So yes, new apartment! In just a few short days, the last of the faithful Hedgehog housemates will be dividing our stuff, dragging things to Value Village, the dump and two different apartments in Ballard, and then settling in. In retrospect moving during the middle of the Holiday season might not have been the wisest idea, but then when is it ever a convenient time to stuff all of one’s worldly belongings in boxes, rent a giant vehicle and haul them across town? This moving distance will be a first for me* so far I have either crossed state lines or just a block or two with my moves.  But thankfully having recently shipped all my boxes almost 3,000 miles and only truly unpacked a month and a half ago, packing everything back up is a little less intimidating.

Oh let’s see what else I was going to talk about….ah yes, I do have lots of good photos and little videos from my Thanksgiving visit home, although I will warn you most of them are of Mathilda, my new favorite puppy.  And the other half of my photos are of my old housemate Anne’s crazy cute kittens.  So basically, expect a post made entirely of kittens and puppies in the near future.

*the only one that would have been a similar distance took place back in high school, but I was off in Germany, so it wasn’t a big deal.

• pack, move into new apartment, unpack
• read just under 6,000 pages to beat my 2010 statistic of 31,000 pages read
• finish transferring this blog over to a self-hosting WordPress site
• prepare for Christmas with baking, present gathering, etc

Thanks to everyone who followed along this month and especially those of you who commented! Happy Holidays!

My trip home (interestingly enough Chicago, Goshen and even Seattle all feel, to some degree, like they fit that description) was wonderful, all too short, relaxing, tiring, full of furious catch-up sessions with friends and definitely something I feel rather reluctant to return from. While I will get to see Becca and Jess in just a few weeks over New Year’s Day, my plans to see family again aren’t currently set and I won’t be able to get home for Christmas this year. Already I am feeling the pinch of both vacation days (by January I will only have 3.5 to get me through the end of August) and money and other than a possible trip in March don’t know when I will get to see my family again. That makes me sad, but I guess it is also part of the big adventure of moving to the West Coast and that is an adventure I am still excited about.

Jonathan Harris visited Bhutan to interview and photograph people about their happiness level.  This beautiful project is the result. via Chookooloonks Also if that doesn’t fully sate your interest in Bhutan, Alan Taylor curated this collection of recent photographs of Bhutan.

As a rule, I am a ridiculous fan of Christmas music, everything from classics like Judy Garland’s “Have Your Self A Merry Little Christmas” to modern interpretations like  “O Holy Night” by Sufjan Stevens.  I generally try to restraint my listening until Thanksgiving (to avoid burnout), but since I am safely pass that deadline, here are two albums I purchased this year and am thoroughly enjoying:

• An Appalachian Christmas by Mark O’Connor – Mixing in twangs of bluegrass with beautiful fiddle arrangements, this album includes a wonderful arrangement of Carol of the Bells and the less familiar Cherry Tree Carol.
• A Very She & Him Christmas by She & Him - Consisting of Zooey Deschanel’s vocals and M. Ward’s back-up and guitar, this album is a great collection of classic carols. My personal favorite is Silver Bells.

Is it a giant photograph or just a bunch of sprinkles?

Beautiful time lapse video of the earth taken from the International Space Station via Kottke

Two weeks ago I wrote a little bit about both Game of Thrones and The Magicians. So I thought today I would include little snippets about several other books that I have read recently and enjoyed:

Eat, Pray, Love, the famous memoir by Elizabeth Gilbert of her year spent eating in Italy, meditating in India and finding love in Bali, wasn’t high on the list of books I thought I would enjoy reading. Wary of the some of the critiques I had heard of it in regards to the privilege Gilbert demonstrates on her travels, I wasn’t sure I would enjoy it. However I had already read Gilbert’s sequel, The Commitment, and had been highly impressed with her writing style and very compelling voice. In the end I was glad that I gave Eat, Pray, Love a chance, seeing as Gilbert does a wonderful job of remaining aware of her own follies and creating warm inviting environment that pulls the reader in. And given my own love for travel, this book was a great inspiration to start planning my next trip.

Written by the renowned gay sex columnist, The Commitment is Dan Savage’s memoir of how he and his partner of 10 years wrestled with the idea of marriage. Hilarious and occasionally over the top in it’s biting humor, I enjoyed Dan’s well reasoned approach to contemplating both the overarching idea of marriage or committing to spend one’s life with another and the over-arching issue of gay marriage.

A 27 year old librarian living in Missouri accidentally kidnaps a young boy whose runs away from his controlling parents. A fascinating road trip novel, that deals with both the highs and lows of librarianship and the greater issue of mid twenties angst, I enjoyed this amusing and well-written story.

Probably my favorite of my recent reads, this story is both set in Seattle and narrated by one of the best voices’s and perspectives I have encountered, that of Enzo, the golden retriever owned by a wannabe race car driver Denny Swift. Enzo tells the story of Denny’s triumphs and defeats and his own role in helping his owner fulfill his life long dream. I highly recommend this one.

I am a little late to the David Sedaris game, but this one was a great introduction to this hilarious writer. Whether it is stories of making a living as a performance artist, learning French or a father who hoarded food, Sedaris reliably makes you laugh with self-depreciating and gloriously bizarre stories. I love the short story format and read this on a couple of bus commutes, however fair warning, don’t read on a bus unless you are cool with laughing loudly in public.

I hope you all are having great times with family and friends!

Abby and I go way back, to grade school when her family moved to Goshen and started attending my church. Her brother Jonathan and I became fast friends when we discovered that both of us were interested in computer programming and constructing strange contraptions to shoot things at rabbits in the yard…but since I was spending so much time at his house I got to know Abby as well. At some point we decided that our relationship could be classified as “budder and frester” (I can’t remember where the terms originated but the idea is almost-but-not-quite brother and sister). Since my guest blog post happens to coincide with Thanksgiving, I’m going to give thanks for my long friendship with Abby by reminiscing over some old photos of good times we’ve had together over the years.

In 2000 our Academic Superbowl social studies team won state!

Hiding out from a storm in a tent in the Boundary Waters, ca. 2002.

We were both in the awesome History of the Southwest class in southwest Colorado in May 2004.

Exploring Seattle during one of Abby's many visits before she finally up and moved here.

Checking out the red floor at the central library in Seattle.

On the Capilano suspension bridge with friends in Vancouver last summer.

By the way Abby and Meryl make awesome water buffalo, at least when they can manage to keep a straight face.

Don’t miss the entire series…go here and press the play button: http://www.flickr.com/photos/davisagli/4925982342/in/set-72157624802951052/lightbox/

And finally, a shot from Abby's parents' recent visit to Seattle. (John is blurry either because of my poor phone-camera skills or because he was starting to grab for the cupcake.)

In case you haven’t heard, Abby and I have just rented an apartment together in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle, so I’m looking forward to more adventures together over the next year!

Last Wednesday

Last Saturday

Last Sunday (taken in my new apartment!)

Alex gets in touch with his Norwegian roots!