment's balcony, and unlock the apartment door. The six of us went in and found the kitchen sink torn out, and the cold water pipe connected to a piece of tubing, which had been directed, laughably, into a tiny little bucket. The bucket, of course, had long since overflowed.
Ben tried to turn the cold water off, but even when he turned the handle all the way, the water kept coming out, so we concluded that the cold water shutoff mechanism was broken. So Ian or Adam suggested that we try and reroute the water outside. "We've got a hose," Ian said, and I added, "So do we."
Emily went to retrieve their hose -- and while Adam, Emily, and Christine worked on connecting it to the pipe, Ian and Ben helped me get into our apartment. Luckily, the workers had left a ladder in the apartment as well, so with the help of the ladder and a boost from Ian, Ben was able to climb onto our balcony and unlock our door.
"Thank you so much," I gushed gratefully as Ben appeared at our front door, "you are awesome!" With our apartment unlocked, I was able to lend our hose to the cause, and some duct tape, too. Finally, at a little past ten or so, we had a length of hose snaking out of the flooded apartment and down the stairs, redirecting the water to the courtyard grass outside.
We all stood outside for a few minutes, admiring our handiwork. Adam examined the window outside his apartment. "Yeah, it's definitely working -- you can see the stream of water slowing down." He thanked us and went into his apartment to do damage control.
I turned to Emily, Ian and Ben. "Well, it was nice meeting you all," I said. They agreed, and we all went back inside. Christine and I retrieved our groceries (which had been sitting outside our front door all night), and, after a mutual sigh of relief, started making dinner. About 20 minutes later, some workers finally arrived to fix the flooding apartment. We could hear them banging around, and a little while later Ian knocked at our door to return our hose.
So all in all, it was quite a night. We got locked out, but we ended up helping our neighbors alleviate a flooding apartment, and they helped us get into our apartment, too. Christine learned that she should carry around her set of keys when we go out, even if I'm the one driving. And I learned that I should probably make a couple more copies of my house key... just to be safe.