Michael Hanscom

Happy New Year, everyone!

Spent last night out at the_vogue, which was absolutely packed with people ringing in the new year and bidding a fond farewell to the club on its last night. I took a few pictures, but not too many — concentrated more on just having a good night out at the club. I almost made it to close, but as I’m still fighting off the last of the cold, I bailed out a few minutes early to beat the worst of the post-club drunk traffic and made it home by two.

There’ve been both good and bad points to 2006, but overall, Prairie and I are both looking forward to closing it out and getting a new year under our belts.

Here’s to that New Year. Hopefully this will be a good one for everyone.

We’re loopy as all get-outs, due to a delayed connecting flight pushing our arrival back in Seattle from 5:00am to 6:30am and sending both of us far into the realms of sleep deprivation, plus having to battle the head cold that I picked up midway through the week…but we’re back.

More details, pictures, and so on will arrive as soon as I can think clearly enough to bother. :)

Update: Dad has posted his pictures from our trip!

Or, of course, whatever holiday you might be celebrating.

I’ve managed to survive another Christmas shopping season while working retail in a mall (something I don’t really recommend to anyone, though this makes my second time), and thankfully, there weren’t too many truly obnoxious customers. A few, yes, there’s always a few, but few enough that nobody totally snapped.

Weirdest request of the season, especially considering I work in a camera shop: a gent who came in last week looking for a “drinky bird…y’know one of those sippy bird toys that bobs into a cup of water….” We managed to get him pointed vaguely in the direction of Archie McPhee’s, then wondered what made him think that we’d have such a thing.

I went out to the Christmas Confessional night at the Vogue on Thursday night, while Prairie was down visiting her family, and got a lot of fun pictures of the various peoples and performers. Quite a good night!

And now, Prairie and I are waking up and taking care of the last few details before we head out to the airport to fly up to Anchorage for the next few days to visit my folks. Enjoy your Christmas (or Hannukkah, or Yule, or whatever) season!

Prairie’s off on a train down to visit her family down in Vancouver (south), so I’m on my own for a couple of days. Probably won’t mean much of anything other than a chance to catch up on watching the Battlestar Galactica and Heroes episodes that I’m a couple weeks behind on, and tomorrow night I’ll be heading out to the last Confessional night before The Vogue moves to become the Blacklight.

(Also: assuming I have everything configured correctly, this post — and all forthcoming posts — should automatically crosspost to my LiveJournal account. In theory. We’ll see how that goes.)

Prairie’s sister H and her boyfriend P just got engaged — to each other, even! ;)

Congrats!

Apparently, we got lucky. A few flickers and brownouts last night, but we didn’t loose power until around 2am (we’re estimating), and it came back on at about 8:30am this morning. We peeked outside, and don’t see any major damage in our area — a street just half a block away was closed off when a tree fell across it earlier, but by the time we got out to take a look, the tree had already been chopped apart and hauled off to the sides, so we didn’t see anything more than a lot of sawdust. So, all in all, nothing major to report, as far as we’re concerned.

Elsewhere in Seattle, though, it’s far different. Flooding, mudslides, downed trees, three people dead (one a woman who drowned in her basement apartment) and one million people without power. Yikes.

Local coverage: Seattle PI, Seattle Times, KOMO 4 TV, King 5.

Looks like the strongest storm in 13 years is going to be hitting Seattle tonight. Yesterday hit hard enough to knock out power at our apartment for a few hours in the morning, with other outages reported across town. Tonight, though, is predicted to make yesterday look positively balmy.

Lots of news on the local websites — but since the power’s fluctuating here, I think it’s time to get off the ‘puter before things go down entirely. :)