Kat: How are you today?
Don: I’m good, though I just ate half a sammich before I noticed the bread was penicillin-laden :\
Kat: ewwww
Don: But hey, it’ll make me sick and get me well at the same time!
Kat: that’s nasty
Laundry fuel
Flickr: Don NunnBig coffee is what makes the world go ’round.
Lake Washington sunset
Flickr: Don NunnOur home star sinking over Seattle across the lake from Kirkland.
We are 12
Flickr: Don NunnHappy hour on the deck at Yarrow Bay Beach Cafe in Kirkland. Beautiful day!
Went to Salt Lake City and Reno for a (combined) week starting Thu 05/01. I remember the Salt Lake portion of the trip very well, the Reno part not so much. This is because I caught what seemed to be a mild cold at the beginning of the trip, but by Sun 05/04, the day we drove from SLC to Reno, the cold had exploded into a lovely sinus pressure / fever / coughing / woe-is-me thing that left me reeling that day and the next, and stumbling in a fog the third day.
Fog in the desert. Go figure.
The SLC trip was for the hell of it—I loves me a road trip, who needs a reason?—but also to help with, and by extension attend, Julie Anne’s brother Jimmy’s 30th-birthday party. The party was scheduled for Sat 05/03, so we drove down Thu 05/01 and ran errands Fri 05/02 and most of Sat and enjoyed the party by working our asses off in the kitchen all night. Lasagna, Caesar salad, and garlic bread for 60 people, coming right up!
Julie Anne had also prepared a 10-minute slideshow of photos scanned from Jimmy’s entire life, childhood all the way to 19:30 a week ago Tuesday. Show was a big hit, particularly the lingering shot of Jimmy astride an absurdly large cannon barrel (total "Dr. Freud, Dr. Freud, please call the hospital operator” moment—Big Laffs!) and the other photo depicting Jimmy in drag that vaguely resembled the Wendy’s logo if she were a hamburger-slingin’ ballet dancer.
The party ended about 22:00 and we finished cleaning up a week later, it seemed. Good thing my car knew the way back to the hotel because I sure as hell don’t remember actually making that drive, and even better it knew the way Sunday morning to Squatters where we met my mom for brunch before our drive to Reno.
I should actually say “Julie Anne’s drive, my ride to Reno,” because that’s the segment where my brain started to forget things like how to make me breathe correctly, and how to regulate my body’s temperature. Short version: I coughed our way across Nevada in between spates of almost death-like sleep while my temperature bounced gaily up and down like those little dots that track the song lyrics in karaoke bars.
Julie Anne was ever the trooper, however, and got us to Nevada in record time, despite her deep-seated need to follow rules which manifests itself most regularly by scrupulous observance of speed limits. This day, however, she threw caution to the wind. Our trip through Wendover to Elko, Winnemucca, and into Reno happened mostly at 85 mph or better, and I may be imagining this but I’m pretty sure she threw the finger to several large truckers (and their big trucks) and possibly a cop or two along the way.
But I was feverish, who knows.
We were in Reno because Julie Anne had a trade show to attend, and I had to be sick there. She was In Charge of the show, by which I mean she handled the show arrangements for her company’s product display there, and she kicked ass and took names and generally owned the world for the four hours of the show’s existence Tuesday morning. I know this to be true because she told me so; I was lying in bed squirming and moaning and coughing and trying to take a single full breath but my brain was still forgetting how to do that, though by then it had a fine command for inducing cramps in all 10 toes and one side of my jaw, I think from all the writhing I had done Sunday night and all day Monday and into Tuesday morning.
It’s an odd thing when you’ve slept for 43 of the previous 48 hours but you’re utterly EXHAUSTED and all you want to do is sleep more, except you can’t get comfortable because every time you move, every time an air molecule even TOUCHES you—and trust me, you can feel EVERY FUCKING MOLECULE touching you—some part of you cramps up.
Damned physiology.
By Tuesday midday I was back among the living, and it was time to wrap things up in Reno and drive back to Seattle, which we did over two days. We drove from Reno through Susanville, CA, and around the south face of Mt. Shasta on CA-89 to I-5 northbound, where we had to watch for cops because the damned road is PAVED with CHP cars, Jesus!, and stopped in Medford, OR. We got a blisteringly early start Wednesday, shaking out of our hotel room for breakfast at about ten minutes before 10:00 sharp, and we were home by about 18:30.
The rest of the week involved unpacking my suitcase, which actually took about 20 minutes Wednesday night but somehow feels like it will NEVER be finished, and then going to work for the two remaining days of the week. This morning was laundry, the usual routine of getting up and meeting Julie Anne at 07:15 to be at the laundromat at 07:30 sharp so we can beat the operator to her job, but today we were half an hour early because it turns out while we were gone, they changed their hours to 08:00 daily. Bastards. I could’ve slept another 30 minutes, got up at 6:45 instead of 06:15, but they didn’t bother to tell US they’d changed their hours.
So we got coffee and bagels while we waited, and we still finished our laundry faster than in weeks previous. MOUNTAINS of laundry, I swear we summited Mount Purex a dozen times over, which would be funnier if either of us used that brand but I needed something with two syllables.
And tonight I’m going to the Seattle Mariners game versus the Chicago White Sox (it was important to say “Chicago” there, to differentiate them from the famed Bristol White Sox) at Safeco Field, where I fully expect the Mariners to get trounced in their usual fashion, thereby maintaining their place at or near the bottom of the AL West. Only San Diego is doing worse than the Mariners right now, so let’s go, Seattle! You can do better!
Have a good weekend. :-)
Liquor-store hours
Flickr: Don NunnNo imbibin’ on election day.
Welcome to Utah!
Massive voting day here in the USA, 24 states have primary elections today. I am thus avoiding the cable news channels like the plague, an approach made easier because I have my friend Matt to provide me updates via IM.
I also opened a bottle of Chateau Ste. Michelle Columbia Valley Riesling, their 2006 vintage. Easily drinkable with slight sweetness and many lovely fruity notes. And it’s a local winery with a delightfully low price, usually $7 or under per bottle—this was the wine we sipped in late November and all of December as we prepared the various holiday meals.
Tonight I am preparing leftovers, because when I got home from some errands today (after lunch with Katharine, and let me tell you, driving across the 520 bridge in a howling windstorm is quite an enjoyable adventure), I meant to thaw a couple of chicken breasts for grilling, but I forgot to do that. So it was either pasta leftovers from late last week, or a PB&J, and I’m out of peanut butter. Which is stupid, it was on my shopping list and I was at the grocery today. But my grocery list was on my refrigerator, silently mocking me across the empty miles.
Anyway. Washington state has its caucuses (for Democrats) on Saturday, and then primaries on Feb 19. We do both caucuses and primaries and then perform some sort of voodoo to determine which method’s results will make a damned bit of difference, but we voters aren’t apprised of that bit of info, so who knows. (Actually, see.)
The winds from today’s storms have abated somewhat tonight, and since I am so carefully avoiding news coverage of the ongoing election insanity, I think I’ll have another glass of wine while I do a few things around the house. Nothing makes cleaning easier, after all, than a bit of liquid courage.
Kitchen fixer
Flickr: Don NunnI’m pretty sure the rest of him is under the sink. He turned off EVERY CIRCUIT BREAKER, so at least I know he hasn’t been eaten by the garbage disposal he’s replacing.
It snowed in parts of the Puget Sound area overnight.
By “it snowed” I mean “snowflakes were spotted in the metro area,” which by itself brought the most of the Sound crashing to a halt. But north of Seattle and through most of Snohomish County, there was actual visible snow accumulation on the ground and—horrors!—on the ROADWAYS too, rendering attempts at travel silly at best.
So of course I had a car-service appointment in Everett, because I like the dealership service place I’ve used before and my scheduled maintenance is covered by a service plan there. Which meant I had to get from Queen Anne, where there was only enough snow to ice over my windshield and freeze my doors shut, to south Everett, where there are about 3 inches of snow and several thousand befuddled and utterly terrified drivers to clog up the roads.
I left the house at 07:30, thinking an hour was more than enough time to clear the 26 miles or so door-to-door. I’d checked the WSDOT Seattle-area traffic map and travel-times chart for northbound routes and they showed all clear, so like a fool I only allowed roughly twice the travel time I’d need.
But then people started getting scared around Lynnwood, near the I-5/I-404 split, and a few of them spun out and several more of them began stopping IN THE MIDDLE OF THE DAMNED HIGHWAY to chain up. Frickin’ idiots all, and it brought northbound traffic to a stop around 44th Ave W. Stop-and-go for the next several miles—more stop than go—with the net effect that I was 15 minutes late for my 08:30 appointment.
No worries there because several other customers had failed to show or called to cancel because of The Snow!, you could just hear their hands wringing over the phone as they wailed about the difficulty about traveling anywhere today!, so I still got right in.
The service appointment set up, I wandered up the road a quarter-mile or so to Starbucks’ Claremont Village QFC location to have a cuppa while I waited, because I figured the coffee in the dealership’s own waiting area would blow chunks. When I walked into Starbucks, I reached into my pocket for my wallet and had a brief moment of horror followed instantly by an adrenalin rush as I realized I hadn’t actually picked up my wallet as I walked out the door at home.
Goddammit!
So I thought, oh well, I’ll just be a Wi-Fi geek today, I don’t need the caffeine. But then I thought, hey, I know my debit-card number, including the security code. Because I am just that nerdly! In fact, I pride myself on it. So I walked up to the counter to ask if they’d be able to process a transaction based on the card number alone.
The drink-prep barista (whose name I did not catch) wasn’t sure, she wanted to check with the store manager. She disappeared into the back briefly and then came back with what was obviously a look of mild distress on her face.
“We can’t take the card information from you,” she said. I think she expected me to explode into outraged insanity right there, so she plunged directly on: “But Amanda would like to get you the drink of your choice and it will be on us today!”
I nearly fell over right there. I’ve never had a bad experience in a Starbucks, most of them are purely functional customer-service environments because they’re trying to get high volumes of people in and out the door as fast as possible. But to be offered a freebie merely because I’d said I had forgotten my wallet was... really something.
So I flustered briefly and said I really appreciated that, but it wasn’t necessary, and the barista said they absolutely would love to prepare me whatever I’d like. I stumbled over my usual order and received it in maybe 3.6 seconds (time, it does funny things in such situations) and asked for the manager’s business card so I could contact her later today with payment information.
Thus I can heartily recommend the Claremont Village QFC Starbucks location not only for its coffee and ambience, but for the amazingly friendly and generous staff who think nothing of offering a free drink to a person merely because he walked into the store without his wallet.
If you’ve known me for more than about 28 minutes, you probably know that I’ve had nearly 4,000 separate home addresses in the roughly 16 years since I moved out of my parents’ house.
I have called five cities in four states home now. The fifth was Seattle, added to the mix when I moved to the Lower Queen Anne area in April 2007, into a one-bedroom apartment in a building that was about to undergo rather a lengthy (and still ongoing, for crying out loud) refurbishment to update the décor and kitchen appliances and so bring it into the 19th century.
But since I lived here the whole time, my apartment was not renovated, and then in September I received a charming letter informing me that effective Nov 01, my apartment’s “market rate” would go from roughly $51 to $1700 per month, and there would be a correspondingly absurd jump in my rental rate. But in the weeks following that letter I saw several postings on Craigslist offering similar apartments in this same building at rates lower than I was quoted.
So I relocated from the first floor, the 1BR unrenovated floor-plan from hell, to a fourth-floor 1BR with an amazing view of downtown Seattle and the updated paint/carpet/appliances and a much better floor plan that gives my cats a continuous circuit route from the entry corridor through the living room and kitchen, a distance of about 25 feet that they have now traveled close to 45,000 miles in their rips-induced fits of activity.
Part of the apartment renovations involved installing new light fixtures, which in an effort to be environmentally aware are of the compact fluorescent variety. Not much of a problem by itself—I haven’t been around such fixtures very much, and I’ve been environmentally evile and refused to convert my own lamps to fluorescent despite endless marketing to the contrary, but it turns out I had a much better reason for not making the change before now.
It turns out that compact fluorescent bulbs save massive amounts of energy because they are so much more efficient than standard incandescent lights, and they achieve this savings mainly by being ludicrously dim.
I’m a bit ahead of myself here, actually. When I first looked at this apartment, it was at night, and I had to feel my way around because the light switches are placed in strange places, usually a couple feet inside the room(s) to which they apply instead of immediately inside the doorways. But when I first hit the switch for the kitchen lights, I experienced for the first time an odd phenomenon: The room seemed darker with the lights on than off.
Was it the black countertops and the dark cabinet doors, or was it the fluorescent bulbs’ amazing ability to SUCK LIGHT OUT OF THE SURROUNDING SPACE?
I didn’t know, and I didn’t think much more about it until I went looking for higher-wattage CF bulbs to replace the ones I already had. I reasoned that if the 13-watt bulbs already in the fixtures were about the equivalent of 40-watt incandescents, then they probably had 60-watt and 100-watt equivalents as well. And they do, with one tiny little consideration: The higher-wattage CF bulbs also have different base styles, rendering them incompatible with the fixtures.
I am stuck with light bulbs that are really miniature black holes, so now I will be searching for fixture covers that are less opaque, because that seems the least foolish of several half-baked options.
Anyway.
The move itself went spectacularly well. My cats only yowled for the 30 seconds it took to walk them from the first-floor apartment to the fourth-floor unit and then lock them in the bathroom so they wouldn’t be underfoot, and the furniture was fairly easy to manhandle into the elevator. Only problem we had was with the mattress, a king-size monstrosity that would only fit in the elevator in small pieces, which I was unwilling to allow. So we flumped it up six flights of 7 steps apiece, grunting and groaning and sweating a lot. And we didn’t even shout obscenities.
I had spent the two weeks before last weekend taking books and DVDs and books and clothes and books and CDs and books and books and a few other books upstairs by myself, which left only the kitchen and various straggler books to be dealt with. That happened Thursday and Friday last week, and we spent the early part of this week on the organizing and arranging and trying to find the damned iPod dock remote, and where the hell are my Netflix envelopes? Though I did find those items this morning, and my cats have taken to the balcony like ducks to water. The cats have been indoor creatures the entire time I’ve had them, but here they can venture out into The Great Wild and 17 seconds later they can rush back inside, newly energized by the sun or the wind or the birds or merely by passing beyond the threshold of the sliding-glass door, and they work off the energy with hour-long spurts of Kitty Rips! which leave charming clumps of cat hair floating lazily across the rooms. I may have to find one of those spring-loaded pet doors you can install in sliding-door tracks so Flex and Annie can wander in and out at will and I won’t freeze (if winter) or have to track down and kill the flying nasties (in summer).
Some random things I discovered during this move:
I have multiple copies of several Celine Dion CDs. No idea where they all came from.
I also have multiple copies of several books. Odd to look at the bookshelf and see the spine of Richard North Patterson’s Courtroom peeking back at me twice. In hardcover, no less.
Sofas are much easier to take apart the second time after the reinforcing glue has already been broken.
Coaxial cable is just like wire clothes hangers when stored in an otherwise empty space. You start with, say, four cables each about 10 feet long, and months later you have uncountable numbers of cables of various lengths and colors, because that’s when the genetic variations start kicking in.
The city of Seattle has a certain beauty in daylight, and an entirely different beauty at night. In daytime, you see the shape of the land and the intricate interplay of the buildings and roads; at night, the city lights blink invitingly in patterns that belie the buildings that hold them but create an entirely new tableau with endless discoveries awaiting. As evidence, I give you two panoramas I created: Daylight and darkness.
This is a gorgeous city.
In roughly chronological order.
This building has been in the throes of a remodeling since roughly the 3rd century BCE. I knew this work would be starting when I moved here in April 2007, which coincided with my midnight-to-08:00 work schedule and what would become mostly futile attempts at sleeping during daylight hours because it turns out that the noises made by hammers and saws and paint sprayers do not function as soporifics.
So I am moving this month. This is (conservatively) the 98th time I’ve moved in my life, and the 18th time I’ve moved more than once in less than a year.
Bonus, however: I am moving from my ground-floor unrenovated apartment to a remodeled 4th-floor apartment in this same building. I’ll have a different floor plan and a better city view, which will rock at night with the vista of thousands of construction cranes’ anti-collision lights blinking merrily back at me.
This move covers a distance of roughly 150 feet, 40 of them vertical. No outdoors, no rental truck required with the silly mileage calculations and the obtuse rental agents and the rental “day” which is actually only 8 hours, but non-consecutively, two hours now and 45 minutes in 3 hours and the remaining time in the final hour before the rental location closes, and if you have the truck back 0.01 seconds late, you’re charged another full day, but this one an actual day because your late return of the truck might inconvenience their ability to overcharge the next poor fool who rents a truck.
No, this move is all loading a box or two, up the stairs and/or elevator, down the hall to the new apartment to empty the box, down the stairs/elevator. Lather, rinse, repeat. Eventually it will be time to move the furniture, and we’ll probably curse and moan and drink a lot like we did when I moved here because my sofa is about a ten-thousandth of a millimeter too long to fit around the corner from the hallway to the living room and we have to remove one set of sofa legs to get the damned thing out of here.
Though because this apartment will be renovated after I leave, we may just ram the sofa directly through the kitchen wall into the corridor and be done with it.
That’ll teach them to put corners in their apartments.
Yesterday my friend Matt asked me—and by “asked me” I mean “sent several text messages that were so plaintively worded, they channeled the tortured screams emitted by the thousands of souls who have been forced to sit through Daniel Day-Lewis’ last several acting gigs”—if I would take him to a walk-in clinic so he could get checked out and possibly drugged up for the head/chest cold and nascent sinus infection he’s been enjoying for the past several days.
Matt lives in Mukilteo, about 25 miles north of Seattle—an easy 90-minute rush-hour drive north on I-5 (just under 30 minutes on foot), but I scored and drove in the middle of the day when there’s no traffic other than silly British Columbians who think the big SPEED LIMIT 60 signs are calibrated in metric units. So it only took me 35 minutes by car, though I was passed in Shoreline by two speed-walking soccer moms and a kindergarten class on a nature walk.
We celebrated Matt’s stay in Clinic Purgatory—two hours and change, including the correctly quoted one-hour wait—with lunch at Azteca (a first for me) on SR 525, a lovely road the locals call Mukilteo Speedway despite its more-often-than-not crawling line of minivans and police vehicles. And after lunch we stopped at the little pet store next door because Matt needed cigarettes.
See, as we walked out of the restaurant, Matt patted his pockets to find his cigs, because the thing you definitely need after you’ve just had a sinus X-ray and then filled your prescriptions for broad-spectrum antibiotics, industrial-strength Sudafed, and codeine-infused cough syrup, after all that what you absolutely REQUIRE, is a smoke. But he had no cigarettes on him, either they were stolen out of his pockets by the clinic doctor (Matt’s utterly certain declaration) or he had left them at home. And Matt had noticed as we walked into the restaurant that the same small strip-mall style retail building housed a smoke shop, one Tobacco City by name—clearly it has aspirations to greatness, this tobacconist on the edge of Paine Field, and Matt was determined to help it along by making his smokes purchase there.
But before we got to the smoke shop, I was looking through the windows of the pet shop at the stacks of cages for the puppies and kittens that probably had been manufactured in sweatshops by not-quite-adult dogs and cats who never got to move more than about 14 inches in any given direction, when they weren’t doubled over grunting out the young’uns. All of which is erased by the utter cuteness of the floppy ears and the big paws and the barking, and also the terminally adorable puppies.
And so we walked into the pet shop and it was stocked with row upon row of cigarettes and packaged tobacco and also wine in racks which greatly resembled pet-store cages, hence my confusion. Also they had beer. Cigarettes and alcohol, readily available together from one clerk via a single transaction, BAM you have two vices ready to go. But no puppies, nor kittens or goldfish or little reptiles. And no pet foods, toys, behavior training areas, and the like.
Finally it occurred to me: Not a puppy factory, the sweatshop dogs are cranking out the fine-grade tobacco and they also have a lovely knife rack over there—you need a large saw-edged dagger when you smoke, it’s the only way to guarantee you get your lighter back.
I was surprised to receive my first bill from Seattle City Light on Saturday. The bill was only $27.01, $16 of which was listed as “Account Setup”—I guess it takes quite a bit of effort to type a new name and phone number in the billing system.
This bill covers service from April 15 to May 22, 197 kWh at $0.0376 per for $7.41 in actual energy cost. The remaining $3.60 is the “base service charge,” which covers who knows what.
The little “Compare Your Electricity Usage” graph shows a bit over 5 kWh daily average consumption, which matches the 37-day billing cycle and the total kWh used.
I was surprised by the low billed amount because I had the impression that electric service within the city limits was stupidly expensive. I haven’t yet determined if the amount seems so low because it actually isn’t that expensive within the Seattle City Light area, or because of the changes in my household since I moved in mid-April:
Probably a combination of these factors and the short billing cycle this time around. Looks like Seattle City Light uses a bi-monthly billing cycle like I had with Snohomish County PUD. I’ll be curious to see how my next City Light bill comes out.
Early-morning fire alarm
From Don Nunn’s photo streamOr: How Don got only about 2.5 hours sleep and still functioned reasonably well the next day.
You may not be able to tell from the spastic motion displayed in this photograph, but it’s a fire truck. Specifically, a big ladder truck belonging to Snohomish County Fire District No. 7. The truck responded to a fire alarm at one of the buildings west of mine sometime around 02:00 today.
I’d had tremendous difficulty getting to sleep because of someone’s goddamned dog and my two felines. The dog was barking just loudly and annoyingly enough to intrude on my consciousness a few times as I drifted toward sleep, and my cats took my stirring to mean it was time to play Indy 500 on the Don’s Bed Speedway. By the time I’d evicted the cats from the bedroom and closed the window all the way, the alarm sound had penetrated my awareness, and a few minutes later the fire trucks appeared.
Of course my camera was at the opposite end of the house—I was upstairs in the master (back) bedroom, camera was in the Escape in the garage—so by the time I got back to the bedroom the fire truck had started a slow circling of the parking lot as the fighters tried to locate the emergency. I’m wondering why they didn’t fire up their spotlights and look for building numbers, but oh well.
In the end, I only saw two firefighters leave the truck and only long enough to walk into the building northwest of mine. They weren’t in there long enough to put out fires or even knock down a door; I imagine they just checked on something and, finding nothing wrong, returned to the truck, which circled once more and left shortly after.
The alarm shut off a minute or so after that, and I was wide awake with my digital camera and a load of adrenaline and irritation surging through me.
So I shot some other photos too, to fiddle with the camera’s various manual and automatic modes. You can see the other shots in my Flickr postings for 06/28/05.
Apparent from this photo: My hands aren’t very steady. And my bedroom windows are really dirty.
Last night I was at the Wal-Mart in Lynnwood, WA, for about 30 minutes with my sister and her roommate. They needed shampoo, laundry detergent, and other necessities of modern life. They often go to Wal-Mart for such items specifically because of the prices and selection.
Yes, Wal-Mart occasionally offers very good prices for everything from toilet paper and toothpaste to clothes, electronics, you name it. A few times when I’ve been looking for a particular DVD, Wal-Mart’s “new” price has been much better than even the “previously viewed” bins at Blockbuster or wherever.
What amazes me, however, is the instantly run-down appearance of even a brand-new Wal-Mart. And nowhere else is the shopping experience such an odd combination of giddy fascination and unrelenting horror.
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