Life

…one of these things just doesn’t belong.

Things like this would be funny if they weren’t so disheartening. I’m really unimpressed by the culture I live in some days.

75 degrees already, and it’s only 8:30 in the morning.

An expected record-setting high of 96 degrees.

Y’know, I thought I moved to Seattle…who snuck up on me and shipped me to southern California (or the midwest, or south, or East coast…I wanted someplace warmer than Alaska when I left, but there’s a reason I stayed in the Pacific Northwest!)?

Ah, well. We’re coping the best we can: fans all over the apartment, daily dunks in the pool, occasional cool showers, spritzers of cool water by the bed, and so on. We keep daydreaming about A/C, but given Seattle, we’d only need it for maybe one week out of the year, so it’s really not worth spending money on. Better to just be wusses and whine our way through the occasional heat wave.

I’m really enjoying this summer so far.

Prairie and I have wheels! Foot-wheels, that is — traditional rollerskates for her, and inline rollerblades for me. She’d brought up the idea a couple times in the past, and we decided to give it a shot a couple weeks ago. Our initial plan was to strap ’em on and go scooting around Greenlake, but then we figured that perhaps we should start smaller, since neither of us had been on wheels in ages (or at all, in my case). We found a cute little park a short ways north of us (Paramount School Park, in Shoreline) that has a short path looping around the park, strapped on our skates…and decided that it was a really good idea not to start with Greenlake! We’re both a bit wobbly at this point, and it’s such a different workout that neither of us would have been likely to make it all the way around the Greenlake loop without wearing out. We’ve been back up to this little park a few times, though, and we’re going to keep doing laps there whenever we get a chance until we feel up to graduating to something else.

Also good: living in an apartment complex with a pool. There’s not much better on a hot summer day than coming home from work, skating, or whatever, and slipping into the pool to cool off. Some days we just go to splash around a bit, and some days we take our snorkel gear with us to get more pre-Hawaii snorkeling practice. Much fun! I am going to have to start experimenting with my face fuzz, however…I’m just not getting a good seal on the snorkel’s face mask because of my mustache. Looks like that’s going to have to go in order to get up to speed on snorkeling. It’ll be worth it — how many times am I going to get a chance to go snorkeling with sea turtles, after all? — I’m just hoping I can come up with something that doesn’t look too terribly goofy.

So far, this has been a very pleasant Fourth. Slept until we felt like getting up instead of worrying about an alarm, walked down to the grocery store and got some donuts, came back here and sat in the shade by the pool and ate the donuts, then camped out to relax in the apartment for a bit. I made coleslaw (using a rather loose definition of ‘made’ — I dumped a bag of coleslaw salad into a bowl, added a bottle of coleslaw dressing, and stirred) and Prairie made potato salad for later in the day, and now we’re both puttering away with our blogs.

If you’re reading this on the site rather than through the RSS feed or the LiveJournal feed, you’ve probably noticed that I’ve changed the design a bit. It’s nothing major — thanks to WordPress’s theme support, I didn’t have to do any real work other than finding a theme that I liked enough to use — but it’s at least something of a change from what I’ve had for a while.

Along with the change, I’ve taken the ‘eclinkticism’ section out of the sidebar, and have instead set up a daily automated post that will add anything I toss into my del.icio.us account each day and post it around midnight or so. This way the links show up both on my main site and on my LiveJournal mirror, and mom doesn’t have to squint at the tiny text in the sidebar. ;)

I’m still trying to get through photos…as often happens, I’m running weeks behind. I’m getting closer to the end of my Solstice Parade photos, after which there will be some blurry shots of a Rat City Rollergirls bout I got to go to on Pride weekend, and then a chunk of shots from the final weekend for the Blacklight. It’s slow going, but I’m making progress….

And, I think that’s about all that’s falling out of my brain at the moment. Have a good fourth, don’t blow any fingers off, and so on!

This note is starting to pop up all over the seagoth journals, blogs, and communities after it dropped into our mailboxes last night:

Hi Everyone – This Friday and Saturday nights will be our final nights at CHAC. Monny & I have decided that we just can’t buck City Hall (we have been getting noise/nuisance complaints since the day we opened the door), and neither CHAC nor Blacklight can afford to pay the exorbitant fines the City Council is contemplating for any infractions by the nightlife in this town. Our contract is up, so we are going out with a bang – June 29th is FabulousFetish Friday hosted by General Bek and DJ Paul Aleinikoff, and of course June 30th is our New Wave Dance Party with DJ Evan Blackstone. Friday we will be upstairs in the showroom, Saturday we will be downstairs in the lower level/lounge. Come on out and dance!

Love, Monny & Shawna

This is really sad to see. While I’ve only been around to see about six years of it, Monny and Shawna have been providing a home for the seagoth scene for the past twenty-some years through the Blacklight, The Vogue (in at least two locations), and it’s quite likely that there were more projects before that that I’m not privy to. Admittedly, while the Blacklight never felt as much like ‘home’ as the Vogue did, it’s sad to see it fold…especially for those reasons. This can’t have been an easy decision for Monny and Shawna.

I can’t really say that I’m overly fond of the forces pressuring them to get out of the business, though. People that move into a hip, happening, club-heavy area of town because they are drawn to the atmosphere, then call in noise complaints against the very clubs that give the area its fun, funky feel. A city entirely too focused on gentrification at the expense of the people and businesses that helped make the city what it is. And, of course, a City Council that seems determined to over-legislate every bar or nightclub in the city into nonexistence.

As long as I’m not too tired after work, I’m going to see if I can make it out both nights this weekend. I may not have been one of the die-hard regulars, and I’m not one of the ‘core’ members of the seagoth community, but through their clubs, Monny and Shawna helped me find some places where I felt at home when I first moved to Seattle, and I met quite a few friends through the Vogue. I’d like my chance to say ‘thanks’ as well.

A number of updates this evening…

• It’s summertime! I had my last final exam today (yesterday was the Chem 101 exam, I e-mailed my Philosophy 100 final paper in this morning, and had my Programming 142 exam this afternoon). No summer classes for me, so it’s time to relax. Yay!
  • I actually really enjoyed this quarter. I was a little unsure about the lineup at first, but it ended up working well, and I had very enjoyable teachers. All in all, I’m pretty solidly sure of getting all A’s again this quarter (knock on wood). We’ll see for sure in a couple weeks.
• The relaxing doesn’t actually begin for a couple days, of course (isn’t this always the way?). Prairie will be at graduation activities for her students most of tomorrow, and I’ve got to work in the afternoon/evening. On Saturday we’ll be going to the Fremont Solstice Parade (I was bummed that I missed it last year, and have been looking forward to this year’s for a while), doing our best to exhaust ourselves, and crash out early, because…

• …early Sunday morning I drive Prairie out to the airport for a four-day trip with my mom and my sister-in-law Emily. Mom decided a while ago to have a “WHPUWHM” trip — that is, “Women Who Put Up With Hanscom Men,” (those brave and stalwart women who actually choose to associate themselves with the Hanscom family), and the weekend has come. My aunt Pam wasn’t able to join, unfortunately, but Mom, Prairie, and Emily will be spending four days on their own, commiserating with each other about all the things they have to put up with. ;)

  • This does mean that I’m on my own, bachelor-style, for four days, from Sunday morning through Wednesday evening. Even better, I have a three-day weekend from work, with Saturday through Monday off. Now, the chances are extremely good that I’ll merely end up spending far too many hours in front of my computer, but with any luck, I’ll be able to get some amount of socializing in. (Is the Mercury doing anything on Sunday nights these days? Preferably something that doesn’t need a membership?)
• We got a new toy! We’d been batting around the idea of getting a laptop computer for a while now for the two of us to share, as with my continuing on through school and our tendency to travel whenever possible necessitating a portable dumping ground for photos when we’re on the run…and Prairie decided that today was the day to take the plunge. Admittedly, there is definitely going to be a ‘period of adjustment,’ as our finances limited us to a price tag in the $600 realm…which meant no Macbook for us, as Apple doesn’t really have a low-end laptop. No, instead, we’re now the somewhat bemused owners of a Gateway MT6705 Notebook PC (oooh, now how’s that for snappy, in-your-face, can’t-forget-it branding!).
  • Getting the computer was a minor pain. Neither Best Buy nor Staples came anywhere close to impressing us with their customer service, but there was a very kind young man at Office Depot who ended up helping us narrow things down.

  • The computer itself seems to be quite nice, though I’m not exactly sold on Vista just yet. While it’s all very nice and shiny, I had rather ridiculous issues getting it hooked into our home network…and to top it off, the Gateway tech support person, while very nice, was clueless (to the point of not knowing what “Static IP” was). I eventually figured it out, and after spending some time setting up user accounts for Prairie and I, and spending some more time removing some of the useless adware that comes pre-installed, I’m now puttering away on the new toy while Prairie putters away on her iMac.

    • I have a bad feeling my G5 is going to be jealous when I get back to it….
• Lastly, as long as we were setting various bits and pieces up on the new laptop and figuring out how to pull photos from Prairie’s little camera on to it, we also spent some time setting my girl up with her own Flickr account and her own weblog (titled ‘Domesticism’ — a fitting and amusing complement to my ‘Eclecticism’), two things she’d been considering for some time and finally decided to get started on. She’s started off with the story of our quest for our new ‘puter…stop by and say hi!

And…yeah, I think that that pretty much covers it.

This coming August, Prairie and I will be heading to Hawaii for a week for her sister Hope’s wedding. We’re really looking forward to the trip — three nights at the Hilton Waikoloa Village with the rest of the family for the wedding and associated events, and three nights camping at Volcanoes National Park — and so we’ve been working on planning ahead and picking up what supplies we’ll need well ahead of time.

This morning, we picked up a couple sets of fins, masks, and snorkels, as part of the hotel we’ll be at is the lagoon (“Teeming with tropical fish and rare green sea turtles, the four-acre ocean fed lagoon is a protected oasis perfect for snorkeling and swimming.”), and as neither of us have ever snorkeled before, we wanted to get some practice time in before hand.

We hit the pool for a while this afternoon (it is so nice having a pool available on hot days), and got to play with our new snorkel stuff. So far, so good — we probably looked like dorks, but we were having a lot of fun. I am going to figure out what to do about my face fuzz, though…the mustache breaks the seal on the face mask, so I’m either going to have to shave it or experiment with finding ways to make it work (some websites have suggested chap stick, vaseline, or some such greasy goo in the ‘stache to help keep the seal).

So now we’ve got flippers. Apparently, this makes Prairie a mermaid…and me a frog. I don’t know, I just report what I’m told…. ;)