Raincharm’s Weblog

Find car
Parked on the street yesterday so that Carl could get to the kid-seat laden car to take a tyke home. It was further away than I remembered.

How to clean car
Scraper or squeegee. I carried them both but managed most with the squeegee. It has a longer handle and wider swipe. Temperature around 37 at home. But warmer than Denver where it is snowing (but they had the 60’s yesterday)

Eagle slowdown?
On the floating bridge there was one of those brief slowdowns for no apparent reason. I am thinking perhaps the eagle was perched there for a while, but had flown away before I arrived.

Backlit mountains
The sun outlining every slope and undulation of the Cascades, with a brighter area showing where the sun would soon be peeking over.

Many layers of hillside trees with varying levels of fog, haze and clarity
Evergreens on the steep slopes from lake to plateau, grey to green.

Sunshine on the houses across the lake
Windows glinting and the painted colors popping.

Blinding sun
Streaming over the roofs of houses less than 15 years old, stabbing the eyes. I predicted this when it was a stand of tall evergreens.

Limited Edgar
Followed a fellow into the office from parking, but the door was still locked. Edgar was limited by his lack of metal key device. He said he would prefer to be a corporation.

Timesheet
It is time to figure yesterdays work and plot todays.

March Madness first day – my teams through = University of Washington (11 seed), Northern Iowa (9 seed), Butler (5 seed) and Villanova (2 seed). I think I lost 5 teams.

As in, I have not posted for a few days here.
Some busy times, some not so busy.
Definitely some highlights that I want to go on about, but probably won’t tonight.

Trip to Vancouver – again.
Paralympics – Sledge hockey rocks
Work – getting to a new normal which means everything is in change mode
Sports – (non-Olympic) – in a moment in time which is pre-seasons of Pro-Soccer, very amateur soccer, pro-baseball, and March Madness.

Tonight we are venturing into a homegrown database about the Kingdome and domeruns. We have set a deadline for ourselves and it may take some effort to get there. I may even have to start Carlos on a great computer adventure by teaching Access before any other programs in the MS Office suite. We shall see.

It feels like winter in my head.
It is finally acting like winter in the forecast as well. At least a northwest winter. Rain. Coldish.

At work we are down a person, and there is training going on that reduces the number available for customers further. The training is just for a few days. But I am not in the training, I am supposed to be working.

It must be spring because a lot of the summer projects are walking in the door. Which means I spent the afternoon at the front counter. I have not had a front counter day in a long time. But I was just not in the mood.

Put a smile on your face and it shows in your voice. I don’t know if any of the customers caught on, but when I had 2 people in my office, one on the intercom and a joke about a previous non-joking e-mail about routing the weekly newspapers correctly led me to say, “Yes, one of the day’s irritants,” I think I may have hurt the feelings of one of those in my office.

Grrrrrr. I was not targeting anyone in particular, just my mood and the day.

I have been less than good about keeping up posting for the past few days.
Part of it was mood, but most of it was lack of energy upon finishing whatever else was on the menu for the day.

There is this “race” thing on Sunday coming up. Really a jog/run, or more likely for me a jog/walk. It is to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day and raise money for something (can’t remember what off the top of my head).  I have been making a two week effort to get to a point where there will be more jog than walk for me. With mixed results.

I know I can go a mile without stopping, but will she? Hills seem to have a fairly big impact on my mind’s ability to keep going. I just know the world will not end if I stop and walk a bit, and my brain is good at allowing me to do just that. I try to get to the, “it will be over sooner if you just keep moving,” point of view, but the immediate relief at moving to a walking pace generally wins out.

Three more training days, so it will all be over soon regardless. Saturday is a travel day, so rest the day before. Except for the old daylight savings thingie, which means we lose an hour of sleep. Love spring, hate to spring forward.

I am eating peanut butter toast. Creamy I believe.

I started the morning attempting to do some running, with mixed success.
Next week I have signed up to do a 5K (3 mile) St. Patrick’s Day run. This is a follow-up to my Jingle Bell 5K in December. 3 months should be more than enough to get ready. NOT.

I have been able to run for more than a mile, most of the time, and did almost 2 miles Friday evening. This morning the plan was to start from home, run to a track, do 1 – 1-1/2 miles at the track, buy some eggs (supermarket next door), and walk home. The run to the track (~1/2 mile) started OK, but much of it is an upward incline, and about a block before the track I was losing steam. Since there was no one around to chastise me – I walked – to the track. Once at the track I ran “My one damn mile.” That is what I called it. I decided I could limit myself to just one, since I had many other things to do this morning.

After finishing the plodding One Damn Mile, I walked a lap (1/4 mile) and then did 3 more laps walking the curves and running the straights. Off to the market, and home again, home again, jiggity-jig.

Back to peanut butter. Yesterday, before our walk to Red Robin (see prior post), we were trying to cover up a blister Carl had developed the previous day. He wanted to pop it (yes we know you are not supposed to pop, but …). So out with a needle and find a match. Very old school. Matches, where are the matches.

Into a high cupboard, towards the back – a jar with several matchbooks, some more than 25 years old, from our Colorado days. We reminisced a bit, and then Carlos noted the jar. It was a peanut butter jar. Lots of people store things in peanut butter jars. We have many around the house with various collections of toys.

This jar was a Skippy Super Chunk variety, and it is glass.

The original Red Robin restaurant is closing.

Current Red Robin

Red Robin is a restaurant chain that started with one place in Seattle. It’s sign says open since 1949. Apparently it was more of a bar than a restaurant until the early ’70s. When we first moved to Seattle in the early ’80s there were two that we knew of, the original and a branch at Northgate. We would go there every now and then. It turned out to be a good place to go with the kids. We still go every now and then, mostly at the original.

We have noticed several things about the original – most notably the steep parking lot. It is dropping from street level down to the ship canal, and they never did anything to make it easier to navigate. The canal and the University Bridge can be seen from the restaurant, and we watch the bridge go up and down (it’s a drawbridge). Lately we have taken to walking to the restaurant, about a mile from our house, and don’t have to deal with parking.

When they announced the original was closing we knew we had to go one more time. If only to get a picture of their original sign – which is inside the restaurant now. It has the Red Robin, if in a slightly earlier version, and he is smoking.

The Original Red Robin

 Since the newspaper article came out, the original has been packed.
We went for an “early” dinner, around 4:30, and had to wait 20 minutes to get a table. But everyone was there for the one last experience, so we waited. It was a nice walk down, a beautiful day, and a good thing to do.

And on their door they had a sign posted that said.
“Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.”
                                                      Theodor Geisel

A Haiku form for Julie

Talented
Engineers are OK?!?
Thrive

Charity
Travel, Garden, Cuisine
Energy

Dance
Seahawks, Cars – fast, Wii
Laugh

Nikki, Rick
Mother, Sister, Friends
Love

Julie

We lost a good one at work today.

I love music.
I never know which artist I am listening to, or the name of the piece.

Not quite true, I can pick out the beatles and groups from my youth. But I have never had the facility for remembering which group is which and goes with what sound. I recognize the names, know the tunes, but could never match them together.

I think it is because I liked many different genres, my roommates always had the larger music collection, and I listened along for the ride.

Carlos knows many different artists, names of band members, little bits of knowledge that he shares on occasion. One of his favorite games with me is to ask who is singing. If I guess correctly, usually based on an internal initial guess, it is cause for note. Sometimes I get a bit irritated, but it is just one of those little games people who have been together for a long time play.

Tonight I mentally guessed Dave Matthews at the first question, but did not answer. (It was Dave) Was I right or wrong since I didn’t put the answer out there for all to hear? About 1/2 hour later I was sure the sound was the same and that is how I answered the question, “sounds the same.” There were several other songs in between the two Daves. I recognized the Indigo Girls, others not so much.

This is really neither here nor there, kind of like how I feel tonight.