donnunn.com

Photo does not match headline.

On the Seattle Times homepage just now, a dour expression for so much lovin’:

Families, Habitat for Humanity use housing bust to start anew (Seattle Times)

Nonprofit homebuilder Habitat for Humanity sees the national foreclosure crisis as an opportunity.

Habitat’s Seattle/South King County chapter recently purchased two foreclosed single-family homes in Kent’s East Hill neighborhood and is in the process of buying another. Instead of the typical building a new home from the ground up, Habitat crews have spent all winter refurbishing them, getting them ready for occupancy.

via Seattle Times; I added links

Another way Habitat for Humanity provides decent, affordable housing where it’s needed. Glad at least one good thing can come out of this national financial crisis.

Squatters Pub Brewery brewmaster Jennifer Talley wins another award

Jennifer Talley, the brewmaster at Squatters Pub Brewery in Salt Lake City, has won the prestigious Russell Schehrer Award for Innovation in Brewing. She is the first woman to receive the honor since it was first presented in 1997 by the national Brewers Association.

She recevied the award last week during the Craft Brewers Conference in Boulder, Colorado.

A native of Chicago, Talley has been the head brewer at Squatters since 1994. Utah beer lovers know she is always experimenting with new beer styles and ingredients creating award winners such as Alt & In The Way, a gold medal winner at the 2008 World Beer Cup.

via www.sltrib.com

Good news! Squatters is my fave brewpub, glad to see the recognition.

Seattle Times: Why can’t we handle snow?

Gee, ya think? ;-)

[I]t’s clear from the outcome that the state, Seattle and its hilly suburbs can’t handle a few inches of snow.

via seattletimes.nwsource.com

Full article text after the jump.

You can HEAR the anguished wringing of hands

It’s snowing in the Seattle area, which means two things.

1. Area school districts started announcing changes to their schedules, or outright closures, more than 24 hours ago, at the first hint of snow in the forecasts.
2. Drivers are freaked the hell out.

The snow is sticking to lawns, roofs, and trees, but it’s barely making the roads wet yet. However, the forecast calls for up to 3 inches of accumulation from Seattle southward by this afternoon.

I am of course in heaven. I was born and raised (and more importantly learned to drive) in Salt Lake City, where men are men and holy underwear is the norm, and where they get REAL snow. Where by “real” I mean in quantities of inches at a time, sometimes a foot or more, and as the license plates will confirm it’s the greatest snow on Earth.

Which means that anytime the Seattle weather forecasts mention snow or La Niña or “Arctic flow” or the other winter-weather flag phrases, I get a little giddy. I remember the years of walking to school uphill in the snow (but one way only) and the inevitable late-night sledding sessions down the block-long alley across the street, including that time Matt almost got crushed by the bus on 6th Avenue but only his sled bit the dust because of his expertly timed ninja dodge maneuver, and the look of utter horror on the bus driver’s face when he felt the bus’s front right tire go over SOMETHING (and probably felt the crunching of the sled’s wood deck) and he had seen a teenager waving wildly on the sidewalk just before that.

Ahh, the memories.

Anyway, back to now. Yesterday we had several brief periods of “snow”—really, it was the hardened version of Seattle’s famous misty rain. You had squint to see it—it made NOTHING wet, not roads, not cars, certainly not exposed skin. Immortalized in a conversation with Julie Anne as we had a late pre-Thanksgiving-shopping breakfast at Original Pancake House in Crown Hill:

Don: Oh look, it’s snowing again.

Julie Anne [squinting]: It is?

Don: You have to really want to see it.

Julie Anne [pause, still squinting]: Oooohh.

Laffs all ’round!

It certainly doesn’t help that the media here in Seattle buy into the frenzy wholeheartedly. KOMO News radio usually switches to their astoundingly lame “driver to driver coverage”: Joe Sixpack calls in on their news line and reports what he may or may have seen, or sometimes what he expects to see, or what his wife’s coworker’s neighbor said she once saw. And somehow the metro area hangs on his every word. Usually delivered all in a rush, because Joe Sixpack is not a professional radio personality and so has no clue about modulation and pace:

KOMO personality: We have Joe from Medina on the KOMO News Line. Joe, tell us what you see.

Joe: Yeah so I was driving on 520 toward I-5 and as I got to Montlake I saw a snowflake and I slammed on the brakes and a semi and a bus behind me almost crashed as they tried to avoid me and I spilled my Starbucks all over the dashboard and now I have to go to the detailer.

KOMO: O...kay, thanks, Joe. Now to Melinda in Shoreline, you have have something to tell us about the power up there?

Melinda: Well our schools are all closed and our power is on, it hasn’t even flickered. But we have about an inch of snow and my driveway is really icy.

KOMO: ...

And so on. It just never ends. I know (or at least I think) they think they’re providing a necessary civic service, but come on.

Really they’re just enabling the cold-weather-pansy mentality.

Too soon?

Text exchange just now.

David: What should I be for Halloween?
Me: A Chilean miner. You can phone it in.

Proving wrong the old adage about stuff not growing on trees*

Via a BBC News article:

A novel—and natural—way of creating new bones for humans could be just a few years away.

Scientists in Italy have developed a way of turning rattan wood into bone that is almost identical to the human tissue.

* Yes, I know rattans are not, strictly speaking, trees, but are more like vines. But the metaphor/lame joke doesn’t work if the facts are paid strict attention.

Kinda weird day this has been

My Tuesday started out as a fairly dull day at work and ended with my subpoena as a witness in a criminal matter.

Jumping backward a bit....

Way back in January, I was involved as a witness in a domestic-violence assault incident in my apartment building. I was the second person to call 9-1-1, and I ended up giving several statements over the course of the day. It was rather a harrowing experience as a witness—I can’t even imagine what it must have been like from the victim’s perspective.

In typical fashion, once all the hoopla had died down, the incident mostly left my conscious thought except for occasional reminders. I was asked to tell the story a lot over the next few weeks as I saw family and friends who knew about the whole thing, but hadn’t heard any details. But after those retellings, it faded from my immediate memory until occasional reminders like brief mentions in the newspaper came along. And most of those came fairly early on—here’s one from Jan 29 and I can’t find the article I’m vaguely remembering from midsummer sometime. When the six-month mark passed without further word from the police or the courts, I assumed it probably had been disposed by plea bargain or something along those lines.

Cue my arrival home today to find a file cabinet’s worth of subpoena paperwork taped to the building’s main entrance door. Seven total; mine’s the one on the lower right.

I imagine the recipient of that UPS InfoNotice was pretty intimidated by this display of summonsy goodness.

Anyway, yeah. Three pages of paperwork demanding my presence at the courthouse in downtown Seattle on or about January 25, which coincidentally happens to be the one-year anniversary of the attack.

So how was your Tuesday?

For your holiday pleasure: Lighted boats on the weekend

Since we live in one of the more nautical corners of the planet, it’s almost considered mutinous not to watch a parade of brightly decorated boats every December. You have multiple chances to join in the salty holiday spirit this weekend.

View the full article on the Seattle Times site: Lighted boats will buoy up your holiday spirits

Ah ha, the power was out!

Some 6,000 to 7,000 City Light customers on Lower Queen Anne, including portions of the Seattle Center and the Space Needle, went without electricity for 45 minutes early this morning

via seattletimes.nwsource.com

No wonder my microwave and stereo were doing the 12:00 --:-- 12:00 --:-- 12:00 --:-- 12:00 blinkies this morning. Kind of weird to find out about an immediately local event via the newspapers a few hours after it happened, though.

And I suppose it’s a good thing I use my phone as an alarm clock.

BBC - Earth News - Giant ‘meat-eating’ plant found

A new species of giant carnivorous plant has been discovered in the highlands of the central Philippines.

The pitcher plant is among the largest of all pitchers and is so big that it can catch rats as well as insects in its leafy trap.

via news.bbc.co.uk

Fascinating. Also: I can never go anywhere near the central Philippine highlands—in fact, I’m a bit leery of their existence with us ON THE SAME PLANET.

See, it isn’t as hot as they say it is

All this heat? It’s clearly in our heads.

We can see that quite plainly from weather.com’s temperature indicator just now.

As an aside:

It’s 90.5° in my living room at this moment, up from 89.2° when I arrived home an hour and 20 minutes ago.

I can’t wait for Sunday when I’ll be on the way to Hawaii. :-)

Bad day for airplanes.

Just in the last couple hours, two breaking-news stories, both CNN.com links.

• Up to 17 killed in Montana plane crash, officials say 7 kids, 7 adults die in Montana plane crash, FAA says—500 feet short of the runway near a cemetery
• Cargo plane bursts into flames at Tokyo airport—two dead (pilot and co-pilot) in this crash

Been kind of a crazy week

On Sunday morning there was an assault and stabbing in my building. Happened to be my neighbors, and I was the second person to call 911. Spent much of the rest of the day talking to police, writing a statement, giving a recorded interview with a Domestic Violence Unit detective.

I talked quite a bit about this on Twitter Sunday*, but I haven’t mentioned it here until now. I wasn’t sure if I was going to mention it here at all, since it involves other people in a sensitive story, but I decided since it was part of my life and the victim’s anonymity has been maintained in the news coverage, posting about that coverage was okay.

Anyway. After the jump, the latest story about the case from one of the local papers.

* See (in this order) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.

Moore, Paramount theatres drop Ticketmaster in favor of Tickets.com

Hallelujah, they say about 20% savings in fees and free at-home printing of tickets.

Moore, Paramount theaters dropping Ticketmaster - Puget Sound Business Journal (Seattle)

Seattle’s plowing silliness is by design

According to the Seattle Times article after the jump, the last several days’ delight of iced roads and daily insanity is fully intended by their snow-removal and traffic policies:

Update 12/31/08: Seattle will use salt in future winter storms.

We are CONFOUNDED by the snow

It just kills me.

After the jump, an Associated Press article chucklingly nails down why Seattle is so afraid of the weather.

MSNBC doesn’t get it

MSNBC doesn't get it
Flickr: Don NunnHey look! It turns out the economy’s kinda bad! Thank God we have President Bush to keep us informed, and MSNBC to break the news!

Appropriate image for a bank takeover

Appropriate image for a bank takeover
Flickr: Don NunnKids playing peek-a-boo, just what you want to instill confidence when your bank fails :-D

Here’s JPMorgan Chase’s Welcome WaMu FAQ, to show they really aren’t playing games.

I can’t believe they actually used this headline

I can’t believe they actually used this headline
Flickr: Don NunnCNN.com’s editors must be chuckling up their sleeves at their own cleverness.

Mark Hacking sentenced for murdering his wife

He was sentenced to 6 years to life in prison for shooting Lori Soares to death while she slept and then dumping her body in a trash bin.

Stories and links below the cut from CNN.com, The Salt Lake Tribune, and Deseret Morning News; also the Soares family statement from the Trib.

Mark Hacking pleads guilty to Lori Soares' murder

Entire CNN.com story below the cut.

See also Salt Lake Tribune story; no Deseret Morning News story yet.

UPDATE Sat 04/16/05: Deseret Morning News story now available.

Salt Lake Tribune: Hacking deal looks likely

Occurred to me I hadn't followed any news on this case for quite a while. I was hoping there'd be a trial so we might get some insight into the workings of the mind that decides killing a person is better than divorcing her, but I see that's unlikely now.

Not that much more likely with a trial, sure, but the chance is a bit greater I think.

I hope if Mark Hacking pleads out that it provides the Soares family with some comfort.

Entire Tribune story below the cut.

Lori Soares’ family removes married name from headstone

Salt Lake Tribune: Name ‘Hacking’ struck from headstone
Her mother: Donates decorative angels sent to her to a shelter for abused and neglected children

by Jason Bergreen

image not available
The Soares family has replaced the name ‘Hacking’ on their slain daughter’s gravestone with ‘Filhinha,’ which is Portuguese for ‘little daughter’
Rick Egan, The Salt Lake TribuneLori Hacking’s family has changed her headstone at the Orem City Cemetery to remove “Hacking” from her name. It now reads “Lori Kay Soares.”

Police found Lori Hacking’s body on Oct. 1 at a landfill they had been searching since mid-July, shortly after Mark Hacking reported his 27-year-old wife failed to return from an early morning jog in City Creek Canyon. He later allegedly admitted he shot her in the head as she slept and disposed of her body in a trash bin.

“We just felt that Mark obviously didn’t want her anymore,” Lori’s mother, Thelma Soares, said during a phone interview. Where Lori’s married name once was on the headstone is now engraved the Portuguese word “Filhinha,” which translates to “little daughter.”

Mark Hacking’s parents were notified of the change, made more than a month ago, and understood, Soares said. Saturday, Soares donated decorative angels sent to her from all over the United States to be used as Christmas ornaments at the Christmas Box House, a temporary shelter for abused and neglected children.

“I tried to think of an appropriate way to share them and the love they represent,” she said.

Children at the Christmas Box House decorated a 12-foot tree, Soares said. A picture of Lori was also placed in the branches. Creating the angel tree memorial for Lori seemed appropriate because Soares’ nickname for her daughter was “Angel Baby,” she said.

“It’s gorgeous,” she said of the tree.

Mark Hacking pleads 'not guilty'

Somehow it doesn't surprise me that Mark Hacking didn't have the balls to plead guilty and be done with it.

I'm sorry for Lori Hacking's family. If there can be any good from this, perhaps it'll be that Mark Hacking eventually feels impelled to disclose the full story of Lori's death, which might help put the Soares' minds at ease.

Entire story below, exactly as it appeared on the Trib's site.

Lori Hacking autopsy yields little

Entire story below the cut.

Deseret Morning News: Lori laid to rest as the tears flow

Entire story and photos below the cut.

Utah brewers get a taste of success at beer festival

Entire Salt Lake Tribune story quoted below. I’ve added links to the breweries and restaurants in question, since the Trib doesn’t provide them in its stories.

Salt Lake Tribune: Lori Hacking's body released to her family

The state Office of the Medical Examiner has released the body of Lori Hacking to her family, which is planning a private burial.

Family members took custody of the body on Tuesday, police said.

"They're very pleased and relieved to have received Lori's body back," said family spokesman David Gehris.

Gehris said the the woman's mother, Thelma Soares, of Orem, and her father, Eraldo Soares, of Fullerton, Calif., are planning a private burial ceremony at Orem City Cemetery, where a headstone has already been erected.

Lori Hacking's body was found Friday at the Salt Lake County landfill following a 10-week search.

Although the office of the medical examiner has completed its autopsy, it has not delivered its written report to police and prosecutors, who this week refused to disclose the manner and cause of Lori Hacking's death.

Authorities believe she was shot to death July 19 by her husband, Mark Hacking, and her body was placed in a Dumpster near the University of Utah Neuropsychiatric Unit, where he worked.

Prosecutors say Mark Hacking killed his wife to prevent disclosure of his deceptions about his college career and medical school.

After Lori was reported missing, family members learned Hacking had not been accepted to medical school at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, as he had claimed, and had not graduated from the University of Utah. The couple were planning to move to North Carolina within days of Lori's disappearance.

Mark Hacking is charged with murder and obstruction of justice in Lori's death. He is scheduled for an arraignment Oct. 29 before 3rd District Judge Denise Lindberg.

Salt Lake Tribune 10/02/04 stories on discovery of Lori Hacking’s remains

Full content of both stories below.