Life

General ramblings connected to my personal life and activities.

Memorial Day weekend

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I had a pretty decent Memorial Day weekend — just fairly uneventful, for the most part. Spent most of my time hanging out and relaxing here at the apartment. Laura (pleasure_lil_treasure_99) came and hung out for a while, and I introduced her to the movie AI: Artificial Intelligence.

Other than that, not a whole lot went on…just a fairly nice relaxing 3-day weekend. I’m hoping to be able to leave early from work this Friday to go out and see a show at the Catwalk: KMFDM, Pig, The Kidney Thieves, and 16 Volt! I’m really hoping to be able to make it, but if I can’t, I’ll have a second chance when they come back through in July. Keeping my fingers crossed….

North to Alaska

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Just when I’d reconciled myself to the fact that I wasn’t going to be able to afford to head up to Alaska this summer like I’d been planning to see James and Stacy get hitched, what do some of my friends do but chip in to help me out with the cost of the plane ticket.

Pretty cool, eh? My friends rock. R-A-W-K rawk!

I got the flight confirmation e-mailed to me this morning right before work. As it stands, I’ll be flying out of here at 12:25pm on Friday June 21st, arriving in Anchorage that same day at 3:01pm. I’ll be up there all through the weekend, flying back down Monday night, leaving at 8:30pm and arriving back in Seattle at 12:45am.

In other news, I got two more small packages from my parents. Knowing my sweet tooth all to well, one was a bottle of Nutella. The other made me laugh — a climbers D-ring with a key ring attachment that has a compass attached to it. Given the fact that it came with a note that said, “Don’t get lost!” I’m pretty sure it was inspired by my lamenting my lack of a compass back when I was first trying to find my way around the Microsoft campus.

Y’know — my friends and my parents rock. Too cool.

Birthday presents!

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I’ve got some very silly parents.

I’m sure that this is just an entirely mindblowing revelation, for anyone who knows me well, or has met them.

I got my first box of birthday presents from them a couple days ago. Two items, both of which made me laugh a lot. The first was a black t-shirt bearing the text, “I’m only wearing black until they make something darker.” They know me so well….

The second I’m almost positive was primarily, if not entirely, my mom’s idea. See, my mom has a fascination (and an unhealthy one, at that, in my slightly smart-alecky opinion) with silly little noisemakers — for instance, some of our family trip back in December of 2000 was devoted to searching for things like the “Big Mouth Bass” or whatever that singing fish was that was so popular a while ago. Now, these little gadgets happen to annoy me to pieces, so I teased mom mercilessly about this during the trip.

So what do I get for my birthday? I got a “My Pet Ferret (With realistic Movement and Ferret Chatter) — Touch and Sound Activated!” I laughed pretty hard when I saw that…both because of the teasing I’d given mom over toys of this sort, and because for a time before I moved to Seattle, I used to have two ferrets of my own. So now, every so often, when I make enough noise, I’m greeted with some happy little ferret chatter coming out of the corner of my room where he sits.

As I said — I’ve got very silly parents.

Music, books and other real-world fun

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Back in the summer of 1991, right after I graduated high school, I took a trip to Germany with the Bartlett High School German Club. While there, I was browsing through a music store and stumbled across a band that sounded interesting — Poems for Laila. I picked up two of their albums, Another Poem for the 20th Century and La Fillette Triste.

Unfortunately, over the years, tapes die — especially well-listened to tapes, as these definitely were. I’d never been able to track down any PfL albums over here in the states, and the times I’d looked into trying to get them as imports, it had either been more expensive than I’d wanted to try, or I hadn’t had a credit card available. This week, however, I stumbled across AudioGalaxy (one of the modern Napster alternatives), and have spent the past day downloading PfL .mp3’s like a madman. Not only have I been able to regain both of the albums I used to own, but I’ve also got the entirety of two more albums (Katamandu and I Shot the Moon), plus much of a few other albums that they’ve released since then. It’s great to finally be able to hear this band again — wonderful, beautiful music. So I’ve been cheezing over that.

I also picked up my next book to read — a compendium of the entire Chronicles of Narnia, by C.S. Lewis. I haven’t read these in ages, and am greatly looking forward to diving back into them again. Should be quite cool.

That’s really about it for now, I suppose. Tomorrow starts the work week again — what fun!

Woohoo?

Ugh

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In brief — I saw Spiderman, it rocked. More later. I’m currently battling off a really nasty flu bug…hence why no updates for a few days, and only this really short note right now before I curl up in bed.

I’ll get more up when being vertical doesn’t seem like such a bad idea. ;)

Dancing is not a crime!

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Well, today ended up being something of an interesting day. I needed to get out of the house for a bit, so wandered into downtown to see a movie. Now, Westlake Plaza seems to be the focal point for most (all?) of the protests in Seattle, and it’s becoming somewhat second nature to swing by and see who’s protesting what each weekend.

Today, though, the protest was something that actually interests me! There’s been a lot of political struggle here in Seattle recently over the Teen Dance Ordinance (lots of background information can be found via this Google search). A local organization called the NorthWest Late Night Coalition was in the plaza today, holding a rally to gain support for their part in the battle to repeal the TDO, with an information booth, speakers, and DJ’s playing. It was pretty interesting, and I stopped by to watch for a while. I ended up chatting with two of the volunteers helping out (Dolly and Chloe, if I remember correctly) and let them know a bit about my history in Anchorage working with Gig’s and the Lost Abby.

Once I got home, I stopped by their website and signed up — mayhaps I’ll start getting involved in things down here! Would be very cool…here’s hoping!

Happy birthday Kevin!

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Happy birthday to my little brother! Kinda scary to think that he turns 26 today — in some ways, scarier than me turning 29 yesterday. Yikes. Hey — he’s still my little brother, though. :D