Hello World

I moved to Boston. I drove everything up in this truck:
It was an exhausting experience and I ate a lot of jerky, but it is over now. Boston seems pretty nice so far, but I will miss DC. Tomorrow I go to Oakland, California, the first stop on my labyrinthine tour of most of the blue United States.

Some images from packing up for the big move:


These are most of the things that were plugged into my computer before I shut it down and packed it away.

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The living room is looking pretty desolate. You can see the brand new windows they installed yesterday (to be enjoyed by the new tenants).

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I'm not sure exactly what, but I think this image says something about the current state of the Democratic party.

In case you were wondering what my new desktop image is, this is it:
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Found on Flickr Blog.

At the end of last week, I went to Boston to look at apartments, and walked around a lot, and saw some nice stuff and generally got used to the idea that I will probably be living there soon. It was pretty hot and sweaty, but I had an exquisite steak and baked beans at an Irish pub on Market (near Washington) and had a pretty fun time getting to know the city.

Then I took the Chinatown bus to New York. May I just state for the record that the Chinatown bus, which takes one between DC and NY or between Boston and NY for $15, is one of the most incredible deals out there. It makes it affordable and reasonable to take last-second weekend trips, and provides a far-superior alternative to train or plane travel. Love it. Can't say enough about it. This is not a paid endorsement.

Things that I did in New York that were probably bad ideas:

• Ate 6 hot dogs, one cheeseburger, 2 tacos, one caramel shake, the fried appetizer sampler and triple delight entree from the worst Chinese restaurant on the upper east side, eggs benedict, a dozen pieces of sushi, and about 8 cups of pretzels in a 48 hour period.
  
• Played a game in which we listed something we disliked about everyone in our group.
  
• Stayed out til 4am the night before my morning flight to DC.
  
• Spent dozens of dollars on drinks.
  
• Took crappy pictures of my friends in dark bars and restaurants.
  
• Got into a huge argument about where to have dinner, causing acrimony and resulting in a disasterous meal at the worst Chinese restaurant on the UES.
  
• Had a bunch of pretentious conversations about politics, real estate, and law school.
  
• Volunteered (well, grudgingly agreed) to help carry a futon up 2 flights of stairs into an apartment that lacked air conditioning, resulting in a deep and abiding sweat that didn't abate for hours of my evening.
  
• Spent way, way too much money.

Things that I did in New York that were great ideas:

• Ordered eggs Benedict.
  
• Drank a martini made with cucumber-infused vodka at Verlaine, a bar I enjoyed.
  
• Threw some darts.
  
• Didn't waste much time on the internet.
  
• Spent an awesome afternoon in Central Park.
  
• Totally dominated a nice brit in an Irish Car Bomb race.
  
• Saw a bunch of good friends and watched them act ridiculous.
  
• Took a lot of pictures.

And then I came home to DC to play softball and have dinner with my little league baseball team (this was the 10th anniversary of our final--and triumphant--season, which makes me feel really old) and watch the fireworks (more pics).

While I was in Wisconsin this weekend, I saw these baby birds in a pretty nice nest.

If you have $494.99 to spare, how about buying me this keyboard?

As you may have noticed, I am a user of flickr. This is a place to put your photos, but it's also a great way to keep up with your friends' photos. There's a ton of community features--you can join groups with specific areas of interest (there's a bloggers group, a DC area group, and hundreds or thousands more), you can leave comments on other people's photos, you can browse by image tags (keywords you assign your photos), and lots more. The best feature though, and the reason I'm writing about this, is the "contacts" feature. You can ally yourself with other flickr users, which has a couple of uses: there's a page where you can browse your contacts' newest photos, and (more usefully) you can set the privacy level on your own photos so that only your contacts can see them.

So that brings us to the point of this post: You should join flickr. I know, I know, you use one of those other photo gallery sites, and it works okay. Trust me. flickr is better. So sign up and give it a shot.

I went to the eye doctor and got two of these:

And then I did this:

So now I have contacts. For more information on this experience, click here.


Although I don't leave my office for another month, I had my goodbye party yesterday. This was my awesome cake.

Then I went to see Bloc Party.

They definitely met my high expectations. They had tons of energy and demonstrated great musicianship (especially their drummer, who is just amazing). Highly recommended. Click here for more pics from the show.

Edit: Apparently, this was a bad show for them. The sound was all screwed up (guitar was too quiet, backup vocals were too loud)--which I noticed, but managed to get past. So if a bad show was that fun, I suspect a good one would be LCD Soundsystem quality.

Then I went to sleep.

( Here are a few pictures from my weekend: )

I'm back in DC after a great 15 days in central Europe, New York, and Connecticut. It was an enormous trip that I am not going to try to sum up right now, but suffice it to say that I saw a lot of impressive stuff, didn't lose my wallet or passport, watched my sister graduate from college, and took 3 planes, 4 trains, 3 buses, and about 20 subways in 5 countries.

For now, I put all of my Europe trip pictures online. I have just started going through them to do tags and captions and all that crap, and in the next week or two I will post a dull entry describing my whole trip, but in the mean time you should feel free to browse the 203 photos I took.