doubting thom

My new Sony digital camera arrived last Thursday, and thanks to it and Flickr, I’ve been crazy-obsessed with it. One of the groups on Flickr–Squared Circle–is devoted to taking pictures of circular objects or phenomenon and then cropping them to a square frame; because Flickr automatically resizes the thumbnails, whatever the original resolution, to a single size, the slideshow from this group can be oddly hypnotic as the images morph from one to the next. I’ve submitted a couple dozen to this group alone, and have started seeing circles everywhere.

I really love the new camera, and I’m having a lot of fun with my latest hobby/obsession.

While the rest of the DC area was enjoying the gorgeous warm weather, driving out to the mountains to see the peak autumn foliage, attending Halloween parties, or taking part in the Marine Corps Marathon this past weekend, Jeff and I were busy moving the final remaining items from his old apartment (while we’d been living together the past year, he’d continued to pay rent on his studio apartment downtown) to the Arlington condo.

Whew. Thank goodness he only had a studio apartment, because this was an exhausting endeavor. To be fair, though, the only thing that didn’t go particularly well, as Jeff notes, was moving the single substantial piece of furniture, a loveseat that converts to a twin sleeper. Convertible furniture tends to be pretty heavy, and even though as a loveseat/twin bed this was on the smaller side, neither Jeff nor I are particularly large or muscular, and negotiating hallway turns, doorways and elevators was neither easy nor fun. Jeff had rented a van specifically for the sleeper, and our plan was to drop it off at Goodwill near the condo after unloading the other stuff; it was only once we were at Goodwill that we found out that they don’t accept convertible sofas, so we had to take it back to my place and move it upstairs, which was not the highpoint of the day, believe me. While getting it into the condo building from the street seemed nearly impossible–and admittedly my soured mood at the moment didn’t help–fortunately it then fit easily into the elevator and through the condo door. Unfortunately, we hadn’t planned to have to bring it here, and don’t really have space for it, so for now it’s lying on its side sandwiched between the existing furniture and the boxes from the apartment.

Right now our living room and bedroom look like the aftermath of a natural disaster. It’s surprising, given the obsession I have with my new camera, that I didn’t take any pictures of the mess in the living room last night, but I may have been too close to it at the time to even think about it any longer, much less memorialize it. However, a day away from it I’m feeling physically stiff and sore but much more sanguine about the mess, so I’ll probably take some photos this evening.

In the meantime, here’s a pic of Jeff standing in the middle of his nearly empty old apartment just before we carried the final load of stuff down to the van.

N.B.: Jeff did most of the work, while I did most of the complaining. I only pitched in for a few hours on Sunday to help move the loveseat and a few remaining boxes, and to drive him over to his place and back on Saturday whereas he gave up his Saturday to continue boxing up stuff while I played with my new camera. He also drove the rental van on Sunday, a generally frustrating and sometimes terrifying proposition given the idiocy of Washington-area drivers and the significant road closures occasioned by the Marine Corps Marathon that same day.

A couple of weeks ago, Jeff posted about our optometrist appointments and his settling on a pair of geekcool Gucci frames. I left that evening without having chosen new frames, and feeling really frustrated from the overall lack of personalized attention and the insistence from the clerk–despite my having told her that I specifically was looking for something different–that I looked good in nothing except a pair pretty much identical to the ones I was wearing.

After that we had our trips to Suffolk and San Francisco, so I hadn’t gotten around to looking anywhere else. On Monday, though, when I picked Jeff up at the Metro we decided to go to Baja Fresh for dinner. Right next door is an optometrist we had almost gone to for our examinations–with more of a boutique than a chainstore feel–but while they accepted Jeff’s insurance they didn’t take mine, so we had gone to Hour Eyes instead. After dinner Monday, though, we stopped in, and the personal attention was light years ahead of what I’d received at Hour Eyes. The assistant really seemed to want to help me find something new, attractive and suited to my features and coloration. And despite our arriving just before closing, they let us stay even after they’d locked the front door–yes, to close the deal and make the sale, but even knowing their motivation I was pleased.

So I left having ordered a pair of Emporio Armanis. Not as geeky as I wanted–I just have to face that none of the heavy plastic web-designer-geeky frames I want look particularly good on me no matter how much I wish they did–but simultaneously different yet similar enough to my current frames to give me a subtly but indubitably fresher look. They were more expensive than most of the frames at Hour Eyes, but the store did offer me a second pair free–though from a significantly reduced selection of plastic frames–from which I selected a pair from prodesign:denmark to have fitted with dark tinted prescription lenses for use as sunglasses.

I was told the glasses would be ready in about seven days, though perhaps less. So I was quite surprised today when I checked my voicemail on the way home from work and heard a message that my glasses were ready for pickup. I’m wearing them now, and I’m very happy with them. I’ll take some pictures–ooh, maybe with my new camera, which I’m hopeful will arrive tomorrow–when I’m not hanging around in my lounge pants and undershirt, and post them later.

Friday morning dawned (ok, we didn’t actually see the dawn) clear and almost unseasonably warm. After breakfast, Jeff took a phone call, leaving me alone to be grilled by be interviewed by chat with his parents. Mostly, they wanted to hear about my life on the East Coast, my work, my education, and my family, but with some emotional undercurrents, especially when they talked about Jeff’s own East Coast stay, with the implication that they felt he’d been there quite long enough.

Friday was Jeff’s family day, time that he set aside from the ongoing reunion events to spend with them. His father, mother and aunt, along with the two of us, headed into San Francisco that day, where we drove past his high school, and took some photos at Point Lobos and many more at the Conservatory in Golden Gate Park in what turned out to be an absolutely beautiful, clear, warm day of sightseeing. We then briefly parted ways with his family, who went for a bite to eat while we quickly visited SF MOMA, which was featuring a temporary exhibit on Glamour: Fashion, Industrial Design, Architecture that I’d read about in dwell on the plane to SF, and that we both wanted to see. I love SF MOMA, and just wish we’d had a little more time there; unfortunately, we ran up against their closing time, and were hurried out.

Afterwards we returned to Jeff’s parents’ home, where by 8:30 I’d gone to lie down, having come down with a pretty severe headache, but thinking I’d be up again shortly and ready for an evening of seeing Jeff’s friends or hitting a club downtown. Around 10:00, though, Jeff came back to the bedroom, where I was still resting, and he agreed he’d rather go ahead and come to bed (our bodies still on Eastern time) rather than go out for the evening.

–And day two, too, was over.–

On Monday, I ordered a new Sony digital camera (Cyber-Shot DSC-W1) and a 1Gb Memory Stick Pro to go with it. The company ended up shipping the two items separately (from warehouses in different parts of the country), and the memory arrived today.

When I picked it up from the front desk at my condo, the concierge wanted to know if I’d ordered a “box of air,” as the package was so light. The dimensions of the outer box measured 12"×9.5"×4.5". The plastic packaging inside was only 7"×5"×1". The actual Memory Stick itself, though, was just 1.97"×0.85"×0.11". What a waste of plastic and cardboard for mailing this tiny item out to me!

We’re back from our short whirlwind trip to the Bay Area for Jeff’s college reunion. As Jeff notes, we hoped to post while there, but that was prevented by a flaky Internet dial-up connection at his parents’ house, which finally cleared up just hours before we were scheduled to leave. At the Stanford bookstore on Saturday, I did manage to use an iMac on display to check my email and clear out about a third of the several hundred spam messages that had collected just since I previously had checked my email Thursday morning, but the timing and location weren’t conducive to posting to the blog.

The trip was fast, jam-packed and exhausting, but with only one minor exception–his final class party late Saturday night–I had a really fantastic time. And even that one event wasn’t unbearable, only a little overwhelming and claustrophobic, and probably understandable given that it was the end of several event-filled days, very late Saturday night, and featuring a crowded gym full of beer-drinking, seemingly entirely straight, unknown twenty-somethings (even Jeff and his friends only saw a handful of people they knew).

We left DC Thursday morning at 11 Eastern, travelling to San Francisco via Dallas/Fort Worth, arriving at SFO 40 minutes early (though the more-than-30-minute wait for the luggage to arrive nearly balanced that out) around 5:00 Pacific, and were met by Jeff’s (delightful) parents who drove us back to their house in Daly City. Despite having a reservation for the reunion “Dinner on the [Stanford] Quad” at 7:00, we were repeatedly urged–nay, required–to eat something beforehand, and Jeff’s mom in fact already had some (delicious, as it turns out) lumpiang sariwa, from a local Philippino Filipino (I actually first used this, then oddly rejected it, thinking that for some reason it might be a pejorative spelling, but then Jeff emailed me that it actually was the more accurate) food store, set out for us on the dining room table.

We then dressed in our suits and ties and made our way to Palo Alto; with Jeff driving his parents’ car, it was my first time to be chauffeured by him. Thursday night was beautiful, clear and only mildly and quite comfortably cool. We parked in the reunion lot and made our way by golf cart to the check-in location–one of our fellow passengers on the cart was from the class of 1954 in town for his 50th reunion; another, from the class of 1974, asked what class we were with. When Jeff answered “1999,” he turned to me and asked if I were also from the class of 1999; I demurred, noting that I was there as a guest, but silently blessing the poor eyesight or generous spirit of his generation that could take, however briefly, 15 years off my age.

After checking in, we made our way over to the gorgeous Stanford quad, in the center of which dozens of tables were set up for all the five- and ten-year reunion classes around and under tents and with centerpieces of boxes of white and red carnations.

Because none of Jeff’s friends were planning to attend dinner that night (most weren’t coming in for the reunion until Saturday), we took two seats at an empty class of 1999 table. Eventually two cute–albeit self-absorbed, snobbish and relatively uncommunicative–guys sat at our table, though eventually they left, making room for two latecomers from the class of 1994 who sat with us since there were no available spots at that class’s tables, and who turned out to be much more engaged, engaging and interesting (she’s given up a five-year practice in law to start her own jewel design business, while he had only recently returned from a year of competitive cycling in Australia). Our table was filled out by a group of friends from the 1999 class and the husband of one of them; when he sat down next to Jeff, he noted that my nametag too lacked a class number, so we connected at first because of our commonality as non-Stanfordites. Over the course of the dinner, we continued to discover that Mark and Dijana were really cool, and by the end of the evening had collected there address in Manhattan, where we hope to visit them on one of our New York weekend trips.

After dinner, Jeff gave me a walking tour of part of the campus, and then we retired back to his childhood home to sleep. Jeff’s mother had moved a second twin bed into his room for me but, surprising both of us, had pushed it against the other, making them up as a single king size bed for the two of us.

–And day one ended.–

Jeff has mentioned (here and here)that he’s been moving his photos online to Flickr, and I’ve done the same, springing for a pro account a couple of weeks ago. Ever since Photodex–where I had the bulk of my photos and screencaps stored online–starting requiring accounts for viewers, so that you had to set up an account and log in even just to see the pictures someone else had uploaded, I had been looking for a new photo-sharing service, and so far I’m pretty impressed with Flickr. I’m now including my most recent photos in the right sidebar here, as well as a Flash application that cycles randomly through all my uploaded pictures. You also can go to Flickr to see everything I’ve uploaded so far, and you won’t need an account just to look. Trial (albeit rather limited in terms of bandwidth and storage) accounts are available for free, though, so you might want to give it a try.

For now I’ve only uploaded a small number of relatively recent photos to Flickr, but over time I’ll likely move all the old stuff currently in Photodex there as well.

Friday after work Jeff and I drove down to the Hampton Roads area to visit my dear friend Sheldon and his rocket scientist POSSLQ, Gretchyn, who hosted us in her/their enormous, gorgeous home.

Appropriately, given that this weekend was the 30th anniversary of D&D, Sheldon and I had first met in 1990 at a gaming store, where he was running an in-store AD&D game I joined; by the next year he and his then-wife, Lisa, and I were sharing a townhouse in Arlington, and two years after that the three of us and my partner at the time, Jay, rented a house together, where we lived until Sheldon and Lisa were transferred by the Air Force in 1994 to a NATO installation in Belgium. They were my family, and I still feel closer to Shel in many ways–despite having been separated by ten years and, first, an ocean and later a continent when they were transferred back to the States, but to Alaska–than anyone except Jeff. So it’s nice to have him back relatively close, even if we don’t see or talk all that often.

It was a wonderful, restful weekend. The drive down and back weren’t so relaxing, of course–travelling on I-95 is rarely pleasant or speedy, after all–but once we were there everything was great. Since moving to Europe and back Sheldon has become quite the oenophile, and always has a really nice bottle or two at the ready–when we arrived shortly after 11pm Friday night, he had a nice Châteauneuf-du-Pape open and breathing and–even better, to my less sophisticated palate–an old vines Zinfandel once we’d finished off the first bottle.

Saturday we had a tasty lunch–one of the best She-Crab soups I’ve yet eaten accompanied by a pot of my favorite smoky Lapsang Souchong–at the delightful Victorian Painted Lady tea room and restaurant in Norfolk–marred only slightly by the unceasingly shrill chatter of the Junior Leaguish young Republican ladies lunching at the nearby tables in their little black dresses, Manolo Blahniks and pearls.

After a trip back to the house for an afternoon nap, we saw the absolutely outrageously crude but very funny Team America: World Police and then treated Shel and Gretchyn, for their hospitality, to a delicious dinner–albeit with less than inspiring service–at Brutti’s in Portsmouth’s Olde Towne. I had the wonderfully rare Sesame Encrusted Tuna, served with a (perhaps just a tad too mild) wasabi creme fraiche over deliciously seasoned “smashed” potatoes. Jeff had the Filet Mignon au Poivre, while Gretchyn had the Jumbo Lump Crab Cakes and Sheldon the Cioppino; everyone was extremely complimentary about their entrees. After dinner we returned home where we opened a wonderful half-bottle of Muscat from Victoria (I’m a sweet wine freak)–in fact, I just went and poured some brandy snifterfuls for Jeff and me from Saturday night’s leftovers. I feel so civilized, so Ewan McGregor in Down With Love.

Sunday was the real treat, though. After sleeping in, we woke to the sounds and smells of Gretchyn cooking the most amazing brunch–fresh cranberry scones with choice of lemon curd, fresh whipped cream or cinnamon honey butter; Belgian waffles with the same toppings but adding honey-marinated strawberries as well; and an amazing vegetable-Gouda savory cheesecake. Accompanied by crema coffee from their automatic espresso machine (something now on Jeff’s and my wish list) and Sheldon’s “Pointsettias”–his version of a Mimosa made with champagne and sparkling cranberry-infused water rather than orange juice–it was one of the very best home-cooked meals I’ve had in my life.

As though the weekend couldn’t get any better, Shel and Gretchyn then sent us on our way not only with the remainder of the Muscat and a bottle of the Zinfandel from Friday night, but also with a spare 42-bottle wine refrigerator–no longer needed since they installed their own enormous climate-controlled cellar–that fit both nicely in the back of the Prius and comfortably now next to the microwave stand in the kitchen. We love it, and feel so much more cosmopolitan now.

The only truly bad thing about the weekend–aside from the realization that we don’t live there full-time in order to enjoy Gretchyn’s cooking on a daily basis–was discovering that Alex not only had gotten sick and thrown up in the bedroom, but that he was a little diarrheac as well–after one of his visits to the litterbox after we got home, I discovered that his tail was covered in feces, which he then proceeded to trail on the carpet. It was a real mess trying to get him clean, and then the carpets, and he fought me–hissing and spitting–as I tried to clean his tail, having to resort eventually to cutting off huge chunks of shit-matted fur, such that he now looks, from certain angles, like he’s had an appointment with a particularly avant garde pet groomer. Not the most pleasant way to end the weekend, to be sure, but the experience certainly showed me that Jeff is a (super) trouper and definitely considers himself to be part of this family, as he pitched right in to help clean up the mess, and to help hold Alex while I wielded the scissors. I ♥ you, babe.

Now it’s home for just a few days before heading West to California for Jeff’s college reunion and my first meeting with the in-laws. Yoiks!

The morning after seeing Varekai, I woke up with a mild sore throat. I assumed at first that it was the result of screaming and cheering throughout the performance, but as the weekend wore on the pain intensified pretty dramatically, eventually spreading to my jaw and tongue and into my left ear canal, with concomitant sinus headaches, a low-grade fever and swollen lymph nodes. That Monday (a week ago) was a holiday for me, so I was able to rest instead of going to work, and I ended up taking last Tuesday off as well to continue to recover. Fortunately, last Friday morning the aches and pains finally largely had receded, allowing me to start our weekend road-trip in a much better state of mind (more about that in a post to follow). There’s still some mild sore throat pain and related symptoms, but for the most part I think I’m past this episode without having required antibiotics.

Jeff already has written about our recent outing to see Cirque du Soleil’s Varekai, so I don’t need to add much except to rave about our front row seats that had us close enough for the cast members to stare at, talk to and otherwise interact with us (I was featherdusted by one of the “clowns”), and for us to see every rippling muscle on the gorgeous Atherton twins standing less than a meter away.

I know some have been underwhelmed by Varekai, but I think I actually liked it best of the four traveling Cirque shows I’ve seen live–Allegria, Quidam and Dralion being the others. There’s a possibility I’ll be going to a conference in Las Vegas this coming year, and if so I hope to catch some of the standing Cirque shows there.