Evite & Fundraisers

I don’t really have a problem with people I know personally using Evite to invite me to fundraiser events. However, I have a strongly viceral negative reaction to people giving my email address to other people — or worse, organizations — I don’t know at all who are having fundraisers. It doesn’t matter if it’s an issue I strongly support; it’s simply horrifically rude to basically give away my contact info to a unknown party without my consent.

I think it particularly bothers me with Evites because everytime I get one, I assume it’s a personal invite. To have a random stranger’s fundraiser mixed in with my friends’ invitations is a real pisser, because it feels like they are masquerading as friends and invading my personal space.

Seriously, don’t do it.

Losing Wisdom

Ok, it was just my wisdom tooth — lower left side, to be exact. I’m still a little numb from the novocaine, I took 600mgs of ibuprofen, and I’m icing it as I type, so the pain shouldn’t be too much of as issue.

I hope!

I asked to see my tooth afterwards. It was huge. My new dentist gave me a really interesting talk on bacteria and what different types there are and what causes what in the mouth, as well as exacerbate heart disease and other illnesses in older people. Really quite fascinating. I’ve never had a dentist that explained so much about the actual science of dentistry and dental health. It was great. No sarcasm.

Independently Wealthy

You know how there is that idea that you should think of what you’d like to do if money were not an issue, and that thing is the thing you should try to pursue as your career? I can’t see how this would work for me. Here are the things I’d do for myself if money & time were not an issue:

• Take cooking lessons and spend hours (almost) everyday food shopping and cooking up feasts. Also, go eat all over the world.
• Leisurely travel, staying for months in any given place until I feel like moving on.
• Get more pets instead of just looking over CuteOverload.com and wishing I had more.
• Go on reading & writing binges for weeks where I am completely absent to the world.
• Watch more movies & tv, catch up on the classics.
• Go to performances, whether of dance, music, or other demonstrations of art or skill, like martial arts.
• Take some dance classes.
• Learn random programming languages, run several random websites, write a bunch of fun applications.

My big issue is that there isn’t the One Big Thing I want to be doing; I want to be dabbling in all sorts of life’s little (and big) pleasures. I can’t see how this would translate into a career.

Todo

• Write up the rest of the honeymoon report. With my memory being what it is, without those entries, I’ll never be able to remember what we did years from now. Or even a month from now.
• Review French Laundry Potluck experience. Work on planning another one soon!
• Plan our trip to NY & Philly in October to visit Seppo’s parents and attend friend’s wedding.
• Take more notes for this year’s NaNoWriMo and maybe start some of the exercises.
• Go get a complete physical. I’ve been meaning to do this for months now. I have no idea what my cholesterol level is. I don’t even know my own blood type.
• Post pics more regularly to flickr.

Being Married

A lot of people ask us how our married life is. Frankly, it’s the same as before, except with the wonderful memory of having celebrated the public affirmation of our commitment in front of loved ones. On a day-to-day basis, things are the same. We’ve gotten our insurance under the same company, but we haven’t yet set up a joint bank account, although we keep meaning to. The only weird things so far:

• People have referred to me as Mrs. Helava
• People have called for Seppo, asking for Mr. Choi
• My new dentist just called Seppo instead of me to remind me of my appointment

On a related note, my dog’s antibiotic prescription was labelled for patient “Mobius Choi”. LOL! That’s just… weird.

I command you to live!

Incite a Novel has been revived and moved from blogspot to our regular domain. It’s only the end of July, but I’ve been kicking around a few ideas this week. So if you have any interest in participating in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month for those late to the party) this year — and barring that, just interested in doing some writing — head over to the site because we’ll be working on various writing exercises for the next few months.

As an example, an idea that Seppo came up with is that we’d each write a short scene unrelated to the main stories with our respective main characters having a meal with a minor character. Then after posting all our scenes, we’d take the characters that other people have introduced and write a little scene with them. This would test the original writer’s ability to get the character across, as well as the second writer’s ability to translate that into a new scene. Hopefully, it’ll also help us “find” our characters too.

Pardon the geek-out

So my first credit card after college was with Bank of America’s America West Airways frequent flyer miles card. At the time, I didn’t care about direct flights and I was just so happy to qualify for a card (I had crappy credit coming out of college — I didn’t get this card until like two full years out of college after I did a lot of “credit cleaning” via calling and check-writing) that I didn’t really pay attention to what program I was enrolling in.

I accrued 50K miles on that card over the last few years. I spent none of it, because it doesn’t go anywhere I want it to directly.

In the meantime, when my sister started having babies, I signed up for another credit card that accrued miles with Asiana Airlines, which flies to Korea directly from SFO, as I intended to visit her often. I have, to date, accrued 80K miles on it, 10K of which was used when we flew from the Korean peninsula to the Jejudo (imagine flying from Italy to Sicily) on a weekend trip while I was visiting her.

However, you may note that she’s now in the US, as are my nieces. Neither Asiana nor America West fly to ATL.

At some point in the last two years, AWA either merged with or was bought outright by US Airways. They had been working on merging the frequent flyer miles programs for a while now, but I hadn’t been giving it much thought, frankly.

Today, I discovered that all my heretofore useless points have been converted to US Airways points. Then to my further glee, I found that US Airways is a part of the Star Alliance! So is Asiana! That means that we have enough points (pooled in the right way, to boot) to book four econo tickets within the continental US, three econo tickets to Hawaii, or two econo tickets to Europe. Well, realistically, I know that the lowest level of award fares have so many blackout dates that this isn’t really possible, but it should be able to get us at least one ticket for free.

Wheee!!!!!!!! *gleefully waves fists around face*

Which means that as soon as Seppo and I both have enough PTO, hello vacation! 😀

100

This past Monday was our 100 month anniversary (er, monthaversary?). Whoa.

What to write

I’m tossing around an idea for this year’s NaNoWriMo. I’m not married to the idea yet, but I’d really like to get the idea fleshed out and see how it feels.

Back to work

I always forget how useful to-do lists are for me. I’ve changed over my firefox homepage to point to the google personalized homepage (w/ The Google 15 prominently displayed on the top left) and to my list of daily to-dos on Joe’s Goals.

I’ve been formulating a blog post in my mind for about a week and a half, tentatively titled “Unified Theory”, covering my (very derivative) theory on social conflict. I’m not sure when I’ll get around to writing it up.

Coming back to work from a vacation is always hard, but I feel energized and ready to go. I have a list of items that I am excited to get done. This doesn’t mean that I don’t wish I had another several months of vacation, however. 😀