websites!

I'm not sure if anyone still looks at this ever, but if you do, you should go check out the new website that my little sister and I have been working on. It's at www.polyglotproject.com. Let me know what you think!

Also, my older sister has been doing a lot with her business and you should check her out at http://www.nurturecenter.com/ and http://www.tendercargo.com

fire!??

Wow, when I got in tonight I found my entire block occupied by maybe six fire trucks and about 50 firemen. Aparently my building caught on fire. It was just the 4th floor- I'm on the 2nd- and they had already put it out and said I could go in. So I'm sitting here on my couch typing this on my phone because my computer is broken. There's pretty extensive water damage to the apt. Anyway, everything is fine I guess, but I may stay someplace else tonight.

the library

i just stepped into the library for the first time this semester, and it is bringing back all sorts of memories.  i'm sitting at the seat by the window where i used to do all my studying as a 1L, and i feel nostalgic for the time when i used to worry about whether i would fail and whether i would get a job, which was actually pretty fun now that i look back on it.  i remember spending so much time here working through everything and watching the snow fall.  anyway, i guess i'm finally getting down to work for this semester.  but it will be over pretty quickly.  home thursday for a while.  

books

so, like i said in my last post, i have been packing up some things to send home. i've accumulated a good collection of books since i've been out here, so i thought i would copy my sister and write out the list of everything i've read lately, not counting schoolwork. this is for the last year or so, i think starting near the end of last summer.

Homage to Catalonia- George Orwell
Traders, Guns & Money- Satyajit Das
Waiting for Godot- Samuell Beckett
Rosencrantz & Guilldenstern are Dead- Tom Stoppard
Waiting for the Barbarians- J.M. Coetzee
Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman- Richard Feynman
Death in the Afternoon- Ernest Hemingway
Medici Money- Tim Parks
The End of the Affair- Graham Greene
On Love- Alaine de Botton
Long Day's Journey into Night- Eugene O'Neil
Hamlet: Poem Unlimited- Harold Bloom
Twelfth Night- Shakespeare
Blood Meridian- Cormac McCarthy
Holidays on Ice- David Sedaris
Status Anxiety- Alain de Botton
A Moon for the Misbegotten- Eugene O'Neil
The Year of Magical Thinking- Joan Didion
The Dharma Bums- Jack Kerouac
The Turn of the Screw- Henry James
This Side of Paradise- F. Scott Fitzgerald
Straight from the Gut- Jack Welch
Dubliners- James Joyce
Exile and the Kingdom- Albert Camus
Lolita- Vladimir Nabokov
The Maltese Falcon- Dashell Hammett
The Annotated Wasteland- T.S. Eliot
The Robert Frost Reader- Robert Frost

also the first two harry potter books fit somewhere in that order.

no parking

i've started boxing a few things up to send home for the summer, and in looking through some things, i found a great collection of historical documents. see, last summer i was borrowing a car from a generous friend and driving to work everyday. i was spending most of my weekends on the upper west side and sleeping on an air mattress at a friend's apartment. well this was a nice little area, and part of what the city does to keep it nice is make it so dreadfully impossible to park that nobody would dare leave their car on the street for more than a couple hours. they come up with ridiculous, unpredictable rules- "no parking 7-9 AM every third thursday" or "3-5:30 each wednesday"- so that you can never be too sure if you're breaking the law or not, or if, by the passage of time, you will come to be breaking the law. i knew i would get an occasional ticket, but being a naive californian and thinking that i had seen the worst of parking tickets in berkeley and san francisco, expected the damage to be minimal. it was not. i paid $520 in parking tickets over the course of two months last summer, or at least, that is the total of the tickets i found stuffed into a drawer- there may have been more. anyway, i am very excited to know that i will have a parking space this summer, and i am looking forward to spending the money on something else instead.

money

since this blog is a sort of pseudo journal, i think i should link to this here so i will remember it when i am old.

florida 3

this really big guy was just sitting along side the water there and we were able to sneak up behind him to get a picture

they had these little baby ones for us to hold. they said that you can't release alligators once they've lived in captivity because they lose their fear of people and will start eating people.

after our tour we drove a while down the road andfound this trail to something called the Shark Valley Observation deck. it was getting dark though so we didn't actually make it to the end. also, the park ranger we met in the parking lot said that alligators become moreactive at night and that it would be dangerous to stay out their.

we got less than a mile down the trail and then quickly found that he was right. this giant alligator was just sitting there on the trail waiting for us. we kept our distance and turned around to go back to the car.

florida 2

our first alligator sighting

another one

there were a ton of these white birds all around. not sure what kind they were.

one swimming alongside our boat

florida trip

ao i've been meaning to blog this for the last week or so. here are a few of the pictures i took on my trip to florida at the beginning of march. six friends and i went down and stayed at a condo in ft lauderdale. part of the trip was just a kinda lazy beach vacation and a lot of eating out, but the part that is the subject of this post is much cooler.

one day we took a trip to the everglades to try and see some aligators. we found a tour company that would take us out in one of those fan-boat things.

here is most of our group. from left to right ck, holly, justin, jane, and chris.

here is our tour guide. he was really cool. basically exactly the stereotype. he showed us scars on his leg that he said were from an aligator bite.

this is what the everglades look like.

the view

hey everyone, i just realized that i've been meaning to post pictures of the view from my room ever since i moved in last summer. considering that out lease might not be renewable i thought i ought to finally get around to posting.

here's the view looking southish at columbus circle:













and here's looking northwestish towards lincoln center:







pretty cool huh?

come visit me before the semester ends.

a fool and his money...

so i am looking forward to spending this weekend here. it seems that some companies have ridiculous ideas about how to go about recruiting and think parties for students are worthwhile expenses. not that i'm complaining, i just think it is ridiculous. anyway, i am going to stop writing before they take away my vacation.

actually, after thinking about it for a minute, maybe this is a good recruiting tool. i am definitely more interested in working for these people now, so their plan may be working.

i thought that this was a pretty efficient way to get my screen cleaned


(not sure how long that link will work)