Immediately after snowfall, it’s best to wipe all the snow off your car so that it doesn’t turn into a three inch thick layer of ice that will take you two hours to remove with your trusty OXO Good Grips Twister Snow Brush.

I gave up after a few minutes, actually.

A few inches in Arlington

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When the new year rolls around, I don’t make resolutions. Rather, I design an elaborate spreadsheet involving vacation days, frequent flier miles, and Marriott Rewards points. It’s got multiple tabs and everything.

One of the few disappointing things about 2008 was that I didn’t have a chance to travel abroad. I had about a month’s worth of vacation accumulated at my old job, but never used it because I literally started my new job the day after I left my old one. Thankfully, I did get paid for all those vacation days and was able to stash that in a vacation savings account that is earning like .000001% interest because the economy sucks.

The first trip I have planned is to Costa Rica in late April. I’ve wanted to go there for a while, but I have always somehow ended up in the waveless former Soviet Union. I’ll be in Costa Rica for a week, pretty much surfing the entire time. I also scored a roundtrip ticket there for 35,000 miles on Continental, saving about $700. Thank you, business travel!

For my second trip, I’m hoping to make it out to North Korea. Yeah, I know. WTF, Lindsay? I can’t really explain my bizarre fascination with the place, but back in 2005 I set a goal to get there by 2010. So if the North Korean government allows U.S. citizens to visit during this year’s Arirang Festival, I’m going to try and make it out there. And yes, I am driving my parents insane with this trip. My mom actually said she would rather I just visit Chernobyl again. (And if you want in on the North Korea trip, shoot me an email.)

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Ah, 2008. What the hell did I do in 2008? Well, I moved out of D.C. and into the Commonwealth of Virginia, traveled to Denver, Texas (San Antonio and Houston a few times), New York City (three freakin’ trips), and the Outer Banks in North Carolina. I also toured an oil refinery, campaigned in both real and fake Virginia, and saw Obama give his last speech of the campaign in Manassas, VA on the evening of November 3rd.

But really, two things stand out in 2008. First, after two years of working for the natural gas pipeline industry, I landed a new job working for the petroleum industry. I had originally planned to move to Houston and look for a job there, but when this opportunity came up I decided against it. For one, I really didn’t want to risk just quitting my job and moving to a new city. In retrospect, this appears to be a good decision, considering the current economic climate. Anyways, at my new job I get to work on interesting issues and do cool stuff like make maps with ArcGIS, so I am pretty content.

Second, I finally moved into my own apartment. Yeah, no more roommates, as I could finally afford to have my own place (albeit, it’s a small 490 square foot studio, but still, it’s all mine). I live in Arlington (Pentagon City, to be exact) in a hulking 1960s era apartment building that wouldn’t be out of place in the outer suburbs of Moscow, and I’m loving it. I’m so glad to finally be out of Columbia Heights (and I am constantly reminded of this whenever I hear news of drive-by shootings a block from my former house) and living in NoVA. Pentagon City is a perfect location. Almost everything I need is within walking distance and I’m a 15 minute, straight shot metro ride to work.

Since moving to Arlington, I can’t say I really despise the D.C. area any longer. In fact, I hardly ever complain about it (ok, I still bitch about the cold weather, but I’m a Californian, so it’s to be expected) and am expecting that I’ll be here for quite a while longer. And you know, I’m perfectly fine with that. A ton of my GW friends are here, and I’ve made some amazing new friends over the past three years as well. And while I love California, I am consistently amazed by the unspoiled beaches in Maryland (Assateague) and North Carolina. I imagine I’ll be spending plenty of summer weekends there.
So yeah, I’ve got nothin’ to complain about here.

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That’s DC’s official headcount for Obama’s Inauguration.

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More on the Inauguration later…

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I really wish Gazprom would post videos of their press conferences, because it would be rather hilarious to see Sergey Kupriyanov and Alexey Miller shouting their statements to reporters:

As of January 7, when Gazprom was forced to cease gas supplies, the transit pipelines in Ukraine were filled with Russian gas. Therefore, the pipeline pressure is supposed to be sufficient for ensuring synchronous gas flow at the entry and exit points of the Ukrainian gas transmission system. Once we feed gas to the entry point, it is to appear at the exit point!

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Especially when they use exclamation marks!

Providing gas for technological needs is the sole responsibility of transiting party!

Indeed!

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318,478, to be exact. That’s how many visitors lindsayfincher.com received in 2008. That’s 26,539 visitors per month and 870 per day. Not bad for a blog about nothing.

Yes, it’s Excel. Shutup.

Unfortunately, I’ve never really tracked data from past years so I have no idea whether the number of visitors has risen or declined. I’ve owned this domain since September 2000 and have been using blogging software to update this site since 2001, when I installed NewsPro because I was too lazy to manually edit the HTML and upload it via FTP. Since then, readership has grown from my parents and friends to people who don’t even know me. The most heavily trafficked parts of this site are definitely my travel posts, and I usually get around 4-5 e-mails a week from random people who have travel questions or just wanted to let me know they liked the site. Although it might take me a while to respond to the e-mails, I definitely appreciate them.

I’m going to try and make more of an effort to update this site with actual content, i.e., past travel stories and what not, and hopefully 2009 will bring some international travel.

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Last week’s concert was good, but couldn’t really compare to Gogol’s show at Coachella in 2007.

Oddly enough, Eugene Hütz did not do any drum surfing at this show. I thought that was pretty standard at Gogol concerts. Also, the crowd wasn’t as into it as the one at Coachella. They were rather sedate, actually. I think there were a lot of people who had been dragged there by friends and weren’t really into this crazy dude jumping around with a fire bucket, singing in Ukrainian and English, and waving around a copy of Taras Bulba. Near the end, Hütz started singing Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall”, which was pretty random.

Overall, Gogol put on a good show despite the crowd’s lack of enthusiasm. If you ever have a chance to see them live, I highly recommend it.

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