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

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

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.

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.

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'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!

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.

So we are on the beach at night after a long day, resting, trying to identify constellations. We give up after a while, and Alan sits quietly as I lay back in the sand and start to doze off. Ten minutes later, I'm starting to get cold. I rouse myself from half-sleep and stagger to my feet.

"C'mon, let's go in," I say, brushing the sand from my legs.

Alan is slow to move. "You know, I've been thinking... we've been together for five years now..."

"Yep," I say lightly, impatiently.

"...I think it's time to take it the next level."

"What do you mean by that?" I am already turning away from him and starting to walk toward the hotel.

He catches my hand, pulls me back to face him. "Jennifer Lee, will you marry me?"

And then before I realize what is happening, he's kneeling, reaching into his pocket, pulling out the ring.

Embarrassingly enough, my response is, "Are you joking?"

"No," he says.

"Yes. Of course," I say, pulling him up, hugging him, crying, spilling tears on the front of his shirt.

And that's the story, really. Later on we go have a drink at the hotel bar -- "to celebrate," Alan says. I wish I could remember the names of the drinks we ordered, what song the lounge band was playing, because it seems like that's what supposed to happen at significant points in your life, right? You remember every little detail. But honestly, all I can remember is that we sat there, sipping away at our alcoholic beverages in silence, mostly because I was afraid that if I said anything, I'd start getting all teary-eyed and choked up again and then our waitress would come over to check on us, and I'd have to explain what was wrong with me.

At some point, though, I did say to Alan, "Nothing's changed, really." When I said it then, it was half a reassurance to myself and half a question to Alan.

But it's been a month and a half since he proposed, and nothing has changed, really. Except that now people ask me about things like THE WEDDING. And I have to refer to Alan as my fiance, something I haven't quite gotten used to yet.

I have gotten used to wearing the ring, though, which amuses me because I've never been one for jewelry. I'm surprised that I actually remember to put it on every day. And at night, when I take it off before I go to bed, I'm also surprised to find that my finger feels empty without it.

We're engaged!

Luckily, we still have my trusty point-and-shoot Canon A70 (thank goodness I decided last night to take it out of my camera bag and give it to Alan to carry!). And I guess in some ways it's better that I left the XTi at home -- that way I won't have to worry about it getting stolen, getting it dirty with the sand on the beach, bouncing it around when we go hiking/biking/whatever... but still. Not a great way to start out my vacation. Plus I'm already envisioning all the great pictures I won't take as a result of having forgotten the XTi. Need to stop doing that.

I also realized that I forgot to bring along the A/C adapter for my laptop, so I should probably conserve my battery and get off the internet. Let's hope I didn't leave anything else important at home...

It was one of the strangest, most disorienting conversations I've ever had -- strange because it was full of subject matter I hardly ever talk about, disorienting because it was probably the most Spanish I've ever had to process at once since high school. He told me how he'd been to the U.S. before, and how he didn't really like it because people weren't friendly to him. ("Americans work hard, but only seem to care about money," he said. "Look at me: I drive a taxi, and I'm not rich, but it lets me do my writing, and that's all that matters.") He said he almost died in a car accident when he was younger, and it was a miracle that he survived without mental or physical damage. After his recovery, he said, his view of life changed. He showed me the scar on his wrist and ran his hand over the ragged Bible sitting on his dashboard and said he now spends his spare time writing. He's written two novels so far, and is working on a third. I tried to get a better idea of what his novels were about, but the only thing I could really gather was that they were religious/spiritual in nature. He expressed his disgust at the world today: "People are preoccupied with sex, drugs, money, war, the internet, homosexuality." "Are you talking about only people in the US?" I asked. "No, Mexico too. Everywhere."

I listened, even though I didn't entirely agree with what he was saying, and tried to play a gentle devil's advocate with my limited Spanish. "You don't like what people are becoming these days, but what about good people, like you and your family? Surely you can't be totally pessimistic." He brought up George Bush and railed against the war in Iraq. His opinion of Bush was harsh: "Someone should assassinate him." I was surprised, if only because I'd pegged him as your typical religious conservative. But of course the rules are different in Mexico, and that there's no such thing as Republican and Democrat.

I forget what else he talked about -- he seemed to reiterate the same themes again and again -- but as we were nearing the airport, I said I hoped maybe I'd read his writing one day. He chuckled as if he knew I didn't really mean it, but when we reached the airport, he told me to wait a minute, and ripped off one page from his pad of receipts -- "this one is for your records," he said -- then ripped off a second page, scribbled his name and a phone number on the back, and gave that to me as well.

2.

I have no idea why I voluntarily decided to go to an event where I would not know anyone -- especially considering how antisocial I've felt lately -- but I think I convinced myself that it would be a good networking opportunity. So I drove up to the city alone, spent 20 minutes looking for parking, and arrived 15 minutes late at the cafe where we were meeting. There were already about ten or so other women there, most of them in their 20s, a few in their early 30s. I settled in at one end of the table, introducing myself and explaining the roundabout way I'd heard about this meetup. At the beginning it was mostly just your standard getting-to-know-you conversation: I seemed to be the only recent transplant; everyone else had grown up in California, especially L.A. There were also surprisingly few Silicon Valley types: Joanne worked for a nonprofit, several women were lawyers or were in law school, and another was a mother/filmmaker (at least, that's what someone else said she was!). There was one engineer, but she was a civil engineer and worked in the city.

I'm happy to report, though, that being Taiwanese and female (in this case, at least) was enough to keep the conversation lively. Two hours later, when the cafe had quieted down and our group had shrunk a little, we were still talking about topics such as travel, dating non-Asian men, politics (Taiwanese and U.S. both), parents, and our parents' politics. At the end of the night, Joanne took down everyone's emails and contact info, and as I drove home, I thought to myself that I should really try to take advantage of these things, try to meet people outside of my small (tiny!) circle of college and work friends here in the Bay Area. It's weird: I've never really liked hanging out with people just because they were Asian/Taiwanese, but this time, somehow, was an exception.

3.

I was surprised at my own ability to speak and understand Chinese -- I am far from fluent, but my vocabulary covered most day-to-day activities -- and I feel like my being able to speak the language definitely helped cultivate a sense of fraternity with the people I met at our host company. I've been to Taiwan many, many times, but always with family, so I've never really had to rely solely on my own language skills, since my mom's always been there as a backup. I think visiting Shanghai was the first time when I really felt thankful that my parents taught me Mandarin as a kid.

It also made me miss being somewhere where I have the opportunity to hear and use Chinese in a totally natural context. I love living with Alan, but the only times I hear Chinese these days is when we happen to pause on the AZN channel while channel-surfing, or at work sometimes when I get to throw around a few words of Chinese with some of the older first-generation Asians. I should really just call my parents more often, eh?

I already miss friends and family, and I especially miss being at home in Alpharetta. I IMmed Ethan soon after I got in, and he responded, "you home?" "back in ca, yes," I typed back, because it felt weird referring to our apartment in Mountain View as home -- home is my parents' house in Georgia, and I just left it! And it's strange to be back on Pacific time, when everyone else I've interacted with over the past two weeks is on Eastern time. Three hours doesn't really seem like a big time difference until later in the evening. It's 9 here, which is still early for me. But it's midnight on the east coast, and people will be winding down and getting ready to go to sleep soon.

To everyone I got to see over the break, it was wonderful to spend time with you. To everyone I didn't get to see, I'm sorry! I hope we can hang out next time. I plan to be back sometime during the summer, when Alan will be interning with a law firm in Atlanta.

And to my mom and dad and sister: I love you. I felt like I got to spend more time with my family than I usually do during visits back to Georgia; there were days and evenings where I opted to stay at home instead of going out, and even though sometimes all we did was sit around the living room and/or kitchen doing our own thing, it felt like I'd never left. It always goes by too fast, though, and I think during this particular visit, I understood more than ever why some people choose to make their homes and take jobs close to family, close to where they grew up. The sense of familiarity, of security and convenience, is strong... and it's something I don't fully appreciate until I go back.

Happy New Year, everyone. There'll be pictures and stuff up on Flickr soon.