Deja Vu

Oh no not again. Its snowing like crazy in Seattle right now. Talina is loudly cursing Global Climate Change as we drive the long long (but much less hilly) way home from Ballard. The roads are really slick already.

It's a New Year!

Every year since I first moved to Boston, I've sent out a holiday letter. Sometimes they're one page full of photos, and sometimes (like this year) the letters take on a life of their own! This year I've decided to post the body of the letter on my blog. You can also download the PDF complete with the associated photos. Enjoy, and Happy New Year!!



Dear Ones,
I started writing this year’s letter while sitting in the Portland Amtrak station, waiting for my train back home to Seattle. It’s the first weekend after Thanksgiving, and the crowds of holiday travelers look tired but happy. Tired but happy sums up how I’ve been feeling as the year draws to a close.

JANUARY
In January, I was accepted to a local chorus, the Seattle Women’s Chorus. The chorus is large (over 160 women), and is a sister organization to the Seattle Men’s Chorus, which has been a pioneer of GLBT choruses for almost 30 years! The women’s spring concert was an amazing combination of songs highlighting early lesbian pulp fiction from the 40s and 50s - some of the first available material that acknowledged the existence of lesbians in literature (important despite it’s original intended audience!). The second half was singing backup for Chris Williamson, a folk singer/songwriter who was one of the first women to put out music on her own label in the 60s. Singing again is wonderful, and it felt good to be involved, even if it did make my spring that much busier!

FEBRUARY
Mid-February, I was caught completely by surprise by the worst abdominal pain I’ve ever felt. I couldn’t even walk into the ER, Talina had to wheel me. I spent about 8 hours in the hospital, had plenty of morphine and got to have a CT scan – I wasn’t allowed to eat or drink for fear I would require surgery. Ultimately it was decided that I had a kidney stone, that it was small enough to pass on it’s own, and was rather unceremoniously sent home. One miserable, vicodin-filled week of peeing through a strainer later, the ordeal was over.

MARCH
In March, during Talina’s spring break, we took our annual Spring Break trip – this year, we went to Italy!! We spent our first day on the trip on layover in Amsterdam. It was cold, and even snowed in the afternoon. We walked around the main area of town, saw the oldest church in Amsterdam, and ate lunch at the oldest department store. Exhausted, we returned to the airport, caught our flight to Rome, and were very happy to fall into bed upon arriving at our host’s.
While in Rome, we visited all the main tourist sites: the Coliseum, the Vatican, the Forum and Palatine Hill… the weather was cold and wet, and it was Easter week. We waited for 2 hours to get into the Vatican museum (it was worth it). My favorite place in Rome was Palatine Hill – it was amazing to be able to walk right up to ruins thousands of years old, and then, standing surrounded by them, see down past the hill to modern Rome below. The best art was at the Borghese Gallery and Museum, which houses several incredible Bernini sculptures. In retrospect it would have been better to start off in Florence, seeing Michelangelo and DaVinci first, and moving forward in time to Bernini. The way it worked out for us, by the time we saw Michelangelo’s David, our minds had already been blown by the Bernini sculpture of Apollo and Daphne, and David just looked kind of clunky.
From Rome, we traveled north for 3 days in Florence and Siena, where we saw St. Catherine’s finger but somehow missed her embalmed head, climbed hundreds of steps at two different towers, and celebrated our dumb luck at arriving during Culture week, which meant that our museum visits were all free!
My favorite destination was our last day in Italy. We took a night train to Napoli, and then caught a regional train down to Pompeii. The sun came out, and we engaged a guide to walk us through the enormous archeological site. In America, there are no more places where you can walk around so freely among such precious history. It felt like Christmas, wandering around through the homes and civic buildings still in such amazing repair after thousands of years.

APRIL
In April, Talina’s mother came to visit us. The weather was good to us; we spent time at the Sculpture Park and finally visited the Seattle Japanese Garden. Then, after years of talking about it, I finally got laser eye surgery. I can now see better than 20/20 without any type of glasses, it’s wonderful to be able to see the clock when I wake up in the morning! I could even see the individual leaves on the maple tree out our bedroom window. I have not had any of the side effects I worried about, and although the healing process was frustrating, it’s been very much worth it!

MAY
In May I turned thirty!! For Mother’s day, Mom and I spent a weekend in Vancouver BC, where we visited museums, the aquarium, and ate a stunning 7 course meal chef’s choice meal at Tojo’s, a Japanese restaurant. The next weekend, Talina surprised me by inviting friends from all over to our home for my birthday weekend, and we enjoyed beautiful weather, late breakfasts, and all night video games.

JUNE
June began with more family visits, as Talina’s sister came to visit for a week. We spent our Summer Break week enjoying the east side of Washington (the part with less rain in June!), where we stayed in a cabin near Lake Chelan. We visited wineries and enjoyed Leavenworth’s crazy alpine village architecture.
At the end of June, just after celebrating a year and a half together, Talina surprised me one night with a ring, and asked me to marry her. I said YES, of course, immediately, and have then spent the last six months trying to figure out how to share the best news of my life with everyone I love. I’m doing a crummy job of it, I know… I’m not well equipped to be this happy, people! We’re working on planning a wedding in July of 2009, and invitations will go out sometime soon.

JULY
In early July, Alaska finally dropped off my list of States To See (that only leaves OK, MO, KS, NE, AR, and KY!) when my friends Duncan and Krista and I flew up to spend 4th of July weekend with my dear friend Adam in Juneau. We stepped off our plane and were taken immediately to the helipad, where we helicoptered out to the middle of a glacier. The weather cooperated; we saw mountain goats on the cliffs, and the impossible blue of the glacier. We also took a whale-watching cruise, where we got to see humpback whales hunting as a group by creating bubble nets. And we saw so many eagles! Alaska is cold, but so beautiful and full of life.
My brother Tad spent the summer on a small farm in Northern California, and my sister Ana and I drove down to visit him. Hyampom is an hour from cell phone service, in the middle of a valley between I-5 and 101. We were surrounded by forest fires, which made for beautiful sunsets but was a little scary. Luckily, the fires mostly stayed on their side of the road, and we didn’t meet too many speeding fire trucks coming around the tight gravel turns in those mountain roads. We did go hiking, swam in rivers, chased frogs, and played cards.

AUGUST
In August, Mom, Ana and I went backpacking together… an ill fated trip that ended badly amidst hordes of mosquitoes (the worst I’ve ever seen!) as I celebrated turning old with a nasty fall that had me limping and bruised for over a month. Unfortunately, we had planned a trip through Oregon to be “tourists” in Portland, so I ended up limping all over Portland and up the coast from Tillamook to the crossing at Astoria.
We shared in beautiful weddings with our friends Amy and Jessica, Ruth and Adam, and Molly and Laurie. Congratulations and best wishes to all!


Best Books in 2008:
Cat’s Cradle (Vonnegut)
Lies My Teacher Told Me (Loewen)
Magician’s Assistant (Patchett)
To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee)
The Third Chimpanzee (Diamond)
Rant (Palahniuk)
At the Water’s Edge (Zimmer)
Spook (Roach)
Persepolis (Satrapi)
As She Climbed Across The Table (Lethem)

If you recall from last year’s letter, I was losing heart as my job hunt went unsuccessful at the end of 2007. I continued to spend the first 6 months of 2008 hunting for a new job away. In June, I finally had a fruitful interview!. They allowed me to delay my start date, which let me to spend my summer using up my vacation days before starting my new job in early September. I am very excited about my new career as a Consultant – can’t wait to get used to being paid to tell people what to do!

OCTOBER
In October, I finally had a chance to do something I’ve been wanting to do for years: sit on a jury. I received summons to local county court here, and sat with a 6-person jury on a domestic violence case. The process was fascinating, and ultimately very uplifting: the amount of serious thought and intention my fellow jurors put into the case, not only those of us chosen but all of the potential jurors during the entire process, restored some of my faith in humanity. It seems people truly DO care about our system of justice, and can be bothered to think complex thoughts about our duty to each other as humans. Thanks, King County!
Talina and I both were lucky enough to spend our Election Day here on Capitol Hill in Seattle, where we watched the election results roll in with hundreds of our neighbors. It was a wonderful experience to walk through the streets of our neighborhood and watch strangers high-five each other in the streets, and to see all the silly grins on everyone’s faces. Celebrating the local election results in the bar around the corner from our apartment is a moment I will never forget. Thank you to everyone who voted this year, the results were better than I had let myself hope, and certainly helped end 2008 on a good note.
Speaking of good notes, through Couchsurfing.com, we hosted and met some wonderful people this year. If you have the ability to host guests, I truly encourage you to consider opening your home to couchsurfers. We have had great luck with extraordinary people from the US as well as other countries, and the experience of meeting through the simple act of providing travelers a safe and free place to sleep has been incredibly rewarding. Because of couchsurfing, I have a new appreciation for aspects of Japanese culture I wasn’t familiar with despite years of studying the language, I’ve gotten to celebrate our US election night with a woman who has taught me about Danish politics, and I’ve been inspired by adventurers starting their lives over in a brand new city.

Places I slept in 2008:

Juneau, AK
Hyampom, CA
Rome, Italy
Florence, Italy
McMinnville, OR
Portland, OR
El Paso, TX
Atlanta, GA
Phoenix, AZ
Indian Heaven, WA
Vancouver, BC

So in summary, this year I: joined a choir, turned thirty, racked up some medical bills, got a new job, traveled to new places nationally and internationally, FINALLY elected a Democrat as President, and got engaged! Happy, but tired.

Love,
me

Set the Tone

We decided to follow the tradition of spending the first day of the new year doing something symbolic of how we wanted the year to go. So, we completed a difficult puzzle while watching Deep Space Nine. Perfect!

Signs of the Apocalypse

Right this instant, it is raining tiny snow pellets on Seattle. Slowly.

New Years Miracle

Via the wonders of Google Video Chat, I got to listen to my little sister practice Auld Lang Syne on her accordian. Seriously, the internet is wonderful. Happy Future, everyone!

I Do Not Think That Means What You Think

Sign on the Taekwondo studio on 45th. Talina concurs, but maybe not for the reasons they had in mind?

Higher Road

Mill Creek is near its boundries, full of snow melt. We tried to play Pooh Sticks, but all the sticks were buried under the snow, and the ice floes we tossed in all melted and disappeared in the torrent.

All Downhill From Here

We took the tobagan out to some snowy hills.