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Seeing a sample of my newly-teenaged niece’s writing makes me wonder if all kids these days write in that horrific, txt-speak style when writing for personal recreation, or if my niece is specifically pioneering this nearly indecipherable, eye gouge-inducing written form. It takes me at least ten times as long to parse the information she is trying to convey than it would were I reading Mandarin or Arabic or Martian.

Given the proliferation of smart phones with actual keyboards, I’ve been hoping that using abbreviated English in long form writing would just DIE, but I’m really not so sure. And I hate to be one of those people who get all uppity about the “institution of English” and all that, but seriously? SERIOUSLY?

Real quick: I work on the 13th floor in the Southeast corner of University of Washington Tower. We have a gorgeous view of Lake Washington, the UW campus, Mount Rainier, and the Seattle skyline (including the Space Needle). We have a pretty nice telescope that exists as a permanent fixture in our office to supplement our enjoyment of this view.

This afternoon just after lunch I was peering through the telescope, head tilted and eyes squinted in concentration, and I was spying on a man operating a crane a number of blocks away. I lingered for a while, because at first I couldn’t make sense of what was going on in his little cab. He had his feet up and pressed against the glass and his hands behind his head. Curious, huh?

Turned out to be pretty harmless. He was just taking a little break, maybe a cat nap; unwilling to make the climb down from his towering office space. But then, just as I was about to move on he took off his shoes. And THEN to my shock and horror and no-I-would-not-be-able-to-look-away-until-I-found-out-what-he-was-doing, he took off his PANTS. His black boxer-briefs exposed to anyone high enough and in possession of a telescope. AND THEN??

He sat down in his chair and started operating his crane. His break was over and so no more messing around with shoes and pants. Time to get comfy and make some rent money.

OK, so not terribly shocking or interesting, but I seriously thought that working in your underwear was explicitly limited to:

strippers
underwear models
espresso stand baristas
teleworkers

What other jobs may you legitimately work in your underwear?

…

I learned the word “pandiculation” over the weekend. Pandiculation is the term for the act of stretching and yawning simultaneously. I like it when I learn a word that describes some specific action. Like, maybe there’s a word to describe the act of doing a back-flip into a swimming pool full of pork rinds.

The photo above was snagged from the Wikipedia article on yawning. 1. I LOVE the painting of this pandiculatin’ man AND 2. I love reading random-ish articles on Wikipedia.

You may know by now that cooking is one of my absolute favorite things to do. Well, let me clarify: EATING is one of my absolute favorite things to do and cooking is the best way to accomplish that. I still consider my experience to be somewhat limited and I have a ton to learn and I make mistakes all the time, but I make it a point to cook every day. I am my own favorite cook. I enjoy the process of cooking and I enjoy learning new things using a hands on approach. I feel that cooking food and eating your own cooking can be a very personal experience. You should strive towards self-gratification through cooking food with YOURSELF in mind and eating the hell out of it.

Yesterday evening, after a long day of working out in the yard, I decided to make use of some turkey drumsticks that the Mrs. brought home from the grocery store. While prepping food for dinner (I decided to use some cedar wood chips in one of those metal smoker boxes)*, I thought through some very simple, obvious cooking tips and trends that naturally revealed themselves over time just through the act of cooking regularly. Here are the first ten things that came to mind:

1. 80% of everything I cook on the stove top is cooked at just above medium. It’s like the sweet spot for heat on my stove. For example, its hot enough to perfectly caramelize onions, but not burn them. Find this sweet spot on your stove. Then find this sweet spot on your stove for each of your individual pans.

Anytime I cook mushrooms, it’s a perfect example of cooking something for just me. The Mrs. HATES mushrooms. She doesn’t even like the smell of them. This is a gift and a curse, because while she’ll never want me to incorporate mushrooms into our dinner, when I DO cook mushrooms, I can cook them with only myself in mind.

2. If your knife skills aren’t as quick as you’d like them to be, employ mis en place to avoid rushing. Cooking can be a rhythm game. There can be a moment when it is appropriate to do the NEXT thing. If your food isn’t ready you may find yourself rushing to make it ready and rushing can lead to mistakes. A mistake may involve you cutting your finger off. Or worse: food getting overcooked or burned!

3. You should use mis en place anyway. To be honest, I don’t always have the foresight in what I’m cooking to properly prepare all of the individual components of the dish, but for the things you KNOW that you’ll be cooking, it’s a good idea. Plus, it helps keep things nice and clean.

Mis en place will save you from having your eggs overcook while you frantically cut up the ingredients that make up your omelet.

4. If you find yourself wondering why restaurant food often tastes so much better than your cooking at home, use more oil and more salt and see what that does for your outlook.

5. Get your pans on the units to heat up ASAP so that you aren’t tempted to put food in your pans before they are at the right temperature. That’s the worst. The WORST. And use enough oil.

6. Taste your ingredients before incorporating them into food. You wouldn’t want something that is off or spoiled to ruin your whole dish. This will also help you balance your food, knowing how each component tastes.

7. Taste your food before serving it to someone else. Maybe it’s under-seasoned, and that’s OK, because that can be fixed. The cooking phase ends when its on the plate and in front of the eater and you won’t be able to make any adjustments at that point. Though I have been known to add more salt to someone’s plate after it had been served.

It’s OK if you don’t always have access to the freshest, organic ingredients from the fanciest markets. Dress up a frozen turkey patty. Make it delicious.

8. Hearing, touch, and smell should never take a back seat to seeing and tasting. When food is caramelized, you can smell that. When food hits the oil in a pan that’s at the right temperature, it has a RIGHT sound to it. And get your fingers into the food. That’s generally the best way to tell if it’s done or not. But first, make sure your hands are clean.

9. Keep some sort of receptacle within reach to dump your waste. This receptacle should not require you to use your hands to open it. I generally use a plastic grocery store bag that I leave on the counter throughout the entire process of cooking and cleaning. It’ll save you time, keep your work area cleaner and reduce the number of times you’ll have to wash your hands.

10. Use kosher or sea salt instead of plain, iodized table salt. Learn how they differ from the plain table salt you may have grown up with. Salt brings out the flavor in food, but I find that table salt adds a metallic, funny taste to it.

They’re not always going to be gems. The meal above? I didn’t like it too much. I think that my description on Flickr was less critical than my actual experience upon further reflection. But that’s OK. You’ll never be able to cook perfect food every time. But doesn’t it look good? A bonus tip: You eat with your eyes first.

So yeah, none of this is exactly rocket science, but I find that a lot of people don’t do these simple things that could enhance their cooking significantly. The way I see it, food is multi-dimensional art that one can appreciate with all five of the senses. The act of cooking is creating artwork and this process is both how the art is created AND consumed. It’s the process.

But the most important thing: Just cook. Don’t worry about having the best ingredients or the most expensive equipment or fear of failing. If you have a can of tuna, an onion, some mayo, and some other miscellaneous ingredients, make the best damn tuna sandwich you can make for YOURSELF. Appreciate that YOU like specific flavor combinations and run with it. Do it for you. That’s delicious. THAT’S cooking.

*This didn’t turn out exactly how I had imagined it in my head. I think that I wasn’t quite able to balance heating the smoker box to a sufficient temperature to provide smoke while keeping the temperature of the grill low enough to cook the turkey legs at the speed I desired. I’ll make some adjustments to my approach and try again in the near future.

A few months back a new soondubu (soft tofu soup) joint opened up in the U District here in Seattle. It is simply called “Korean Tofu House.” I have a love/hate relationship with Korean restaurants in the area. I have documented some of this in previous posts such as here, and here. Most of the time they are in some ways compromised by the likes of teriyaki or orange chicken or any number of non-Korean cuisine. I understand this. I understand that the goal is to run a successful business and often one needs to include chicken katsu on the menu to make it more attractive to the Western palate.

My understanding of this concept; however, does in no way help me get decent Korean food in the U District. There’s Sunney’s Cafe up the street, but I dunno, it has never really done it for me. $7 for a bowl of ramyun? No thanks. There used to be a decent place to get nengmyun: Cold, unyielding buck wheat noodles that often simultaneously occupy your mouth AND your throat; basking in ice cold, sweet and savory broth, and a sliced hard boiled-egg), but that place closed down. A few others have come and gone. Most of them had “gyoza” on the menu. Again: No thanks.

So the Korean Tofu House opened up and I ignored it, deferring the inevitable disappointment I’d experience once I had a chance to sit down and have a look at the menu.

But today, randomly and decisively, I decided that today was the big day. No meetings this afternoon (since I clearly smell like an entire bulb of garlic now, I’m sure), it had been a while since I’ve had soondubu, and otherwise, I probably would have ended up with a giant portion of french fries somewhere instead.

The restaurant, located at 4142 Brooklyn Ave NE is small, but not constricting. The menus were simple and to the point, but to be honest, I already knew what I was ordering and so I didn’t linger over the menu very long. I am happy to report that I don’t *think* there was teriyaki on it.

I ordered the pork soon dubu, which, in my opinion is a MUST when evaluating soon dubu. You gotta have the pork (or, you know, beef is OK too).

The banchan usually comes out first. For me, the arrival of the banchan has always been a study in personal style and hunger level at the table. If one starts digging into the banchan right away, even before the arrival of the rice, then I figure he or she either has impulse control problems or is very, very hungry. Me? My mother always told me to wait, because the banchan is just too salty to eat by itself. I (almost) always listened to my mother.

When the banchan arrived I was pretty excited. Typically, U District banchan consists of two, maybe three side dishes. THIS place had SIX. Probably two or three dishes short of what I typically experience at a Korean restaurant in South Tacoma or Lynnwood, but nonetheless very, very exciting.

Starting at the top left and moving clockwise there were bean sprouts (the way I like them, not too watery, and just salty enough), onion pancake (pretty good), Ggakdugi (well seasoned, perfect age, maybe not hot or “smoky” enough), spicy bean sprouts (these were a’ight), marinated fried tofu (pretty good, actually: the sauce was just about right), plain ol’ kimchi (pretty much the same complaint as I have about the ggakdugi).

Overall, the banchan was pretty good. I’d say that for the most part, each dish sort of ventured towards too salty. I like salty, so it works for me, but others might not feel that way.

The soon dubu arrived at my table moments later, violently bubbling and twisting about like a fiery cauldron overflowing with spicy black magic. The waitperson, upon receiving my consent, cracked a raw egg into the center of my blistering hot soup. I always enjoy that.

The soup itself didn’t disappoint. It certainly wasn’t the best soondubu I’d ever eaten, but it was far from the worse. The tofu could have been softer, the soup could have been spicier, but the balance of the ingredients was on point and I was definitely not mad at it. It lacked the smoky, rich endorphin-inducing heat that other soups often have in them, but again, it all worked well enough.

My total bill was less than $9. And I have leftover soup.

I’m going to go back. Soon. The next time I go I may opt to order one of the staple Korean meat dishes (bulgogi or spicy pork) or perhaps see how well they do bibimbap (which, incidently, you can get a decent bowl of at a couple of places here in the U District). I will also be sure to examine the menu a little more carefully to determine whether they have nengmyun, since it’s going to be in season soon.

It wasn’t perfect, but today, my heart was warmed by the presence of an uncompromised Korean restaurant serving uncompromised Korean food. I hope they keep it up and ignore the confused looks and nervous questions they receive from their less adventurous patrons. I hope they don’t ever, EVER serve teriyaki. Soon dubu diluted with the salty tears of the ashamed are definitely not good eats.

Join me next time?

After a long and agonizing weekend of NOT seeing Star Trek, I finally went to see it last night at the IMAX theatre. I don’t care to provide a full-length review of the movie or anything of the sort, but I will say that I enjoyed it and that it was a very comic book-esque twist for the Star Trek continuum. IMAX was large, loud, and exciting as per usual. The cast of the movie was pretty. Sexy iconic Star Trek imagery ejaculated forth from a deflector shield-shaped cornucopia of futuristic gadgetry. I had a box of Jelly Belly’s. All was well.

My only disappointment was that there weren’t any quality nerds in the crowd. I KNEW that this would be the case, since real geeks would have gone to the Cinerama on opening night and additionally SCOFFED at the idea of seeing it at the IMAX theatre, citing some point about how Star Trek isn’t really an IMAX movie.

Just for future reference, ST was not shot in IMAX, and therefore is not a true imax film. imax is 65mm, 15-perf film, with an aspect ratio of 1:1.37 and a MASSIVE amount of image area, approximately 4x the size of VistaVision (VV is also the same format 35mm still cameras shoot, imagine a negative almost four times the surface area of one that was shot in your still camera.)

Star Trek was shot in cinemascope, an anamorphic format that squeezes the image on the film, but projects it through lenses that stretch it back out horizontally to its 1:2.35 aspect ratio. C-scope is run through a normal movie camera vertically, (90 degrees to a still camera) and exposes a frame taking up four perfs of film – about half the film area of a 35mm still camera. Credit: CrunchGear for the explanation.

While I expected the IMAX to be mostly free of hardcore Trekkies and Trekkers, my disappointment was still tangible. You know, like the lazy hope of being pleasantly surprised instead of putting forth the effort of just obtaining the pleasant without the surprise? Yeah, that.

There was ONE guy who dressed up in a Next Gen red shirt. I’ll give credit where credit is due, because really, not only did he go out in public wearing a Star Trek uniform, but those uniforms are REALLY unflattering. Also: I cannot validate the quality of his nerd. He did not reek of living with his parents nor of never having seen a woman naked (IRL, obv). And speaking of both of these concepts: I spent a good five minutes last night thinking that it might be fun to actually get some guys together to play D&D or some other game involving dice (of the greater than six-sided variety). This morning I realize that while some people become aggressive jerks, hopeful lotharios, or tactless trainwrecks after they’d been drinking or otherwise under the influence, *I* seem to think that playing D&D with a bunch of dudes in some guy’s musty basement is a good idea. Just say no, folks (to D&D).

I made the ’shop below. I think that if you take Me and add a tiny bit more eccentricity plus some wealth, it would equal this toilet in real life. In my bathroom. With me sitting on it. For hours at a time.

I’d keep it classy tho’ and probably install a built-in warming wet wipe dispenser. Because I am not a savage, after all.

Another very busy couple of weeks. It’s kind of nice to be busy I suppose. Again, I am opting to provide an update via mostly photos. If anything, I’ll look back and have a visual catalog of my April activities and such. I think that I would be disappointed; however, if I looked back on these blog entries years from now and see no evidence of the fact that swine flu is taking over the world. So there it is, swine flu. It’s here.

Also: Aporkalypse.

April 4, 2009 – Scott and Bobby came over and I made them this dinner that I posted in a previous entry.  Afterwards (or was it BEFOREwards), I shot a few family pics of the two of them and their baby Liam.  Such an adorable family the three of them make (plus their two dachsunds Joey and Dexter).

To be honest, some of the very best photos were taken by Mrs. S.  Her use of light and composition was pretty tight.

April 11th, 2009 – Reese celebrated his third birthday with friends and family. His mother, Sara, was very,very pregnant during the event and was looking towards her 8th trimester before (see April 16th)…

April 12, 2009 – Easter dinner was at Mrs. S’ Aunt and Uncle’s place near Puyallup.  They had their entire family home demolished and built a new one on the lot.  I ate a lot of ham.

April 14, 2009 – Shot another beautiful home for Jesse and Pickett Street Properties. You can find more info on this listing here.

April 16, 2009 – …Sara gave birth to a baby girl.  They named her Kalli.

April 24, 2009 – I went to see Atmosphere with Dids and P.E. Mark B.

The show was exceptional in two ways: First, it was the first time that I was able to see Ant perform live with Slug at a show. Usually when Atmosphere tours, it seems to be without one half of the hip-hop duo. A special treat to see the latin version of Steven Seagal back there doing his thing. Ant’s production work on both the Atmosphere albums and Brother Ali’s albums have him up there on my list of all-time favorite producers.

The second way in which it was exceptional was that my boy Dids was recognized by sight by Slug himself. We were making our way down the line to get to the back: I was busily counting the number of guys that I thought were older than Dids (my count was zero), and Dids was counting the number of guys that he thought were blacker than me (also zero?) and someone called out to him. I figured that he had accidentally bumped into and over-aggressive high schooler and was getting grief for it. Turned out that it was Sean Daley himself. “Hey, I know that face,” he called out to Dids.

Dids participates on a popular hip-hop messageboard that Slug and a number of other hip-hop artists frequent. Dids being the prolific poster and Important Internet Personality he is, Slug recognized him immediately. My theory is that maybe Slug thought he saw Brother Ali walking up to the Showbox and did a triple take before realizing it was Dids.

We then continued toward the back of the line and a few minutes later Slug showed up and gave us all fist bumps as he continued down the line to chat with his fans. Seems like a good guy. I don’t know of a lot of headliners that make a habit of hanging out with his fans before a show while they wait in line.

But that’s not all: Shortly after the show this post appeared on the message board:

i rushed off stage just now to come here and tell you that i saw dids.

and he looks way more normal in person than this board had me to believe.

but disregard this post if dids gets spotted a lot, maybe you see him often.

in fact, disregard this post period.

it’s just that i haven’t been around as much lately, and i miss you guys.

let us screw now.

Anyway, discussion ensued, Slug described me as “medium black”, etc. etc. Another comment:

dids is officially an internet celebrity.

recognized in public by someone who’s actually famous.

So if you didn’t know? Dids is an internet celebrity. Please believe.

April 30, 2009 – Lois’ FOURTH birthday. I don’t know where the last four years went, but its hard to believe that we’ve had her for so long. I didn’t make as big a fuss about her birthday as I have in the past. I bought her some doggy cookies, gave her a bath, took her on a long walk, and just gave her extra special attention. I also bought a new crate for her bed to rest inside, since we previously had her sleeping underneath a chair with a blanket draped over it. Decided that as a grown ass man, I should keep the dining room furniture in the dining room.

Also this past week I moved into my new cubicle. It’s just a few feet away from my previous cubicle, but I needed to move down to accommodate future staff from another department. I was a bit apart from everyone else anyway, so this is probably a good idea. AND my view is better:

That’s all I’ve got for now. I’m hoping to be better at posting with greater frequency instead of producing these super long photo recaps. I’m looking out the window and I see clear skies and light traffic on the freeway and I’m wishing I could get out of here. We’ll see.

From my Dad in an e-mail yesterday:

Twitter seems to be redundant. And anyway, who cares if I just washed my car, etc. Please explain the fascination.

It’s a very good question. And in some ways true, to a point. I did my best to explain at least my point of view on the topic. I didn’t bother to correct much of the grammar, punctuation, or spelling except for a few obvious typos, but here was my response:

So Twitter. It’s an interesting topic and let me see if I can fully express how I feel about it.

So you say redundant, but what does that mean? Do the status updates in Facebook completely reproduce the functionality of Twitter? Well, that depends on what you are using the status updates for and how much you want to get out of it. To tell people what you had for breakfast? Sure. Both places do the same thing with Facebook being superior, because of the mechanism that allows your friends to provide feedback.

But that’s not all Twitter can be used for.

And sure, there is a very self-indulgent trend in people tweeting about their breakfast or many other stupid, mundane things; HOWEVER, it is this culture that facilitates the propagation of OTHER information that is more useful. Twitter has a culture of people tweeting about things that are important to him or her. If I didn’t tweet about breakfast, then maybe I wouldn’t be inclined to tweet about other things that are close to me, both physically and emotionally.

One of the things that Twitter provides is a real-time stream of information from people about topics that they care about, things they are observing, events that they are experiencing, products they are using, personal revelations, etc. etc.

I have my “status updates” on a personal level, but what this contributes to is a collective cloud of information that can be searched.

OH, but one way I like to look at it is that Twitter is not so much a social network, but an internet protocol like IRC or e-mail or IMAP, etc. Software developers create applications with Twitter at the heart of it.

You can view Trending topics in the Twitterverse (I actually hate this term, but I’ll use it for the sake of simplicity) that are being discussed RIGHT NOW. This can be significant in that instead of waiting for a news agency to report something that has happened in the world, say, like a natural disaster or something, you can get this information AS IT HAPPENS from Twitterers. The same person that will comment about breakfast will also tweet that an earthquake just happened in their city. All of the other Twitterers will do the same. I have a Twitter client (Tweetdeck) that I leave up on most of my computers that show trending topics graphically by size. So big topics show up in large text. I click on the text and it shows the context of the word. It might be another ten minutes before the first news agency even knows about it. And THIS is in the information age. I have experienced this at least three times in the last week, where I was frustrated that I couldn’t find out about a story on a news site that I heard about on Twitter, because they just didn’t know yet. One of these topics was about a tsunami!

Companies like Google covet the real-time nature of Twitter and are likely working to develop something like it. Web crawlers have gotten really fast, but they aren’t real-time.

Advertising agencies and consumers alike benefit in that you can get first hand feedback of people using products as they’re using the product.

You could tweet something like “Who has the best IM client?” and get answers from people out there real-time.

On a social level, it provides unprecedented access to people in industry, celebrities or artists you admire, product information and updates, etc. etc.

In many ways, it’s like you’re tapping into an entire shared consciousness. And this consciousness isn’t really continuous, it just forms and changes as needed. I think of things like chat rooms and message boards and web sites as “places.” Twitter seems to form discussions and communications on an ad hoc basis. A topic is raised and many points of light converge in one place and form a cloud. The cloud disperses and is gone after a while. I like this quote:

“Twitter reverses the notion of the group,” said Paul Saffo, the Silicon Valley futurist. “Instead of creating the group you want, you send it and the group self-assembles.”

And finally, remember a couple of things: More and more people are using smartphones with data plans or beefy text messaging plans. The reason people can be so self-indulgent and prolific with their posting is that it’s easy. It doesn’t actually intrude on life, because it takes about 20 seconds to do. This trend will continue, I think.

Facebook has a lot of bulk to work around. Maybe they could retool their status field to be queried in the same way that you can with Twitter, but I think it would take a significant change in infrastructure paradigm to accomplish this. Facebook is just too slow and not accessible enough. Twitter is simple and I think that’s why it works so well.

Anyway, I know I don’t really have much of a commenting audience here, but if you have any further thoughts regarding how Twitter IS or ISN’T redundant as it relates to Facebook status updates, please leave a comment.

OK, so I haven’t been really that motivated to post a long-form blog entry, but BOY OH BOY have I been going to town on Twitter. “Going to town.” That saying always cracks me up. There’s always some implicit sexual connotation in it regardless of context. At least in my mind. Yours too, right? Yeah.

ANYWAY, Twitter’s been getting a lot of press lately, because of the Ashton Kutcher and CNN race to a million Followers challenge. Then there was Oprah joining up. The Twitter “Oprah Effect” has been quoted as being the catalyst for as many as 800,000 new Twitter accounts in a very short amount of time. I’ve heard a lot of buzz about old school Twitter users feeling like Twitter has jumped the shark as a result of all of this publicity and interest, but… I mean, given that Twitter is basically a glorified internet protocol, can’t you just do your thing and let others do theirs and unless the new traffic affects your overall experience, what difference does it make? In order for Twitter to fully realize its potential, doesn’t it need to move WAY beyond a few hundred thousand tech geeks tweeting about stuff that geeks talk about? I’ll choose to not sweat it.

Somewhat related, I’ve been hearing from a number of my friends that they’ve recently received friend requests on their social networks from their uncles and mothers and baby sisters and co-workers and other people they generally want some separation from on these networks. That their special internet playground is under siege and that they don’t know whether they should pull up the drawbridge and start heating up the cauldrons of tar or just welcome them in. They are worried that it’ll alter the way they use these services; what they say and how they say it, the language they use, the photos they choose to post of themselves. Potentially an awkward or challenging position to be in. I think it’s natural to feel like something is being intruded upon in this instance. We don’t always want to hang out with our families AND our friends at the same time, and when we do, we might change our behavior a bit. The level of decorum increases. But it’s a harder sell online since it’s not location based; rather, a persistent, digital world where nothing is missed and everything is cataloged FOREVER and the peanut gallery is very, very large.

My personal approach is not sophisticated. You figure that the world is going towards more social networking online, so you can’t hide out forever, right? Work on accepting the expectation that if it gets put on the internet, your GRANDMA will see it eventually. Accept that or alter your behavior to accommodate. Maybe create an anonymous Livejournal page if you have a real burning desire to participate in a forum where complete or specific anonymity will aid in your digital catharsis. Maybe work on cultivating the boundaries you’d like to maintain as a responsible adult with your friends and family. That may involve REJECTING Facebook friend requests in an open and clear manner OR not tolerating intrusive commentary once they are inside. I guess mostly I think the key is to be less passive-aggressive. I know a tough sell for people in certain regions of the world (see: Seattle, WA, Passive-Aggressive Capitol of the World). If we’re going to share so much of ourselves out there on the internet, these issues need to be confronted.

Maybe you’ll learn something about Grandma. She has a digital camera too, you know.

Oh man, very busy last seven days.  The massive bags under my eyes can attest to this.  I was fitted for contacts earlier this week and last night I tried on the trial pair and despite the fact they were pretty comfortable, I took them out and put my glasses back on, because I looked so haggard without the mask of glasses.  I have about 800 unread items in my Google Reader and if I don’t get through it soon I might have an OCD nervous breakdown.  And who wants to read week old tech news and celebrity gossip anyway?  Anyway, here are some highlights from this past week:

Saturday, April 4th

Our friends Scott and Bobby came over with their little boy Liam (which reminds me that I took some photos of Liam that day and I still need to process them) and I made dinner and we drank wine.

Sunday, April 5th

We decided to unleash Lois onto the world. It was so beautiful out and Spring is really the perfect time of year for a pug to be out in the sunshine. You see, because of a pug’s flat face and wrinkles and such, they don’t cool of as well as other dogs. They get hot and wheezy and otherwise uncomfortable. Sunday was perfect. We drove down to Fremont and walked around the Sunday Market and then had lunch outside at the PCC.

Monday, April 6th

Mrs. S and I went to see Lily Allen at the Showbox SoDo. We were supposed to see her last time she was scheduled to be in town, but something was amiss with her visa and she wasn’t able to come to Seattle. I hadn’t actively listened to Lily Allen in quite a while (and hadn’t heard a single song from her new album), but I figured we were owed a Lily do-over so I bought tickets. It was an enjoyable show and Lily Allen was SUPER cute. She gave a shout out to her Twitter people. I started Following her shortly after. I was slightly distracted by her constant fidgeting with her tube top. Maybe a little self-conscious despite her getting fit over the last year.

Tuesday, April 7th

I took Tuesday off from work, because I was anticipating being out really late on Monday night (and old people like myself do not like to come to work on just a couple hours of sleep). Jesse had a listing he wanted shot soon-ish, so I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone and schedule the shoot for that day. The home is in Marysville in kind of an out-of-the-way, quiet area. Very nice. And the homeowners seemed to be very nice as well.

Tuesday night I accompanied Mrs. S to Ballard for trivia with some friends. The majority of our crew that night were teachers on Spring Break looking to unwind a little bit. They were already pretty toasty when we arrived, but then again, SO WAS I. Fun time, despite really being terrible at trivia. I believe we were SECOND-TO-LAST in the entire bar. Last place received a prize. Second-to-last place gets NATHAN.

Wednesday, April 8th

After work I had to run out to Lake Stevens to shoot a home for one of Jesse’s partners at Pickett Street. Unfortunately, despite the agent’s insistence that this was a home in Lake Stevens with an Everett address, I opted to MapQuest it and follow the instructions all the way to EVERETT. After I failed to find the place, I Google Map’d it and was still unable to find the house. I called the agent and had him e-mail me directions. Surprise, surprise: Lake Stevens!

The shoot took about an hour and a half. Again, a very nice couple. Two young kids, dogs, a busy, modern life (the lady of the house passed the time while I was there glued to Facebook).

I rushed home to a quick dinner and headed upstairs to process the photos from Jesse’s shoot. It took about four hours to complete, but on the plus side I was able to listen to about five full-length albums. I heard The Hazards of Love by The Decemberists for the first time and really liked it (I’m just realizing how twisted some of it is). A couple shots from that listing:

And oh! During work that day I photographed a fake meeting where the participants all “pretended” to be bored while the Executive Director told a story (don’t ask, beats me):

Thursday, April 9th

Last night. I drove home from work and Mrs. S and I took the dog for a walk. Another quick dinner and then a few minutes with the dog in my lap before another trip upstairs to process photos from Wednesday’s shoot. I got to listen to another four or five full albums including Q-Tip’s The Renaissance, which I hadn’t heard yet. I always reserve judgment of an album until I’ve heard it at least three times, but I *think* I liked it. There is one song with Norah Jones doing some vocals (Snore-Ah Jones hnnrr hnr) that I liked a lot. Some pics from that shoot:

Overall, I thought that my house photos this week weren’t too bad. What they tell me is that I really, really need to calibrate my monitor at home, because I see some pretty wide variance in color and levels from that monitor to the one that I use at work. Who knows what the Pickett Street people are seeing on their monitors? So, note to self: Calibrate monitor. I also feel like I am sinking a little too slow in a lot of my shots.

Friday, April 10th

Is today. It’s payday, which is pretty exciting. No pics yet, but to maintain consistency, I give you a pretty sweet addition to my Clothes Found on the Street set captured yesterday after lunch:

I have intentionally made no plans for tonight. I knew I’d be tired by today and additionally I slept TERRIBLY last night. I think tonight will be the couch and a martini and the new issue of Wired or Esquire or whichever magazine I subscribe to and am behind on. Looking forward to it.

Happy Friday.  We made it through another week, didn’t we?  Life goes by SO fast these days.  At light speed, even.  Oh the consequences of not stopping to smell the flowers once in a while.  As I tell my friends:  We’ll be DEAD soon!!  It’s just all too fast.

Nothing of any great substance here today (as opposed to normally, where the substance is just OOZING out of every stretched out, ACHING pore).  I just wanted to share some brief stats I came across yesterday.

I generally don’t spend a lot of time looking at my web site stats (and it’s not necessarily because I know that the number of hits could be considered absymal, but really, I don’t care), but once in a while I’m curious and I’ll take a little sneaky peek for any random curiosities, to see if anyone is  stealing any of the photographs I’ve hosted without going through the trouble of rehosting (many goatsee* photo swapping opportunities!) and whether I can discern any miscellaneous trends.  I wanted to share the following category of stats: Top 20 of 40 Total Search Strings. This is for the month of March:

As you can see, 12 of the 20 search strings are related to LL Cool J or Old Spice Swagger.  Clearly this is the result of this post I made a bit back regarding the topic (coincidently, I watched five minutes of Krush Groove last night and it was right at the part where a young and very skinny LL boldly and dangerously barges into the office to give an audition to an initially unreceptive audience.  SPOILER: Cool James is triumphant!).

Also of interest are the searches for “black man smoking a cigar” and “massive nachos.”  My uninitiated audience has good taste, at least.

I like that the palpus of hungry minds occasionally grazes against the indiscriminate surface of my little Internet world.

*If you are one of the last dozen people in the world that does not know what goatsee is, DO NOT Google it.  You cannot unsee it.