Eclecticism

Or, of course, whatever holiday you might be celebrating.

I’ve managed to survive another Christmas shopping season while working retail in a mall (something I don’t really recommend to anyone, though this makes my second time), and thankfully, there weren’t too many truly obnoxious customers. A few, yes, there’s always a few, but few enough that nobody totally snapped.

Weirdest request of the season, especially considering I work in a camera shop: a gent who came in last week looking for a “drinky bird…y’know one of those sippy bird toys that bobs into a cup of water….” We managed to get him pointed vaguely in the direction of Archie McPhee’s, then wondered what made him think that we’d have such a thing.

I went out to the Christmas Confessional night at the Vogue on Thursday night, while Prairie was down visiting her family, and got a lot of fun pictures of the various peoples and performers. Quite a good night!

And now, Prairie and I are waking up and taking care of the last few details before we head out to the airport to fly up to Anchorage for the next few days to visit my folks. Enjoy your Christmas (or Hannukkah, or Yule, or whatever) season!

Prairie’s off on a train down to visit her family down in Vancouver (south), so I’m on my own for a couple of days. Probably won’t mean much of anything other than a chance to catch up on watching the Battlestar Galactica and Heroes episodes that I’m a couple weeks behind on, and tomorrow night I’ll be heading out to the last Confessional night before The Vogue moves to become the Blacklight.

(Also: assuming I have everything configured correctly, this post — and all forthcoming posts — should automatically crosspost to my LiveJournal account. In theory. We’ll see how that goes.)

Prairie’s sister H and her boyfriend P just got engaged — to each other, even! ;)

Congrats!

Apparently, we got lucky. A few flickers and brownouts last night, but we didn’t loose power until around 2am (we’re estimating), and it came back on at about 8:30am this morning. We peeked outside, and don’t see any major damage in our area — a street just half a block away was closed off when a tree fell across it earlier, but by the time we got out to take a look, the tree had already been chopped apart and hauled off to the sides, so we didn’t see anything more than a lot of sawdust. So, all in all, nothing major to report, as far as we’re concerned.

Elsewhere in Seattle, though, it’s far different. Flooding, mudslides, downed trees, three people dead (one a woman who drowned in her basement apartment) and one million people without power. Yikes.

Local coverage: Seattle PI, Seattle Times, KOMO 4 TV, King 5.

Looks like the strongest storm in 13 years is going to be hitting Seattle tonight. Yesterday hit hard enough to knock out power at our apartment for a few hours in the morning, with other outages reported across town. Tonight, though, is predicted to make yesterday look positively balmy.

Lots of news on the local websites — but since the power’s fluctuating here, I think it’s time to get off the ‘puter before things go down entirely. :)

It was pointed out to me by Casey when I ran into him, Jen, and their daughter on the bus yesterday as I was heading home from school that, with the dearth of posts here lately, I’ve been letting down those (poor, sad) souls who depend on my rambling here to live vicariously through me. Sorry ’bout that!

Overall, things keep plugging along. The quarter went pretty well overall (I’m pretty sure of A’s in Programming and English, History could end up either a low A or high B), but school and working retail in the Christmas season have been taking more than their fair share of my free time.

Now that school’s done with, we’re rapidly approaching the end of the holiday shopping season, and various and sundry other concerns have disappeared, we’re looking forward to taking some time to relax. We’ll be visiting my folks in Alaska in a few weeks, flying up to Anchorage on Christmas day and returning to Seattle just before New Year’s Eve. We’re really looking forward to this trip — with Prairie’s family close, we’ve seen a lot of them over the past few years of holidays, so it’ll be nice to get my family in the mix this time; plus, this will be Prairie’s first visit to Alaska (and in the dead of winter, no less). We’re hoping to be able to show her the Northern Lights, at least one moose, and if we can track down one of the silly touristy companies, see if we can get her on a dogsled ride.

So there you go — more goodies for your vicariousness…or something like that.

No final in English (just a final paper that was turned in last week), my History final was yesterday, and my Intro to Programming final was today. I think I annoyed some of the other students (hopefully only mildly) and amused the teacher in the programming class, though — I goofed up the time for the final, and came in half an hour late. Sat down, got the test, and was done in ten minutes. Handed it back to the teacher, who said that I’d probably just set a record, and headed out with three or four students still in their seats. Heh. Oops? ;)

The programming class was a lot easier than I’d expected it to be, actually. While I’ve been working with HTML for years, I’ve always avoided looking into programming because I’m not much good with math and numbers. Since the class was all based around JavaScript, though, I’d spent enough time banging my head against it while futzing around with various website projects over the years that I did better in this class than I’d figured I would.

The teacher also encouraged me to continue on with CSC142 (I think that’s the right number, at least) next quarter, when the classes start working with Java and go into more advanced topics. I’m giving it some serious consideration.