super fun weekend with having wil come to visit me here in seattle. i haven't seen that boy in maybe two years with him being out in germany, macedonia & iraq lately. our whole weekend was jam packed with activities so that he could see as much of seattle as possible. plus, with the amazingly warm weather (sunny & in the upper 70's!), i wanted to take advantage of being outside as much as possible. upon arriving, i whisked him off for a stroll along golden gardens beach, which was followed by a dinner at ray's boathouse and then meeting up with eugene, lynn & bill to see the brad mehldau trio at jazz alley. on saturday, we walked down from cap hill over to pike place market where we had lunch at delaurenti's, grabbed some gelato at bottega italiana and hung out at the waterfront. we then walked all the way back up to my place, rested for a bit and then headed to alki beach where i rollerbladed and he ran alongside me. we then rushed back, changed, got dinner at tango and then caught the seattle symphony at benaroya hall where we got to hear a great performance of brahm's german requiem. later that night, we met up with the asian posse at bada lounge where wil reunited with an old loveboat friend of his, eray. the two eventually continued to party it up at down under---i went home. easter sunday, we met up with fred & eray for a lovely brunch at bluwater greenlake, followed by a leisurely stroll along greenlake where everyone and their mother was soaking in the sun. yay. wil's going to be with the army until at least 2007, heading to afghanistan later this year :-( it was really interesting over brunch hearing his perspective on the war and his thoughts on our progression. with all the negative messaging the media has been sending (soldiers dying left and right), it was nice to hear a somewhat positive take on how much we have done so far. hmm.



finally got my wireless router today. wahoo! took me awhile to set up. i did something incredibly stupid. i won't even say. but it was stupid. anyhow, realized what it was and got it working. but now i'm stuck---i'm trying to get some decent security on this thing...but anytime i try to set up WEP or WPA or whatever, i totally lose the connection. help? it's getting too late for me to really care right now...but i'd like to get that working soon. anyhow, one cool thing is that i happened to also get a USB adapter for my tivo and finally got my tivo all hooked up on the network. i tested out the tivo software that i got, threw some pictures and music into the tivo folder...next thing i know, i've got a gorgeous image of blackcomb glacier on my tv downstairs. suh-weet.



pi finally gets off the boat. yes, i finally finished reading life of pi. curious what y'all think. i thought it was cute...but that it was trying too hard to send the reader some sort of message about god, religion, being agnostic or whatever. it just didn't really get to me that way. frankly, i was getting tired of hearing this boy's daily battles with catching dorados or glaring into richard parker's eyes. thank god he finally got off the boat. was he really on a boat with a tiger? who cares--sure, it was probably the cuter, light-hearted story. either way, i don't know how it really changed my view on religion and its role in our lives, which is what this novel attempted to do, based on the "suggested questions to ponder" in the appendix. i'm not one that really gives religion much thought...but geesh, the da vinci code got me thinking more about religion than this book did. don't get me wrong--i didn't absolutely hate this book at all. it's a really imaginative, charming story about one boy's will to survive. sure, you can even go as far as deconstructing it such that it tells two tales, one that seems more full of fantasy but enjoyable, the other realistic, but more gruesome....and the parallels of those concepts with how we choose religion to justify the terrible destructiveness of nature. i think i just got thrown off by the author's statement in the beginning of the novel, where one of the characters tells us that the story that follows "will make you believe in God" (p. viii). The narrator replies, "that's a tall order," and he's right. it didn't come close. sorry. and what was with those two japanese characters at the end? it was like the author's attempt at humor...and it really wasn't that funny.



bellydancing is fun.