I’m at my house. WALLS GETTT

ZOMG I finally got the theater working with PS3!!!!

In the spirit if @joelpage’s birthday, having some cake.

Pulled up to the office to see the UPS guy unloading iPhones for everyone!!

Piroko went to Tokyo in January, and I stayed back in Seattle for a while. I worked a bit, went to Macworld, and then moved into Ann & Julian’s house to play video games with Nathaniel for a week. That was a memorable time; we finished Prince of Persia, Braid, Persona 2, and LittleBigPlanet. I started on Persona 3, and Nathaniel started Shadow of the Colossus. We made cookies and celebrated the new year together. It was my first extended time living with cats… I do love cats.

Really want to go to this next session, but not feeling well at all. Resting & migrating in my room.

@tjw Hm. Also with the too many shirts.

At my house. Bedroom has a sweet bathtub in it.

Fine ham abounds

The best mug

Prelly happy right now.

There was an unprecedented-in-recent-memory snowy winter in Seattle this past year. Most folks stayed inside for a week; we drove our new car around town almost every day, rumbling over the dangerously unplowed, deeply-pocked ice-stratum streets.

We visited this pizza place on the terrifyingly snowy night of our friends Ann & Julian’s housewarming party in West Seattle. It’s hard to argue with!

These are the belongings of the founder of Bastyr University. We went there to listen to Christmas carols by Piroko’s boss’s choir.

Delicious, surprisingly affordable Korean food in Lynnwood.

One of the new communities we checked out had an in-progress house that we looked inside just to see the floor plan. Piroko’s brother may live with us when we get a house, so we’ve been taking him along.

We’re house hunting. The more houses I look at, the more I want to live in a house like the one I grew up in: suburban, quiet, and with a big wilderness area in back.

My friend Andrew had this laying around in his apartment, and it sure brought back memories. When my cousins and I were kids, we used to create elaborate rules for these electric racecars. We had a money system where you could use winnings to buy options for your car, like super sticky tires (some kind of glue that we figured would help your car stay on the track even around sharp turns) and earthquake tires (which allow you to separate the track at a location of your choice once per race). Indeed, we were the type of kids who could never just play a straightforward game; everything needed to have a codified ruleset.

We bought ourselves a new car. Here it is, the day we picked it up, in the dealership’s garage. Piroko’s sister named it Palschurom for us, via whatever magical mechanism in her head conjures up the names she assigns to various inanimate objects.

We bought a couple of cars; one for us, and one for Piroko’s brother. When we asked about trading in our old Maxima, the dealer brought out a book for checking on the value of old cars. Appropriately enough, the title of the old car value book is… NADA.

I drink a glass of wine almost every evening. I used to shun all alcohol, but a bit of reading convinced me that a glass of wine, enjoyed for its flavor and its gently relaxing effect, is far from the binge drinking and the glorification of intoxication that I witnessed in school. The *Commonsense Book of Wine* also reassured me that it’s all right to drink inexpensive wine.

This photograph doesn’t really do it justice, but you asked for it.

When two of my coworkers came back from vacation, their offices were decorated in amusing ways. Every object in Aaron’s office was wrapped in aluminum foil. Rowan’s office was turned into a pink Disney-princess fantasyland. A good amount of this stuff is still in there, months later.

We visited a huge Japanese antique sale in some kinda huge warehouse. Often I look forward to the day that my home is populated by cross-generational-quality objects like the furniture and art here, rather than, well, Ikea. I just can’t get enough of high-quality objects; bonus points if they’re older than I am.

My favorite cuisine is Korean, partly because of the *variety* of dishes. There is an astounding number of Korean restaurants and shops around our apartment in Shoreline. Our standby is Old Village, though Ho Soon Yi and Sorabol are also lovely. We can get a full-fledged, high-quality, painstakingly-packed meal for about the same as it would cost to cook for ourselves. Here is the box of *banchan*, the side dishes that come free with any proper Korean meal.

This jauntily-lettered warning at my friends’ old apartment reminds me of Mario Kart.

There have been pinball machines at the office since before I started here. But they stayed in disrepair until we moved to the new office and a couple of pinball-minded coworkers (like Aaron here) hired a repair guy to come work on them. Now they see regular maintenance, and there’s a bit of a pinball subculture around the office. Medieval Madness is the table of choice for most, and so whatever motivation drove me to master the unwieldy pipe car in Mario Kart made me want to get good at our other table, Star Trek: The Next Generation. That game is capricious and cruel, but once you get to know it, it can be quite exciting. As I’m the only one who’ll put up with its sadistic, seemingly random ball drainage, I currently populate its high score lists all by myself. There’s something else that draws me to the TNG machine: when I was a kid, visiting my cousins in St. Louis, they used to eat dinner on trays in the living room while watching Star Trek TNG every evening. I was so impressed at how they knew all the lore, recognized the recurring side characters, and recalled the outcomes of reruns. I wished I’d followed such a detailed show, and had someone to enjoy it with me to the same degree. They even had the Star Trek Technical Manual. Now I’m trying to line up some time to borrow my friend Nathaniel’s DVD sets and watch TNG myself.

It’s still [NOW](/?919)!

The meanings were on the other side: “injury” and “ward”.

This scene strongly reminded me of one time at Takashimaya Times Square in Shinjuku. The store was, I think, Franc Franc, where I got some nice French-designed notebooks for taking notes while reading. I was irritated about something. There was an open door leading out to a patio area like this one.

It’s hard to find stuff to do around here that we both enjoy, especially when we’re both in a kind of dissatisfied mood. Going to the bookstore is always enjoyable, though: she can flip through fashion and decorating magazines, while I peruse science and fiction books. We’re both looking forward to our trip to Tokyo in January, when we can entertain our pent-up hankering for fashionable clothes (her), geeky media (me), and all-around high-quality goods and foods (both of us).

This Casio dictionary has served me well for the past few years. It’s smaller than the comic books I use it on, and it’s still more convenient than any iPhone or Mac dictionary app. I still have so many Japanese comics to read, but I only tend to get through them when on vacation. For some reason I feel more like reading in English when I’m at home, and more like reading Japanese when I’m traveling. Maybe it’s because I have so many good memories of reading novels while curled up in bed at home, and so many good memories of reading comics while on trains around Tokyo and on planes to and from Japan.

We stayed in kind of a weird hotel. One of our engineers ended up calling the cops on some noisy people a few floors down, and on Twitter the next day it turned out to be the guy who makes NetNewsWire. Heh! On the wall of the lobby were these sinographs; I think they messed up their four-elements concept, because these say �water�, �fire�, �wind�, and �the planet Earth�. Whoops.

One morning I walked a while to a French cafe that someone offhandedly mentioned the night before. I had coffee and breakfast there while reading ハツカネズミの時間. Next to me, someone was getting advice on how to manage some important business transaction. It was a pleasant time.

This place had a lot of character.

It was a fine time.

Usually a trip to a bar or any other kind of after-hours social event at a conference makes me uncomfortable and regretful that I came. Somehow the chemistry was right this time, and I enjoyed hanging out with those strangers pretty well.

The secret musical guest at WWDC this year was Barenaked Ladies. It was pretty weird to see the band I listened to at my brother’s house in Wisconsin when I was like 11 years old, up on stage at an event I was attending as a professional member of the Mac developer community. I pushed up close to the front and sang along.

It was all worth it.

These people stood around for a long time, trying to dislodge something from the sign area. Most of their efforts involved jabbing it with this plastic pylon bollard thingy.

We went to WWDC, which is always an inspiring and motivating experience. The additional service oxens promised by the airport didn’t show up, but I admit we didn’t stick around until 4:00 AM.

The fire alarm in our apartment complex went off, right when we were about to sit down to breakfast. Turns out someone’s young kid was trying to cook, and burned something. Standing outside waiting to be let back in felt a lot like college, when people used to pull the fire alarms just to be jerks.

Element.

I had a lot of trouble with my external hard drive. I ended up tearing it apart and sticking the drive in another enclosure. At one point I was sure I’d lost the only living copy of the database containing all of my journals since age 10. It continued to flake out in scary ways, so I eventually used my hardware budget from work to buy a [Time Capsule](http://www.apple.com/timecapsule/). All is well.

At the grocery store, trying to believe how many dollars Gillette wanted from me for a pack of cartridges, I finally got fed up and declared that there must be a better way to shave. It seemed like that for every other product I used, there was some kind of non-sleazy-seeming choice; the same must be true of razors. The Mach 3 and Fusion systems always struck me as kind of cheap and cartoony, a caricature of manliness that comes from the same fantasy land as the late-80’s G.I. Joe toys. The marketing uses the same dull, generically attractive women as beer commercials, and has the same insulting swoopy chrome branding as a cut-rate PC manufacturer. I did some exploratory Googling and came up with the legendary [How to get that perfect shave](http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6886845) article; that led me to the whole traditional shaving revival that’s going on around the internet these days. The line about safety razors being the way Cary Grant shaved sold me right away. :D It wasn’t much longer that I was ordering my own Merkur handle and blades. Doesn’t it look orders of magnitude classier than the others?

I’m kind of scared. For the first time since I started this photo-log, I have a dearth of interesting photographs. I think it’s because my life has settled into a routine of relative predictability, occurring within a limited set of environments. There must be something interesting to photograph around here…

One day at lunch, our CEO announced that we should stop working for the day and take the afternoon to relax, play games, eat delicious hors d’oeuvres, and be proud of recently releasing a major update to our most popular product. Several of us played a game of Kingmaker, a board game from 1975 which is probably the most gratuitously complicated game I’ve ever played. I think most of the players found it tedious, but with its Song-of-Ice-and-Fire-esque War of the Roses theme and its classic feel, I was pretty thrilled.

I bought some clothes. Sometimes I don’t look like such a slob anymore. We spent what seems like all of our waking time together discussing how to get out of that apartment, researching the law, talking to helpful friends and volunteers and friends of friends, starting our apartment search all over again, and despairing. Eventually we left, and hoped that a judge would agree that we were justified in using the Seattle law that says tenants can move out if the landlord refuses to remedy a “defective condition.” The judge did agree, and I walked out of the courtroom feeling similar to the way I did when I tried riding a bike for half an hour in the St. Louis summer first thing in the morning without eating or drinking anything.

So we went to Chicago for Christmas. It was, as always, a lovely time to see everyone, slide back into Midwestern mode, and feel really cold. We made our regular visit to the Art Institute. Aside from my regular favorites like [Alberto Pasini](http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/111736), the most interesting thing was this little info panel that goes up when a painting gets moved, just because it wasn’t really intended for me to read. I love getting a peek at the workings of such an organization.

Some streets in Seattle are not streets at all, but stairs.

As bad as the apartment was, it was in a colorful neighborhood with plenty of fun stuff to see.

It took me a while to realize that this price was for the **gal**lon of “**suede**” paint below the sign, not the photo of the **suede**-wearing **gal** above it.

So after months of throwing ourselves at the apartments for rent section of craigslist, we found a place that I thought would be fine. With nobody living upstairs, and only sharing one wall, there would probably be minimal noise. It was spacious, and in the up-and-coming Madison Valley neighborhood. Andrew offered to help us move, and it became an all-day event, what with all of the stuff we’ve accumulated since coming to Seattle in two carloads. By the time we got the last truckload there, it was dark out. Piroko set up a contraption involving our futon frame and some lamps, so that we could see where we were dropping our boxes. Of course, this apartment ended up causing what may be the worst three months I’ve ever had. The very, very short version of the story is that the previous tenants were not *tidy people*; the landlord didn’t clean up after them at all, and even denied that their dog left its territorial mark on our carpet. I am grateful that this situation coincided with the busiest period I’ve ever had at work; nearly all of my waking time was dedicated to plowing through writing and design tasks that kept me somewhat distracted from the abysmal nature of my daily surroundings.

I have questions about this scene. First, why put a specific date on the sign? Shouldn’t they just write “do not use”, then take it down when it’s okay to use? What happens on July 17 that suddenly makes the counter all right to use, but happens without anyone being around to take the sign down? Also, what was the thought process that made the sign designer add a small child behind the parent, waving her arms for attention?

This is my new favorite bookstore section.

We went to Carkeek park, while searching for apartments in that area, and met a friendly rock.

We took a long walk to look at a potential new apartment; the noisy guys upstairs from us were driving me mad. The place ended up being pretty intriguing but also a little spooky: there was no door separating the common entry stairs from the apartment’s living room, so anyone could just march up and find you hanging out there. Not too much longer, though, we did move into a new place… If you correspond with me regularly, you have probably heard about it. If not, hang on and I’ll post about it soon.

Piroko and I went hiking somewhere. I can’t even remember where it was; we just drove and drove until we saw something that looked promising. We found a cave with a stream running out of it, and I ventured pretty far into it. Caves really exist in real life.

I think these signs are supposed to make me think positively about their candidates. All I see is that someone has proudly emblazoned his name on a big hunk of litter.

As we were checking out at the grocery store, I spotted the cashier referring to this finely-illustrated, homemade guide. He was nice enough to let me photograph it.

We went to Wisconsin. We took a ride on a hay truck. We met a shaved llama.

We sat out in the hot sun and the rain for the iPhones our company bought us. We didn’t really *need* to, as one could have just walked in that evening after all the excitement and easily bought one, but being in line for such stuff is great fun. We played Munchkin, read, and convened with our fellow fans.

Cary Grant! What a guy. My cousin Steve introduced me to him with *North By Northwest*, and just recently I finally saw *An Affair to Remember*. If you’re looking for someone to emulate, you could do a lot worse than his characters.

Los Angeles has Family Mart and Yoshinoya. I didn’t really like the atmosphere in that city, but I am jealous that they have such stuff just sitting out in the open.

1. The La Brea Tar Pits actually have bubbling black tar! Andrew and I were quite impressed. 2. Did you know that “The La Brea Tar Pits” means “The The Tar Tar Pits”?

Now that’s a nice [TLA](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_letter_acronym).

OmniFocus told me to post a photo, so I did.

We visited Pismo Beach, and I found various areas of the sidewalk were labeled with a letter-number pair. One of them was [particularly meaningful](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pismo#PowerBook_G3_.28FireWire.29) for us Mac fans…

Every time I think I’ve seen pretty much every bizarre creature that people have discovered, I run into something like this. You should see the rainbows rippling along its body in person some time.

This sign apparently used to say “Office”. Now it says “Office”.

We took another walk through Muir Woods, because I can’t really get enough of gigantic, millenia-old trees. The exposed roots in the path were polished to this shiny finish by all the feet that walked over them every day.

I thought these ads for Target were kind of lame. They add *less* to a bunch of positive words, which kind of struck me as negative. This mirrored version added a whole new dimension to its backfiringness.

On a San Francisco street car, I witnessed someone get swindled by the [shell game](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_game), played with some 20-ounce pop bottle tops. The guy was good; several shills played for small amounts first, and of course they all won. When it was the marks’ turn, they ended up putting something like $120 down. In a matter of seconds, they lost, the street car reached its stop, the game was packed up, and the shell man and the shills all disappeared in different directions. I have often regretted not doing something to stop those poor people from getting sucked in, but I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to dissuade them without upsetting the people running the game, people I really didn’t want unhappy with me. It was a surreal and frightening experience.

It’s been a long time. I don’t know what to type.

Some people were doing this flexy activity outside of Moscone West, where we were attending Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference. While I’ve learned a lot at WWDC these past two years, the strongest memories are definitely of playing Munchkin at the hotel after hours.

This tunnel under the street in Discovery Park has an eerie glow, especially when it’s starting to get dark outside. I love how much of this city makes you feel like you aren’t anywhere near a city at all.

A bird made its home on this pipe in the garage of our apartment building, right above our parking spot. It was pretty calm around people, so we got a pretty good look at it when we came out to the car.

Emphatic quotation marks at their best.

This kitty, and a dog across the street, often peeked out at us as we started our daily walk.

I guess I’d choose “911” in this case, for brevity and memorability.

[Meditate on that for a while.](/?1125)

The alpaca office is in there, apparently. This comes from an outing with our friends Jon and Sarah, who are a couple of the *grown-up friends* we’ve acquired in Seattle. See, with some of our friends, we still have a pretty college-style way of hanging out: spontaneous invitations to hang out, dropping in to sit on the floor and play video games, unselfconsciously bouncing around between activities. With other friends, it feels grown up: in-advance planning, an offering of something to drink when we arrive, lots of taking care to be nice to each other. Actually, trying to think of attributes of either type leaves me thinking that the difference is just in my head, and I just segregate friends into ones I met before college and ones I met after.

This is a masterpiece.

At our Green Lake apartment, the lady and I did a lot of walking around the neighborhood. I’d like to be back there, rather than in this awful new place. I’ll post about the new place eventually, and hopefully we’ll be out of it by then. It’s odd that I’m late enough in updating my journal that I’m reminiscing about the photos I post.

I found some calligraphy by someone named 萌. If you follow Japanese popular culture at all, this stamp may be funny or interesting.

Here is some hydroelectric something or other.

I’m so proud of this photo.

This used to be the way I walked to work. There’s this forested ravine in the middle of the city, right along the path between our old apartment and the office. In many walking trips back and forth while reading books, I only walked into one stationary object. Walking while watching anime on my iPhone, however, was pretty unsuccessful.

These trash cans are decorated with spammy flyers from Japan. I don’t know if this means that Japan has such good graphic design that even its junk is worth using to decorate stuff, or if it means that the USA has such bad taste that we think their junk is attractive enough to decorate stuff with.

1. It’s interesting that the city puts signs on trees that it intends to cut down. 2. This sign has disappointing grammar. “Which” seems to be trying to refer to a noun that doesn’t actually exist. 3. I guess it’s good that trees are not sentient, or else this would be terribly disturbing.

Most of my local news for the past year and a half came from the headlines I saw on my neighbor’s newspaper as I walked out of the building. Every now and then I’d even lean down and flip the thing over to see a bit more.

When I was, oh, nine years old or so, my parents took me to San Jose to see some relatives. On the plane, I read my first not-necessarily-for-kids book, *The Source of Magic*, by Piers Anthony, given to me by my brother-in-law and mentor-in-geekishness. The book began my 24-book relationship with Piers Anthony in particular, and vaulted me into my reading habit in general. On that trip, we visited the Winchester Mystery House, which was fascinating to my weirdness-addicted brain at the time, and remained legendary in my mind for all the years since. Back in San Jose for my cousin Chris’s wedding, we had a chance to visit the House again. It was just as enchanting as I remembered, and this time I got a nice mug.

I used to work at JCPenney. In retrospect, I am kind of wary of a place that would hire my teenaged self. Whenever shoes go on sale at a department store, I see this situation. It’s a pretty awful thing to meet the moment you walk into a store.

Some intersections in Seattle have this new style of crosswalk button. It’s an astoundingly good UI, especially among all the awful ones people have to use every day. It’s got a nice little chart to explain what the signals mean, a button that gives a little *click* and turns on a light to let you know that your press registered, and a pleasant chirp to alert you to the walk signal. I get excited when we come to a crosswalk that has one of these instead of the old, hostile silver dome buttons.

In Tokyo, we do a lot of shopping at Daiso. It’s a 100-yen store, something of an equivalent to American dollar stores, except that some of the products are not garbage. Part of this seems to come from the way Daiso buys up big remaining stocks from failed companies, which is a bit depressing. But at least the stuff isn’t going to waste. Now there’s a Daiso right in downtown Seattle, for some reason. I’m certainly not complaining; cute, affordable, decent-quality products like the stuff they sell here are something I really missed from Japan. Now I have some cute Japanese-style lunch boxes for bringing food home to Piroko. Also, “Stationary”.

Now that Piroko is back with me, we do a lot of shopping. I think I got out of the house more in these few months than in the two years she was gone. At this Tully’s (where I won’t go back, because I got pretty bad service and because I have my own French press now anyway) they have this big sign of coffee statistics. The weird thing is that most of these strike me as a sign of the coffee excess we indulge in here in the USA, and kind of discourages me from wanting to drink coffee at all. **One Billion Cups Of Coffee!! Don’t you want to make it one billion and one!?** Also, whenever I see the Tully’s “T” logo floating somewhere, I think it’s the teleporter from Quake and I want to grab it.

Mitch Hedberg had a bit about escalators: *I like an escalator, man, ’cause an escalator can never break. It can only become stairs. There would never be an “Escalator Temporarily Out of Order” sign, only “Escalator Temporarily Stairs. Sorry for the Convenience.”* Thanks, [Wikiquote](http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mitch_Hedberg). This escalator was actually broken; they had some of the stairs removed from it so that they could get at the mechanism underneath.

So we had a fancy dinner with some members of Piroko’s family, to celebrate our marriage. It was intimidating to give a speech in the language, in a traditional room, to a bunch of formally-dressed strangers. But I think it went quite well. This is *buri*. I recently watched an interview in which clammbon bassist Mito explained that this fish has various names in different regions of Japan.

I don’t really understand why we don’t have bakeries like this in the USA. Don’t people want fresh-baked bread? And the food shopping underneath department stores; the closest thing we have to that is the prepared meals section of Whole Foods, which doesn’t exactly stack up.

These are just what they seem to be: custom-made pet coffins. We passed by this display on the long walk to the glasses shop. It’s such a sad sight, conjuring images both of those who have need for this product, and of the person who decided to make a living of creating such a product.