Still going after all these years.
It was sunny and pleasantly cool as I drove in this morning after a couple days of hard rain. I had the sunroof open. The ornamental cherry trees in the parking lot outside my building are in full bloom. It must be approaching springtime.
Naturally, we’re going skiing this weekend. This time we’ll stay local, but we’re going with Shel, her fiancé Vik, and her sister Kris. They’ve threatened to take us snowboarding. Should be fun.
Lisa and I are heading back to Whistler this weekend, and I’m in meetings all day, so don’t expect to hear anything from me until sometime Sunday night. Be good, y’all.
So what brought that on? I was driving back from the UPS depot after picking up a package (grumble grumble signature required grumble) and coming through the oxymoron that is downtown Redmond, when suddenly I realized I wanted a sammich. Not a sandwich, which could have been adequately provided by the cafeteria at work, but a sammich. Something with soul.
Only there aren’t any in the greater Seattle area, particularly Eastside, that I’m familiar with. Quizno’s? Schlotzky’s? Please. Chain sandwiches can never be sammiches, and besides both make me reach for the Alka-Seltzer. Burritos are fine, but they aren’t sammiches. And don’t even get me started on the orthographic abomination that is the “wrapp.”
Surely there must be better alternatives out here. I hope.
Last night I was talking with a friend about my progress since getting out of business school. I went from naïvely feeling on top of the world to feeling that I was lower than dog crap and worthless. Now I’ve climbed part way back. As my friend pointed out, I am now at least to the point where I acknowledge that I have feelings and can talk about them, which hasn’t always been true.
Dave and I had an off-blog dialogue a while back about male grief and male emotion. I was partly right then:
It’s a reinforcing loop. As men stay silent, the culture becomes accustomed to men not expressing their feelings. Eventually, expressing feelings becomes an exception, exceptions aren’t tolerated, and the cost of not expressing feelings becomes over time too high to bear.
But I missed one point. As time goes further by, it becomes easy to forget that you have emotions. Which is a mistake. Emotions can’t be destroyed; they just get expressed in other ways, like inexplicably lashing out at friends or convincing oneself of one’s essential worthlessness.
I’ve been fighting a Black Dog since getting to Seattle, if not before. Now at least I have lifted the crushing cycle of self doubt and understand a little of what caused it. The only question about my newly rediscovered emotions is what to do about them?
We spent yesterday in driving snow at Stevens Pass, learning that my early successes in skiing at Snoqualmie and Whistler don’t necessarily guarantee continued upright skiing when it comes to tackling blue runs. Best wipeout: coming down a slick steep run, my skis lock momentarily and I go sprawling. Not just a fall, I cartwheel head over heels, my skis going out at right angles to my body, until I land spread-eagled on my back. Needless to say, this happened fairly close to the chairlift, from which I could hear applause and cries of “I love you!” (male voice) and “I want you!” (female voice).
What could I do? I raised one pole in salute. (They were too far away from me to see my finger.)
I always hate to predict that I’ll be off the air because I invariably end up blogging anyway. But Lisa and I are heading up to Vancouver to do some skiing and see the city, and I think the chances of my being near a web browser are slim. A good weekend to all…
One thing that George and Becky remarked on last night while visiting us was how new Kirkland looked, despite being a fairly old community. We pointed out that a lot of the building in Kirkland over the past few years has been “teardown”—small houses on valuable properties have been razed so that new, larger (I wouldn’t say ostentatious) houses can take their place.
Kari Happold Real Estate agent, says that the neighborhood was originally vacation homes for folks coming across the lake from Seattle in the summertime, and so a lot of the original houses aren’t especially large. I suspect, on the basis of this history of the town, that some also housed workers in the Kirkland shipyard. Today, of course, on our hill overlooking Lake Washington any property that has even a little bit of a lake view is enormously valuable. So the old houses are going.
Another one (this one a bit of an eyesore) was demolished yesterday down the hill from us. While I certainly don’t mind the potential appreciation in the value of our house, I also can’t help but feel that some of the history of the place is being lost.
(Title reference: “Houses in Motion” from Remain In Light by the Talking Heads.)
Just had a lovely evening and dinner with George and Becky. Great seafood (oh, good time to try oysters!), good wine (including a free bottle that the table next to us left behind!), great company. We’re already making plans for the next vacations together—Napa? skiing in Utah? Now that they’ll be on the same coast, the possibilities are endless!
On Saturday three of my favorite people will be flying into SeaTac. George and Becky are coming out for a visit with some relatives (and maybe a little beer tasting). Should be a good time all around.
Who’s the third? Why, that would be my all time favorite person, returning from Boston.
Finally went skiing today, at Summit West. Ow. Ow. Ow. Ow. There are muscles along the outside edges of both legs that I didn’t know I had, and that are eager for me to renew acquaintance with them. It was a pretty good time, though, at least until the rain started in earnest.
Okay, so that was just slightly defensive for not having posted anything today, but I had good reason: I was at an all-day off site marketing seminar, being talked to by the likes of our CEO, Kellogg professor Mohan Sawhney (who had some worthwhile things to say in spite of inventing B2B), and Tom Peters. Lots of things that I won’t discuss on the weblog, but it was fun.
Oh, and I see George got the scrapple I sent. Hopefully Becky will still speak to me. Oh, and this site is now link #4 (and site #3) if you Google for Stoltzfus scrapple.
Lisa and I went to a dog show in Puyallup on Friday night. We thought, What better way to find a breeder who could tell us about how to get a Bichon Frisé puppy? Well, apparently the right answer was, “Lots of better ways.”
But not to get too far ahead of the story. The dog show was being held in the Puyallup fair grounds, about thirty miles south of where we live, to the east of SeaTac. This means that on a Friday afternoon at 4 pm, it was about seventy minutes away. We got there at about 5:45. The papers we had said the show, which included the meeting of the Puget Sound Bichon Frisé club, would go until 10 pm. Plenty of time, we thought.
We walked into the first building, which looked like a preparatory area—dogs in crates, on grooming tables, being watched by twelve-year-old kids—but with no apparent breeders in site and only a small crowd in the far end of the building. We saw another building to the right and walked through. Immediately we were hit with a miasma of dog. More dog crates and pens, stalls selling liver treats and grooming implements—all shuttered. We looked at each other and said, “Uh-oh.” Then we saw chairs at the far end of the next room set up in a ring and heard an announcer’s voice. Finally, I thought, we’ve found it. And a Bichon was on the judging table. We drew closer and realized that this was a general judging of “non-sporting” breeds, not the Bichon Frisé club judging. And there were only about fifty people there. The ones who weren’t handlers in the ring were waiting for their turn to go on. We watched the Bichon take third place and talked to the lady at the AKC desk, only to find out that the Bichon club was meeting in the building we had first been in. We walked back to find most everyone cleared out.
We went away without having talked to a breeder. But we have some addresses and phone numbers, and we’ll press ahead.
We had planned to go skiing this weekend—for me, it would have been the first time skiing since high school—but reality intervened. First, taking down the tree took much, much longer than expected. Second, we woke up on Sunday, looked at each other, and said, “Maybe we’d better go sightseeing instead.” (This week was also the week we started going to the gym again, and I don’t think either of us felt up to a day on the slopes yet.)
In our defense, the snow isn’t great here yet. The relative drought we’ve had in Seattle this fall and winter has also affected snowfall at the skiing resorts. On Friday the western section of Snoqualmie Pass had only about 40 inches of base. (I’m told that’s not a lot.)
So we drove north, since we hadn’t explored in that direction yet, to Bellingham. Which, coincidentally, is the home of Orchard Street Brewing Company. Which, sadly, turns out to be closed on Sundays. Ah well: another time, perhaps…
The rain finally caught up with us here. The nice thing about living in Seattle is that inclement weather rarely delays the traffic at SeaTac; the airport is so used to dealing with rain that it barely registers. My in-laws are currently being driven to SeaTac on their way back to New Jersey. It was a fun couple of weeks.
They took us out to dinner last night. There were only a handful of restaurants open on New Years Day on the Eastside; one was P. F. Chang’s in the mall. Putting aside my reservations about chain restaurants, we decided to go. It was quite good, actually. And they’re not afraid to spice the food. In fact, the Schezuan Beef was so highly spiced it’s still reminding me I ate it. Hopefully my stomach will calm down enough soon that I can have some coffee. I am not waking up quickly this morning…
We decided to do a night in tonight, so I went to the Blockbuster at the bottom of the hill for the first time. This in and of itself wasn’t so amazing. What was amazing was:
Now that is Customer Relationship Management.