Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
The stuff about me and my life. The “diary” side of blogging.
This weekend, I…
…explored Ape Cave
…saw the south face of Mt. St. Helens (the north face, with the crater, was too clouded over to see)…
…hiked along Lava Canyon…
…and played on a rope swing!
All in all, a very good weekend. I hope yours was as enjoyable!
Oh, this is good — our building has a 30-day shutoff notice from the water utility posted on the front door.
Not one of the tenants. The building. In other words, the leasing agency for the building hasn’t paid the water bill for long enough that under normal circumstances, it would be shut off, but as this is an apartment building, we’re given an extra 30 days to see if something can be worked out.
I’m thrilled about this one.
Update: Even better — I just tried calling the offices of Kauri Investments, our leasing agency, and couldn’t get anyone to answer the phone, not even a receptionist. Better and better…
Update: The following is the text of an e-mail I just sent to the sole Kauri employee with an easily accessible e-mail address on the Kauri website, after my failure in contacting anyone by phone.
From: Woody Hanscom
Date: Mon May 19, 2003 12:23:18 US/Pacific
To: kenta@kauri.com
Cc: parkseneca@speakeasy.net
Subject: Park Seneca Apts. water shutoff?Kent –
I’m neither an investor nor a real estate professional, however I was unable either to reach anyone (even a receptionist) by calling the Kauri offices, and yours was the only e-mail I found for anyone at Kauri on the Kauri website. I do hope that this isn’t too much of an intrusion. I’m cc:ing this message to parkseneca@speakeasy.net, though I’m not currently sure who checks that e-mail account as it was set up under Melvin Kelly’s name, but he is no longer the building manager.
I am a resident of the Park Seneca Apartments, in unit 405, and this morning I found a notice posted on the front door of the apartment building alerting us to the fact that due to delinquent payments, we face having our water shut off in 30 days. I hope you’ll understand that I find this to be a fairly major concern. While I have fallen behind on bills from time to time in my life, when I do so, that affects only myself – not a 50-some unit apartment building.
In the year that I have lived here at the Park Seneca Apartments, I have had to cope with an elevator that seems to be broken more often than not, a renovation that seemed to drag on forever, with constantly shifting reports on when various services would be turned on or off, months without on-site laundry services, and a few weeks surrounding the replacement of the water heater when there was little to no hot water at all in the building. I have watched as many of my fellow tenants, equally or more disgusted with the difficulties encountered during the renovations, moved out. I chose to stay on, as I do enjoy the location of the building, its proximity to downtown and Capitol Hill, and as I haven’t wanted to deal with the hassles of trying to find another apartment and moving (not to mention attempting to move without the benefit of a working elevator). However, instances such as this shutoff notice go a long way to making me question the wisdom of continuing my residence here.
I sincerely hope that the current situation with the water bills will be resolved soon, and I (and my fellow tenants) will not have to deal with the severe inconvenience of not having water next month. My intent at this point is to continue living here, for all of the reasons previously stated. I did, however, feel that it was worthwhile to raise my concerns with the conditions I have been living with, in the hope that difficulties such as this will not be a concern in the future.
Sincerely,
Michael “Woody” Hanscom
Who knows if it’ll do much good, but hey, I feel (a little) better.
An interesting article in the NYT today about the pros and cons of getting personal with weblogs, something I occasionally struggle with. My site tends to be somewhat dry much of the time, but while I occasionally toy with the idea, I’ve never been too sure if I want to “open up” more in such a public medium.
I’m not likely to make a dramatic shift in the tone of this weblog — I’m naturally fairly private and reserved, and not likely to go into any sort of no-holds-barred expose — but there are definitely times I consider broadening the scope of what I write about. Maybe I’ll head that direction at some point, maybe I won’t, I’m not too sure. It bears consideration, however.
Of course, since I just edited this post three times, and almost deleted it, things may stay just as they are. ;)
(via Paulo)
My current workspace here at home has been a bit cramped for a while. I’ve got two computers under my desk (one Mac and one PC), and three 17\” monitors on my desk (two for the Mac, one for the PC). It’s a nice workspace, but when you factor in two keyboards and two trackballs, it leaves very little actual deskspace left over.
This weekend, I picked up a new trackball for my Mac (a Microsoft Office Keyboard that I got free from work), my trackball, and my printer all plugged into the USB hub, switchable between both of my computers. Far more manageable, and I’ve got a lot more desk space available (of course, that means I’ll just have that many more soda cans strewn across my desk, but that’s beside the point…).
The only oddball glitch is that, for some odd reason, the Mac will occasionally forget about all the devices after I switch over to the PC and then switch back to the Mac. I’m not sure why this is, and was afraid I was going to have to go back to two sets of keyboards and trackballs. Then I discovered that as long as I leave the old Mac keyboard plugged in (sitting vertically on the floor, leaning against the Mac’s case), then when the Mac doesn’t respond to the keyboard or trackball that are on the switch, all I have to do it tap a key on the old keyboard with my toe, and suddenly everything on the switch starts responding again. It’s a little odd — and not quite a perfect solution, but hey, it works.
This babble brought to you courtesy of the fact that as I’ve been posting rather sporadically for the past week, I need some filler posts on the main page so that my site doesn’t look too tweaky. ;)
Today’s Foxtrot cracked me up.
My little brother Kevin, who’s been visiting his fiancee Emily in Africa for the past four months (she’s finishing up a 2-year stint in the Peace Corps) got home recently. When he left, he had dreadlocks down to his butt — but since he shaved them off at some point during the trip, dad was kind enough to post a picture of the ‘new look’!
It looks like dad may be posting some of the pictures Kev took over the past few months, too. I’m looking forward to seeing more, and at some point, hearing more about the trip. In any case, it’s good to know he’s back and safe.
Welcome home, Kev!
Here we are — one day of my life, my entry into the Mayday Project.
Since most of my Saturdays generally involved hanging around my apartment, doing laundry, dinking on the web, and other such fun stuff, I actually made an attempt to get out of the house for the day (since 14 pictures of my computer monitors wouldn’t be very interesting). The times aren’t exact on-the-hour, as I don’t have a watch, so I just took a ton of photos throughout the day (140-some) and grabbed decent ones around the right time for this page.
12:00pm: Waking up, heading for the shower. One of the benefits of having shaved my head is that I don’t look too terribly goofy first thing in the morning — hard to have ‘bedhead’ when you’ve got hair 1/8 of an inch long!
1:15pm: Saturday was the Grand Opening for Washington’s first Apple Store, in Bellevue, so I hopped a bus out to the Bellevue Square shopping mall to check it out. When I got there, it was about a 30 minute wait to get in — apparently the first person to line up showed up at 6:30 in the morning, and at one point the line stretched around the shopping center! It’s not a computer — it’s a cult. ;)
2:20pm: There are two spots inside the Bellevue Square mall (which is huge) set aside as playspaces for children not as much into shopping as their parents — a good spot to spend a few minutes after finishing drooling over computer toys.
3:10pm: I spent a while wandering around the mall, and after I couldn’t take anymore, I started heading back into Seattle. There was a fountain by the exit of the mall, that had two remarkably brave ducks swimming around in it, hoping for handouts from the shoppers passing by.
4:05pm: Once back in town, I spent a good amount of time wandering through the Pioneer Square area before heading towards the Pike Place Market. This was taken just outside of a flowershop in Pioneer Square, which was almost invisible except for the petals strewn across the ground outside the entrance.
5:08pm: Heading back toward the apartment and passing by Westlake Plaza, I stumbled across a bunch of kids doing some sort of dance demo/fundraising — one guy on a drumset laying down rhythms, with five or six other kids dancing. Some pretty impressive breakdancing, too.
6:01pm: I went through the Convention Center Park on the way back up to my apartment. There’s a large planter in one section — this was taken flat on my back underneath the planter.
7:30pm: My idea of an appropriate drink while hanging out at Fado’s, an Irish pub downtown — Coke!
8:07pm: Prom season in Seattle. Lots of the standard limos all over the place, but every so often you spot someone with actual class.
8:50pm: The trees around my apartment were covered in this webby, filmy stuff — at first I thought they were spider webs, which creeped me out a bit, but it turns out when I took a closer look that they’re actually caterpillar nests — nifty!
10:07pm: Dressed and ready to head out to the club: basic black!
11:00pm: At the Vogue, my club of choice in Seattle. Goth/industrial/new-wave. Woohoo!
12:00am: My friend Rick, sitting in his corner at the Vogue. I’m not sure he expected me to pull out the camera…
1:15am: Elephant picture #1: Me on the dancefloor.
2:00am: Elephant picture #2: Me on the dance floor again. Shake that boo-tay!
That’s it for now —
Had a good day wandering around Seattle yesterday taking pictures for the Mayday Project. Unfortunately, putting pictures up is currently on hold, as Rick accidentally walked off with my camera when he left the Vogue last night. Hopefull he’ll be over to drop it off soon, and I’ll be able to get the pictures posted…
The other day at work, I’d wandered up to the 7-11 up the block to grab something more than what our vending machines can offer us for food. On the way back, I passed a family walking down the street that had two of the cutest kids, and so I grabbed a quick picture for the site.
Enjoy!
After discovering that he was Nightcrawler, Adriaan asked which X-Man the rest of us are. So, I took the test…
Name: Gambit
POB: USA
Mutant Power:Through physical contact, Gambit can charge inanimate objects with kinetic energy, which is released on contact with explosive results. Gambit also has slightly enhanced agility and speed.
Brief Bio:Growing up alone in New Orleans as a pickpocket, Gambit’s red eyes always set him apart. A thief and a ladies man, Gambit joined the X-MEN after rescuing Storm from the Shadow King.
Gambit and Rogue have always had an on/off relationship, because of the barrier of her powers. They did manage to get it on once though, when a villain removed their powers temporarily whilst holding them prisoner below Antarctica.
The really amusing thing is that when I took a similar test back last June, it said I was Gambit, too!