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Kim, Gabe and I just went to see the new Batman movie, and I’m more than pleasantly surprised. It’s directed by Christopher Nolan, the same guy who directed Memento, which is probably my favorite movie of all time, and his directing skill shows in Batman Begins. Plus he helped write the screenplay. Chrisian Bale makes a pretty good Batman too, and this time, Batman steals the show, not the bad guys. I was surprised to see Batman on the IMDB top 250, but after seeing it, I’m not.

Gabe has a computer that we’ve designated as the media server at our house to hold music, movies and other media files. I’ve always wanted to try to setup a PVR (Personal Video Recorder) to record TV, basically like a Tivo. I got a good deal on a Hauppauge Win-TV-250 TV tuner card and went about setting up the software. This proved more difficult than I thought. I always heard MythTV was cool so I downloaded Knoppmyth to try to get it running but didn’t have much luck. The TV signal didn’t come in and I don’t think there’s any way that it was gonna easily support the wireless internet card.

The server already had Windows XP on it, so I figured rather than trying to download a linux distro with good wireless support and then configuring MythTV I’d try finding some windows PVR software.

The first thing I tried was BeyondTV, which isn’t free but had a trial period. It worked great right out of the install, but it didn’t have a way to play music or other movies off the hard drive. You could configure the remote to control other programs like Winamp or Windows Media Player, but it wasn’t very slick.

So far I’ve settled on an open source piece of software for windows called Media Portal. So far it looks like it does almost everything I want well. It took a little while to get setup, but it looks like it’s under pretty heavy devolopment so I imagine it’s going to improve quickly. I think the hardest thing was getting the tv schedule using XMLTV, which you have to download and configure to use a Zap2it account. It seems a little buggy watching TV sometimes, but the music and movies interfaces are awesome.

I may still try to configure MythTV sometime on Fedora Core 4, but only if I find the time.

Jake invited us down to Golden Gardens last night to hang out with him and his navy buddies. Brian came with. The weather has been beautiful and the beach was packed. We never jumped in the water as Jake planned, but we had a good time barBQing and talking. They made us put the fires out around 10:30. Seems kinda lame to me. Jacob and Waleska showed up later in the evening. Jacob’s been getting to fly in the Boeing 777 for testing which sounds cool. He also just bought a boat. I can’t wait to see this.

Kim’s new desk

A bunch of people helped Eco Encore move from their Ballard location to South Seattle. Brian came to help and we got it done just after noon. The new office is bigger and kinda weird. It’s divided up into cubicles and next the the Asian empowerment offices.

I dropped Brian and Kim off at the Freemont Fair, but didn’t feel like going myself since I felt really tired and a bit sick.

After leaving Kripalu, Roslyn was nice enough to drive us around and look at wedding locations. We had looked at one site on the way to Kripalu with Abbey and Marc, but it wasn’t very promising. This day though, each site just seemed to get better and better. We’re looking into renting a big house for a week and having the wedding and reception there. Wedding sites are a rip off in my opinion since you can pay a $2500 site fee and get the place for only a few hours. We can rent a house for that price and have it for a week. We saw some houses, and also a few nice inns and bed and breakfasts that could work too. It was fun, but a little overwhelming.

My favorite site was a big house overlooking two ponds. The house was in good shape and the property was awesome. The guy who owns it has a cool little cabin up the hill from the house with an even better view and another pond with fish. There will be hay bales in the fall when we plan to have it and the trees will all be changing. There’s just so many damned details to plan though. Good thing we’re taking out time or else I think it would drive me crazy. Roslyn seems to be excited to help though and has a lot of good ideas, so it’s nice to be reminded that Kim and I won’t be doing this whole wedding thing by ourselves.

Roslyn dropped us off late at Kim’s Grandma’s house. We tried sleeping upstairs but it was way too hot and muggy so we slept on the floor downstairs. The next day we chatted with Marc and his parents for a while, spent some time talking to Aunt Mary Anne and Grandma Josephine, and then it was off to the airport for another long night of traveling to get home.

This part of our vacation was the longest in duration since it lasted a week, but time at Kripalu is weird and I’m not sure how long it felt like it lasted, a few days or a month. Kripalu is a yoga retreat center where you can go to relax, get in touch with yourself, or whatever it is you want to do. Kim and I signed up for the seva volunteer program, because otherwise it’s expensive. The deal is that we work 35 hours during the week and in exchange get room and board and access to whatever programs are going on during our off hours.

I know as a generalization most guys probably don’t have any desire to go to a yoga retreat center, but they also probably don’t know that the ratio of girls to guys is probably close to 6:1. It’s just that most of the women are middle aged and as a few women there described themselves to me “crazy”. Seriously though, everyone I met there was incredibly nice and supportive. It’s an amazing atmosphere that makes you feel like you’re removed from the ‘real world’. You come out wondering why people in the outside world can’t be as accepting and peaceful. Perhaps one day the rest of the world can, but that’s a whole different topic.

Sunday evening when we arrived we found our rooms and attended a seva orientation. I got a top bunk in a room with two other guys named Noah and Jim. Kim was in a sleeping porch style bunk area with about 30 other women. At the orientation we met the other sevas and got our work assignments. I got maintenance crew and Kim got kitchen. Both my room mates were on maintenance so we got to spend a lot of time together and I liked them both a lot. Noah and I got along really well and hung out outside of work and seva stuff. Jim was a bit older than us and did his own thing on his off hours, but was a great guy to work with.

The days at Kripalu can be as full as you want them to be, and usually a little fuller. The first yoga session was at 5:45 AM and I’m proud to say that I went more than a couple times. After yoga came breakfast, which was eaten in complete silence. It’s a surreal experience, but I highly recommend it after a week of doing so. Kim says she likes it because nobody talks to her in the morning so she doesn’t have to pretend that she’s not grumpy and tired. After breakfast is work from 8 until lunch at noon then back to work at 1 and out by 4 if not earlier. You could do workshops at lunch hour, but it was hard to fit in with eating. The work schedule was pretty lax which was awesome. Then there was afternoon yoga at 4:15. Then every evening there was something different to do: dances, bands, lectures, meditations, drumming circles, etc. Lights out was at 9:30, but my room mates didn’t care so we didn’t enforce that.

I mostly worked helping Carl remodel the women’s sauna area. I had some tool experience so I got to use the power tools and help frame quite a bit. We also moved a lot of furniture. Kim mostly washed dishes and cleaned the floors. I think she may have thought she was signing up for food prep, but I think she had a good experience anyway since she got to be good friends with a few of the people she worked with.

The best part of it all was just meeting and hanging out with the really cool people that came from all over. We did extreme yoga in the hall one night. We went down to the lake to go swimming all the time, and Noah and I accidentally ‘stole’ some kayaks we thought belonged to kripalu but were actually someone else’s. They were really nice and said it was okay that we took them out on the lake though. We almost always ate the food outside with groups of people at picnic tables with a gorgeous view of the lake. We played soccer, listened to lots of music, danced, sang at a kirtan, went into town for ice cream one night, and talked a lot.

I didn’t check my cell phone or email until the end of the time I was there and it was wonderful. Our mail server went down at work so poor Dennis had a terrible week while I was gone getting it back up. It was a great relaxing vacation and the work I had to do didn’t even feel like work. I was more than happy to do some physical labor for a week since it’s a wonderful change of pace from working a computer desk job.

Sunday came and we said our goodbyes and Roslyn picked us up to look at wedding sites in the Berkshires.

I like vacations. They’re fun…

Okay I’ll write a bit more than that. In fact, there’s so much to tell I’m gonna split it into three parts. Call it my vacation trilogy. Kim and I flew out Thursday, the 2nd, and guess who else did? Laura Kl – Eeee – eye – n! We ran into each other while we were waiting for our flight, yes the same flight. Random, eh? The flight sucked though. It was late, so they didn’t get our bags onto the transfer and there was a ton of turbulence so we couldn’t sleep on the red eye. I spent the next 4 or 5 days exhausted.

So we arrived and Marc picked us up from the airport. We hung out at his parents and then picked up Effie to visit the tea leaf reader. Effie was really frazzled since Jacks’ parents had decided to come early and stay with them before the wedding – bad idea Jack. We treated Effie to some Thai food and fun with crystals and tea leaves. A nice man whose name I think was Harvey read our crystals and tea leaves (he says he’s stronger with the crystals). We stopped at Praline’s for some ice cream and then we were off to the rehearsal dinner.

The rehearsal was quick and went well with the help of an extremely bossy, comes with the package of getting married at Old Sturbridge Village wedding coordinator lady. The food at the dinner was great and everyone gave speeches whether they wanted to or not thanks to Jack’s dad. After dinner Effie’s father shared some Peruvian pisco with us.

The next day was the wedding and all that led up to it. I’m amazed more and more that weddings even happen seeing how as they’re probably one of the most planning intensive and coordinated things that will happen in most people’s lives. This wedding went off without a hitch with a beautiful ceremony. Effie was beautiful in her dress, her cousin sang and made people cry, and people were all happy. I have to say though, by far my favorite part was the reception.

The bar was open, the snacks were great, and everyone was having a blast. The food was great, but there was hardly time to eat it because as soon as the music was on, there were people partying it up on the dance floor. The DJ was awesome. He was this old man name Seth who knew how to party. There were balloons, big hands, conga lines, slow dances and all sorts of other fun stuff. I caught the garter and ended up having to wear it (something about gender equality, I forget whose idea that was).

After the reception, which ended too early at midnight, a bunch of us hung out in the hotel for a little while longer. The next morning we said out goodbyes and Effie and Jack were off on their honeymoon to Mexico, and Abbey and Marc drove Kim and I to Western Massachusetts for the next part of our trip.

We went with my parents to see the new Star Wars movie before they headed back home. It was even fun to watch the second time, unlike the last few they came out with. After the movie my parents left and Kim and I went back to Folk Life to meet Kim’s friend Amanda. Then we came home and were exhausted. Vacation soooooooon!

Waking up at 4 AM sucks. Just ask Kim. I got to go back to bed! Kim, Rachel, Dylan and Todd took my forester up the mountain for the first few legs of ski to sea. Laura, Kaia and I went back to sleep. I dropped Laura and Kaia off at the canoe point and drove Rachel’s car to where I would spend a LONG time waiting to mountain bike. My parents showed up and we went to hang out near the river where the canoers would be coming in. They cheered for all the teams running up the hill carrying their canoes. Coincidentally, we ended up meeting Aspen, a guy who says he is dating Laura. Laura denies it, but she denies ever dating any guy really.

Kim did downhill on a snowboard, Rachel x-country ski, Todd road bike and poor Dylan ran 9 miles downhill and got heat stroke. My whole team showed up at the mountain bike site before Kaia and Laura did in the canoe. They had a pretty slow time, but thankfully they made it so that I had enough time to go without being disqualified. I think I did pretty well on my mountain bike leg. It was about half on the road so it wasn’t really much of a mountain bike course. The hardest part was a 10 minute run through a sandy beach. I handed off to Steven, a guy I had never met, and he took off to kayak.

We all waited at the end where Laura’s parents showed up. Steven ran up and rang a bell to end the race. Our total time was somewhere above 6 hours while the first place team was under 3. Crazy people.

A bunch of us went out to dinner for some really good Italian food at D’Anna’s in Bellingham, and afterwards Dylan got Kim and I some free ice cream at the shop next door. We said out goodbyes to our team, especially Laura who is moving to the east coast to work on a ship for a few months.

Kim’s parents left early Saturday morning and my parents, Kim and I spent the day at Folk Life. I got my mom to go contra dancing, and we saw women’s barbershop, sea shanties and Spoonman playing with a group singing Manu Chao songs. Good times. And… we got a new room mate! Her name is Violet and she seems really nice. Jacob will be interested to know that she has a Trogdor bumber sticker. I’m glad a girl will be moving in for some balance to the house. She’ll be moving in tomorrow while we’re at ski to sea, speaking of which, Kim and I are leaving for it right now.