Category: Seattle

…just fighting a nasty cold that came on suddenly this afternoon, and buried under a pile of work. I’m also trying to minimize the amount of stuff I post to my blog in preparation for the move, but I will try to ping it daily to reassure you that I’m still alive. If you don’t see the blog updated, send out the search dogs. I’ll be the one buried alive in cold germ by-products.

Lisa comes home tonight. It’s been a really crazy week and I can’t wait to see her. I’ve been practicing all week for the first real concert that I’ll sing with the Cascadian Chorale: selected choral dances from Purcell’s The Fairy Queen, with the Ballet Bellevue. It’s really different singing for the ballet. As our director points out, he’s got to remember 29 different tempi—if he’s off on the tempo, the dancer will be thrown.

I have to go straight from my performance to pick her up at SeaTac, so I guess I’ll be the only tuxedoed guy by baggage claim. Now if I can just find some roses it’ll be perfect.
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Shel has been trying to tell me about Archie McPhee for a while now. Today Boing Boing pointed to them in reference to the Jesus Action Figure, so I followed their link. Now that I look at their website, I see why Shel was so insistent.

I especially dig the barista action figure (comes with multiple heads, a Tall and Grande coffee cup, and a barista apron!!). Fuzz, an action figure of a real 21-year-old McPhee employee whose general demeanor should be instantly recognizable to anyone from the Northwest, is also pretty cool.

Lisa’s off to visit her parents. I returned from dropping her off at the airport two hours ago and am skillfully procrastinating. While I batch this week, I have the joyful duty of finishing the final wallpaper cleanup myself today.

I also found another bug in iTunes2Manila, one that inexplicably failed to surface in my last round of testing. Apparently the workaround to get plaintext from a Unicode string doesn’t always work, and sometimes it gives an error instead. I hope I can get to fixing that today. Finally, though I have no feedback from my lone tester of Manila Envelope, I need to release 1.0.3b so I can get on with incorporating some new features. I’ll be spending today figuring out the revised mechanisms for drag and drop in Jaguar so that I can hopefully support Brent’s RSS clipboard format.
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It’s been a pretty busy morning today. I’m still glowing from last night’s meal: grilled salmon on a bed of pureed fava beans with a lemon and chive citron-oil sauce. From the Babbo cookbook. I have to confess that I winced a bit at the price when we bought it (the day we met Mario), but so far it’s been worth every penny. Er, dollar.
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After a productive day getting Manila Envelope 1.0.3a out yesterday, I haven’t done much blogging at all today because of a full workload. I am still alive though. There’s a lot to write about and only a little time in which to do it.

Dan Shafer at Eclecticity calls it “racing the aggregator.” Do you stop to write about something you see in the aggregator, knowing that you’ll fall behind as you do so and that there will be lots more things that pop up to write about?
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Brent: NW OS X Dinners. “I was thinking of starting an informal thing, not a users group or anything, but semi-regular dinners with other people here in the Northwest who are OS X developers. I mean ‘developers’ in the broad sense–not just people writing desktop apps but webloggers, scripters, designers, writers, system admins, power users, and so on.” Right on!
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Anita Rowland got married on Saturday! Congrats to Anita and Jack. I hope that your marriage is the best thing that ever happened to you, as Lisa has been to me.
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We got Larry safely off yesterday after wandering the Public Market for a while. (In case you were wondering, the Athenian Inn is long on atmosphere and view, short on staff and food.) We decided to go to see Mario on Sunday and napped and gardened yesterday prior to going to dinner at Arvind and Kim’s. Excellent company and Indian food.

It’s raining today so it’s a good chore day. Brining a chicken for roasting later, organizing the files, laundry, transferring prescriptions from Massachusetts. Ah, domesticity.
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Mario Batali will be at the Festa Italiana Seattle this weekend. I will be there to make sure Lisa doesn’t throw herself at him :). Too bad I’m bad at bocce.
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Returned home late last night from Maine. This morning I was awakened (Lisa had already gone to the office) by a rapping on the wall more or less behind my head. I threw on khakis and a t-shirt and went out through the garage to see what was going on. As I opened the outside door, a squirrel ran away.

Sighing, I went back through the garage and tried to open the door, only to realize it was locked. No keys in my pocket. Thankfully we had left a window unlocked on our back porch, or I’d still be out there freezing. More trip details later.

I almost forgot until I saw Anita’s post about the festivities last night. As we introduced ourselves, we talked a bit about ego surfing (Anita is the third Anita, Brent the second or third hit, Jerry the #4). I mentioned that I would always be the second Jarrett, at least as long as NASCAR remained popular and kept Dale’s site highly ranked.

At this the other lady at the table (a large table in the middle of the room with a few random onlookers still seated) stirred. Putting down her drink, she said, “I’m a big NASCAR fan. My number one is Mark Martin.” I said, “That’s great. I guess I have to root for Cousin Dale.” She asked whether I meant “Junior”; I hastened to clarify “Dale Jarrett.” At this she launched into a several minute discussion of how NASCAR wasn’t just popular, it was “grown from hard work”; how Martin was deserving because he had a family and young children; how old she was and how long she had been watching NASCAR; and other details. All at a fairly slow pace, not slurred, but relentless. Being less bold than Coleridge’s Wedding-Guest, I couldn’t stop her with a “Hold off! Unhand me, grey-beard loon!” Eventually I figured out that nodding and smiling silently while maintaining eye contact was the best way to stop the conversation. She moved off and we got on with our meetup.

Am I a sadder and a wiser man? No, but I am still subtly troubled by the conversation. Was she desperately lonely? mentally ill? or just drunk?
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Just got back from the Seattle blog meetup at the Sit ‘n’ Spin. Decent turnout–at the peak we had seven folks, six of whom blogged. Attendees besides me: Brent, Anita, Nat, Jerry, and C. (whose name I truncate not for privacy’s sake, but because I never quite caught it across the table. Sigh. The hearing is the second thing to go, and I forget the first.) plus C.’s friend “Rusty” who was there for the poetry reading in the back room.

Interesting night. Fun discussion. After some initial effort, we kept from talking about the RSS wars, though it was hard–I don’t think anyone had met a former Userland employee before. But poor C.–the rest of us spent most of the time talking about different weblog packages and programming languages. There is a difference between techbloggers and other bloggers, and I am starting to suspect that for me, at least, it’s the same difference that got me beat up in elementary school. C. was the only one who had the presence of mind to write down everyone’s URL; I’m sure that I’ve gotten at least one of the links above wrong.

Other note: I’m sure glad that Anita posted her picture on her blog; I don’t know how we would have figured out how to find each other otherwise.
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Between a day-and-a-half long class at work, a long rehearsal last night, and taking Lisa to the airport (she’s going to Maine for Kelley’s wedding), I didn’t update yesterday. Did anyone miss me?

Blogging will likely be light on Friday through Sunday–I’m flying out Thursday night to follow Lisa.

Looks like we got our extra biomass cleared out just in time. It was raining this morning–for the first time in weeks–but stopped by lunchtime. Got to love Seattle. Yesterday when we were watching the Mariners game, it started raining in about the second or third inning. I learned two things: (a) the roof on Safeco Field takes about four or five batters, depending, to move over the entire field; (b) Labor Day really does mark the end of summer, in a very real way, in Seattle. They’re calling for intermittent showers all the rest of this week…