Life

General ramblings connected to my personal life and activities.

My family, circa 1977 or so

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This is one of my favorite old family photos. Probably just a proof that was passed on during the selection process, it always makes me laugh when I see it.

Our family around 1977

Mom’s yawning, I’m looking off to the side and could drool any moment, Kevin just looks confused, and dad’s the only one to be paying any attention to the photographer.

I’m guessing at the date of the photo (Kev looks around one-ish, I could be around four-ish), but I think I’m close.

iTunes “Time” by Pink Floyd from the album Dark Side of the Moon, The (1973, 7:05).

Where it all began…

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In case there was any curiosity where my tendency for innuendo-laced humor, flirting, and the occasional blatantly sexual comment come from, I present you with the following evidence…

Me, mom...and Playboy

Me at age two or three, in mom’s lap…looking at a Playboy.

Doomed from birth, I tell you. I couldn’t have been “normal” if I tried. ;)

iTunes “Rhapsody” by Siouxsie and the Banshees from the album Peepshow (1988, 6:22).

Muldoon Road, Anchorage, Alaska

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Another 360° panoramic photograph from my recent vacation. This time, I’m standing on one end of a pedestrian overpass on Muldoon road, just beyond the curve where Muldoon becomes Tudor (the curve can be seen on the extreme left and right of the image).

Muldoon Road, Anchorage, Alaska

My parents’ house, where I lived from mid-3^rd^ grade until I moved out when I was 18, is hidden beyond the trees just to the left of the tree in the foreground towards the right side of the image. The Chugach mountains rise just beyond our housing area, giving it its name of Chugach Foothills. The houses in the mid-ground in front of the mountains went up during one of the housing development booms while I was in high school. Mostly obscured by the tree on the right of the image is a large park, often used for summertime soccer games.

Were you to follow Muldoon Road to the far northern end (a few miles beyond where it disappears in this photo), you’d end up at my alma matter, Bartlett High School. While I moved to Seattle just a few months before my 10-year reunion and didn’t go, my friend Royce was there (while he graduated in ’90, his girlfriend Stephanie was in my graduating class) and snagged me a Class of 1991 10-year reunion T-shirt which he gave me while I was visiting.

As with the Lake Spenard photo, there is a QTVR photo in the extended entry for this post (I do it this way so that modem users like my parents don’t have to download the 2 MB QTVR movie when they load the main page).

Spenard Lake, Anchorage, Alaska

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One of the panoramic shots I took while on vacation in Anchorage &dmash; Spenard Lake, which together with Lake Hood makes up the single busiest seaplane airport in the world (over 90,000 operations in 1994).

Spenard Lake, Anchorage, AK

Since this is a full 360° panorama, you can see the same seaplane at the far left and right of the image. The mountain range in the background is the Chugach Mountains, which had just been hit with termination dust earlier in the week (for you lower-48’ers, ‘termination dust’ is the snowfall on the peaks of the mountains — its appearance marks the end of summertime in Anchorage). Towards the right of the picture are three cars: my mom’s van, which I was driving that day; James’ Geo something-or-other (which will soon have the custom license plate “NUPRIN” — “Little, yellow, different”), and Mercedes’ car. Just behind the workshack is a yellow apartment building, you can just see the balcony of Marc and Laura’s apartment.

For a more “like you’re really there” experience, click on through to the extended entry, where I’ve posted a Quicktime VR version of this image (assuming this works, I’ve not yet tried uploading Quicktime files via ecto).

My parents were kiddos too!

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One of the PROJECTS I took care of when I was visiting home was installing a new scanner for dad that had a slide attachment on it. Apparently at some point in the past, someone decided that slides were “the thing”, so dad now has a huge number of slide carousels down in the garage.

Mom and dad at age 20

Now that he has a scanner that can see them, he’s been going through and adding a lot of old photos to the family photo album. I love seeing these — it’s so fun to go through shots of my folks when they were around my age (or younger — as in this photo, taken at age 20 at their wedding rehearsal dinner).

I’m sure there are more coming, but right now, dad’s added pictures of mom and dad in college, dad in R.O.T.C., their wedding rehearsal dinner, and their wedding.

iTunes “Sheep” by Pink Floyd from the album Animals Trance Remixes (1995, 16:03).

One week in

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I’ve made it to the end of my first week on “banking hours”, and you know…I think I just might be able to get used to this. While I’m still definitely no great morning person, it hasn’t been quite as difficult forcing myself out of bed when the alarm goes off at 6:30am as I was afraid it might, and I’m definitely enjoying both getting off work at 5pm and working this close to home. These days, I can walk out of work, hit the corner store on the way back to the apartment, and still be home by 5:15pm. Not bad at all.

The job’s been interesting this week, too. As my new position is primarily administrative and organizational — accepting jobs from the company I’m placed at, setting them up, and then sending them off to one of our main stores to be printed, after which they’re returned to me and I deliver them to the clients — I’ve been spending each day with a few hours at the new position and a few hours at one of the two stores I’ll be working most closely with, to give me some time to meet the people I’ll be working with when I send orders over for printing. Many of these people I’d spoken do on the phone at one time or another, but it’s been good to put faces to names, and to spend some time getting to know them a bit better than just over the phone.

Another benefit I’ve found to having evenings open — socialization! When I was getting off work at 9pm and not making it home until around 10:15pm on my old schedule, there just wasn’t a whole lot going on outside of the bar or club circuit (which I enjoy, but I’m not about to do every night). With real evenings free, though, there are a lot more opportunities. Wednesday evening I got together with some of the guys from work at the Elysian brewery up the street (though I’ve never been a beer drinker, the food and soda were just fine), and last night Rick came over and hung out for a while. Aside from my evenings out at the Vogue or Prairie coming in on the weekends, I’ve had something of a hermit life for the past few years since I moved down to Seattle — maybe it’s about time for that to change, huh?

All in all, while the mornings are still a little rough, I think this is definitely going to be a positive change.

iTunes “Candyman Collapse (Radio Version)” by Connelly, Chris from the album Afterburn: Wax Trax! Records ’94 and Beyond (1994, 3:55).

Too hot! Too cold! Augghh!

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One definite disadvantage to switching up to the 8am-5pm schedule I’m on now.

As it’s more of a “normal” workday schedule, and there’s a lot of other people who operate at these hours, it’s a lot more difficult to get a consistent water temperature in the shower in the morning.

Aaaahhhh, the joys of apartment living!

iTunes “Airport Hell” by Rollins, Henry from the album Think Tank (1998, 14:35).

The new me

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I don’t think these pictures really do them justice, but I got my new glasses today.

My old glasses

My old glasses — I’ve had these for years now. They worked well when I was younger and needed something to give my face some depth, but as I’ve aged, they’ve come to dominate my face rather than accent it. So, on the advice of a few people and the assistance of Prairie, I found something smaller and less domineering.

My new glasses

So here’s the new pair. Much smaller, lighter, and totally rimless — with the anti-glare coating they’ve got, they’re almost invisible. Incredibly light, too, I’m still marveling at how much heavier the old ones feel now.

My new glasses, with shades

Even better, these come with little clip-on shades that match the shape of the lenses perfectly. For the first time in ages, I’ll actually have sunglasses — we occasionally tried to get me prescription glasses when I was younger, but they’d invariably disappear after only a few weeks, and it quickly became apparent that that was just an unfortunate waste of money. It’s going to be very nice to be able to go outside without squinting.

So, that’s my excitement for the day — that, and picking up Star Wars on DVD. Okay, yeah, I’m still a little miffed at Lucas for not releasing the original Original Trilogy, but I — along with many other people — grew up on these films. I just couldn’t talk myself out of picking them up.