Tuesday, September 30, 2003

Allan has furry eyebrows:

Monday, September 29, 2003

Back in June I mentioned a ramen place that I was going to try. Well, I tried it. It wasn't bad. But I think I'm jaded by the effect where time makes past things seem better than they really were. (Otherwise called nostalgia, I suppose.) Because there used to be this little Japanese noodle place near where I grew up, across from CSUN, that served a pretty tasty ramen, and I can never find ramen like that anywhere.

Anyway, this place wasn't bad -- I might go back except it's pretty far, and there's supposed to be a new noodle place opening on Washtenaw.

Happy Birthday, Katie! This is the first birthday that has been covered twice. My blog is officially a year old. Woo!

Showing off our braces/retainer in 303 (not that you can tell from this shrunken image.. well, you can sort of see the glint in my mouth):

Tuesday, September 23, 2003

It's getting colder at night. According to weather.com it's 45° right now.. a sign of colder temperatures to come. And it's only September.

Taxes are weird. For some reason I was thinking about this while walking home today. Now I don't know much about economics or accounting or tax law so this might be totally wrong. Now, when you buy a used car and go to the DMV to transfer it, you have to pay tax on the value of the car. So say you buy a car, then sell it to someone, and then buy it back. Now the state has collected sales tax three times. (This is assuming you go through the proper DMV channels and actually pay the tax and all that.) But you're in the same situation as you would have been had you never sold the car. So it's kind of weird, like you're getting taxed for the same thing multiple times. It seems like when you resell something, you should get a prorated tax refund or something. As far as I know, this doesn't happen, right?

On the other hand, I know you do get a tax "refund" if your car gets totalled. Because this happened to me a few years ago.. my car was totalled and the insurance company paid me blue book value plus tax. Of course this isn't so much a refund as it is an insurance payout, since the money comes from the insurance company rather than the state.

Just in case you were thinking to yourself, gee, Kevin should post more of those random not-related-to-anything posts.

Saturday, September 20, 2003

Happy Birthday Erin!

I wish I had my yearbook here so I could scan in her 8th grade photo. Oh well, this one from the top of Mammoth will have to do.

Thursday, September 18, 2003

Yay, I got the thumbnails to scroll when you click "next" or "previous" in the albums. At least, it works for me. Someone tell me if it works in IE.

Wednesday, September 17, 2003

I put up some Seattle pictures.

Turns out the rust on the brake rotors just rubs off after driving around for a little bit, so it's all good.

Did you see the 10th anniversary Conan special on Sunday? It was pretty hilarious.

My Mom is coming out to visit in October and we're gonna see Simon & Garfunkel perform live in Detroit for the opening of their reunion tour. Cool!

I feel like I was going to blog about something but I don't know what. Oh, probably about adjusting back to the school thing. Yeah.

Sunday, September 14, 2003

I'm back in Michigan! It is humid here. My car was really dirty but I washed it today. Unfortunately it seems that the brake rotors have developed a layer of rust, so braking effectiveness is not so good. I'll either have to have them turned or replaced. Good thing I didn't install my new pads before I left.

I'm in the process of putting up an album of Seattle pictures. It's almost done, I just have to put them in some sort of order or something and then upload them.

Ok, I'm hungry and I have to go buy groceries now.

Monday, September 8, 2003

Ah, this weekend was fun. On Saturday we got up early to buy ingredients for Romanian borscht and Slovak halushky. We chopped and grated stuff all morning and cooked until the afternoon. Of course I did less of the cooking and more of the cleaning of dirty cooking implements. But whatever. Anyway there was so much food that it lasted us the whole weekend.

So after the food was ready and all the people had arrived, we ate and drank and were merry. We were so merry our celebrations also included guitar playing, pool and hot tub antics, and charades. It is hard to mime words such as "abstract" and "special". Other words were funny such as "bastard" and "pedophile". Some words you'd think would be difficult, but actually weren't, were "singularity", "photosynthesis", and "metamorphosis".

So that was Saturday. On Sunday we cleaned up the mess from the day before and went for a bike ride along the Lake Sammamish trail. We also came upon a playground with swings and stuff so we took turns swinging real high and jumping off. Anyway, I hadn't ridden a bike for many, many years so today my ass hurts. Why can't they make bike seats more comfortable?

That was my weekend. This week I gotta give a presentation and finish all my work and documentation of work. Also pack and ship things and moving-related things like that. Less than one week from today I'll be back in Michigan. Yay!. I'll miss Seattle. So many days of good weather and blue sky as if out of a painting, and great friends. But I'm ready to go back.

Tuesday, September 2, 2003

Wow, it's already September. I only blogged 3 times in August, for what I believe is the all-time low so far.

This past weekend was uneventful, for once. I did a lot of sleeping, watching TV, and reading that Cryptonomicon book. It's a good book so far, but long. I've read like 250 pages and I'm less than a quarter of the way through.

Most of you guys who are in school started already or are starting today. I would be too but I'm here in Redmond finishing up my work. This summer has been really great - in terms of the weather, the people, all that. Contrary to expectation it hardly rained all summer, and not once did I have to use an umbrella. They say on the news that, by one measure, it's the driest summer in Seattle in [some high number, like 40] years.

Anyhow, next couple of weeks are going to be pretty busy as I finish my work and take care of all the things that have to be taken care of in terms of moving and stuff. We're having a party next weekend and I'll get to sample some genuine Slovak and Romanian food created by my roommate and officemate. Yum.