Eclipse

So, I'll be posting a bunch of crappy photos I take of the eclipse here. Enjoy.

Hold the Lettuce

Apparently, my niece has acquired a kitten of her very own! I was told a few days back that my sister followed through in her plan to get a pet for her new home. She had told Sylvia a couple weeks ago that they were going to get a kitten, and asked her what exactly they should name it. Sylvia was absolutely insistent and certain on one name:

Lettuce.

She wouldn't budge over the two weeks that followed, answering every query on the new cat's name with the same moniker - Lettuce. And, so, on Friday, Lettuce arrived!


Remarkably, he looks almost identical to Emmy, one of the two household cats in my parents' home, when she was first brought to our house.


Separated at birth and by some miracle of cryogenics still a kitten? We may never know. Also, I post this whenever possible, since it's so incredibly cute:


Emmy's on the left, and Sophie's on the right. This may have been one of the first times they saw snow!

More Apartment Pictures

I spent this afternoon driving around with the windows down and blasting LCD Soundsystem. To motivate myself to clean up a little around here I got some more decorations and rearranged some things. Going with my whole shutterbug motif as of late, here's a bunch.

Some coasters I found. They're made from recycled PCB boards. Just nerdy enough!

TV show DVDs in the endtable

More DVDs, games, Blu Rays; I think the colors look pretty nice

More sleeves for the sleeve wall. Added the three on the right.

Audrey Hepburn <3

Catch Up

So I've been lazy, and have been delaying my posting about my adventure last weekend. Bate your breath no more, dear readers!

Anyway, I made a sojourn down to Andy's newish place down in Lexington Park, MD. Here is roughly the route I took, though it seemed to take a lot less time than Google thinks it would. I left about an hour after I woke up last Saturday, and arrived at about five or so. Just in time to watch some horrid SciFi movies with Andy, it seemed!

The drive was fairly nice, including some bridges and the awesome Baltimore Harbor Tunnel. YOU GO UNDER THE WATER. It's incredible. Andy and I hung out and watched some random things on Saturday night, got some pizza and it was all-around good to catch up. The next day was the main event, though, as we made the quick jaunt into Washington, DC, a place that I've incidentally never been to.

We drove around looking for a space for a bit, and we found one where I wouldn't have to parallel park, or rather I did, but the space was gigantic. No plugging the meter necessary thanks to the virtues of Easter Sunday. I knew that holiday would be good for something.

First we took a spin around the National Mall, checking out the sights a bit and figuring out what is where. Really, I've seen all these monuments on television, but spatially I had no real clue at where they were in relation to one another save for what I've seen in Forest Gump. Anyway:

Me looking like a jerk in front of the United States Capitol building.

More Capitol Building pictures.

The Washington Monument was pretty imposing, mostly because you could see it from everywhere around the Mall and beyond. I ended up taking a lot of pictures of it just because of this.

Some jerk with a soda bottle is in the way.

If you've never seen the Washington Monument in person, it's gigantic.

I felt lazy, so we didn't go all the way down to see old Honest Abe, but we did walk through the FDR and Jefferson monuments. The former was extremely interesting, laid out from his first to third term with iconic imagery in order, though Andy and I walked it backwards.

Jefferson Monument. LOOK OUT FOR THAT SUPER MUTANT!

Big J.

FDR chillaxin' in his wheelchair with his dog, Fala.

Some poor dudes in the Depression. Wah wah, I haven't eaten in eight days.

Awesome monks sitting in front of the waterfall in the FDR memorial. I hope it's not weird that I thought they looked so awesome that I wanted a picture.

And I took some odds and ends pictures just walking around. I don't know what all of them are, but I'll venture a guess at the very least.

Some house that's some color.

Some secret code carved into stone, no doubt.

WATER!

An eagle that just won a boxing match.

RED.

Decoration

It's about time something interesting went in the dining room.



More to come once I clean up around here. More boxes for the box graveyard!

EDIT: Here's some more pictures after cleaning up the living room a little. Still need to vacuum, but it's looking quite spiffy so far.

A special friend on the television. Still kind of cluttered with wires, but looks okay now.

New end table to the left of the couch. The lamp is still naked because I bought the wrong kind of harp for the shade. Oh no!

I bought some 3M sticky hook deals so that I'd have a place to hang my coat. Previously I'd toss it wherever I felt like.

UPDATE: April 7

A little more shopping that I intended to do yielded some more cool stuff. Figured I'd append it to the post rather than keep posting about the same subject.

Lateralus Art Disk

Bowie album I made into a clock. ARTSY.

The wall. I'm not sure if I want to rearrange stuff - would they look better right up next to one another, perhaps?

Long Beach, New Jersey (3/21)

Ah, so today I had nothing to do. I poked around at a couple folks and it seemed they were quite busy as they tend to be, but no matter! I can certainly improvise given the right amount of desperation. And the muse struck; with the addition of the new GPS to my gadget arsenal, I could safely wander and not worry about having a repeat of last weekend. And with that, I was off.

I wandered down Route 73 and to Route 70, heading east toward the coast. I wanted to think, and I supposed that the ocean pummeling the shore was a good soundtrack for that. I was soon barreling through the pine barrens. I stopped to take a few photos, since it was pretty refreshing to see these sites in my new state. It had been awhile since I had escaped the concrete and glass of the cities and suburbs.



Anyway, it was a pretty enjoyable ride. I hadn't traveled on the state routes for very far, so it was good to head to a portion of the state that didn't enjoy an interstate pass-through. After taking two or three photos, I realized that the in-camera memory would only hold a grand total of five; a new memory card was in order. When I was nearly to the Garden State Parkway (which shoots north all the way to the New York City area from South Jersey), I noticed a plaza with a Best Buy and Target, so I pulled in. The shopping center was in a place called Manahawkin, which to me is such a ridiculous name for a city.



As you can note in that last image, those spaces were for fuel efficient or carpool cars only. I should have scolded that lady riding alone in an SUV, but I didn't care enough. I would suppose that my car fits the bill, though.

Regardless of proper parking etiquette, again I was off, heading down Route 72 toward Long Beach, New Jersey. I really didn't know that this was my destination until I got there, honestly; I just wanted to wander somewhere that involved water and sand, and a moderately long drive. The pines gave way to smaller trees, which gave way to land too soft and sandy for anything of height to grow in. A couple of bridges later and the reason for Long Beach's name became pretty evident.




In the map above, obviously, Long Beach is the super long strip of land jutting into the sea. The last photograph was taken facing west, clearly, since the mid afternoon sun was in that direction. I kept driving and eventually I got to land's end, complete with a nice public beach that was desolate thanks to the mid-forties weather.

Just the beach.

I'll keep this in mind if I find any unexploded shells.

Don't get ripped...

My shadow. I know there's a super deep thing that I can say here, but it escapes me.

Footprints and a gull.

I spent a bit of time pacing about on the beach before heading up into the city to look for something to eat. It's strange sometimes to walk around coastal cities, as everything seems to have one or several decks, and the feeling that you get when you glance oceanward and see nothing but sky over the buildings.

Familiar territory.

I'm sure they have a million of them, but this would work well on Planet Money's signs of the economic downturn.

The kind of surf shop my dad would love to see.

I walked around a bit before spotting the Wawa above, and decided that would be a pretty good option for food, since the sunset was approaching pretty quickly and I wanted something quickly. I'm not a big fan of eating in restaurants alone, anyway. So I went in and got dinner.

Yes, welcome. I hope nobody noticed the flash when I took this.

Would have been an okay food option had it not been boarded up. And by boarded I mean cardboarded.

Tasty fish.

Dinner. Only a little bit sandy. And yes, that's a scary claw of some variety!

So I ate up my sandwich while sitting on a nice log bench, waiting for the sun to sink lower and lower in the sky behind me. I watched a few guys in full body wet suits surfing for awhile, and assumed they were ridiculously cold in the ocean water. I snapped a few more shots as the night started to creep in.

A cool looking house/whatever it was.

I took a bit of video, too, though I'm sure the quality isn't that great. The soothing ocean sounds are pretty nice though, I must admit.

After it started to get darker I decided to start heading back, so I walked up to my car and marked the beach with my GPS. To my surprise, it automatically named the spot "beach", though I wanted to be a bit more specific, so I changed it anyway. Pretty impressive, though, that the little thing realized I was at the coast.

Walking back - my car's on the right side.

This was a pretty cool view, I thought.

Made me laugh on the way out, so I snapped a picture on the return trip.

I liked the name of the road.

And I arrived back home at about 8:30. A pretty good day trip, I must admit. The GPS handled everything mightily, with naught a discouraging word as I deviated from its planned trip and it had to compensate. I chatted with Adriana on the way back for a few minutes to discover she was also on the road from Duluth back to Minneapolis.

For those of you interested, the coordinates of my GPS marker are as follows: 39.649839, -74.173553