from the desk of stinkpot

1) [you grow codgety]

“they’re gonna be sooo sorry!”

thus warned christina after one of our many pieces of junk mail dealt her a nasty papercut yesterday. something snapped in the poor girl, because she decided to take up an old pastime of mine: taking all of those return envelopes in the junk mail, stuffing them with other shredded junk mail, and sending the lot of it back to their senders. this, of course, sticks it to the man: the sender is forced to pay postage for not only their original piece of junk mail, but to ship shredded mail back to themselves. ::gleefully rubs palms together:: in fact, it probably costs those mass mailing fiends a little bit more, since it diverts time from the message handlers assigned to process those accursed credit card pre-approval forms.

clearly, christina and i have a little too much time on our hands. nevertheless, it’s nice to fool yourself into thinking that you’ve got a modicum of control over the daily bombardment of junk mail and spam.

actually, we even noticed that some of these return envelopes have little bar codes on them. i give those envelopes special attention: my hope is that right before the mail handler at Bank of America Processing mutters an obscenity and tosses our letter in the trash, he/she scans the bar code and takes us off of the universal junk mailing list.

really though, i encourage anyone reading this to go off and try sending some trash back to those junk mailers. if, for every 1 person that responds sincerely to the junk mail, 9 or 10 send in garbage, the signal-to-noise ratio would be so low that perhaps mass mailers would reconsider their approach. think of all the trees that would be saved!

if that’s not enough to draw you into our lunacy, at least do it for the cathartic pleasure. i mean, just take a look at how much fun christina was having:

[the above photo was snapped with a 35 mm f/2 lens i just picked up for my slr. the thing produces the most wonderful night photos and close-up portraits]:

on to reason 2) as to how you know you’re getting old:

[you get really excited about kitchen appliances]:

that’s me with our brand new portable dishwasher, freshly harvested off of craigslist. i’m completely in love with Squirty (our dishwasher’s nom de guerre). up until about a week ago, i had no idea miracles like squirty even existed; it turns out, these dishwashers sit on casters and can be rolled to the sink, where you simply connect their water intake to your sink’s faucet. as the cutouts in the guinness commercials say, “how clever!”

we’d been living without a dishwasher, in our otherwise nearly perfect apartment, for the past 11 months. each night, i usually do the dishes while christina cooks – it costs me an hour of work, and the nightly enjoyment of “dishpan hands.”

well now, thanks to squirty, my dry and scaly hands will be no more!

ssssh, though – we haven’t said anything yet about squirty to our landlords. we also haven’t mentioned anything yet about the 29 gallon fish tank sitting in our study. our landlords are very particular about water usage and we burned the remains of our meager supply of political capital last month, negotiating a decrease in our rent. (they were none-too-pleased that i took the liberty of caulking their window frames.) oh well. vive le squirty!

i took today off, it being america’s birthday and all.

christina and i celebrated with our delightfully canadian friend jesse. like a good american boy, i made hamburgers. my griddle must have been channeling abe lincoln’s ghost: i put out the best burgers of my life. red onions, garlic, paprika, and peter luger’s steak sauce, all wrapped in ground beef. delicious. cows ought to grow with the aforementioned ingredients, those burgers tasted so good.

we went down to the river this evening to watch the fireworks. the streets were absolutely packed with pedestrians and cars had no chance of getting anywhere or finding parking; hooray for bikes!

here’s some proof we were there:

as usual, i tried to play photographer. i think this is the best shot i took:

it’s as if a red and purple supernova is bursting directly above the charles river.

more (mostly cliched) pictures of the evening’s fireworks hang out here.

life doesn’t get any better than today.

i slept in. i cut some fresh honeydew. i had lunch outside, under a crisp blue sky with my labmates. i wrote good code. in fact, i wrote great code – i fixed a bunch of nagging bugs, which earned me an early ticket out of lab. so i played tennis. having not played in 6 weeks, i completely binged. i played for about 5 hours straight. i finally found other guys to play singles with.

i’ve just finished my dinner of costco sushi. my tummy is full and i’m ready for bed.

eric (the head of my lab) hosted the first-ever alm lab bbq today at his house in medford.

it was great: the lab is this wonderful size (four grad students and one post-doc) where you’ve got enough people to officially designate it a “lab,” while still maintaining intimacy. our lab really feels like a warm, immediate family – exactly what i was hoping to join in graduate school. hooray!

as usual, i brought along and took some pictures.

eric’s son – kai – is adorable:

grad student role call: jesse (his shirt is hilarious):

sean:

sonia (in the pretty red dress):

and me of course:

our post-doc arne (reading a japanese celebrity gossip mag):

and of course, the lab khan, eric:

the rest of the photos live here.

it’s a bit late now.

i meant to get a lot done tonight (read: do some research) but instead, i got caught up going through the photos i took while we were abroad.

gawsh, i must’ve brought back about 1500 photos. i axed about a third of them. the remaining two thirds are heading here in a giant batch job as i write this. gah, the process of weeding out photos and organizing the survivors took about 4 hours!

these photos have been such a huge time sink. last night, i spent about 2.5 hours fretting over about 200 of them that had been all underexposed, due to a boneheaded move i made on my camera. (if you ever need to fix the exposure of 200 photos in photoshop, i took notes on how to go about fixing the problem.)

i should try and take less pictures.

in any case, the fruits of my labor can be found at this address.

goodnight moon!

hooray! our internet is finally working again, which means that this webserver is finally back online.

after months of spotty service, i think verizon has finally fixed the problem. a repairman came out the other day and saw that our phone line was actually exposed to the elements (which would explain why our dsl died whenever it rained). he rerouted our line and, after an expected unexpected delay, our internet works again.

fingers crossed – the problem might even be solved for good!

the boston muddy buddy race took place this weekend. this race has been a huge event on my calendar. my teammate – andrew – signed us up some time in february. chris and i even cut short our european odyssey to make it back in time for the muddy.

the race sounded incredible on paper. in teams of 2, you bike + run 6 miles through the woods. teams share a single bike; runner and biker switch off about every 1.5 miles. supposedly, the race organizers would ensure that you would finish the race caked in mud.

the muddy buddy certainly did not disappoint. 5.95 miles of the race were grueling and moderately muddy. (it poared today, which played right into the course’s hands.) andrew and i even donated some skin to a crop of big, sharp rocks, thanks to the smooth tires i had installed on my mountain bike for urban cycling.

the last twentieth of a mile, however, was unbelievable. the course finished in a gigantic mud pit, through which you had to crawl – g.i joe military style – headfirst.

if that sounds nasty … that’s because it is. nonetheless, judging from the expressions on everyone’s faces, the mud pit was like some wonderfully filthy adult epiphany: getting really dirty is really fun.

ok, enough words. the photos i’ve posted below should speak volumes. oh and i want to note that most were taken by christina with the SLR – she’s a natural!

a bunch of people had made clever, mildly distasteful shirts for the race:

andrew led the charge on the bike. (he’s on the blue bike in the center, sporting the “liter” on his shirt.) our team name was “liter of cola” – completely lost on me, since i haven’t seen super-troopers. at least half of our team was in on the joke.

(that’s me in the yellow helmet, tackling the mud pit.)

i found that the best way to get under the flags was to simply do the breaststroke. of course, that meant a faceful of mud. i should also mention that the mud was just disgusting – it felt, looked, and tasted, like the earth’s watery stool. bleh.

immediately after the race: (this is, i think, one of the best photos anyone has ever taken of me. also, notice andrew on the left: he’s super-nauseous right there, from a combination of exhausation and inhaling mud.)

filth + exhaustion = love at first sight:

i had no idea how andrew could tell where he was going:

our shoes are done:

i’ve also now got the perfect headshot for my page on the lab website:

syvlia (andrew’s sister) and her good friend liz also ran the race as teammates. both also got dirty (sylvia has her back to the camera, while liz is introducing her back to the sticky, slimy mud):

there were a fantastic number of opportunities for great photos of strangers:

these guys below won the costume competition:

such a fun way to spend a day!

[all the photos live here. i highly recommend checking out the mud pit sub-gallery.]

(ugh, once again, i got no work done today. argh.)

hooray, christina and i are finally back home! actually, we got home yesterday – i couldn’t post anything until now, however, since our internet has been dead the last two days. ::angrily shakes fist at verizon::

of course, when the internet did come back on, i was greeted by this on my screen:

up there on the left, you can see that i had 4464 unread emails! turns out that i forgot to turn off my world cup ticket finding program during our trip. so every 5 minutes or so of the past 2.5 weeks, i’ve gotten an email from myself.

in any case, it was an incredible trip. somehow, we managed to backpack our way through a slew of cities: amsterdam, brussels, prague, berlin, cologne, dusseldorf, gelsenkirchen, and london. it was a real adventure, since we had no prior hotel reservations and little-to-no access to phones or the internet. (we did have a tent though.) we had so much fun: along the way, we got to have lunch with the top filipino tennis player in the world, explore both a sex and a chocolate museum, and live european soccer mania. i took about 1000 photos. over the course of the next week or so, i’ll start uploading them and, hopefully, i’ll even find the time and energy to mention them in this blog. i’d be really sad if i forgot all of the wonderful stories behind those pictures.

oh and i almost forgot! hemashi, one of christina’s best friends, found this photo and sent it to us today! chris and i, in a rare burst of patriotism, had decided to paint our faces the day we saw the americans get their butts kicked by the czechs. a bunch of photographers noticed us smiling (this was before the game started) and took some pictures. i was hoping we’d come across at least one of them …

found a cheap internet cafe and so i thought i’d check in …

sadly, i’m sick as a dog right now. left the windows of our tent open one hot night and slept outside of the sleeping bag. when i woke up at sunrise, it was about 50 degrees and i already had symptoms of the flu. bah. what’s even worse is that i think i’ve transmitted the bug to christina, who’s starting to sport the same sore throat and headache that presaged my cold.

seeing the game today should make us feel a lot better though. the americans will be playing the czechs here in a small german town called gelsenkirchen (soft ch). we’ve been camped on a football field in gelsenkirchen for 4 nights now; we got here extra early to pick up our tickets as well as to secure lodging (by deciding to come to germany at the 11th hour, we were unable to find any hotels over the internet).

fortune has really smiled on us here. not only were we able to find a cheap, relatively clean camp-site, but we were also able to grab phenomenonal seats. it turns out that when we bought our tickets online, we were only buying seats in some undetermined region in the stadium. those seats could have been anywhere from on the field to the last row in the nosebleeds. it turned out that the computer put us in the very front row, right where the penalty area begins (the equivalent of the 20-yard line in american football). insane! my hands were shaking as i signed the receipt for the tickets.

ok, i’ll put an end to this smug-tastic post. auf wiedersehen!

oh and this blog will likely grow barren for the next two weeks.

christina and i did manage to find a relatively inexpensive flight to europe to go and watch our soccer game. of course, since we’d already gotten leave from work and were going to be in europe … we decided to turn the weekend soccer match into a 2.25 week vacation.

we’ll head to london, scoot down to brussels, make our way to gelsenkirchen germany, retreat to amsterdam, and finally escape through london. we’re both really psyched, especially because this’ll be our first true backpacking trip – just us, 2 backpacks, our trusty semi-waterproof tent, and a rail pass. hooray!