This is the last day in which I might think of 2004 as the current year. It's kind of arbitrary, I know, but so it goes. This has been an eventful week. Nicole and I took an incredibly quick trip to DC, to take care of some passport paperwork and other things. It was fun -- we got a nice hotel for not much money, and ate in a nice Indian restaurant. We also did some fun shopping (I didn't buy much -- scraping as much money together as possible for Europe). Yesterday we went snowboarding, if you can call what I did snowboarding :) Everyone's terrible when they start, and while N says that I learn quickly, I still didn't make it down any hills without falling a few times. Still, it's enjoyable, and I only took a few falls that really hurt. Some of the falls I actually turned into flips, touching the ground minimally or not at all, which is fun but exhausting. Needless to say, I'm sore all over, especially in the lower arms and wrists, but that's not so bad. The primary thing I seem to be doing wrong is having difficulty turning a full-on motion into one of the two guard positions. As a result, I go down the mountain switching from left almost-full-on to right almost-full-on, using a front guard between. I know I'm not using the normal snowboarding terms, but I don't care. Anyhow, that's what I need to work on -- once I have the full-on transitions down, I might be a decent snowboarder. All the falls happened because the guard positions, while great for slowing down, are difficult to keep for any length of time, because once the face wedges under any snow, the board flips. Boarding in Sankt Moritz is going to be fun. I might ski one day while there, just for laughs.
N bought a number of neat sciency books while we were in DC, among them Emotions Revealed, a book by an author who also wrote a number of other books I like.
The end of the year also brought a disaster of enormous scale. Like everyone else liberal in the states, I noticed independently that the damage from this is far greater than September 11th. As of right now, at least 120 thousand people are dead, many more are injured, and huge numbers of homes are gone. I was somewhat happy to see that american media covered the event, given the "rest of the world doesn't exist/matter" mentality I've seen in the past. Still, it's frontpage news in most papers, albeit sometimes with a subtext of how many Americans died. Amazon.com has managed to raise an impressive amount of donations -- a little over 8.4 million dollars from 120 thousand people, roughly the number of people who died. Strange coincidence.. It appears that the British government is taking the lead in providing aid, having put about 100 million in so far (compare to 20 million from the U.S.), something N attributes to their strong historical involvement in the region. It's amazing how many lives have been ended or damaged by this. It's hard for me not to become very depressed by this -- it's overwhelming.
Amazon tells us what their most wished-for things are. Some selected categories:
Electronics
- Apple iPod
- Canon Powershot SD110 3MP digital camera
- Phillips DVP642 DVD player
- Another flavour of iPod
- Yet another flavour of iPod
- iPod dock kit
- iPod earphones
- iPod FM transmitter
- Canon Powershot A95 5MP digital camera
- Altec Lansing Inmotion mobile iPod speaker system
Books
- Jon Stewart Presents America (I almost bought this)
- Chrichton's State of Fear - stupid book
- Mitch Albom's The Five People you meet in Heaven - sounds amusing
- Dan Brown's The DaVinci code - Probably stupid. Some people take it seriously
- Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots, and Leaves - Good book.
