I'm not sure how many of you are already on Facebook, but it's so much easier and faster to upload photo albums that I think I'll put most of our photos there and paste the link here for people to view them. When I'm done, I'll post the link here.
Here's a preview of the next travelogue I'll send out . . . as soon as I write it . . . I don't know, I guess I just need to learn how to be fascinated by life in a somewhat-sane country because I just don't have the desire to write at the moment. I'll try to work on that. But I still do love to take pictures!

Boston

Hey everyone! I am under no illusion that this will be even half as entertaining as the random insanity we reported from China, but we thought we'd keep up our updates anyway. It's just going to be a much bigger challenge to my writing skills to make it at least interesting enough for you all to read at least some of it. So here it is!

September 3, 2008
Hey, everybody. I'll tell you right now this isn't going to be as interesting or entertaining as our travelogues from China. I mean, I haven't seen anyone urinating in public. Well, Mario relieving himself in the literal middle of nowhere between Lakeview and Winnemucca doesn't really count, does it? I haven't seen any strange food. Wait, I take that back. The eclectic little "supermarket" on the corner by our complex has 50 kinds of cheese and an interesting collection of meat. No dog, sadly, or rat, but it does have bear meat, lion meat, and python meat. I'm getting ahead of myself, though. We arrived in the U.S. in June. The first thing we ate was a delicious take-n-bake pizza. My mom graciously made a run to the store just to get us some ranch dressing to put on it. Man, I love America. Man, I love ranch dressing. And pizza. And carpet! We had a fantastic time with family and friends for two months at home. We also had a not-so-fantastic time cleaning all the rat feces off our belongings we stored while we were gone. Dad did a great job looking after our stuff and we're very grateful for the space. That rat made a mess, though. It decided to make its nest under a dresser and constructed it almost exclusively out of the straps from our bike rack and Mario's golf bag. Man, I hate rats. The rat was long-gone by the time we got home, but a remarkably wet spring meant all of our stuff was also covered with a nice green mold. That was fun too. We ended up tossing a lot of stuff, but we were really surprised how much survived the rat and the spring. We had to take everything out of the boxes, clean it, and repack it. We discovered when we tried to move the dresser that the rat was gone, but a family of bees had moved into the vacated premises. The fun just didn't stop!
We packed up our stuff between camping trips and wedding receptions in a trailer very generously and wonderfully provided by Rich, Mario's step-brother. We were a little skeptical when we picked it up, honestly. In my brother Jed's words, "At least you won't have to worry about anyone stealing anything out of it – it looks so bad no one will want anything you've got in there!" It worked great, though, and Jed was right—no one stole anything!
I don't mean to skip the time we spent with family, but all of you know how much we enjoyed the time we got to spend with you. We had some good times. Like my 2-year-old nieces putting each other in time-out. And playing Sing Star with my brothers, their wives, and Mario. I would have lost a lot of money on that bet.
After having to repack the trailer twice (thanks, Jed!), we took off. Our poor little Subaru was almost sitting right on its tires, but it pulled like a champ. The trailer lights worked when we left my dad's house the first time, then they didn't. So we borrowed a set of magnetic universal trailer lights from him, which worked when we left his house the second time. Then they stopped too. When we got to Tyler and Susan's house in Salt Lake, we were talking to Tyler about the problem, and he found a new set of universal trailer lights, which worked. Unfortunately, our little problem meant he had to then spend the whole evening we were supposed to be just hanging out with them trying to find a soldering iron for us to fix the wires. When we left the next morning at 4, the lights worked. Then they stopped too. We gave up and just drove the rest of the 2,500 miles with broken lights.
We stopped in Colorado for a visit with my dad's family, which was awesome. We loved spending time with Gram, Gramp, Jane and kids, Kate, and Walt. Mario was very impressed with Colorado, the scenery and the family.
We headed out the next morning for the rest of the 2,000 miles. We slept at rest areas, went a top speed of 70, and discovered that Nebraska has awful radio stations. Half were gospel rock, a quarter were straight-up butt rock (for those of you not familiar with butt rock, Motley Crue and The Scorpions are two illustrative examples), and the rest were talk shows. Pretty sweet.

New York was beautiful. We decided to stop at Niagara Falls our last day on the road. Because we had a trailer, though, parking was going to cost $25. We thought we'd outsmart the system and just pay a meter since we were only planning on being there for an hour or so. We drove around and found two meters together that we could use, only to discover that one of them was for a maximum of 30 minutes. There was nothing else we could do and we had wasted so much time already that we just decided to go with it. So we sprinted down to the falls, took about 7 pictures, and sprinted back to the car just in time to get out of the spot before the photosensors on the meters gave us a ticket (we couldn't even bank on the po-po not coming by right when it expired because they're freaking automated! How unfair is that?! Shouldn't they have to catch you?). All five minutes we spent looking at the falls were breathtaking. It was impressive and very beautiful and we hope to go back again soon, preferably when we have more than exactly 30 minutes to enjoy it. So that was an adventure.We got to Mario's "cousin's" house in Vermont and were blown away by how beautiful it is here. It is unbelievable, and the fall colors haven't even started yet! We were very well taken care of by Mario's family there and are now staying with a 2nd-year law student in the complex we will be living in here in Cambridge until our apartment is finished being renovated on Monday. We're really looking forward to getting settled in after so much time in transition.Mario's had two whole days of classes now, and he seems to be doing just fine. He had to go back to the library to study the evening after his first day of class, which the 2nd-year student said was both admirable and scary. I'm still unemployed, which sucks, but hopefully that will change soon.
September 28, 2008
I (Mario) just finished my fourth week of classes. I still enjoy the classes and the material, but don't really enjoy the time it all sucks away. I spend as much time as I can possibly stomach (at least 14 hours a day during the week and half of Saturday) to do my reading assignments for class and I still feel like I'm not doing enough. I'm not even sure how much I should be doing, if I'm doing it right, or if it will even be helpful. Obviously, it helps me not look like an idiot when one of my professors decides to call on me, but other than that I have no clue how I'm doing. But I guess that probably all of my classmates feel the same way. I am enjoying the school. Being Harvard, it draws some exciting and unique guest speakers. This past week I listened to former presidential nominee Michael Dukakis and former FCC chairman Dr. Minow discuss the history and importance of presidential debates. As a side note, when we were buying our TV from BestBuy, John Kerry walked past me as I was checking out. That's two former presidential nominees in less than a month. Next month, Al Gore will be here to talk about the dangers of man-bear-pig! (for those who don't watch South Park, it is a reference to global warming) I don't have any other law school experience to compare it to, but my classmates seem to be fairly normal and varied. It doesn't seem like there's going to be much of a problem with maliciousness among students to try to undercut each other's performance, which is nice. Overall, I'm pretty happy with it all. Except for the man-bear-pig part, of course.
We have been in our very own apartment for three weeks now. There's good news, bad news, and no news. The good news is it's not as small as we had feared. The actual living space is adequate. It's not large by any stretch of the word, but it will do for the next year. The bad news is there is absolutely no storage space. We have exactly two closets that are each about two feet square. That's it. In our lease it says we were supposed to get a storage space in the basement of our building, so we brought our grill, golf clubs, camping chairs, tool boxes, suitcases, all kinds of things. When we got here, we were told that the "storage space was lost in the remodel." I'm not sure what that means, but I was sure we were going to have to take some stuff out to Chelle's (Mario's cousin) house in Vermont to store. I was shocked to discover that it all fits under our bed! It's going to be a bugger to get out again because I packed it all under there perfectly when we didn't have mattresses so I could see everything, but at least we still have it here with us. Actually, I take that back – we didn't fit everything under the bed: we still have our cooler out, which has turned out to be incredibly useful as a table when we want to eat while we watch TV. And that brings us to no news, which is that we don't have couches and don't know when we will have couches. We ordered couches from a furniture warehouse, along with a mattress set. He had the mattresses there but needed to have the couches shipped in and said it would take about 5 days. We still had our living room full of boxes anyway, so that was fine with us. Five days later, we still didn't have any couches. The guy said our couches were being shipped from Texas and hadn't left the warehouse yet but they would be coming soon. Immediately after that, there was this little problem in the warehouse. I guess little problems are to be expected when warehouses get caught in hurricanes. It didn't have power or access to communication for about a week. And we still don't have our bleeping couches. We did finally get our mattress, so at least we're not sleeping on the floor anymore. It was a pretty good system we had for a while, though. When we'd get up in the morning, I'd fold our "bed" in the living room in half and it would then serve as our couch for the day. Now we're just using our camping pads and a blanket. So basically, what with our blue Coleman cooler and our two camping pads in use every day, we're essentially camping out in our living room. Pretty ghetto, but it's all part of the adventure!
I (Angie) have now been working for a week and I'm enjoying it. I'm a receptionist at a biofuel company called Verenium. I take the bus to and from my job and actually have to dress like an adult to go to work, as opposed to most of my other jobs where I could wear pretty much anything I wanted. I still feel like I'm playing dress-up walking around in my suit jacket and slacks. Who am I kidding?! The job description actually said they wanted someone "polished." Who of you thinks I'm polished? Boy did I fool them!
Anyway, so life is good. Well, apart from our car getting broken into our second week here. They smashed the window and stole the GPS unit Michelle and Brig loaned us to help navigate Boston. When they offered to let us use it for our first few weeks, we declined. I mean, how hard could it be to just follow our MapQuest directions? They insisted that we really should take it, and we found out why immediately on entering the city: it's like a blind, mentally-handicapped guy who doesn't know how to drive laid down the street grid for this place. It's is absolutely ridiculous, and that's coming from someone who just lived in China for a year. The streets are insane – some intersections have 5 or 6 streets! And none of them have signs posted! Drivers here are really aggressive but forgiving. I think it's because they know exactly how messed-up their streets are and they cut people a break.
We still haven't been able to see much of Boston because it's got this nasty little habit of calling in torrential rain storms every Friday that conveniently (that's sarcasm, in case you didn't catch it) last until Sunday afternoon. So we've been making very good use of our new TV. We decided a while ago that we didn't want to live like penniless bums anymore. We wanted to find a middle ground between utter deprivation (remember the heating scandal two winters ago in Corvallis?) and moderate frugality. In other words, we were ready to cross the line between starving students and the adult world. So we bought a flat-screen TV. And we have cable. Mission accomplished—we are officially adults now!
We really love it out here. We miss you all and we miss Oregon (Go BEAVS! Hope you saw the USC game!), but it is beautiful and new and exciting here and we're really enjoying it. Like always, we'd love to hear from you all when you have time.
Love,Angie and Mario