Below are the most recent 14 friends' journal entries.

Wednesday, January 6th, 2010
wendy_lady	9:26a	Swimming Signed Aiden up for swimming lessons last night! Yay! 3 months for half an hour every Tuesday night while Sean is at kung fu class across the street! How awesome is that! Plus, it forces me out of the house, and makes me spend time with my son instead of sitting him in front of the TV while I sew! (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, January 5th, 2010
wendy_lady	9:27a	RIP Robert Lanccessair Found out yesterday that Sir Robert Lanccessair from the ROC passed away from a heart attack on Sunday. This has come as a complete surprise, and I am still in the WTF??!!! stage. Please keep his family in mind. There are more tough times ahead of them now. (Comment on this)
philaros	12:38a	40 Topics, 40 Days, 40 Years Old: The Final List Back in November 2009, I decided to write a series of 40 posts on 40 different topics about myself, leading up to my 40th birthday at the end of the year. If you've been reading along as I wrote them, you know that already, but I'm writing this post for future reference, an index linked to all the posts so that they're easy to find again.  Procrastination Cleft Palate Reading Speech and Sociability Franco-American Catholic Upbringing Early Musical Influences Violin Lessons Soccer Cub Scouts Paper Route Pants Dungeons & Dragons Geek "Most Likely to Succeed" Student Orchestras Boy Scouts Retail College Night Owl Rome Religion and Faith Major and Myopia Floundering Chung Moo! Nashua Chamber Orchestra Papers and Zines and Blogs Professional Rock, On-Air and Live Moving Out (Goth) Dancing Seattle Food Cat Homeowner Go Play NW Freelancer KEXP Volunteer Crush Stories 40 Years Old If you are reading this on LiveJournal, you can also find all of the above posts, plus a couple other related ones (such as this), by clicking the 40t/d/y tag. Current Mood: accomplished Current Music: KEXP 90.3 FM (Comment on this)
Thursday, December 31st, 2009
philaros	8:23p	40 T/D/Y #40: 40 Years Old Forty years ago, on December 31, 1969, at 7:14 AM, I was born. I come from two families of long-lived people, and I have a reasonable expectation of living into my eighties or nineties, but even so it’s reasonable to say that today I’ve become middle-aged. I don’t feel middle-aged. For years I’ve generally been the oldest among my friends, and I’ll often complain of or remark upon being old. But the truth is, I feel young. The other day, when I told one of my newer friends that my fortieth birthday was coming up, he said in sincerity that he thought I didn’t look a day over 33. When I’m out at a good concert or having a fun time elsewhere, I feel more like 23. When I think about my efforts to find a romantic relationship, I feel more like I’m still stuck at 13. When I consider some of my bad habits such as avoiding the job search I loathe or my constant general procrastination, I wonder if I ever aged past three. Most of the time though, I do feel like I should still be in my mid-twenties, like I couldn’t have spent more than a year after college floundering my way toward a career, and my time from starting to work in Boston through moving to Seattle and establishing this new phase of my life must’ve been only a year or two at most. Surely my thirties must still be several years away, or at most my friend must be right and I must still be 33. I don’t feel middle-aged because I clearly still have so many things to do. I don’t have a stable career yet or steady income. I’m still scrabbling to figure out what I should be doing and to find work. I haven’t had a long-term romantic relationship yet. I haven’t been back to visit Europe—at least, not since visiting my younger sister in Germany in 1996—or maybe gone on to visit other parts of the world. I have friends I’ve never visited in their homes, and friends online that I’ve never even met in person. I have game design ideas to develop, books to read, music to hear, essays to write, photos to take. I don’t feel middle-aged because I clearly still have so much to learn. How to find and carry on a long-term romantic relationship. How to overcome my flaws and make the career I want. How to cook better meals. More about the music I love, and the music I don’t care for as much. More about the page layout work I’d like to do. More about the city where I live, the friends I’ve made, the family I come from, the world in general. I don’t feel middle-aged because I clearly still have a young spirit. I still have a fascination with and wonder at the many things in the world. I still have a whimsical sense of humor. I still take simple delight in a great song, a well-designed graphic, tasty tasty chocolate chip cookies, cool new technology, dancing, purring cats, a heroic tale, Star Wars, Lego toys, a clever turn of phrase, the futuristic feel and architectural design of the Detroit Metropolitan Airport where I’m currently writing this. But I am middle-aged, and I’m not sure whether that makes a difference in my life. I do believe I have to take more thought for my future, because there’s not as much left as when I was young. I’m still worried about monthly expenses when I should be well into saving for retirement. I’m also worried about how to shape my career, how to find and keep doing work I’m interested in and still earn an adequate income, not be held back by false expectations of what I should be doing—mine or others’. Because that’s another part of being middle-aged: recognizing what I am and what I am not, what I can change, what I should change, and what is fine the way it is. I’ve always been a procrastinator and a night owl; how necessary is it to change those traits? how realistic is it to think I can change those traits? how much can I mitigate them or work around them? I’ve never been much good at finding romance; I have been working to improve that, but a large part of that change involves understanding myself better and being cool with myself, so that I can let a relationship develop naturally. I wrote about being voted “most likely to succeed” and still not knowing, 24 years later, what success even means; but I recognize that “success” is not a singular condition of my life as a whole, it’s the state of being satisfied that I’ve done what I set out to achieve, and without definite goals to pursue, I can’t have success either. Generally speaking, I feel each new decade of my life has made me happier. I had plenty of happy times as a child, but I was happier as a teenager when I outgrew being tormented by the tauntings of others. The new freedoms of being an adult and choosing how to spend my time made me happier in my twenties than in my teens, particularly once I finally started on a career path toward the end of that decade. Overall, I feel my thirties have been a great decade of personal growth and happiness. Moving first to Boston and then to Seattle, developing some great new circles of friends, building a career as a technical editor, buying a home, helping to found and run a gaming convention, volunteering for KEXP, writing about music, finding a little romance… all of these things have been very good for me, even (perhaps especially) when not as successful as I hoped or wanted. The last two years of my thirties have been very challenging, sometimes painfully so, and I have not always risen to the challenges. Although the circumstances have sometimes been beyond my control, such as the serious economic downturn, I’ve disappointed myself in how I handled the challenges. Particularly with work and finances, I’ve been in a very precarious situation all year and still find it difficult to see or pursue a way out of my difficulties. I’ve tended to rely on the vague belief that it will all work out, and managed to be lucky. At the age of 40, I feel I should do better, be better, than that. That said, I never quite give up hope, either, that I can change, I can do and be better. And for all that I feel I did not measure up to some challenges, I realized that this year I met some older goals: going out on dates, getting my concert reviews out to a wider audience, writing for the KEXP Blog, getting back into desktop publishing work. I declared 2007 the “Year of Change”, but really it’s been a whole decade of change, sometimes quick, often gradual. 2009 was often rough, filled with anxiety and fear and drama and dismay, but it also had good things both old and new, and good times, and new opportunities, and hope and happiness. I’m middle-aged and I’m still young. Today, I am 40 years old. Current Mood: accomplished (Comment on this)
wendy_lady	5:23p	Do you wanna? If you would like to be part of a very whiney, yet very personal and healing group for me, please let me know. Current Mood: determined (12 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, December 30th, 2009
philaros	11:36p	40 T/D/Y #39: Crush Stories As a kid, I had my share of secret crushes, as I’m sure most kids do. Even in first grade there was a girl I liked in particular and wanted her attention but felt nervous about getting it. I think around fourth grade is when girls and crushes became regular subjects of conversation among my friends and me, but again I never dared tell my current crush that I liked her, afraid of rejection. In junior high as other kids started dating, I continued to nurse secret crushes. I wasn’t a complete wallflower, though. I could still talk to these girls in class as regular people, I wasn’t left stammering and blushing, unable to speak. I went to my first school dance in seventh grade, and although at the end of the evening I had to be coaxed into a dance by one of my long-time female friends, I enjoyed the whole experience enough to attend the dances regularly after that. I went to the junior high dinner dance by myself without reservation and had a good time with my friends. I had a major crush in junior year of high school, although it took me about half the year to realize how I felt. She passed out handmade Valentines to some people, including me, and wrote on mine “U R so sweet!”, which made me very happy. I don’t recall whether I spent a lot of time thinking about asking her to the junior prom, but I do remember overhearing her talking to a friend just before French class one day and her saying something about the prom that made me realize I might already be too late. So, after class, I pulled her aside and stammeringly asked if she would like to go with me; she seemed pleased to be asked but apologetically explained that she’d already agreed to go with someone else. I was crushed but took it well, and ended up going by myself, though I did give one of my good female friends a ride to and from the prom. In senior year I had a lesser crush on another classmate and asked her to the prom, but she also turned me down. This time though I asked another friend, a junior I knew who also took violin lessons, to be my prom date and she said yes, and we had a very enjoyable time. In the photos my parents took before we left, though, I look very painfully awkward; rather than putting an arm around her for the photos, I instead kept that arm behind my back and held my other arm with that hand. I still can’t believe no one told me to relax and hold her, it’s ridiculous. During college I had my first halting relationship, with yet another younger friend I knew from violin lessons. Interestingly, I learned at one point that a few of my friends had thought of fixing me up with her for my senior prom date; I believe one of my friends suggested her at one point and I dismissed the idea out of hand. She and I spent a lot of time hanging out after I graduated and we became close, eventually having a few make-out sessions, but she was never really interested in being more than friends while I struggled hard to keep my feelings in check. When she started college, during my fall sophomore semester at Thomas More (she was at a different local school), we grew apart, and by the time that semester ended I knew I had to stop calling her and trying to hang out. Fortunately the Rome semester gave me some needed space and time away; I no longer sought out her company, but I did see her a few times over the next several years as just friends and it was fine. Throughout the rest of my twenties and into my early thirties, I had occasional crushes but never tried pursuing anyone. Frequently I would only realize I’d developed a crush after knowing someone for several months or more, by which time it was clear that that person liked me as a friend but no more than that. A couple of times I developed a closer friendship with someone but still believed nothing further could come of it. On a very few occasions a woman would show some signs of possibly being interested in me, but never anyone that I found interesting in turn. I wonder though how many times I may have missed expressions of interest because I felt strongly that no one would be interested in me, or whether I could’ve had a chance with any of my crushes if I’d been more confident and less self-conscious. For quite a while after moving to Seattle, I continued on as I had been doing, feeling lonely a lot and developing one or two crushes that I knew would go unrequited. Eventually I started to put a little more effort into actively looking to meet new people and go on dates. It’s been a long slow effort for me, gaining more confidence, losing some self-absorption, trying different possibilities, trying to be open to different opportunities, and learning to relax and focus on being out in the world rather than on finding a particular someone. I’ve had a lot of support from my friends, who’ve helped me better understand myself and better understand how to relate to others. I’ve definitely changed and grown a lot in the past few years, and though sometimes I still feel I have a very long way to go, I also believe in myself. My crushes don’t always have to be secret, my interest won’t always go unrequited, my loneliness isn’t endless. And while I’m very tired of feeling lonely, being alone isn’t always so bad; I can take joy in the things I’m free to do on my own, and continue to keep an eye out for others who may enjoy sharing some of my life with me. Current Mood: accomplished (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, December 29th, 2009
philaros	11:00p	40 T/D/Y #38: KEXP Volunteer Although I discovered KEXP as soon as I moved to Seattle, and promptly became a regular listener, I didn’t start thinking about volunteering for them for quite a while. Around April 2006 it occurred to me that volunteering would be a good way to get out of my house more and meet new people, as well as being more involved with music I love and doing something to support the station I enjoyed. However, I let months pass without signing up, and so I put it down as one of my goals for 2007. I finally filled out the volunteer application just before their summer membership drive in July 2007. It was so close before that drive that I wasn’t confirmed as a volunteer until afterward, so I did not do any shifts during the drive, but I did start soon after by helping out at a mailing party, when volunteers package the thank-you letters and gifts from the drive. I became a regular at mailing parties, and for the fall membership drive in October I signed up for a couple data-entry shifts, which also became my regular role for membership drives. I also signed up to work at the KEXP BBQ in August on the post-event cleanup/breakdown crew, and a couple months later went to an orientation meeting for volunteering at KEXP-sponsored events. However, right after that, they discontinued sponsoring shows, so it wasn’t until a year later, in November 2008, that I was able to man the membership table for my first KEXP event, My Brightest Diamond playing at the Triple Door. At the end of 2008, the station approached me with a special request. They had been discussing an upcoming big data-entry project for the online team, and I’d been recommended for taking on the task. I already had a reputation for speed, accuracy, and attention to detail from my data-entry shifts during the pledge drives. I agreed to help out, and started in early 2009. The project involved updating information in the database of live performance recordings that can be played as audio streams from the KEXP website. In particular, most of the recordings over the past decade had been saved just with file names, such as “yourfavoritesong.rm”, which were hard to read on the website and hard to find through Internet searches. My main task thus was to fill in the title field for all the files, so for example the song would appear on the website as “Your Favorite Song” and would come up in typical search results; naturally, most of the files were missing other required metadata, which I had to fill in as well. I started going to the station each week: although I could access all the work online from my laptop, I felt that it helped me to make a regular schedule of going to the station to get it done, and I also enjoyed the opportunity to be at the station and get to know the KEXP crew. I was surprised though after a couple weeks when I found myself included on the interns mailing list; apparently, simply having a regular weekly volunteer shift was enough to be counted as an intern. Over the course of 2009, I went in to the station most weeks and spent three to five hours working on this project, as well as another shorter data project for several weeks, and finished up the main one in early December; in total I worked 161 hours as an intern this year. I don’t know for sure what’s next, but I’ll be continuing to do some kind of intern work for the online team in the new year. When I went in 2007 to the orientation meeting for KEXP events, I explained that I had my own music blog and wrote reviews of the shows I attended, and asked whether that would be a conflict of interest. I was instead told that they were always looking for writers for the KEXP blog, and encouraged to contact their webmaster. I did send an introductory email at that time but never heard back, no doubt simply because he was busy, and I never followed up on it. In August 2008 I attended the KEXP Volunteer Appreciation Party, which featured several bands that had members who volunteered for the station. I was particularly struck by one band, Hotels, and loved their sound so much that I started stalking following them, attending their next few shows and writing about the shows in my blog. When I started my internship at the station, I had the opportunity to introduce myself in person to the KEXP webmaster and offer to write for the blog, with my first suggested article being a review of Hotels’ second album Where Hearts Go Broke, being released that February. The webmaster agreed, and that is how I started writing for the KEXP Blog. That proved to be a great opportunity, as I was able to attend some shows and events I would never have considered, such as My Bloody Valentine’s amazing performance in April, the Sasquatch Music Festival in May, and the Decibel Festival in September. I also expanded my music writing by starting an occasional series of articles about the different subgenres of rock. It’s funny now for me to think of how long it took me to start volunteering for KEXP, because it’s such an obviously great fit for me. I’ve really enjoyed becoming part of that community and making some good new friends. I also believe strongly in the station’s mission to provide and educate the community about music, and I’m glad to be part of that, enjoying even the mundane work such as data entry that I do for them. Although I’m currently faced with serious financial issues and a pressing need for regular work to get regular income, I still intend to be as active as I can be in the coming year with KEXP. [Note: Once again, backdated to appear on the day it was scheduled to be posted; I've been just too busy these last couple days of vacation (ironically, busy in part with work) to keep up.] Current Mood: accomplished (Comment on this)
obake	7:49p	ATTN: Late Night Seattle Peeps I would like to draw your attention to this new restaurant: The Night Kitchen It looks very promising and I am assured that it is run by Supercool People(tm). It's refreshing to have a real restaurant open so late (as opposed to IHOP or Sharri's or Denny's), especially with such a full menu. I definitely want to check it out! Current Mood: interested (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, December 28th, 2009
philaros	12:43p	40 T/D/Y #37: Freelancer Eleven months after moving to Seattle, the company that had hired me went through a restructuring and laid off a bunch of people including me. Fortunately, another college friend and one of my new Seattle friends had their own startup company and need of my services, so they picked me right up and I worked for them for the next four years. I primarily worked as a technical editor, making sure the documents they produced for projects were well-written, and also did some software testing. Things started changing in 2006, though. As the company grew, there wasn’t as much work for my writing and editing skills as expected, and I wasn’t keeping as busy as I should’ve. Also, my position was viewed as a cost center: necessary for running the company and providing quality work, but not bringing in revenue. To alleviate some of this, they offered to appoint me to be the office manager. The added duties included a small raise, which I needed, and I did want to keep working there, so I accepted. However, I quickly found once again that I really disliked doing office administrative work, and over the course of the year became more and more unhappy with being there. Meanwhile, my friend Tony had held out at the first company for a few more years, but decided to go freelance early in 2006. As I talked with him about it, freelancing started to sound like a much better position for me to be in. I liked the prospects of flexible work hours and location, working when and where I wanted to—and doing away with the daily commute I currently had, which was not as bad as when I worked in Boston but still could take a couple hours out of my day. Because my work was already project-based, I thought that it would make more sense to be getting work from multiple clients rather than trying to stay busy in a single full-time position. I also saw potential for substantially increasing my income based on what I could charge as an hourly rate, instead of being on a fixed salary. A job review in late 2006 and conversation with my manager about where I saw myself in five years settled my mind: I did not see myself continuing at that company, and decided I would leave in the first half of 2007. By February 2007, I was moving forward quickly: I had already asked Tony to put me in touch with people he was doing contract work for, and yet another conversation with my manager persuaded me that ready or not, I should give my notice by the beginning of March that I would be leaving. Instead, it turned out everyone was already on the same page, as my bosses decided to lay me off at the end of February: it was clear to all of us that I no longer belonged there. That was actually a good thing, as they also gave me a small severance package and I was able to extend my insurance coverage for a few months until I picked up my own. So we parted on good terms, and I’ve continued to do occasional work for them as a contractor. Since then I’ve been working on a freelance basis, mostly for the Microsoft vendor that Tony first put me in touch with, with some work for a couple other clients including my previous employer. Overall, I’ve enjoyed it a lot. I like being able to take my laptop around town and work in different cafes, or work at home into the wee hours of the morning. I’m glad I no longer have to deal with the commute to Redmond every day, and I’m saving a lot of money by not having to drive every day. I still believe in all of the reasons why I decided that I should become a freelancer: freedom in when and where I work, variety of projects, not beholden to any one company to keep me going, and potential for increased income. However, I’ve also found it increasingly difficult to keep going as a freelancer. Naturally, I quickly ran into the obvious problem: I loathe searching for work, and I don’t like doing office administrative work either, so I’m ill-suited to manage my own business. I never spent any time in developing contacts and expanding my client base, I just continued to work with the few companies that Tony put me in touch with, but I need a bigger base to provide enough work for an adequate income. The obvious solution would be to work with employment agencies, and it seems like a natural fit: their job is to connect companies with service providers, my job is to provide a professional service. Regrettably, I did not start looking into that until the latter half of 2008, when the economic downturn began and even Microsoft started cutting back on projects, so the agencies have had very little work to offer me. And of course the downturn meant that the companies I was already working with had less work for me as well. The potential for greater income depended upon me finding more clients and work, and the flipside of that potential is that without a solid client base—or even with one, when the economy turns bad—I also face a potential for drastically inadequate income. One positive change in freelancing did happen in 2009. When I started freelancing in 2007, I included page layout/desktop publishing as one of my goals for the year. I’d always enjoyed the work I did for the Nashua Chamber Orchestra’s program books and season brochures, and I wanted to find opportunities to return to that kind of work, this time as a paid professional. Again, as is typical of me, I did not immediately take any steps toward that goal. I figured that as it’d been a few years since I’d done any layout work, and since I’d never done it as a professional, I probably should take a course in design, but I was busy just getting into freelance work in general and also didn’t have money available to pay for a course. And so that goal drifted unfulfilled until this past summer. I was talking to John, who knew of my interest in returning to layout work, about my dire work and financial situation, and he offered to recommend me to his employer for a project that needed someone to do the grunt work. I’ve been working on that in stages the past several months, and his employer’s been very happy with my work, enough that after the first round of drafts and revisions, they recommended me to another company needing someone to do a small and quick turnaround layout project. That’s made me happy in turn, and hopeful that I may be able to find more such work in the near future in addition to my existing work as a freelance editor. Current Mood: accomplished (Comment on this)
Sunday, December 27th, 2009
philaros	8:58a	40 T/D/Y #36: Go Play NW Although I’d been a role-playing gamer since I was twelve, I’d never gone to a gaming convention. When I was young, of course, it simply wasn’t a possibility. As an adult, I just never thought much about it. I heard of the big two, GenCon and Origins, which were off in the Midwest, and it never even occurred to me that I could attend one of those. Nor did I think of looking for a smaller convention in the area, such as in Boston, and when I did hear of some, I didn’t think about going. The fact is, I’d never been much interested in playing games with people other than my close friends. In high school I did join the D&D Club and attended regularly for at least a year, but I found it unsatisfying. We’d start a game one week, and the next week a couple players wouldn’t be there and the others would all be interested in starting some other game. We also had clashing expectations about how to play the games. We started playing the first adventure in the Dragonlance setting, and I chose to play the insatiably curious and mischievous “kender” character, but promptly found myself shouted down by the other players when I would try to insist on investigating anything. I’d read the Dragonlance tie-in novels and so knew about the story and characters the adventure was supposed to be about, but whether or not the other players had read the books, all they cared about was plowing through as fast as possible to beat the monsters and grab the treasure; it didn’t matter to them whether a certain character was supposed to end up with holy artifacts as part of advancing the story, to them the artifacts were just things to make a character more powerful and thus something to squabble over. I know we played two or three sessions of that adventure, and that’s about all I remember from the D&D Club; I went to a bunch more sessions over the year but can’t remember anything else I played. During college, I got to do a little gaming with my new college friends, but we were always so busy that we never got to play anything for any length. Some time after college, I learned of a local gaming club that met at the public library, and I tried attending that a couple times, but it was similar to the high school experience: the first week, I joined a large group of ten or so people making up characters for a cyberpunk science-fiction game; the next week, half those people weren’t there, the ones who were started a different game, and I joined a couple other people in trying a fantasy game and quickly realized that we weren’t going to have compatible interests at all, so I excused myself and left. Besides that, I gamed on a few occasions with new people that my close friends knew, and that was it. When I moved to Seattle, I was reunited with my college friend and fellow gamer Tony, and was introduced to his Seattle gamer friends. I also got in touch with and befriended John, a gamer I knew from the Talislanta RPG mailing list that I’d been on for several years, and started playing games with his friends too. So both my gaming circles and gaming frequency expanded, and I enjoyed it a lot. Through John I also got involved in a couple online gaming discussion forums, discovered a bunch of new games, and became involved in designing new games. I still had no thoughts about attending game conventions, though. But then in the summer of 2006, John went off to a mini gaming convention that some people from one of the forums organized. Unlike the big conventions such as GenCon, which were as much trade shows as fan conventions, this event was just a weekend of people meeting up and playing games, and John came back with tales of the fantastic time he had meeting people we’d only known online in the forum and playing games with them. He and Tony’s friend Brandon also went off to GenCon that summer, and again came back with more tales of the great time they had playing games. Tony and I looked at each other sadly and said, “We want to have a weekend of playing games too!” And we thought, well, the forum people organized their weekend on an ad-hoc basis, expecting it to be just for people in the Chicago area, and found that people from all over the country (such as John) were willing to fly in for the event; we ought to be able to organize something like that as well. John and Brandon were keen on the idea as well, and thus was born our own Seattle gaming weekend event, Go Play Northwest. We planned our first event for June 2007, to be held at Seattle University. To facilitate the arrangements, we formed our own non-profit organization. We attracted over 50 people, mostly from the gaming forum but also some other local gamers we knew, and everyone had a great time. Having proved we could do it and having had a great time, we decided to continue, and we are now planning our fourth annual event for next June. I’ve had a lot of fun, and enjoyed the opportunities to play some great games with a bunch of people I otherwise never would have met, let alone gamed with. I also feel good about being one of the founders, about seeing something that I would like to do and then taking the steps to make it happen and having it succeed. It’s another reminder that when I do decide I want to do something, I can make it happen. Current Mood: accomplished (Comment on this)
Saturday, December 26th, 2009
philaros	10:34a	40 T/D/Y #35: Homeowner In 2004, I started thinking it was about time to look into buying a condo for myself, and I put that down as a goal for 2005. However, in late 2004 I also got braces for the second time in my life, to prepare for the bone graft I’d need in order to get permanent false teeth to fill in a couple gaps in my upper teeth. As I recall, shortly before getting braces, I was pretty much debt-free, besides maybe a few hundred dollars outstanding on my credit cards. In fact my finances were good enough that I decided to pay for my braces up front using a credit card, because I got a small discount for doing so, rather than paying in installments. I was confident that I would be able to clear that credit card debt within six months. But I also had some car repairs that fall, and I decided not to go home for Christmas that year specifically because of the expense of braces. So, I also expected that I would not actually attempt to buy a condo in 2005, just that I would make an effort to learn about home-buying so I’d be prepared when I had the financial resources available again. In March 2005, I ran into some major car repairs, as first my radiator failed and then another engine part failed, costing me somewhere around $3,000. Between this unexpected expense and the braces I was still paying for, it was clear it would be a while before I could save up any money for a down payment on a condo. I also did an analysis of my finances, to see how I was spending my money and where I might be able to reduce expenses, but it didn’t look good. My biggest expenses were rent and my car (gas and maintenance), and although my rent expense would go toward a mortgage instead, it looked like the rest of my disposable income that was currently going toward my credit card debt would also be taken up by a mortgage. But then at the end of April, I got news that pushed me to start learning about home-buying in earnest. My landlord told me that he had plans to renovate a couple of the apartments and that once he’d done so, he wanted to move into the apartment I was currently renting. So I went to a seminar for first-time home buyers, got a loan pre-approval, and got an agent. Over the next few months I looked at several places, and discovered that condos in my practical price range were all smaller and more expensive than my current apartment. One thing I learned was that there’s a difference between what banks thought I could afford and what I thought. I might’ve expected the banks to be more conservative, but at least at that time the pre-approval process considered only gross income and outstanding debt—loans and credit cards—which resulted in a higher figure for monthly payments than I thought I could manage after taking into consideration my everyday living expenses. Condos of a size close to my apartment were at the top of my pre-approved loan range but seemed too expensive in monthly payments for my finances, and even condos that were just a little smaller and also much further out from the center of Seattle were still too pricey. However, I didn’t want to abandon my search, because I was still faced with losing my apartment within a few months and I figured the rent at a new apartment would be high enough that I might as well be paying a mortgage on my own place instead. I made a couple offers on places that were smaller and further out than I wanted, but otherwise seemed nice enough. I was outbid for those. My search had a temporary lull in August as only one suitable place was on the market, and I didn’t like it. And then in early September my agent brought me to a place in north Queen Anne, quite close to the Fremont Bridge, which had recently dropped in price. It was roomy, fairly close to the size of my apartment, and I liked the feel of it. It was still expensive, at the top of my price range and high in monthly payments, but the seller’s agent was willing to work with me to drop the asking price a bit and roll in the closing costs instead, and my agent convinced me it would be worth the stretch in my finances. And so I became a homeowner. Overall, I’ve been happy since then to have my own place. It’s still a comfortable size for me and I still like the location, within a short walk of Fremont and longer walks to Ballard or downtown, and also close to several bus routes downtown. However, I’ve been having doubts about my decision this year. The economic downturn has meant a serious lack of work for me, making it difficult to meet my mortgage and condo association payments each month; when I talked to my bank about assistance, they basically said that without regular income the best they can do is help me sell my place before I’m faced with foreclosure. Additionally, this past year my condo association has discovered that the buildings have a serious water intrusion problem and we will need to replace the outer walls, a very expensive process. Combined with my financial difficulties, I’m in serious danger of losing my home. On the other hand, the association might be able to cover the repairs, or a substantial portion of the cost, through insurance. And as I don’t have any good options if I lose my place, I’ll just have to find more work of some kind. I’ve already put effort, time, and money into being a homeowner and I like my home; it’s worth further effort to keep it. Current Mood: accomplished (Comment on this)
Friday, December 25th, 2009
philaros	9:18a	40 T/D/Y #34: Cat I’ve always liked cats. When I was little—and indeed even still today—I loved tigers in particular. It’s possible that that love of tigers is derived in part from the fact that my dad’s family nickname at the restaurant was “Tiger,” for his sometimes fierce temper. To this day I have cousins who call him “Uncle Tiger,” although I don’t remember hearing that nickname at family gatherings when I was growing up. In any case, I thought tigers were awesome and I liked all cats in general. I would pretend I had a pet tiger, or could transform into one; conveniently, my best friend Andy liked wolves, so we each had our own imaginary animal and didn’t have to argue over who got to have the tiger. We didn’t have any pets when I was growing up, though. I’m sure my siblings and I asked once or twice about it but my parents always just said no. Perhaps it’s not surprising then that all of us as adults eventually got pets at some point: my older sister got a couple birds, my younger sister and her partner got two cats, and my younger brother had a cat for a while but had to leave it with friends when he moved apartments and later figured out he was allergic to cats anyhow. Once I moved to Seattle, I started thinking about getting a cat of my own, but I was reluctant to seek one out. I worried about being able to care for one, and I worried that getting a cat would just be a way for me to avoid seeking out human companionship. I also faced some strong enthusiasm from some friends, which I found a bit off-putting; I would get a cat when I was ready, and not because everyone else thought it was a great idea that I should do right away. So, a couple years went by, during which I considered getting a kitten from a family friend who was fostering some, but I never followed up on that. And then in late 2004, I was feeling squeezed financially, and decided that I would not go back to my parents’ home for Christmas that year, my first (and so far only) time missing that gathering. I was pretty sad about it, but it seemed like the right thing to do. As it happened, about a week before Christmas, neighbors of my friends Tony and Farida discovered a stray flame-tipped Siamese kitten. After spending several hours checking around the neighborhood, they’d been unable to find anyone claiming the cat, nor had any missing-cat signs been posted, so they determined the cat needed a home. Farida invited me over for dinner as a pretext to bring me to meet the cat, who was adorable and not too shy of me. The cat needed a home, I wanted a cat, so I agreed to come back in a few days, Christmas Eve, and take it home. Despite being anxious all that day, when I saw the cat again I felt very happy with my decision, and the cat also seemed quite content to join me, walking right into the carrier and calmly checking out my apartment when we got home. When I brought the cat to the vet, I learned it was female, about 17 months old, not microchipped already and not in their notices of lost cats, and so it was safe to claim her as my own. What I didn’t learn until a couple weeks later was that she had not yet been neutered, which was demonstrated by her suddenly spending her nights running around the apartment caterwauling. So we had a bit of a rough period settling in, but once she was fixed we got along well. Being a geek, I decided to name her in Tolkien’s Elvish language, and came up with the name “Nimloriel”, meaning “golden-white maiden”, in reference to her color (white with orange highlights), but that felt a bit heavy and I shortened it to just “Nimiel” (“white maiden”). My anxieties proved unfounded, of course. Cats are generally easy to care for, and though she can be a nuisance at times and seems easily bored by her toys, she’s still little trouble and lots of fun. And as happy as I am to have her companionship, I’m certainly still looking for female companionship of the human kind. Current Mood: accomplished Current Music: Christmas Revels (Comment on this)
Thursday, December 24th, 2009
obake	7:24p	Christmas Eve lyrics OLD CITY BAR by Trans-Siberian Orchestra In an old city bar That is never too far From the places that gather The dreams that have been In the safety of night With its old neon light It beckons to strangers And they always come in And the snow it was falling The neon was calling The music was low And the night Christmas Eve And here was the danger That even with strangers Inside of this night It's easier to believe Then the door opened wide And a child came inside That no one in the bar Had seen there before And he asked did we know That outside in the snow That someone was lost Standing outside our door Then the bartender gazed Through the smoke and the haze Through the window and ice To a corner streetlight Where standing alone By a broken pay phone Was a girl the child said Could no longer get home And the snow it was falling The neon was calling The bartender turned And said, not that I care But how would you know this? The child said I've noticed If one could be home They'd be all ready there Then the bartender came out from behind the bar And in all of his life he was never that far And he did something else that he thought no one saw When he took all the cash from the register draw Then he followed the child to the girl cross the street And we watched from the bar as they started to speak Then he called for a cab and he said J.F.K. Put the girl in the cab and the cab drove away And we saw in his hand That the cash was all gone From the light that she had wished upon If you want to arrange it This world you can change it If we could somehow make this Christmas thing last By helping a neighbor Or even a stranger And to know who needs help You need only just ask Then he looked for the child But the child wasn't there Just the wind and the snow Waltzing dreams through the air So he walked back inside Somehow different I think For the rest of the night No one paid for a drink And the cynics will say That some neighborhood kid Wandered in on some bums In the world where they hid But they weren't there So they couldn't see By an old neon star On that, night, Christmas Eve When the snow it was falling The neon was calling And in case you should wonder In case you should care Why we're on our own Never went home On that night of all nights We were already there Current Mood: melancholy (Comment on this)
philaros	12:26p	40 T/D/Y #33: Food I was a very fussy eater as a child. I didn’t like much to begin with, and was always reluctant to try new foods. I arbitrarily disliked whole kinds of food, such as cheese, even though I happily ate pizza. I wouldn’t eat tomatoes but would eat tomato sauce; I didn’t like peanuts but loved peanut butter; I didn’t like fish, but my mom got me to eat tuna by telling me it was “chicken of the sea”. I loved canned peas—and still do—and also liked canned corn, but absolutely hated canned green beans, string beans, and wax (yellow) beans with a passion. I would spend a good half-hour or more at the dinner table, reluctantly and very slowly finishing my green beans after everyone else was done dinner, so that I could get dessert. (My younger sister, more pragmatic, would ask what was for dessert, and if it wasn’t anything she felt like having then she’d happily abandon whatever part of dinner she didn’t like.) I also hated meatloaf, the one dinner sure to cause me to wail with dismay, such that it’s still a running joke in my family. In elementary school for the first several years, I would only eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch. I didn’t like any kind of regular sandwich fixings—I might’ve eaten cold turkey or ham, but I wouldn’t eat cheese or lettuce or mustard or anything else you’d put on a sandwich. Eventually around fourth or maybe fifth grade my mom persuaded me to start trying the hot lunch at school by pointing out things on the menu that I would eat, such as the turkey dinner or pizza on Fridays, and letting me buy only the meals I wanted rather than paying for the full week. Although my dad worked as a cook in the LaRose family restaurant, my parents never urged my siblings and I to learn how to cook, and I didn’t have much interest. I did learn to make cookies and brownies for parties or bake sales at school. Later, in Boy Scouts, I learned to do some cooking while on campouts; I was particularly fond of making french toast. But I still wasn’t much interested in preparing regular meals at home. We all settled into fairly well-defined roles: Mom would make dinner, one of us would set the table, I would always clear the table, and my sisters would wash and dry the dishes. As I got older, I very slowly and gradually became willing to try more foods. Macaroni salad is a good example: my mom’s macaroni salad is made with mayonnaise, pickles, celery, and eggs, all of which are things I believed I didn’t like (besides macaroni itself). However, one day for whatever reason I decided to try some, and discovered it was really good. Likewise, I found that cheese by itself was good, not just when it was on pizza, and I started eating sandwiches with meat and cheese, instead of just peanut butter and jelly. Still, I was never that adventurous about eating, and it took years for my palate to expand. I’d never liked vegetables much. Carrots, peas, and corn were all good, other kinds generally not. Beets were the one vegetable that my sisters and I all hated, while my mom loved them. When we were older, my mom added broccoli into the vegetable mix; I didn’t really like it, but it was okay in small amounts. The one vegetable I still hated passionately was green beans… until one day, for some reason, my dad brought home fresh green beans and prepared those instead of canned. What a revelation! Fresh green beans were good. We’d always had fresh carrots, so my only guess about the green beans is that the fresh ones didn’t keep as long and that’s why we had canned. Once I moved out of my parents’ home, I had to start cooking for myself. While living in Medford, my home-cooked meals stayed fairly simple and conservative, featuring a lot of pasta because that was easy to make, and including at least one frozen dinner a week and at least one can of chunky soup as a stew-like base. Boxed couscous and rice pilaf were also regular items. I did however also make a point of buying frozen vegetables and mixing them in or having them on the side; I also started taking a daily vitamin supplement, just in case. In Seattle, my cooking and eating menus have slowly expanded even more over the years. I’m now more willing to try new foods or foods I rejected in the past often without trying them. I’ve also been a little more ambitious about cooking. In 2003, I decided I would invite a bunch of friends over for Easter dinner and make chicken cordon bleu, which I’d never done before, and it turned out fine. I stopped buying frozen dinners and started buying more fresh meat to keep in the freezer and prepare for myself. Out for lunch at a mall one day, I decided to try a grilled chicken sandwich that included spinach on it, and found it quite tasty, so I’ve since added spinach into my regular home menu, both uncooked as a substitute for lettuce on sandwiches and cooked with various meals. Pasta is still a staple of my diet but I found some meals took long enough preparation that it was worthwhile taking the time to bake potatoes, too. I not only started using recipes out of cookbooks, but also felt able to experiment and adapt them to what I had on hand. I’m now at a point where even though I often don’t feel like cooking, or feel like it’ll take longer than I want to spend in order to get a meal, I’m always happier for making the effort and cooking a decent meal instead of falling back on something like a pseudo-stew made from chunky soup with macaroni and frozen vegetables added. Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention ice cream. I’ve always loved ice cream, and my family almost always kept ice cream on hand for dessert, as well as often going out to ice cream stands during the summer. So naturally as an adult I continued to keep ice cream at home for myself. A couple years ago, I made some idle remarks about how I should learn how to make my own ice cream, and Tony and Farida gleefully took me at my word and bought me an ice cream mixer. It turns out that homemade ice cream is much better than store-bought ice cream. I actually eat less now than I used to because I feel obliged to make it myself rather than buy some at the store, so that means I have to take the time to make it. (Similarly, I used to always have cookies on hand for snacking, but I came to feel that homemade cookies were better-tasting and better-quality, and so I rarely buy cookies anymore and only have them when I make a batch.) Plus, bringing homemade ice cream to a party always makes me popular. Now I just have to figure out how to make an ice cream cake, per Farida’s request… Current Mood: accomplished (Comment on this)