Personal

It’s Friday! This is a good thing…the end of a slow work week. Not that I’ve really got anything amazing planned for the weekend, but at least I’ll be killing time at home where there’s a slight possiblity of being able to find something to entertain myself with instead of being here at work. That whole issue of needing to give the appearance of being able to justify your time no matter how slow it is kind of kills much ability to find some interesting ways to kill time.

Of course, so does the corporate firewall. But that’s another story. ;)

Candice and I never did make it out to the movie…we’d checked the time for the closest bus through the tunnel, but the bus tunnel is closed on holidays. Go figure. Ended up being just an evening at home, I dinked around on the ‘net, she read magazines…exciting stuff, I tell ya.

Not much going on other than that so far. I’m a bit short on money, thanks to two short work weeks in a row, which is making paying bills something of an exercise in creative financing, but parents are doing what they can to help me out, which rocks. As much fun as the past two weeks of vacation (more or less) have been, they certainly do take a frighteningly large chunk out of my paychecks.

Earlier this week Chad had his birthday dinner at 13 Coins, which was fun…Candice, myself, Rick, Peter, Casey, Jen, Chad, Don, and Dez all out having fun and being silly. Got one wonderful quote out of the evening, too…for some reason we were joking about Rick being incapacitated in some form, to the point where he we just kept him in the bathtub.

“Oh, don’t worry,” said Dez. “We’d entertain you…read to you or something.”

Rick wasn’t too sure about that, apparently. “Oh, sure — ‘Which would you like? Dr. Seuss or Schindler’s List?'”

“Hmm…Horton Hears a Jew?” said Dez.

We all proceeded to crack up.

And that’s about all I can come up with to babble about off the top of my head right now.

Time for a little catch up on things that I’ve missed for one reason or another.

First off, this picture was taken when Miranda was visiting a couple weeks ago. This is her little girl Lorelei, who just turned 1 year old on the 24^th of December! She’s a really sweet little girl, and it was great to be able to see her again when they came through.

While I was up in Anchorage, I was able to do some running around and visiting my old haunts, and I took a few pictures while I was there. I took this shot of the mailbox just because so many people don’t seem to understand why I’m so thrilled to be in Seattle now. Well — see all that snow? Piled up almost all the way to the bottom of the box itself? That’s why I like being in Seattle! :D Not to mention the temperatures that suddenly dropped down into the below-zero range one night. Admittedly, there are other reasons…but that’s a very prominent one. I got to slog through more snowdrifts in the weekend I was up there than I’d thought I’d even see this winter…ah, well, I’m back in 40-degree weather now. Enough whining.

Anyway, I got a pretty decent shot of Candice while we were in the car. I dunno if she’ll try to kill me or not when she finds out I put this picture up, but I thought it was worth doing. She’s actually still up in Anchorage right now, but is flying back down here tonight. Being able to spend Christmas with her was very cool, but we were both looking forward to being back in Seattle. Both of us are much happier in a bigger and warmer city — more to do, and better temperatures to do it in.

I wanted to stop by the mall where TimeFrame used to be while I was there, so that was one of the first places we hit. First surprise — the whole thing’s blue! Baby blue, even! Ugh. Then I get to the doors, and they’re remodeling the entire inside of the mall, too, so everything’s all ripped to shreds. The doors were unlocked so I went ahead and wandered in to take a look. As I was walking down the hall, there was a banging at another door — turns out it was Rob Thomas, my old boss. His dad Brett (the owner of TimeFrame) was there too, so I got to spend a couple minutes talking to them. They both seem to be doing fairly well under the circumstances — they’ve scaled back to a 5 employee business just focusing on oversize color and lamination, and I think they’ll do a lot better that way. The impression I got was that they’re much better small business owners than big business — so even though the failure of TimeFrame was a blow, I think it’ll most likely be a lot better for them in the long run, and they seem to be realizing that also.

Saturday I spent first with Candice and her family for dinner, then we went out to ‘Koots and I was able to see a few of my friends — some of whom I hadn’t even told I was going to be there! Richard, Rachael, Stacey and James all showed up, and I also ended up running into Jason (an ex-roommate), Gillian and Jason Buck (old friends from the clubs), and even Courtney Ramsay (who I went to high school with)! Candice also found her friend Nick, and he apparently approves of me — always a good thing.

Since I’d had dinner with Candice and her family on Saturday, she came over for dinner on Sunday. I’m pretty sure my family liked her — if nothing else, she and Dad got caught up in conversation thanks to their common interest in religion. While I’m nowhere near as schooled as either of them when it comes to that, it was fascinating to listen to. After that we went back over to her house and hung out for a while, then after hitting VI for some late night munchies, I ran her back home and crashed out again.

Last-minute shopping was the order of the day for Monday. I picked Candice up and we headed out to brave the insanity of the 5^th Avenue Mall on Christmas Eve day. Luckily, it wasn’t quite as bad as it could have been, and we managed to emerge relatively unscathed. After shopping we headed over to Candice’s friend Nick’s family’s house so that she could see him and his kiddo (Josh? I’m so bad at names…). That evening we went to Christmas Mass twice — once at Candice’s church, Gloria Dei Lutheran, and once at mine, Christ Church Episcopal (which is currently meeting out of member’s houses during the search for a new building…the page I linked to is somewhat out of date). In between the two, I got to go with Candice’s family to a party at their neighbor’s house — between dinner with her family, the party at Nick’s family’s place earlier, and this party, she got to parade me before a whole ton of people this weekend! I’m pretty sure I didn’t make too big of an ass out of myself at any point, though.

Finally, we made it to Christmas Day. Kevin had brought his friend Aart down from Fairbanks, and Candice came over after her family was done with their morning Christmas rituals, so we had a nice round of presents getting opened. Before Candice had to go back to her family’s house for Christmas dinner, she, Aart, Kev and I were able to duck out to Son of River City Billiards for the annual rounds of pool that Kevin and I have been doing whenever we had a chance for the past few years. Believe it or not, I even won a few games — even a couple without a scratch on the eight ball giving me the win! I was stunned! After Candice took us back home, she left, and dad finished up our Christmas dinner. I had to do a bit of an eat-and-run, unfortunately, but once I had some food in my system Kev ran me out to the airport.

With all the various troubles as of late and the resultant extra security at the airports, they’re recommending that travellers show up 2 hours early. This ended up working out really well for me — there were so few people travelling on Christmas day that as I checked in, they were able to bump me up to the next earlier flight, so I ended up flying out at about 5:45pm instead of 6:42pm! The flight down was bearable (but after the flight up, I don’t think I’ll ever be quite as blase about flying as I used to be), and because of the switch I was back in Seattle an hour earlier than I had expected. I caught a cab back up to my place…and that about catches up the Christmas weekend.

It was a lot of fun, and seeing friends and family again was great…but I’ve gotta say, I’m so glad I’m living down here now. Seattle is definitely much more ‘me’ than Anchorage ever was. And that’s it for now….

Well, I’ve made it back. I didn’t get a chance to update more during the weekend, and I’m too tired to do a full update now…but it was a good weekend. Saw some friends, met Candice’s family, she met mine, all went well. The flight home was much better than the flight to Ak, which was a great relief — though I don’t think I’ll ever be completely comfortable with flying again. Grrr. Ah, well.

In any case, I’m back, and I’ll babble more about things later on, I’m sure. Hope everyone else had a good Christmas too!

Welp, I made it to Anchorage — although, to be honest, I really didn’t think I would for a while. I had the single worst flight I’ve ever been on on the way up. Most of it went fine, but then about half an hour before we touched down, we hit the worst turbulence I’ve ever gone through, plus multiple air pockets where the airplane would suddenly drop for a couple seconds before it caught lift again. I’ve got to say, that was the most all-out terrified I’ve ever been — one drop I might have made it through with just being a little frightened, but when it kept happening over and over, I really started to freak out. I was completely convinced that we were going down — especially when after it started happening, and when the captain came on the intercom, rather than telling us something about how we’d hit some turbulence and would we please all sit down (which, while it would be stating the obvious, would have been somewhat reassuring), all he said was, “would the flight crew please sit down and buckle in now.” Not encouraging.

However, we did make it through (after feeling the plane drop out from underneath me way too many times), and eventually landed in Anchorage. I’ve never been so happy to get off an airplane in my life. It’s kind of frustrating really — I’ve never been scared of flying before. Now I’m nervous about getting on the plane back to Seattle in a few days. I will — but I’m a lot more antsy about it now than I would have been otherwise. I’m probably not the only one, either, as I heard many of the other passengers commenting that none of them had ever been through something that bad — turbulence, sure, but never fifteen minutes of continued extremely heavy turbulence with four or five air pockets. I never want to have to go through that again.

In any case, once we were down and got off the plane, parents met me outside the gates. We headed down to the baggage claim to pick up my one piece of checked luggage — my umbrella. I’d taken it with me out of habit this morning when I went to work, and since it’s a full-size umbrella with an inch and a half long metal tip, the airlines made me check it in rather than letting me keep it with me as a carryon. Unfortunately, the baggage handlers at Sea-Tac forgot to actually load it on my plane, so it’ll be getting delivered here to my parents’ house sometime tomorrow. I didn’t even have any real luggage and they managed to lose it!

Once we got back to the house it was around 12:30am and parents were pretty beat, so they went right to bed. I called Candice, and the two of us met up at VINL. We stayed there until about 2:30 or so, when we both decided that we had better go home until we passed out right there in the booths. We each headed back to our respective families’ houses…and here I am.

And now that this update is in…bedtime for bonzo. G’night folks!

Woohoo! I was just about to go to bed when I realized that as of today (well…the 16^th), I’ve been living in Seattle for six months! In that six months, I’ve found a solid 40-hour a week job with good possibilities for getting permanently hired on with Xerox at some point in the future; I’ve found a cute little apartment right near the Capitol Hill district; I’m earning enough money to be able to afford a high speed DSL connection to the Internet; and I’ve found myself a really wonderful girlfriend.

I think it’s official — I’ve managed to duck the Hellraiser chains that drag so many people back to Alaska when they try to leave.