Life

I got to spend a nice few hours yesterday with Mom as she passed through Seattle on the tail end of a quick trip to see some family and friends scattered around the lower 48. She showed up at my work just in time for me to head off on my lunch break, took advantage of the empty apartment to nap for a few hours through the latter half of my workday, then we grabbed a quick dinner before getting her on a bus to head back out to the airport for her flight home.

We hit Moby’s, a restaurant in the Convention Center for dinner. The food wasn’t bad, but it seemed a bit pricey (I had a $9 cheeseburger, which was a little overcooked and not as big as a $4 double quarter-pounder with cheese from McDonald’s), and while their ketchup came in Heinz bottles, it definitely wasn’t Heinz — or if it was, it was seriously watered down. Can’t say I give high recommendations to this place.

“Back on a Mission (DJ Dan)” by Cirrus from the album Back on a Mission (1998, 8:14).

…according to Weather Underground.

Mid-80’s today, predicted high of 89 tomorrow. Uff-da! Me? I love it. Summer’s back!

The only potential downside is that it looks to be cooling off as the weekend starts, dropping back down into the 60’s with a chance of rain. Still…I’ll keep my fingers crossed.

“Success” by Duran Duran from the album Thank You (1995, 4:05).

Still alive, still here, just haven’t been very talkative. Quick weekend recap, though:

Saturday was a jaunt to the University District Street Fair for a few hours. Quite enjoyable, with a couple very entertaining shows by street performers, two of which are fairly well documented in this photoset from the day.

On the way to the fair I spent some time wandering through Westlake Plaza, tracking down all of the various plaques that make up the Westlake Kids Walk public art project. I’d been walking over them for a few years, now, and it was kind of fun to actually see if I could find them all. I think I did…

Sunday was spent at home, cleaning up the apartment a little bit. As I’d spent much of the past month battling a cold, over-stressed from long days at work, or both, things around here had fallen into a pretty sad state. It’s by no means spic-and-span now, but at least I won’t be completely embarrassed should someone show up — as, if all works out well, my mom will be on Wednesday! She’s in the midst of a trip to see friends down here in the states and has about a twelve hour layover here in Seattle, so she should be taking advantage of my proximity to downtown and the bus lines to rest for a few hours during the latter half of the work day, and then we’ll have some time to visit in the evening before she has to return to the airport. Yay!

Rick stopped by for a few hours yesterday also, and ended up leaving with the first two Harry Potter books. He’s not read them yet, and has finally had enough people tell him that he should that he’d decided it was time. He mentioned this and that he was planning on buying them “at some point” — I decided that this wasn’t good enough, and handed him my copies of the first two to borrow to get him started.

Other than that, not much to report. I really do intend to write a bit more about Star Wars Episode III (though it’s rapidly becoming more of a moot point as more and more people see it for themselves), and I’m sadly behind on sending stuff to Seattlest. My one-to-two posts a week completely disappeared last week, and I need to get back into gear on that — last week, I was a few days behind on my daily reading, and every time I saw something that I thought would make a good post, someone else more on-the-ball than I had beat me to it. I’ve got one post that I’m stalled on, too…last week just wasn’t my best for actually prying anything out of my brain.

Hopefully that’s over with, though. At the very least, there’s some nice bright sunshine outside of my window, it looks to be a good day (I hope work doesn’t muck that up too much), and I finally managed to catch up with my reading last night. If all goes well, I’ll be back on the ball this week.

And with that, the day begins…

“Bitter End” by Sister Machine Gun from the album Metropolis (1997, 5:20).

It’s raining pretty decently right now, so I ducked into the Convention Center on my way home for lunch. Walking past the lower level shops on my way to the elevator, I spotted a girl in the beauty salon sitting with a pomeranian propped up in her lap.

It was cute, so I grinned. She looked up and saw me, smiled back, and shook one of her dog’s paws at me, to wave “hello!”

“Deed, The” by Kickshaw from the album Superstar (1999, 5:06).

Prairie and I were in the midst of getting ready for dinner and a movie on Friday evening (which consists of Prairie cooking while I make appreciative “yum!” noises as I sniff the air) when suddenly all the power in my apartment went out. Power outage? The building across the street still had power…and so did the hallway in my building, as did my neighbor (who, as always, is quite happy to provide his own soundtrack to my life).

Crud. My apartment had no power. I checked the breaker box in my apartment, but all four breakers looked fine…and besides, with four breakers, any one of them popping would take out part of the apartment, not the whole thing. This wasn’t looking good.

After a bit of panicking, I tracked down the emergency number for the power company and gave them a call. After being reassured that my power hadn’t been turned off — even though I’m a bit behind on that bill, even the power company isn’t grouchy enough to kill someone’s power at 7:30 at night, long after the customer service center has closed for the weekend — we determined that it had to be the master breaker for my apartment.

I wandered out into the hall and started looking for an obvious breaker box. Sure enough, there were some promising-looking boxes at the end of the hallway. Two smaller boxes, one with a single breaker switch, and two larger boxes. Not knowing which was which, I popped open the smaller of the two large boxes.

Bingo — circuit breakers. Old circuit breakers, to be sure, but circuit breakers. I found the breakers for my apartment (all the way at the very top, of course), found the dead one, and swapped it out with a new breaker from the small pile conveniently left at the bottom of the breaker box. This is pretty old technology, which amuses me — the breakers are about the size of the base of a light bulb, and screw into their sockets. But hey, it works. Plus, there’s these three intimidating-looking things at the bottom of the breaker box — I’ve got no clue what they are, but they look pretty cool.

I was curious, though, about what was in that second, larger box, since all the breakers for the units on my floor were in this box. So, I popped it open — and immediately my eyes went wide and I took a small step backwards. I’m not often faced with “Yikes!” moments, but…

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