Author Archives: twood

Gay-Wood Wedding

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Rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated.

Instead, I’ve been busy with my brother’s wedding to Alison Gay in NJ, immediately followed by a conference in Boston. It was a very pretty wedding and took place at the Colonial Dames House in Philly (an elegant downtown home for British-loving loyalists).

While I am generally morally opposed to online video, I’ll make an exception to post the video of my best man speech from Nic’s wedding. For reference, both Nic and Alison are historians and they met while working at the Constitution Center in Philly.


Tim’s Wedding Toast on Chime.TV

And here is an assortment of photos from the event

p.s. I’m very curious to see what sort of search terms will reach this page given its title…

Barclay Farming

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In late may Megan and I headed down south for her cousin’s wedding in South Carolina. Along the way we made a few stops, the first one in New Jersey to visit my family. My dad gave us a tour of his vegetable patch in the community gardens at Barclay Farms. I didn’t see any popcorn sprouts (they grows in small, microwavable bags, right?), but lots of other things were starting to come up.

Thailand: Bangkok

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This is the third installment of excerpts from the travel diary I kept during my trip to Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand in 1999. The previous posts covered Singapore and Kuala Lumpur and Penang. Present day thoughts are in italics — after Penang I didn’t keep up with my journal very well, so the remaining posts will be mostly annotations.

Bangkok

Bangkok is full of amazing temples – it often seems like there is one on every other block. The Grand Palace was also amazing and truly spectacular. It is huge and covered in gold. Other than that though, Bangkok wasn’t too interesting. It is dirty, full of smog, and has terrible traffic. We went on a boat tour mainly through the outskirts of the city. The guide was an interesting lively guy, but he kept us how extremely happy and content the people that lived in little shacks along the river were, which seemed a bit of an exaggeration. They let us off at a snake farm where we saw an impressive show. Men grabbing poisonous snakes with their mouths, stuff like that.

I may not have liked Bangkok too much because I got sick during our first or second day there. Having an upset stomach while in the country with the greatest food in the world is a terrible misfortune, so I can’t have been too happy.

It was neat to explore the ancient buddhist temples and imagine what the lives’ of their safron robed monks were like. Many of the monks were very young – barely teenagers. It is common in Thailand for kids to spend a few years at a temple. How would that experience change the life of an American teen?

grand palace

The Grand Palace was an incredible place. Since this trip I’ve been to a number of European royal palaces, and while they are obviously majestic in their own right, none have the level of detail exhibited by the exquisite carvings and statues everywhere on the palace grounds. Not to mention the fact that literally everything seemed to be covered in gold.

Penang: Pearl of the Orient

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This is the second part of the travel diary from the trip I took with my dad to Singapore, Thailand, and Malaysia in 1999. The trip was before my sophomore year of high school, and was my first experience outside of the US. In the first week of the trip we explored Singapore for a few days before going on to Kuala Lumpur and the Taman Negara rain forest. Once again, my present day comments are in italics. Now we move on to Penang, a Malaysian island once known as the Pearl of the Orient.

Days 7-8: Penang

I like Penang.  It is a dirtier, older version of Singapore.  There are tuk-tuks, trishaws and people on bikes everywhere.  It isn’t a particularly beautiful city, but it has a real flavor of south east asia.

I remember taking a ride on a trishaw (basically a bicycle cart taxi) around town when we first arrived in Penang. Besides that, we walked everywhere during our trip. Since then, whenever I am abroad I much prefer walking around the cities that I visit.  I use public transportation when the distances are long, but taxis are an absolute last resort. In most cases, I’d rather walk from point A to point B so that I can really see what the surrounding areas are like.  Perhaps this habit comes from Penang where I remember laughing at the overweight american tourists in Hawaiian shirts and sun glasses being ferried around in trishaws. It seemed like they spent more time inhaling the exhaust from the cars and motorbikes zipping around town then actually seeing what the city had to offer.

Today we have had bad luck.  First, a clan headquarters that is supposed to be a very interesting site was closed for repairs.  Then the museum my dad really wanted to go to was closed since today is Friday.  After that, the restaurant we walked all the way across town for wasn’t at all what we expected and didn’t seem to sell lunch.  Now it is starting to rain.

Our hotel room is currently covered in drying clothes.  The clothes I washed back in Taman Negara did not dry at all due to the humidity [in retrospect this is somehow not very surprising].  Hopefully today they will make more progress. There are also lots of rats here, and dogs – the first we have seen this trip.  Hopefully neither of those will end up as our dinner.  Money changers are everywhere in Penang.  They usually also sell jewelry and/or (oddly enough) used books.  Actually, it seems that everyone sells used books.  There was a place that sold “used English books and motorcycles”.  Quite a market niche. Continue reading →

Finally Spring!

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In the last week, Spring has finally arrived in Amherst. The season suddenly changed from cold and gray to incredibly warm and sunny. We’ve had several days in the high 70s now, and it looks like the forecast will remain that way for the time being. I was very ready for winter to end this year, and even though I am very busy working on a paper which is due in a few weeks, life just seems so much more pleasant now that I can sit by an open window and feel the warm sun on me.

Mac Home and End Keys

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Sorry this is not a very exciting post, but it will probably be useful for somebody…

For some reason the people at Apple think that the Home and End keys should scroll you to the top or bottom of a document rather than the start or end of a line. After searching far and wide, I have finally found how to get back what I consider the normal functionality in a bunch of applications I regularly use: the terminal, Firefox, Emacs, and Eclipse. Continue reading →

Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, and Taman Negara

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I recently found the travel diary from the trip I took with my dad to Singapore back in 1999 (when I was still in high school). This was my first trip out of the country, and an amazing experience. To help preserve it, I’m going to repost bits of it here along with some of the pictures I have. I’ve added some annotations which are in italics. Enjoy!

Days 1-2: Singapore (Aug 13, 1999)

We arrived in Singapore at around 6:30AM after a very long flight (about 24 hours). Singapore is beautiful. The bus ride from the airport was spectacular, exotic trees lining the road, beautiful flowers, etc. Once you get into the city the trees start to disappear although that does depend on where you go.

While we were walking around we came to a Hindu temple where an elaborate ritual was going on. Drums, chanting, all that stuff. Next door was a Chinese temple which was also bustling – perhaps because it was Friday the 13th?

Our second day we continued to explore Singapore. We visited a “theme park” designed to teach Chinese mythology which was pretty interesting. However, it was pretty much empty, so I guess people aren’t too interested in learning that kind of thing. Afterwards we went to the Singapore Cruise center and then toured an old cargo ship. For dinner we went to the “Malay Village” which was disappointing because of both the rain and the lack of things there. We did have some good satay though. Continue reading →

More Food

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Time to chronicle more delicious meals.

  • BHD #13: Filip made pig with baked sliced potatoes
  • BHD #14: Tim made Yaki Soba
  • BHD #15: Filip made cod and Emily’s (in)famous rum cake (which has no rum in it, but lots of vodka)
  • Intermission: Tim and Filip realized they had been cooking too often
  • BHD #16: Gal and Avigail made a kosher meal with orange and apricot chicken, asparagus, and fresh baked challah

The Dinners

The Diners

Fencers

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Last weekend we hosted the Virginia Tech women’s fencing team at my house (Megan is a former fencer). They were up here for a national tournament at Smith College.  I had never seen “real” fencing before, so it was interesting to lean a bit about the sport’s rules. Plus it was fun to see people waving swords around dressed in outfits that looked like space age full body diapers. We took a bunch of pictures and managed to get a few good action shots.

Kids these days…

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Now that I’m in the quarter-century-plus club, I think it’s my job to complain about how much trouble undergrads are these days. A week or so ago our neighbors (who are attached to us and share a driveway) had a big party. This happens a few times a semester, but I guess this time they were loud and rowdy enough that one of our other neighbors called the cops. I was about to head to bed when I heard the cops banging on their door. After that the kids (very slowly) dispersed, but like a good paparazzi I took some pictures of them loitering around and urinating on someone else’s house…