Congratulations, Zack!

I’m a little bit late, but my brother still deserves congratulations on his college graduation, back on December 15. His major was Parks & Recreation Management, so I like to envision him doing things like he is in this picture all the time from now on. He took us on a very awesome hike when [...]

Read Full Post »

Serving Beer for Mongolians

I certainly get to do interesting and unexpected things for my new job. Yesterday, I helped one of my coworkers serve beer to a group of businesspeople from Inner Mongolia. Yes, beer. At 11:00 in the morning.
Before you start to get the wrong impression, allow me to explain. The group was here to participate in [...]

Read Full Post »

Reading List

I decided it would be interesting to try to keep track of what books I’ve been reading, all in one place, so I’ve started the new “Reading” page. It would probably have made more sense to wait until January, so then it would be all new year, new slate, but I’ve been reading some good [...]

Read Full Post »

A Waste of Good Chocolate

Yesterday, Mark and I went to the mall. Our purpose was to allow Mark to torture the clerks at the Williams-Sonoma story by having them open up the fancy knife case and then stand there while he tested the chef’s knife from each of the 8 different good cooking knife sets, overanalyzing each one with [...]

Read Full Post »

Meditative Orange Peeling

It was when I lived in Japan that I began to eat clementine oranges in the winter. Actually, maybe they were a different type of mandarin orange there, but they were about the same size, and never had a label attached to them that I could read, so they are, to me, the same thing. [...]

Read Full Post »

Word Tracker

At some point, while looking at TESOL research on students’ reading habits, and later when looking at website usability information for my last job, I was made aware of a research method that allowed researchers to track readers’ eye movements across an area of text. For TESOL purposes, researchers were looking at speed of reading [...]

Read Full Post »

What I Did With My Monday Night

I have posted my review of Paprika over at Geek Buffet. It is a strange, strange movie. Pretty, though. On the weirder end of semi-comprehensible anime.
One thing that’s nice about my new job is that I informed about all sorts of interesting events happening on campus. Of course, as it stands right now, if I want [...]

Read Full Post »

Reading on the Beach in December

My latest library book apparently traveled to the beach with a prior reader, and now the beach has come to me, in the form of fine sand distributed liberally all over the outside of the book, trapped between the dust jacket and the library’s protective clear plastic. It makes for an interestingly unseasonal juxtaposition in several ways, [...]

Read Full Post »

New site design

As you can see, I changed the site design. New template, new header image. The new image is from my month in China, from the bamboo museum we visited near Hangzhou, I believe. Like it?

Read Full Post »

Tagged

Hilary has tagged me with the “seven facts” meme. The rules are as follows:

Link to the person who tagged you and post the rules on your blog (Yes)
Share 7 facts about yourself (Yes)
Tag 7 people at the end of your post and let them know (No)

So here we go with 7 random but related facts:

Just [...]

Read Full Post »