The ethics of jaywalking

In general, I'm not the biggest jaywalker. Sean rolls his eyes when we're trying to cross busy streets and I drag him to a crosswalk, or make him wait for a green light.

But, I do jaywalk on certain streets. I walk up and down Pike every day to/from the bus, and after weeks of waiting at the same light every day while no cars pass by, I got more and more comfy with jaywalking. If I don't do that, the 6-block walk to the bus takes about 10 minutes because of all the lights.

So one day I was waiting at a light and standing next to me was a man with a seeing-eye dog. After a couple cars passed, I started jaywalking and then I thought "hmm, I hope I don't confuse the dog". No, of course the seeing-eye dog was not fooled by my lawlessness - he patiently waited for the green light. The dog probably thought to himself "that human isn't very well trained!"

Then a couple days later, at that same light, I start jaywalking and across the street from me is a man with two little kids. He of course didn't let them cross, but then I thought to myself that I was setting a bad example in front of those little kids.

I don't know - this is my question for you. Is it morally wrong to jaywalk in front of dogs or kids, and if so which one is worse?

OurJoules Blog

I recently started a blog for OurJoules. So, if you've been wondering what I'm up to with the site, you can follow along here, at the creatively-named:

OurJoules Blog

Driving the Van to Costa Rica

Someday Sean and I will drive the sweet van from Seattle down to Costa Rica, stopping at all the awesome surf breaks along the way.

Until that magical day arrives, I have found someone to live vicariously through!!! Abigail is a 30-something Seattle lawyer who took a Spanish class here at SLA and then packed up her 3 dogs, hopped in her sweet (Euro)van, and hit the road! She is apparently in Belize now.

Conversation from Yesterday

Yesterday I had lunch with one of my former grad-school buddies at Nana's Soup House. (Which is awesome BTW, if you're in Seattle go there and try their corn chowder. MMMMMMMMMMMM good.) Here's the beginning of our conversation:

S: How's your work going?
me: It's ok. I was kind of bored today so I'm teaching myself how to write database queries.
S: Is that what most secretaries do when they're bored?
me: I don't know.

Sometimes I think about going back to "real" work, but then again I want to take a class at UW next quarter that meets in the middle of the day. I doubt a real job would allow me such flexibility.

Wedding Picture

As some of you already know, Sean and I didn't officially get married in Tucson. We went to the courthouse the day before the wedding to get our marriage license, and it was closed! Budget cuts, I assume.

We still did the ceremony, of course! Here we are, all cleaned up (with some bubbles in the foreground):




But when we got to Hawaii we did our "real" wedding, in a courthouse with a judge and one witness who clapped for us, after our 3-minute ceremony. Here we are again, in beach mode (yes, Sean is wearing board shorts):

The Key Story

Until our honeymoon, I have never taken a surf trip where I brought my own board, so I did not realize quite how much of a hassle it would be.

When we got to Hawaii, we had someone greet us with leis (which smell AMAZING, by the way). You can see said leis in previous post. They were supposed to provide us transportation to our hotel, until they found out we had surfboards. They won't fit in the car, we were told, so we had to take a cab. I was slightly surprised by this, since I thought Hawaii of all places would be pretty accommodating to surf boards, but hey, no big deal!



(Yeah this is a limo. It cost the same as a cab, but more comfy for us and our large board bag.)

A couple days later we rent a car so we can go check out the north shore of Oahu. We're cruising along in our sweet Yaris, and I'm sitting almost on the dashboard because we had to squeeze the boards in there, but we're still having a great time. Then we see the sign in the car "don't get the key wet or else the car will not start." Hmmmmmmmmmmm.


(View from inside the Yaris. BTW Honolulu traffic was baaaaaaad.)

Electronic keys are a major difficulty when surfing. And the whole "leave it on the wheel" thing isn't going to cut it in a place where every 3rd person we talk to tells us how their car has been robbed on the island.

We drive to 2 or 3 stores before finding some small ziploc baggies, and then go for a short surf with the key in a bag. When we got out, the key was almost completely dry. Oops. Thank goodness the key still worked, but we thought we better not push our luck again. Serendipitously, we saw a car in front of us which showed us the ultimate solution to the problem.... a Combo-lock-key-storage-thingie.

The next day we find a hardware store, buy this dang thing (for about twice what it's going for on Amazon), and head out to the surf break. Our big fat key fits in the box, or so it seems until we try to close it! Nooooooooo! So close, and yet so far!!!!!

This was pretty devastating, as you can imagine. So when we got to the big island, we vowed not to let this happen to us again. When the lady at Alamo tried to give us a car with a fat electric key, we asked for a car that has an 'old school' key. The fun thing was, she looked around until she found one, which was a Kia Sedona (mini van) and gave that to us for no upgrade charge. (Try this trick next time you want a free car upgrade... might work?)

The Kia was sweet.... I got used to having 8 cupholders in the front and don't know how we can go back to living without them. But guess what?!?!? In our excitment to get a different key and sweet van, we failed to notice that this 'normal' key was attached to its electronic keyfob friend via a cable!!!! Not a keychain, which you can open and close, a freaking cable.

Well, guess what we did. Sean found a lifeguard who helped him saw the cable with some kind of sharp tool. (Don't worry, we gifted Alamo with a new, normal keychain.) By the way, that lifeguard then proceeded to tell us not to get into the water because it was too dangerous, despite the fact that we could see tons of snorkelers and complete beginners taking surfing lessons. Cheers, friendly Hawaiians.

So the moral of the story is - keys are crafty adversaries!!! If you are going on a surf trip, eternal key vigilance is required.

Honeymoon

Hey, we're back! And, we're thinking about getting our internet back too... although still haven't done it yet.

Haven't organized the honeymoon photos yet either, but here is my favorite one: