Category: Seattle

Ross Mayfield nails how I feel about autumn in Seattle, describing the effect of being in northern latitudes after the equinox:

In Estonia, where I lived once, its compounded by the fact that coming winter solstice the sun barely skirts the horizon and its basically dark except mid-day. A strange and wonderful cycle ensues. From summer solstice, the party of the year, on to Christmas people get a little depressed. From Christmas to party time moods heighten.

I miss the amazing glowing late afternoon light that used to come in early October afternoons in Charlottesville and Boston. The hardest thing about working right now is getting in with the light, and leaving after it’s dark. Plus the fact that there’s no late afternoon light most days.

For all that, I’m feeling pretty good compared to last year. Amazing what a change of job does. Not to mention good music.

The rain started a day early, dashing
hopes of keeping ahead of the falling
leaves. While the moving ahead of clocks
should bring more sleep it brings no more
daylight; the days are shrinking fast.

Urgh. I should know better than to try poetry, even free verse, out in public after a long hiatus…

Apropos of nothing, I’m starting to think seriously about taking up some woodworking projects for our home. Driven partly by our increasing need for storage, partly by the low attractiveness/cost ratio of prebuilt shelves, and partly—I confess it!—by articles about built-in bookshelves in This Old House magazine and on their website, I’m now fighting visions of magnificent wood Craftsman built-in bookcases in our third bedroom cum library.

This is of course compromised by the fact that I’m totally inexperienced in woodworking, and have no idea of what sort of design would be in keeping with the Craftsman bungalow architecture of that part of the house.

Research, here I come…

Looks like everyone’s favorite underattended Seattle rock and roll museum will be joined in June by another Experience…the Experience Science Fiction museum, to be “co-located” with EMP in the Geary building. Guesses as to which galleries it will displace in the EMP?

Impressive advisory board, too: Greg Bear, Gregory Benford, Ray Bradbury, David Brin, Octavia Butler, Orson Scott Card, Arthur C. Clarke, Freeman Dyson, Harlan Ellison, Lucas and Spielberg, Neal Stephenson, Kim Stanley Robinson, Majel Roddenberry… practically a Who’s Who (and still alive) in the field today.

Prayer, if you believe in it (and maybe even if you don’t), is in order: Seattle’s blogmom Anita Rowland has diabetes and ovarian cancer…and no health insurance.

Folks, this is really bad news. Anita, as she is wont to do, is putting a really brave face on it, but this is not a good situation at all. I wish there was something we could do for her.

I was planning to go to the Blog Meetup tonight but fate and work intervened. Hope it went well.

I was cleaning out my phonecam’s memory today to make room for BloggerCon photos and found this collection of photos from our recent trip to the Museum of Glass in Tacoma with Charlie and Carie. Unlike our previous trip, the temporary exhibit was about glass this time—fine glass art from early 20th century Austria and Germany, including a lot of phenomenal pre-Bauhaus and Bauhaus pieces.

Unfortunately I lacked the presence of mind to take pictures of that exhibit, but here are a bunch of shots from the permanent outdoor installations (yes, outdoor glass exhibitions. Amazing, no?). To my dismay, the photos don’t quite convey the dazzling transcendence of the color experience, even taken with my Lomo-esque Nokia, which tends to oversaturate the colors in every shot. But they aren’t too bad.

George just emailed us a link to the perfect excuse, now that we’ve been on the west coast 15 months, to finally head down to Napa (and spend some time with him and Becky): the Wine and Food Affair. Two days in the Alexander, Dry Creek, and Russian River Valleys, over fifty wineries, $40 bucks a person. Sounds like a road trip to me!

Like a switch had been flipped: today is the first day of fall, and the Lake Sammamish valley in which downtown Redmond sits was shrouded in fog as I drove in this morning. Good metaphor for how I felt all yesterday. Today is looking up, though.

I got a call from Esta last night, and again this morning. Though things have been extremely busy, she is doing well. Their power returned today, for the first time since Thursday; she says that some of the smaller rural areas east of Richmond might not see power until sometime in October. She is also discovering, I think, that there is as much to be learned outside the classroom in her program as inside. I certainly found that to be true in my MBA, and I suspect the same is true for most graduate programs.

Good time last night at Uptown Espresso, despite the inability to access their WiFi (you had to have signed up for an account before you got there; as I said last night, you could buy, but they weren’t selling). As always, Jake has an attendee list. Some new attendees including Radical Congruency (a theological blog) and fellow Microsoftie JP Stewart (who I missed somehow at previous meetups). And Top Pot donuts are insidious little things.

PES’s “roof sex” furniture ad made quite an impression; as promised, here’s the link (since I last linked it in 2001, AdCritics has changed its business model and you can’t find it there anymore without paying). All I can say is, Wahoowa.

I’ll be at Uptown Espresso at 2504 4th Ave in Seattle for tonight’s Seattle blog meetup. At the same time, Scoble is hosting a geek dinner Eastside. One of these months these events won’t overlap and I’ll get to go to both.

I’m seriously rethinking my strategy about getting car service done at the original dealer. That strategy put me quite a few miles out of my way today.

When it was time to have some recall work done on my Passat (rerouting a cable behind the rear wheel well, swapping out the ignition coil), I figured who better than the place that sold me the car. Complication #1: the dealer is in Everett, which is about 15 miles to the north of us as the crow flies. Of course, the crow doesn’t have to negotiate rush hour traffic through the I-405/I-5 crossover. While I got to the dealer in plenty of time, by the time I got my loaner car (well, loaner rental from the Enterprise shop at the back of the lot. Actually, loaner rental Chevy pick-up truck. This is important; bear with me) and got back on the road, it took me over an hour to get to the office.

Complication #2: Parking. Specifically, parking the big Chevy pick-up in the tiny spaces allotted at Microsoft. Every single outdoor space within walking distance of my building was taken, so after ten fruitless minutes I had to drive down to a newer parking garage (which unlike the older ones actually had the 7′ clearance the pickup demanded) and catch a shuttle bus back to my office. Between the commute and the parking, I missed my first meeting of the morning and was late for almost everything else, and in a foul mood too.

Complication #3: Getting back to Everett in the evening to reclaim my car—then turning around and driving into Seattle for an MIT Sloan recruiting event. Fortunately, this one took only 45 minutes, so I was just a few minutes late.

Suffice it to say, I’ll take recommendations for good dealer service departments closer in.

I had to leave work early with an attack of nausea and all over body aches that left me wondering whether I was coming down with the flu. After four hours of sleep I felt a lot better, but it’ll definitely be touch and go for another few days.

I did have a good culinary adventure tonight: braised chicken with tomatoes and fennel. But that’s a story for another day.

Funny couple of days with so much traffic coming from Dave’s link on Monday. Now that everyone is gone, I don’t know what to say, but I feel better.

Quiet here the last couple of days with Lisa on the east coast. She gets back tonight, fortunately. Quiet in the keiretsu, too; Esta has started her new part-time job at the seminary in advance of classes, Greg is just returning after a short battery charging hiatus, Craig appears to have gone dark after his whirlwind user acceptance testing tour, George has been busy in his woodshop, Adam is too busy with his new son to post, Tin Man has been rediscovering Lord of the Rings; and in Seattle, Beth has been at Bumbershoot AND Radiohead AND is quitting smoking and Tara has been posting some magnificent past life stories.

… is the Internet’s way of telling you that it’s noticed you’re not blogging over the weekend. The primary reason is it’s been a quiet one. We slept quite a lot from Friday afternoon through early Saturday evening—probably about 14 hours—then hung out with Arvind and Kim, their golden lab puppy Sumi, and their friends Lucy and Russ from Hollywood. We had a great time, though it was late by the time we got back. Today we got in our fall/winter vegetables (not from seed, obviously), went swimming in the lake…you know, the usual stuff.

I haven’t gotten to Bumbershoot yet. But tomorrow is the day. New Pornographers, Wilco, and REM… I’ll have phonecam coverage and lots of words after tomorrow.

Thanks for the link, Tony. I’ll try not to take too many more lame days on the blog going forward.

Jake has another good writeup for this month’s Seattle Blog Meetup. I had hoped to go, but other events (surprisingly, not work—yesterday was the last day of my in-laws’ visit with us) precluded my attendance.