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[Jul. 2nd, 2009|10:34 am] |
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( 28 ) |
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| muir woods, olympic national park, hot springs |
[Jun. 15th, 2009|09:03 am] |
I visited Muir woods again recently (the third time? the fourth time?). I somehow got a new appreciation for their idea of preserving wilderness this time. I guess historically public land has been preserved but always in a human-sculpted form as a nice park with plants and pathways and grasses, while the people who founded this reserve knew a hundred years ago that plain old wilderness was something that will become increasingly rare.
Despite growing up in Washington, I never (after childhood) went out to the western half, which is completely dominated by an enormous park. There's even a rain forest (as defined by volume of rain) on the western side. Meena and I went out there last week on a vacation.
The highlight was probably the olympic hot springs. It's a short hike (2.4 flat miles, some of it along a decaying abandoned road) but long enough to filter out casual visitors. We had this beautiful pool to ourselves.
My other bit of vacation trivia is that there is in a rain shadow behind the mountains along the north coast. Sequim, despite being in overcast western Washington, claims they get 299 days of sun a year.
Every time I visit the northwest I find myself missing the air, weather, and greenery again. California and particularly San Francisco sure is nice but I'm not sure it's the right kind of nice for me. |
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| break-in |
[Jun. 14th, 2009|10:31 am] |
Someone broke into our place a few weeks ago. It seems they used a screwdriver to pop the front door and our apartment door; we've not been good about using the deadbolt, especially in this sort of circumstance where Matt left home mid-day and knew I was returning in the afternoon.
My life philosophy has "own nothing worth stealing" as a sort of unintentional side-effect but that mostly means I mooch off of my roommate. I lost nothing while he lost a laptop, mac mini, projector. The worst was that they stole Meena's camera and laptop, since she's (a) a poor college student and (b) had no backups of her eight years of photographs. (It seems some of them are scattered across various online services so it's not as bad as it first seemed.)
The whole thing hasn't upset me as much as I would've expected. It seems, with a few weeks of reflection, that I think of crime as a sort of natural consequence of mixing vastly different incomes in such a small place, and San Francisco has that worse than any other place I've lived (my street = million dollar houses; 3 blocks away = tons of homeless). I guess I have a sort of sad resignation about it and I'm mostly glad nobody was hurt. |
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| Boston |
[Apr. 1st, 2009|09:33 pm] |
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I'll be in Boston tomorrow through Sunday. Any places or people you recommend? |
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| motivation |
[Feb. 18th, 2009|10:04 pm] |
Dear internet,
What keeps you going? What motivates you to get out of bed in the morning?
Genuinely curious,
Evan. |
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| what else is there? |
[Jan. 31st, 2009|11:40 am] |
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What Else Is There?, Röyksopp featuring Karin from The Knife. (As Dan said: awesome video, not as sure about the song. But that woman has a rad voice.) |
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| all quiet |
[Nov. 20th, 2008|11:24 pm] |
I haven't written a real post in months. I apologize. I like to think of
the LiveJournal friendship relationship as a real exchange, my secrets
for yours, and I haven't been holding up my end of the bargain. Looking back,
four months ago I posted "I have a lot on my mind and not a lot of time to type
it" and today I am still holding that same thought: that most things worth
saying take more than a few sentences/minutes to communicate. The modern
world (or maybe the internet -- the two are sort of confused in my mind) are
whatever word means the opposite of conducive to prolonged concentration, and I
hate how even I would have began to skim this post now if I were reading it and
I hate even more to contribute to this vast superficial static.
Instead I have fragments of posts collected on my laptop that are meaningful
to me and maybe properly enigmatic for "constructing an online personna" but
actually kind of annoying otherwise. One excuse for stopping there is that I'm just not much of a
writer. In elementary school I refused to write the assigned journals
because I had nothing to say. I started with LiveJournal as a toy to program
on and somehow we eventually absorbed each other -- the idea that continual
internet bloodletting led to my "rich internal life" seems equally plausible to
me as the idea that you just grow up a bit in your 20s.
My other excuse is that there really isn't anything going on. When I was a
teenager (a teenager! I started here a teenager and I'm now twenty seven years
old) the fear of self-revealment online was a teenager's fear of being too
earnest: Are
you sure you want to be telling me all this, I quoted. Now the
embarrassment refracts into a twenty-year-old's fear of exposure of being
inoffensive and bland. In truth, I am a computer programmer and this year I've got more video games played under my belt than books read. Here's a piece of one of those
aforementioned unpublished posts:Everything is mundane. At work I
push quietly forward on The Project* and at home I push quietly forward on the
projects. There are a week's frustrations and then a week's victories and in
two weeks they are forgotten. Would we be friends if we met at a
party? Sure if you want to talk about computers or music but that's not quite
where I'd imagined I'd be.
* That's Google Chrome, now that it can be named. |
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| portland |
[Aug. 7th, 2008|02:49 pm] |
Dear LJ, I'm sorry I haven't posted anything of substance in a while. I have a lot on my mind and not a lot of time to type it.
I'm gonna be in Portland this weekend for a wedding. Anyone around there interested in hanging out on Sunday? I seem to have lost my phone, but email works. |
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| some minor happenings |
[May. 21st, 2008|11:06 am] |
My DSL has been out at my house since Wednesday. It's probably been better for my social life.
On Wednesday I went home from work "early" to join a bunch of friends in the park, and slacklined for the the first time this year.
On Thursday I biked 44 miles to work. I'm not at all the marathon biking sort -- the ride was probably somewhere around 20x longer than any other bike ride I've done -- but I thought it would be something fun to try once. So many of my friends doubted I could do it! The best parts were going through the city as part of a large pack (maybe 42 people initially; I joined up with a larger group); going through a park full of eucalyptus; and the parts where the wildflowers were thick enough to smell. The worst parts were forgetting to bring my bike gloves, especially since this bike has rough handlebars; Thursday being the hottest day yet of the year; and in general the second half, which was through the relatively boring, treeless, and flat south bay.
( a picture of various people getting ready )
On Saturday some friends roasted a whole pig. If I had any pictures of it they'd likely gross you out. It was delicious.
On Sunday I observed the mayhem that is bay to breakers. Now I am sunburned.
On other days not mentioned I worked. A lot. Somehow I managed to pull a 12-hour day yesterday. |
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