Anyway, we made it to the beach, and, as usually, I didn’t feel much like going into the water. It was just too cold for my blood. I really tried to go in, but I couldn’t stand it, so I was sitting on the sand again in no time (we didn’t bring a towel). The previous night, Kevin had told us that Broward County had launched a bicycle-rental program with stations in various places, and we found out that we’d be right near one of the stations, so when we were done at the beach, we checked it out.

There were some bikes locked up, and you could unlock one after swiping your credit card in this machine that was next to the bikes. So Kate and I each got one to ride around. The first thing I noticed was that the bikes were small and low to the ground; even Kate, who’s probably about average height for a person, found hers to be uncomfortable. The second thing I noticed was how sturdy and fully equipped they were. Each one had a basket, a bell, a lock, a light, fenders, three speeds, and other frills my childhood bicycles would have envied if only bicycles could feel. (I’ve always preferred single-speed bikes, so anything more than that seems lavish and unnecessary.)

But the best-equipped bicycle in the world can’t prepare you for a cruise down the bike lane of an American street. I had never actually ridden next to traffic before, and it was slightly unnerving. After we had gone a short distance, I proposed we turn back because it looked like the traffic next to us was only going to get worse. So, we brought our bikes back to be locked up again for someone else to use, except I guess I didn’t push mine into the locking thing all the way because I got charged an extra ten bucks on my credit card later.

That evening, our host made spaghetti for dinner, and then we all went out to a local bakery for coffee and light noms.

And then it was December 31. We were flying out from Miami International Airport, which I had never actually flown in or out of before. Early, early, early in the morning, we left our host’s place and took a taxi to the nearest Tri-Rail station, and then we took the Tri-Rail to the station before the airport because the station at the airport is closed, and then we had to take a connecting bus to the airport. Because the Tri-Rail doesn’t run very much on Saturdays, we had no choice but to get there very early. We were so far from MIA that I don’t even think we could have taken a taxi the whole way.

At the airport, I had time to dash off most of 2011: The Year in Review, and then we flew to Chicago. We had a long layover at O’Hare, but I didn’t want to go out into the city because it was cold and snowy and I didn’t want to have to go through security again. We managed to kill some time just by walking around and having a meal. And then we took good old Alaska Airlines back to Seattle.

Eventually, we were back at my place, and I was getting ready for guests to arrive for New Year’s Eve. I had been looking forward to this night for months since I knew I’d have one of the best views of the city’s fireworks show. Kate, understandably, wanted to enjoy the view of her eyelids, so she retired early as a few of my friends showed up. I tried to make sure it was nice and quiet for Kate (which was difficult, since several of the guys had already been partying), but Kate later said she didn’t hear a thing.

Three of my friends and I stood on the balcony and watched as dazzling fireworks erupted from the Space Needle for a good six or eight minutes. And so it was the new year.

Kate and I spent the first few days of the year buying things that she needed for cooking that I didn’t have. So now I actually have mixing bowls and pans and things like that. I had January 2 off because New Year’s Day was a Sunday, and then it was business as usual on January 3. I went to work, while Kate did her own thing. That week I had lunch with her every day, usually at home, but once she met me at work and we went to nearby 13 Coins.

Saturday, January 7, was the last night of Kate’s visit. In the evening, we went to see a foreign film (nothing romantic, just some boring movie about a kid) and then had a romantic dinner at Amore Infused. Since Kate wanted to make mulled wine after dinner and I didn’t have a corkscrew, we brought a bottle of wine with us and asked the waitress to uncork it. After our meal, we stealthily brought it home. (It was a good idea to eat there. I had never been there, it was great, and there was a fire in the kitchen a week later. It’s been closed since then.)

When we got home, Kate made mulled wine (I’m including the Wikipedia link since I had never heard of it), and we drank it out on the balcony. Even though it was cold outside, the mulled wine kept us warm. I didn’t think I would ever like hot wine, but it was pretty good. I managed to drink half a mug (I don’t have wine glasses), and I would like to have it again, when hopefully I’d be able to stomach more.

We slept for a few hours, and then it was almost time for Kate to go to the airport. I helped her pack (she’s a last-minute packer), and we headed there together. We arrived early, so we had a few minutes to kill before she had to go through to security. We savored those minutes, though I knew there would be many more soon.

Kate has quit her job in Russia and is coming here again on Friday. She’ll be staying with me for almost three months. I’ve never done anything like this before, and I’m excited for what the future holds.

This was my first time seeing snow anywhere I’d actually lived. I’d only seen it on trips to DC and Russia. Seattle only gets 5.9 inches per year on average, so anytime it snows, it’s a big deal. A lot of the city shuts down because there aren’t a lot of snowplows and people don’t know how to drive in the stuff. Some people grumble and insist on going about their day as usual, but they seem to be the minority.

Anyway, as soon as I realized it was snowing, I went out on my balcony and took some pictures. I went out to breakfast at Top Pot with my friend Nick, and the snow had pretty much tapered off. But as soon as I got back to my apartment, it started coming down again. It snowed harder and harder and harder. Then Nick and I decided to go for a walk downtown while it was still snowing.

Phil Spector Christmas songs looped in my head. I was giddy. Snow makes me giddy because I missed it in my childhood, you see. It’s fun, and it’s funny—to see all these familiar sights frozen over and covered in snow. I’m not afraid to say that I made and threw snowballs. But I wasn’t the only one who was enjoying the snow. I saw three or four snowmen. Oh yeah, I also took a lot of pictures.

On Monday, most of my co-workers worked from home (that’s the great thing about having a computer-based job), so I followed suit on Tuesday; there was still a lot of snow around and nobody wanted to drive in it. On Wednesday, it snowed all day, so I worked from home again. Then, I realized that I didn’t have much of an excuse to be working from home since out of all my co-workers I’m the one who lives closest to work. So on Thursday and Friday, I was one of the few people to show up.

There was still a lot of snow around on Thursday night when Nick and I went out to celebrate his birthday, and the snow was all melty on Friday. But that night it started to get warmer, and by yesterday morning, almost all of the snow had disappeared.

It might not snow again for another year. The child in me is sad, but the adult part of me thinks it’s good that everyone will be back at work.

Here’s an interesting Lifehacker article about how to make better spending choices: The Comfort Principle.

So it was two days after Christmas, and my aunt was taking Kate and me around Gainesville to see and do stuff. Before lunch, she took us to her work at No More Homeless Pets, which shares a facility with a couple of similar organizations. We passed by a room with some kittens in cages.

I would have been content with just looking at the kittens, but Kate wanted to go into the room with them. So, we went into the room. Then she wanted to hold one of the kittens, so my aunt opened one of the cages and let her pick one. Then she wanted to hold all of the kittens, so she picked up each one in turn. Also, I ended up holding some of them.

Later, we went to the bat houses on the UF campus to watch the bats fly out at dusk. Except we were really early for that, so we first checked out the nearby Baughman Center and watched the gators swimming around in Lake Alice. We also took a brief detour to my old apartment building because Kate wanted to see it. Having visited me there during her first three trips to the US, she had a rosier overall image of the place than I did. When she wasn’t there, I would spend most of my time avoiding strange roommates, eating pizza by myself, killing fleas, and not cleaning anything.

The next day, we set off for South Florida. My dad took the day off from work to drive us to Lakeland, and we took Amtrak the rest of the way. I had only taken Amtrak once before—namely, the express service between DC and Orlando for you and your car—so I didn’t have much of an impression of how it was. I knew that in Europe, you get assigned a seat when you buy a ticket. In the USA, or at least in Lakeland, they tell you where to sit when you get on the train, and they group you together by destination. They also write your destination on a piece of paper and stick it above your seat. It’s shameful.

It was time for a late lunch, so Kate and I went to the dining car. We lingered there for quite a while, and when we came back, some other people had been given our seats, so we had to find some other seats that were empty (though maybe they belonged to someone who was in the lounge car or whatever). Finally, we arrived in familiar old South Florida. I hadn’t been there in almost a year and a half.

Since none of my friends nor anyone on CouchSurfing could put us up, we fell back on the Passport Service. Count that as a perk of being an Esperantist; I was this close to dropping $400 on a hotel. So this Esperantist picked us up from the station and introduced us to his husband. We spoke Esperanto with each other, even as we went out for dinner at a pizza place. I hadn’t spoken it in a while, but it came rather easily.

The following day, Kate and I had a late lunch with my friends Nick and TJ. We went to this place on the beach that Kate had a Groupon for. It was nice to catch up with them. I wanted to spend more time with them, but they had to split because they both had to work that night. So Kate and I hung out on the beach for a little while, and then I called up my friend Kevin and asked if he wanted to hang out. He picked us up, and we went to take a stroll in downtown Fort Lauderdale.

None of us had ever been on the Water Taxi before, so flagged down one of their boats from the banks of the New River and rode the entire route, down the river, up the Intracoastal, and back. On the way, we got to see a lot of rich people’s huge houses, still decorated for Christmas, and unfamiliar views of familiar bridges and buildings. I’m very glad that we did it. It stops near some convenient places, like Las Olas Boulevard, and once you have a ticket, you can use it to get on and off for the rest of the day. Protip: tickets are $10 per person after 5 PM.

Possibly related link: Why Do Russians Smile So Seldom? For what it’s worth, I think Kate is smilier than the average Russian.

Apparently no company currently makes them, and only websites that sell them are a few online stores that cater to left-handers. Of those, I found that England-based Left-Handed.com had the best selection and the lowest prices, so in November, I ordered one there. Not long after, I received a left-handed Swiss Army knife from them, but it wasn’t the model I ordered. The one I wanted had scissors, and the one I got had some different tools, including a wrench.

I could see how they could have made that mistake. The two models are similarly priced (about $40), and the knife I got was packaged in its original box, which didn’t identify the model. They were probably next to each other on the shelf. No big deal, I figured. So I sent the store an e-mail letting them know about the mix-up and asking for an exchange (although I was secretly hoping they’d let me keep both).

Two weeks passed and I didn’t hear anything from them, so I went ahead and mailed them the knife in the original box with the invoice and a note asking for them to send me the right knife. I chose to send the package First Class (misleadingly, the lowest tier of service that the USPS offers for shipping), which, to Left-Handed.com in England, cost me $11. I didn’t count on them paying me back for any shipping more expensive than that, so I didn’t get a tracking number or anything.

After a few weeks, I still hadn’t heard from Left-Handed.com, so I sent them a message through the contact form on their website. The holidays came and went—no reply. Last week, I tried calling the phone number listed on their website, but no one picked up, not even an answering machine. Then I tried calling them during their business hours (1 AM to 8 AM Pacific Time—not an easy thing for me!), and no one picked up then either. Finally, I sent them another message via the contact form, asking as politely as possible for the item I bought.

Okay, so maybe I sent the first e-mail to a no-reply address. Maybe they didn’t get the package. Maybe their contact form is broken or my messages got stuck in their spam filter. Maybe they don’t have an answering machine, and maybe they had closed up shop early when I called. But I very much doubt that all of the above are true. They seem to be ignoring me, plain and simple. I understand that my story may not sound credible—maybe people have tried to rip them off before—but a simple “We don’t believe you” would be more courteous. If this was my fault, my mistake was to be too trusting.

At this point, I don’t know what recourse I have. I originally paid by PayPal, but it’s too late for me to file a complaint with them. (Of course, if I had thought to do it earlier, I would have.) It seems that the only way to get the attention of Left-Handed.com would be to buy something else from them, although I’m very unlikely to give them any more of my money due to the way they’ve treated me. It looks like I’m out 50 bucks, so I guess all I can do is warn everyone not to make the mistake of doing business with them.

Oh, and I’ll send them a link to this post too, in case it gets their attention.

I’ve often wondered if there’s a website that keeps track of the surprisingly common trend of homophobic public figures being outed as gay themselves. Turns out there is: Gay Homophobe succinctly announces “# days since the last prominent homophobe was caught in a gay sex scandal” (25 as of right now) and lists previous “winners” (there were seven last year alone).

Way too early in the morning on Saturday, December 24, I took a taxi to Seattle-Tacoma International Aiport. After a layover in Phoenix (spoiler alert for those who haven’t been there: the landscape is all brown), I found myself at good old Orlando International Airport, waiting for Kate to fly in and my family to pick us up.

After a long wait, Kate arrived and so did my parents and my sister. We set off back to my parents’ house, where we had some light noms for dinner and decorated the Christmas tree. Some people always decorate their Christmas tree on Christmas Eve, but in my family we normally do it super early, so it was nice for my family to wait. My dad and/or mom had actually cut down the tree themselves since they live out in the relative wilderness now, near Christmas tree farms and things like that.

The next morning was Christmas morning, and, still jetlagged, I slept way in. By the time everyone woke up, it was time for a late breakfast, so we decide to eat before opening presents. Then we exchanged gifts. It was such a familiar feeling to me that it was hard to remember that I wasn’t home for Christmas the previous year. I normally dread giving gifts because I never know what to get, but this year I felt like I’d picked some winners. (I was really happy with the stuff I got, too. I’m surrounded by good gift-givers.) Later, other friends/family came over for a turkey dinner, and after that, more gifts were exchanged. It was a great Christmas.

The day after that was a pretty lazy day. My parents had the day off, so we all went for a hike nearby. It might have been pretty cold by my previous standards, but I found that after living in Seattle for less than a year, I could withstand the Florida winter a lot better. We probably did other things that day, but I don’t remember what they were.

On Tuesday, Kate wanted to explore nearby Gainesville, but my parents had to work. Fortunately, my Aunt Sandi volunteered to take us around, and we even visited some places I had never been to before. After going to Bealls Outlet (one of Kate’s favorite stores), we tried to go to the Devil’s Millhopper only to find that they were closed on Tuesdays. Nearby was a musical instrument store I had never been to, so we checked it out. We plinked around on a steel drum, surely to the delight of everyone who was working and shopping there, and I strummed some acoustic guitars for Kate.

For lunch, we went to The Jones, a local-type restaurant that I had wanted to go to with Kate during one of her previous visits (that time, we went to an Italian buffet instead). The food was great, and I’d love to go there again.

Well, that’s all I have to time to impart right now. Next time: kittens.

You probably know that certain societies (ours not being among them) have a lax attitude toward drinking alcohol. So it seems that the effects of alcohol are a self-fulfilling prophecy. The author of this article for the BBC suggests that if we make alcohol seem boring to kids, they’ll stop binge drinking and engaging in other drunken shenanigans.

In the days leading up to 2011, I had arrived in Russia to see Kate, first spending a few very busy days in Saint Petersburg before actually visiting her. Once we were together, she showed me around her hometown, and then, more relevant to this discussion, 2011 happened.

• January 1 – I ring in the new year with Kate in Russia.
• January 4 – I arrive home from Russia.
• January 10 – I’m hanging out with my friend Andrea when she finds out she got in to her first choice of law school.
• January 24 – I talk to representatives from Amazon at my department’s career fair and give them my resume.
• January 26 – Amazon offers to interview me on campus.
• February 2 – I have a first-round interview with Amazon.
• February 3 – Having passed the first round, I go through a second round of interviews.
• February 9 – I see Penn & Teller speak (both of them!) at UF.
• February 10 – I get a job offer from Amazon.
• March 18 – I find out that Krishna Lunch volunteer Stacie has died.
• April 14 – I get honored for my two and a half years of service to the Dean of Students Office at UF.
• April 30-May 1 – Graduation weekend: My sister graduates on Saturday, and I graduate on Sunday.
• May 6-8 – My sister accompanies me on an apartment-hunting trip to Seattle.
• May 9 – I’m quoted in a news article about Where’s George?
• May 14 – Kate arrives in Florida to visit me again.
• May 19 – I move out of my apartment in Gainesville.
• May 20-22 – I vacation with family and friends at the family condo in Fort Pierce.
• May 22 – With Kate in tow, I set off for Seattle.
• May 24-27 – Andy visits Kate and me in Seattle.
• May 28-30 – Kate and I visit Olympia and Aberdeen, Washington.
• May 31 – My first day of work at Amazon.
• June 2 – Kate ends her visit to the US.
• June 4 – I buy furniture for my new apartment.
• June 21 – I move in to my new apartment in downtown Seattle.
• June 25 – I watch an LGBT pride parade go down my street.
• July 4 – I have some people over for a housewarming/Fourth of July party.
• July 9 – I apply for my Washington state ID card.
• July 13 – I celebrate my birthday with a few friends.
• July 30 – I watch the Seafair parade go down my street.
• August 15 – I go on a community crime watch walk in my neighborhood.
• September 1-6 – For my first vacation from work, I visit my family in Florida.
• September 21-23 – I host my first CouchSurfer.
• September 30 – I see a movie presented in Cinerama at the local Cinerama theater.
• October 14-16 – I visit my friend Luke in Oregon.
• October 23 – I go to the Northwest Chocolate Festival and CroatiaFest at the Seattle Center.
• November 19 – I go to a benefit show featuring Rainn Wilson and others.
• November 24 – I celebrate my first Thanksgiving away from my family, and indeed, everyone else.
• December 24-31 – I meet up with Kate in Florida and we visit my family and friends. More details to come!

As you can see, I haven’t written much during the latter half of this year. I haven’t done very much during that time either. In 2012, I resolve to do more interesting things and to write more. We’ll see how that goes.

Happy New Year!

The new interface, known as Unity, has made a lot of users upset, and a great deal of digital ink has been spilled over its flaws. I don’t mean to jump into the mostly one-sided flame wars, but hey, it looks like that’s what I’m doing. But I just want to peacefully opine, for anyone interested now or in the future, in my own little space (here).

So, here’s basically why the change was made in the first place. The software that powers Ubuntu’s interface is called GNOME, and the current version (2.x) was getting pretty old. By default, it looks mostly like traditional Windows, except that that the panel on the bottom of the screen is just for open programs and the panel on there’s a panel on top for the time and everything else. (Here’s a screenshot of my desktop from a few years ago.) The GNOME developers recently decided to overhaul everything and call it GNOME 3. The new GNOME looks more like Mac OS X, with a single panel along the top of the screen and a section for program icons on the side.

Meanwhile, the Ubuntu people decided to come up with their own interface for GNOME, called Unity, which happens to look and behave a lot like standard GNOME 3. I’m sure they have their reasons for duplicating the GNOME developers’ work, but I don’t know what those reasons are. I do know, or can guess, that Ubuntu wants to attract new users by making things simpler (or, from the perspective of the power user, dumbing things down) and by making them more visible on tiny mobile devices. So there’s that.

I’ve been using Unity for about a month, and I have to say that it’s so-so. It’s pretty flashy, even for little old me with an unsupported graphics card, but it’s still rough around the edges. There’s some inconsistency with the way some applications behave: the top bar is supposed to show the menu (file, edit, etc., whatever it’s called) when the cursor is over it and the window title when it’s not, but not all applications support that behavior. And some programs (such as LibreOffice Calc) sometimes don’t show up in the collection of icons (which I believe is called the launcher, which is confusing because previously a launcher was a shortcut).

One big mark against Unity is that it’s hard to customize. I know they tried to make it simple for new users, but I had to download a separate program (gnome-tweak-tool) just to be able to change simple things like the default font size (which is enormous—this is for you, mobile users!). That’s inexcusable. (In fact, the default whole theme is hideous, so I went through some trial and error to pick out a theme that I liked.) And while I found the default font (creatively titled Ubuntu) to be pretty ugly, the thin version (Ubuntu Light) is sexy as hell, if a bit hard to read at first. I recommend it.

Overall, I don’t think Unity is great yet, but it has potential. I really wish Ubuntu hadn’t come up with its own competitor to GNOME 3, but such is the world of free software: if you don’t like something (even if it’s for some silly reason), you can do it your way.

Next time, I’ll be talking about things that aren’t boring. Stay tuned!

Are you an introvert? I am, but fortunately, I don’t get asked a lot of ignorant questions about it. In case you do, it might be good to provide some snappy answers. Example: “Why are you always so serious?” “Always? Have you been stalking me?” On second thought, maybe it’s better to sit down and try to have a productive conversation about introversion, so just take these for whatever entertainment value they may provide.

It was my first Thanksgiving away from my family. Lots of people travel on and around Thanksgiving, and I didn’t want to be caught up in all that stuff when I’d just be visiting them in a month for Christmas. So I stayed here instead.

All of my friends either went away to their families or had their families visit them. I entertained the thought of volunteering at a soup kitchen or something like that, but I didn’t really try too hard to find out about it. I’d also heard that they would turn people away due to a surplus of volunteers. (It sounds like nonsense now that I think about it, but whatever…)

I slept in. I caught the Macy’s parade (tape-delayed, I guess), and I had been watching it for a few minutes when some singer missed his cue to start lip-syncing his own song. That’s when the TV went off. Not long after, I video-chatted with my family.

Once it was getting to be around dinner time, I went to the famous 5 Point Cafe for dinner. I was pretty sure that they had a “Thanksgiving dinner” on their regular menu, but they actually didn’t. They were in Thanksgiving mode there, though. It was pretty crowded, so I sat at pretty much the only seat I could find, which was at the far end of the counter on the restaurant side. On the wall next to me, where the daily specials are usually listed, was written each employee’s name and what he or she was thankful for.

For Thanksgiving, they were serving actual Thanksgiving dinners (i.e., for more than one person), but there was no way I was going to buy or eat that much food. I ended up getting the chicken fried steak, which I had never had there before. I could only eat half of it (they say they have the biggest chicken fried steak in Seattle, and I believe them), so I saved the rest and ordered a slice of pumpkin pie. I kind of like pumpkin pie, and we’re not a pumpkin pie family for whatever reason, so I figured I might as well.

After that, I went to the Cinerama down the street and saw The Muppets. Even though it’s common for movies to be released on Thanksgiving, I’m pretty sure I’ve never been to the movies on Thanksgiving, so I didn’t know how crowded it would be. It wasn’t very (although the theater is huge). The movie itself was great fun, and I’d recommend it to everybody.

That’s about all I did on Thanksgiving. The next day, I didn’t have the day off, so like most of my co-workers who didn’t take the day off, I worked from home. That went pretty well except that I had just changed my password and my laptop decided not to accept either my old password or my new password after I had locked it. I actually went to work with my laptop to see if I could log in there, and I could, so I went back home immediately and continued working.

Interesting/creepy: every Beatles song played at the same time. (Via waxy.org)

I rounded up everyone I knew who wanted to come (i.e., a couple of people), and we went. Well, first we had a brief board game night at Mark’s place, and then we set out for dinner and then went to the show after that. It was pretty cool to be handed a free book along with our ticket, although the book wasn’t particularly interesting. I mean, I guess you would love it if you dig philosophy (paging Peter). It basically consists of a bunch of philosophical questions, and you’re supposed to ponder the answers and fill them in yourself, or something like that. There’s also a great deal of art on every page.

So that was something to look at as we sat in our seats. I wouldn’t have bought it, but yeah, it will look good on my shelf. By the way, our seats were pretty bad. We actually were given tickets for seats in the very last row, right in front of the sound people. Apparently the people giving out the daily-deal tickets were giving them out randomly, so if things had been different, we could have gotten much better seats just by coming earlier or later. (Or we could have gotten seats in the same row, of course.)

Anyway, eventually the show started. Phoenix Jones, Seattle’s (in)famous real-life superhero, talked about the bad press he’d received lately and decided to unmask himself… as Rainn Wilson! The real Phoenix Jones came out later and shared some of his more amusing missteps in his history of fighting crime. Of course, he kept the suit on and didn’t mention his real name, although it has been revealed in the press.

There was some music, including this band that was playing its second-to-last show, some pop guitar guy (you know the type), and the singer from the Decemberists (who played some sad country songs). In between those were monologues and dialogues with Rainn Wilson and others, including Mindy Kaling (also of TV’s The Office—she read from her new book) and Anna Faris. And in between those were videos: several by this foundation that the whole show was put on for, and a couple of blooper reels from recent episodes of The Office.

There were also raffles during the show. Prizes included gift certificates to local businesses (I think) and a Dwight Schrute (Rainn Wilson’s character on TV’s The Office) bobblehead signed by Rainn Wilson. (He humorously dismissed it as a meaningless prize.) Additional lulz were had when the impromptu decision was made to raffle off Mindy Kaling’s Seattle gear (she appeared onstage looking, in Rainn Wilson’s words, as if “grunge threw up”). A few minutes later, Mindy Kaling appeared onstage again to ask the lucky winner for her BlackBerry back; it had been in her ugly sweater or something.

So, what was the point of the whole thing? Well, apparently Rainn Wilson is from Seattle, and the purpose of the show was to draw attention to this group called the Mona Foundation that promotes education for kids (mostly girls) around the world. All the proceeds from the show went to the foundation, so I paid them half as much as I could have. That’s kind of amusing.

It’s really cool to live in a big city where big-name events like this are practically in my neighborhood. I look forward to many more (and hopefully more of my friends will want to go with me next time).

And now, here’s a mesmerizing time-lapse video of the Earth as seen from the International Space Station.

But my trusty Victorinox is a bit awkward to use. Even though I’ve had it for years, I’m still clumsy pulling out the blades or trying to use the scissors. It’s because I’m a left-hander using a tool designed for right-handed people.

I usually don’t like make a big deal out of the fact that I’m left-handed, but it’s frustrating to live in a world where everything is designed to be used easily by right-handed people. My everyday inconveniences are invisible to them. They don’t have to use the “wrong” hand to press buttons on the microwave or open double doors (why not have them both unlocked?). They find the arrangement of buttons on the remote control to be completely intuitive, and they can adjust their watch like it’s nothing. It’s almost as if I’m in (literally) a mirror universe where everything is inexplicably off.

So, what makes a Swiss Army knife left-handed? Well, right-handed Swiss Army knives are designed to be used easily by right-handers, so on a left-handed one, everything opens out the opposite way. (Exercise: Hold a Swiss Army knife in your left hand. With your right hand, pull out the [larger] blade. It is now pointing toward you.) If it includes scissors or a corkscrew, those are reversed as well. (Right-handers turn clockwise, lefties turn counter-clockwise.) Here’s a video that explains more.

Left-handed Swiss Army knives are surprisingly hard to find. I contacted Victorinox and Wenger, the makers of authentic Swiss Army knives. The representative from Victorinox said that their tools “should be ambidextrous” (which you now know is baloney). Wenger said that they had tried making left-handed knives but that they had stopped due to low demand. So they did exist.

I called around to local outdoorsy and cutlery-type stores. None of them had any—at one place, the guy even asked if I was pulling his leg. (“How can a knife be left-handed?”) I scoured the Internet and found some for sale in online stores that sell left-handed things. They’re all made by Wenger, and they all have this dopey “left-handed” symbol on them (an international floating-head guy with a glowing left nub), perhaps to serve as a warning to the rest of the population. They’re also more expensive than their right-handed counterparts, but it looks like left-handed.com has the best selection (five models!) and the most reasonable prices.

So, after much searching and comparing, I’ve just bought this one, and it should be arriving… eventually. The site’s based in the UK, and the shipping was cheap.

The instruction booklet for Monopoly is like the Bible: everyone thinks they know what it says, but no one actually reads it. Monopoly can actually be fast-paced and interesting if you play by the rules.