Visited States Part II



create your own visited states map
or check out these Google Hacks.

It's a bit more respectable than last year's. Hopefully, this year I'll add California and some other West Coast states to the list.

On a Closing Note before the weekend before Christmas:

I think I am finally settling into adulthood. It feels great to be able to say that. daN and I have decided we’re going to move south of the river to Jamaica Plain sometime soon after the new year, but we’re going to rent. His commute from Somerville to Foxboro is too long to put it off any further, and we realized that we won’t be able to afford house payments AND graduate loans. Since daN plans on going back to school soon, and then myself after that, it didn’t seem like a good idea to put ourselves in the position where we wouldn’t have ANY money to spare each month, knowing how much grad school costs.

At any rate, the point is, we’re settling nicely into adulthood and making good decisions and are more comfortable with ourselves, our pasts, our interests, and where we are in our lives now. It feels good.

Flying Humans

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/10/sports/othersports/10flying.html?ex=1213592400&en=bde797c2d885f22b&ei=5087&excamp=NYT-E-I-NYT-E-AT-1219-L2&WT.mc_ev=click&WT.mc_id=%20NYT-E-I-NYT-E-AT-1219-L2

I promise to do a real update soon. In the meantime, check out this crazy article about flying humans!

Photos!

Long awaited, I finally posted photos of Mum's wedding, our Christmas tree, hanging out at Dad's this summer _ with many artistic views by daN of Dad's cat Toonces _ and, also, on my new Facebook profile, some of Friendsgiving. Sorry, but I don't know the link for that one yet. However, you can see the others at picasaweb.google.com/lindsay.leclair

Enjoy!

1. "Don't Catch Colds" Pass
2. YAY CHRISTMAS!

We are putting up our tree today, so not a long post, because we need to go GET the tree.

Anecdotally, I think that my "Don't Catch Colds" pass has expired. For several years, I managed to not catch whatever was going around. This year, I've been catching nearly everything that's been going around. I guess my immunity was good for a certain set of microbes, and now the microbes have outgrown my immunity, so now I have to catch new microbes and strengthen my immunity.

That's all well and good, but the upshot is that I've been unusually under the weather this season. It's a good thing I decided against being in the company holiday play.

Also, I'll be 28 this Thursday! If you're in the Boston area or have the evening of Saturday the 15th free, we'll be celebrating at Do Re Mi Karaoke at 442 Cambrigde Street in Allston. Please come! But let me know so I can reserve the properly sized room.

YAY TREE!

Catalogue Choice: Ever feeling like you're getting an inappropriately large number of catalogues?

Paper use has a huge impact on the environment, and each year catalogs use 53 million trees and billions of pounds of paper. Processing and transporting this paper results in billions of pounds of
carbon dioxide emissions, and requires 53 billion gallons of fresh water. This website gives people who shop via catalogs the choice of which catalogs they will receive and those they wish to stop.

www.catalogchoice.org

Kudos for the Week

1. The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold -- a book
Read it. It's a wonderful narrative whose structure supports the theme without making it difficult to read, which is more than I can say for many other books that I've read recently. While it deals with heavy hitting subjects and afterlife, it still manages to reinforce the idea that human experience matters. It might be my favorite book that I've read this year -- I don't know, though, it's a tough call between The Lovely Bones and John Irving's recent opus Until I Find You.

2. Little Miss Sunshine -- a movie
Last night we finally watched this movie, and it's a hillarious and yet life-affirming black comedy. It managed to expose the trials of human awkwardness in a funny way without being overly pejorative or critical. To me, it seemed to celebrate the varieties of human experience while being sympathetic to its many horrors. Little Miss Sunshine was just the right combination of "these poor people" + "holy shit, that's really funny!" + "oh, no, what next?" to retain its poignancy and avoid being too painful a la typical Ben Stiller movies.