we’re moving. again. it’s been almost ten months, so i guess that it’s time. with the situation here not being particularly good (whopping 17% rent increase, construction about to begin about 15′ from our bedroom, etc) and our friends vacating this pretty awesome 1920s sears cottage over near the university, it seemed like the right decision.

in the move, we’re losing a bunch of square footage of living space, but we’re gaining a full basement (i’m psyched to renew my love affair with a 10″ sliding compound miter saw), our own washer and dryer, a backyard, and no shared walls. oh, and it’s $350/month cheaper than our rent would be here, so we can continue to earn like tech workers but spend like grad students. if frugality was a crime, we’d be doing life. a life that looks a lot like our current lives, now that i think about it.

whenever my seemingly yearly move plans are mentioned to my parents, my mother sweetly (and i don’t think sarcastically) replies, “that’s why you’re in my address book in pencil!” so yeah. saturday. new neighborhood: ravenna.

pardon my pigpile but this is really the biggest news story of the day?

what i love about this whole brouhaha is that it brought itself to life inside a vacuum of its own creating. tell me that’s not heavy. right-leaning news outlets are all about the muslim, kill whitey, unpatriotic, terrorist fist-bumping rhetoric. no one outside of people who are 100% plugged into left-leaning news commentary actually know that any of this back-and-forth is going on (i took an independent poll). then the obviously left-leaning and obama-loving new yorker puts image to the left-leaning news commentary about right-leaning rhetoric and everyone (obama included) lambastes them and it’s all over every news outlet in the country and everyone is running to make sense of what’s happening. and unless my math is incorrect, i’m pretty sure that this story is going to collapse under its own weight right about… now.

i noticed a new underwear store for men opening up on matt and eliza’s block when we were walking past the other night. this is the sign in their window:

are there more cock and ball logos like this? the only one i can think of is that old skate company limpies.

it’s funny that kids used to skate with that giant flaccid phallus silhouette on their chests.

- woke up, felt urge to puke
- went into bathroom, realized bathroom was gross
- held in vomit while cleaning toilet
- toilet cleaned, vomit released
- ate bananas in attempt to settle stomach
- felt a little better
- ran 18.7 miles (wished i did 20)
- ran ice-cold water in the tub
- made giant fruit salad
- sat in ice-cold bath while eating giant fruit salad
- looked around, wished that i cleaned tub, too

tonight i went out to dinner with matt, eliza, and jesse. it was going normally until eliza thought that michael bolton was sitting two tables away (though really, something like this was bound to happen, as it always seems to). it seemed somewhat implausible, as this wasn’t fancy dinner, it was neighborhood sushi dinner in seattle washington and definitely not the best neighborhood sushi dinner in seattle washington.

whether or not this person was michael bolton was hotly debated for some minutes, with pictures being brought up on iphones and held up for comparison. i was pretty sure that it wasn’t him (no nicollette sheridan, in seattle washington, etc), but i had a hard time convincing eliza. i had one piece of information that i was pretty sure would clinch it, but couldn’t bear to bring it up as it had been used as a weapon against me some months ago when someone said, ‘hey jay, you know who else is vegan just like you? michael bolton.’ boom. ouch.

however, my competitive instincts took over and on our way out, i told eliza to check and see if he was eating fish. he was. not michael bolton. ‘really?’ she said, ‘then why would he wear his hair like that?’ double boom.

mia is in phila for the weekend because that’s the kind of patriot she is. she called me from the wedding of three centuries, which was taking place at independence hall. apparently the guy who plays ben franklin is marrying the woman who plays betsy ross. i had a million follow-up questions, but there was a concert starting and she had to go.

oh. wait. this actually made the news? really? follow-up questions averted.

full story here and here.

last night, mama de pooka dropped by to pick up some stuff and she started telling me about this restaurant she went to last week in tacoma that has the calories and grams of fat listed for each menu item. she and her food-companion sat down, opened the menu, dropped their jaws, and left to get food elsewhere. what surprised her were two things 1) that a burger/nachos kind of restaurant in tacoma would have nutrition information and 2) that the aforementioned nachos contained somewhere north of 1000 calories. holy shit.

this made me wonder what would happen if all restaurants had to list calorie counts next to each item on the menu. would people stop going out to eat? if not, would they change how they ate? would it be bad for business for restaurants to label? would they simply change the way they cook to use less fat? or would they lobby the fda to increase the total recommended number of calories again?

a very edited-down set of alaska photos are up on flickr now. it was hard work, i think because of the photo-major-hyper-critical-self-critique thing that doesn’t ever go away even when posting vacation photos.

enjoy.

last night i was talking to a friend who is thinking about changing jobs. he works in a large office building downtown. he told me that he enjoys his work, likes his coworkers, and is fine when he’s at his desk, but starts to get down when he rides his bike into the corporate parking lot, sees the unhappy people get on an elevator to go up to their desks and then ride back down at the end of the day even unhappier than when they started. i have exactly the same feelings, and i suspect they’re pretty common.

the elevators/parking lot/dealing with strangers bad interaction stuff is by far the worst part of my day. it’s why i haven’t taken the bus in about four months. i’d rather ride my bike in the rain than deal with the bus. today i took the next step toward not dealing with unknown humans by taking the stairs on each of my three trips up to my desk on the 10th floor. no more elevators. ever.

as an aside, i wonder if that social anxiety disorder medicine is right for me. i should ask my doctor.

before i started work at america’s biggest online bookstore, i assumed that it would be all magic and super-perks everywhere (free returns? huge supply rooms full of every book ever?). turns out that other than having it be a really good icebreaker at parties when people find out where i work (this only works outside of seattle — in seattle, everyone works here or at the other big company), there really aren’t many. i mean, i love what i do and the impact i have on the internet as a whole, but the other big company has a super-sick gym that contains the old sonics floor on which their nerds can play basketball at lunch. i’m just saying.

the biggest perk at working at america’s biggest online bookstore is getting to attend lunchtime talks by visiting authors. i’ve seen a pretty great assortment of talks and won books written by: david lynch, jonathan lethem, and floyd landis. yesterday, david sedaris came to speak. i won his new book, too. i’d never won raffles until recently and now i can’t lose. (here’s where my losing streak starts.)

there isn’t a lot i can say about david sedaris that hasn’t already been said (other than a surprising number of my coworkers didn’t know who he was, which i didn’t think was possible), so i’ll talk about waiting in line for 40 minutes so that he could sign my book. there were only about 30 people in front of me, which means that he took a fair amount of time with each person, and i got to spend a fair amount of time away from my desk yesterday.

turns out that he does a little drawing for people and the opening line is a lot like those caricaturists in central park — they start drawing you on rollerskates and then ask if you like rollerskating (at least this was the case in 1983), for me senor sedaris started drawing a turtle and then asked me if liked turtles. my only possible reply was, ‘um, you already started it, so yes.’

he then began a stream of consciousness drawing/talking thing, which i think if i had to sign a billion books per week i’d be doing, too. his went something like, ‘your turtle, he’s a smart turtle, you can tell by the glasses… and he’s reading a book… about jesus being crucified… i guess that book would be the bible…’

here’s the drawing. it’s pretty rad:

in retrospect, i probably should have told him my last name so he coulda said something about the greeks instead of something generic about turtles and jesus.

When hiking in bear country, you’re supposed to make a lot of noise so as to not surprise a bear. I’ve been yelling out ‘hey bear! Bear bear!’ Which sounds like the best beer guys at shea stadium, who yell out ‘get-cha beer here’.

Needless to say, this got old rather quickly, so we started playing ‘I’m going on a picnic…’ We started yesterday in denali.

our new mantra goes ‘apples, beers, cans of beers…xavier high school boys, youth, zaxxon’ before looping around to double letters ‘aardvark, berry bubbalicious, coca-cola…xenophobic xylophonists, yelling yeti, zippered zebras.’ This also gets incredibly old but it keeps the bears away… Or so we thought.

As we were walking into town tonight (hope, alaska pop: 150), and mia was going on a picnic (and up to g — grizzly bear repellant) we saw a dog who had cornered a black bear not 10′ away from us. We wouldn’t have spotted it otherwise.

I wish we were better about bears. No matter how prepared you think you are, you’re still a little freaked out when you actually get tested.

We’re in an rv in denali. We dubbed the rv ‘das boot’. All-in-all it’s pretty amazing. Denali is the size of massachusetts and has only one road in it that only runs 90 miles to the west of the entrance. there are school buses that shuttle people into the interior and will stop for wildlife viewing or to pick up and drop off hikers. There is a lot of very remote wilderness here.

You can pretty much hike everywhere in the interior because there are no trails and almost no trees, due to the treeline being at 2000 feet.

Yesterday on the bus, we saw a sleeping grizzly. Thing was big. And kind of sweet looking. We’re really into bear safety now. I’m kind of obsessed with it, actually.

Whenever someone on the shuttle bus spots an animal in the distance (and it can be up to about a mile away), they yell for the driver to stop so that we can all stare at the dot on the hillside and take pictures that won’t turn out. During these moments, I spend my time documenting people taking pictures, which will actually turn out.

I’ll post photos upon my return. Lots of typing because the three other occupants of das boot are sleeping in. I death-marched them to the top of a peak yesterday, so they’re tired and hate me. They’ll probably hate me more when they find out that I’ll be doing it again today.

My first impression of alaska is that it seems like a more intense version of washington state. Longer days (midnight sun!), bigger mountains, a more ethnically diverse population (surprisingly) who are even friendlier than the moderately diverse washington population. Basically, it’s the pacific northwest taken to its logical conclusion.

Also, this is where all of those huge 1970s station wagons came to live out their last days. For all of the above reasons and more, I am already 100% into it.

The plane ride up to alaska was similar in feel to a plane ride to las vegas — that super-hyper anticipatory energy mixed with weird tackiness and incredibly bad hair.

in the midst of the nuttiness, I turned to mia and said: it’s like crazy slipped its meds and decided to go on spring break. To which she added: and forgot to bring its inside voice.

I feel better now that we (and our luggage) made it to the motel. My brother and his wife arrive in about an hour (at like 2am). Tomorrow we pick up the rv and head north. Gas here is cheaper than seattle. Score.

Blogging from my blackberry. Please pardon any typos.

barack obama rode a cooler bike?

though the last one had a really sweet (though ugly colored) custom serotta, and that didn’t turn out so well for him. or us, for that matter.