I smell strongly of flowers

Apartment 403 was a touch musty when we first moved in, so I bought one of those plug-in air freshener thingamajigs. That scent turned out to be pretty overpowering at times, so I don't leave it plugged in all the time. Apparently some of the scented oil leaked out onto the body of the device, because as I went to plug it in my hand came away covered in a thin layer of artificial flower smell.

This is going to be a complete disaster, because this scent seems impervious to traditional cleansing methods. I am currently emitting (albeit sweetly pleasant) odors at long range. I may need to wear gloves to work tomorrow.

And since I have no better context to work this picture into the blog, here's the very pretty tree I look at every morning from my bus stop. Seattle has a strange spring... it's already very green, but the flowering trees all seem to bloom quite early, well before the other deciduous flora in the city. Sadly, the wind and rain knocks off most of the blossoms once they are out.


Yuck. My hand is starting to make me ill.

Two recommendations (plus a bonus rec)

Slow weekend. Four drinks on Friday night pretty much left Huan, Tyler H, and I unable to do anything fun the rest of the weekend (Huan was sick until Sunday morning), so we went gambling. I lost a decent amount of money, but I did get to watch Chris Wilcox (he stands out in a casino) play $500 hands of blackjack all afternoon.

Anyways, two recommendations:

1. If you wanted an excuse to get an HD TV (mom and dad, I'm looking in your direction), then the Discovery Channel has given you a reason. Their Planet Earth series is amazing. Don't even bother watching in low-def. The actual vignettes that they follow aren't terribly interesting, but it's visually breathtaking. I'm watching an eagle chase a crane, and it's like a scene from Top Gun but with birds. The crane, sadly, left its wingman. (Franko, you should have gotten a snow leopard.)
   
2. What is the What by Dave Eggers. Technically a novel, but essentially a biography of one of the Lost Boys of Sudan. I thought that Eggers premise of turning a biography into a novel would annoy me, but I'm guessing he's done basically the same thing that James Frey did, only he's honest about it. I still have 300 pages to go, but it's a fascinating read.
3. The best end to a basketball game was easily this. Trust me... as much as I loved seeing Carolina nearly take the collar in overtime, I'm now a huge Barton fan. If I can find out where it is.
   

An intervention

I heard a couple of disturbing stories from back East tonight. One involved a friend who went out with a "guy" who "wasn't in to March Madness." I'm not sure how anyone could say that, much less mean it. And I'm really confused as to why someone would admit that while on a date.

That said, I received far more disturbing news just minutes later. Franko is getting a cat. A (presumably) live cat. With fur and claws and meows and stuff like that. It is not a dog disguised as a cat either, which is what I was hoping for. It seems an odd choice for someone to take on that kind of responsibility out of the blue. Especially when that pet is a cat.



When hearing the news Huan called Franko to confirm that he didn't mistakenly type "cat" when he meant "dog." Franko also confirmed that he wasn't having a stroke, so it appears as if there really will be a cat in his life. And not a dog.

To compensate Huan for the mental anguish this has caused, Franko allowed us to pick a new name for the cat (it's currently called "Johnny Cash"). Here is the list we're choosing from:

• Mr Wiggly
• HuanandTyler
• The Aristocat
• Dewey Beach Cougar
• Pussy Galore
• Sex Panther
• Mrs Whiskerson
  
• Bad Idea
  

Please vote via the comments, and we'll announce the new name of Franko's cat after the Elite Eight is over. If you have to ask when that is, get a cat.

It would appear I wasn't actually on TV

But I was at the game. Despite a rather compelling ending to the actual game, the crowd got much more excited about one of the on-court diversions during a fourth quarter timeout. Some guy from the stands had to make a lay-up, a free throw, a three pointer, and a half court shot in under 60 seconds. If he made them all he won a 50" plasma TV (no one seems to have a spare one of these to offer me, BTW).

He quickly made the lay-up. It took him a couple tries but he hit the free throw. He struggled for a long time on the three pointer, but finally made one with about 15 seconds left. He ran into the half court circle and I figured he'd have nothing left. His first heave drew back iron... pretty close. His second nearly banked in. With 2 seconds left he throws up his third shot... crowds watches skeptically... buzzer sounds... nothing but net. Key Arena blew up. Tyler H, Cory and I actually exchanged hi-fives. Not sure who the dude was, but he came up big.

Of course, it would have been more interesting with me on TV. I was wearing bright orange. Oh well.

Watch for us on TV

There's a pretty good chance that I'll be on TV tonight (Wednesday). I'll be going to the Sonics/Wizards game with Huan and Tyler H, and I'll be wearing this. Check Comcast Sports Net at 10:00 EDT.

Bright orange t-shirt + horrible upper deck seats = guaranteed air time.

I'm going to the game for a couple of reasons; I've become a big Wizards fan, Key Arena is 5 blocks from my apartment, and the tickets were presumably $5. The Washington State Lottery is running a promotion that upper deck seats are $5 in March... even with $8 beer that's a reasonable night out. Except that you have to buy the tickets from Ticketmaster, which charged me the following:

• Tickets: $5/each
• Convenience charge: $2.75/ticket
• Processing fee: $3.75
• Tickets Now: $2.50

Total? $21.50. More than double. Now, I know I'm beating a dead horse, but Ticketmaster is just absurd. So they want to pile on fees... that's fine. Do they really need to spit in my face and charge me a 55% fee for "convenience"? I'm not exactly sure who is getting said convenience. The "Tickets Now" fee is absurd ($2.50 to email you tickets... that's right, email), but at least it provides a service. The $2.75 is just recouping costs. Or adding to profit. Ticketmaster execs will reside in a special place in the afterlife.

If you have a spare one of these...

I'm starting to feel like going on a gadget buying spree. My last consumer electronics purchase was quite some time ago, and given that the iPhone won't come out for a couple more months, well, the itch needs to be scratched. So if you happen to have any of the following, please send one my way. Or, don't send me one and make me pay for it myself.

• A Nintendo Wii. The arrival of Tiger Woods Golf and 100% positive feedback from people who have it make me feel like it could be a good fit in Apartment 403. Plus, Huan is Asian so he must love video games.
  
• New speakers for my bedroom. They should also charge my iPod.
  
• A digital camera that takes better pictures in the dark. I need a camera that is better tuned for dark bars full of pale people with mysteriously red cheeks.
• A Crackberry. I've prided myself on not having a job where I was important enough to require constant email access, but since I don't know where anything is in Seattle it might be nice to have the mobile Interwebs.
• A TV that looks good in a 550 sq ft apartment looks puny in a 1200 sq ft apartment. This would not. Plus, I have TV envy and I'm afraid that even my parents will have 50" of hang-on-the-wall goodness before too long.

(BTW, getting paid once a month kind of stinks. When you have these urges towards the end of a month and look at your bank account it can be rather depressing.)

West coast basketball

I've got a much longer post brewing on the newest strain of Duke-hating (i.e. cheering after a Duke loss in stadiums where neither Duke nor UNC are playing), but in the interim I wanted to make two basketball related comments:

1. People are making way too much about the VCU win. Yeah, they're good, but Duke is bad. We had no athletic talent on the team this year (save for Gerald "The Hammer" Henderson). Every victory by Mason last year was more surprising than VCU beating Duke. They beat UNC and UConn... those are monster teams. And now they are forgotten by everyone who isn't named Huan or Tyler.
   
2. I'm coming back to the East Coast for the first tournament weekend next year. Games start out here at 9am, which is terrible, but it's more terrible that they're over with by 9:0pm. The beauty of the East Coast is that when basketball is done you have one more drink and then go home. Out here you have a gaping hole in the rest of your evening. Plus, I'm getting too old to start drinking at 9am. Noon is fine. But 9am is harsh.
   

I dislike the Killers

I think last.fm is pretty cool, as it allows other people to see what kind of music I'm listening to. Currently the graphic on the right shows a lot of bands that I like, and one that I really don't. I hate the Killers. Their first album was okay, but Sam's Town is god-awful. I have not listened to it since installing last.fm, and so I don't know why it shows up. So please know that I don't listen to the Killers.

Sadly, this was the most interesting that that happened this week

Okay, it may have actually happened last week, but that would still make it a highlight. If you don't regularly use Microsoft Excel you can stop reading, as this post will have little meaning to you.

Part of the project I'm working on requires collecting and aggregating a bunch of data from different sources, and then comparing them to each other. In the past this has been done very manually, and it took days or even weeks to compile one page for a monthly review meeting. I figured some automation was in order, so I went to town with all the Excel I learned back in the day (and haven't used in years). I was throwing around VLOOKUPs and INDEX and MATCH and all the greatest hits. It was impressively complex, but I pretty much figured out a system to do what I wanted. It took me about two weeks to do this.

Sadly, the bright people at Microsoft already solved this problem. They call their solution "pivot tables." Redoing the same work using pivot tables took me three mouse clicks. I am not making that up. I had to walk around the building twice to calm down after coming to this realization. I'm an idiot. That said, if Microsoft ever removes that functionality, my spreadsheets are safe.

BTW, I really did just tell a story where the punch line was "All I needed were pivot tables!" Shocker... I'm still single.

Weather forecasts here are worthless

Life remains dull. Which is why I'm posting on the weather. Today was gorgeous. 65 degrees, sunny, Rainier and the Olympics were both visible (which is kind of the measure of how nice the weather is), just amazing. The forecast, however, called for nothing of the sort. It called for the exact same weather that has been predicted for the past six weeks: cloudy, chance of rain, mid 40 temps. This kind of unpredictability is going to be terrible as I try and squeeze in rounds of golf during the off-season.

Man, I sound like an old, boring man. Better posts coming.

Match Point

It's no secret that I'm struggling to meet folks out here. This seems to be a theme for many people who are new to Seattle, but I don't think I met a lot of people back East either. My specific dilemma is this: I can be solitary for 48-72 hours before going crazy, I only know four people in Seattle, and I'm absolutely terrified of the process of meeting new people. To be sure, I'm drawing a fine line here: I enjoy being introduced to people, which is how I met all the wonderful people I count amongst my friends. But I would rather play with vipers than introduce myself to a total stranger.

This is a pretty bad phobia to have when you're in my situation. The most obvious solution to this is the Interweb. Whether it's meetup or match or myspace, there are a multitude of options to screen and "meet" people electronically. I'm not necessarily looking for something romantic, I just want to find some people. On some level, the impersonality of the web is perfect for me, and frankly, I'm an epically good emailer, while my conversational skills are kind of hit-or-miss. Everyone I've talked to about going this route has wholeheartedly recommended it. I'm an constantly regaled with the stories of how so-and-so met such-and-such online and got to learn about their city and now they're engaged or now they know lots of new people. It all sounds great. Except for one thing.

All of the stories are second hand.

So am I just blessed with friends who are all perfectly happy with their social situations? Are my friends not comfortable online? Is DC just the kind of town where social networking kind of breaks for adults (since everyone is scared about their boss finding out they might have a social life)? I have no idea. But this worries me.

Three other things worry me:

1. My first encounter with match.com was in 2002. A guy I worked with at the time moved to Boise and put up a profile to try and meet girls im Boise. We found the profile in Richmond and spent an hour at work grouped in someone's cube looking at it and making fun of it. That has always stuck in my head.
2. Screen Names. Most people I know (except for my dad, strangely) use something very closely related to their name when picking screen names or email addresses. They don't use "qtpie103" or "ski_luvr" or crap like that. I've moved away from my first AOL name (karttyler) to rtcurtis and tyler.curtis because I want people to know who they are communicating with; I like the genuineness. So when I see the "qtpie103"s of the world, I become very skeptical of what their deal is. I don't know why it bothers me so much, but it really, really does. It's why I hate the idea of "blogger communities" where people refer to each other by screen names rather than real names. You know when it was cool to do that? When you played Dungeons and Dragons in 5th grade. And you know what? It wasn't cool then, either.
3. This.
   

[This is where I'll readily admit that I'm definitely going to do match or meetup or something at some point... kind of like buying a Blackberry. I know I'm going to do it, but I feel the need to fight it and point out all the reasons why I shouldn't do it before caving and (hopefully) being really happy that I caved.]

So that's what I'm battling with right now. Huan mentioned something about an East Coast ex-pat group one of his friends is putting together. And I'm starting to meet some b-school friends of Tyler H's (MBA is to Seattle as JD is to DC), so maybe one of those will turn into something.

Seattle, where the roads are paved with boulders

Back in May, 2004 I flew to Houston with my dad to pick up a car he purchased on Ebay and drive it back to DC. At one point on the trip back we were stopped by a "drug interdiction" police officer and our car was casually searched for drugs. (This is a story enjoy telling to all the lawyers I know, as it sets off hours of exceedingly terrible debates about whether there was probable cause for the officer to search our car. I then sneak away to the bar and try to find non-lawyers.) Anyways, to combat the boredom of 1200 miles of open road I kept something of a diary, mostly keeping track of how many Cracker Barrels and Waffle Houses we passed (answer: lots).

I also kept track of which states had good pavement and which states did not, as my dad's Porsche transmitted every nook and cranny directly to our butts. I don't have the list handy, but Texas road were abysmal, as were Alabama and most of I-81 in Virginia. Tennessee roads were pretty nice, as was the 15 mile stretch of Georgia we passed through.

I was thinking about that trip on my way to Target this afternoon. As far as I can tell, I-5 in Seattle is paved with the same cobblestones found on some roads in Georgetown. You can actually see big, round stones in the aggregate used to pave the roads. At highway speeds the coarse pavement makes the car shake like the anti-lock brakes are on (if you've ever slammed your brakes and felt the vibration, you know what I mean). What's worse is that the pitch of the road noise coming from my tires is such that it blocks out all mid-range tones coming from my stereo system, making the music I'm listening to sound as if it's being played in a toilet: a lot of bass, some treble, and nothing in between. It's brutal.

I have no idea if this is prevalent in other parts of the state, but my initial ranking for Washington state roads is bottom quartile.

Grain threshold

I'm a fan of multigrain breads. For a long time I was impressed by eight or nine grain breads... they had good texture, the occasional surprise crunch, and like my fake-organic Fuji apples, they made me feel better about over-eating. In recent years bread makers managed to squeeze additional grains into their product, so when I left the East Coast I was accustomed to buying 12 or even 15-grain loaves. While I wouldn't say that 15-grain was twice as good as 8-grain, there definitely seemed to be a positive relationship between number of grains and flavor.

Well, that breaks down somewhere between 15 and 20 (see graph).



I was at the grocery store last week and I saw 20-grain bread. I was flabbergasted. Who knew there were even 20 grains to put into a bread? (Certainly not me.) Well, apparently the marginal 5 grains are derived from a rubber tree. Or the spandex plant. The 20-grain is easily the worst bread I've ever had. I would prefer a nice sourdough with a thin layer of mold to the 20-grain. Hopefully I can get some East Coast mid-teen-grain bread out here this weekend.

Things that are annoying me

I promise more substantive posts this weekend, but as Huan pointed out its tough to blog when life is routine. To tide you over, here are some things that have been annoying me recently:

1. My desk chair. While living in my old apartment I struggled to find a desk chair that had no wheels. Finally I bought a simple chair from Crate and Barrel made for dinner tables. It worked great on the hardwood floors. Now the chair is on a carpeted floor, and it is miserable. I need wheels.
2. Noodles. I love noodles. I remember pestering my parents to go to a wholly mediocre place in Springfield called the Pasta Peddler because I knew they would have pasta, and with a witty name like that the food would probably be good too (I was 10, give me a break). Now I work in the International District, so my choices during lunch are Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, and wholly mediocre "other." Thus for 5 weeks my lunches have consisted of pho, ramen, soba, lo mein, etc. And my backup "quick/easy" dinner is spaghetti. So I'm sick of noodles.
   
3. My cellphone. First, it takes at least 15 seconds between pushing a button and getting a reaction. Second, people keep calling me at 6:45am thinking I'm on the East Coast.
4. Buses. Trains only go where there are tracks. Buses, at least in Seattle, seem to go wherever they want. Before 7:00pm the #2 bus basically takes me door to door. After 7:00pm the #2 doesn't come within 2 miles of my office. Although neither the King County Metro site or the street placards inform you of this fact. Buses also change numbers with seeming randomness; imagine if you got on the Red Line, and two stops later you found out you were on the Orange. It's disconcerting.
   

New to the 403

We've got some new additions to Apartment 403. First, I greened up the place on Saturday by purchasing a pygmy date palm at Home Depot (which is just blocks from both the Starbucks headquarters and a Krispy Kreme). (And the answer is two glazed.) (And if you're really dumb, the question was "Did you get any donuts.")



I have a very mixed track record with plants: either they live forever, or die within two weeks. My Aunt Linda once bought me a plant for Christmas. She described it as "indestructible." It didn't even see February. If the pygmy date palm can make it to the Derby I feel it's in the clear. (There will be an upcoming post as to why the apartment is perfect for warm weather plants. It will also explain why I'm already missing A/C.)

The second addition is the dining set I bought online a couple weeks ago. It finally showed up this morning. First, look at this picture and try to spot what's wrong:


You probably don't see anything other than styrofoam. Well, that's the whole problem. That's just packing material for two chairs and the table (less the table box, which I threw out before taking the photo). There are still four more chairs to unpack, each with more styrofoam and cardboard. I'm pretty sure the two delivery guys could have pushed the boxes to the apartment and not worn through the various layers. I'm astounded by how much packing material there is, especially considering this isn't high end furniture. This would be less annoying, but our building/city is psycho about recycling.

Another reason I like Seattle

I spent almost five years in D.C. without a primary care physician. It wasn't for lack of trying. But every time I needed to see a doctor, they either weren't taking new patients or their first available appointment was in 2009. I was told more than once to use the emergency room if I wanted urgent care. Eventually, I just started going to the nurse practitioners at the Marie Reed School's clinic in Adams Morgan, which I'm pretty sure wasn't intended for people like me (i.e. insured). But they were the only health care professionals that I could see without having to know five weeks in advance whether or not I would need a doctor.

(This, by the way, is what you blog about when you have nothing to say.)

It took me all of four days to find a PCP in Seattle. The receptionist even sounded apologetic for making me wait four days for my appointment.

I saw my new doctor (nice guy) this morning to get a referral for a physical therapist for my ankle (basically, years of sports injuries have left me with the connective tissue of a 65-year-old). He asked me where I lived and said, "Well, I'll send you to Jennifer Lesko, then." Which happens to be the exact name of an ex-girlfriend. It's a different Jennifer, of course, and my panic passed.

Also, I've learned that taking a red Solo cup full of delicious tomato-based dip is enough to earn you a nickname. T.C. received this email this afternoon:

"You guys up this week? Should be some good games on...

When: Thursday
Where: Sport bar
When: 6:30pm

Tylers- can you invite salsa boy."

Whimsical ranking: Apples

If I had to rank my favorite types of apples, here is what I would say:

1. Fuji
2. Ambrosia (just found these yesterday)
3. Pink Lady
   
4. Braeburn
5. Gala

Normally I would have to include Honeycrisp, but I'm on a big organic kick, and I'm not sure that Honeycrisps can be grown without the assistance of man and chemicals and injections of honey goodness.

To our readers

All 63 or so of you.

There are many ways in which Google is cool, but one of the cooler things is Google Analytics. Basically you sign up and it gives you interesting information about your website. If you were running a real website some of this information might be helpful. But our blog hardly qualifies as real, so the information isn't helpful.

But here's what I know about you, our readers:

• Most of you are are in Arlington, VA. Probably most of you are named "Pat."
• We're being read in at least 7 countries (USA, Argentina, England, Finland, Malta, Singapore, and China)
• I don't know anyone in Malta, China, or Argentina. Or Finland, for that matter.