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[I trigger the update]
Installing. About 27 minutes remaining...

[5 minutes later]
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[48 minutes later]
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Digital zoom does it no justice, but I was pleased by the view from my north-facing office window this morning just after sunrise:

Mount Baker, visible from 80+ miles away bathed in sunlight and peeking above the rooftops and below the clouds.

But not my coworkers. Them, I’m fine with.

I go to work early to avoid my coworkers. I leave early for the same reason.

— Vodka Time (@VodkaTiem) September 3, 2015

Although I don’t use work to avoid non-work peeps. I use antisocial behaviour, which works just as well.

I guess Bemis didn’t feel comfortable putting “See where you pee” on the toilet-seat packaging.

Supreme Court rules same-sex marriage legal in all 50 states.

Beautiful writing from the majority opinion by Justice Anthony Kennedy:

No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were. As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.

The judgment of the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit is reversed.

It is so ordered.

An indoor cat, Flex always makes a beeline for the lawn edge so he can do a bit of grazing.

One of the (dis?)advantages of being color-blind is that I tend to dress simply, in solid colors and materials that are easy to match—basically the adult version of Garanimals. I also favor darker colors in general, and a lot of navy, green, and blue in particular.

Today, then, I am an unintentional 6-foot freshly inflicted contusion:

• Navy boxers
• Black socks, shoes
• Dark blue jeans, black belt
• Navy tee under a black Henley
• Navy hoodie under a black wool overcoat

This is the result of a few standard clothing items (I always wear black socks) mixed with random grabbing out of the dresser drawers and laundry basket.

Tomorrow I will probably happen to choose brown or green and so will switch to the Healing Bruise look on the holiday, because with the new year comes optimism, or something like that.

Flex resting on the kitchen floor mat.

I’ve never had to use an OveGlove before to handle a mug after reheating. Ouch.

The aftermath of the chicken pot pie recipe Julie Anne made tonight. HELP ME.

Your guess is as good as ours.

Nightly meds for Flex, my 10-year-old black cat who has hepatitis and diabetes. He’ll be on daily steroid and insulin doses for the rest of his life.

Steroid on the left: 0.5 mL budesonide in an allegedly chicken-flavored suspension. Flex adores chicken but doesn’t much care for the medicine. And I gotta say, the one time he pulled away as I was giving the dose and it splashed on my lip, chicken was not the flavor note I came away with. But of course I’m not the target audience.

On the right, the U-40 syringe holding Flex’s 1.5-unit dose of ProZinc insulin. (He gets that dose twice a day.) The injections don’t bother him unless I manage to goof on the initial stick—happily, it’s been a few weeks now since a stick made him cry out or twitch away.

On our way to Bainbridge Island for a leisurely afternoon of wine-tasting and lunch.

Not why I put the cushions there, Flex, but excellent idea anyway.

Because, why the hell not.

Not a milestone this year, a regular old (hee hee) run-of-the-mill birthday. But still getting a multiple-day celebration thanks to your family and friends who love you.

Here’s to 40-some more!

Everyone, go pester Jewells with birthday wishes at her various online haunts:

• Jewells in Seattle
• Facebook
• Twitter

A routine task, putting away laundry.

I pick up socks, turn to the dresser, put them away, turn back to the basket. Stack of tee shirts, turn to the dresser, put them away, turn back to the basket for the last pair of jeans it still holds:

The weird thing is, it wasn’t until a full day later we thought to wonder where the balloon shop is.

Flex cannot pass up a chance of a hint of a possible tiny bit of food. We often find him perched in the kitchen sink this way.

In no particular order.

• I don’t particularly like working from home.
• Flexie. The keyboard is not your resting place.
• Drinking one’s own canned beverages? Feh.
• Alamo!
• These kitchen-table chairs UTTERLY BLOW for anything more than about 25 continuous minutes of use.
• Seriously, Flex, go the hell away!
• Yay whatever music I want to play, at whatever volume.
• Remote access is simultaneously
• cool
• mind-boggling, even if you know at least the basics of the technology involved
• irritatingly slow
• Annie: The claws are not required for standing on my leg, ow ow ow ow ow
• This neighborhood is almost freakishly quiet on weekdays.
• The sofa, it calls to me....
• GODDAMNED CATS

When I couldn’t work from home, in the days when my job didn’t offer it (retail is hard to do except at the store) and before the technology was fully baked (hail the days of Citrix on Decker Lake Lane!), I wanted to work from home all the time.

Now I can work from home pretty much whenever I want and I avoid it. I like keeping my home and my workplace distinct and physically separate, too easy to lose work/life balance otherwise. And no cats at the office, which makes it orders of magnitude more productive. Or at least far less cat-hair–covered.

Is this what it means to gain perspective, or (gasp!) to become an adult?

Flex does not care for his confinement at the clinic.

I step away to refresh my coffee . . . .

Left to right:

• My own MacBook Pro. It started coming to work with me a few months ago.
• My older work laptop, a Dell Vostro something or other. It’s connected to the dual widescreen monitors.
• My new work laptop, an HP Envy dv7. Hoping to have it fully configured and switched as my main work machine by this afternoon.

It really shouldn't be possible to say, without lying, "I've been up for 6 hours" at 10:45 on a Sunday

— Don Nunn (@donnunn) November 25, 2012

Bit of a wild workday. This wall decoration at Bake's Place perfectly matches.

Thank heavens for technology. Otherwise I’d be lost.

Our Towering Inferno has settled down to a crackly comfy little fire.

Happy Memorial Day. :-)

Julie Anne’s efforts to get a fire going in the chiminea met with... difficulty, shall we say:

The several sheets of newspaper on the lower right was a full New York Times when she started

So I stepped in (at, for the record, her suggestion) with the charcoal lighter fluid.

Kids, don’t try this at home!

A couple minutes later we still had the roarin’ fire we sought. Cuz, science!

No eyebrows singed in the making of this inferno

The phone, she is broke :-(

We joined friends for a matinee of The Producers in Issaquah. I was getting into the car on our way to the theatre when I bobbled the phone in my left hand and it clattered to the driveway for the fourth time I can remember, and this time it gave the unmistakable psht! sound of the glass giving up the fight.

Yay AppleCare+ — we’re waiting now at the Apple Store, University Village for warranty service. Should be all good in the next hour or so.

Twelve-year-old me really really really wanted this morning to watch Seattle City Light deal with the fallen tree a block down the road. The tree went down as a fast-moving storm blew through the neighborhood Friday evening, taking out or cable service and snapping a power pole in the process, and my 12-year-old self was all about gawking at the work to fix the problems because: Ooh! Big powerful machines!!!

Forty-year-old me knew that if I didn’t mow the damned lawn, it would overtake the house in a matter of hours. It had been three weeks since the last mowing, a combination of weekend plans and bad weather repeatedly delaying the next mow.

Somehow my brain arrived at a perfect compromise: Mow the front yard first!

So that’s what I did, and I managed to avoid chopping off any digits and scalping the turf even though I kept my eyes on the work down the street even more than I kept my eyes on the task immediately at hand.

And how was your Saturday?

So today, a couple of things:

On the drive home from work—which was itself unusual, I haven’t driven to work without a specific reason (like after-work plans or errands I need to run midday) in I don’t even know how long—I found myself belting out If That’s What It Takes. Which got me to thinking:

1. HOW IS IT EVEN POSSIBLE that I know all the words to this song.
2. Why didn’t I notice what I was singing until the last 30 seconds?

Thank God no one else could hear me in stop-and-go traffic with my windows rolled up, though this kinda shoots that all to hell.

Then for dinner tonight: Fish sticks.

I can’t remember exactly when I last had fish in stick form. I mean, I’ve had fish & chips fairly regularly over the last few years, but that fish is more wedge-shaped or (in many Seattle-area restaurants anyway) random–filet-shaped. There have been other fish entrées in restaurants fairly regularly over the last few years. And I grill fish on a regular basis year-round, mainly because I like to watch the planks burst into flame. But the stick form, they fell out of my life when I was, oh, maybe 12 or 13, and didn’t make another appearance until tonight.

And oh were they good. Crunchy little things, 2 by 1/2 by 1/4 inches. I remember them being much bigger when I was a kid, by which I mean about the same length and width but maybe twice as thick. Also soggier, no matter how long you baked them, but maybe the bigness was cuz I was smaller and now I’m an adult and most things from my childhood seem smaller, like the time I voted at my elementary school and I needed to use a restroom and I thought, good Lord, I’d have to kneel use these urinals.

Oatmeal and an apple fritter.

Cuz, you know, I’m all about balancing things out, even though the Diet Coke wouldn’t fit in the frame.

The high-rise offices of Grand Gateway disappearing into the mists.

Foggy day at Grand Gateway, Xujiahui, Xuhui District, Shanghai, China

Boozing up the rum cake.

Holiday baking in full force!

Catching the 522 near my house.

Back to work today for the first time since November 23. Since that day I’ve spent 8 days in the Caribbean (ah, sun/sand/water....) and took a day off for my 40th birthday yesterday.

And now SLAM back to the regular routine. Amazing how quickly the old patterns return:

1. Alarm at 05:30, didn’t even twitch.
2. Out the door by 06:00 to the park & ride.
3. On the bus, 30-minute ride to the office.
4. Yay badge still works!
5. Computer set up, time to start Outlook chewing on email updates.

All this and it’s only 07:15. I’ll spend most of today and possibly part of tomorrow filtering through vast volumes of email and other messages and catching up on what happened while I was out.

On the plus side, I’ve a short work week. So the crazy can only last four days.

How’s your Tuesday?

Only 6 weeks into our time in this house and finally the boxes are moved.

Progress!

Annie and Flex have been following the sun’s slow march across the living room.

Corned beef hash with poached eggs, home fries, and pumpkin pancakes at Original Pancake House.

This has become a weekend ritual during the cold/wet months.

An indicator of how this Monday will likely go:

I required five attempts to leave the house successfully. I believe this is a personal best.

First try: Realized I had forgotten my work badge (and, by extension, my transit card since they’re in the same badge holder).

Second try: Forgot Netflix DVDs for return mail.

Third try: Turned to lock door, determined this would be difficult since keys were still on the shelf inside my apartment.

Fourth try: Halfway down the stairs, remembered my wallet was still on my desk in the living room.

Fifth try: Half a block away, noticed my phone’s charge level was only 63%. Considered returning for the wall charger, remembered I have a USB charge cable on my desk at work.

So then. How’s your Monday?

On the bus headed to the office.

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.

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.