Anecdotes


Resist False Winter
(326 Words. April 24, 2011, 12:06 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Yesterday was the warmest day of the year to date, reaching 69 degrees at this nearby weather station. According to UW professor Cliff Mass, the spring has been the coldest on record since 1948 from an off-the-cuff perspective (number of days over 55). I moved a bunch of the furniture from our main living area out on to the…

I Dream of Maakies
(510 Words. April 24, 2011, 11:49 AM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
I awoke on April 23 from a dream, which I felt immediately compelled to share with the artist concerned (Tony Millionaire, of Maakies and more): I had a detailed dream of a huge, twenty-five-pound signed-and-numbered limited edition Maakies book, 24 x 12 or thereabouts and and two inches thick, indigo dyed upper edging and deckle pages on the opening…

Up in the Air
(588 Words. September 09, 2010, 07:45 AM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
A couple of weeks ago, just before heading to California to visit family, a friend’s tweet alerted me to something I should have known long in advance. The Airship Ventures Zeppelin NT “Eureka” was headed in to town for a two week stint out of Everett’s Paine Field. A bit of online legwork, and I had left a message…

The Sun that Burns
(539 Words. August 30, 2010, 11:23 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
On Saturday, I spent the whole day sitting on the beach near the San Onofre nuclear plant, reading. The whole day was cool, and the morning, from 10 to 1 or so, was grey and misty, quite pleasant. Just as the clouds pushed back offshore, the Goodyear blimp mosied on by, headed south at about 800 feet. I friended…

Floaty
(72 Words. August 24, 2010, 05:19 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
The Airship Ventures Zeppelin NT is in town or thereabouts until September 8 or 9. I booked us in on a morning flight, September 5. Longtime blog readers will understand my insane levels of excitement. I drove up to Paine Field and back this afternoon on a scouting expedition. You can’t see it in this picture, but the cabin…

RIP Harvey
(304 Words. July 12, 2010, 09:27 AM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Local-news site Cleveland.com reports that comic-book writer, jazz critic, and curmudgeon Harvey Pekar died overnight at his home: Pekar, 70, was found dead shortly before 1 a.m. today by his wife, Joyce Brabner, in their Cleveland Heights home, said Powell Caesar, spokesman for Cuyahoga County Coroner Frank Miller. I can’t help but think Harvey would be amused that his…

warm
(7 Words. July 08, 2010, 10:28 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Summer, finally, after six months of sixty….

Capture culture
(228 Words. July 06, 2010, 09:07 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
I found some Possum videos today. She spent so much time in my lap that using Photo Booth was obvious, unobtrusive, and, frankly, forgotten until juts now. I may post some eventually. I have been using an iPhone for a couple of weeks now. I’m predictably dissatisfied, primarily because of the many, many things it can’t do that my…

Dead Bird
(236 Words. July 05, 2010, 10:53 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
So, speaking of the dead young of our avian neighbors, one of our cats brought the body of a small bird into the house today. We’re not sure who it was, but the general hunterly evidence of late points to our nearly year-old boy cat, George. Viv called out to me about it as was I was in the…

The Eagle
(235 Words. July 04, 2010, 03:09 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
As I was rebedding lettuce this afternoon, the crows started squawking and raising a ruckus, a sure sign that an eagle is near. Usually you can tell where the eagle is by following the shifting trajectories of the crows as they fly toward the center of the mob, chasing the eagle around the sky until the bird leaves. This…

specs
(319 Words. July 02, 2010, 05:06 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Well over a year ago, I bought a turn-of-the-century pair of spectacles off ebay for around $5. One of the pulled-wire temples was broken, and I had it repaired before I got lenses cut for the hardware, which consists of a padless bridge, the hinges, and the temples. Unfortunately the temple repair was poor and broke immediately. I waited…

Deluge
(27 Words. June 20, 2010, 12:49 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
It is raining like to wash the house away. In other news, a good man and a good friend just let me know that he is engaged!…

smudges and smears
(6 Words. June 15, 2010, 11:39 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
I seem to be drawing again….

Mucky Pup
(38 Words. June 07, 2010, 07:54 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
The dog park was like a swamp today! I headed up with the pooch around 2 pm, when the sun peeked out for two seconds, but by the time I got there, it had started to sprinkle again….

Gusher
(581 Words. June 02, 2010, 06:29 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Such rain today! Coming back to the house at about eleven, I looked northwest from the top deck of the high I-5 bridge, up and over to the Ballard fishing port. Just past the two bridges that mark Fremont, the rain faded the city and boats to foggy gray. Looking up, above my fellow motorists, I could see that…

More Possum
(319 Words. May 22, 2010, 03:51 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
I suppose I should write this down now, as ten months is a short time to know a small animal, and the memories won’t get any clearer. Possum’s favorite toy was a stuffed squirrel, which she began playing with when it was the same size as she. We buried it with her. Viv took some pictures of me holding…

RIP Possum kitty, July 7, 2009 - May 22, 2010
(224 Words. May 22, 2010, 03:14 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
I had just set about lighting a fire on this chilly May day when Viv burst through the front door in tears. Startled, I jumped and swore. Viv said, “Possum…” and I replied with certainty, “Possum’s dead.” Viv led me down the front steps to the edge of the driveway, and our darling baby girl cat lay stiff and…

Spring '10
(15 Words. April 11, 2010, 04:59 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Smell of woodsmoke on the air, sun through light overcast, cool April air. Feels good….

gone
(12 Words. March 25, 2010, 10:55 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
I miss certain solo-proprietor specialty shops in the urban core sumpin’ fierce….

Nighttime
(511 Words. March 22, 2010, 07:55 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
OK, so, uh. On St. Patrick’s Day, a rock musician and studio guru named Alex Chilton passed away at 59 from a heart attack while mowing his lawn in New Orleans. Chilton is best known to the average person as the author of the theme song to ‘That 70’s Show,’ a song called “In the Street” originally written for…

Les Heures
(117 Words. March 15, 2010, 10:00 AM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
I experienced a lucid dream this morning in which I stumbled upon a sub-basement sited comics shop specializing in European imports. The shop was called “Les Heures,” and all the commerce information, such as the times of operation, was displayed in French as well. After making my way down the stairs into the shop itself, I greeted the proprietor…

man, what a great day
(197 Words. February 07, 2010, 04:19 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
I haven’t felt this happy at five o’clock in years. I began the day ready to head to a contract call, but they cancelled (booo, but no hard feelings). That left me with a few more hours in the day, and my initial plan was to start working on some tax-and-accounting stuff - our 2010 income will be complicated…

More sooner!
(9 Words. February 04, 2010, 12:07 AM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Biweekly music playing with Joe and Greg. Yes please….

Runways
(66 Words. February 01, 2010, 05:16 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
couple weeks ago, I went for a long walk in Sand Point and came across a ‘new’ trail, which appeared to simply have been bulldozed back down to the WWII runways. It was very SF, like seeing what landscape engineering in an orbital or trans-system ship. Come to think of it, the little village right next to the radomes…

argh
(29 Words. January 26, 2010, 06:04 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Which cat is it that is not properly using the litter box? How can I isolate for and test this? Lock one at a time in the basement, maybe?…

Yelling
(129 Words. January 20, 2010, 06:11 AM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
I awakened this morning from a dream in which while at a darkened coin-operated video-game arcade, I took a series of calls from competing IT salespeople which culminated in IT salesperson A yelling at me for even considering speaking to IT salesperson B. I told him to get fucked, as one might well imagine. Still, what an odd dream….

Good and bad
(225 Words. January 18, 2010, 05:28 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Finally, we have higher-speed internet access: 2.x mbps as opposed to the former 256k dsl. Swapping out the access points and routers went very smoothly, thank heavens. The biggest stumbling block was dealing with the behavior of a mixed pack of Airport Express wireless networking devices. Thankfully they have settled down and give every sign of continued maintenance-free networking…

Karel
(328 Words. January 02, 2010, 08:28 AM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Last night I had an elaborate dream about my deceased friend Karel - somehow he and I had managed to obtain some sort of subsidized space in a large, castle-like building. His family was there, or at any rate my dream version of it. The majority of the tenants were from Eastern Europe and my job was to coordinate…

The Eve of the Feast of Osiris
(1005 Words. December 15, 2009, 04:32 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Recently, while conducting my annual researches into the origins of the beloved holiday legend of Osiris Claus, I had occasion to venture deep into the vaulted reaches of a dusky book-crypt. Far and far I had crept, flickering cell-phone my only source of illumination as I scanned the cobwebbed stacks in search of the rumored grimoire. Out amidst the…

More WTO
(1173 Words. December 01, 2009, 06:44 AM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
I looked through my blog archives to see what all I’ve written about WTO and was surprised when I only turned up this relatively short piece. I did a hard drive search and found the letter I sent to the city council which appears to have been based on the shorter version previously posted, but which also includes the…

Back to the Old and Weird
(96 Words. November 29, 2009, 05:00 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Had brunch with Kineta and Demian before a viewing of the great “Old, Weird America” exhibit at the Frye. A communications snafu meant that Adrian was not tracked down to join, which seems a shame. I had seen the show a couple weeks ago while waiting for a League meeting and it knocked my socks off, especially the work…

Mulch and muck
(198 Words. November 28, 2009, 03:13 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Finally gave the lawn a winter haircut, mulchinated the leaves in after waiting for the whole treeload to end up on the ground. Just before I started mowing, I noticed a bit of white plastic peeping out from an eroding bare spot in a corner of the yard that we know was used as a dump by prior owners….

LIbrary mystery
(56 Words. November 25, 2009, 02:57 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Hey UW people! How are the books that line the walls in the giant Suzallo study room organized? There does not seem to be a system, and the books do not have dewey decimal tags. The spines nearest me are a jumble: “Pacific Slope Railroads” is next to the “New Oxford Book of Carols,” et cetera….

Worried pooch
(84 Words. November 16, 2009, 07:09 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
The windstorm last night freaked the dog out and since then he will not sit still until he is allowed to touch me. Last night that took the form of rooting around until he got my hand on his head and today during the day it has meant that he has been lying on at least one of my…

Stormy
(58 Words. November 06, 2009, 07:25 AM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Man! That storm last night was really something. I was too tired to wake up and appreciate it properly, though. Still, giant thunderstorms are one of the things I miss about the weather from elsewhere. Haven’t walked around the house to check for deadfall yet but I bet there are some downed trees and limbs here or there….

Not as planned
(318 Words. November 04, 2009, 05:37 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Today was a hamster wheel of falling behind. First, I woke up at 5:30, thanks to the time change. Not a bad thing, necessarily, but around 1 pm I really started feeling it. Then, my first-off activity in the morning is scouring Craigslist ads and prepping responses. There were so many this morning that I did not wind up…

Twenty
(1638 Words. June 04, 2009, 05:03 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
initially posted as a comment on MetaFilter earlier today In summer of 1989 I was in college and had been taking some summer courses. In one class I was taking, a drawing class, a fellow student and I were the most accomplished draftsmen in the class. Interested in each other’s work and one another, we struck up a casual…

hot!
(58 Words. June 02, 2009, 06:09 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Our last freeze was just about a month ago. Today, we are entering the third day of sustained heat. It’s not being reported as in the 90s, but it sure is in parts of my house and yard. I keep telling myself it’s good for the garden, but I know damn well it ain’t good for me….

Arrgh
(15 Words. March 20, 2009, 04:54 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
I am fundamentally NOT GRATEFUL and am absolutely certain: it is a waste of time….

frame changes
(221 Words. February 19, 2009, 09:59 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Around 1986, I visited my sister in Bruxelles. One evening, we visited a young man who was a critic, and who specialiized in bandes dessinées, comics. His rundown nineteenth century student apartment was lined, floor to ceiling, in hard-bound albums, the large format 64-page books that are standard for ‘serious’ Euro-comics. They were all in French, and we were…

Endless
(30 Words. February 16, 2009, 09:49 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
As a child, I intensely desired the Endless Book. Now that it flows through my computer hourly, I see that I was quite mistaken in my desires, exactly as forewarned….

Glass
(32 Words. February 16, 2009, 09:48 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Finally getting some semi-normal PNW weather. My glass-room part of the house was in the eighties today; it is time to start sprouting stuff. Nevermind the drought out in the Big Room….

Valentines
(230 Words. February 14, 2009, 05:30 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Spent today running around with Viv. We ate breakfast at the new-to-us Caprice Kitchen, at 80th and 15th in upper Ballard, and enjoyed it. Looks like it might be worth a trip for dinner. Google Street View shows fewer businesses at that corner than there are now, most of which look newish. However it also looks like there was…

nope
(56 Words. January 25, 2009, 08:19 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
I remember a really detailed visualization of a soon-future west-coast ecotopia, due in my adulthood, involving cedar groves, legal pot, solar panels, and so forth. I can’t say I look to that any longer. I can still smell the sandalwood, but it means something different to me these days, something I no longer feel desire toward….

Harold's
(68 Words. January 20, 2009, 08:57 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Harold’s Reno. Viv bought me a kooky souvenir drink galss, evidently circa 1963-1973, in the likeness of a cone-free Saturn V lunar orbiter. It’s inscribed “Harold’s Moonshot,” “Reno,” and “Liquid fuel fill red line,” or words to that effect. I am personally certain the drink was originally served with an umbrella cap supplying the crew capsule, but have yet…

SNOWPOCALYPSE AUGHT-EIGHT DAY ONE
(142 Words. January 19, 2009, 08:35 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
SOMETIME AROUND DECEMBER 18: The snow came last night around 8, and it is sticking like crazy. Our steeply inclined death-ride of a street is snaring the unwary as usual, cars caroming their way to the bottom of the hill like billiard balls on a slanted table. Every few minutes brings the high-pitched whine of wildly spinning drive wheels…

shit i'll never know
(17 Words. January 18, 2009, 11:05 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
for some reason, i guess, people think of me as a positive person, which really irritates me….

Cables and snow
(34 Words. December 19, 2008, 09:03 AM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
On the way to work this morning my cable chains snapped. The resulting body damage to my car will clearly exceed the purchase price of a new laptop this year. Fuck you, Osiris Claus….

SNOWPOCALYPSE AUGHT-EIGHT DAY ONE
(138 Words. December 14, 2008, 06:05 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
The snow came last night around 8, and it is sticking like crazy. Our steeply inclined death-ride of a street is snaring the unwary as usual, cars caroming their way to the bottom of the hill like billiard balls on a slanted table. Every few minutes brings the high-pitched whine of wildly spinning drive wheels as people try to…

I'LL GET THE CHAIR FOR THIS
(328 Words. December 13, 2008, 04:47 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Today whilst conducting post-work errands, I stumbled upon a peg-built Windsor-esque chair featuring what appears to be the logo of Harvard University - three open books displaying the word “VERITAS” set within a shield and oak leaves. I recalled seeing chairs just like this in my childhood during a year my family spent in Boston while my dad was…

what
(304 Words. October 18, 2008, 09:10 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Fellow MeFite and undeclared internet lingo pope Languagehat semi-recently posted on an internet-only coinage, the undeclaimed and unpunctuated use of the word what on a line by itself in comment threads. Generally speaking, the usage connotes an unemotive but nonplussed response to novel stimuli. Something like your grandmother processing the concept of trepanation, or your parents’ response to your…

Hard
(20 Words. October 18, 2008, 08:51 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
I have had some hard days lately. Today is one, no doubt. October becomes November with agonizing deliberation this year….

Forgetful
(48 Words. October 08, 2008, 10:19 AM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
When I woke up this morning, I felt very sad, but did not remember why for a minute or two. It was odd - the sadness was a distinct, physical feeling, which for a few moments was disconnected from anything I could hook it up to in memory….

Vested
(287 Words. August 18, 2008, 08:39 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Finally getting around to watching the third and final season of Deadwood, loving it as much as the initial two runs. I was startled to note that the vest worn by Hearst in the scenes where he is placed under arrest by Sheriff Bullock is a near match to one of my antiques. Pausing the show and rushing down…

Snap
(95 Words. August 17, 2008, 02:55 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Just now, as I was eating a small snack (cold edamame, if you must know) when I heard and felt an unexpected SNAP in my throat, at the level of my larynx. It coincided with swallowing, and now my entire throat os extremely sore with the pain concentrated at the prow of my larynx. My jaw muscles have also…

Arc
(64 Words. August 09, 2008, 08:23 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
UPDATE: For a much more impressive shot of the same rainbow, which really captures the intensity of the thing, see here. The image above is heavily color-manipulated from the original below, using only photoshop basic selection and color-enhancement tools. It begins to approximate what we just returned from seeing, sorta. Amazing double rainbow, minutes ago at sunset. Sadly, no decent…

Anniversary
(46 Words. July 19, 2008, 07:07 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Yesterday was my tenth anniversary. At dinner with Viv, we watched the nearly-full moon rise and reflect on the water, framed by scudding clouds. Just at dessert, trees framed a meteor. I watched it spark and fall flaming down the sky to vanish in midair….

Solstice
(24 Words. June 22, 2008, 11:46 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Man, the solstice up here sometimes means four hours of dark, and it like to mess a body up. If a body is me….

Vomit
(30 Words. June 09, 2008, 12:31 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Everything that passes through my mind makes me feel a wave a physical nausea. I am filled with loathing so profound that it is literally bringing bile to my mouth….

ptttt
(11 Words. April 27, 2008, 10:43 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Warm, happy cat on lap impedes keyboarding but prompts blog entry….

Near Ava, Ohio - 1926
(1240 Words. April 23, 2008, 06:56 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Several years ago, casting about for a subject of interest to me on which I felt I might be able to contribute in some small way, I wrote a blog post concerning the wreck of the United States Naval airship Shenandoah. Happy with the result, I had no idea that the piece would become a destination for readers from…

Schwag
(56 Words. April 11, 2008, 12:43 AM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
James gave me a CD after he and Erin played their set at CHAC, which I enjoyed. Hope to have a meal with him while he’s in town. I also found a double-sheet master of SARS Chicken stickers… although they may, in fact, not be by the Chicken Kid, as a moment of pondering reveals….

Worry
(102 Words. April 06, 2008, 07:02 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Oh, man, I’m bummed! A favorite author, who I now count as friend, is suffering some serious diabetic complications. He’s alert and in his usual sardonic good humor, but he’s suffering and it kills me to know it. I do not identify him by name not to draw privy curtains over his illness - I have learned all this…

Circa
(453 Words. April 05, 2008, 05:29 AM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Recently, I was prompted to rummage through the back of a memory drawer by a MetaFilter thread on the circus. In the thread, a poster noted that the classic big-top incarnation of the American circus ended with a terrible and deadly fire in the 1940s. I found this very puzzling, as I have distinct personal memories of having attended a…

Joel
(224 Words. April 02, 2008, 07:42 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
For reasons unknown to me, this guy that used to work at the Safeway on 15th for years and years just popped into my head. He had had some kind of operation that left him without an ear, and generally wore a bandage over it, and a brown, broad-brimmed hat. He also wore a device in a holster on…

Trim
(22 Words. March 25, 2008, 10:32 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Trees chopped, tweaked, twigged, and trimmed. Many plants moved out into the greening, cold spring. Speeding corn moved out of starter flat….

sleepy
(71 Words. March 20, 2008, 04:14 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
For reasons not entirely clear to me, I stayed up too late last night and am very sleepy this afternoon. Had a happy little lunch today in the ID with Greg, whose film is proceeding apace. Wandered around Uwajimaya for ten minutes while waiting for him, always an interesting experience. I was sort of halfheartedly looking for kooky cellphone charms…

Cell phones and servers
(462 Words. February 28, 2008, 05:46 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
So - recently my home-hosted Mac server’s boot drive took a powder, and needed to be hosed and rebuilt. The server functionality has proved significantly more difficult to rebuild than in the past, primarily a function of orphan docs clogging Google search results pertaining to this or that combination of this or that system and server software release. At about…

AT&T hosedown
(226 Words. February 25, 2008, 10:13 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
At around midnight between Monday and Sunday, AT&T (formerly Cingular) started blocking internet access on my cell, which is currently a Treo 680. After a couple hours on the line with their nerds and sales goons, it was established that the company had programatically excluded MediaNet users based on ‘unapproved hardware,’ such as my 680, which is not an approved…

Sun and Wood
(258 Words. February 24, 2008, 07:21 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Most of my day today was spent loading a solid half-cord of well-seasoned but mossy and buggy cedar rounds from some craigslister’s backyard, followed by a dump run to the astonishingly clean and sort-of science-fictiony Shoreline Transfer Station. For my sawbuck, I had been expecting a quarter-cord at the most of iffy wood, not the really decent stuff I ended…

re: Castro
(155 Words. February 19, 2008, 07:08 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
I’ve been asked about this a few times today, so here’s the standard reply, which is a straight-up party-line Cuban-American family reply: Fidel’s retirement doesn’t really change anything, today. It might, if Raoul actually creates programs to change various economic or even political practices. But Raoul’s track record is not such that one anticipates big change. On the other hand,…

Achievers!
(54 Words. February 17, 2008, 05:37 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
This weekend viewed, in theater: Juno There Will Be Blood No Country For Old Men Misc other: Visited EMP and SF museum Chores completed: Vacuuming Dishes Veterinarian visit for dog Long dog walk Grocery run Pantry straightened up, old food tossed Straightened up both living rooms Passport applications filed Online housecleaning and updates finished…

Haints
(180 Words. February 02, 2008, 09:25 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Recent news of mortalities hither and yon - tard bombs, a suicide, another suicide, two or three recent murders, a pet put to sleep - has me musing on my relationship to my own dead. I am told I spend more time with these shades than others do, than is socially common. I don’t have a useful means to evaluate…

Book and Film
(119 Words. December 28, 2007, 08:25 AM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Last night, I dreamt that I have been running a self-published book off of this blog’s archives every X number of words. I held the slim and floppy newsprint perfect-bound paperback in my hands and flipped though it, feeling the metal type impressions and wondering how I was able to afford three-color handset type decorations and one-color engravers cuts of…

light
(13 Words. December 16, 2007, 07:05 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Five days left until my first day off since December 1. Can’t wait….

Mangy
(109 Words. December 07, 2007, 10:11 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
I just took my dog out for a night time constitutional which concluded with me in hot pursuit of our domestic canid, who, in turn, had taken off as if on fire after a smaller animal, an urban coyote, had the temerity to cross our driveway out of the dark. I had assumed coyotes must live around here but this…

Pigeons
(221 Words. November 15, 2007, 04:56 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
As I pulled in, relieved to be free of the terrible rain-bound traffic on I-5 tonight, I noticed a flock of forty pigeons wheeling in the gathering dusk over the arc-lit asphalt of the filling station. Thinking nothing of them, I proceeded about the business of filling my tank. I fiddled with my wallet and selected a credit card, and…

Sims
(101 Words. November 07, 2007, 10:14 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Anybody know if it’s possible to obtain multiple cellphone SIM cards that are all activated as the same number? I noticed when I upgraded viv’s phone a ways back that it came with a new SIM, which I did not use. If I had, would the old SIM remain usable? If not, is the deactivation automatic? There are two parts…

Honey grub
(64 Words. November 03, 2007, 10:04 AM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
I dreamt that three fat honey grubs pupated into thrre brilliantly plumed baby birds, one a toucan. Another appeared to be an African Green but was afflicted with some sort of worm. The grubs were deam-grubs, about an inch long by a half-inch and translucently filled with honey, like insect sushi candy. I wonder if the grubs were inspired by…

Futur passe
(264 Words. October 31, 2007, 11:02 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
I don’t really know if this is interesting in the least, even to my self, except that it must be to me since I just spent the last hour fiddling with gadgets in order to realize that maybe I had something worth the hour I’d just spent. A few years ago I picked up a weird, japanese-market private label (IBM,…

Phon
(65 Words. October 23, 2007, 08:56 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
The ability to stream internet radio on my Treo has me unwarrantedly fascinated. It’s inadvisable to do so if not plugged into a powersource, but I am fascinated by the idea of tuing into WFHB late at night. The Treo’s built-in speaker is crisp and does a decent job with music, as I would expect based on the impressive sound…

Crash
(87 Words. September 20, 2007, 10:18 AM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
Chloe, my sweetheart of a cat, knocked our vintage 2002 iSight webcam to the floor as I was using it to videochat with my parents. It’s dead. I still have to do a couple of tests, but it doesn’t appear on the firewire bus of any of the computers I have checked it on, with differernt cables. Googling for repair…

Quadro
(408 Words. August 24, 2007, 09:31 PM, Comments: 2) MORE >>>
Thanks to the kindness of, in order, a friend and Mr. Steve Jobs, I now have a Treo 680 in place of the past year-or-so of a Nokia 6620. In the intervening time, I have grown quite used to numeric-keypad navigation of the two Symbian OS java apps Google Maps and Gmail, and the switch to Palm’s web browser Blazer…

Bang flash boom
(53 Words. August 23, 2007, 09:16 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
I am heartbroken. Last weekend Lindsey kindly had us as guests on the Saturday afternoon battle sail between the Lady Washington and the Hawaiian Chieftain on Lake Union. I had a camera full of great pictures and video. I just erased it completely due to the non-standard unmountable camera chip file format. Goddamnit….

Lonesome whistle
(68 Words. August 08, 2007, 08:53 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
My suburban childhood home was built in a subdivision which was built around an extant railbed. Although the rails were about a mile away, the nights of my childhood often included that rumble, that jingle and that roar. Often the plaintive hoot of the engine’s warning horn was also heard. These are sounds I have not heard in the night…

Dream
(39 Words. July 21, 2007, 12:04 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
The earwigs, each the size of a full-grown housecat, tugged at the potted plants, lugging them in an ineffectual attempt at camouflage. As they eventually dropped the containers, we were surprised to see hows many of them there were….

The Future
(119 Words. July 19, 2007, 09:57 AM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Viv and I celebrated our ninth wedding anniversary at Ballard’s delectable Se&241;or Moose. The food was as delicious as ever and it is always something else to watch the staff running flat out to get the food out from the tiny, tiny kitchen. Sleepy, we returned home and accidentally caught an episode of the absurd Discovery Channel game show ‘Cash…

The Desert
(1268 Words. July 14, 2007, 03:05 PM, Comments: 4) MORE >>>
We arrived home from Las Vegas - my first visit - last night very, very late. We had been there all last week for my in-laws’ 50th anniversary dinner. My parents, who have also been married fifty years this year, were able to attend. At the dinner, one of Viv’s cousins accepted her long-time beau’s proposal of marriage. This was…

Curds
(9 Words. July 08, 2007, 10:40 AM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
For some reason, this evening I dreamt of poutine….

Forth
(340 Words. July 04, 2007, 08:19 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Toady was an unbelievably beautiful summer day - mid-80’s on my deck and not a cloud in the sky. For unfathomable reasons I was highly productive while at home. I tarred the roof of our deck, which has had torrential leaks under even moderate rain. Now I only have to wait two months for some precipitation to see if I…

Then he strangled it.
(125 Words. June 23, 2007, 05:22 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Boing Boing: Man kills attacking bobcat. It is impossible, of course, to predict how one might react to being attacked by a non-domesticated animal. Personally, I pray I would have the wisdom to spare myself the experience of choking a cat to death. I am, I assure you, warming to the dog. But there will be no more dogs. There…

Burn
(33 Words. June 05, 2007, 09:22 PM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
This weekend was mostly spent out in the yard, uprooting dandelions. As a consequence, the back of my neck and shoulders are fried to a crisp, crackly red which is currently most painful….

Blister
(13 Words. June 02, 2007, 04:52 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
I have developed a blister on my right hand from weeding the yard….

Gimpy
(5 Words. June 01, 2007, 11:37 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
The dog’s sprung a limp!…

Fear the Kraken
(59 Words. May 21, 2007, 11:44 AM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
The Kraken, in his natural habitat - Ivar’s Lake Union. I invented this drink at table and it was, um, a learning experience. 2 oz vodka 1 oz clam juice 1 raw, fresh oyster Shake Vodka and clam juice over ice until clammy. Serve in martini glass. Garnish with oyster. Taste the upwelling fruits of the briny depths….

MIsery
(18 Words. May 12, 2007, 10:37 AM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Odd. 101-degree fever on waking, full-body ache centered in the joints. No snot or fuzzy head, just discomfort….

In dreams
(340 Words. April 29, 2007, 11:15 AM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Last night I dreamt a friend and his wife dropped by for a visit. I was living in a huge semi-converted warehouse studio, the sort of half-baked industrial conversion I associate with twenty-year-old artists. My friend was wearing a hoodie and pants that he had, improbably, decorated with fifty or so of the labor union local emblems I once…

Headache
(258 Words. April 19, 2007, 11:04 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
My headache, into day three now, is so immense and pervasive that the pain it gives approaches beauty. I believe it may be my first real-life migraine. The tip of my nose hurts in ways that are like yet distinct from the pain of cold, of burning, and of bruising. With any luck, i should begin to experience hallucinations…

Loose ends
(405 Words. April 14, 2007, 07:54 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
ITEM: Viv, Greg, Stacey and I attended the Ghost LIght production of Tartuffe, featuring two actors that Greg and I have worked with previously, Michael Oakes (sp?) and Patrick Allcorn. The show was hilarious, easily eclipsing a theater-in-the-park performance (possibly by Theater Schmeater) Viv and I saw about ten years ago under the noisy jets in Volunteer Park. We…

Loose ends
(405 Words. April 14, 2007, 07:53 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
ITEM: Viv, Greg, Stacey and I attended the Ghost LIght production of Tartuffe, featuring two actors that Greg and I have worked with previously, Michael Oakes (sp?) and Patrick Allcorn. The show was hilarious, easily eclipsing a theater-in-the-park performance (possibly by Theater Schmeater) Viv and I saw about ten years ago under the noisy jets in Volunteer Park. We…

Josh Bell rocks (?) the DC Metro
(450 Words. April 07, 2007, 08:58 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
WaPo recasts Josh as busker. He’s game. DC commuters? um. Point: JOSH! I really, really liked this. I sent this note to the WaPo team responsible for the piece. Thank you all for making my day. I knew Josh, distantly, as a kid when we were growing up in Bloomington. I haven’t seen him except to be aware of…

Plus one (or more) (or less)
(256 Words. April 07, 2007, 05:15 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
This morning as I got the paper I heard a new birdcall, a quiet ‘hoo.’ It was coming from very nearby and after a bit of jockeying I was able to see the source. I was surprised to note that the bird appeared to be a smaller-than-I-usually-note Steller’s Jay. I was more surprised by the uncharacteristically melodious call, however….

Outage
(42 Words. April 07, 2007, 05:01 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
My apologies for the downtime today. There may be more over the next week or so. I’m prepping the web server for the upgrade and getting comprehensive backups in place in case of disaster. Tie a knot in your quipu for me….

Ink
(34 Words. April 05, 2007, 08:58 AM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Last night I dreamt I drank a bottle of fountain pen ink. I recall examining my darkened lips and tongue in the mirror and thinking, ‘Why, surely, my shit will be the deepest black.’…

Ms. Jay
(149 Words. March 29, 2007, 08:52 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
A Steller’s Jay is nesting about five feet from my back porch. I think it’s probably a mated pair, as I had noticed a vocal and aggressive (even for these blue meanies) jay yelling at me for the past couple of weeks every time I walked around that side of the house, but tonight after taking my fair share…

Sprung
(11 Words. March 06, 2007, 03:16 PM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
It is 70 degrees out without a cloud in the sky….

Casting
(156 Words. March 03, 2007, 07:21 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
We held casting auditions for the film today at the Shoreline Historical Society, and thanks to the hard work of Greg and Joey, saw the impressive talents of about forty actors. We had a wealth of talented and attractive performers for the female lead, but much fewer for the male roles. Happily, two of the guys that gave it…

Time
(43 Words. February 27, 2007, 07:05 PM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
Was it only six years ago that I had enough personal free time to play in a band and read a novel a week? Is it the terrorists, the capitalists, or the technologists that have stolen my time away? Who do I sue?…

Islamic geometry
(80 Words. February 24, 2007, 10:01 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Here’s the Beeb on that story about the advanced geometry of Islamic art I was flappin’ my gums about at Greg and Stacey’s t’other day. The coverage doesn’t capture the “NO SHIT, SHERLOCK” sense I had as I listened to the coverage, but the last time I really had the same sense of the obvious was listening to Colin…

Blow
(19 Words. February 19, 2007, 08:35 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
The wind is growling around the house and through the trees. Our fire is keeping us warm and sleepy….

Attention Seafarers and Chanteyists
(210 Words. February 18, 2007, 10:48 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
I regret to report that the New Yorker double-issue of this week, Feb. 19-26, 2007 contains a dynamite main course in Mark Singer’s long piece, The Castaways. Why the regret for a terrific piece? Well, it ain’t online, so I can’t extract or link. You, dear reader, will be forced to the extremis of commerce to chime with or…

Warm and sweet
(141 Words. February 17, 2007, 10:21 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
It was as warm and clear as promised, temperatures nearing seventy as the day wore on. Viv and I accomplished a great deal, with her attending a class on dogmanship in the morning while I did load after load after load of laundry. On her return, she straightened a couple rooms in the house and I tidied up the…

Boolshite
(675 Words. January 28, 2007, 08:56 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Over the past few mumfs, I have been running experiments regarding media convergence in our home. I have a Mac Mini set up as a primary media server, connected to an eyeHome breakout box that runs media from the Mini over vanilla GB ethernet out to a variety of media, including a surround receiver via optical and to that…

The Admiral's Panties
(328 Words. January 28, 2007, 06:17 PM, Comments: 3) MORE >>>
League of Intoxicated Gentlemen January 2007 Ballard Meeting, courtesy Manuel. I was EXTREMELY locquacious Friday night. As Manuel took this pic, I was channelling the Deadwood character E. B. Farnham for reasons absolutely unknown to myself even at he time. By the end of my disquisition, I even had William Henderson’s unmistakable speech pattern and accent down. Also, for…

Dawg and Pengie
(264 Words. January 27, 2007, 07:24 PM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
This blog has now officially entered post-apartment-dwelling life. Viv and I are welcoming Rocky, a 10-month old border-collie mix, into his new home with us tonight. Poupou offers some helpful links. Rocky was the very spirit of good behavior last night as we hosted Chris, Sabrina, and Cooper as the boys narrated their Antarctic adventure over the Christmas holidays….

Dubya Tee Eff
(47 Words. January 27, 2007, 07:19 PM, Comments: 2) MORE >>>
Driving up Aurora at 6:00 tonight we pulled off just before crossing the high bridge to gape at the massive and mysterious firework show flaring over Lake Union and cracking booms into the night sky. It was quite a show; wonder what the heck it was for?…

Deenis
(25 Words. December 21, 2006, 08:55 PM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
Grrrr. My DNS provider was under a DDoS attack for most of the preceding 48 hours. As of today, I have backups in place. Argh….

Pinochet
(625 Words. December 10, 2006, 05:46 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Gen. Augusto Pinochet, dead at 91. My family and I lived in in Viña del Mar, Chile during the year 1969, and many of my earliest memories are set in our house and nearby. I recall playing outside in the wintry June air and various details of life in Chile in those days, details that reveal much about Chile’s…

Rotten
(63 Words. December 06, 2006, 08:38 PM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
The other day on the commute I was stuck in traffic behind a minivan whose vanity plate was a near vowel-less transcription of the name “JOHNNY ROTTEN.” The van appeared to be driven by a prosperous fellow in early middle age sporting a closed-back Yankees cap. I tried to take a picture, but cell phone cameras remain a fur…

Old Soldiers' Home
(390 Words. November 11, 2006, 05:22 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Many years ago, at least twice and possibly more, my parents took my sister and me to visit with the aged residents of what was then the Indiana State Soldiers’ Home and which today is known as the Indiana Veterans’ Home. The building seen in the first link is the one I recall. We sat on the expansive porch…

Quotes
(56 Words. November 03, 2006, 09:46 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
I’m quite happy with the unexpected Battlestar Galactica. Jutst moments ago, a scene played whcih quoted, in order, “Alien,” the Butthole Surfers song “Cherub,” and the Kubrick/Clarke fillum “2001.” These nods, however, do not constitute the basis oof my interest, but as the dramatic equivalent of an amusing storefront sin on the Simpsons. “I see bodies.”…

Boo!
(131 Words. October 31, 2006, 10:42 PM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
By far most people I know are in direct contact with their sense of family heritage, of when relative X came here from country Y, and seem to benefit from this knowledge. In my family, this idea was long gone by the time I was adopted, and although the work of others has uncovered the obvious, (given the cuckoo…

uhhh
(41 Words. October 10, 2006, 07:49 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
More than one person has expressed concern about my state of mind recently as a consequence of a recent blog entry. Allow me to clarify that while I’m saddened by the prospects of my friend, I don’t feel out of sorts….

Staring at the ceiling
(453 Words. October 04, 2006, 10:49 PM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
I have a friend, a good and kind man who runs to the nebbish, facing some extremity. He’s on the verge of real homelessness, skating on the edge of no more couches and spiraling debt - not of the credit-card variety, but of the unpaid rent-and-utility-covered by-friends variety. He’s got a substance problem, which he at least is aware…

Hoboken
(511 Words. September 05, 2006, 09:41 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Of late, I have been having some real doozies among the annals of dreams. I am considering just dreamblogging, as what happens with my eyes shut is clearly of greater interest than that which occupies my days: In a multilevel ramshackle building, possibly the former barn of an early twentieth-century factory-farming concern, a number of commercial concerns are ensconced,…

Keyed!
(10 Words. August 25, 2006, 04:41 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
I have locked my car keys inside my workplace. Arg….

Bocce!
(106 Words. August 20, 2006, 05:18 PM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
After an intensive round of googlizing and calling local retailers, I was able to locate a bocce set for sale today, and thus will spend this evening cooking and eating hot dogs, apple pie, and root beer floats to the soothing accompaniment of the klonk of lawn bowls. I was briefly introduced to this sport one blazing September afternoon…

Zilliness
(392 Words. August 19, 2006, 12:55 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
I have been keeping an eye on Zillow’s valuation of our house this summer, largely for morale-reasons. Currently the site lists the home as valued at well over 100K more what we paid for it in October. Anecdotally, I have heard that Zillow tends to err on the side of inflating reported values. It’s certainly what I expect the…

nearly wrapped
(237 Words. August 13, 2006, 05:47 AM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
About 2 hours ago, we struck for the night. We have two pickups to bang out in the morning - I’m guessing around 11 am - and the shoot will be over and we pack it up and head home to Seattle. I am very happy with the results - the shots look great, we got good sound, and…

Fillum
(90 Words. August 11, 2006, 11:09 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
I’m spending the weekend out of town helping with a friend’s film shoot. The crew has taken over a good-sized house in the south Puget Sound area and tonight I am running sound on the shots, which mostly entails holding my arms above my head for a long long time. We’ve completed the first of three setups and one…

Carkeek
(181 Words. August 05, 2006, 05:08 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Viv and I finally took the walk to the sound through Carkeek Park from the shopping center that sits by one of the park entrances this morning, and we’ll be back. The highlight of the walk was a restored apple orchard by the trailside that had been planted by the Pipers, who originally homesteaded the area a bit over…

Grass
(143 Words. August 01, 2006, 08:18 PM, Comments: 2) MORE >>>
As Jon points out below, i appear to have no idea what I am talking about, as my bellyaching is premised on the improbable (and, to me, apparently unwelcome) fact of my prosperity. I have been sucking on this idea like a lemon for a few days and really don’t have even an analysis, let alone an answer. I…

Slow down
(250 Words. July 27, 2006, 08:00 PM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
I have to admit, I am frustrated with my decreasing frequency of posts. For three years, roughly, I posted daily. Since the turn of the new year, I have posted every three days, give or take. I beleive that the difference has primarily been our move to a new home. It was in quite rough shape and every week…

Ok, it's hot already
(146 Words. July 23, 2006, 05:25 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Our porch thermometer reads 104 degrees. Yesterday was not as hot although I thought today would be cooler. We began our day at 8 am with a brisk hike at Twin Falls State Park, just beyond Mount Si on 90 east of the city. We went with Greg and Stacey, at Greg’s suggestion. I actually agreed to the plan…

Heat
(45 Words. July 17, 2006, 08:55 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
I hear tell it’s hot out there. Here, it is not. I spent my early evening under a cloudless 70-degree sky wrestiling with a mister-tyle soaker hose and recalling heatwaves I have known in the past. Come visit. It’s in the sixties in the basement….

In dependence
(473 Words. July 03, 2006, 06:41 PM, Comments: 2) MORE >>>
Apologies for the slowdown on bloggery of late - my Now Playing deadlines and an extended visit by the in-laws coincided. Happily for me, Viv’s parents spent a solid week working on the yard - sifting soil, ripping up old grasses, planting new flowers and so forth. It’s great to see Viv so excited and happy about gardening and…

whoosh
(95 Words. June 28, 2006, 10:30 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Oh, man, having a houseful of senior citizens certainly can keep one busy! Viv’s folks have been visiting for an eventful two weeks and went home today. I love them dearly and miss them already. It’s good for my noggin to be around Spanish speakers. In other news, Karel’s gonna get a visit tomorrow afternoon; I found out circuitously…

Heatwave
(2 Words. June 24, 2006, 01:51 PM, Comments: 2) MORE >>>
90 degrees!…

Embarkation
(94 Words. June 18, 2006, 10:35 AM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
This guy was begging for food at the Canadian ferry terminal as we lined up to go, and I started teasing him by pretending to eat. He kept getting closer and closer and closer until he first perched on the rearview mirror and kept ducking his head in to drool on me with his large beak. then he hopped…

Slide
(103 Words. June 13, 2006, 09:55 PM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
Well, I dropped in on my pal today to pick up a guitar of mine he’s been using lately and bought a dining table from him. He’s a sweet, caring man with a strong musical gift who seems to have made it to the threshold of middle age without realizing how his appreciation of marijuana sets him up for…

Wall
(17 Words. June 11, 2006, 09:47 AM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
The wall’s done, I’m sore, an will be going on a search mission for a pal today….

Uncertain
(34 Words. June 09, 2006, 07:41 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Tomorrow at early-thirty I’ll begin helping my neighbor build a retaining wall between our properties. Today I heard that a dear friend who has, um, some responsibility issues, is getting evicted from his apartment….

Corvid Assault
(401 Words. June 08, 2006, 06:13 PM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
Moments ago, as Viv and I emerged from our car after wheeling to the drive and carport, we were struck by the ungodly ruckus a great mob of airborne crows were raising. I remarked to Viv that the crows must be worked up by the encroaching cloud cover, as we have noted with interest the wave of bird life…

Cerises
(222 Words. June 07, 2006, 07:42 PM, Comments: 2) MORE >>>
Well into summer, I can see that our neighbor’s fruiting trees will yield a generous harvest of Granny Smiths and that his sickly, aged cherry tree is doing just fine, with a batch of plump cherries at every juncture where the tree still fruits. My own fruit trees are not nearly as happy. Three large cherry trees are fruiting,…

Treed
(50 Words. June 06, 2006, 07:19 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Well, after a couple weeks using the kindly-provided Nokia 6600 I find myself really, really missing the Treo and getting it fixed or getting a new one has clumb plumb up my list. Let’s hope my cell provider refrains from the kind of fuckery recently inflicted on Agent Cooper….

Rat
(454 Words. June 04, 2006, 07:04 PM, Comments: 4) MORE >>>
In our backyard, there is a five-foot pole that arcs to create a hook. We’ve hung a birdfeeder from it and have enjoyed watching the local critters - many varieties of bird and several squirrels. On Wednesday i had the unpleasant duty of doublebagging the remains of one of the squirrels, apparent moments after the little guy’s head was…

Woody
(70 Words. June 03, 2006, 03:41 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
After a hard four hours of yardwork, for some reason I smell the distinctive aroma of pin oak, a tree that dominated the Northern Indiana woodlands of my earliest youth. The vast quantities of leaves and acorns the enormous trees deposited on our yard and the expansive, forested ravines over the back fence mulched over the winter into a…

ugh
(49 Words. June 02, 2006, 07:49 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Man, no sooner did the DSL get restored than the server went down, pinned in some perly loop. I hate it when that happens. And now, internets, while it’s great to have you back in my house, I have plans with my wife. Please don’t drink all the beer….

Broke
(85 Words. May 28, 2006, 03:38 PM, Comments: 2) MORE >>>
So, last week the brake light on our car comes on and won’t go away. We plan on taking the car in on Saturday. Being slowpokes, we miss the chance but find a place that will work on it Sunday. With luck, we’ll get the car back around five. Between this car work and that gas outage and repair…

Heat
(78 Words. May 14, 2006, 05:15 PM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
Man, what a beautiful day. Not a cloud in the sky, high seventies, a mild breeze. I finally got up on the ladder and started cleaning my gutters, after I hung some plant baskets for Viv. I owe Patrick and others a roundup and writeup on my findings concerning video post-and-host services; my take appears to be in opposition…

Boom
(209 Words. May 11, 2006, 11:42 PM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
Pursuant to our vapor-provisioning crisis, I had dinner with my folks and one couple of my aunts and uncles tonight. My uncle’s career was in welding, specifically as a pipefitter, and worked on the Alaska Pipeline back in the seventies. As soon as he heard my tale of gas-pipe woes, he first asked me a bunch of technical questions…

Burning a Candle in the Window
(30 Words. May 11, 2006, 06:04 PM, Comments: 2) MORE >>>
As we returned from my parents’ one-night hotel room around the corner, we saw a PSE van pull up, and - oh happy day - hhe restored our gas services….

Gas Haul
(57 Words. May 10, 2006, 04:28 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Two-thousand-odd dollars later, a more responsive HVAC company has identified and repaired no less than five additional leaks in our internal gas piping. Puget Sound Energy, of course, can’t be here until tomorrow. While I’m pleased that the gas infrastructure now hold water, I’m a little peeved that my wallet has been relieved of that unsightly bloat….

Gastly
(46 Words. May 09, 2006, 08:39 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
PSE, sweet talked into inspecting our new pipes, found another leak and on those grounds did not reactivate the gas. We have a different service company coming tomorrow at 8am. My parents are currently on the tarmac at SeaTac, taxi-ing into their gate before coming here….

Gas Crisis, day 3
(144 Words. May 08, 2006, 09:55 PM, Comments: 3) MORE >>>
Still no heat, hot water, operable stoves or working dryers over here at Hard Luck Acres. Friends of labor will be saddened to hear that three days into the bathing strike, forces greater than the massed will of the workingman (my wife) intervened to direct me to a cold shower - rimshot puhleeze! Thank you! I’ll be here all…

Stinker
(267 Words. May 08, 2006, 08:11 AM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Per Jon’s suggestion, the bathing strike plan is in effect. I actually made a gas company phone person cry last night after she had told me there was no way for them to come out to turn the gas on (we got the repair done and it’s kinda cold). After she told me that it wasn’t possible for them to…

Gas
(131 Words. May 07, 2006, 09:16 AM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Yesterday Viv and I smelled gas in the house and called Puget Sound Energy to check for the source. The technician found a leak in a pipe that appears to lead to the kitchen. PSE then cut our gas at the meter until the leak is repaired. We called an insurance carrier we’ve used for house issues in the…

Phoning it in
(147 Words. May 07, 2006, 09:09 AM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Happily, I have been able to get iSync to work with the substitute phone that Eric was kind enough to send to me, the Nokia 6620. Aggravatingly, the phone is officially unsupported by Cingular. This seems to be the source of some peculiar issues and flakiness in connectivity for data. Also, at first blush, there are some issues with…

Amazing Grace
(239 Words. May 06, 2006, 05:06 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Yesterday evening as I stood outside at Greg and Stacey’s house, I heard a bagpiper in the far distance playing Atholl Highlanders (warning: iffily-timed midi file autoloads). Today, I went to a neighbor’s house to peruse an estate sale, and obtained a number of things, including a decent Sony tape deck, a silent 8mm Bell and Howell projector for…

Freeeeedommm
(175 Words. May 04, 2006, 08:32 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Yesterday evening I stapled 25 feet of chickenwire to the outside rails of our deck, to create an outdoor area for our cats. I inadvertently left a basement door open as I put away the ladder and tools, a fact i discovered as I prepared for bed a few hours later. One of our cats, an eleven-year old male…

Out there
(11 Words. May 03, 2006, 10:16 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Lindsey (or is it?) explains how she came to leave Chit-town….

800
(13 Words. May 03, 2006, 09:58 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
1-800-Hanso.org I called it, and got Hanson Sweepstakes. I wonder if i misdialed….

Gruesome
(194 Words. April 25, 2006, 06:27 PM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
So, speaking generally, the skinny on my smashed Treo is: I’m SOL. Apparently the Treo 700p is due out in mid-May (that’s the 700 with PalmOS on it instead of Windows Mobile), but Palm hasn’t made a formal announcement on this yet. That means that even used Treo 650s are running around $300 on eBay. Forum postings indicate that…

Step
(22 Words. April 24, 2006, 09:09 PM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
Word to the wise: do not step on your Treo 650 until such time as the Treo 700p has been released. dammit….

Burrrrn
(26 Words. April 16, 2006, 07:06 PM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
The spots on my right hand where I foolishly, and twice, attempted to grasp the handle of a dutch oven containing our ham are mighty discomforted….

See Nay Moi
(68 Words. April 05, 2006, 08:31 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
I got rolling with Vimeo yesterday and today, and apparently was able to email a movie to my Vimeo account; but for some reason the clip isn’t rendering there successfully. Googling for a direct Vimeo-to-MT pipe such as Flickr makes available has been fruitless, to date. That reminds me, i keep meaning to make sure Jim sees the cover…

Echo
(140 Words. March 28, 2006, 10:49 AM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
It’s weird to be back on the Hill for the first time since the shootings. The Stranger just published their minute by minute account online, and the headlines of both the P-I and the Times banner news of the dead. Walking by Rainbow Grocery on the way to eat from Group Health, I glanced inside and saw an old…

Three things
(45 Words. March 20, 2006, 11:01 PM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
The first thing is something I noted at about 8 am, and have since forgot. Aha! It was a guy on a bike with an iSight taped to his helmet, facing forward. The next two are pictures. “Huckleberry Blue Has a Posse” “Support our Pants”…

O, woe
(51 Words. March 19, 2006, 08:55 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Crappe! Yon synkical operation ‘pon ye faithfulle communications device yclept ye Treo has cast forth all trace of names, telephonical contact coordinates, &c. from ye device! Fie! Several centuries later: I was able to locate a system-level address book backup - from NOVEMBER 2005. So I feel like I’m moving again!…

Freddy
(597 Words. March 14, 2006, 06:39 PM, Comments: 6) MORE >>>
AZ posts an unresolved reflection on an acquaintance’s puffery, prompting a recollection of my own on the theme. During the tail end of high school and early college, I was friends with a street drunk named Freddy, “Freddy the Biker,” to give his full moniker. “I’se just a broke-down ol’ scooter tramp without a scooter,” he’d say, by way…

Shecky chez Zero
(29 Words. March 12, 2006, 06:50 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
On the occasion of receiving the Zero Boys Live 1984 Reunion DVD, Shecky waxes informative yet grandiloquent upon the topic of Hoosier punt rot. Go, implore the solvent….

humf
(89 Words. March 06, 2006, 09:57 PM, Comments: 2) MORE >>>
Well, this is odd. I have oodles of stuff happening and nearly no inclination to write about it. For the record: I’m helping a friend to make a short film. I have a huge pile of brush to cut into 15-inch lengths. My wife is going to have surgery later this month. We are having an open house at…

Mown
(81 Words. March 04, 2006, 02:32 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
It’s a perfect spring day here. I took advantage of the unexpected sun to mow the lawn, after cleaning up a winter’s worth of twigs. The twigs await cutting to suit use as kindling. As I finished the lawn, I heard an insistent and repeated chirt sound. A ruby-throated hummingbird was perched in a neighbor’s still-leafless tree, declaiming his…

Bye-Bye Bert's
(95 Words. March 02, 2006, 06:20 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
I was bummed to learn of the closure of Bert Grant’s Yakima brewpub from the P-I today. From the time it opened to the last time I was on Yakima, about five years ago, a stop at the old depot was a requirement of the trip, in token of Grant’s role in the craft brewer renaissance and in celebration…

Pears disappear
(209 Words. March 01, 2006, 08:58 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
I swung by the liquor store on my way to pick up Viv, in need of gin, and wandered aimlessly for a patch. Rounding a corner I was haply surprised to see Clear Creek Eau-de-Vie, a variety of brandy that has been of interest to my family for years (my grandfather was a pear farmer and my dad has…

Bullet dodged
(34 Words. February 26, 2006, 11:55 AM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
Happily, the Powerbook boots smoothy this morning and does not emit the aroma of a brewery, so I presume whatever intoxicant was preventing the machine from operating as expected last night has been metabolized….

In anticipation of a sore back
(78 Words. February 25, 2006, 06:07 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Today, by some coincidence, we received both a new living room set and a new living room set, one a couch-chair combo in chocolate leather, one a bunch of flat boxes from Ikea. I have completed the build of a chair, a couch, and three shelving units, with two shelving units remaining. I started the day with a brisk…

Skating
(205 Words. February 24, 2006, 09:09 AM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
This morning, Puget Sound awakened to an ice storm. Viv and I cautiously took the car about five blocks away before losing control of it on the ice and returning home. As I write this, the radio reports that I-5 offramps are blocked by jackknifed Metro busses. The snow on our yard was beautiful in the dawn fog. When…

Stump
(163 Words. February 17, 2006, 10:00 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Every few days, I have been grabbing a couple of logs from my fast diminishing woodpile to split for kindling. As I think I noted previously, I needed something to split the logs against, and I have been using a massive piece of scrap wood, a former support beam that I take to have been a leftover from the…

The Wind
(78 Words. February 17, 2006, 04:53 PM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
The weather here lately is cold and clear, the golden brightness of the sun blaring in some apparent appeal for balance after our forty days of forty nights earlier this year. Today, also, there have been strong winds here and there in the region, causing power outages and the like. Here, my neighbor’s spinning vents are whirling madly. I…

League night
(22 Words. February 12, 2006, 10:03 AM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
Friday night, the League of Intoxicated Gentlemen hit Capitol Hill. Saturday, I was somewhat hampered in efforts to move beyond the couch….

Fee Fi Fo Fum
(56 Words. February 05, 2006, 06:15 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Spencer appears to have discovered that not only is there a troll under the Aurora Bridge, there may be giants in your recycle bin. I wonder, is my pooptastic bum from a couple years ago some sort of mythic being, too? I sort of like the idea of mapping classical myths onto problematic urban apparitions….

Sun
(37 Words. February 05, 2006, 11:51 AM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Today is the first day in months that we’ve had tons of sunlight in the house. The cats, quick on the uptake, have demonstrated a keen grasp of the purpose of the great washes of golden warmth….

Shipwrecked.
(64 Words. February 03, 2006, 07:17 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
This week’s This American Life (URL not valid until next week) explores a story that amused me when I saw it blow by in the online edition of the NYT a ways back. Involves Russians, artists, young people, and rum (or cognac). The show’s second half is a melancholy revue of life in New Orleans, post-Katrina, that sounds like…

See you in the funny pages.
(22 Words. February 03, 2006, 06:03 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
BoingBoing links to a webcomic by a fellow whose pal purchased a large number of 99-cent vibrators, and gave them to him….

Woodshedding
(151 Words. February 02, 2006, 09:24 PM, Comments: 2) MORE >>>
I split wood again tonight for a few minutes. The block I’m splitting against is too low for comfort but I do not have a good way to raise it for the moment. Stooping to pick up the flinders kills my back within minutes. My right arm is a bit sore, which I take as a good sign. My…

Yard Arm
(1148 Words. February 02, 2006, 08:43 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
In the back yard, I drop ants of differing appearance into the reservoir portion of a spray bottle filled with water. Peering into the neck of the bottle with one eye, the ants appear as huge as cars and people. They can walk along the walls of the bottle and do so, carefully gathering air into a diving-bell about…

Time and changes
(574 Words. February 01, 2006, 10:29 PM, Comments: 3) MORE >>>
I’m starting this entry too late to do it justice - 10 pm. Despite this, here are some dates and events associated with my family’s residence in my Bloomington childhood home. Summer, 1976. We move to Bloomington from West Lafayette. Previously my family had come to town for an academic conference or interview and stayed on the square in…

In my room
(513 Words. January 31, 2006, 08:45 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
My childhood bedroom was about the size of my current bedroom, but a bit more square. A closet faced with two bifold doors, I think, was bumped out from the wall that also held the entry door. I suppose the room must have been about fifteen feet square. In the center of the wall to one’s right, on entering,…

Householding
(620 Words. January 30, 2006, 08:08 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
A friend mentioned to me today that in the piece I posted yesterday, my description of the house I grew up in makes it sound like a mansion. It’s not; it’s a factory-issue Cape Cod two story with two first-floor bump-outs, and each interior room is of modest dimensions. Technically, the largest room in the house is the basement,…

Look to the Trees
(627 Words. January 29, 2006, 11:00 AM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Behind my childhood house, there was an immense city park, roughly following the contours of a creek that sat between the cul-de-sac my home was on and the parking lot of the Indiana Bell office building about 500 yards away. The sides of the mostly-gentle hills leading into the valley were uniformly suburban-lawn length grass, cleared years ago and…

Oh, and one more thing
(477 Words. January 28, 2006, 11:42 PM, Comments: 2) MORE >>>
While Viv and I were at the nordic behemoth’s caves, I received a voicemail from an old friend in Bloomington, someone I knew in high school and later in the music scene: he and his wife and kids have moved into my childhood home on the far east side of town. Far out. I have no idea how he…

Stain Me
(316 Words. January 27, 2006, 11:15 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Tonight I had the months-delayed pleasure of booting up a new computer; well before the move, planning to be as broke as I am, I had grabbed a refurbished Mac Mini with the intent of building it from scratch to be my internet services machine once we landed here. It’s neat, specifically due to that tiny size and dense…

Rugburn
(286 Words. January 02, 2006, 03:23 PM, Comments: 3) MORE >>>
Viv asked me to pull the rotten old carpet off the staircase to the basement today and I’m about a quarter of the way done, after about two hours. I’m finding it utterly dreadful, which is interesting. At one of the parties we attended over the weekend, some friends were volunteering to help with one another’s demolition jobs on…

elphless
(35 Words. December 31, 2005, 06:44 PM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
Dammit! I just hosed a full gig of pics from the Elph, AGAIN! That included basically all of the pictures and movies from the move. Dammit! Now I’ll never see the old place again….

Hogler gun
(61 Words. December 19, 2005, 10:57 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
FINAL SCORE. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire: I concur, the best of the films to date. I fear it may be a high water mark. Better than any of the books I’ve thus far read, richer and more convincing. New clutch: installed, snappy, and quite different in feel from the other one. Holiday, work, and move exhaustion:…

Last meal
(239 Words. December 18, 2005, 07:49 PM, Comments: 3) MORE >>>
Viv and I are driving the last load from our apartment to the house as I thumb this into the Treo. I loaded the car with fragile things, paper sculptures and the like before our final meal as Capitol Hill residents, at the reliably delicious, and reliably overpriced, Coastal Kitchen. We picked up a few replacements for things gone…

Beat
(343 Words. December 12, 2005, 11:14 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Alas, I am so busy, Dear Internet, that I must confess that while I think of you all the time, it is only now that I can spare a moment to write. Of course, I have nothing much to say, my time filled with the empty clock-calories of modernity. Ever wonder how that value-priced gasoline brand can price a…

Space
(90 Words. November 24, 2005, 10:12 PM, Comments: 2) MORE >>>
No sooner did I read Tom’s interesting analysis of his decision to go back to wintel for his laptop needs than I am presented with a low-space dialog regarding this laptop’s internal 70gb drive. Tom notes that from his perspective, Powerbook HDs are not upgradeable. As someone who once performed a hard-drive upgrade on an original iBook, my bet…

Not happy
(84 Words. November 21, 2005, 09:22 PM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
Our credit union sold our mortgage as soon as we closed; I was not unprepared for this but I had a self-deluding hope that I would still be accessing Alaska USA customer service personnel instead of EvilBankAmeristates. The real pisser for me is that I can’t just transfer money from my main account ot my loan account. I can’t…

Nikolais
(378 Words. November 21, 2005, 09:05 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
You know, looking at the postmark on the old Russian stamp and comparing it to the Hungarian one leads me to believe that the stamp must have been postmarked in 1901, possibly in October. THis is because the Russian postmark reads “1 X 07.6” while the Hungarian one reads “68 VII. 1…” and I immediately read it as July,…

Patched
(152 Words. November 20, 2005, 11:37 AM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Well, using Uploadr, I was able to upload a bunch of pictures to Flickr. For some reason, FlickrExport is still uncooperative. Here are some of the pix you can see over at my Flickr page: After repeated rounds of yelling, begging, emailing, and so forth, my ISP went right ahead and sent out a second router of the exact…

Out of Sync
(260 Words. November 19, 2005, 06:38 PM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
Well, I think I found my first Tiger app incompatibility: The Missing Sync. I’ve downloaded the last version 4 update and have a $25 upgrade coupon for 5, so I might just spend the dough. The interior painting on the house is basically done. That leaves the laying of the new floor, refinishing the old one, and retrimming the…

no love yet.
(26 Words. November 15, 2005, 09:31 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
ETA of new server is tomorrow. I spoke to the ISP, having received no update on IPs, and indeed, no notes were added to the case….

La laa, la la laaa
(487 Words. November 14, 2005, 09:40 PM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
What do you call a workday that begins at 6 am and ends at 8 pm? In other news, we bought the floor for the house’s large family room over the weekend, about $1.5k, in a thicker-plank red oak than the existing oak that was under the carpets. On the whole, the remodel is on track to go over…

Ahh, Sunday.
(26 Words. November 13, 2005, 09:57 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
My day of rest involved eight hours of work! Not counting the hour it took to buy a floor and the hour to see a movie….

Jacob Marley
(30 Words. November 12, 2005, 07:37 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
When you’ve been awakened in the night by your beloved kitten ferociously gnawing on the still-warm, headless corpse of a rat while crouching on you, purring loudly, the world changes….

In Dreams
(200 Words. November 10, 2005, 09:10 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
I awakened at 3:48 am in a cold sweat brought on by an anxiety dream about a friend’s blog. The friend posted about an friend of his who, he’d learned that day, was killed in a freak funeral-home accident, when she was pulled through what appeared to be a band saw, by the three-dimensional Quicktime VR of the decendent’s…

Fun Resoundingly Defeated
(222 Words. November 08, 2005, 09:47 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Excerpted early-return election numbers: MONORAIL: Endless gridlock: 28,821, 67% Monorail: 14,143 32% I voted for the light rail project for the first time in 1990. It was projected for completion in 1995. Do date, not one track has been laid, and the downtown bus tunnel, which opened that same year with rail built in, is closed, so that they…

Rattus
(106 Words. November 08, 2005, 07:02 PM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
On Saturday, Petr found a rat hiding in the closet of the new place. On Sunday I set four traps. On Tuesday, I found the rat, dead in the one I set by the furnace. The animal did not appear to suffer, as the trap bar landed directly across the brain pan. Happily, there was no mess, apart from…

And the Winds do Blow
(51 Words. November 06, 2005, 08:16 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
16 dead in Indiana tornado, 200 injured, more casualties expected in deadliest Hoosier tornado outbreak since April, 1974 (I’ve written about these tornadoes and my recollections of that April day but, of course, the blog’s d own). Tornadoes in November? That ain’t right. Update: 22 Dead, sayeth the NYT….

disassembly
(28 Words. November 03, 2005, 10:40 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
I took the whybark.com server apart tonight in anticipation of a physical move tomorrow. I expect to configure it Saturday. I sure hope the damn line is up….

Slogging through the bitmuck
(393 Words. November 03, 2005, 06:04 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Sigh. On October 27, Qwest disconnected our phone and connected the new line, with a new number, at the new house. I moved the Qwest-provided router to the house and plugged it in, and the router illuminates to a state indicating connectivity. On November 1, I called Qwest to get our old number restored in the new location. We…

Tub + paint
(16 Words. November 02, 2005, 07:46 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
AskMe: How do I clean my tub that has been stained with latex paint? for review….

Downtime
(150 Words. November 02, 2005, 06:51 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
For the first time in several days, I did not spend the immediate four hours after work at the new house. Doing so afforded me the following learning experiences: The wine store remains out of stock on the Swiss white I hunger for since a teen, grown on the shores of Lake Geneva and dry as sandpaper. I shall…

doors
(77 Words. October 30, 2005, 05:09 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
We’ve found yet another salvage store, this one much closer by than the other and offering a wider inventory selection and better prices to boot. We did not locate a used shop table yet, though. I met our rear neighbor, who bought at about the same time we did. He’s about our age and will be living in the…

Lawnmower man
(411 Words. October 30, 2005, 09:38 AM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Lawn: mowed. Edging: started. Contractor: engaged. The contractor made great progress today, nearly completing the removal of the paneling. Viv worked on cleaning the shelves we puled from closets and cabinets throughout the house. The washer and dryer were delivered but we hit a snag when the leads to the hoses each leaked, in the valve. We had to…

Happy Birthday, Suzy.
(182 Words. October 28, 2005, 05:32 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Today my sister would have been 35. So not only is it Fitzmas. I paid my first gas bill today; I can already tell that I dislike the utility company, which is clearly untrustworthy - a six dollar ‘convenience charge’ to pay via card, an online billpaying option that cancels the paper bill: the unmistakable spoor of evil. My…

offline!
(17 Words. October 27, 2005, 11:42 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Phones are down as of 10/27 - looks like DSL will be back up on November 1….

Rivet
(121 Words. October 25, 2005, 09:22 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
You know, it’s really frustrating when you take the doors of your refrigerator off in order to change the way the door opens from left-to-right to right-to-left and discover that the last part exposed, the base mounting pin, is riveted in place on the carrying plate rather than removable and reconfigurable, like everything else. Which you had just removed,…

Service interruption
(39 Words. October 24, 2005, 06:36 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Qwest informs me that they will be transferring phone and DSL to the new location on October 27. I forecast some dark fiber in my linkfarms. Please bear with us as we navigate the outer reaches of telco provisioning….

Sleepers awake
(42 Words. October 23, 2005, 07:35 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
My final weekend count of Home Depot visits appears to be five. It’s unclear if this should remain an index or a high point. I would prefer to plan the jaunts and execute them once per weekend on Saturdays at 8 am….

Money pit!
(82 Words. October 22, 2005, 05:45 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Today, I put my newfound knowledge to use in the service of self-pauperization, and now own one each of the appliances featured in the previous blog entry. Also today, I found a child’s folding lace fan and the jawbone of a dog (?) in the yard. Pics to come, but I post via bluetooth from the porch. Which reminds…

the excitement!
(36 Words. October 22, 2005, 05:42 PM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
This Yesterday evening, I have learned about washers, and also dryers, and furthermore, about lawnmowers! One thing I have taken away from my studies is this: appliance prices appear to be tracking the housing market’s rise….

up and down
(73 Words. October 18, 2005, 09:33 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Another day, another meeting at the house. This time the contractor, an electrician, did not show up. We walked Karel through the house as well and he will be giving us a painting estimate. We’re also waiting on a full-boat contractor’s estimate that includes all of the work we need done. I have noticed that since Saturday, I have…

sleepy
(43 Words. October 16, 2005, 10:19 PM, Comments: 2) MORE >>>
Man, long day. We met a contractor at the new house, ate at Cyndy’s Pancake House, showed the house to some friends, and then I picked up Dan, Spence, and Manuel for a League meeting in Georgetown, from which I have just returned….

Have an error
(104 Words. October 14, 2005, 06:07 AM, Comments: 6) MORE >>>
A while ago I concluded that I had accidentally eaten part of a habanero, a conclusion not embraced by all but one which remains in place in my mind. This belief was reinforced when last night I unthinkingly popped a whole roasted pepper into my mouth and then thought to ask, just as my diaphragm went into convulsions, “Was…

there it is, then
(49 Words. October 12, 2005, 07:03 PM, Comments: 2) MORE >>>
Yesterday we signed for the house. Viv gets the keys tomorrow morning. I’m deeply unhappy and upset about it. I feel like I’ve just murdered someone, a friend. I don’t really wish to write about it, but it seems wrong to let it simply pass by without a mention….

Oh Dear
(141 Words. October 09, 2005, 11:12 AM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Something unexpected just occurred as I worked to copy some text files into the ‘albums’ directory of my Gallery install - all the albums directories vanished. Alas! Uh-oh. Regarding ‘mv’: As the rename(2) call does not work across file systems, mv uses cp(1) and rm(1) to accomplish the move. The effect is equivalent to: rm -f destination_path && ...

Oh Dear
(27 Words. October 09, 2005, 11:07 AM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Something unexpected just occurred as I worked to copy some text files into the ‘albums’ directory of my Gallery install - all the albums directories vanished. Alas!…

What We Did Is Public
(149 Words. October 02, 2005, 07:56 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Incredibly, word has belatedly reached me of the wrap on a Darby Crash biopic, which will apparently lead to a Germs reunion tour. Don Bolles, later of Nirvana and in between his Germs time and that with Kurt, was the original drummer for 45 Grave, who also recently were slated for a revenant tour, but have apparently dropped out….

oh.
(107 Words. September 30, 2005, 09:34 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Posting slowdown? Me frowning a shitload and generally hatin’? Yup. As PF reminded me, it’s September. So this month, you all get to add Hurricane Katrina, the New Orleans Flood of Ought-Five, and Hurricane Rita to your 9-11 reflections, while I add these two recent seasons of ire to my own, well-aged one. I really thought I would get…

Returning home
(13 Words. September 28, 2005, 08:03 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Bart and Michael returned to New Orleans this week, and took pictures….

Dye Land
(577 Words. September 27, 2005, 05:50 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
As I noted yesterday, I first really became a serious appreciator of Bob Dylan about ten years ago, when I first picked up a cutout copy of Good As I Been to You, the first of two stripped down, scratchy-voice-and-guitar records of mostly old-time songs. The other record, World Gone Wrong, is entirely comparable. The records were the occasion…

Hard Times
(81 Words. September 23, 2005, 06:03 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
I am, and as far as I know, always have been, a pessimist. Listening to news reports of the second hurricane-related flooding of New Orleans as gas prices rise are not proving to be conducive to the frame of mind traditionally associated with the experience of buying a new home which may be characterized as “happy,” “triumphant,” or “pleasant.”…

Ejaculation
(30 Words. September 22, 2005, 09:13 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
You know, it’s a beautiful thing when a news editor pitches a news item to a publication’s senior editor and the senior editor’s response to the pitch is “Holy crap!”…

Found
(31 Words. September 21, 2005, 08:09 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
You know, watching Lost tonight after watching a plane land on bum gear at LAX this evening has affected my experience of the show. I’m not sure in what way, exactly….

Cal Andersen Park Tomfoolery
(113 Words. September 20, 2005, 08:20 PM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
Meant to post this last night but fell into a black slumber e’en as I reached for keyboard. What was formerly the Capitol Hill reservoir is about to become Cal Anderson Park. A late night stroll revealed a suspiciously climbable - but still dry - fountain. A field of cobblestones will accept the outbound flow from the fountain’s hill….

Tenuki
(67 Words. September 18, 2005, 02:00 PM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
This is my pal Tenuki, who has been helping me to do some writing this weekend. He is bossy, but very affectionate. His family comes home late tonight and there will be a touching reunion scene. He’s been mostly good, but he did let me know I had to scoop his necessaries by peeing on the bathmat. I washed…

Another day, another bid.
(22 Words. September 17, 2005, 01:12 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
This morning we put another bid in on a house. This one is looking pretty promising. We should know by tomorrow morning….

Around the corner from the tree
(113 Words. September 14, 2005, 10:05 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Tonight we had dinner with Chris and Poupou in the Little Saigon area at the intersection of 12th and Jackson. We were aiming to eat at the Tamarind Tree but found ourselves in a long line of people who had obviously been waiting for some time. I scouted for nearby eateries and found the family-style Thanh Vi right around…

Takeover
(14 Words. September 10, 2005, 11:42 PM, Comments: 2) MORE >>>
He jgumped upt onntp the kpbbrd and sat dwn befpre helping with this entry….

Hand brake
(199 Words. September 10, 2005, 03:24 PM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
Sometime between 1970 and 1972, I think, my mom drove my sister and I to the nearest grocery store, a Marsh’s, in West Lafayette, Indiana. I think she was driving the family car, a 1967 Pontiac Tempest in flake sky blue. The top was up, and Mom left my sister and I in the car. The store was located…

Floating Couplets
(471 Words. September 08, 2005, 09:29 PM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
New Orleans was the original capitol of the American imagination, before this country owned Louisiana. The port at the end of the great midwestern river system that provided the economic engine which begat this nation, its’ place in the country’s heart - and mine - is as central as that of New York or San Francisco. A tad reduced…

...One More Thing
(63 Words. September 06, 2005, 09:29 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
In light of recent developments, I can reveal this about tomorrow’s Apple hoopla: if it’s the iPhone, i’m iNterested. If it’s what it probably will be, a sub-gig iTunes phone with no embedded PDA or OS, I won’t even look at it. The only bright spot in the rumor mill to date have been the tales of ramped-up production…

Thud
(37 Words. September 06, 2005, 09:15 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
It has come to my attention that I have a blinding headache. It has also come to my attention that KG, friend of my yoot, is now a Manhattanite, abiding deep in darkest Bleecker Street. Lucky bastidge….

Helicopters
(120 Words. September 01, 2005, 06:49 PM, Comments: 4) MORE >>>
Five years ago, helicopters hovered over my neighborhood for a week, night and day. At first, they were a novelty, of interest to me because of my love of flying and flight technology. Then, they became a signpost in the sky - I could find whatever absurd police/protester/neighborhood interaction was taking place by looking for the choppers. Finally, after,…

A Miscellany
(504 Words. August 30, 2005, 10:47 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
ITEM: Both Matt and Bart have updates. The Royal Pendletons are playing a gig this evening in Memphis, which seems a perfectly sensible way to deal with the fate of the band’s city. Bart and company are safely ensconced in a rainy Bloomington. ITEM: Having nothing at all to do with the topic du jour, high school co-conspirator and…

Silent
(210 Words. August 22, 2005, 10:26 PM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
After watching the silent antics of Buster Keaton at the Paramount this evening, we passed a young man who lay sprawled asleep in the gutter around the corner from the Baltic Room. I whipped out my cell phone as Viv and Spencer paused. I framed the shot, got it, and moved on. Viv and Spence began to chat with…

Missed
(12 Words. August 16, 2005, 08:48 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Had to skip the Onalaska gig and crunch house numbers instead. Bummer….

Yikes!
(32 Words. August 15, 2005, 09:26 PM, Comments: 4) MORE >>>
Offer accepted! Holy cow, we’re gonna own a house, I think! The unknown: the seller has insisted on an accelerated purchase calendar that compresses a 30-day process into a 10-day process. Yikes!…

Seward Park
(14 Words. August 14, 2005, 12:00 AM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
We spent a happy afternoon with Chris and Sabrina in Seward Park this evening….

Sunset
(104 Words. August 12, 2005, 09:25 PM, Comments: 2) MORE >>>
As sunset illuminated the city with pinks and reds, Viv and I drove home from West Seattle. We have just placed our fourth offer on a home. This one looks very much as though we will get it. We are both excited about it, too. I invented a drink to celebrate for Viv, the Homebuyer’s Sunset, which I realized…

Where does it go?
(407 Words. August 10, 2005, 04:36 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Between househunting and work, I’m amazed I’ve been able to post at all. I have an ongoing convoluted personal discussion with myself about househunting - nearly all of it bitter - which under other circumstances would have ended up here. I have been engaged, as well, in interesting email exchanges with various friends, which presumably has also sopped up…

Back behind that mule
(57 Words. August 06, 2005, 05:46 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
We considered making an offer on this house, but concluded it was too large to suit our needs. You know, it’s hard get back to work what with the plowing and planting ad weeding and feeding when you’ve spent a week at the beach and felt the biting sting of sand on the Oregon wind at midsummer….

Hot Walnuts
(67 Words. August 02, 2005, 11:21 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
This day Viv and I had the pleasure of dining in the company of Eric and Anne at the Pink Door. This followed an extended sojourn about the streets of the traditional rush-hour downtown traffic. It is to the credit of the visiting parties that they did not leap out of the car in honest expression of the fear…

Heat
(56 Words. July 29, 2005, 11:32 PM, Comments: 2) MORE >>>
There is little in life that offers more potential for embarassment than concluding that your father has undertipped, realizing you don’t have cash on you to make up the difference, and concluding that you must mention it to him, only to realize after you call it to his attention that he has not, in fact, undertipped….

Umbrellas
(74 Words. July 25, 2005, 10:54 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
A while ago, when Amazon introduced their interesting block-by-block street-level photo map, I noticed with amusement that our sun umbrella was open and on the deck of our current apartment when the photo was taken. Yesterday, I happened to zoom in very close to a satellite view of our deck - the same view that Google Maps uses -…

Ken
(20 Words. July 21, 2005, 10:03 PM, Comments: 2) MORE >>>
Hard at work. Holding forth on the subject of mattress copy. Pointing out a possible error in historical attribution….

Feline, plums
(21 Words. July 20, 2005, 10:41 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
One cat: Several golden plums: The tree has fruited this year more than any since we’ve lived here, over ten years….

Lack of local color
(28 Words. July 19, 2005, 09:25 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
I was amused on zooming way out in the satellite view of Google Maps to note a possible reason for my having left Indiana as a young man….

Break Time
(434 Words. July 19, 2005, 05:53 PM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
Well, after a very intense six weeks of househunting (I estimate we’ve now viewed about one hundred separate homes), other obligations require us to take a break for a week or two. For those keeping score, we bid on two houses, the one I blogged about that was located in South Park, and another I have not yet mentioned…

Float
(11 Words. July 12, 2005, 09:04 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
…and we’ve submitted an offer on a house. More details later….

Drive Somewhere
(8 Words. July 09, 2005, 02:04 PM, Comments: 3) MORE >>>
My drive test is scheduled for July 23….

Cat, considered as menace
(19 Words. July 08, 2005, 05:15 PM, Comments: 3) MORE >>>
Chloe just knocked my after-work martini to the floor, thankfully not breaking the glass. But alas for the gin!…

Housing
(230 Words. July 07, 2005, 11:03 PM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
Another day, another five houses. We saw two really pretty places, relatively close in, each well under 1000 square feet. Both were presented as two bedroom homes but realistically they were one bedroom places. In each case they were priced at $300k. We also saw two more places a bit further out which we will be seriously considering. One…

I'm your 21st century boy
(158 Words. July 06, 2005, 05:32 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
June 30, 2005 To: Mike Whybark, Seattle FINANCIAL INSTITUTION WITHHELD has been notified by FINANCIAL INSTITUTION WITHHELD of a theft of records from a third party credit card processor. … Unfortunately, your card number is among those potentially at risk. Please note that no personal data, such as your name, address, social security number, or member number was involved…

What is it that makes a house a home?
(636 Words. July 05, 2005, 10:56 PM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
Viv and I have been consumed, eaten alive, devoured by househunting. On Saturday, before enjoying some sprawling dinner and drinks with Greg and Stacey, we saw no less than fifteen houses in an all-day marathon. Some were good, some were bad, none were it. I particularly liked a 1947 house in near-ish southwest Seattle near a golf course, to…

Hail
(236 Words. July 02, 2005, 09:42 AM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
I had an amazing dream last night in which I was on the phone in a friend’s incomplete, under renovation house. I was speaking to Scott Colburn and Joey and Johnny Ramone on the telephone, when enormous hailstones began to fall from the skies outside. I got off the phone and rushed to grab my new camera, which at…

Hopkin Update
(494 Words. July 01, 2005, 04:56 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Seven months later, my Hopkin Explained post is still generating interest and links from large collaborative sites. Every other month, on average, someone links to it from a high-traffic link-collector, and I get another day of several thousand site visits to the page. Just today, MetaFilter, a site in which I actively participate, linked to this page - again….

Piltdown
(26 Words. June 28, 2005, 08:47 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Viv and I were sorry to see Jean go, but we assuage our sorrow with the hilarity of a Nova devoted to the Piltdown hoax….

Flashbangback
(194 Words. June 26, 2005, 12:07 PM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
Someone down near the Broadway Playfield, near what has previously been the staging area for participants in the annual Gay Pride Parade, has been setting off m-80s or cherry bombs or something. That, in conjunction with the flock of chittering helicopters plaguing the neighborhood this morning, have created a mild flashback to November 1999’s WTO experience. For us that…

Rent
(56 Words. June 22, 2005, 08:52 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
…And so I think we’re bowing out of the rent race. I can’t visualize moving twice in a year. Viv may differ as she is concerned about having to move in a rush and having to find a place to rent in a hurry. I think we’ll probably have more discussions about this in the future….

Shelter
(28 Words. June 20, 2005, 08:57 PM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
We beat the track again for a place tonight. We have a prospect, and turned down a prospect, and we’re sleeping on one too. Man, is this exhausting!…

House Beat
(137 Words. June 19, 2005, 09:55 PM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
Man, we rolled by over ten houses today, and got into three. We filled out an app for one with a sweet location and have appointments for three more on Monday and Tuesday. We’re really moving. Afterwards we had dinner in Ballard (again) with Don and Trish at Sofrito Rico, a Puerto Rican place at the end of the…

Wybark
(283 Words. June 17, 2005, 06:17 PM, Comments: 4) MORE >>>
While perusing this fascinating analysis of the reported use of airplanes during the notorious Tulsa race riot of 1921, I came across a reference to the black community of “Wybark, Oklahoma,” which Google and Google Maps report to be located somewhere in the precincts of Muskogee. This newsletter reports that the community “was located at Section 6 Township 15N…

The New Sea
(663 Words. June 16, 2005, 09:11 AM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
When I turned to look at the clock, I noted, with some astonishment, that it was 4:00 am. I did not feel sleepy, but considered the situation and with mild anxiety decided I should try to get that additional two hours of sleep. Despite my dread, I soon drifted off. The dream resumed, apparently having moved forward by a…

Riverbed
(747 Words. June 16, 2005, 06:10 AM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Last night was largely occupied with an epic nightmare which took place in two discrete parts. I awakened at 4:00 am, miserable from the experiences in my head, before fearfully drifting into another sleep which contained a direct continuation of the original dream. It being several hours later, I only retain fragments of the dreams. Here is what I recall….

Triple
(12 Words. June 14, 2005, 09:57 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
I blame the tsunami warning for my unseemly and temporary triple post….

Ropa Vieja
(123 Words. June 14, 2005, 09:38 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Stacey has posted on how we spent our Saturday. It involved Stacey, Greg, Viv and I cooking (mostly me and Stacey in the kitchen) a big ol’ mess of ropa vieja. It was yummy, we drank a bunch of mojitos and some Spanish riojas I had brought. I was surprised that neither Greg nor Stacey knew of my Dad’s…

Gravity's Plumb Line
(19 Words. June 14, 2005, 05:47 PM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
There is little like the anxiety of watching a laptop fall to the floor when one’s hands are full….

Welcome
(12 Words. June 02, 2005, 07:10 PM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
This note was on my door when I got home from work….

Mouse Madness
(271 Words. May 28, 2005, 06:46 PM, Comments: 5) MORE >>>
Five years ago, I picked up a pair of first-generation 3.x MS Intellimouse Explorers. In the business move on Friday, one was crushed. “No problem,” I cheerily thought. “I’ll just pick up the most recent discontinued Explorer on eBay or in a store locally.” I did locate one, but to my horror, the crisp scroll wheel had been replaced…

Heat
(4 Words. May 27, 2005, 02:38 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
It’s hot. Too hot….

They do!
(20 Words. May 21, 2005, 06:33 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
News flash: Tom and Rachel are married! I thought about blogging from the actual ceremony, but discretion happily triumphed….

wat
(36 Words. May 21, 2005, 08:00 AM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
oops - Last night I met Dan after work for a beer and we ended up having dinner - delicious Ethiopian food - with Viv and Vonda. Sleep followed immediately thereafter, at the cost of blogging….

bloglore
(211 Words. May 19, 2005, 10:51 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
I wrote a 500-word-plus meditation on the changing fortunes of Broadway in my neighborhood today. I was sitting in Cafe Septieme waiting for Viv, watching the street as cloudburst after cloudburst cycled between sun and wet. Alas for me, my Palm-based blog app lacks an autosave and due to a moment of inattention on my part, poof, away it…

War Room
(144 Words. May 14, 2005, 05:16 PM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
Viv and I walked into The War Room, a new club on Capitol Hill, recently. I had noticed that the deck was open, but when we walked in, the interior space was completely empty. All of the hung art - and possibly the club logo - is by Stewart Fairey of “Obey Giant” fame. The club adertises free wifi….

The Nation
(209 Words. May 11, 2005, 10:32 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Hey look, ma! I’m an academic reference or possibly case study! “Late in September, 2004, Mike Whybark, a resident of Seattle, began researching the background story to the original flier and reported his findings in The Nation (see Whybark 2004).” Sadly, however, The Nation (later in the paper cited as a Seattle-based publication) has never seen fit to send…

records
(67 Words. May 10, 2005, 09:53 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Unbelievable week at work. I asked an acquaintance to lend a hand, and he came through, big time. Sadly, I can’t really blog about it. I can say that we are busier than we were at Christmastime. I am sooo tired. I’m kinda bummed that I am behind on some of my stuff for the magazine because the day…

Samantha's
(71 Words. May 08, 2005, 12:44 PM, Comments: 2) MORE >>>
We went to Samantha’s Spring Extravaganza last night. Daymented’s pix include this celebrity couple. As that picture was taken, every camera in the room was popping flashes at us. It was hilarious and disorienting. I also had the pleasure of a long chat with Jeff Sharman, and regret not having had a chat with Tara about her new job….

Ear hear
(359 Words. May 07, 2005, 05:58 PM, Comments: 12) MORE >>>
I was unable to get into the doctor this morning, which means I will have to wait until Friday morning. Happily, at some point in today’s running around a channel appears to have opened in the wax, and now I can hear again. I will continue home irrigation, an odious and messy business, in the hopes of being done…

Blown
(100 Words. April 30, 2005, 05:45 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Yow, whatta day. We finally dropped off the busted teevee and went podunking. Brunch at upper Queen Anne’s Paragon, followed by random house-for-sale flyer sampling. We ended up in a couple of antique stores we’d never been in, and I got my gentleman’s clothes butler, finally. On our way south, we pulled over hurriedly and pinched the tire between…

Crushed
(169 Words. April 26, 2005, 07:57 AM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
My sleep last night was extremely restless and full of nightmares, concluding with a dream that yanked me awake. In that dream I was walking along a wooded bluff above a pebbled beach with a companion. We were discussing the several wrecked buildings that were scattered along the ridge. Apparently I recalled a time when the mossy cul de sac…

bzzy
(19 Words. April 25, 2005, 10:55 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
One thousand orders awaited us on arrival at work on Monday morning. We shipped about 350. Blogging will suffer….

Fremont
(77 Words. April 24, 2005, 05:23 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
A fine saturday beering was had in the company of Dan, Jim, Tom, and for a part of it, Manuel. Viv joined us for nosh at Blue C Sushi to get things rolling. On the way, Viv and I had a bite at Ivar’s fish bar on Lake Union. I dropped in on Dusty Strings as well and made…

Crime
(24 Words. April 20, 2005, 10:24 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
A friend of mine had a break-in tonight. It’s a bummer. I’m glad we were able to be there for him; he’s understandably unsettled….

Teevee
(343 Words. April 19, 2005, 05:40 PM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
Well over a month ago, we inadvertently became a semi no-TV household. Our satellite provider mailed us a replacement ‘smart card’ for our satellite box, a five-year-old WebTV-integrated PVR which we have never used as a PVR or as a WebTV device but only as a receiver. The smart card managed to disable the device, and so the only…

The Return
(641 Words. April 17, 2005, 09:57 PM, Comments: 5) MORE >>>
My weekend has been spent doing the dispiriting task of developing my employer’s human resources policies, at least to an initial state. I believe I have it wrangled but I found the experience tremendously disheartening, even though the intellectual and work-relation problems resolved by having a policy in place clearly make it necessary. How can I put it? It…

Party
(54 Words. April 09, 2005, 01:00 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
We had a lovely time at Karla and Diego’s birthday party last night. I have some pictures to share but as the computer rebuild is proceeding, I’m limited to moblogging. Therefore I am posting only a single image. Viv is watching the fairly creepy Julianne Moore flick, The Forgotten, so this lovely doll wins….

Goodwill
(758 Words. April 02, 2005, 11:04 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Well, having some unexpected free time, we went back to Goodwill and found some glasses. They weren’t the ones we’d come up with initially, but they’ll do. I can’t tell you how much I enjoy picking through the glassware at Goodwill - it’s like a giant, transparent, three-dimensional puzzle, and your challenge is to find the items that match….

Herman Miller
(283 Words. April 02, 2005, 03:55 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
On the way to the Apple Store, we ran some errands. Viv missed a freeway turnoff and we found oueselves in the parking lot of the Goodwill store on Dearborn. A couple of weeks ago we had carefully picked over the ever-changing selection of glassware for a set of red wine glasses; this morning one was broken as the coffee…

Odd I see
(517 Words. March 29, 2005, 03:21 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
I left work early today because of a dental appointment. It was a cold, sunny day and a chilly wind was blowing. I was not dressed for it and the walk to the bus stop took on the aspect of a struggle. I paused and called Viv, and then one Eric, and then another. As I spoke to the…

Die lan
(178 Words. March 28, 2005, 08:39 PM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
Among other amusements this evening, I roughed out another first draft on the Treo, this time not on the bus but prone on the couch. Since the laptop drive is providing failure warnings, I had considered my options and determined that an outboard backup drive was the place to start. It is, and what have you. So I’m studiously leaving…

Eye tem
(326 Words. March 27, 2005, 06:25 PM, Comments: 3) MORE >>>
ITEM. Trying NetNewsWire for the first time. Not sold, very definitely not sold. Glad that I was able to export/import the blogroll from blogrolling.com. No beef with the app, it’s the way the content is sketchily available. I also miss the site formatting, although I clearly understand the advantages of leaving it out of the feeds. ITEM. Disk Tool…

Der tod
(138 Words. March 25, 2005, 10:03 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
A couple of beers at The Comet with the man that married my wife. To me, I mean. Then we had sushi and bento at the wonderfully quiet Oasis Cafe up the block. On the way home walked by the nearly-complete reservoir park, where that van driver plowed into the wall twentyodd days ago. The park looks lovely and…

no wifi for you
(86 Words. March 25, 2005, 02:39 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
I went to the Elysian for lunch on my way home from work, hoping to get some work done, and was puzzled by the repeated failure of my computer to connect to the wireless signal, which is clearly visible under the name “Elysian Free Wi-Fi.” The formerly open access point now required a password to join. Inquiring with my…

Baked Alaska
(36 Words. March 24, 2005, 12:06 AM, Comments: 4) MORE >>>
Dinner Wednesday night at The Oceanaire with Greg and Stacey. I hear Greg can’t make it to practice Thursday which is just as well, as I have some seriously overdue copy I need to work on….

Bleeding Gums Murphy
(94 Words. March 15, 2005, 08:11 PM, Comments: 4) MORE >>>
OK, the second dentist in two years is telling me I have Oscar-quality gingivitis, which results in the scurvy-like loss of teeth due to bone loss. The first place suggested using a flouride rinse, but the new place stressed the importance of punishing, De-Sade-esque flossing and the patience of Job, in order to actually wait out the interminable 30-seconds-per-quad that…

You Can't Just Sing in the Supermarket
(339 Words. January 30, 2005, 11:09 AM, Comments: 5) MORE >>>
I met Dan and Jim at the U. District Safeway, where we discovered a produce section crowded with fifty or sixty folks, to the growing bemusement of the store’s employees. Eric Sooros emailed me that he was accosted by a store representative be cause he, his wife Rose, and their infant child “looked like they knew what was going on.”…

Clicking
(172 Words. January 26, 2005, 06:44 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Man, today is the first day in months that I’ve felt refreshed and efficient. I was a whirlwind at work today, just cranking out the orders, and when I got home I immediately piled into jobs two, three, and four. I still have to move the laundry around downstairs, but I was able to bat cleanup on everything else, in…

Hot
(94 Words. January 20, 2005, 08:49 PM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
While googling revealed no reports of concern regarding the square white power supplies curently shipping for iBooks and Powerbooks, I just noticed that the one attached to this computer is so hot that it hurts to touch it for more than a few seconds. In other news, I looks like the feverish intense and concentrated two hours of magazine-related work…

That's Sick
(268 Words. January 19, 2005, 08:41 PM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
Damme! I was scheduled to meet some miscellaneous digital reprobates at the behest of Mr. Dent this evening. But this morning when I woke up I had nausea, bad enough that I went home from work and crawled into bed. Naturally, I said to my self, “Self, this is a perfect time to try a trial install of OS Commerce.”…

The biggest Bunyan
(259 Words. January 06, 2005, 04:55 PM, Comments: 3) MORE >>>
I have written about my love for Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry here, quite some time ago. Among other things, I wrote My personal favorite was the little room off one of the stairs into which one stumbled upon discovering the floor had been faceted in many crazy angled slabs. These slabs simulated random motion, as though the room…

PNWuary Mefi Meetup
(87 Words. January 04, 2005, 06:04 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Hey look! It’s blurry pictures (and a very dark 11mb video) from last night’s MetaFilter Meetup. In attendance: kindall, agropyron, cirocco, astruc, alexgb, caitlinb, mwhybark, non-MeFite Adam, black8, Danelope, Keyser Soze aka Frito, fatllama. Here are the photos. (Alas, I found that ecto won’t play nice with MT3.x + Blacklist while attempting to upload these pix here. Bye, ecto!…

Plam
(198 Words. December 28, 2004, 09:06 AM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
I actually meant to mention this in yesterday’s entry: we were able to locate my missing PDA in the lost-and-found at Virginia Mason. That’s a mixed blessing, but on the whole a good thing. I had been looking at 8mb and 16mb Vx’s on eBay (the newly-returned PDA is an IBM-branded 8mb Palm Vx, also an ebay purchase) and while…

Mas
(19 Words. December 25, 2004, 11:21 AM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Spence came over and shared the day with Vivian, my parents, and me. There was much eating of cheese….

eve of eve
(85 Words. December 23, 2004, 11:54 PM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
Well, you see. A) My beloved Chloe cat has found that she can move the cursor by pawing the trackpad. This is more distracting than disturbing, but may prove dangerous if she recalls my passwords. B) LAN woes continue, driving me quite batty. C) Retail hell is concluded for the year. D) I took my folks out to dinner at…

Holiday Notes
(149 Words. December 22, 2004, 06:16 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
A note from an old mentor and certified musical mad genius included the following bit, which is too good not to share: REDACTED had another very successful year developing new toys for the U.S. military using cutting-edge space-age-type technologies.  It’s all hush-hush top-secret kind of stuff; hip sci-fi style survival gear that LOOKS as cool as it sounds.  Supposedly the…

Shipping
(89 Words. December 21, 2004, 07:56 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Next to last day of retail hell. We are finally catching up. Attempted to attend a planning meeting via IM for a Seattle-based blogventure. Alas, dsl and privacy-setting issues limited my interaction. A participant promised to forward a transcript. My folks were scheduled to fly in at 3:30 yesterday but snow delays on the east coast held them until…

fully packed
(103 Words. December 19, 2004, 06:44 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Okay, last stretch. Order volume has dropped slightly. We’re doing one more death march on Tuesday to try to zero any backorders out - that shift starts at midnight and ends when we have shipped the last item we have that is in stock and ordered. Our order volume over the past thirty days was more than two times the…

Beat, daddy, beat
(20 Words. December 16, 2004, 07:25 AM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
Fourteen hours of shipping the goods yesterday and we’re just barely keeping even. Ten more days. Just ten more days….

Xmas among the Bloggy
(140 Words. December 14, 2004, 07:24 AM, Comments: 4) MORE >>>
… and several days later, I have some pictures to share! Ms. Dayment, our hostess. Manuel and Hopkin, together at last… …at least until Tara got her priorities straight. Samantha started out with the most amazingly hideous holiday nutcracker of all time (a tugboat captain garishly highlighted with sparklies). In the end, though, she wound up with a different…

Retail Selection
(1501 Words. December 11, 2004, 03:42 PM, Comments: 3) MORE >>>
Man, I’m getting frazzled. Item one: Last night we attended Daymented’s annual Blogger White Elephant party. I am too pooped to post the pitchas. I will state for the record that I have very, very entertaining footage of a certain photoblogger enjoying a particular sort of endorphin stimulation. Tara ended up with Hopkin, which she stole from Manuel. I…

DSLember Seventh
(33 Words. December 09, 2004, 06:05 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Holy cow, you’d think that ten years after the rise of IP networking it wouldn’t take TWO FREAKING DAYS to troubleshoot a router configuration anymore. Argh. And I’m still not done, it seems….

Meet the Candidate
(29 Words. December 06, 2004, 08:50 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
I’d like to introduce you to a new friend of mine. I won’t mention him by name in order to minimize the goog factor. Shh! No pointing. Be nice….

Superpolymesh
(226 Words. December 05, 2004, 01:06 AM, Comments: 5) MORE >>>
Viv and I just got back from seeing The Incredibles (finally), and I won’t bore you with predictable rantings about its’ excellence. I will say, however, that word on a certain Randian subtext is clearly correct. Part of the film’s triumph is the remarkable fact that this did not provoke sneering on my part. I certainly cannot wait for…

Dizzy with sleeplessness
(123 Words. December 04, 2004, 05:14 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Please accept my sincerest apologies for my shift to linkmongery here of late. Non-blog writing responsibilities are all coming due at oncet and I’m having to put all my words over there. That said, sometime yesterday, this site passed the 150k lifetime visitors mark. Hopkin continues to ripple out into the world; yesterday a large number of visitors began…

Support
(144 Words. December 01, 2004, 07:53 AM, Comments: 2) MORE >>>
Recently, I noticed a line item on my phone bill for “DSL 640k,” which puzzled me, as I was pretty sure the last service upgrade notice I had on my DSL was to 320k. This morning, I found myself with two seconds to rub together, so I called Qwest to find out what the deal was. Amazingly, the experience…

Neko
(306 Words. November 28, 2004, 02:02 PM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
Last night we went to see Neko Case at Neumo’s. Click the pic for more blurry pix. I shot a fair amount of video, too. I’ll link to the clips here; they are all in quicktime format. The show opened with the out-of-place on the bill Dexter Romweber, a true southern madman, who was in fine form. Despite this,…

Hopkin's Thanksgiving
(9 Words. November 27, 2004, 11:46 AM, Comments: 4) MORE >>>
Hopkin came with us to Thanksgiving this year….

Hopkin Explained
(1295 Words. November 22, 2004, 07:09 AM, Comments: 88) MORE >>>
Where to start? As I noted here previously, sometime around September of 2003 some fliers appeared in Seattle, proclaiming the loss of what appeared to be a small boy’s frog. “Who took my frog?” the author asked, plaintively. Concluding with a determined “P.S. I’ll find my frog,” the fliers were noted and remarked upon by at least a couple…

Craig Thompson Awards Sweep
(327 Words. November 21, 2004, 04:37 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
In my inbox today is a press release from Portland-based Top Shelf Comix, properly tooting their own horn on a first time eent in the history of comics. Portland-based comics author Craig Thompson swept the comics industry awards this year, winning every award he was nominated for in recognition of the stunning accomplishment of his second graphic novel, the…

New Voyage
(414 Words. November 20, 2004, 10:11 PM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
Apparently I haven’t been paying close enough attention, as in October the Star Trek: New Voyages project released their second episode, In Harm’s Way. Regrettably, it seems they also have not been paying attention, as it’s impossible to ID the content from the URL or storage structure they have implemented at the moment. Presumably, someday, a more effectively designed…

Hee hee
(94 Words. November 18, 2004, 10:09 PM, Comments: 2) MORE >>>
Viv, looking over my shoulder as I perused a certain mirror of a site devoted to photoshop tomfoolery, got a big kick out of some of the pix. When we got home from dinner, she pestered me for the URL, and I hooked her up. About seven pictures in, she cries out, “OH NO! GOD, WHAT IS THAT!” Alas,…

Sets
(108 Words. November 16, 2004, 08:40 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
You know, I have only ever visited one live movie set while work was going on, and it makes a huge difference in visualizing what my film people are talking about when I’m doing quote work with them. I can only assume this holds true for journalists without development experience when interviewing computer people. I think, though, there’s more…

1919
(127 Words. November 16, 2004, 09:45 AM, Comments: 3) MORE >>>
Yesterday morning on my way to work, I glanced through the cold morning rain to see a cardboard box in the alley near a bus stop. A tattered piece of cardboard caught my eye, turn-of-the-century display type peeking out from the pile of debris. I investigated and found a stash of theatrical posters from St. Louis, dated between 1919…

Veteran
(89 Words. November 11, 2004, 05:13 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
I don’t think I mentioned it here yet, but I’ve started writing professionally again. I’m finding it fun. It’s hard to squeeze the phone interviews in between work and blogging and cooking et al, however. I’m also chasing down a project which I think the blogging community at large will find interesting but since I don’t know if it’s…

Laurels
(37 Words. November 09, 2004, 09:47 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
I’m meeting with lawyers all day today in consideration of the potential branding and revenue effects of being forever linked with tentacle porn. A leading strategy is to go with a kawaii blitz to offset google effects….

Mefi Mofi Etsee
(326 Words. November 07, 2004, 01:09 PM, Comments: 2) MORE >>>
Last night was the MeFi MoFi Blog windingdangdoodle at the Elysian. I didn’t realize that the brewpub took reservations, and should have made one. I parked at the bar until folks started showing up a bit after seven. Mars Saxman was first and we chatted about the improbable appearance that night of Psychic TV at a nearby club. Erika…

And we're off.
(872 Words. November 02, 2004, 07:44 AM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Well, folks, here we are. Good luck to you, and to us all today. I have an extraordinarily pessimistic view of the stakes and circumstances of this election. I mean, it’s extraordinary for people at large; if you know me at all, my view is utterly unsurprising. Voting for either Bush or Kerry will not bring about the fundamental…

Aztecs, the Clash, the Presidency and the Bible
(850 Words. October 31, 2004, 01:26 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Occasionally, I mention that one piece or another in a given issue of The New Yorker has particularly struck me. In general, though I try to avoid doing so, mostly because the magazine appeals to me so consistently that if I did not deliberately choose to exclude it from my blogging, I’d be repeating myself weekly. This week, however,…

Mars comes to New Jersey
(275 Words. October 30, 2004, 06:43 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
KUOW is continuing the delightful tradition of broadcasting the famed Mercury Theater on the Air Halloween broadcast of The War of the Worlds tonight. It seems, no matter how many times I have heard it, just as successful (script link) in creating an atmosphere of credible tension and urban apocalypse. Listen. Now I look down the harbor. All manner…

Feel the power!
(221 Words. October 29, 2004, 10:33 AM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
Hello Mac land! I’m trying to track down a second power adapter for my 15“ aluminum series Powerbook. I’m having a hard time tracking down the scuttlebutt on the available adapters. Small Dog apparently only carries the Apple OEM variety, and hoo-boy, people hate it. The MacAlly PS-AC4 looks as though it should work (the marketing pic shows it…

Happy Birthday, Suzy
(13 Words. October 28, 2004, 10:55 AM, Comments: 4) MORE >>>
I miss you a lot. Your pictures are back up here….

HOLY COW
(60 Words. October 25, 2004, 06:06 PM, Comments: 3) MORE >>>
Bill Clinton just called me. Okay, so he was a phone-bot. But let me tell you, when you pick up the phone and hear “Hello, this is Bill Clinton,” it’s still noteworthy. For the record, my response was to burst into laughter and listen closely to the whole thing to see if they’d figured out some way to do…

More Dreams
(551 Words. October 24, 2004, 01:09 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Lat night, I looked out of the windows of a building that exists only in my mind, at the windows of another building. The facing wall was old, and brick, and the windows set in the brick were dark. Multiple layers of glass blurred the reflections I saw in them. The curious thing was that the windows did not…

Dreams
(193 Words. October 23, 2004, 11:19 AM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
I had a dream that I could see Mount Saint Helens from a public park here in Seattle. The mountain was steaming as it has been but also burping up rocks and ash, which you could see flying into the air and dropping down the sides of the mountain. Oddly, the mountain was visible through a break in a…

Thrift
(251 Words. October 17, 2004, 01:46 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Yesterday we went thrifting. This place, J. T.’s Attic, is up on Greenwood near 85th. It’s only open on Saturdays from 1 to 5. It’s a real mixed bag, and the store suffers from that overstuffed, cluttery feel that some secondhand shops can fall prey to. It’s easy to get snagged on something and wind up pulling a lamp…

Snap
(96 Words. October 11, 2004, 07:37 AM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Arguments for and against Armageddon, one of an infinite series. Heated political discussion on the shores of Green Lake. Evidence in favor of a healthy democracy. Argument against! Topic of the argument: war in the Middle East involving Americans, Israelis, and Arabs. Argument for! Verdict: A draw. An in-store display of orange, green, and purple pumpkin-shaped trick-or-treat lootbags. Argument…

How to steal a Zeppelin
(1166 Words. October 02, 2004, 07:28 AM, Comments: 4) MORE >>>
This is the final installment of Blimp Week II, folks, and I’m playing a couple of requests. Soon-to-be parasite on society Paul Frankenstein (he’s famous, you know) IMs, suggesting the title above. Ergo: 1. Go to Google Image search. 2. Enter the word “zeppelin” and hit the submit button. 3. Steal as many zeppelins as you’d like. Thank you!…

Woah
(86 Words. September 17, 2004, 10:23 AM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
For some reason I had occasion to closely examine the hardware specs on my new Powerbook. It’s a new-reconditioned machine from Apple, and I had thought that I was getting something like a 15% discount on the configuration with one important bell and whistle, the DVD-burning superdrive. To my shock, it became apparent to me that the machine is the…

Tagalog billboard and wifi
(102 Words. September 13, 2004, 10:34 AM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Wifimaps.com informs me that there are no known free hotspots within walking distance of where I work. Sadly, the map renders aren’t bookmarkable, but there are some static maps available. Walking to work from the bus stop this mnorning I noticed an unspectacular beer ad, for Michelob, featuring a man and woman cuddling, kind of, on a couch. The ad…

Ignominious failure
(235 Words. September 05, 2004, 08:01 PM, Comments: 5) MORE >>>
I spent yesterday evening in Tacoma eating the best fried oysters ever in the world, along with southern-style fish-fry food the likes of hush puppies, catfish, and corn. I had promised Bart I was going to shoot for the next episode of Rox at the fry; alas, my nerve failed me and I shot not a thing. I still intend…

A rarity
(163 Words. August 31, 2004, 05:14 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Having just poured myself a gin and tonic, it being hot, I put it aside for a bit. When I remembered it was there, I picked it up and took a big slug, followed by surprised sputterings and profanity at the burning sensation my mouth encountered. I either forgot to mix the drink as I put it aside or I…

sore throat
(167 Words. August 28, 2004, 12:17 AM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
On our way to pick up Spence and roll on to the Daymented Everything Party, I was over come with hunger, so we dropped into the U-District’s Sushi Express (“Drive-By Sushi!”) to nosh. While there, I saw a blogger I do not know except by sight, Dan’s pal Zannah, come in and sit down, presumably with hubby. The food was…

Plum Nelly
(69 Words. August 26, 2004, 07:00 AM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
We’re back! Didja miss us? (The last week-plus was an exercise in stealth distance blogging, all done by remote control from fabulous Laguna Beach, California. We saw tiny sharks! Also of interest is the fact that Gmail performed considerably better than my desktop email app.) This seventeen seconds of Veo-video was shot four blocks from my in-laws’ house, the…

buoyancy
(140 Words. August 23, 2004, 07:32 AM, Comments: 5) MORE >>>
The white fish is swimming upside down more now than last night. Before I fed them tonight, he was swimming normally. As soon as he ate the food, he became unusually buoyant, like an underwater balloon. None of the other fish in the tank seem to have this problem. I noticed him struggling to swim down to the bottom last…

a happy ending
(638 Words. August 21, 2004, 07:29 AM, Comments: 3) MORE >>>
I just spent the last half-day trying to fix my father-in-law’s e-machines desktop Windows XP box. He can’t clearly explain what happened, but somehow he became concerned that a new scanner he’d purchased had installed bad stuff on the computer, and I think he sought to remedy this by hand-removing some of the items he thought the installer had put…

ividly
(594 Words. August 15, 2004, 11:00 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
I spent a big chunk of today finally exploring the integration features in iDVD, iTunes, iPhoto, and iMovie. I’m working from a mixed base of assets representing the two most recent camping trips we went on (to Mount Baker in June and to the Olympic Peninsula this month). As it happens, long-time MacWorld editor Jim Heid saw a prior entry…

First Test
(120 Words. August 14, 2004, 11:03 AM, Comments: 5) MORE >>>
In one hour and thirty minutes I will be taking the first drivers’ test of my life. Update, 2:30p. I failed. This is not surprising or upsetting given that I haven’t practiced at all for several months and loathe cars* and driving anyway. But my tastes and desires aren’t germane here, and I’ll be testing again as soon as possible….

Microfilm
(488 Words. August 10, 2004, 08:35 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
(1 minute. 6 mb 1.8 mb, 320 x 240 mpeg, no audio. Control-click to download, looks like I have Apache set to not stream mpegs or something.) As I mentioned, Viv and I (and Spencer) were out of town this weekend. We were on the Olympic peninsula, in an ill-advised attempt to visit the Hoh river valley on the…

Sun-addled
(16 Words. August 01, 2004, 09:33 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Can’t blog. Sun fried brain at beach. (Looks like we just missed Tom and krewe.)…

A New Thing
(217 Words. July 28, 2004, 07:48 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
I live in a heavily rental-oriented neighborhood in downtown Seattle. Renters are not, by-and-large, voters, and thus they are not generally campaigned to. This evening, I stepped outside to take the trash to the dumpster. I’ve been listening to the Democratic convention speeches all week, generally with interest and sometimes with criticisms. Tonight, as I carried my dripping bag of…

Change
(110 Words. July 27, 2004, 05:29 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Viv got home late last night. Among her California booty was a bumpersticker that her dad gave her. As some readers will already know, Viv’s parents came to the U.S. from Cuba after the revolution. While my father-in-law is far from being the political caricature of Cuban emigres seen as players in both Florida and national politics, it’s safe to…

Cam, gear, shaft
(252 Words. July 19, 2004, 07:16 AM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
I bought Viv a Minolta DiMage X20 as an anniversary present. My primary criteria were size, cost, and standard batteries (I hate manufacturer-proprietary rechargeables). It’s currently available at Amazon for $170, a somewhat different price than I paid. I was very surprised at the camera’s bounty of features, which includes (as do many cameras these days) low-res digital video clips…

ten years ago on a cold dark night
(144 Words. July 18, 2004, 02:51 PM, Comments: 6) MORE >>>
Vivian and I had our first date ten years ago tonight. It was wiltingly hot. We had a choice between The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl or The Lion King. The documentary was my first choice, but Viv was unsure who the subject was. Let me tell you, explaining why you want to see a film about a Nazi…

The Pepper Tree
(233 Words. July 15, 2004, 07:03 AM, Comments: 2) MORE >>>
In the earlier post referencing a photo-log of my commute, I expressed grumpiness that the captions of the images failed to properly appear in Gallery. One reason is that the interesting tree seen here was not annotated. It’s a Brazilian pepper tree, a problem plant in Florida. The tree is just behind the Canal Boiler Works but probably not on…

Chers blogeurs et blogeuses
(39 Words. July 14, 2004, 07:49 PM, Comments: 2) MORE >>>
We’s a gwine ter have a wing ding hyar, an RL peeps is a comin’. Summ a youse wot mebbe mought wanna come, youse is inviteried. Puh-leeze to email me and ah’ll hep yez ter the haps, gatesters. Dig?…

Hi ho
(53 Words. July 13, 2004, 06:36 AM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
Although there is a bus ride in the middle, here are the things I see every day on my way to work. Yesterday morning, though, there was an added attraction: the burned-out remnants of Hillcrest Market. A walk to work. (Grumble. The captions didn’t come over from iPhoto and I’m out of steam.)…

¡Hasta La Victoria!
(181 Words. July 11, 2004, 11:16 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Today was an insanely busy day. Errand after errand. Luckily, we were able to meet up with Spence for dinner and finally catch F 9/11, which stood up. It was like hearing an impassioned argument. It’s worth seeing, and on the way home, Viv was saying how she wished she could get her Cuban-emigré parents to see it. She heated…

droopy
(165 Words. July 06, 2004, 05:46 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
I’m a bit sozzled with sleepiness. Viv and I went to the Museum of Flight to see the new wing, and ogle the flying antiques. After years of hunting, I found a NASA cap, to replace one lost to sleep-deprivation during the dotcom era. The new cap’s OK, but I still miss the old one, which was better made. As…

American Girl
(1169 Words. July 04, 2004, 06:33 PM, Comments: 6) MORE >>>
A day or two ago I somehow happened to hear a song that was unfamiliar to me but obviously by Tom Petty, which included the lyric She grew up in an Indiana town, Had a good-lookin’ mama who never was around. But she grew up tall and she grew up right With them Indiana boys on them Indiana nights I…

Vegan Roadkill
(47 Words. July 01, 2004, 07:29 AM, Comments: 2) MORE >>>
The roadkill cooked slowly, only gradually charring enough to allow one to easily slough the charred skin. Once that material patched off, an unsightly orange tone was observed in the yet-underdone flesh of the item. Later, we were set upon by a night nibbler….

Oh too
(66 Words. June 30, 2004, 07:00 AM, Comments: 3) MORE >>>
I was without oxygen, and equally without beer. It was only a matter of time until it was all over. No doubt they would find me, sprawled amidst the rock and snow, feed cap semaphoring over the miles, flickering yellow and off, yellow and off. If not for the backwash of the snowboarders’ leavings, I would be dead toady,…

54 Buick P-40 Special
(122 Words. June 29, 2004, 07:00 AM, Comments: 3) MORE >>>
As we drove south on Chuckanut Drive, overlooking the waters that hold the San Juans, we came across this lovely militarian art car, lableled in stencil on the trunk “54 Buick Special P-40.” The car also featured what I’d have to describe as ‘tail art,’ and a front-facing fifty-caliber machine gun in the back seat, not clearly visible in…

Two Bells and Three Men
(164 Words. June 24, 2004, 09:28 PM, Comments: 2) MORE >>>
I just returned from a beer-up at the Two Bells with Messrs. Harpel and Elope. We had a pleasant evening in which I learned that “no one cares about my sandwich,” notwithstanding the fact of my munching Crab Louie whilst my compadres consumed burgerfleisch. Kaycee Nicole was likened to A Rape in Cyberspace. Tom regaled us with tales of his…

Main Line Berry
(198 Words. June 04, 2004, 04:07 PM, Comments: 2) MORE >>>
Just finished interviewing Frezan Ozpetek, a Turkish-Italian film director who is in town for SIFF for a couple of days. The SIFF press suite is in the W, more-or-less next to the new Seattle Public Library. In the large photo that is the most prominent element in the page that opens from the Library link in the prior sentence, I…

Memorial
(593 Words. May 31, 2004, 08:37 PM, Comments: 3) MORE >>>
This Memorial Day, Viv and I walked up to the least-known military cemetery in central Seattle, the Grand Army of the Republic cemetery just beyond the north end of Lakeview Cemetery, to the north of Volunteer Park, overlooking Montlake and Portage Bay. The small cemetery went through a period of extreme neglect, which it’s recovering from. RootsWeb offers a database…

Hang it all over
(280 Words. May 30, 2004, 11:34 PM, Comments: 3) MORE >>>
Viv and I attended the soiree for Donnie Darko at Consolidated Works on Saturday night. Free drinks, nibbles, etcetera. We ran into Karla and her husband Diego, and Gillian and Kristopher. I saw Brad go by but didn’t run into him again, which is too bad. At any rate I had gallons to drink. At one point I overheard two…

sore arm
(322 Words. May 28, 2004, 06:14 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
I spent much of the day to day viciously malleting slot-and-stem industrial shelving together, only to find that I had done so, for all six shelving units, upside down and backwards. My arm is quite sore. It’s heavy work for a keyboard jockey, I assure you. Yesterday was a record day for rainfall in the region, and we discovered that…

The Tables
(313 Words. May 26, 2004, 06:59 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
As predicted, I spent a major portion of my day at Boeing Surplus, which is having a sale this week. We came away with about five simple slab-style desks, a round break table, two quite nice task chairs, and four nice conference chairs. The task chairs are fully ergonomic, solidly built, and cost $10. The conference chairs cost $2. Each…

It Burns
(154 Words. May 24, 2004, 06:36 PM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
Evil toxic awful stinky floor sealant next door that the damn floor refinishers didn’t think to inform anyone in the building about is FLAVORING MY FOOD LIKE SHARPIES. I went into the apartment to tell them to stop it and get a floor sealant that won’t KILL BABIES and this tiny Vietnamese teenager who spoke no English was applying it…

Too short
(81 Words. May 15, 2004, 01:41 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
My folks were in town a bit unexpectedly this week for a couple days. While there, my dad and I finally went on the biplane that offers quick little hops out of Boeing Field at the Museum of Flight. My dad’s first degree is in aeronautical engineering and he passed his love of planes directly on to me. To…

Chair
(83 Words. May 04, 2004, 06:38 AM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
On Sunday afternoon, at Dixon’s Used Furniture, we found a fully-ergonomic office chair for Viv’s home office. The chair is a Teknion Adovcate, and it’s very comfy. I have a significantly older Herman Miller fancypants chair (pre-Aeron, but still the cush), and I’m slightly jealous. Word to the wise: it was $40, an outrageous bargain, and they have two left,…

Help and Commerce
(1097 Words. May 03, 2004, 06:04 AM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
On Sunday, after some appropriate dawdlesomeness (regrettably including bowing out of a sketched-in plan to visit the celebrated Kubota Gardens, bummer) Viv and I ran a furniture errand (about which more later) and ended up at Costco. It was a the usual monthly weekend visit, part of the fabric of Northwestern (and, increasingly, the nation’s) as long as I have…

Power
(30 Words. April 27, 2004, 05:39 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Giant power wows are hitting my neighborhood, so the server might go down. *womp* Blinken lights, radio static. Makes me wanna run out to look at the donner und blitzen….

That's DUMAS
(39 Words. April 27, 2004, 02:46 PM, Comments: 2) MORE >>>
Today I got in touch with my inner tard, by attending a film for review and SITTING IN THE WRONG THEATER for an hour. Sigh. I will restrict my activities for the rest of the day to non-technical pursuits….

Hole in my Kitchen
(157 Words. April 17, 2004, 12:18 PM, Comments: 3) MORE >>>
There’s a hole in the kitchen this morning; our circa nineteen-seventies dishwasher gave up the ghost, and today a new one will be installed. In the hole, there’s some archeology. The apartment building we live in is one of the twenty-or-so scattered around Capitol Hill in the nineteen-twenties by Frederick Anhalt, a character’s character. This building employs a decorative…

Algiers
(431 Words. April 16, 2004, 10:27 AM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
I had a lucid dream this morning in which Vivian and I were stuck on the wharves in Algiers on our way to Iraq. I had forgotten my sunglasses and had to run around looking for clip-ons that fit my specs. Right next to the wharf-and-building complex we were on was a sort of historical display of old sailing ships,…

April in the center of the universe
(61 Words. April 11, 2004, 11:13 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
A sunny afternoon in Fremont. I hear we got up to 80 degrees. There were frites, and art, and hats. And clocks made out of hard drives. Also, a dead crow. Later, pho. Whilst pho-ing, I saw a SARS Chicken sticker that was peeling away from it’s placement, so I gave it a good home….

Counting your chickens II
(159 Words. April 07, 2004, 04:56 PM, Comments: 3) MORE >>>
And finally, without intending that I would devote my day to Jeff’s blog topics, I ventured to the University District where I attended a press screening of the forthcoming Jonathan Demme documentary The Agronomist, about slain Haitian journalist and activist Jean Dominique. As I walked north from the Route 43 terminus, one block west of Trader Joe’s, I spied a…

rebooting
(55 Words. March 31, 2004, 03:19 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
The powerbook that suffered brain damage as a result of martini consumption has had an emetic and while it’s not 100% it is booting and as far as I can tell is likely to recover. Unfortunately, I think I have to disassemble and clean the keyboard, unless I can score one for cheap on eBay….

Punished
(16 Words. March 31, 2004, 03:04 PM, Comments: 2) MORE >>>
I think I just saw Jeff Bezos at a press screening for the new Punisher film….

Round 2 (or is it 3)
(33 Words. March 25, 2004, 02:36 PM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
Back again for round 2 of FTF job interviews. I think I did OK, not kickass, but decent. I erred in not bringing a water bottle as I found myself susceptible to drymouth….

Barbered
(61 Words. March 18, 2004, 03:32 PM, Comments: 8) MORE >>>
I told my barber “Three and a half - four inches on top, shorter on the sides.” He misheard that, somehow, as “Three-fourths of an inch on top, shorter on the sides.” I did not realize what had happened until he clapped clipper to pate, and by then, we were committed. Oh well. I hear the military is fashionable this…

Phone interview
(95 Words. March 17, 2004, 12:59 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
I had a phone interview today, which went well enough, I suppose. I was only really unhappy with my responses to one specific question, concerning freelance clients. My non-writing freelance client relationships have tended to be so very informal that I had a hard time recalling the names of the specific companies involved - I could remember the individual people…

Snoqualmie Falls
(187 Words. March 13, 2004, 08:08 PM, Comments: 2) MORE >>>
Viv and I drove up to Snoqualmie Falls this afternoon and walked around the old trains near the depot. It was obviously the off-season, and while the plants down around our apartment are beginning to think it’s Spring, the trees at the higher elevation of the Pass are under no such misapprehension. Wait, can trees experience apprehension? Nevermind. The trains…

Spalding Gray at the Comet
(941 Words. March 09, 2004, 04:57 PM, Comments: 2) MORE >>>
Spalding Gray hunches around his beer. His body looks thin inside his padded gray winter jacket, a wintering seabird. He’s been perched on the bar stool since early evening, drinking slowly. It’s a raucous Thursday night at Seattle’s venerable Comet Tavern. To Gray’s left, there is an open space at the bar, drawing patrons to and fro in search of…

yuk
(47 Words. March 04, 2004, 02:15 PM, Comments: 2) MORE >>>
It’s really no fun when your kitchen sink barfs up your neighbor’s dispos-alled schmutz and floods your kitchen and dining room at 10 am. And then when your indoor cat runs away outside in fear it’s also no fun. Sigh. UPDATE: Sink still clogged. Cat came back….

Transmissions
(275 Words. February 22, 2004, 01:16 PM, Comments: 4) MORE >>>
I wandered into the tinfoil hat Wikipedia entry from an old entry over at Tom’s place, and that led me to the entry on the microwave auditory effect, whereby directed microwaves can cause modulatable clicks in the inner ear. It triggered a memory of one of the most amazing things I have ever seen and heard. My dad exclaimed, “There…

Herb
(355 Words. February 20, 2004, 08:47 AM, Comments: 3) MORE >>>
I spent the night before last and last night hanging out with my old pal Herb Reith, in town to seek gainful employment upon the conclusion of his MFA from the University of Cincinnati. I’ve known Herb since he was about ten. Indirectly Herb helped introduce me to the mandolin. He and another younger friend, Joe Zagorski, had started playing…

Cat Pic (as required)
(58 Words. February 10, 2004, 05:15 PM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
So all day today, this feline, Simon, has been insistently parking himself on my lap. He’s a robust fellow and a bit hard to type around. It does keep the top of my thighs nice and toasty, though. I guess someone let him read the universal blog license terms or something, so I’m obligated. Don’t tell Chloe, OK?…

That's Classified
(77 Words. February 04, 2004, 05:41 PM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
A few help wanted ads that caught my eye this afternoon: Organ Donor! Who wouldn’t want that gig! I wonder, if experience is required, exactly how much? I did have my tonsils removed as a child. What are the odds of two medical establishments in the Pacific Northwest cleverly naming themselves after mythic figures of the regional Native American culture?…

in dreams
(17 Words. January 29, 2004, 08:47 AM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
I woke up this morning after an epic dream all about a very detailed experience of insomnia….

burn baby burn
(120 Words. January 27, 2004, 08:24 PM, Comments: 4) MORE >>>
Damn, if platters gave off cyano fumes I’d be a dead man. Within the last week I completed the authoring process on some archival DVDs for an early-80’s band, for distro only to a tiny group, and found myself with a list of people that collectively have been promised delivery of about fifty discs, variously DVD and CD. This is…

Clueful male, HWP, moves to NYC
(47 Words. January 18, 2004, 03:29 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
My pal David is moving to the city. He’s looking for places via craigslist, and I vouch for his personal hygiene and excellent education. City people, can I get the hookups rolling? He’ll be there to get housing on Tuesday and will move there in two weeks….

Warbussing
(186 Words. January 14, 2004, 05:52 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
I had my interview in Redmond (no, not with a certain software behemoth) this afternoon and it went very well. Over pho the CTO showed and discussed the company’s product and I’m still very excited about it. I also found the CTO likeable and enjoyed our conversation. On the way home, I couldn’t find the stop for the 545, which…

ah... oops
(50 Words. January 05, 2004, 04:53 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Sorry! I unplugged my DSL router as I left for jury duty today. The King County Courthouse heating system was out, and the outdoor temperature is in the twenties. I’m still cold. I was impaneled and dismissed on a burglary case. One down, one to go, unless they keep me….

DVDs and jury duty
(370 Words. January 04, 2004, 07:00 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
There’s some interesting news afoot I haven’t been able to tackle today, having spent it finishing the DVD authoring on a project I initiated in September (my test burn is being prepped right this second - cross your fingers for me). I expect to develop it tomorrow, however, although I will be embarking, in theory, on a new experience tomorrow…

snow business
(4 Words. December 31, 2003, 12:18 AM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
still snowing, but slacked….

Snow '03
(27 Words. December 30, 2003, 10:39 PM, Comments: 2) MORE >>>
As I type, it’s snowing heavily with about an inch on the ground. The flakes are dense in the air and swirling but the night is windless….

too quiet
(34 Words. December 30, 2003, 09:21 PM, Comments: 4) MORE >>>
Sure is quiet out there. Rumor has it that Ken Goldstein products may put in a return appearance. In other news, I applied for seventy-nine jobs today. Wonder if I’ll get a call back….

An opening and a closing
(20 Words. December 29, 2003, 09:19 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Hollywood: Saturday evening, December 2003. Tim Curry, Musso & Franks. Seattle: Monday evening, a week later. Barton Fink, IFC….

Sun, Wind, Rain
(305 Words. December 29, 2003, 02:49 PM, Comments: 13) MORE >>>
Just a quick pointer to the Tablet-posted ROTK review, for comparison. My Ink and Pixels column catches up with Pete Bagge, and I review a couple other flicks on that ROTK link, too. Looking about elsewhere, I note that Maciej has brought over some coverage from the other side of the pond of our recent sleepless nights, and that Paul…

Fremont After Dark
(489 Words. December 13, 2003, 12:47 PM, Comments: 3) MORE >>>
Last night we met friends at the new-to-us Norm’s for dinner and a couple beers. I had the fish and chips, which was unspectacular and served on, um, potato chips. The chips are made on the premises and were not greasy in the least, so light as to be fluffy; but goddammit, fish-and-chips is NOT fish and potato chips; and…

Concorde
(222 Words. November 05, 2003, 05:09 PM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
The Museum of Flight in Seattle: Concorde Dr. Xacto and I went to the Museum of Flight in hopes of seeing the Concorde conclude its’ final flight this afternoon - unfortunately the screening I was at earlier ran a bit late and it threw our schedule - we missed the actual landing itself. We did get there in time to…

This is the end
(347 Words. October 06, 2003, 08:39 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Right on schedule, our winter rain arrived. It’s chilly and damp and dark and the clouds and fog are like a blanket that inverts the usual function - pull it up around your shoulders as your body heat is sucked away from you. But by god it beats the snows of my childhood. For a couple days before the wet…

An unexpected passing.
(185 Words. October 03, 2003, 08:56 PM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
I just got a high-school friend’s obit via email from another old pal; it’s put me in a musing state. The decedent was someone who utterly transformed after high-school, from a prototypical stoner kid into an academic superstar whose career trajectory, according to the obit, had most recently involved work in the DC area, bridging government and academe. The obit…

Well, you know...
(36 Words. September 19, 2003, 07:51 PM, Comments: 2) MORE >>>
That’s about six years old. Both long hair and facial hair are gone. Silly facial hair grown for Halloween, a magnificent Regency swordsman’s get up. I may have had a great floppy hat as well. Arrr….

Gizmos video
(216 Words. September 10, 2003, 12:27 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Sorry for the dearth of postings - the trip, combined with some media projects here at home, are soaking up my brain and free time. The media projects are associated with creating a DVD from an old VHS tape of a reunion perfomance by the Gizmos shot the last day of July in 1988 - the tape was edited and…

my toesies
(199 Words. September 08, 2003, 06:58 PM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
May I just say: and note that further imagery exploring the artistic effects of light abd shadow involved in my recent visit to my in-laws in Laguna Beach on a perfect late-summer weekend may be found here, here, here, and here. Worthy of note were the amusingly provocative Oracle banners at the SeaTac federal screening positions: “Oracle makes Linux unbreakable:…

Pontiac TEMPEST
(221 Words. September 05, 2003, 02:21 AM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
A pleasant walk about the neighborhood of a summer night’s wee hours is often a salutary endeavor, accompanied or solo. On this night, amid a quiet unnatural for a city, I spied the winking eye of Mars gazing across the fruited plains of Capitol Hill. I found some scrap wood, half-inch plywood, that is just what I needed to mount…

Zoo
(188 Words. August 19, 2003, 12:18 PM, Comments: 2) MORE >>>
We visited the zoo on Sunday, and I took a bazillion pix. Highlights: Hearing a tiger roar, which made all my hair stand on end. Then we watched him play with a rubber fishing-net float. I got a shot of him bursting through some foliage with his toy right after the roar. Watching the gorilla troop - there was a…

Campaign Diary: Day 1
(243 Words. August 14, 2003, 08:00 AM, Comments: 3) MORE >>>
Today, in order to properly demonstrate my commitment to the candidcacy for the Governorship of California, I awakened hurriedly, twisted in the sheets, in danger of missing my bus to the University District for a press screening of the Claude Lelouch film, “And Now Ladies and Gentlemen” starring Jeremy Irons and Patricia Kaas. Fortunately, I made it to the theater…

Blackout!
(258 Words. August 06, 2003, 08:59 AM, Comments: 2) MORE >>>
Soo… I was closing in on a server-side software debug (updating Marc Liyanage’s PHP 4.3.0 to 4.3.2r7, if you care) when BANG All the lights in the house went out - this was around 9pm on Monday night, the fourth of August. Viv and I stumbled around in the dark for a few mintues, trying to remember where the flashlights…

pfooo
(6 Words. July 30, 2003, 12:19 AM, Comments: 6) MORE >>>
jeebus it hot the unarchived forecast….

parental units
(253 Words. July 29, 2003, 09:54 AM, Comments: 2) MORE >>>
So, it’s like this: Mom and Dad are in town. Yesterday we went to the Museum of Flight and just as we pulled into the parking lot, a paiir of Air Force F-14s flew in low and fast to land at the strip behind the museum. It was distracting to pokey through the parking lot as my fellow airplane geeks…

Windstorm abates
(119 Words. July 23, 2003, 08:31 AM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
howzabout some nice Vancouver pix, eh? a house, afloat. Rock artist Kent Avery. His works. In action: one, two, three, four. I looked but found no web trace for this guy. Amazing stuff - perfomance art, sort of; sculpture, for real. The pix above took about as long to take as it takes you to look at them. on this…

Supah Nachurl Bish C'lumbah
(364 Words. July 20, 2003, 07:04 PM, Comments: 3) MORE >>>
Viv and I just spent the sunny weekend of our fifth anniversary in beautiful Vancouver, B. C. We may venture out to see Jason Webley this evening but it was a long hot drive back south. I was pleased to see that our good neighbors to the north have the good sense to guard the Molson brewery with an army…

Too good to be true?
(155 Words. July 10, 2003, 07:42 AM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
The Mandolin Cafe has a plug up for No Hassle Hosting which has a plethora of hosting plans ranging from $3.95 to $29.95 a month. $3.95 gets you 30mb with 1gb transfer while $29.95 gets you 1gb with 30gb transfer. You read that right. Even better, this page lists the included services - which clearly appears to indicate mysql, php,…

Camp list
(467 Words. July 09, 2003, 04:42 PM, Comments: 5) MORE >>>
A friend recently expressed an uncharacteristic desire to go camping, and I found myself sagely offerring bits of advice and help, such as the camping checklist that Viv and I have been using and refining for the past couple of years. This is odd, if natural, as two years ago we more or less just started from scratch. It’s interesting…

Does Fremont Suck Now?
(1026 Words. July 07, 2003, 08:27 AM, Comments: 6) MORE >>>
Our entertainment this fine Sunday was to take an urban hike from our home on Capitol Hill to Fremont and back, seeking the answer to the question, does Fremont Suck Now? Formerly, Fremont was the center of a certain bohemian sensibility in Seattle, home to many’s the thrift emporium. Time was, of a weekend, Vivian and I were oft to…

Haircut
(135 Words. July 04, 2003, 05:56 PM, Comments: 3) MORE >>>
As threatened. Spent much of today cleaning up. My folks will be out here later this month and it seems wiser to vacuum once now, when it’s been untended for a fairly long time, and once more a bit closer to the date of arrival when what looks lovely and clean now may turn out to be an unacceptable…

Do not mistake the metaphor for literal truth.
(543 Words. June 29, 2003, 07:12 AM, Comments: 4) MORE >>>
See you soon! As I recently signed an email at work: Kissy-kissy to each and every one of you beautiful people! It’s, I have to say, a complete shame not to be on the Hill this weekend: I think, in some ways, this year’s pride parade will partake of the nature of a victory celebration, even if the victory…

Cherries
(178 Words. June 27, 2003, 07:04 AM, Comments: 4) MORE >>>
One of the interesting things about our apartment is that the building was landscaped when it was constructed with fruit trees. We have blueberries, strawberries, golden plums and Rainier cherries. I’ve been watching the cherries ripen on the tree for the past few weeks, and today as the temperature neared 80, I decided it was time to harvest a few….

How it is
(12 Words. June 23, 2003, 11:02 PM, Comments: 3) MORE >>>
It is I, I who am the stocker of the liquor stall!…

the social whirl
(419 Words. June 22, 2003, 08:22 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Viv and I spent most of Saturday night celebrating the solstice at Gravelvoice audio wizard Scott Colburn and his lovely wife Jaye Barr’s new church home, on the deep fringe of Ballard. I’ve known Scott since we were juvenile delinquent punk rockers back in the southern wilds of Indiana, and had the pleasure of working with Scott for several years…

Somethin' tasty
(1509 Words. June 10, 2003, 08:25 AM, Comments: 2) MORE >>>
Fort Ebey State Park and Whidbey Island Viv and I took advantage of the unseasonably warm weather over last weekend, the first full weekend in June, to camp out at Fort Ebey State park. It’s south by about one-third of Whidbey Island from the bridge at spectacular Deception Pass. You can reach Whidbey from Seattle either by road or by…

zzzz
(0 Words. June 08, 2003, 08:30 AM, Comments: 4) MORE >>>


Online in 1980
(1077 Words. June 01, 2003, 02:20 PM, Comments: 5) MORE >>>
Sometime in 1980, I think, my dad spent a great deal of time determining that he wanted to follow his individualist streak and obtain a Kaypro II, a 64k dual-floppy machine that used the pre-DOS operating system CP/M and whose most important feature was the tank-like, large-suitcase-style construction. The keyboard was housed in the lid of the box, and the…

A tumble
(375 Words. May 13, 2003, 05:32 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
As I made my way home from talking with local filmmaker Jamie Hook, I grabbed a bite at the Kidd Valley near my house. Just as I turned from the counter, another patron said something that ended with the words “…fallen.” I turned to look out the door where a concerned elderly woman hovered over another elderly person, lying on…

Visitors and such
(740 Words. March 30, 2003, 09:35 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
This weekend we had a pleasant visit from my high-school chum John Strohm, currently deep in law school at a small Alabama college. He and I visited the Experience Music Project, and I must say the museum is improved as a result of visiting in the company of one other person with a deep, life-long interest in American popular music….

Oregon Coast
(385 Words. March 24, 2003, 03:42 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
I hope to turn in a longer entry, but a picture is worth a thousand words, correct? We spent Saturday night at a beachfront cabin on the Oregon Coast in a small town called Netarts (nee-tarts). The cabin was an outrageous bargain - directly on the beach, with a complete kitchen (dishwasher, microwave, etcetera), and feturing miscellaneous amazing antiques, including…

note to self
(17 Words. February 28, 2003, 09:27 AM, Comments: 4) MORE >>>
In the future, have at least one meal prior to drinking several pitchers of beer with Spencer….

Pouslbo bound
(19 Words. February 08, 2003, 07:45 AM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
Orange alert? head for Poulsbo, WA! Regular blogging will resume sometime Sunday. BABBlers, post pix! I insist!…

A nice night out
(41 Words. January 18, 2003, 12:18 PM, Comments: 5) MORE >>>
In celebration of Viv’s birthday (her 29th, of course) we’ll be having a nice dinner before seeing the Triumph of Love in preview at the Seattle Rep this evening. Ta-ta! (Should I wear my bowler, fer the luvvagod? Too eccentric, huh.)…

Artifact
(160 Words. January 17, 2003, 07:36 AM, Comments: 4) MORE >>>
So there I was this afternoon, digging around in a completely-dwindled pile of plastic grocery bags back in the kitchen closet. The pile amounted to two bags, so maybe it was not a pile any longer. I was fixing to scoop the poop from our exceedingly fecund cats’ necessary box, as clearly instructed to by my lovely wife via the…

Zapata murder suspect fingered
(477 Words. January 16, 2003, 07:48 AM, Comments: 3) MORE >>>
I thought that ex-Seattle people might be interested to learn that DNA evidence has led to the arrest of a Florida resident on charges related to the 1993 murder of Mia Zapata. Mia was the singer of The Gits, who survived her death in various variations, and was a member of the Comet-centered Capitol Hill music scene here in Seattle…

BOOKIE
(1365 Words. December 17, 2002, 02:36 PM, Comments: 5) MORE >>>
To my recollection, I read and re-read The Lord of The Rings series of books with some frequency after that initial foray into the land of the written word. I am certain I read it when met a new cohort of boys in fifth and sixth grade; I probably read it in the same copies as I had when a…

Learning to read
(1302 Words. December 16, 2002, 12:33 PM, Comments: 4) MORE >>>
In 1973, my family lived in the Boston-area town of Brookline, where I walked to Devotion School a few blocks away, and I had my first taste of city life – one that formed many of my tastes as an adult. We lived on the second floor of a large turn-of-the-century house in a neighborhood of such houses, peppered with…

Concerning Hobbits
(503 Words. December 15, 2002, 03:44 PM, Comments: 3) MORE >>>
My contribution to pre-opening frenzy for The Two Towers this week (the Peter Jackson film opens on December 18 in the U. S. to remarkable anticipation, I note for posterity) will be a series of essays about my relationship to the books. I’ll begin with my earliest recollection of Tolkien. The primary storybook of my earliest childhood was “The Golden…

Friday the 13th proves lucky
(293 Words. December 13, 2002, 07:32 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Seattle man finds it’s his lucky day SEATTLE, December 13, 2002 – Embittered, alienated cynic Mike Whybark opened his email today to find a note from another Michael, one Michael Griffin of the Fort Worth area. Mr. Griffin, also known as “tater-haid,” informed Mr. Whybark that he had mysteriously qualified to receive a commemorative promotional lunchbox featuring the design work…

BAM!
(47 Words. December 08, 2002, 05:10 PM, Comments: 4) MORE >>>
I just drove our formerly perfectly-maintained ‘97 Corolla into the support pylon of our street-front garage. Score: one garage door, one side fender. Match to pylon. Maybe I don’t really need a driver’s license after all, and all these years of avoiding it were for a reason….

Dec 2 1999
(430 Words. December 02, 2002, 08:47 PM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
From an email I dispatched on the morning of December 2, 1999: “Demonstrations yesterday, last night and today appear to me to be spontaneous expressions of resistance to the abrogation of our constitutional rights - for example, by mayoral decree, only the police or military can posess a gas mask within city limits. The decree does not appear to be…

n things I did or failed to do in the past 36 hours
(515 Words. November 30, 2002, 10:07 PM, Comments: 2) MORE >>>
I saw Harry Potter II at a downtown mallplex after noting that the Cinerama showing we had tix for was too crowded. I reflected on my privileged childhood exactly as I did when I saw the previous film - why, for example, does Harry go back to his horrible foster parents when every international ruling class school has summer residencies,…

one of those days, or something.
(352 Words. November 18, 2002, 06:49 PM, Comments: 4) MORE >>>
As you may have noted, I am getting my steam up on ye olde alternative comix reviews. But, alas, I got the call which indicates the end of funding for the reviews. Which is a drag. It’s not like the reviews pay well - they don’t - but they cover the cost of publication and almost the time investment for…

Mavis part two
(110 Words. October 27, 2002, 02:35 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
The night after we brought Mavis home, Dave picked up a copy of The Stranger, Seattle’s gen-x alternstive weekly, which has generally suffered at the hands of Seattle Weekly’s backing by Village Voice media and by a lack of staff turnover. The paper still shows sparks of former greatess, however, and one such spark has been the inclusion of…

Mavis is back!
(358 Words. October 26, 2002, 07:51 AM, Comments: 2) MORE >>>
About three weeks ago, our neighbor’s cat, Mavis, disappeared. They were pretty unhappy, as you might imagine, and put up flyers. Mavis is a house kitty who’s very skittish around cars, and so no-one could figure where she’d gone. Friday night as Dave, Viv and I walked back from a pho dinner at Thanh Bros on Broadway, we saw a…

Fall in Puget Sound
(331 Words. October 23, 2002, 02:35 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
I quickmarched to the bookstore today, against my wallet’s better judgment, in order to pick up a couple books for review at Cinescape. It is a crisp, clear, sunny day; the afternoon sun shining brightly on autumn-scented air. The bright leaves of fall crumble beneath the feet of my neighborhood, and the trees – all of the trees, with the…

Getting a bit tougher
(510 Words. October 22, 2002, 09:36 PM, Comments: 3) MORE >>>
So. My job has taken a turn for the much more interesting, as you may have noted. I spent Monday afternoon on the set of X-Men 2 in Vancouver, watching a scene being shot, which I described for Cinescape here: X-MEN 2 exclusive shooting notes. The other story posted today from the visit can be found here: X-MEN 2 spoof…

or, how I learned to stop worrying...
(888 Words. October 20, 2002, 12:44 PM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
The explosion blinded me, and I started back in shock as I waited for feeling to return to my face, just ahead of the rumbling wall of debris carried on the shockwave. I began to realize that I had heard a loud sound just as I looked up, out of the window. I should not have long to wait….

Vancouver
(251 Words. October 19, 2002, 10:48 AM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
It’s a long drive up and back in a day - 3 hours each way, with a slow border cross both ways. We got waved into Canadian emigration for a short bit of closer scrutiny on the way up it was shorter on the way back. I had left my birth certificate in the trunk when we hit the border…

Rainier
(89 Words. October 16, 2002, 07:10 AM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
pix.whybark.com :: Rainier with Spence (8-26) :: 9 is an image of the other mountain, which Eric and Anne did not see except when they flew out. There’s some neat shots of the high trails around Paradise in the fog starting here. I believe I like this one the best. These are pix from late August, on a jaunt taken…

sparse weekend
(93 Words. October 13, 2002, 06:50 PM, Comments: 2) MORE >>>
Apologies for my weakened discipline - Eric and Anne are in town and I haven’t had time to plant butt in chair long enough to discourse upon aught. There will be makeups and fictional dates attributed. But I have been practicing my conjugations of “tump”, in honor of Eric’s degree from Texas A&M and his paternal status as horse-wranglin’ Texan….

Sunday's a day of rest, innit?
(218 Words. October 06, 2002, 11:23 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Aargh, sorry this entry isn’t up til now. Guess I got too involved on Friday and Saturday. So: howzabout some mixed notes? First off a big YEESH to Mr. Baruz for hooking me up to mainline a dang wordgame: Bookworm will keep me from my household chores for days. Weeks, even. I got NOZZLES with some bonus or something. Next,…

Jag Jag Jag-u-war
(240 Words. October 02, 2002, 07:09 AM, Comments: 3) MORE >>>
So… Billy Childish played a song once that had that refrain, above, and it’s a great song. When Steve Jobs sings it, it’s not so good, to me. Ever since the very earliest installs of OS X I have had recurrent, highy irritating timeouts in the console which essentially amount to “I can’t see any name servers, so you can’t…

iTunes and community radio
(896 Words. September 26, 2002, 07:02 AM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
WFHB Bloomington Community Radio is the successor station to a “cable free-form radio station”, known as WQAX. QAX (pronounced “quacks”) thrived or limped from the early ’70s into the mid 90’s, when its place in the community was taken by WFHB, a low-power station that had obtained a broadcast license due to diligence on the part of community radio activists…

Brownie Hawkeye
(40 Words. September 02, 2002, 05:26 PM, Comments: 2) MORE >>>
Matt’s Cameras: Kodak Brownie Hawkeye covers the camera we juct picked up at Goodwill’s Labor Day sale for, um, two bucks? The deciding factor was the roll of shot color film still inside. Ah, er, uh… - film at 11….

busy busy busy
(24 Words. August 28, 2002, 01:19 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Writing a ton of comics reviews yesterday and today - soppin’ up my blog energy. Ergo, limited bloggage ahead. Thank you for your time….

Mt. Rainier day 2
(222 Words. August 25, 2002, 02:52 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Mount Rainier National Park Saturday, after having gotten situated at Ohanapecosh, we began to realize how much stuff we’d left at home. We then took a stroll through the “Grove of the Patriachs”, a small stand of old-growth that was somehow overlooked earlier in the century, and has been conveniently provided with a raised, level planked walkway. Then we experienced…

Mt. Rainier day 1
(139 Words. August 24, 2002, 02:34 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Mount Rainier National Park (NPS) - Camping We drove to Ohanapecosh, in the lower right corner of the park. We arrived there at about 4, if I recall. Vivian and I were most unprepared for the trip, as it turned out. We had spent serious time on developing a checklist and pre-pack procedure, but for some reason, on this trip…

"The time has come," the Walrus said...
(867 Words. August 22, 2002, 07:06 AM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
…”To talk of many things: Of clams, and ships, and sealing-wax, Of cabbages, and kings; And why the pho is boiling hot, And whether pigs have wings.” Too much to do interfering with writing here. In fact, I’m going to be a day late on a story pitch to Eric at Cinescape, darn it. And I still have to wrangle…

Well, that sucks.
(397 Words. August 21, 2002, 03:01 PM, Comments: 3) MORE >>>
Moments ago, I returned from running an errand in the neighborhood. I was musing to myself about the proliferating dog poop scene in my apartment building’s yard spaces, trying to not get all bent out of shape about it (one of our neighbors is temporarily fostering a pair of sweet little granny lap dogs; since they already have one dog,…

I saw Elvis
(101 Words. August 19, 2002, 10:58 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
No, really. He was standing out front of Twice-Sold Tales at the intersection of Broadway and John tonight at 10pm, looking at books on the cheap racks, when Viv and I walked past on our way home from the silent movie tonight. He was wearing a red Red Top Taxi work shirt with a name patch that clearly read “Elvis”….

Where ya from?
(686 Words. August 16, 2002, 10:32 AM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
Paul Frankenstein’s brother has some thoughts on what people mean when they ask “where ya from”. He’s of visually apparent mixed ethnicity, and in his experience, people want to know about his mixed ethnicity when he’s asked this question, and he doesn’t care for the implication that answering “America” fails to cut it. Which I can understand. Yet, in another…

Sixth and Grant
(95 Words. August 15, 2002, 04:01 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Anne Zender proffers a short piece on house at Sixth and Grant in Bloomington, Indiana, my homwtown and where Anne went to college. This house is about two doors from the Runcible Spoon, a former employer of, um, really, everyone I knew in Bloomington, at one point or another. Perhaps you worked there as well. And on Saturday we’ll greet…

Spidering the garden
(48 Words. August 15, 2002, 06:51 AM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
In the summer sun, they’re riding their webs like tars in the yardarms of the trees. Their webs bellying and snapping in the breeze, these fine ladies will shortly double in size - late August often shares a brood of wind-riding gems, each an inch or two across….

'Bye, Mom and Dad
(338 Words. August 03, 2002, 08:55 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Today we spent a pleasant afternoon with my parents in Seattle’s International District; they hadn’t visited the new megaUwajimaya and Mom was in the market for some Vietnamese fish sauce. Viv and I had been to the store previously but hadn’t really wandered around it. It’s huge. The fish they have on display in range and price was competitive to…

'Rents!
(156 Words. July 31, 2002, 07:25 AM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
My mom and dad are visiting so, um, some light posting is probable. I will give them my best for you! Today we drove all over lovely industrial south Seattle, and stopped by the Museum of Flight to gawk at the Blue Angels. My Dad told a story about working for Boeing as an aerospace engineer right after college, and…

Courtyard Social
(196 Words. July 28, 2002, 04:13 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
On Saturday I organized a little get-together for everyone that lives in our apartment building. Our building is relatively small - seven units - and is a very pleasant place to live, so tenant turnover tends to be slow. One of our neighbors has always made it a point to be freindly with everyone in the building, if possible, and…

no rain but the deluge
(145 Words. July 27, 2002, 07:37 AM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
OK, it’s like this. About two weeks ago we decided to host a small wingding for just the people that live in our apartment building. That’s at one pm today. About half the tenants will be there to start but we expect more later. About a week and a half ago, we arranged to get our apartment demolded (this last…

It's a blog, blog, blog world
(747 Words. July 25, 2002, 07:15 AM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
These things come in threes, right? ACT ONE Last week, I was corresponding with the estimable Chris Dent, who lives in the childhood home of my oldest friend, Eric Sinclair developed the verry interesting wiki variant warp is a good egg. Eric’s family home is one of the houses I have very strong childhood sense memories of, including detailed smells,…

Moran State Park, part 2
(699 Words. July 24, 2002, 07:16 AM, Comments: 2) MORE >>>
I’ve completed processing my pix from our camping trip to the San Juans, and posted the results here. While I have broken the pictures down into sections, a highlight reel may be called for. In this entry, the small pix are linked into the pix.whybark.com album they come from, so click the thumb once to get to the album, find…

Moran State Park
(24 Words. July 21, 2002, 09:17 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
This is lovely Cascade Lake, where our campsite was located. Man, the San Juan Islands are beautiful! Not that this is, like, a secret….

See you Sunday!
(0 Words. July 20, 2002, 08:25 AM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>


Greetings from Hurricane Ridge!
(96 Words. July 17, 2002, 07:23 AM, Comments: 2) MORE >>>
Why hello! Nice to see you! Viv and I took the ferry to Bremerton and drove north and then east to Sequim bay, where we camped in the lovely (but not spectacular) Sequim Bay State Park. Then the next day we drove up the road a few miles to the Port Angeles entrance to Olympic National Park, and drove…

We're off!
(18 Words. July 13, 2002, 08:44 AM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
We’ll be out and about enjoying something similar to this until Sunday evening. Sorry you can’t join us….

More on Bob's Java Jive
(482 Words. July 06, 2002, 05:11 PM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
Pursuing the theme of promoting comments by site visitors to entries when it’s appropriate, here’s site visitor Jeff Baker commenting on my April entry concerning the queen of Northwest bars, Bob’s Java Jive: Bob’s Java Jive was the perfect getaway for PLU students about 20 years ago. The coffee shaped building was cool. Cozy, but not too cramped. I remember…

Why I live here, not there.
(155 Words. July 03, 2002, 05:47 PM, Comments: 2) MORE >>>
A taunt: Oh? is it hot? I hadn’t noticed. It’s, um, a comfy seventy-two here in Whybark International World Headquarters. I hear you east-coast types are basting in your undies over there, sweatin’ to the oldies under the blazing wrath of old Sol. If Seattle isn’t obliterated by terrorists tomorrow, and you call first so I can go over it…

I take it this means the spammers win
(37 Words. July 03, 2002, 03:23 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
in the inbox today: Date: Wed, 3 Jul 2002 15:11:33 -0700 (PDT) From: G D Subject: eternity in the heart To: mike@whybark.com MIME-Version: 1.0 email from GOD So, um, does this constitute taking sides in the spamwar?…

Bowler, Coke and Derby
(1221 Words. June 30, 2002, 04:44 PM, Comments: 12) MORE >>>
Last weekend, Viv and I were wandering about Capitol Hill, and stepped into the Red Light on Broadway, purveyors of fine vintage threads to our urban hipster nabe. Red Light is an odd store - there are at least two locations, and they generally have very high quality stock, sometimes of surprising vintage. I once found a beautiful men’s suit…

Well, then. Naturally.
(368 Words. June 25, 2002, 07:07 AM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
As I’ve discussed over the last few days, I’ve been performing hardware surgery on bellerophon, the server that provides you with this website. All has gone reasonably well, but not ideally, and so I brought her into the office here to work out the booting problem that was puzzling me. I had employed the highly-regarded Carbon Copy Cloner, an Applescript-based…

Home at last
(275 Words. June 08, 2002, 11:00 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Astute and/or assiduous readers will have realized that I spent the last two-and-a-half weeks in sunny Southern California with family, attending a wedding, lying on the beach, going to Disneyland, missing out on getting drunk with Ken Goldstein while he visited Seattle, and taking lots and lots of photos. What better way to end a visit to the greater…

...and we'll sink with California...
(17 Words. June 05, 2002, 04:12 PM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
There are many reasons people choose to live in Orange County, California. This is one of them….

Moffet Field from I-5 (Blimp Week followup part IV)
(104 Words. June 02, 2002, 10:48 AM, Comments: 3) MORE >>>
From the mid-twenties until the beginning of World War II, the Navy had at its disposal two fully-equipped LTA bases from which the great dirigibles could operate. These were, and remain, Lakehurst in New Jersey, the first of these bases, and the lesser-known Moffet Field in Sunnyvale California, just south of Anaheim (just south of the newspaper offices of…

El Salsa Molé
(329 Words. June 01, 2002, 10:17 AM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Molé is, of course, the sweet-hot dark sauce found in eaterias all over el Norte, and of course in many fine kitchens and on many fine tables throughout Mexican America. I assume you’re familiar with the celebrated “Chicken en molé” and ready to learn more about the mysterious fusion of chile and chocolata. According to many scholars of legend, molé…

Disheartening news
(302 Words. May 29, 2002, 06:34 PM, Comments: 4) MORE >>>
Via Karen on the Jason Webley list I subscribe to, some aggravating news concerning my favorite of the Seattle summer music festivals, Folklife. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, I had to miss the festival this year, and so I have not had a chance to round out the news from Karen. She tells of Folklife’s new-this-year policy of harassing street performers…

Nothing to see here, move along
(46 Words. May 23, 2002, 07:21 AM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Infiniti sent me, and presumably a few thousand others, this: Here’s a closeup of the copy: Well, that certainly sounds promising, eh? Let’s look inside! Sigh. Ohh-kay. Won’t be rushing out to get my drivers license today. (Yes, it’s posted a wee bit early again.)…

los Leones de Habana '60
(60 Words. May 21, 2002, 07:42 AM, Comments: 3) MORE >>>
I decided my Goog hat is lost for good, so I went out to find a new one. I’m not completely happy with this one, but it’s pretty cool. It’s a replica of a 1960 Havana Lions cap. Since I married a Cuban I think I can get away with it. But geez, don’t try to talk baseball with…

Has anyone seen my hat?
(39 Words. May 17, 2002, 11:18 AM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
I left it around here somewhere I swear. I miss it. It has sentimental value - I got it at the Guggenheim while visiting the witty and erudite Ken Goldstein. Here’s a picture. I hope I find it….

The goodrich blimp?
(112 Words. May 02, 2002, 07:03 AM, Comments: 2) MORE >>>
Nope, the Goodyear paper bag. While we’re on the subject, check out Goodyear’s killer site on the company’s long association with lighter-than-air aviation: www.goodyearblimp.com. Includes this page featuring old film footage of lots of interesting things, including a five-ship fleet parade, the christening of the Akron, and other footage that will confirm your pre-extant belief systems regarding lighter-than-air aviation. I…

The Tornadoes of April 1974
(611 Words. May 01, 2002, 07:08 AM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Listening to the coverage of the tornado storms of late April 2002, I was put in mind, as I am every time I hear coverage of tornadoes, of my experiences on the evening of April 3, 1974. I was eight years old. The map above links to a very large and detailed version; here are some photos. Over April 3…

Dinner, space, and the past
(431 Words. April 22, 2002, 06:49 AM, Comments: 2) MORE >>>
This Saturday night Vivian and I had dinner with Adam, Spencer, and Sarah at Spencer and Sarah’s place. Dinner was delicious grillins: salmon, portobello mushrooms, prawns, and asparagus, with chocolate dipped strawberries, pears and cheese, and a lovely salad. Spence then treated us to three super-eight silent films: Charlie Chaplin’s early “Easy Street”, in what I believe to have been…

Burke photos
(46 Words. April 19, 2002, 06:23 AM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
I’d intended to post these alongside the Burke Museum entry, but was behind on image processing. Forthwith: The crushed van. The Flash Gordon Laotian New Year’s Rockets. A dino skelly. Should you be so inclined, you may see more images of the pleasant afternoon here….

BOB'S JAVA JIVE
(276 Words. April 16, 2002, 08:06 AM, Comments: 7) MORE >>>
It’s been some time since I made a pilgrimage to the greatest bar in the Northwest, Bob’s “World-Famous” Java Jive. The Java Jive is a bar in a building shaped like a coffee pot. I was told, while on a visit there in the company of Alan and Charlie of thee Sun City Girls and the fabulous Chuck Swaim, that…

On TAXES
(110 Words. April 15, 2002, 01:50 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
A simple set of facts that interest me, and I hope you. Last year, my household income was very much greater than it is currently. I’m not working at the moment, and I was last year. While our total aggregate income tax was quite dramatic, we still received a very significant tax refund. This year we had a significant tax…

Happy Birthday, Tiny Tim!
(281 Words. April 12, 2002, 03:15 AM, Comments: 2) MORE >>>
April 12th is TINY TIM’s birthday. He would have turned seventy. I saw Tim in the context of a “golden oldies” roadshow at Navy Pier in Chicago, at the Festa Polonia (or whatever it’s called), in, um, 1988, the day before I got my tattoos. Oh my, there’s a story in that too. There were retread versions of Iron Butterfly…

SASQUATCH SIGHTING
(166 Words. April 10, 2002, 11:24 AM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
I missed a few cool pix from the weekend trip. Click the small images seen here to load larger versions of the shots. Notable among them is this lovely specimen of Bigfoot (left), on display in a downtown Anacortes shop window. I’d be remiss if I did not share this issue of the celebrated, yet completely unknown comic book, “Strange…

DEM BULBS
(523 Words. April 08, 2002, 07:56 AM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
As I noted on Saturday, Viv and I went to Anacortes and La Conner for part of the weekend, on the first day of the annual Tulip Festival. I’ve just finished processing the photos, and wanted to point out some choice treats. As we often do in small towns we visit, we dropped by the local Historical Museum (almost never…

HOWDY, NEIGHBOR!
(213 Words. April 06, 2002, 09:02 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Vivian and I went to Anacortes and La Conner this weekend, to attend a friend’s somewhat-spur-of-the-moment wedding reception. This weekend also happened to be the opening salvo in the annual “Tulip festival” in that area of the state. It’s where all of New England’s fall colors come back to us every year, after the end of winter. I can’t…

SPRING, FINALLY
(434 Words. April 03, 2002, 12:02 PM, Comments: 1) MORE >>>
Today is a glorious bright spring day; not a cloud in the sky, the sun is shining brightly, and the air smells like flowers. I actually LEFT THE HOUSE this morning. I went to Seattle Central to withdraw from my pre-calculus class, which is being taught by someone who should have been a mean football coach and certainly will not…

MUSIC and FRIENDS
(238 Words. March 31, 2002, 12:36 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Had a busy, busy day yesterday. Greg and I recorded four songs for a demo. Then it was off to the Comet to wish the Karel a happy big 3-0. After that, we went to Spencer’s new digs where he’s moved in with Sarah and her son Izzy. At the housewarming, it was great to see two sets of friends…

Akira Kurosawa, part two
(771 Words. March 28, 2002, 12:00 AM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
Once I had a disasatrous conversation with an aged Japanese colleague of my father’s. He had shown us great kindness and hospitality in Japan when we were there in 1978. He was retiring and traveling around the world to say good bye to colleagues. He expressed that the world had changed and that the old culture of Japan was dead,…

Akira Kurosawa, part one
(212 Words. March 27, 2002, 01:00 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
PBS’ Great Performances recently ran a 2-hour documentary biopic on the great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa. It was pretty interesting - and included some truly horrifying newsreel shots of the carnage and most especially corpses left after the great Tokyo quake and fire of the mid-1920s, in which as many died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki are thought to have pershed….

Classmates.com
(167 Words. March 26, 2002, 12:35 PM, Comments: 0) MORE >>>
I had a phone interview this morning with a very professional recruiter for Classmates.com. I fear I started things off badly by asserting that they were IIS-based and located in Kirkland, which is incorrect in both cases. I can’t say it was the most successful phone interview I’ve ever had. Still, I certainly hope to hear from them again. I…