Life

General ramblings connected to my personal life and activities.

Incommunicado

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The weekend from hell!

Well, not really, the next few days should be pretty good overall. They’re just going to be really busy, and probably not entirely unstressful. As such, I’m likely not going to be reachable or even online until…um…Wednesday, at the earliest. I think. No guarantees.

  • Today: After work, Prairie and I drive down to Vancouver (yes, down…the Washington Vancouver, not the Canada Vancouver) to visit her mom.

  • Tomorrow: Drive from Vancouver to Corvallis, OR for a family get together. My parents are flying down for their 37th anniversary weekend, and we’re all meeting up with my brother, his wife, and their kiddo (my nephew!) at their place for the weekend.

  • Monday-Friday: I’m on vacation for a week! No work! Yay! Not going to be resting for all of it, though…

    • Monday: Drive from Corvallis, OR back up to Seattle. Prairie’s got a class to teach that evening at one of her new jobs, then after the class, we drive out to Ellensburg to her apartment and meet up with her dad there.

  • Tuesday: Rent a U-Haul, and put everything Prairie owns into the U-Haul and her dad’s truck. Drive from Ellensburg to Seattle and put all of her stuff into the new apartment. Drive over to my apartment and grab the big stuff (bookcase, desk, dresser, futon, electronics, boxes) while her dad’s here to help and take all that over to the new apartment.

  • Wednesday: SLEEP IN! Sometime that afternoon the installer from Speakeasy will be by to hook up the DSL line in the new apartment.

  • Thursday-Sunday: Rest and relax in between trips back and forth between my old apartment and the new apartment to get all the rest of my stuff and do a cleaning sweep.

And then it’s back to the usual routine.

So…really busy, lots to do, and I’ll be electronicaly nonexistant. Analog only…meatspace all the way.

Weird.

In honor of the weekend’s family get together, though, I took a couple minutes to scan in some of the old family photos I absconded with last time I was up in Alaska. Some of these have been posted before, some haven’t, so sorry if I’m boring anyone with repeats…but if you’ve never seen ’em before, enjoy!

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It’s the little things that count

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Two things that gave me a grin (for very different reasons) on my way home from lunch today:

  1. The fifty-something guy standing at the corner of 8th and Pike just outside the Convention Center wearing a bright yellow t-shirt paired with not just leopard-print parachute pants…but topped off the ensemble with leopard-print shoes as well. Obviously a very trendy thirty-something in the mid-80’s who’s never bothered to clear out his wardrobe.

  2. The lady driving the big obnoxious SUV who had to back out of the Convention Center’s parking garage because her behemoth of a car was too big and gave the “MAX HEIGHT 6’6″” sign a good whack when she tried to drive in. You spend that much money on a ridiculously impractical vehicle like that and then drive it through the city, you deserve every moment of frustration you have trying to find a place to park it.

Okay, I’m not always a very nice man. But I’m okay with that.

iTunes “Not My Slave” by Oingo Boingo from the album Best o’ Boingo (1986, 4:46).

So what’s the deal with the kilt, anyway?

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Update: Welcome, Utilikilt Newsletter readers! Seeing myself mentioned in the newsletter was a very pleasant surprise — good to (virtually) meet all of you! For more UK goodness, drop by the Flickr Utilikilts Group, going strong since 2004. :)

My first UKI got this via e-mail last night, and figured it was worth answering publicy as well as via e-mail.

On Aug 16, 2005, at 10:03 PM, Amy wrote:

I have a question about the utilikilt you wear. I’m sure you covered it somewhere on you blog but I wanted to know what’s the draw of the kilt? What I mean is, why is a utilikilt better than wearing shorts or pants? Do you take a lot of crap from strangers when you’re out in public?

I’ve been meaning to write you for a while now on one subject or another from your blog but this is my burning quesiton!!

(grin) Well, let’s see…

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Preparations

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Much of the weekend was spent running around, getting boxes, making plans, and generally starting to get things ready for the move. We’ve got a Hanscom family get together this coming weekend, and I managed to get a week off of work for the move and a bit of vacation, so our current game plan goes something like this:

  • M-F: Work (sigh). Prairie’s heading back out to Ellensburg to finalize everything there, and I’ll spend my evenings packing things up and getting ready to move.

  • Friday: Prairie comes back out to Seattle, picks me up from work, and we drive down to Corvallis, OR to spend a weekend with my parents, my brother, his wife, and their kiddo at my brother’s place to celebrate mom and dad’s anniversary and have a family gathering.

    (Parents: Prairie and I will probably crash out at her mom’s place in Vancouver on Friday night, then continue on down to Corvallis on Saturday morning. I’ll e-mail you later today or this evening with more details and to make sure we know where to go in Corvallis.)

  • Next Monday: Drive from Corvallis to E-burg (uff-da!) and meet up with Prairie’s dad.

  • Next Tuesday: Rent a U-Haul, load it and Prairie’s dad’s truck up with all of her stuff, and bring all of her stuff into Seattle. Get the big pieces (desk, dresser, futon, bookshelves) from my place over to the new apartment while we’ve got her dad around to help.

  • Next Wednesday-Sunday: Make short trips back and forth between this apartment and the new one getting the rest of my stuff moved, and rest as much as possible.

The application is in!

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Well, we’ve gone and done it — we turned in the application for the apartment we looked at yesterday. The apartment Prairie looked at this morning was “nice, but not as nice,” and while the apartment we checked this evening was nice, we weren’t comfortable with the area. It was only three blocks away from Aurora (for my Anchorage readers, think north Muldoon/4th Ave./Spenard rolled into one, but bigger and seedier), and the neighborhood just didn’t give us the best vibes.

So, we went back over to yesterday’s option, turned in our application, and then zipped down the few blocks to Prairie’s sister’s place. After a few minutes chatting with them we left the car there (so as not to have to pay for parking in downtown Seattle all week) and hopped on a bus back to my apartment. The bus situation is nice, too — the apartments are just a block away from a stop for number 41, which is a straight shot to downtown Seattle, all of about half an hour.

If all goes well, we should hear back by midday tomorrow…and with luck, we’ll get the go and have our new place!

And then comes the moving…

iTunes “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” by Duchin, Eddie and his Orchestra feat. Martin, Mary from the album Pop Music: The Early Years 1890-1950 (1938, 2:57).

The Search Has Begun…

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Prairie and I looked at an apartment yesterday evening up in North Seattle (just off the 130th St. exit from I-5) that looks really good. A 1960’s-era apartment complex, decent sized 2-bedroom with fairly new appliances in the kitchen, ground level (but rather than being open to the street, it’s half-sunk and looks out into a rock garden with cherry trees), parking spaces, a storage locker, good laundry room (not in the unit, but good sized and with new machines), a pool (!), and only a few blocks away from her sister. Looks very promising, and the landlord was a sweet lady who’s very involved with the neighborhood community.

We’ve got two more to look at today — another also off the 130th St. exit that Prairie will be looking at today while I’m at work, and one roughly halfway between Green Lake and Carkeek Park that we’ll both see this evening — so with any luck, one of those three will be the place, and we’ll be able to put money down and start the process of moving within the next week or two.

I’m going to miss being with walking distance of downtown a bit, but the tradeoff is more than worth it (finding a 2-bedroom in the $800/mo range just isn’t very easy this close to central Seattle), and between Prairie’s car and the bus system, it’s still a quick jaunt into the core of Seattle for when I want to come in for clubbing, wandering around, or anything else I might want to do down here.

We’re keeping our fingers crossed, but at least judging by yesterday’s showing, things are looking very promising. Yay!

iTunes “So Much” by Impossibles, The from the album Ska: The 3rd Wave, Vol. 4: Punk it Up! (1998, 3:23).

Bad Math

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Approximately 60 units in my apartment building, a mix of studios and one-bedrooms.

Three sets of washers and dryers. Of these six machines, at least one will be broken at any given time. This week, it’s one of the washers.

Wash loads take about 30 minutes. The dryers take about 60 minutes.

What all this adds up to is laundry taking an absolutely ridiculous amount of time to do. I started my two loads at around five this afternoon. It’s now eight in the evening, and I’m looking at, oh, at least another hour and a half if all goes well.

Meh.

iTunes “Ba and the Ka, The” by Anubian Lights from the album In to the Mix (1997, 6:02).

Bridal Parties are Fun!

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At least, as long as your definition of “fun” includes 20-some 20-something sorority girls drinking far too much alcohol, being incredibly loud (which is saying something in a dance club), having no concept that there’s anyone else on the dance floor, nearly starting a fight near the bar, and eventually having one of them carried out of the bathroom by two big beefy guys because there was no way she’d be able to walk.

So…yeah. Interesting night. Certainly amusing to watch all this from the sidelines.

Still, good times were had. A little flirting, a few new people met (Hope, Jennifer, Elizabeth and Felix), chatting outside in the cool air with Melissa, Suzanne, Brooke, Mickey, Ogre, and Ron, and some bouncing around on the dance floor (though that was somewhat hampered by both sorority girls and the Vogue‘s famous lack of ventilation…but I hear that Mony has a new fan ready to install, so hopefully that’ll get a bit more air flow going through in the near future). All in all, not a bad night.

Also (and totally unrelated to any of the above), after Prairie declared that one of my pictures of the Teatro ZinZanni acrobat to be quite “yum”-worthy, I tweaked it a touch to turn it into a suitable desktop image.

Teatro Zinzanni Desktop

There’s a 1280×1024 version ready to be used as a desktop image (or “wallpaper” for you Windows users) available to download here, should you wish.

Now…bed.

iTunes “Pigs on the Wing 1” by Pink Floyd from the album Animals Trance Remixes (1995, 5:48).

Girl talk, MT32b3, and Alan Moore

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Had a pleasant evening after work yesterday, when I headed up the hill to Charlie’s and got together with Melissa, her daughter (whose name I either didn’t catch or, more likely, have forgotten), Christa, and Erin. Quite fun, actually, being as I ended up in a situation I’ve stumbled into quite a few times before in my life and always enjoy when it happens — being the only guy in something of a ‘girl talk’ session. Laughter, rants about current and former lovers and friends, ongoing drama…all that fun stuff.

There are times when I really enjoy not being the “typical male”…or at least far enough removed from that stereotype that I can occasionally be around for such things. I may have worked over the years at decreasing the amount of drama in my life, but I must admit, I do enjoy being a spectator! ;) Quite enjoyable, in any case, and it seems that this may become something of a weekly event.

After coming home and chatting with Prairie for a while until she wandered off to bed, I upgraded my Movable Type beta installation to v3.2b3, which is essentially the final candidate build. Ran into one small oddity during the upgrade process, but after filing a bug report and having Brad Choate pop up in iChat to talk about it, I’m leaning towards it being a caching issue and nothing major with the system.

I’m looking forward to upgrading my main site to v3.2 once it’s finalized and I’ve had a chance to go over the new documentation. This may end up meaning that I do a full redesign — there are a lot of changes in the new templates, and it may take me some time to wrap my head around all of them. I’m not sure yet if I’ll upgrade the backend and keep the current design and then work on a new one in the background, or just go whole-hog and start over with the new basic designs…more to ponder.

I’ve also just finished reading Alan Moore‘s ‘V for Vendetta‘ graphic novel after the movie trailer peaked my curiosity about the original movie, and am currently working my way through Moore’s ‘The Watchmen‘. While Prairie (a confessed ‘book snob’) may giggle at me for reading “comic books”, I’m enjoying both of these, and ‘V for Vendetta’ in many ways seems very topical in todays world — which, given its subject matter, is actually a little disturbing.

And that pretty much sums up life in the world of me at the moment. Not quite sure what my plans for the weekend are, though there’s a lot of Seafair stuff going on around town right now that I may see if I can find a way to check out at one point or another. As is usual for me, though, I’m not planning much of anything more than about 20 minutes in advance…except for running off to work, which (insert overly melodramatic sigh here) I must go do. Off with me, then!

iTunes “24 Hour Man” by Lock Up from the album Something Bitchin’ This Way Comes (1990, 4:46).