Sunday, December 19, 2004

It's 2pm on Sunday afternoon. The current temperature is 5°F and with wind chill, it's -14°F. It's cold!

In Los Angeles, the high today is 80°F.

Thursday, December 16, 2004

I learned something earlier this week. So there are 4 Kroger supermarkets in the area (Kroger owns Ralphs, for you SoCal people), and I found out that only one of them is open 24 hours (the one near where I live). I found this out because I went to Kroger but they had closed off the milk/OJ/eggs/etc. section to wax the floor, so I figured I'd just go to another Kroger. I went to the ones on Industrial, Packard, and Carpenter, and they were all closed. I ended up going to Meijer.

When I got home later, I found out there's a 5th Kroger on Maple that is open 24 hours. Oh well.

I went flying on Wednesday for the first time in like 2 months. It was a different experience flying around over a snow-covered landscape. Pretty neat. The radio transmit button on my side of the plane was broken though, so my instructor had to handle all the radio communications from the right seat. Having not flown in 2 months, I was sort of glad because then I could focus on flying the plane. =)

Today I saw Hero, which was cool. They had an event for grad students where they showed it for free. I liked the story and the cinematography was great. The audio was in Mandarin with English subtitles, and I thought it was interesting how small things are lost in the translation. Language is used for more than literal meaning, and there are a lot of stylistic elements (the way sentences are phrased or which words are stressed) that add to the movie that can't really be conveyed by the subtitles, especially when translating between two languages like Chinese and English that are so different.

Friday, December 10, 2004

I'm back from Portland. It rained every day we were there. We did go snowboarding, and it was cool because there were around 10 inches of new snow when we were there. But since it was early in the season, only 2 lifts were operating, and one of them was for the bunny slopes, so I spent all day on the same trail. Oh well, good to know that I still remember how to snowboard. (Took me about a run or so to get familiar with it again.)

Portland is the home of Powell's, the largest independent bookstore in the world. Since I'm a fan of bookstores, I enjoyed it very much. It's about 6 times the size of an average bookstore, because it has these rooms named after colors (each color being some group of book topics), and each room is about the size of an average bookstore. It was pretty cool.

Friday, December 3, 2004

December already. That was fast... How was your Thanksgiving? Mine was cool, had a good Thanksgiving meal with Jenny and friends and hung out in New York. I missed a small snowstorm in Michigan while I was there, so I have yet to see any snow this season, which is unusual.

Lots of traveling coming up. First, I'm leaving for Portland tomorrow with my research group for a conference. We may go skiing/snowboarding at Mt. Hood on Sunday, which would be fun. It's early in the season so there isn't much snow yet, but I think it's supposed to snow tomorrow so that would help the cause. Then in December I'm driving out to New York for Christmas and to help Jenny move to Ann Arbor. She's gonna be here for several months, which is cool. In January I'm going home to LA to hang out with friends and family and to watch Sean get married. (!)

That's it for now. As my roommate Jay would say, yeeeeoooooowwww!

**

You know what's weird? I was reading some of my posts from a year ago, just to see what was going on in December '03. And as I read it, half the time I'm going, "Wow, that was a whole year ago?" And the rest of the time I'm going, "Wow, that was only a year ago?" It's funny, because nothing makes me say "Yeah, that pretty much happened exactly when I thought it did."