looking cautiously optimistic

We went to see a couple more wedding venues on Saturday: The Faculty Club at Berkeley and Madison’s at Lake Merritt Hotel. The weekend before that, we saw Berkeley City Club.

I really love Madison’s — it’s just beautiful, the view is fantastic, and it’s a local business, so it has some relevance to us and our lives. We made up a spreadsheet this weekend of the various different options we have at the different places. There is no conclusive answer yet. I hope we can decide soon.

ETA: My friend is selling her wedding dress. She bought another one that suits her better, so she’s selling the one she had picked out before. See the ad here and mention me to her if you decide to get the dress. 🙂

banal

How do you pronounce banal? www.dictionary.com says:

Usage Note: The pronunciation of banal is not settled among educated speakers of American English. Sixty years ago, H.W. Fowler recommended the pronunciation (rhyming with panel), but this pronunciation is now regarded as recondite by most Americans: it is preferred by only 2 percent of the Usage Panel. Other possibilities are (rhyming with anal), preferred by 38 percent of the Panel; (rhyming with canal), preferred by 46 percent; and (the last syllable rhyming with doll), preferred by 14 percent (this last pronunciation is more common in British English). Some Panelists admit to being so vexed by the problem that they tend to avoid the word in conversation. Speakers can perhaps take comfort in knowing that any one of the last three pronunciations will have the support of a substantial minority and that none of them is incorrect. When several pronunciations of a word are widely used, there is really no right or wrong one.

I always pronounce it the second way.

This leads me to the true topic of this blog entry: being anal.

Five minutes after typing that last sentence: Holy crap, I just deleted a bunch of stuff I had written about being anal, then realized that I had already posted on this very topic already. I don’t remember when, but I know I did. This isn’t really happening to me. Oh dear.

transmission

Seppo and I were heading down 880S when the transmission suddenly died. We flipped on the hazard lights and coasted to the nearest exit (fortunately, we were going slightly downhill shortly after losing the transmission). We had just picked up the car yesterday from the garage after getting the front axel replaced. It cost me a pretty penny. And a few ugly ones too. Thank goodness I upgraded to AAA Plus at the end of last year, because we were able to get towed to the garage we used for the axel instead of somewhere within a measely seven mile radius. When the tow truck picked up the front of the car, the transmission fluid gushed out in a terrifying rush. Looked like creepy machine blood. Seppo’s mom picked us up from the garage, then we had some food at Noah’s Bagels (where they forgot Seppo’s order entirely, then burned my bagel to charred black goodness, forgot Seppo’s potato salad, then didn’t toast the bagel dark the second time — oh well), then came home, where I found that I can’t seem to connect to the VPN at my work. This is pretty comical.

That will show me to get “angry” at things that don’t really make me that angry. Heh.

The good thing is that we were able to get to a safe place after we lost the transmission. We also have jobs where we won’t get instantly fired for missing a day. We got to eat an early lunch outside. We had someone available that could pick us up, no problem. We had AAA Plus! Hee. We can spend some time with the dog. It’s not bad, all things considered.

I only hope the car does not cost a lot to repair. We are assuming for now that the problem was caused by the work done by the garage earlier in the week/end of last week, but there is no guarantee that it’s not a new, unrelated problem. Let’s hope not.

phone

Sometimes (like this morning), when I’m on the phone letting it ring and ring in hopes that someone will pick up eventually on the other end, I forget who I had been trying to reach by the time it gets picked up/goes to voicemail. The same thing happens when I’m on hold. I have to constantly remind myself who I was going to talk to and why, or I end up sputtering nonsense or hanging up out of embarrassment.

Talk about ADD.

Angry Ei-Nyung

Pissing me off today: the fact that websites related to weddings overuse italics and center alignment, rendering most pricing charts unintelligible. Whatever happened to neat little rows and columns? Or how about a dynamic pricing page where you can select various options and number of guests to get a ballpark figure for the total package?

I hate you, gaudy wedding sites.

answer: no, i don’t.

Question: So you think you can dance?

I have been watching this show, now that Hell’s Kitchen is over, and I am nothing if not a reality tv monkey. I have to face up to who I am, and when I look in the mirror, I see the shamed face of a woman who loves reality tv. I can only watch one at a time though. I have learned in the past that I can’t really do two at once. It is too much of a time commitment, and I want to actually have some semblance of a life.

Anyway, I love this show. I don’t love how once in a while, they try to get some shock value by being overly insulting (I dislike Creepy Uncle Nigel), but for the most part, they keep it zipped. It’s like this show combines two of my great media loves: reality tv competition + breakdancing. There was even an instance of a dance battle in last night’s episode. Awesome. They have dancers of all sorts of different backgrounds (jazz, ballet, hip hop, break, tap, etc) going through various classes to learn different styles and to get evaluated by the instructors. They are down to the final 16 people. I think the format changes now that they are into the finals, but what do I know.

If I could instantly pick up some skill overnight, it would be breakdancing.

Seppo and I are taking tomorrow off from work. Yay! While it’s a pretty exciting idea, in reality, we’ll probably just end up taking the car into the mechanics and run some other errands. Heh.

the library

I went to the Main Oakland Library for the first time yesterday. On my way, I saw a group of people picketing with signs that said, “Honk for Peace” and “Honk for Bush’s Impeachment”. Naturally, I honked and the group gave me a peace sign and a thumbs up. I believe this is the first opportunity I’ve had to honk for something other than anger at reckless driving since I’ve had my license. 😀

The library itself was quite a bit smaller than it appeared on the outside. The last time I used to frequent public libraries was when I was in high school in Philadelphia. They were sprawling, multi-floor libraries. The one I went to was not tiny, but not huge either. It was a little disappointing, but I think I will be going back often for some light reading.

We are so close to the end of our project at work that I can taste it. Seppo and I are thinking of taking a mini-vacation at some point. I wonder where we’ll go.

what people say

I often wonder what other couples talk about when they are alone. Seppo and I have a lot of car conversations, as we carpool to work together nearly everyday. We discuss random things such as:

• If one of our straight friends came out, who would you be the most surprised about? The least surprised about?
• What is the first frivolous thing you would buy if you won the lottery?
• If you were to mix-and-match all of our friends into different couples, who would you match up?
• If you were to start up a band, who among our friends would you put in the band?
• Who do you think looks the oldest of our friends? The youngest?
• Who of our friends would you trust the most in a survival situation?
• How many cars in the Bay Area do you think have both a Bush/Cheney ’04 bumpersticker AND a rainbow one?
• Do you think there is a higher probability of people dying on or near their birthdays than on a random other day (not counting major holidays)?
• What will the new wave of energy production be in the future?
• What are the most interesting uses of flexible display technology?
• If you were to make a movie and you wanted someone to provide the score for it, who would it be?
• What do you think explains our respective self-esteem levels when we were going up?
• If you were to mix-and-match our friends into other friends’ bodies, who would you put in whose body and why?

We do a lot of these. I think this started back when we were doing the long-distance thing while I was in Boston and he was in LA, then we continued it when he was in Oakland and I was in San Jose. It’s fun, provides a lot of insight into the other person’s mindset, and makes sure that phone conversations are not stilted and boring, which is one of the worst thing that can happen to a long-distance relationship, not to mention the easiest. These conversations, which often seem random and irrelavant to real life, often lead into interesting discussions about things that affect us in a practical level.

I often overhear other couples talking at restaurants and think to myself how I would have to throttle someone if I had to have conversation as inane as they did.

backwards in time

Seppo sent me a link to his old homepage on the way back machine, so I took a trip down memory lane.

• My first homepage – Warning: it’s awful, but I was maybe 18 or 19 and it was 1994 or 1995.
• My second homepage – Warning: it’s still awful.
• Wayback Machine’s snapshot of my third or fourth website back in 1997 – Still embarrassingly awful, but a much nicer format.
• My own archive of my “blog-before-blogs-existed” culled from the previous.
• Random thoughts from 1998

Don’t hold me accountable for the stuff I wrote then. 😀

By the way, I updated a bunch of links on the right to reflect websites I actually look at. Yes, I am a copycat. Yes, I am always the last to the party. “Hey guys, where are you going? I just got here! Guys?!”

strike two

What did I do this weekend? I can’t even remember. Friday night, we went over to Uyen and Charles’ house for a delicious dinner of lamb, breaded fried zucchini, and green beans, followed by a very blueberry ice cream. Yum. I just love lamb so much.

Saturday was a big blur. I exercised a little and helped Seppo do some gardening. He spent a lot more time than me working outside though, because I hadn’t realized he was working until later. We grabbed lunch with Steve and Joe at Ratto’s, then took Seppo’s mom for our monthly dinner at Angelfish. The suzuki is fantastic every time I have it, but it was particularly good this weekend. I think I read a little Harry Potter then watched Better Luck Tomorrow.

Sometime in the wee hours of Sunday morning, I finished Harry Potter. We went to Merritt Bakery for brunch, sat around for a bit, then took Mobi to the beach. Oh right, before we went to the beach, we stopped by the Boathouse on Lake Merritt to check it out as a potential place for our reception. The place was… abandoned, complete with broken windows. Hence the title of this blog entry. Heh.

We took Mobi to a little mini beach near the Berkeley Marina. It was a sandy, sheltered area where we could keep a reasonable eye on him, so we let him off the leash. Then he ran away. Ok, just kidding. He didn’t run away.

We made a garlic rosemary lemon roasted chicken au jus for dinner, and invited Uyen and Charles to join Joe, Seppo, and me (Colin is out of town). We made endives for the first time ever. Seppo made a delicious plum “soup” from our new Gordon Ramsay cookbook In the Heat of the Kitchen for dessert.

Then we played Boggle.

Wow, this is the most boring entry ever.