Day 53: Had a nice uneventful Saturday, enjoyed a really good dinner out on our back deck, then curled up for a movie-and-champagne evening (Polite Society is delightful).
Michael Hanscom
Year 50 Day 52
Day 52: The plan was to get dinner from Aguacateros, which has been our favorite local Mexican restaurant since we moved to this area. But when I got there, I discovered that at some point recently, they’d closed for good — signs down, windows papered over, the works. Really disappointing! So instead of really good Mexican food, we got a “what’s here and easy” meal of hot dogs, beans, and chips. (Admittedly, it wasn’t bad…just not what we’d planned on.) And now we need to find a new go-to Mexican restaurant!
Year 50 Day 51
Day 51: Every spring the college rents a herd of goats (you’ve heard of goats, right? <rimshot>) to clear out the undergrowth around the trails and pond on the west side of campus. We got word yesterday that they were back, so I started off my lunch break by wandering down to say hello.
Year 50 Day 50
Day 50: I’ve realized that, much to my chagrin, as an opinionated 50-year old white man, I need to update my profile picture across all social media to something more fitting. Because this is ‘Murica and it’s in the Constitution, right?
Year 50 Day 49
Day 49: Just hanging out with my wife’s Head, which I’m keeping displayed on a shelf in my work office. Just prior to the pandemic, a hairdresser’s dummy head mysteriously appeared in my wife’s faculty office on campus. When she moved to an administrative position at the college, the Head moved with her. Now that she’s moving back from administration to a tenure-track faculty position, she’s switching offices once again, and as she has the summer off, I get to babysit the Head until she can move into her new office. We’re pretty sure the Head is enjoying its change of scenery for the summer.
📚 Cyteen by C.J. Cherryh
29/2023 – ⭐⭐⭐ 1989 Hugo Best Novel
This one took me a while to get through, and it wasn’t really until the latter half of the book that I really started to feel like I was really getting invested in it. It’s dense, with a lot of the plot revolving around political maneuvering, cloning, and using psychological conditioning to educate, train, and mold the personalities of clones, as well as to influence and adjust both clones and non-clones throughout their lives. I often found myself reading just a few pages or sections at a time before setting it down, rather than just reading my way through. There’s a lot of in-depth, high-concept ideas in here — great if you’re into that kind of thing, but difficult if you’re not. (Right now, I appear to be somewhere in between those two extremes.)
Year 50 Day 48
Day 48: Today is our 21/10 anniversary — 21 years of knowing each other, 10 of marriage. We had a good short trip to celebrate yesterday, and we’re both a little tired today, so I’m making dinner…where “making” is defined as “going to pick up takeout from a favorite local restaurant”. It works!
Year 50 Day 47
Day 47: Tomorrow is our anniversary, so we decided to run off to the Bothell McMenamin’s for the night. We got to listen to some nice music from the courtyard, had a great meal at a local restaurant (not one of the ones here; none of their menus looked right to us for tonight, but The Cottage was excellent), and have some good chocolates and champagne in the room. The room on the whole is cute…except for the painting of this location’s namesake, Wilbert Andell Anderson, who looks like a creepy backwoods redneck badly cosplaying his just-discovered Viking ancestry, and who is staring directly at the bed.
Year 50 Day 46
Day 46: Decided it was time for a little book shopping today, and we were both able to fill in a few gaps on our shelves. If you’re ever in the Kent, WA area, Page Turner Books gets a high recommendation from us. A cute local new and used bookstore, with a great focus on SF/F and a good selection of mysteries, so it’s able to satisfy both me and my wife.
Year 50 Day 45
Day 45: Today’s photo is actually a re-creation of an event from yesterday, which comes with a bit of a story.
Yesterday was Highline’s commencement festivities which, as last year, were held on campus (and it is so much nicer than the traditional stadium ceremonies). My wife and I had shown up early in the morning to help with setup, and then I’d been finding other ways to help out, so I’d been doing a lot by the time noon rolled around. So, a little tired, hungry, and slightly over-peopled, I headed back to my office in the library building to have lunch.
Also in the elevator with me were three of the librarians, also on their way to have lunch together. They got off on the fourth floor, and I got off on the fifth, sat at my desk, and enjoyed a quiet lunch.
When I finished eating, I checked my work email–and found an email from one of the librarians telling me which office they were in and inviting me down. While it was quite a while later, I figured I could see if they were still around, and since they were just a floor away, I took the stairs down…
..and the door to the fourth floor was locked. Oh, right, that makes sense. The library building was closed for the festivities, so that door would be locked. I went back up to my floor…
…and the door to the fifth floor was locked.
As were the doors to the sixth, third, and second floors, and the only door on the first floor is an alarmed emergency exit.
I was trapped in the stairwell.
So, rather bemused by the whole thing, I sat down and started by emailing all three librarians: “Are any of you still around? I’m trapped in the stairwell.” And then I started looking each of them up in Outlook to find their office numbers, hoping that one was around in in their office, or at least within hearing distance of their phone, so that I wouldn’t have to resort to calling campus security to let me out.
Thankfully, though they’d finished lunch and gone their separate ways by this point, one was in their office, and I was shortly able to send a follow-up email saying “I’ve been rescued!” And a little later, I found the other two out on the lawn enjoying the festivities, and we all had a laugh as they apologized for getting me stuck.
So, that was my mid-day adventure getting locked in a stairwell in the midst of the school’s graduation celebration. Hopefully it’s the last time this happens!