We went to the Bellevue Arts Museum today (...for the first time). One of the exhibits was a show of Michael Petersen's work called Evolution | Revolution, which is all amazing stuff. After achieving mastery of lathe-turned woodwork (evolution), he decided to start over by carving holes into wood using...
The record string of rain-free days I mentioned earlier this week ended as a non-event Thursday night as rain came down at 11:49pm, 11 minutes short of the end of the day. It's a little bogus anyway though since the end of the period is measured with down-to-the-minute timing but...
Today tied 2009 for the record in longest spring dry spell in the puget sound region, as measured at Seatac airport. No rain tomorrow means we'll have a new record. I originally came here, in part, for the rain. But I'm sticking around for the days without....
My friend Rich's birthday was at the local Family Fun Center. It's like a Chuck-e-Cheese with different franchise rights...and fewer gropings. Let's skip past the games, food, and overall atmosphere—what was most interesting was the patronage. It seemed like half the people there were attending a 1980s party. Lots of...
This is the building I mentioned yesterday—it's the headquarters for Weyerhaeuser, a local timber and paper company. Say what you will about Weyerhaeuser1, this is an incredibly striking building. The one shot I got of the front captures the moodiness of the area when I visited on Sunday but it...
This Friday and Saturday, Cinematic Titanic is coming to Seattle. That's right—the brains behind MST3K will be ripping on a movie live. I'm definitely going to get tickets, but I haven't yet decided for which night. Anyone local going?...
Starting on the 1st of this year, every chain restaraunt in Seattle (and King County, where I live) is required to post the caloric content of everything on their menu. In case you're wondering, "chain" equates to more than 15 stores nationwide. The thing is that up until today, I...
Color me surprised. Seattle's Alaskan Way Viaduct is in such poor shape that a reasonably sizeable earthquake would topple it—so local leaders have been trying to find a replacement for the last few years. There have been three somewhat viable solutions proposed: rebuild it, replace it with a surface street,...
We've just had our first serious snow of the season. Even though the numbers aren't too impressive, the snow's density and lack of plowing means that the roads are in horrific shape. State Road 520 (the main highway that feeds this part of Bellevue) has been shut down, and the...
I just read that Coinstar is based here in Bellevue. I didn't know that....
An interesting observation by my Japanese hosts is that Americans—even in Americans living in rainy areas like Seattle—often don't own umbrellas. And my sample set indicates this is true. Neither Layla nor I own an umbrella. I chaulk this up to widespread use of the automobile here in the US....
If you live in Washington, don't forget to vote tomorrow. Practically everyone I know out here lives in King county, so if you don't know already where your polling place is, you can find it here. They're all open from 7am to 8pm....
The Washington state primary is coming up on August 19. This excites me far more than the Presidential primaries and caucuses that swept through months ago. One interesting point is that this year, Washington has switched to a Top 2 primary, in which the two candidates with the most votes...
We went to a Seattle Mariners game earlier. On the way there, we stopped by the Pyramid brewery for dinner and (a few) drinks. The wait was 45 minutes. But due to a clerical error, we were bumped to the front of the queue and seated less than 5 minutes...
One of the best parts of this story about two ruthless Washington-based outlaws hell-bent on pillaging and nap time is that the officers who caught the lads snoozing after their latest caper managed to snap a photograph before throwing on the cuffs....
I took this picture earlier today at the lake at Wild Waves and Enchanted Village in lovely Federal Way. The fish have apparently figured out the most effective way to beg for duck food, dispensed in handfuls for $0.25 in big gumball-looking machines mounted along the lakeside. Creepy....
Seattle is fairly far north. Not like, Iqaluit north, but pretty far up there. The first thing that probably comes to mind when you think "north" and "daylight" is that the winters must be comparatively dark. This is true. The second thing that probably comes to mind is that the...
The WTF snow did a real number on the hedges along the back of the house. See how they're all bent to the left? They should be standing straight up, and typically are only a few inches from touching the house. WTF, snow?...
We got a flyer in the mail recently asking us to rank our preference for which local park projects should get funded. I've never gotten anything like this before. I like it. We voted for the ... park stuff....
I still can't explain exactly why, but the roads in western Washington (and particularly those on the east side of Lake Washington) are filled with courteous drivers who practically never speed. It's a little odd traveling down the highway and noticing that the biggest differential between posted limit and actual...
The thing about the winter here in the pacific northwest is that it's actually pretty dry. That's not to say there's no precipitation—there's "plenty" of snow, but the freezing temperatures draw all of the latent humidity out of the air. And even though it doesn't really snow all that much,...
Here's a hint to all of you aspiring young ignoramuses out there: if you're planning on drifting a car you've just "borrowed" from the dealership where you work, it may not be best to do so at the parking lot marked 1 in the map at right. Why is that?...
I'd like to update last night's post with an addition: My reasoning is that the biggest idiots of them all are the ones who slide off the road and go crashing into the fire hydrants. As you can see, sometime last night (or early this morning) someone drove completely off...
Approximately once or twice each year, the sky falls on Seattle. Tonight is one of those nights1. On days like this (and on the day afterward) I invariably have a bunch of conversations about the weather and the traffic, and many of them result in the other person commenting that...
The big story tonight in Seattle is that the local buses will have to have their front-mount bike racks temporarily removed due to a design flaw in the racks. In the meantime, the county is installing smaller racks, and has apologized profusely to bike-riders, who may be inconvenienced by the...
It turns out that despite all of the rain we get here in Seattle, rarely do we get "significant" snow on Christmas day. In fact, we haven't had more than 1" of snow on the ground in the last 17 years. Oddly, December is one of our most precipitatious1 months,...
High winds are predicted for Seattle (and suburbs) today. High winds bring down trees. And downed trees take out my power and cable access. So if /dev/null is down today, it's because a tree is down. Hopefully not across the house....
When we first moved into our house, our neighbor across the street mentioned that the tree in her front yard would soon need to come down. It turns out that the top ~15' of the tree had died, leaving the lower branches exposed. When the tree's crown dies or is...
We woke up to this view this morning. I [heart] fog. It turns out all of Seattle is like this today....
...include going to the Redhook brewery, drinking some beer, and then lying on their lawn and watching Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas on a giant inflatable projection screen. Sweet....
This came over the wires this afternoon: a water main broke underneath one of the huge bridges here in Seattle and washed away a bunch of road. Two cars (pictured at right) were left stranded on loads of broken ground. Apparently the broken water main was originally laid in 1912....
I'm not sure what manner of shenanigans those kids are trying to pull this time, but holy crap....
Hey look, more snow. The interesting thing here is that I took this picture at 9pm in the middle of the winter, and due to all the light pollution around here, the sky is actually fairly well-illuminated. In related news, there was a 60-car pileup on I-90 just east of...
Incidentally, it's illegal to drive in Washington with unsecured loads—some scientists were killed a few years back when a tarp flew off a truck and caused a huge wreck....
This is easily one of the coolest radio-controlled airplanes I've ever seen. At least, I think it's a radio-controlled airplane. Sortof difficult to tell. This hangs above one of the baggage terminals at SeaTac....
I've been talking about using the bus system here in the greater Puget Sound area for months. Seattle (and its suburbs) sport the best transit system of any area I've ever lived—and it's nearly as useful as that in major European metropolii. The key word here is talking, because for...
Remember the last time it snowed in Seattle? I sure as hell do. I remember it primarily because we got stuck at the office until 8ish, and then spent the next two hours getting home. And then another hour moving the car 200 feet. Well, it's 6:30 right now, and...
Not only was downtown Bellevue packed with people as Layla and I wandered over there earlier this evening to find dinner, but all of the parking lots were closed because they were completely full. And even though it was fairly chilly (admittedly a balmy 49° after last week's freeze fest)...
Reading part of the Wikipedia article for the Pacific Science Center linked to by my previous post, I happened across this sentence: In the mid 1970s, the lower-level math area was dominated by the IBM Mathematica exhibit where demonstrators in orange jackets ("OJ"s) made soap bubbles and showed audiences how...
Huzzah! So, this first picture is from the robotics exhibit at the Pacific Science Center at the Seattle city center. Specifically, this is a screenshot (if you can call it that) of a controller program for a big industrial robot that plays tic-tac-toe. Unfortunately, whoever wrote the program misspelled "Putting"...
It's Decemberish, which means it's time for a slough of office holiday parties. Tonight's is hosted by a big chunk of the Windows organization, and it's out at the Benaroya concert hall in downtown Seattle. They held this same party last year and, although it appears it wasn't then notable...
Just because I'm stuck awake making sure the fire doesn't burn the house down, here's yet another traffic post. This is a traffic camera taken at the ever-so-useful Seattle Area Traffic Home. Note the timestamp, and note all the traffic. This is typical of most roads in the area tonight....
This is a photograph I took a few minutes ago outside my apartment. Yes, it's midnight—and if you look closely, you'll see that yes, there is still bumper-to-bumper traffic out here. There are brakelights as far as the eye can see in that photo. The road curves upward so that...
It snowed today. The roads are an absolute disaster. In comparison to major rains, which generally clog the major highways and arteries that run adjacent to them, the snows back up all roads. So even though the bulk of SR-520 and I-405 had cleared before Layla and I tackled them...
It's been a while since Layla and I last went out to Snoqualmie Falls, so with the family in town, we decided to take a trip out there. The thing is that the only convenient time was earlier tonight and, well, it's actually really cold right now. If given the...
Another election season over. Hurrah for the unchanging forward march of change—and just how much things won't change because of it. There really weren't any hugely controversial issues at play here in Washington this election—the three biggest initiatives (I-920, to repeal the recently-instituted estate tax; I-933, to compensate landowners for...
Layla brought this home from a shopping trip a few weeks ago—apparently some woman was wandering around the store in which Layla was shopping, randomly asking people if they spoke Spanish and then, if appropriate, handing them this flyer. Since Layla speaks Spanish, I've now got a hilarious flyer for...
This is, for all intents and purposes, the first time I've been stuck in a major metropolis (or immediate suburb of a major metropolis) on Halloween ... during rush hour. Holy hell. I suppose it could just be a Microsoft thing—there are lots of families that cart their tots off...
There's a sushi place just down the road from where I live. And the sushi there really isn't bad. The thing is that as far as I can tell, everybody who works at the restaraunt speaks Chinese. Odd, that....
So I found out yesterday that most of my immediate family is coming to visit in a few weeks. I had thought originally this would involve four people (mom, step-dad, two step-siblings) but it turns out this will really be five (+sister). That's an awful lot of people to be...
What you're looking at is some manner of kid's balloon playworld thing near the Macy's up at Alderwood Mall north of Seattle. As far as I can tell, Grover is seriously giving the business to that unlucky trailer there. It's too bad I only got the shot from this side....
I'm headed over to the Redhook brewery in a few minutes to join a bunch of coworkers for trivia night. Hooray for food, questions, and beer. My understanding is that the rest of my trivia team is out there solely to, "kick the asses of a bunch of uppity [expletive...
Weather and traffic are the two most oft-mentioned complaints I've heard about Seattle. And frankly, neither really bother me. The traffic here isn't nearly as bad as Albuquerque when it rains, or D.C. at any time of day. My commute from Kirkland to the Microsoft campus is only 20 minutes...
After far too damned long of dry days and clear skies, we've finally got a significant downpour. I really really miss the rain. I always liked New Mexico (with its quick and dirty summer showers) far less than California, which has a wintertime filled with grey skies and drizzle. Seattle...
When I first moved to Washington, I noticed that there was a Church of Scientology right around the corner from the Microsoft campus. It's always seemed odd to find the Church over here on the eastside—it certainly didn't fit in too well. Today, however, I noticed that it's been turned...
Spotted today on the way to my flight....
During the ~90 minutes I was around downtown Kirkland last night, I saw:A mid-1950s Mercedes convertible Two C3 Corvette Stingrays A half dozen 911s, including a 997 Carrera and a 996 GT3 Easily a dozen BMW M3s Ferrari 308 Ferrari 360 Spider Some odd mid-1980s Rolls Royce And this wasn't...
Being that Seattle sits astride a number of lakes, and being that lakes don't tend to combust particularly well, most of the 4th of July fireworks shows in the area occur on the water. And since it was a damned nice day, Layla and I (and a number of others)...
Layla and I went to the local Ross today—partly because she wanted to look for new comforters, but mostly because I needed to buy a new robe. My five-year-old Wal*Mart robe has finally developed a tear in the shoulder and it's time for it to be retired. Anyway, back to...
Since Bonnie got a kick out of the duck pictures from a few days ago, here is a gallery with all of the duck shots. Plus, the gallery contains the full-resolution shots....
I took this picture last weekend in the middle of Seattle. Awesome. And yes, they made it safely to the other side....
I took this earlier today. I also got one of a Robinson R22 doing turns over Puget Sound. Seriously, how cool is that? P.S. This was taken with Layla's Sony DSC-T1, which isn't exactly capable of massive magnification. This plane was close....
I spotted this on the way to the airport yesterday. It appears that even in Seattle, things aren't perfect all the time....
I got a picture of this last week—it's on the menu at a great sushi place in Seattle called Wild Fish....
I can't make it much clearer than the post title. It's a picture of a guy on a horse at the drive-through at a McDonald's somewhere between Seattle and Stevens Pass. Golly, that's blurry. I got a better picture once we pulled into the parking lot, although the dude had...
Earlier, I promised to post pictures of the Boeing assembly facility in Everett. Let's get to it. Big doors on the Boeing assembly plant. You can see here three of the bigass doors on the side of the assembly plant. I think these three are for the 747, although I'm...
For Valentine's Day Layla got tickets for the factory tour over at the Boeing plant in Everett. It turns out that Everett—much like a number of other cities in Washington which aren't Seattle—happens to look an awful lot like Roswell, New Mexico. Eerie. Back to the point: the Boeing plant...
In the last ten days or so, I've said the following things:Wow, the power really never goes out here. I remember having nearly monthly outages in Socorro, but it seems like the grid out here is super stable! The best part about Seattle isn't the rain really, it's the total...
I realize that I've posted about the zoo before, but I spent a damned lot of time at the office today and I'm also feeling lazy tonight. Who would have thought? It's a monkey. Color me amused!...
I was poking around at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer website just a few minutes ago (the local section there is great) and noticed that one of the photos in their Photos of the Year: 2005 gallery looked awfully familiar. Below is the shot in their gallery, taken by Joshua Trujillo, a...
One of the highlights of the summer I spent working in Washington D.C. was my close proximity to the National Air & Space Museum. Over the fourteen-odd weeks I spent out there, I suspect that I made it out to the museum for at least a half-dozen day-long trips on...
In my big reorganization of my post categories, I ran across this old entry with pictures of the apartment. For giggles, I took pictures of the apartment as it is right now but from the same positions as before. Behold, the before/after shots. Before is on the left. After is...
I've mentioned before that there are some seriously hot cars here in Redmond. This is due almost exclusively to Microsoft, and that's something I'm OK with. One of the things that I've noticed recently is that I don't really get surprised when I see something hot or really exotic anymore....
I've talked a bit about the geographic lunacy of Washington before. Since I've never lived somewhere with fantastic crinkly edges (like Norway), Washington is nutty fun in terms of bits of land that stick into bits of ocean and so forth. With great amusement, I present a crinkly edge of...
Especially if the money is $0. Last night Layla and I went to her division's holiday party in the middle of Seattle. The party was held in the top floor of the Science Fiction Museum (and Hall of Fame) right next to the Experience Music Project and the Space Needle1...
I mentioned earlier that our original plans for today had been interrupted by new plans to go to the zoo. The zoo is awesome, we reasoned, and that's enough of a reason to change our plans for today. Unfortunately, an NMI1 popped up: it turns out that the BMW picked...
Layla and I have had plans for this afternoon for a few weeks—we got the invite to Issaquah to head to the Costco there, and were already looking for an excuse to go there (Issaquah, not Costco) anyway because, hey, beer is there. Honestly, I don't really know what Layla...
As I mentioned in my last post, Layla and I went to see Video Games Live last night. As a followup to the fact that the organizers had to cancel a bunch of their planned shows due to poor advance ticket sales, I want to say that the show was...
Tonight, Layla and I are going to Video Games Live. For those of you who don't know (which is probably most of you), VGL is an orchestral performance of a bunch of past and present video game soundtracks. I'm sure they're going to play a bunch of stuff from Halo,...
Today involved whole bushels of moving. Wowee. The picture at right was something I grabbed when I image searched for, well, "moving." So yes, lots and lots of moving. For all I care, things can move themselves from now on. I am happy to be disassociated from the whole process....
Some things confuse the living crap out of me. One of these things is a tiny bit of Whatcom county, Washington which actually sits at the end of a peninsula which is otherwise completely Canadian. Take a look. Zoom out to get the context. Yeah, that's nutty, isn't it? I'm...
Last night, Layla and I went up to Bellingham to catch the premier of a (ostensibly student) film called There. There isn't listed in IMDB—I looked. Sometimes, things like that are. Sometimes, they aren't. This time, it wasn't. Nevertheless, the film was really pretty good. It had a good number...
IKEA, UKEA, we all KEA, for IKEA. Indeed. I took my first trip to Ikea today. I consider this a landmark moment in my ongoing suburban homogenization. In any event, the damned Ikea store is ... well, more than a store. The parking lot, for example, is actually indoors—this is...
I had at least six boxes full of books. Now I have three boxes full of books (to go to storage), a box of books (to go to the office), and a bookshelf full of the rest of it all. Behold. In other news, I have a tip for you...
Last weekend Layla and I went to the falls in Snohomish Snoqualmie1. Hot. "Snoqualmie Falls" is really just one big waterfall, but it has a bunch of old power generation hardware around it. It seems that the Falls have become some popular recently that the town has put a ton...
The Pacific Science Center was where we went today. Err, I actually started that sentence with, "The Pacific Science Center" and didn't know how to keep going. So there you go. Now you're stuck with it. It's right next to the Space Needle. Inside, it has Big Numbers. And smells....
Earlier today I went to the EMP—the Experience Music Project. It's a music museum, and it's in Seattle. To my understanding, the EMP is actually a giant tax writeoff. Paul Allen (the, you know, co-founder of Microsoft) is a collector of music memorabilia and by the late 1990s he had...
Today, Layla and I went whalewatching. We had a fantastic time. Here's a small glimpse of what we saw. Admittedly, this is the best shot I got the entire time. I'll post more about it later. For now, I'm exhausted....
This sign is in a parking garage at the Pike's Place market in Seattle. If you click, you'll notice that whoever wrote the sign up originally appears to have a rather pronounced fear of using the word, "in."...
...may occupy the same space at the same time. Specifically, a Ford Escort may not occupy the same space as a carport pillar—at least not at the same time. Luckily, the Escort is in the position that the pillar used to be, so at least the carport roof itself isn't...
The Spectacularly Great State of Washington has a few oddities. One of these is the transport licensing system. Every other state in which I've lived (well, really only California and New Mexico) has had a consolidated licensing system: go to the DMV for your driver's license, registration, and biannual full...
Movies are far more entertaining when you're pissass drunk. Even movies that I don't think I'd normally get into. And especially the previews and the opening credits...because then, you're drunk more than ever. Wooo!...
Two things of note. Both with pictures. The first is a fortune from a Chinese place here in town. By the way, it says, "You will dine in an exotic restaraunt." You would not believe how hard it is to take a picture of a becookie'd fortune. The second comes...
Apart from some chiropractic foolishness, there are very few signs here in Washington. It took me a while to notice it, but I've come to realize that compared to The Great American West (i.e., both California and especially New Mexico), there are almost no signs around here. Buildings and elevators...
It's 5:23am. I'm awake. Really. In general, my sleep schedule works so that I wake up before 6 and am at work by 7, or that I don't get up until 9:30 and make it in an hour later. There's really not much in between. This morning, it was a...
I spotted this on an apple run earlier. w00t!...
Where to begin? Layla and I went to Seattle for the 4th celebrations. As usual, massive driving around occured as we tried to figure out: 1) where the best festivities would be, and 2) where to park. I think we showed up in Seattle around 2:30pm, and I just got...
Layla and I went to the beach today. Holy hell. In specific, we went to Ocean Shores, which is about 120 miles from Seattle. The drive took around 2.5 hours, although mappoint.msn and maps.google disagreed on the driving time by 3.5 hours. Google must assume you're slow, or old. Here's...
Layla and I ran out of things to do today. So, we went to a blueberry farm. The fact that these things exist are kindof odd in the first place. Apparantely the farm—which is, as far as I can tell, a public park between Microsoft and Bellevue—allows people to wander...
I'm back online. w00t. There is some weirdness surrounding my modem, though. It works more like a bridge than a router. Bummer. Later tonight I'll probably post all the stuff that I couldn't from the office. And probably try to get earl online. But I can't promise that I'll have...
Here's a screenshot of my wireless network browser thing. On a somewhat unrelated note, this dialog has reportedly been changed for SP2. I guess I'll have that all figured out in a day or two....
I've mentioned Fred Meyer once before. Fred Meyer is a store that baffles me—and further than just the name...which is odd. What really got me the first time I walked into one was seeing a jewelery store right inside the front door. It turns out that it's a sortof upscale...
Who the hell ever came up with the word for a zoo? It's weird. Yesterday Layla mentioned that she wanted to head over to the zoo sometime this weekend. And I also mentioned that I wanted to drive through the University of Washington campus to get a feel for things....
I've shopped 'till I $TITLE. I mentioned earlier that I bought a coffee maker (and so forth) already. Honestly, I only took care of the really obvious things so that when I actually moved into my permanent housing, I wouldn't be immediately overwhelmed with things I needed to purchase. So...
I think I live next door to a pro baseball player. As I was pulling up into the parking lot today, I saw him getting some stuff out of the trunk of a car that's always around, and jumping into the passenger seat of another car, which is also usually...
I've seen two signs here in Kirkland that crack me up. Optical images? Unless they sell disk images, I suspect they would be optical. The next one is great, though. Oh damn that's great! I nearly peed myself when I read that the first time. Nutty chiropractors!...
I can't sleep at the moment. This is a serious bummer. The biggest problem is that I'm switching from a damned-late/too-much-sleep schedule to a buttass-early schedule. Invariably this will involve me not getting nearly enough sleep tonight. So tonight I write and screw around with the hope that I'll be...
I just got back from a trip across the Sound from Seattle to Alki Park. "Park" is somewhat of a misnomer. It's really more a strip of land between the road and the waterline. At no point is it more than a hundred meters wide. But it is fantastic. The...
Liz and I tried to go to Canada today. We sortof almost made it. Here's why we didn't. Right when we came across this sign, two biker dudes rolled up next to us and one said to the other, "I think the road is closed." And then Liz said, "I...
My temporary housing comes furnished. Looking at the rate schedule in the provided housing booklet, it looks like it's costing something around $300/month to provide me with amenities such as a bed, dresser, plates, and a vacuum cleaner that hasn't yet been used. One oddity, however, is that although the...
The weather in Seattle has been atrocious for the last few days: sunny and warm. I'll show you what I mean. Actually, this really isn't bad, but it was sortof weird moving out of New Mexico and into Seattle and finding sunnier weather here than was back south. Today, though,...
Liz and I went to Seattle yesterday. It was pretty damned sweet. First, we had to go to her swing dance camp so she could register for the weekend. Parking was expectedly atrocious. The camp itself is held near Capitol Hill, a place to which I had never been previously....
I didn't have a chance to write about this when it happened. So here it is now. On Tuesday (I think—it could have been Monday...whatever) I was over using Layla's internet connection when I remembered about the Craigslist/Googlemaps widget that a PhD student threw together. It's sweet. So, we started...
Jarrod, John, Layla, and I all went to the Crab Pot for dinner. The idea is that for $20–$25/person, they steam up buckets of seafood and literally dump them out on the table. You then dig through everything and eat ... everything. Of course, this invariably leads to talking mullosks...
Today, I went to Ballard. Technically, I went to Seattle (so I could finally hang out and spend some time in the city), but I ended up in Ballard. Most importantly, I spent some good time just doing nothing at all. Hopefully I can get as much of this in...
Layla and I went to a place called the Lai Thai earlier. Mmmm Thai food. I realized two things at dinner:I'd love to learn whatever the alphabet is that's used to write Thai, even though the usefulness of it is pretty much zero, and how the hell long have I...
