i know i haven’t updated in a million years, but i have news today so i figured i could take a few minutes at lunch to let you all know that i’m still alive and kicking.

So Enrique just called me to tell me that he had an interview with some people who told him they could pretty much guarantee him the position for which he’d applied. That is not the same as actually being guaranteed the position, I realize, but I’m writing about it because more than being happy about the particular job, I’m excited that they were so excited about him. I mean, I obviously think he’s great, but with the state of the economy, I didn’t expect his first interview to result in a job offer. These guys actually told Enrique that he would probably lose interest in the work quickly, but they hoped they could promote a guy like him before that happened, since he was really “a cut above” the applicants they usually get. Their company only hires people who are bilingual, so it meets both Enrique’s main criterion (that they will give him money), as well as mine (that he can work on his English while there). And even if he does tire of it quickly, it’s still good for the momentum of everything to put that work authorization to use and get yourself out there.

Anyway. That’s good news whether it comes through as promised or not, because every positive interview experience makes you more confident about the whole process. I haven’t seen anything scientific published on the subject, but I read somewhere that a young man with no family of his own in Honduras is estimated to have about a 5% chance of being granted a visa—the US isn’t letting you in on their watch unless they expect to make money on the deal. So although one in seven (ONE IN SEVEN!!!) Honduran people lives in the United States, they are almost all illegal, and not likely to be hiring for legitimate jobs as I had hoped they might be. I’m glad that there are other spanish-speakers, though, who are.

It would also be nice because it’s here in Durham and the hours are such that we could easily continue to share a car, which would really encourage me to get to work earlier and go to the gym more reliably. Since Enrique does not find it a daily struggle to show up to work on time, I’m hoping I can ride on the coattails of his get-up-and-go-itiveness to personal career success, fame, and glory. Or at least, you know, feeling like I’m doing the best job i can. I could definitely stand to get into work earlier.

Speaking of work, I’ve finished my food and should get back to mine. If you’d like, check out pictures on flickr of Michigan and my new baby cousin!

too much is going on. a quick summary:

my dad’s friend Moe passed away. I’m really sad about this because I think he really changed my life a lot, and it’s really not fair that someone who played such a major role in resolving conflict between my dad and me in some critical years could be taken from his own family so quickly. this family has just been through so much already, and it’s really heartbreaking.

in happier news, Enrique’s work permission arrived, we applied for his SSN, and today he’s going to see about a job. wish him luck!

we had a really nice weekend before the news broke about Moe. pictures and more about all of that later.

Enrique’s work permission just got approved! he still has to wait for the physical card to arrive, but this is the best news ever.

Also, we’ll be in Michigan from June 12-20…so get in touch if you want to meet up :)

And now, for your consideration, a skit (true story):

mary: wow, I really like your sunglasses!
college friend: oh thanks!
m: really, I’m jealous. I look horrible in glasses.
cf: i’m sure that’s not true. you just need to find the right pair. here—try these on
m: (tries on glasses)
cf: oh. yeah. i see what you mean.

Sigh, just one of many accounts leading to my decision that I’m a contacts kind of girl for life. The problem with this is that contacts are expensive, and so are optometrist’s appointments.

I’ve been known on occasion to buy contacts online, but I hate to do it because I think it’s tacky as hell for your optometrist to get a call announcing that not only are you are too cheap to pay him or her the extra few extra bucks they charge for the convenience, but you’re also not even a little ashamed of that. I go out of my way not to be cheap with people, and while I’m not passionate enough about patient etiquette to go once a year like clockwork and pay for all my contacts at a significant markup, I also feel a little dirty shuffling in and out of my local optometrist’s office, acting like I’ll come back later to spend real money, only for them to get a call from 1800contacts.com to verify my prescription and let them know that their services just aren’t worth the repeat business to me. I mean, I don’t have issues with not spending money I can’t afford to spend, but I do have a pretty serious issue with being so blatant and rude about that decision. If I were an optometrist, that shit would piss me off.

So, since my prescription virtually never changes, I’ve gotten into the habit of going to the optometrist every 2 years, instead of every year, and buying 6 months’ worth of contracts from him, and then 18 months’ worth of contracts online when those run out. That way, it’s only one obnoxious call every 2 years, and I’m keeping the tackiness to a minimum.

These days, I have the fantastic benefit of Enrique’s family, who can bring me contacts from Honduras, where they are cheaper and (like everything else, and i mean everything) available without prescription. But ‘cheaper’ is still not cheap, and getting other people to buy you presents is not really the same thing as saving money. And that’s where glasses come back into the conversation—you can get a lot more wear out of contacts if you’re willing to give your eyes a break from them every once in a while.

Unfortunately, my glasses are rather infamous at this point. They were ugly to begin with, but ten years later they’re out a nose pad, and the over-the-ear parts of the frames are embarrassingly deformed from pensive nibbling during my college years of problem sets. And although my prescription virtually never changes, it has changed enough in a decade to make them not perfectly functional even if you can put vanity aside and accept them as they are. It’s hard to make use of my glasses when I look so bad in them, and it’s hard to pony up the cash for new ones when I so seldom wear them. Yet, as a person who frequently stays up late staring at a computer monitor, I know that glasses I’m willing to put on my face will save my eyes and wallet a lot of wear over the years. And so, I turned to 39dollarglasses.com.

39dollarglasses.com is fantastic because I actually did select a pair of glasses for $39.00. I found a coupon code online for free shipping, so we’re talking really, really 39 dollars. The site offers pictures of each model on a variety of face shapes, which I found much more enjoyable to consider than squinting through trial pairs under the supervision of a salesperson. And best of all, since you can order glasses without a prescription verification (provided you know it), no tacky phone calls to your optometrist.

The glasses arrived promptly, are cute as hell (if i do say so myself), and came with their own complimentary cloth bag and hard case. This Sunday I didn’t even miss my contacts. Best idea ever, I’m telling you. I’m obviously not trying to say that all people should eschew professional care on a medical condition to save a few bucks, but I do think that in my case (where every checkup is mundane and results in the same prescription), this is definitely a great service. Recommended!

The bread is delicious.

I’ve introduced a new category to my blog (categories are not currently public but probably will be in the future) to sort posts where I talk about things I’m doing to not spend money. There are a million things in the pipeline on that front, so stay tuned!

My mom says it’s fun to watch me get all domestic, and it’s true that I’m pretty much in nesting mode, pretty much all of the time lately. Like I recently joked to my cousin, I sometimes feel like I have a representation of the 21 year old me on one shoulder screaming, “LAME!” whenever I decide not to go out so I can paint a cabinet in my kitchen, but I’m learning to embrace this increasingly strong desire to be lame on the grounds that I have many future goals that require money, and being domestic is significantly more conducive to saving than other interests of mine, such as acquiring shoes, finding good sushi, and knowing what Kenneth Cole is working on at any given time. Since Enrique and I are pretty much living on one income (mine), these last couple months before he gets his work permit seem like a great time to perfect our spending habits. It’ll be huge for us if we can apply all of his income toward our longer-range plans, so that’s the goal: to learn to get ahead on one income so we never depend on two.

My interest in cooking at home comes mostly from the experience of living with Enrique—cooking for one is not much fun, but cooking is kind of a necessity when you don’t want to reveal that your natural diet is eating peanut butter off a spoon before running off to do something else. Truth be told, I don’t have that much experience cooking outside of the occasional dinner gathering, and zero experience trying to cook with a budget in mind. She’s too polite to say so, but I suspect that I’m an embarrassment to my mother who gets invited to talk on the evening news about effective grocery shopping on a budget, when I’m classically more of the “this avocado is five bucks but—nom nom nom” camp. Anyone can eat healthy and delicious food, but I think it takes real talent to eat healthy and delicious food on a budget. I mean, salmon is delicious and healthy, and so is asparagus, but neither are particularly cheap. When you’re a noob chef and trying to be nice to your checking account, the dollar menu at Wendy’s starts to look pretty good.

A local woman here runs a website dedicated to providing nutritious meals for a little over a buck per person per meal, and it’s pretty inspiring. I have to admit that she’s turned me into somewhat of a fanatic.

The extra time investment of making her food (and similar recipes) from scratch hasn’t bothered me at all, since I love spending time in the kitchen—it gives me something earthy and tactile to do after a day of looking at code, and Enrique and I have some of our best conversations while cleaning and chopping and sauteing. But actually, it hasn’t felt like extra effort at all. Since everything is from scratch, a basically stocked kitchen already has everything you need to make pretty much everything on that site. I’d bought strawberries because they were on sale and looked delicious, but let me tell you, they were way more delicious as part of the shortcake recipe. It took virtually no more time to make with flour and sugar and eggs than it would have taken me with the shortcuts I usually take, and extra tasty.

Cooking/baking like this is also especially nice in my case since the kitchen is the one place where the language disconnect still exists between Enrique and myself. We get by just fine in either Spanish or English until something is burning and we need the other to get a special cooking tool with a crazy name out of a drawer of eight billion things. Flour, sugar, eggs, broccoli, cabbage—these are easy words. High-fructose corn syrup? not so much. In the words of Enrique, “Hi Frog Toast Corn Situp? Are you f—-ing with me, or is that really something you eat?”

I think it might actually be easier to make pretty much everything from scratch. Considering that it’s definitely cheaper and healthier, I’m more than willing to stress-test this theory.

And let me tell you something else, Internet—I was worried that maybe this diet (which, strictly interpreted, does not include meat) didn’t have enough protein, and then someone set my ass straight. Bucky (who just scored in the 99th percentile of medical students on his boards, can we get a heeyyyyyoooooo) told me last night that the average american eats way too much protein anyway. I always thought that the major harm in the Atkins/South Beach era was the whole your-brain-needs-carbs-to-function part, but it turns out that eating too much protein is pretty harmful on its own. It hurts your kidneys and leeches calcium from your bones. I eat more than enough protein without trying, so I’m definitely not going to stress about adding beans or meat to meals where they seem superfluous.

I am also newly committed to making my own bread, but since I haven’t actually baked the dough yet, I’ll have to write a follow-up post on how that went. The Cooking for Good lady sure makes a strong case for it, though. And I do love bread—I rarely eat it because it seems like calories and preservatives without much nutritional value, but I think I’d really enjoy eating more bread if I knew exactly what was in it.

Suffice it to say that I’m very excited about cooking from more raw ingredients, and I’d definitely recommend checking out the website. I’m not going to take this to an extreme—I like steak and ice cream, and now that I’ve finally met a man who also loves tapioca pudding, I’m definitely not going to stop buying any of these things. But I think a diet based on homemade breads, fresh veggies, and exceptional meat (in moderation) would be a lot more rewarding than what we’ve been doing.

Also, in our printing-recipes-off-the-internet age, this has become the most useful thing in my kitchen.

I think that’s everything I wanted to say about everything. Now off to work!

David just pointed out to me that Design Sponge just posted a guide to Durham, which may interest people who follow this blog either because they live in the Triangle or because the top picture in that link features my office, whence this very post comes. awesome!

Also, thank you for your ideas about hosting—I’ll research those some more tonight. In other important notes, the iPod touch might be the best and worst thing that ever happened to me, and the Red Wings are absolutely better than the Blackhawks. Check back soon for more important facts!

and i’m thinking about switching. anyone have any recommendations? i don’t really need customer service, just reliability and shell access. I don’t really plan on hosting anything dynamic so price outweighs flexibility.

I’m with site5 right now and they’ve been pretty good, but it seems stupid to renew blindly when they haven’t made any serious impression on me. Enrique tells me my iPod touch arrived today—my latest attempt to quell my iPhone lust without breaking my Sprint contract or going bankrupt. At least this way I can play with iPhone apps and come up with some genius idea that makes me rich so I can retire at 30. I think as a rule, programmers are very unhappy with their lives if they don’t have some sort of pipe dream about the awesome personal project with which they’ll change the world/get rich someday. So we’ll see. If anybody has ideas for an iPhone app they’d like to see, you should let me know because I’m dying to start playing with it.

Life is strange. I’m posting this under grief because I’ve been feeling it lately. It’s strange to me that two nights ago I could just spontaneously lose it without any obvious trigger whatsoever, and the next night everything is fine and it’s hard for me to put myself in that place where everything is hopeless. Everything is not hopeless, but after a year and a half it feels that way when you can start sobbing for no reason.

I think it’s really easy when you’re carrying a deep pain about something to get really frustrated when stupid things go wrong on top of it. Like the umbrella should fucking know better than to break on your way to the funeral. When nothing is the way you want it to be, it seems like the least the objects and characters in your life could do is be normal, but life can’t be like that. For me, the best way to keep moving is to remember that the team that wins is always the team that spends the most time on offense, so your options in hard times are to curl up in your net and let life keep taking shots at you, or get up and start taking shots at it. If life has to be nuts, it can at least be nuts on your terms, I think. So if I tattoo the periodic table on my back or adopt a Ugandan baby this week, that’s probably what it’s about.

In even more craziness, here’s an amazing video of an elephant painting a picture of an elephant, courtesy of Tim. Wonders never cease.