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Buttons, bridges, etc
Today I got up early. I need to figure out my upcoming trips. I am really bad at doing so. It doesn't make sense to fly back to Pittsburgh from Seattle, so I'd basically fly there first from Philly and then fly to Seattle after. Seems the best idea is to skip the USSM/LL get-together on Jan 10 and go to Pittsburgh that weekend instead. It's kind of a shame, I'd like to see all the baseball blog nerds in Seattle, and at the same time I'm a little worried that since I'm totally not up on the inside jokes and/or the Mariners anymore, it might not be worth me going.
A weekend trip to somewhere in CA once I'm on the west coast would be easy. Seeing everyone I want to see in the area would be hard.
I think I'm gonna do a trip back to Seattle in late February for Puzzle Hunt. It is destined.
I want to write a year-end thing, but is there any reason to?
Man, I just went and found my old planfile collection from CMU. What a smack of "how moody *WAS* I?" combined with "dang, those are some great song lyrics and quotes". I was looking for one particular one and then just got caught up reading 4 years' worth.
Uh, I got sidetracked.
This early afternoon, my dad and I rode the bus about 10 blocks west to where Bundy Typewriters is now, so he could drop off one of his laptops that is having screen issues, and have them look at it and hopefully fix it. Normally I would have totally just walked that distance myself, but well, Dad can't, so I went with him. While he was in the store, I walked to Bruegger's and bought a dozen bagels, so we can use up the gigantic care package full of cream cheese and lox that my aunt sent home with us after the party Sunday. Then we took the bus back here. Exciting!
I almost convinced my dad to buy me an iPod by pointing out that HE doesn't REALLY need any new Apple products. Ahem.
Anyway, in the mid-afternoon I caught a PATCO train out to Haddonfield, and Stewart picked me up at the station and we went to Cherry Hill to see The Curious Case of Benjamin Button at the Megalopaplexasaurus or whatever you call that huge movie theater there.
I'll say, the movie was pretty good. With previews it runs about 3 hours solid, which is a bit long, but you actually don't really notice the time going by, no pun intended. And the movie itself was really well-done -- the special aging effects and so on. The only thing is that they didn't make enough of a big deal about the... er... fate of Benjamin, which was the truly creepy thing about the short story (we read it in HS along with stuff like the Portrait of Dorian Grey, in a series of "fantastical literature", though I only vaguely remembered it). It's like, they kind of rewrote the story in a bunch of ways, but I think what they did is okay (I mean, to some extent they had to, since they moved it ahead to take place as if the female lead was just dying now in 2006). I don't think I'd say that this is like, the Best Movie Ever or anything, but I wanted to see it and it didn't let me down, at least.
After the movie, we went over to the nearby Generic Shopping Center With Big Chain Stores And Restaurants, and ended up at Cheesecake Factory for dinner, and I got a huge salad and a slice of cheesecake and finished them both (mostly because Stewart didn't think I would. Bah). I guess we talked about all kinds of random crap, and showed off to each other our photos of his new nephew and my new niece. It's great how with modern technology, you don't need wallet-size photos, you just whip out your cellphone camera or digital camera and go "Look! There's me, see, and then I took this one while holding her..." Also, we're old.
Between the 3-hour movie, the 30-minute wait wandering around Barnes&Noble waiting for a table, and dinner and dessert, it was 11pm by the time we were done, so he gave me a ride back to the city and guilt-tripped me over the fact that it's now a whopping FOUR DOLLARS to cross the Ben Franklin Bridge.
Bizarrely, I quoted 1922 as the date it opened, and I'm wrong, it was built from 1922 to 1926. Either way, apparently it was 50 cents for a round trip on the bridge in 1926, and that would be the equivalent of about $6 today. Of course, when I think about it, there might be some sort of socioeconomic thing going on there, in that anyone in 1926 who actually had a car and drove across the bridge, would generally have been of a higher economic status and been able to afford the 50 cents as part of the expenses of driving a car, I think, whereas nowadays car ownership and bridge driving is ubiquitous. Or maybe I'm full of it again.
Either way, it's around $4 to take PATCO round-trip to Philly from places in Jersey, so why not just do that instead?
A weekend trip to somewhere in CA once I'm on the west coast would be easy. Seeing everyone I want to see in the area would be hard.
I think I'm gonna do a trip back to Seattle in late February for Puzzle Hunt. It is destined.
I want to write a year-end thing, but is there any reason to?
Man, I just went and found my old planfile collection from CMU. What a smack of "how moody *WAS* I?" combined with "dang, those are some great song lyrics and quotes". I was looking for one particular one and then just got caught up reading 4 years' worth.
Uh, I got sidetracked.
This early afternoon, my dad and I rode the bus about 10 blocks west to where Bundy Typewriters is now, so he could drop off one of his laptops that is having screen issues, and have them look at it and hopefully fix it. Normally I would have totally just walked that distance myself, but well, Dad can't, so I went with him. While he was in the store, I walked to Bruegger's and bought a dozen bagels, so we can use up the gigantic care package full of cream cheese and lox that my aunt sent home with us after the party Sunday. Then we took the bus back here. Exciting!
I almost convinced my dad to buy me an iPod by pointing out that HE doesn't REALLY need any new Apple products. Ahem.
Anyway, in the mid-afternoon I caught a PATCO train out to Haddonfield, and Stewart picked me up at the station and we went to Cherry Hill to see The Curious Case of Benjamin Button at the Megalopaplexasaurus or whatever you call that huge movie theater there.
I'll say, the movie was pretty good. With previews it runs about 3 hours solid, which is a bit long, but you actually don't really notice the time going by, no pun intended. And the movie itself was really well-done -- the special aging effects and so on. The only thing is that they didn't make enough of a big deal about the... er... fate of Benjamin, which was the truly creepy thing about the short story (we read it in HS along with stuff like the Portrait of Dorian Grey, in a series of "fantastical literature", though I only vaguely remembered it). It's like, they kind of rewrote the story in a bunch of ways, but I think what they did is okay (I mean, to some extent they had to, since they moved it ahead to take place as if the female lead was just dying now in 2006). I don't think I'd say that this is like, the Best Movie Ever or anything, but I wanted to see it and it didn't let me down, at least.
After the movie, we went over to the nearby Generic Shopping Center With Big Chain Stores And Restaurants, and ended up at Cheesecake Factory for dinner, and I got a huge salad and a slice of cheesecake and finished them both (mostly because Stewart didn't think I would. Bah). I guess we talked about all kinds of random crap, and showed off to each other our photos of his new nephew and my new niece. It's great how with modern technology, you don't need wallet-size photos, you just whip out your cellphone camera or digital camera and go "Look! There's me, see, and then I took this one while holding her..." Also, we're old.
Between the 3-hour movie, the 30-minute wait wandering around Barnes&Noble waiting for a table, and dinner and dessert, it was 11pm by the time we were done, so he gave me a ride back to the city and guilt-tripped me over the fact that it's now a whopping FOUR DOLLARS to cross the Ben Franklin Bridge.
Bizarrely, I quoted 1922 as the date it opened, and I'm wrong, it was built from 1922 to 1926. Either way, apparently it was 50 cents for a round trip on the bridge in 1926, and that would be the equivalent of about $6 today. Of course, when I think about it, there might be some sort of socioeconomic thing going on there, in that anyone in 1926 who actually had a car and drove across the bridge, would generally have been of a higher economic status and been able to afford the 50 cents as part of the expenses of driving a car, I think, whereas nowadays car ownership and bridge driving is ubiquitous. Or maybe I'm full of it again.
Either way, it's around $4 to take PATCO round-trip to Philly from places in Jersey, so why not just do that instead?