Month of Daveness - January 2010

I've found that I really enjoy summarizing time periods. Here's January:

Mood

That's right - This month I knocked it up a notch and added some extra data points to the Spreadsheet Journal. The mood graph above shows my subjective measurement of my mood throughout the month.

The peak: Friday, January 15. Went to a birthday celebration for my friend Cledwyn at a place in northeast DC called Palace of Wonders. There was a burlesque/variety show, and I met quite a few decent people that night. Good times. I've learned that pretty much everybody I've met out on the town really enjoys talking to strangers for some reason - And I'm consistently surprised how interesting other people turn out to be. But maybe that's just selection bias (i.e. I just remember the good ones...).

The low point: Saturday, January 23. Had to work on both Saturday and Sunday. Halfway between my weekend of work, on Saturday evening, I spent far too long trying to get a graphics card driver working on Ubuntu. And I failed miserably at this task. Also I was just in a bad mood.

And my average mood for the month: 62% Positive. That's fairly good, one would think. Though part of this tracking experiment is to see if I subconsciously converge on the mean (50%). At the end of the year, I'll either see some interesting patterns or I'll prove my theory correct. Exciting either way, I think... right?

Food

January was kind of a slower month than usual for me. It was cold and Laura was in South Africa for the first two weeks. I was especially lazy. I went to four restaurants over the month (one of them twice), listed below in order of awesomeness:

- Mandalay Restaurant and Cafe. Authentic Burmese. Very good - Laura's wide rice noodles with romaine hearts, tofu and peanut sauce was tops.

- Mai Thai. Best Thai food I've had in my 27 years of [not often] eating Thai food. Massuman Curry was excellent. Went here twice this month.

- Charlie Chiang's. Chinese. They do vegetarian very well. I realized at this restaurant that tofu is in fact not a boring and tasteless thing - you just have to cook it right. In fact, I have cooked four different Tofu dishes at home (all of which were surprisingly tasty) in just the past few weeks. See below for the month's winner...

- Nando's Peri-Peri. South African masters of chicken. Extremely good chicken. For some reason the atmosphere of this place makes me uncomfortable (fast food-ish, quasi-self serve, hard to navigate). But the food's delicious.


As for staying in:

I mentioned above that I finally realized the value of tofu. I was previously fairly confident that tofu was mostly crumbly, wet rubber. But it's all in how you cook it. Tofu is yet another ingredient in a growing list of things I'm getting into cooking, and cooking somewhat well (I think). This month I'll nominate the following dish for Dave's Cooking Hall of Fame:

Spicy Fried Honey Tofu

- Firm Tofu, cut into 1/2" square blocks
Add however much you want of:
- Hot Sauce
- Honey
- Sesame Chili Oil
- Olive Oil
- Cayenne Pepper and Salt

Pop it all in a pan and fry the hell out of it, adding more honey while it cooks. Trust me, it's tasty. And spicy.

12:01 AM, 01/01/2010

I spent the first few hours of the new decade with these people:

New Year's Eve was quite the night. I would explain why we were all making such wild gestures, but it would take away all the funny.

My resolutions for the new year? To dislocate my elbow and lose my phone within four weeks. I know -- Ambitious, right? I dream big.

Things that Happened that, if Given a Choice, I Would Have Chosen for Them Not to Happen.

Monday, January 11th - Dislocated my elbow:

Heard a "click" during my non-routine-living-room-rug-exercise-routine somewhere between push-up number 30 and 40. The next day, my elbow started to swell, and by the end of the week it was mostly unbendable. This is the fourth time I've dislocated Little Elby. Some day soon I'll post the full history...






Wednesday, January 27th - Lost my phone:

After watching State of the Union at a friend's place in Virginia, I left my phone in the cab back to DC, and didn't remember the cab company... Normally I wouldn't mind too much, but this phone was a Samsung Omnia with a touchscreen, 5 MP camera, 8 GB hard drive and a ton of personal data. But alas, I was somewhat excited to switch over to THE bandwagon of my generation, and by Jan. 31st I had an iPhone. Which is 300%-500% more amazing.

Got Stuff Done

I finally took the time this month to finish editing the video I recorded of my trip from Tucson to DC.

For those who don't know: When I moved here two years ago, I bought a video camera, mounted it to my dashboard with Velcro and box-packaging foam and videotaped pretty much the entire 2,300 mile trip. 99% of which is the view out the front windshield of my '96 Honda Accord. I know, it sounds boring, but when you speed it up to 8 times normal speed and add some music, it's... Well, less boring. Here's a sample:




This was somewhere in Southwest New Mexico on day one of the trip. Maybe someday I'll upload the full 18 minute video...




And as for the month's more straightforward data:

Statistics

Nights out at Bars: 6

Movie Theater Movies: 1 (Up in the Air ... Avatar was sold out.) Up in the Air was not bad. The ending was much better than I expected.

Movies Watched at Home: 5
- Star Trek
- Gran Turino
- Atonement
- March of the Penguins
- District 9

Your movie reviews for for the month:
District 9 and Gran Turino were excellent. March of the Penguins was surprisingly watchable. Star Trek I'd seen before, and Atonement caught me off guard - I hated it while watching it, and now I think I like the idea behind the movie a lot. Though I probably won't watch it again...

Trips to Target: 0

Haircuts: 0

Trips to Safeway: 3

Exercise: 500 sit-ups, 120 push-ups (before dislocating the ol' Elbow), and a lot less walking than usual. It was cold out there! And that's making me fat... Speaking of cold -

Average Temperature in DC: 35 F! - Graph of the month's temperatures courtesy of wolfram-alpha:

Other Notables

Technology: Learned a tiny bit of Perl and a little bit more of PHP this month, and explored the magical (and annoying - WTF Ubuntu Radeon 9250 device drivers?!) world of Ubuntu and Linux Mint. If I were on a desert island with a computer without an internet connection and one operating system besides Windows, it would be Ubuntu. Because all the good stuff comes pre-packaged. Though if I had internet access on this island, it would be Linux Mint - because A) you can download all the Ubuntu apps, and B) it would remind me more of the Windows that I'd be missing so dearly...

Governmental: 1. Filed my taxes at the end of the month. DC is sending me a check, but I owed $9 to the Feddies. Nine dollars! What are the odds? 2. Received my first ever Jury Duty summons. I'm due next Tuesday. That should be interesting...


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And that was my month. February ought to be more interesting...