Dmitri's Bucket of Projects

An awesome trip to the Adirondacks this year. Two solid hikes, the blue ledges a simple hike to a little tributary to the Hudson. one side of the creek, shore where the hike ends. The other side, a 200 foot rock face. It was pretty cool. The next day, we hiked to the top of Owls Head Mountain. The view was amazing. Just amazing. Pictures don't do it justice. I picked up an electric griddle which made some awesome breakfast sandwichs and then some of the tasiest grill cheese sandwiches I've ever had. Bacon + Tomato + turkey slices + cheese = friggin' awesome! :-)

Daks 2008

It's 5 months to the day that my Mother passed. Afterwards there was a rush to clean out the apartment, sort out who is taking what, and what's being donated. My sister and I had a healthy attitude about it and a good deal of it went to friends or friends of friends who could really use it. It's astounding when you're confronted with the problem. What do I do with a ton of plates and an eclectic collection of silverware? One of Nicole friends or a friend of a friend was moving into their first place and was broke. She was happy to take it. I didn't even know this person but it made me so happy to think this stuff was going to find a home. We ended up throwing out alot but not nearly as much as I thought we would have to. All the major pieces of furniture found a home, even the cursed coffee table. Cursed because Nicole and I hated the thing. It was older than we were, made of oak or some such heavy wood with a large glass top. The height was not like any other coffee table which may explain why Nicole and I bruised our knees on the stupid thing more times than we could count. We joked about hucking the glass and taking a saw to the wood which we'd then burn in my fireplace at Thanksgiving. :-) I was almost disappointed we didn't get to follow through on that one.

Sirpa Lenna, my mother, passed away, late Saturday night, March 29th. Services were held Saturday April 5th. Her memory will live on in the hearts of so many people. Good friends of hers came from all over. People she's known for decades. Dear friends, former neighbors and co-workers new and old. My sister's good friends all came to lend their support. A special thanks to the Butler's who came at the start and stayed the whole time, which was incredibly kind. My own friends, Pat, Tom, Mark, Doug, Eric, Aggie, Aric, Sara and Christine all came to pay their respects and lend their support. And my deepest gratitude to Damien, Frank, Mike, Ryan, Vic and Courtney who drove all the way down from Boston to express their support. Words can't express how good it felt to see so many people. Thank you all, and thank you, Mom, for being so wonderful as to inspire such a gathering.

Sometimes I wish I could put life on pause. So I could catch me breath. My mother's been fighing a good fight. A very long fight. Now, the end nears, and everything else falls by the way-side.

Christmas 2007

2007 Christmas

Pictures from Crete

Crete

I got home a few hours ago, spent that time catching up on mail, paying bills and repacking. Off to Dublin tomorrow, continuing on to Crete on Sunday. Yeah, nuts. Tokyo was good. The roll out was successful, and seeing my friend Al was really good. We putzed around Akihabara for half a day, checking out weird anime/techie stores and arcades. I dropped some money into a pachinko machine. Later we visited the Sensoji Temple (also known as Asakusa Kannon Temple), a Buddhist temple in Tokyo. Sunday I went out to meet him , his wife and their one year old son, in Yokohama. It was a nice area. We did a little boat tour, which was more about just having a nice rest in the A/C while still seeing stuff. the rest of the week I was just anxious to return to NY and start my little va-cay. The last night there I met Al at the Hachiko statue in at Shibuya, we grabbed dinner and hung out at a few arcade waiting for a down pour to end. I picked up my one gift for myself, an Xbox360 Wireless LAN adapter. Why? Because it was way cheaper there. IN the states it costs around $100. There it was 8,290 Yen, which is about $73. I needed one since the move, and opportunity came a knocking. :-) I'll upload pictures in a couple of weeks, when I get back from Crete. Or after the Adirondacks trip.

Landed in Tokyo Monday, and have been doing little else but sleeping and working. I'm staying in the Roppongi Hill area which apparently is quite the place to be. Having never been to East Asia, this is kind weird. It does make me want to take up a foriegn language. The whole place reminds me of an old friend. Fortunately or unfortunately, my dinners have predominantly been room service. Unfortunate in that it'd be nice to have time go out to restaurants properly, but fortunate in that room service is really just delivery from the rather nice restaurants in the area. I had a truly yummy katsu don my first night, and a yakisoba last night. I'm looking forward to the weekend as I'll get to hang out with my friend Alain. We were good friends in college but I haven't seen him in the years since he moved, with his wife, to Japan.

Japan Trip

KK's visit has come and gone. She's been gone roughly 24 hours and my place seems emptier without her. Between all the running around we had precious little time. Thankfully the Crete trip is only 5 weeks away. We caught the latest Harry Potter movie which I enjoyed so much I began to consider reading them. I polished off World War Z and then picked up the 1st Harry book on a whim. I devoured it in a few days. Kind of quick for me since I'm a slow reader. I picked up year 2 and 3 today, and am looking forward to them. I didn't care for the Chamber of Secret movie very much. It's my least favorite of the 5. I'm hoping the book is better.

It is addictive :-)

Habitat was great. I spent most of the day installing base board. The rest of it banging on a rock. Seriously. We were repairing several homes that had been damaged in the big storms we had a few weeks back. In the basement a rock was protruding up from the floor. Supposedly it's the top of a huge rock that was too big too move when the place was constructed. Anyway, I hated it how it was sticking out of the way so I found a mason's chisel and with a hammer banged on it. It turns out rather than being a hard piece of granite it was just some mass of sediment. It wasn't too big, the original builders were just too lazy. I broke it up enough to conceal it completely. The owner was pretty happy about that, which made me feel good. I got to meet a bunch of nice people from where I worked including a few that higher ups on another team that I have worked with before, and made a good impression. A nice bonus. My legs are still hurting from all the squatting though. It's a good pain though :-)

I still can't put down World War Z. I'm maybe 50 pages from finishing and am forcing myself to put it down today so I can work on my own place. I've still more unpacking to to, and I need to get a stud finder so I can hang some things. KK in T-4 days.

Update: busy day running errands at the usual suspects (Depot, Target, etc.) I picked up the new Linkin Park CD "Minutes to Midnight" (9.99 at Circuit City this week), and I have to pass it along as a solid purchase. I mainly picked it up for "What I've done" from the Transformers trailer and movie. and was pleasantly surprised. They apparently spent a lot more time on this album and it shows. The lyrics are actually quite good, especially "Hand Held High", a fitting song given the events of the weekend. 250 dead in Iraq and the New York Times calling Bush's plan to stabilize Iraq, through military means, a lost cause.

.. spend $10 and buy 2 hours and 23 minutes of childhood joy. Wouldn't you do it? I did that today. And I loved every minute of it. I never thought I'd say this, but thanks Michael Bay.

On another note, I can't put down a book I am borrowing from a friend: World War Z. It's the story of the zombie apocalypse written by a reporter interviewing survivors. A Chinese doctor, a opportunistic drug company mogul, a human smuggler, an illegal surgeon, a former head of state, a muslim fundamentalist, and many many more from all across the globe. It's an incredibly imaginative work. I just hope I can put it down tonight becaue I'm leading a team at Habitat for Humanity tomorrow.

My first night in the new place. It's too quiet and doesn't quite feel real. I'm honestly still waiting for something major to go wrong. The new noises are a bit more unsettling than they should be. I wish K was here to share in what should have been a celebratory night. Instead I'm reclining on my love seat, borrowing someone else's wireless connection, blogging. I also wish I had a cat so I could blame it for the strange noises.

A week a few days from now I'll be in my new home. Closing was shortly after I got back from Ireland, and since then it's been about packing, and making the place my own. fresh paint in the living room (a warm reddish brown.. it reminds me of chocolate) dining section (part of the living room went with a grayish brown that ended up being much more gray than brown, not sure I'll keep it but looks nice with the brown living room) and main bedroom (planned on nice warm color , but ended up going with "Seven Seas" by Behr a dark blue but not navy). The bedroom blue I wasn't sure about. A few different paint pamphlets had a strong blue with white accents (like this) and some other colors. After it went on the wall I knew I made the right decision. It goes with the wood furniture I have and I'll leave the ceiling white and get white wood blinds. I'm really psyched about it :-). Now what to do with the guest room?

It's been ages, and so much has happened. My time in Ireland was better than I could have imagined. The photos just don't do it justice. I can't remember the last time I took two weeks off for a vacation. I always thought "2 weeks? that's almost too much". Never again. Why? When you land on a Saturday having taken a red eye, with a crying baby a few aisles back, enjoy a nice Irish fry-up, sleep for a few hours and then go out until 4am,.. well you need a couple days to recover. Sleep in for the next couple of days and you know what you do? You laugh outloud because you still have over a week and a half left!

The country was beautiful, but definitely my favorite thing was the people I was with. Kathryn's family and their assorted friends and significant others were warm, welcoming people that always made me smile. Even if I had never met Kathryn, I would love to call these people friends.

Then a few days after I got back, I closed on my place. Since then Life mainly been about work, missing KK, packing boxes, prepping the new place, and sleep. Oh and some WoW when I get a chance.

On her way down to the city to pick me up, so that I could drop her off at JFK, my girlfriend was in an accident. Just a few minutes into the trip, some moron decided that the solution to sun-glare was to speed up and change lanes. She's OK with just a concussion. She was kept over night at the hospital for observation and was released the following day with a neck brace. She was driving my car. I thankfully saw her before I saw it. I'm still in shock when I look at these. And deeply grateful that she is safe.











You'd think that the other driver would be a shoe-in for jackass of the day. Yeah, you'd think that. But, no, humanity is nothing if not amazingly determined to sink to new depths. While my girlfriend lay unconscious and the emergency personnel used the jaws of life to rip off the passenger door to get to her, there was someone else on the scene. Someone who looked at the two bags that had been on the passenger seat but were removed to get to the unconscious beauty. Someone who thought: "hey,.. that's some laptop bag" and "oh, look, a hand bag" then went and took them. The offending driver had poor judgement. But this thief is human garbage.

The contract is signed. They say it almost feels surreal , writing that deposit. Not to me. It felt quite real. I am excited!!!

I saw two places tonight. They were in the same complex and had the same overall floor plan. One was empty the other still had people in it. The later was much nicer, and was significantly better taken care of. The price diff is about 15k, though I imagine the place that isn't as nice, which as I said was empty, is more willing to negociate.

Looked at my first place today. It was rather disappointing. I had really high hopes for it. It was two bed room, really close to the train station , it even had a little bit of a enclosed grass/garden. The lay out was odd, the price & common charges were too high, but the clincher what the bars on the window (it's ground floor). Since they probably weren't allowed to put them on the outside of the build, they put them inside. It looked like a prison. Special thanks to my agent who came out on Superbowl Sunday to show it.

A couple of quick things of note: I saw this cool article on yahoo this morning which inspired today's post. I also just finished a great book called Stiff by Mary Roach. I'd heard about the book a long time ago and had pretty much forgotten about it until I saw it in the store before Christmas. I figured I'd wait until after Christmas as my mother and sister always get me good books for the holiday. Good as in critically well recieved, not always good as I enjoy them. The only thing I've asked from their books is they can't be Oprah books, and they can't have every male character being a contemptable twirp. So this year my mother got me Stiff and The Plague by Albert Camus. When I opened Stiff , she said that she'd heard it was really fascinating. I chuckled and, knowingly, asked "From who?" She couldn't remember. I decided not to remind her. I enjoyed the book quite a bit though it doesn't have a very steady pace. I found the first half of the book much more interesting than the later. Lastly: Burning Crusade is finally out. I pray I can get some more of my friends back into it. I miss playing and talking to them.