Personal

Just to follow up on my whining on the last post, I didn’t fall asleep until sometime after 3am — and my alarm goes off at 6am. Most days I just smack the snooze until 6:30 or 7, but I knew that if I started hitting the snooze today, I’d likely end up just falling back asleep and waking up hours late for work (and as I’m the solitary staffer at my position, that would be a Bad Thing).

So now I get to run the entire day on something less than three hours of sleep.

This is not going to be terribly enjoyable.

Background info: this is a regular problem with my neighbor, and this is the first time it’s happened to me with any neighbor in this building. The building itself dates from the early 1900s, and the walls are thick — actually hearing anything from my neighbors has generally been a very rare thing, and the few times I have, it’s been muffled and easily ignored. Until this guy showed up.

I don’t know if he works at all, but if he does, it must be on some swing or graveyard shift that has him sleeping through the day. Afternoons, evenings, and long into the nights and mornings, he consistently has either his television or his stereo absolutely blaring, and when it’s the stereo, he’ll often have one single song on continuous repeat.

Knocking on his door (which I tried a couple weeks ago at 1am when the volume went up suddenly on a Saturday night/Sunday morning, again that same Sunday morning at 5am, and last night at about 2:30am) is pointless, as he never answers. I know he’s there and awake, as in addition to the noise you can often hear him moving about the apartment if you’re in the hallway (the doors in this building aren’t as thick and soundproof as the walls are), but he will not answer.

I complained about this a few months ago ago to the building’s residential manager, and things got quieter for a short while, but lately they’ve been getting louder again. I talked to the manager again a couple weeks ago (after the futile 1am and 5am attempts at getting my neighbor’s attention), and it turns out that my neighbor is something of an odd duck anyway. The manager also has problems getting this guy to answer his door, and apparently when he talked to him about the noise issue last time, this guy accused him of harassing him. Later on, the manager was going through the building with the maintenance crew to check on leaky pipes and such, and when my neighbor opened his door and saw the manager with two husky guys, he accused the manager of bringing along “muscle” to intimidate him.

Bizarre guy. So, now I just need to start keeping a record of nights like last night and get everything in writing so that there’s a documented trail of issues that the management can use if it gets to the point where they feel the need to evict him (which, at this point, I would not be complaining about).

Someday I’m going to get out of the apartment living thing, not have to deal with neighbors on the other side of every wall, floor, and ceiling, and it is going to be so, so nice.

And now, I’m off to yawn my way through my day.

Whee!

“Pride (In the Name of Love) (Techno Remake Club)” by Clivillés and Cole from the album Pride (In the Name of Love) (1991, 7:59).

I may not believe in Astrology, but that doesn’t mean it’s not occasionally interesting. Nitallica posted a Mayan Horoscope, which I’d never seen before. Where I’m apparently fairly bull-headed in both the standard Zodiac (Taurus) and Chinese (Ox), according to the Mayans, I’m a Serpent.

• 27 July – 22 August: Murcielago (Bat)
• 23 August – 19 September: Alacrán (Scorpion)
• 20 September – 17 October: Venado (Deer/Stag)
• 18 October – 14 November: Lechuza (Owl)
• 15 November – 12 December: Pavo Real (Peacock or Turkey)
• 13 December – 10 January: Lagarto (Lizard)
• 11 January – 6 February: Mono (Monkey)
• 7 February – 6 March: Halcón (Falcon)
• 7 March – 3 April: Jaguar
• 4 April – 1 May: Zorro (Fox)
• 2 May – 29 May: Serpiente (Snake)
• 30 May – 26 June: Ardilla (Squirrel)
• 27 June – 26 July: Tortuga (Turtle/Tortoise)

The Moon of the Snake – La Luna de la Serpiente
2 May – 29 May

This animal comes across in the collection of Mayan animals in the same fashion as that of the fox. It doesn’t have any of the negative connotations that has been given to it in the West. Quite the opposite, it represents the redemptive spirit that illuminates the mind. They like to live well, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t have a strict and unwavering ethical code. Always refined and exquisite, the snake won’t give its love to just anyone. It is very intelligent and convenient to have it as a friend rather than as a dangerous rival.

(The rest of the descriptions are behind the cut…)

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My brother Kevin is in town for the weekend to hang out with a couple old friend of his, and I was able to get together with the three of them last night for dinner at the Ipanema Brazilian Grill downtown.

Much fun was had — I haven’t seen Kev in a few months, the last time I saw Steve was for the three-family anniversary get together in August of ’02, and I’m honestly not sure when I saw Rob last. We all got to catch up, and much hilarity ensued.

The Ipanema Brazilian Grill is an interesting place. It’s down in the Harbor Steps building across from the Seattle Art Museum downtown, so I was able to just wander down there. We’d agreed to meet there around 7, and since I ended up being the first one there, I got us on the waiting list and grabbed a seat at the bar. The boys showed up shortly afterwards and joined me, and we waited for our table.

And waited.

And waited.

When I’d put my name on the list, I’d been told that it would be about an hour’s wait. When it got to be fairly well after an hour without any sign of movement, Rob went over to talk to the hostesses to see what the situation might be. He came back a little annoyed — apparently, when he asked what the best strategy for getting a table in a timely manner was, he was told to “show up at 5:01,” right after they open, “and you’ll get seated.” The bartender then told us that chances of getting a table on a walk-in basis on a Saturday night were slim…but he’d see if he could help us out.

We debated whether to wait for a bit longer or just bail (with quite a few jokes about the reason for our being shunned being “the hippie in overalls” [my brother] and “the guy in the skirt” [me, kilted as usual]), but right about when we’d almost decided to head out, the bartender came back and let us know that we’d be seated in just a few minutes. Sure enough, not long after that one of the hostesses came over to get our attention — and the bartender got a big tip from us.

The next shock for me — living, as I do, on a starving college student budget (only without the college classes to show for it) — came when I took a look at the menu. A single, flat, per-plate fee of $34.95. My jaw dropped, as that’s about three meals at my usual quality of dining out, or a few bags of groceries from the grocery store (admittedly, this may say more about my usual dining habits than about the restaurant itself). Still, we were there, and after some friendly invectives hurled Rob’s way, we settled in for the meal.

The last nasty surprise didn’t affect me all that much, but amused Steve. When we got to the table, he ordered a beer from the tap — the only type of beer that they had on tap. Moments later the waitress came back and let him know that the tap was broken. Okay, so he asked what they had in bottles.

“Bud, Bud Light, Miller, Miller Light, and Guinness.”

Okay, I don’t drink beer, and that was enough to raise my eyebrows. Maybe it’s just that my friends often tend to be as much beer snobs as they are coffee snobs, but Seattle’s often appeared to me to be as much of a beer town as a coffee town, and seeing a higher class restaurant limit their beer selections to various flavors of watered down American piss water — though, admittedly, balancing that out with Guinness — was a definite surprise. Needless to say, Steve went with the Guinness.

However, with those caveats out of the way, once we got into the meal itself, it was incredible, and definitely worth that initially jaw-dropping price (it’s just not going to be a place I make a habit of hitting a couple times a week…). Rob, the only one of us to have been here before, had told us that this was a “meat-o-rama” — that it was time to “get our meat on”, to “put your meat where your mouth is”, and he wasn’t kidding!

The dinner itself is an all-you-can-eat Brazilian style buffet. You grab a plate and hit the salad bar to grab anything you might want to supplement the main course with, and then sit back down. Each table is given a coaster that’s red on one side and green on the other. Put the red side up, and you’re left alone to eat and talk.

Put the green side up, though, and you’ll soon start to be visited by the servers. The servers circulate throughout the dining area, each one with a skewer that has one of fifteen different types of meat on it, fresh from the grill. They’ll stop by the table, let you know what they’re carrying, and if it sounds good, they carve a slab off right there. You catch it with the small tongs they give you, put it on your plate, and dig in.

It definitely makes for a very interesting and varied dining experience. The meat was incredibly good, too — perfectly cooked, melt in your mouth tender, and oh-so-tasty. I must admit that by the end of the night, that per-plate set price didn’t seem anywhere near as extreme as it did when I first sat down. We’d flip the coaster to green, get a few samples of the different choices, flip it to red to work our way through what we had and let it settle, and then flip it back to green and start the process over again.

Eventually, we got to the point where we couldn’t pack any more in, and just sat back to talk, joke around, and let things settle before we pried ourselves out of our seats and waddled out the front door. A few more minutes of chatting outside, and then Kev, Rob and Steve hopped in a cab to get back to Rob’s house, and I headed up the hill to work off some of what I’d eaten up at the Vogue.

Had a good few hours of bouncing around and chatting with people (finally, after almost four years, I’m starting to meet a few more of the people I see there week after week), and then back home to fall over and pass out.

Good friends, family, food, and music all in one night. Not bad at all.

“Good to be Alive” by DJ Rap from the album Go (1999, 4:15).

A pet peeve of mine that’s been bugging me for some time now. I’m not sure just when this started happening, but I think it was just within the past few years.

When I was trained on cash handling and register usage, it was drilled into my head that the proper way to give a customer their change is to count it back to them, starting with their total and working up to what they gave you. This ensures that both you and the customer are sure that they’ve been given the correct change.

For instance, if someone bought a $5.26 item and paid for it with a $20 bill, I’d give them their change starting with the coins and counting up: “Five twenty-six, six,” as I drop $0.74 into their palm, “seven, eight, nine, ten,” as the dollar bills get counted back, “and twenty,” as the $10 bill finishes it all off.

For some reason, though, I haven’t run into a cashier who does this properly in — well, I’m honestly not sure how long, but certainly not the last few months — and it drives me up the wall. Not because I’m that anal about how money’s counted back to me, but simply because what seems to have become the common standard is obnoxiously inconvenient.

These days, they’ll just say something along the lines of, “Four seventy-four is your change,” and put the money in my hand — but they’ll put the money in the same way they say it. This ends up placing the bills in my hand first, and then the coins, so that suddenly I’m standing there with my wallet in my left hand and a small stack of bills in the right, with a pile of change sitting precariously on top. At this point, it’s almost impossible to move at all without dumping the coins all over the counter or the floor.

Doing it the correct way — that is, of course, how I was trained, and how I want it to be done — allows me to cup a couple fingers under the bills and around the change in my palm, slip the bills into my wallet, and then drop the change into my pocket. Now, though, I’m left standing in front of the register, feeling more than a little idiotic as I try to juggle wallet, bills, change, and whatever I’ve just bought without either holding up everyone behind me or dumping my money all over the place.

Drives. Me. Up. The. Wall.

When did this start being an acceptable way to give customers back their change? Do companies just not train their cashiers properly anymore?

(On a semi-related note, I noticed while I was tending the register at my old store that I was the only person there who made sure that all my bills were facing the same way in the stacks — face up, with the top of the head towards the right side of the drawer. Again, something that was drilled into my brain when I was being taught how to handle cash that seems to be completely ignored anymore.)

Kids today, I swear….

“Music (Deep Dish Dot Com)” by Madonna from the album Music (2000, 11:24).

Happy St. Patrick’s day, folks!

Somewhere way, way back in our family’s lineage we actually have a wee bit of Irish blood — no big surprise if you’ve ever met me, given my so-pale-it’s-translucent skin and red hair. However, while I got the traditional Irish look, it’s my mom and my brother that acquired the taste for beer so dark it needs to be served with a knife and fork. I’ll stick to a very non-traditional Dr. Pepper.

So hit the pub, hoist a Guinness, do your best (or worst) brogue, wink at a pretty lass — and if you find that pot o’ gold, toss a piece or two my way, would you? ;)

Update: Mom fills in the details on our Irish heritage in an e-mail…

From Ressie Wills’ family history records:

Robert Hamilton b 5-16-1760 Banbridge, Down, Ireland
M 4-30-1781 Pa
Susianiah Keane d 11-15-1790 Warren Co. Oh.

Robert Hamilton came to America in 1774 to make his home in Old Lancaster, Pa., with his uncle, who was a blacksmith by trade. After the death of his uncle when he was 14 years of age he enlisted in the Revolutionary War.

At least several generations ago!

The catch is, though, that County Down is Northern Ireland — the Orange folks, not the green ones.

But “Everyone is Irish on St. Patrick’s Day.”

Patrick himself is buried in County Down, outside of Ulster.

More details behind the cut, if anyone’s interested.

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I’ve decided it’s going to be a good day today. I woke up in a good mood, felt more rested than I have fairly often recently, and there was gorgeous golden sunshine coming in through the windows.

Therefore, it’s going to be a good day.

‘Cause I said so, and I’m God today. :)

Last week, Seattle was in the midst of an unusually warm spell of weather for this time of year (which doesn’t seem to have ended — it seems we’re in for an early spring this year). With the weather warming up, I’m starting to occasionally bring my kilt to work with me so that I can change before leaving. One of the days I’d done this, I had to head over to one of my job’s other downtown branches to fill out some paperwork.

Yesterday I again had to run by their store after work, this time to drop off a job. When I walked in, the guy manning the front counter waved me over. “Tell you what….”

“Yeah?”

“I saw you in here wearing your kilt. Went out and got one for myself the next day.”

“Excellent!”

“I go past their shop every day, and kept thinking about getting one. Saw yours, and got mine.”

And another man escapes from the tyranny of trousers.

“Yallah Habibe” by Cirrus from the album Drop the Break (1997, 7:44).