i prefer pi

I prefer boysenberry more than any ordinary jam. I’m a “Citizens for Boysenberry Jam” fan.

• Currently eating: toasted pumpkin seeds
• Jack-o-lantern: 50% carved
• Miles run in the past week: 20.5
• Processor: heatsink removed, old thermal compound cleaned up, still sitting on my desk

I want to say that the work of Fred Eerdekens blows my mind. In reality, that’s too strong a statement, but it’s still very cool. It’s the visual activation of negative space taken to new levels. Flickr shots here.

EDIT: Also, I suck at page layout.

It was cold and grey and dreary and rainy — in short, a perfect Seattle morning! — when I headed into work, so I decided to wear my scarf. It was, as Matt said, pretty flippin’ sweet.

P.S. I think that the first snow of the season started falling up at Stevens Pass last night. I think that I might figure out how these tire chains work and head up there this weekend…

In roughly chronological order, I:

• went to my church’s tenth birthday service.
• saw Bill Gates at a park one Sunday afternoon pushing his daughters on the swings while Laura and I were sitting on a bench; yes, they were having a good time; no, I didn’t talk to him; no, I didn’t see any Secret Service men about.
• saw (the last Seattle performance of) Bombay Dreams with some friends; it was silly yet fun, but I don’t think that I’ll get the recording any time soon.
• ran ten miles with Jacob.
• went to Bainbridge Island and the Olympic Penninsula with Laura to see what we could see. We saw Fay Bainbridge State Park, a pumpkin patch, Poulsbo, Port Townsend, and Kingston, and a lot of beautiful autumn leaves in between.
• ran around Nike’s corporate campus in Beaverton, OR. It’s very beautiful, probably the most nicely-landscaped company that I’ve ever visited.
• went to Powell’s City of Books in Portland. My most interesting find so far has been Sex, Marriage, and Family in John Calvin’s Geneva, but I also got some Wodehouse, Bunyan, Bonhoeffer, and Brand.
• saw the nation’s largest Sitka spruce tree again (it’s a really big tree), the Pacific Ocean again (at Cannon Beach, where it was blustery and rainy most of the time, but with some nice breaks for beach-walking), and the end of the Lewis and Clark trail again (on our way back to Seattle).
• turned twenty-four.
• got a scarf from Laura, which she made herself.

A study in annual felicity:

Thanks everyone!

Some facts, in order of increasing alarming-ness:

• I have a friend
• This friend has a mom
• This mom has a blog*
• This blog had an entry, and I left a comment, and my comment was a question about the post
• Said mom replied to my question by leaving me a facebook message

A perhaps-unforeseen consequence of opening facebook is that people’s moms are now on facebook. Just FYI.

*(Actually, she has two, but that’s beside the point)

Jacob and I did a long run — my longest! — on Friday in preparation for an upcoming half-marathon. We finished just barely over our target time (by 37 seconds), and considering the fact that the difference was spread out over ten miles and we were timing ourselves by the clock on my mp3 player, I felt pretty good.

Sometimes, I make pretty good decisions. Deciding to go for this race has been one. Quitting grad school in favor of a real life and a full night’s rest and the Seattle weather has been another. Sometimes, however, I make really bad decisions, and I made a doozy of one on Friday. Right after I ran ten miles, probably burning in the neighborhood of 1500 calories, Jacob told me about the Top Foods Market and their limitless candy section. “Seriously,” he tells me as he gets out of the car, “it’s like a Sweet Factory times two.” Seriously?

Seriously. Instead of going home to eat pasta and vegetables like I’d planned, I went by Top Foods “just to check it out.” The only problem was that once I got there, I discovered that I was powerless to resist the siren song of white-chocolate-covered gummy bears and Sunkist Fruit Gems (the king of gummy candies), and I went home and ate candy until I felt sick inside, then I waited a long time and ate some bread, and then I fell asleep in the shower.

When I woke up (the next morning), I swore off candy forever, and my resolve lasted until roughly 3:00 that afternoon, when I tried something called “Dark Chocolate Seafoam” at Boehm’s Chocolates in Poulsbo. But that, my friends, is another story.

Right-o.

It’s been eight months (plus two days) since I rolled into Seattle. Has it really been that long? Or that short?