kadmium

I'm really enjoying Rob Gifford's "On the Road in China" on NPR's Morning Edition. Today's episode was particularly good. Gifford had stopped to talk to a group of people at a Protestant church waiting for an itinerant preacher. When the preacher failed to show, the congregation pressed Gifford into giving a sermon because they assume that all Westerners are Christians. I don't know what Gifford's actual religious views are, but apparently the sermon was a little dicey. (You'll need either Real Audio's player or Windows Media Player to listen, unfortunately. I don't know why NPR is locked into the two crappiest audio formats on the web, but that's a different post.)

Dad and I are back from Antarctica and I’ve posted my pictures. These are unedited, so don’t be surprised if some of them seem dark or some seem to be there for no real reason. I just wanted to get them up so everyone could see. Over the next week or so, I’ll go in and edit some of my favorites and come up with my personal slide show.

For now, go forth and browse Antarctica. The pictures are arranged by date and location.

A quick entry from Ushuaia, Argentina, el Fin del Mundo. It’s raining outside and we have three hours before we can board the boat, so we found a locutorio with phone booths and computers for rent.

More in a couple of weeks.

Jason Kottke and Meg Hourihan are friends of friends of acquaintances, but I did have the pleasure of meeting them briefly when they came to Anchorage for a conference last spring. They decided to move from San Francisco to New York, taking a couple of months between the two to hang out in Paris. They happen to have left for Paris the day that Katie and I arrived in San Francisco.

One of the things that excited Katie and I about our trip was the variety and high quality of restaurant food that we could find in San Francisco, something that Anchorage lacks. So I was kind of amused to read this on Jason’s site on Thursday: Except for the horse meat tartare.

More about our trip later today.

If you who read my parents’ site as well as this one, you know about the trip that my father an I will be taking this December. It’s true — I am going to leave Alaska in the dead of winter to go to Antarctica. For vacation. More as things develop.

Katie and I are finally taking a trip. Yay! It’s been a while since we got out of Alaska, and we’ve got these two coupons from Alaska Airlines for $150.00 each that are going to expire in January 2003, plus we finally crossed the magical 40k threshold on our Alaska Airlines miles. So we’re going to go to San Francisco to see some friends we haven’t seen since we left Texas and celebrate our fifth anniversary and Halloween, all in one big, blowout four-day weekend.

We used some of our miles to get our tickets for half price, then used the coupons to bring the round-trip cost of each ticket down to $51.00. w00t!

Now we need some advice.