I was really tired after coming back home from the in-laws’ on Sunday, so I went to bed at 10pm, disappointed that I wouldn’t get to witness the landing of the Phoenix spacecraft on Mars at 2am, Spain time. But then I woke up at 1am and couldn’t resist getting up to tune into [...]

Before sending off my absentee ballot in March, I took photos of each side of the filled-in ballot so that I could remember who I voted for and compare my votes with the final results.

This morning, I went to check something on my Mac OS X dashboard, which contains several weather widgets for various locations that I care about. One of them is my hometown, Morganton, where my parents still live. So you can imagine my horror when a javascript malfunction in the widget code produced these [...]

This blog post was written by my great-grandmother, Ruth Rasmussen (pictured to the right), 88 years ago. Although her writing does not specify a year, there are some clues. She said that the trial took place on Wednesday, April 28th. By my calculations, April 28th fell on a Wednesday on 1915 and [...]

My absentee ballot for the May 6, 2008, North Carolina Democratic Primary arrived finally. Like a good voter, I spent a couple hours putting each candidate’s name into Google and learning about their opinions on various issues. Some of them, like the humorously named Duskin Lassiter, lost my vote for simple reasons of [...]

I’m way late to the game on bringing this topic to the blogosphere, but I wanted to post a few comments on this, now infamous, comment made by Geraldine Ferraro, the gist of which was, “If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position [as a Democratic nominee front runner].” [...]

In my first year Spanish class, back in high school when I had no idea that I would ever live abroad or how important the Spanish language would become to me, our class had an open-ended project to make something related to Spanish-speaking culture. I think my mother had just read some crafts article [...]

Just some photos of some decorative foliage in the downtown district of my home town from my February trip. The cabbages are in front of the computer store my mother runs. The green thing is from the photography studio next door.

Last night, I felt like watching a movie. I had four or five to choose from. I wasn’t familiar with any of them by name, so I looked the first one up on IMDB to get a plot synopsis, see the actors, and get a feel for the general quality of the film. [...]

Put yourself in her shoes for a moment. You come home from a hard day’s work, and find your husband, as always, in his office, working at his computer. You stand in the office doorway, exchange greetings, and start talking about your days. As you lean on it, the door slowly [...]