Personal

Our living room is filled with boxes. Some full, some partially emptied, some waiting to be broken down and taken out to the recycling…but it’s still a lot of boxes. Most of mine are still over at my old apartment, too. Uff.

The end result is going to be nice, but man is moving a pain in the butt.

Anyway. :) A quick recap, somewhat brief because I’m hot, tired, and fighting off a cold (which I’m going to blame on my little brother):

The weekend with my family was great. We hadn’t had a chance to have the whole family together since Kev and Emily got married about a year and a half ago, this was the first chance I’d had to meet my nephew Noah, and this was the first time Prairie was around my family as a whole — while she’d met Mom, Dad and Kevin before, it had always been separately as one or another of them was stopping through Seattle on a trip.

Noah’s a great little kid, too. Thirteen months old, and out to explore everything. Pictures from the weekend are, as usual, uploaded to Flickr.

Monday morning Prairie and I got up early, hopped in the car, and came back to Seattle. I crashed out at my apartment for a few hours while Prairie went off to the first day at her new job, and then we headed out to Ellensburg that night. Got up the next morning and managed to get her entire apartment packed into her dad’s truck and a U-Haul in just a few hours. We caravanned back to Seattle with me in front driving the U-Haul, Prairie following me in her car, and her dad behind us in his truck, corralled K, H, and P into helping us unload, and dumped everything into the new apartment. While Prairie and K got a few things organized and cleared a little workspace, the rest of us went over to my place to grab a full load. Back again, another round of unloading, and then we declared ourselves done for the day.

Now we’re in the process of getting everything unpacked, sorted, assembled, and put into its proper spot. I think this place is going to be a really nice little apartment once it’s all done…but we’ve got another few days worth of work to do before it’s really going to be ready.

So, things have been and continue to be busy here. More updates as time and energy allow.

Two things that gave me a grin (for very different reasons) on my way home from lunch today:

1. The fifty-something guy standing at the corner of 8th and Pike just outside the Convention Center wearing a bright yellow t-shirt paired with not just leopard-print parachute pants…but topped off the ensemble with leopard-print shoes as well. Obviously a very trendy thirty-something in the mid-80’s who’s never bothered to clear out his wardrobe.

2. The lady driving the big obnoxious SUV who had to back out of the Convention Center’s parking garage because her behemoth of a car was too big and gave the “MAX HEIGHT 6’6″” sign a good whack when she tried to drive in. You spend that much money on a ridiculously impractical vehicle like that and then drive it through the city, you deserve every moment of frustration you have trying to find a place to park it.

Okay, I’m not always a very nice man. But I’m okay with that.

“Not My Slave” by Oingo Boingo from the album Best o’ Boingo (1986, 4:46).

Update: Welcome, Utilikilt Newsletter readers! Seeing myself mentioned in the newsletter was a very pleasant surprise — good to (virtually) meet all of you! For more UK goodness, drop by the Flickr Utilikilts Group, going strong since 2004. :)

I got this via e-mail last night, and figured it was worth answering publicy as well as via e-mail.

On Aug 16, 2005, at 10:03 PM, Amy wrote:

I have a question about the utilikilt you wear. I’m sure you covered it somewhere on you blog but I wanted to know what’s the draw of the kilt? What I mean is, why is a utilikilt better than wearing shorts or pants? Do you take a lot of crap from strangers when you’re out in public?

I’ve been meaning to write you for a while now on one subject or another from your blog but this is my burning quesiton!!

(grin) Well, let’s see…

Read more

Much of the weekend was spent running around, getting boxes, making plans, and generally starting to get things ready for the move. We’ve got a Hanscom family get together this coming weekend, and I managed to get a week off of work for the move and a bit of vacation, so our current game plan goes something like this:

• M-F: Work (sigh). Prairie’s heading back out to Ellensburg to finalize everything there, and I’ll spend my evenings packing things up and getting ready to move.

• Friday: Prairie comes back out to Seattle, picks me up from work, and we drive down to Corvallis, OR to spend a weekend with my parents, my brother, his wife, and their kiddo at my brother’s place to celebrate mom and dad’s anniversary and have a family gathering.

  (Parents: Prairie and I will probably crash out at her mom’s place in Vancouver on Friday night, then continue on down to Corvallis on Saturday morning. I’ll e-mail you later today or this evening with more details and to make sure we know where to go in Corvallis.)

• Next Monday: Drive from Corvallis to E-burg (uff-da!) and meet up with Prairie’s dad.

• Next Tuesday: Rent a U-Haul, load it and Prairie’s dad’s truck up with all of her stuff, and bring all of her stuff into Seattle. Get the big pieces (desk, dresser, futon, bookshelves) from my place over to the new apartment while we’ve got her dad around to help.

• Next Wednesday-Sunday: Make short trips back and forth between this apartment and the new one getting the rest of my stuff moved, and rest as much as possible.

North Seattle, here we come!

Playing with the Gmap Pedometer, I’ve found that we’ll be living .75 miles from Prairie’s sister, and just one mile from the Northgate Mall. Easy walking to all sorts of stuff in the area. Nifty!

“Lover Man” by Bakra Batá from the album Music for Bad Guys (1994, 5:29).

Well, we’ve gone and done it — we turned in the application for the apartment we looked at yesterday. The apartment Prairie looked at this morning was “nice, but not as nice,” and while the apartment we checked this evening was nice, we weren’t comfortable with the area. It was only three blocks away from Aurora (for my Anchorage readers, think north Muldoon/4th Ave./Spenard rolled into one, but bigger and seedier), and the neighborhood just didn’t give us the best vibes.

So, we went back over to yesterday’s option, turned in our application, and then zipped down the few blocks to Prairie’s sister’s place. After a few minutes chatting with them we left the car there (so as not to have to pay for parking in downtown Seattle all week) and hopped on a bus back to my apartment. The bus situation is nice, too — the apartments are just a block away from a stop for number 41, which is a straight shot to downtown Seattle, all of about half an hour.

If all goes well, we should hear back by midday tomorrow…and with luck, we’ll get the go and have our new place!

And then comes the moving…

“My Heart Belongs to Daddy” by Duchin, Eddie and his Orchestra feat. Martin, Mary from the album Pop Music: The Early Years 1890-1950 (1938, 2:57).

Prairie and I looked at an apartment yesterday evening up in North Seattle (just off the 130th St. exit from I-5) that looks really good. A 1960’s-era apartment complex, decent sized 2-bedroom with fairly new appliances in the kitchen, ground level (but rather than being open to the street, it’s half-sunk and looks out into a rock garden with cherry trees), parking spaces, a storage locker, good laundry room (not in the unit, but good sized and with new machines), a pool (!), and only a few blocks away from her sister. Looks very promising, and the landlord was a sweet lady who’s very involved with the neighborhood community.

We’ve got two more to look at today — another also off the 130th St. exit that Prairie will be looking at today while I’m at work, and one roughly halfway between Green Lake and Carkeek Park that we’ll both see this evening — so with any luck, one of those three will be the place, and we’ll be able to put money down and start the process of moving within the next week or two.

I’m going to miss being with walking distance of downtown a bit, but the tradeoff is more than worth it (finding a 2-bedroom in the $800/mo range just isn’t very easy this close to central Seattle), and between Prairie’s car and the bus system, it’s still a quick jaunt into the core of Seattle for when I want to come in for clubbing, wandering around, or anything else I might want to do down here.

We’re keeping our fingers crossed, but at least judging by yesterday’s showing, things are looking very promising. Yay!

“So Much” by Impossibles, The from the album Ska: The 3rd Wave, Vol. 4: Punk it Up! (1998, 3:23).