Life

Dad just posted a series of photos of Meier Lake, the retreat center for the Episcopal Diocease of Alaska, on our family website. I spent a lot of time there as a kid, usually twice a year — once for the congregational Winter Retreat, and once in the summer for church summer camp.

I’ve got two very clear memories from my time there.

The first was one of those bizarre moments of weather you get occasionally. The main lodge building sits alongside one side of the lake, looking out over the water, and has a balcony running aross the face of the lodge. One summer day I was able to stand on the balcony, dead center relative to the lodge, with half of the lake and everything to my right in a deluge of summer rain, and with the other half of the lake and everything to my left in beautiful summer sunshine. Just amazing.

The second was another summertime day, when there was some downtime in the camp. I grabbed one of the canoes and went out to the center of the lake with a book, stretched out, and had a nice lazy lie in the sun, floating on the water. After a while, I noticed something in the sky, and realized that there was a bald eagle circling me overhead, probably trying to figure out what I was, and if I was edible or not.

Summertime in Alaska. One of the few things that I miss about living up there. Not enough to move back — but I do miss it.

Elizabeth: Six feet of addictions, Dyanna: Very superstitious…, Kirsten: Hey baby, what’s your sign?. There’s something of a mini-meme regarding obsessions, superstitions, the occult, and all things that go bump in the night running around right now.

(Hrm. Random side note — not all things that go bump in the night. I’d elaborate, but I try to keep this website somewhere in the PG to PG-13 range, and it’s a bit early in the morning to go veering into R territory. But I digress [oh, boy do I digress…]…)

I figured I’d go ahead and just start tackling the subjects in order. Given my tendency to babble, however, you’ll have to click on to keep reading…

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Finding this post of Jeremy’s made me laugh today, simply because I’d spent part of the walk to work snapping away with my camera…

Spring has definitely hit Seattle. The past two days have been really warm, and today the clouds that we’ve been living under for the past few weeks finally broke, letting sunshine flood the world again.

One of the things I like about living in the Lower 48 after so many years in Alaska is the riot of colors that nature produces. Alaska, while very pretty, tends to be rather monochromatic for much of the year — the white snow in winter, and the green of birch and pine in the summer. Even in fall, we only get a couple weeks of yellow when the leaves turn.

Winters here in Seattle tend to be pretty drab, but from spring through fall, the colors are just amazing. The sudden blooms of flowers and trees spreading througout the city bring everything to life again. We’re blessed with a fairly large number of cherry trees (or, at least, cherry blossom trees — I’ve yet to see any actual cherries), and the storms of pink petals swirling throughout the city are gorgeous.

Was the phrase “another day, another dollar” coined (no pun intended) at a time when that was actually the average payscale?

Gah.

Home, tired, grumpy. Pissy, actually. The worst thing is, I’m not entirely sure why. Guess it was just a “Monday.”

I’ve had a slight headache for about a full day and a half now. Nothing major, and Tylenol kills it, but it doesn’t quite seem to go away. So that was a fun way to wake up.

Stumbled through my usual morning blahs (never having been a morning person), and made it off to work. Got to work, and was immediately handed a large pain in the butt job that I’d worked on Friday, but that had had a couple small problems. Fixing that took about the first hour of my day. Finished that off, started writing down my time on the billing sheet, and asked what the date was. The seventh? Oh, crap — that means Mom’s birthday was yesterday, and I’d completely spaced e-mailing her, posting something here, or calling her. Hence the mid-day “Happy birthday” post from earlier.

From there on out, it was just a grumble of a day. No job seemed to be simple, none of the customers seemed to give actual clear instructions of what they wanted, and Windows was fighting me at every opportunity. Every day I have to work with that damned operating system, it reminds me more and more why I’m a Mac person. Things that should be easy never are, and even the things that I know how to do are made more difficult than they should be. Grrr.

We have the beta of Office 2003 on our machines. Word just keeps getting bigger and bigger, and more and more bloated. There are now so many options that it’s almost impossible to actually find any one particular option if you’re not already familiar with it. You go looking for something, and you just end up buried in a sea of menu options and poorly worded checkboxes. Information overload.

I hate hate hate Word’s “Auto Format” feature. I know how to type, dammit, and I don’t need Word guessing/assuming that when I type one line and put a couple returns after it, that I really wanted that line to be twice the font size, in a different font, bolded and italicised. Dammit, if I want something formatted one way, I’ll format it. I want the program to do what I tell it to.

Oh, sure, people keep telling me that I can turn all those things off if I want. First off, where? I spent ten minutes digging through Word’s preferences trying to figure out how to kill that “feature.” I think I eventually found it, but I’m still not convinced. Secondly, why should I have to turn all these things off? Features are great, but in my world, they should be disabled by default. Then, if you need/want/use them, you can turn on the ones you want. But you shouldn’t be faced with an out-of-the-box configuration that has every little doodad turned on, just because it can be!

If I could ask one thing of the Word developers, it would be a simple dialog box that would appear on the first run, and could be (easily) found later on, that would switch between “brainless” mode (with every little doodad active), and “I actually have a clue” mode (where you can acutally work without the program getting in the way). Of course, they’d probably have to name them something else. Bummer.

Publisher (which, admittedly, as a long time PageMaker user, I’m already strongly biased against) is the worst offender in the “you’re too stupid to actually know how to do anything beyond drool on the keyboard” camp. “Wizards” are constantly popping up, asking me if I want to do this, or if I really wanted to do that, or if this is really the pre-formatted template I wanted to use, yadda yadda yadda. Just get out of the way and let me do my work!

Not only that, but for some bizarre reason, Publisher is the only Office application that can’t run multiple windows/documents within one session. Any other Office app can have multiple documents open at once, and if you close them all, the application stays open so that the next document opens faster. Not Publisher, though. Every document is a seperate instance, and when you close a document, you close that instance of Publisher. Close the last one, and Publisher disappears, so the next time you have to open a Publisher file, you have to sit and stare at the spash screen while the program loads. Sure, that’s only a matter of a few seconds, but when you’re dealing with tens of Publisher files per day, it adds up.

Anyway, yeah. Windows sucks. Office sucks. Microsoft sucks. I want to use a computer, not fight with it. Coming home to my Mac — even an old, slow, desperately in need of being replaced, 350Mhz blue and white G3 — is such a relief at the end of the day.

Then, I finally get to leave, and I walk into my apartment building and practically get a contact high while I’m in the entryway. Now, I’ve got nothing big against pot, or pot smokers, but it’s not something that I choose to do, and I’d rather not have to smell it every damn day when I get home. Apparently someone in one of the apartments right near the entryway to the building is one heck of a smoker, and roundabout 10pm is their time to toke up, because I’ve been catching whiffs every day when I get home for about the past three weeks, at least. Tonight was the worst it’s been — the smell was incredibly strong, strong enough that I was surprised that I couldn’t actually see the smoke, and I could still smell it at the top of the stairs on the fourth floor.

Ugh. Anyway. I think I’m done for now. Just had to bitch for a while. Time to go find some food…

I’m a day late posting this — I didn’t really think about the date this weekend, until I had to ask at work today what the date was (“It’s the seventh?! Ack!”) — but happy birthday to mom!