Raincharm’s Weblog

I have survived another year at work.
After 28 years that might seem like a forgone conclusion, but the last few years have seen many people changes. I had my annual review yesterday. One of the discussion topics is short term and long term goals. I find I am tending to think in terms of projects rather than broader goals. We are getting a new hydraulic model, and that would be fun and interesting to use. But with less than 10 years on the horizon I am not sure that would be the best use of training dollars.

If you follow national weather you may have noticed the rain has returned to the northwest. I believe we have already surpassed our December quota. All of the water has loosened the ground and made it easier for the wind to take down a tree or two.
Exhibit A

One of three that fell on our brand new decant facility and car wash. Roof damage, lights loosened and a wrinkle in a support beam. There will be a closer look at the important items today.

Nothing hit the office building. But of course we took out 14 trees with signs of disease that weakened their structure.
The result of the arborist report.

The result of a 2014 windstorm.

In reverse order of course.

I would not mind a bit calmer weather this weekend, .kind of like this.

That about sums up the last few days. DARK could work as well.

The type of DARK you notice at 3 pm when it looks like. 8 pm outside.

Weather report just on, “RAIN for the rest of the day, with wind gusts up to 50 mph.” My goal is to stay inside with my nose to the grindstone.

We have literally lightened things up at home by putting up lights. On the tree, a window here and there, and in the kitchen. Stumbling towards Christmas.

Pictures to follow when I get back home.

Speaking of lights, when we departed on an errand on Sunday, the sound of sirens here and there filled the air. We saw at least 5 police cruisers exiting the freeway and infiltrating the neighborhood at freeway speeds.
“Something’s up.”
It turns out this was a multiple car jacking, accident causing, shots fired on the run car chase. It skirted our neighborhood. The Seattle Times posted a compiled dash cam view of the chase. We could tell where they were, including an extended drive the wrong way up Roosevelt. The chase ended with a shoot out, although you can’t really see anything graphic.
 

I don’t think I have ever been to Bailey’s Crossroads.
It is probably not Bailey Park (It’s a Wonderful Life) but maybe.

Wherever – it is in the eastern time zone.

I had a really busy week this week. Starting with the Sunday after Thanksgiving, work has been fairly constant. Two meetings with outside agencies. One had an incredibly positive outcome (but means even more work), and the other had at least a partial negative outcome (which probably means slightly less work). And there was an evening neighborhood (work) meeting with five well-heeled property owners. They put on quite a spread. Of course I could not partake because I was talking the entire time. But they had good questions, and we will find out whether this group will want to go further with our agency. Meetings that can go either way are generally less tense – they are making the decisions, and that is just fine with us. But the meeting meant not getting home until after 10 PM.

And now we have 5 house guests for the weekend. They are all out playing now, hopefully have made it to the Seattle Center. 2 adults (grandparents) and 3 kids – pre-teen to teenager – with all of the energy and emotions associated with those ages. Their primary goal for the weekend was the Dr. Who exhibit at the Experience Music Project (EMP).

And underneath it all I have a cold. Today is the day I would want to curl up on the couch and sleep through some games/movies/whatever is on. So instead we went out to a few local art venues – museum based and local artist based. Probably good to get out for a bit, but our original plan to walk everywhere was shelved by the cold accompanied by a very steady rain. Call me a wimp. I think it will be the better decision in the long run.

Back to the situation that I blame for sinking into the cold. Usually I can power through the cold, but I was having an emotional response to not being able to troubleshoot my phone.  It sapped the extra energy I would usually have in store to stave off illness.

Here is a You tube video – Bailey’s Crossroads or Seattle? so you can see what I was dealing with. And the snip. Look closely. It say’s Bailey’s Crossroads and 9:50 AM. It is really – Seattle and 6:50 AM.

The key is the time zone change. I might not have noticed a wrong location on the west coast. But my alarm went off at 2:45 AM local time, and not at 5:45 local time. Apparently I shut it off earlier, and did not really wake up enough to realize the problem. [Day two I set two alarms, not knowing what would happen.]

If I went to maps it would show my location near something called Lee’s Pike Plaza (it’s in Virginia). After 10-20 seconds the gps would take over, and move into Seattle – and the time would change. And then it would bounce back to Bailey’s Crossroads. When I left the house it would return to Seattle, or Sammamish, or some other appropriate location.

I spent at least 3 hours total with Verizon help folks on the phone (a landline – so I could work on my cell phone).  We tried changing settings, clearing cache, and on and on and on. Finally I had to load everything up to the cloud and completely reset my phone. This included updating all apps, then deleting all apps that had been added – and the apps that had been updated appear to be back to the pre-update form. … My frustration was highest with the fact that nobody seemed to know why. “A software glitch.”

Now – in Verizon’s help folks favor, they did not try to get rid of me, and one called me back on 2 days after the initial conversation, to see how the problem was resolving.

And I have not taken to resetting Carl’s phone. It would also show Bailey’s Crossroads, but the time never changed. And now it is showing Seattle.

I am all about leaving things alone for right now – I just don’t have the energy.

Speaking of energy – Carl has been busy putting up Christmas stuff. I am supposed to be adding lights, etc … we will see whether that actually happens today.

Carl had done some decorating. But I neglected to get a picture. Perhaps for tomorrow.

We are continuing to work our way through leftovers from thanksgiving.

Thank you Mark and Dottie.

Trying to arrange the house for a full house. Unfortunately I had more thoughts than actions last night.

Carl is having some holiday fun at work. He and Sagan drove a train, visited a teddy bear exhibit and other holiday sights. Today they are going ice skating.

This is a few months old. Sagan’s drawing skills are improving by leaps and bounds.

Welcome to December.

And Thanksgiving, black Friday, saner Saturday, and chartreuse Tuesday.

We shopped on all of those days, except Thanksgiving. And they were all interesting experiences, but none of them were overly crowded.

Tuesday was a search for pants, in a very empty store. No line. Open dressing rooms. A low stress outing, as clothing shopping goes for us.

On black Friday we went in search for a new cover for our futon. The last cover was probably 20 years old. The store we bought it at has been gone for a while. There are really only a few futon stores around, so our choices were limited. Even more because we were determined to avoid the mall areas.

Next up was couch shopping, which may seem odd since we were updating our current “couch” with a new look. We decided since the kids both have college degrees that we could move past our college furniture. That and the futon seems to give my back fits. There will be a furniture merry-go-round as the couch boots the futon, the futon boots the trundle beds out of the study, and the trundles find a new home.

We even ventured to Costco. It was as empty as I have ever seen a Costco. Although we did get behind a couple at the checkout who split their haul into two of three parts and kept trying different gift cards to pay for them.

I think the key to a laid back shopping experience on black Friday is to go for items that are not on most folks Christmas lists.

The couch shopping continued into Saturday – at the mall, which was pretty empty. We did finally make a choice after sitting on more than I would have thought possible.

Our week has not been all about acquisitions. On Wednesday night we went to the theater and saw a fine production of The Sound of Music. Thursday we got to enjoy a great turkey dinner with friends. And tonight we saw the Seattle Men’s Chorus with Titus Burgess. A fine show. I really enjoyed their send up of Freddy Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody, with lyrics featuring Santa instead of Mama. I think you would have to hear it to fully appreciate the result.

All for now. I need to squeeze a bit more out of November before it’s over.

First frost of the season on Monday.

A bit of a surprise when I walked out the front door to go to work. In addition to scraping the windows I had to wait for the fog on the interior of the car to dissipate.

It has since warmed slightly and turned to rain and wind. I don’t think we actually lost power at work today, but some of our facilities did.

Click to view video.

You can see the smaller trees moving outside the window, but the more impressive show is the tall trees to the left. They were swaying at least 20 feet.

Trees down here and there made getting around interesting. Of course I was sequestered in a series of meetings and not allowed to try getting around.

When I finally left, I was stunned. No wind at all. Just the rain.
And even the rain has subsided for the evening. A beautiful moon now dominates. Or it did until it got too low to see well.

Yes. That spot shows the lack of clouds.

I admit I am tired.
So you will have to be satisfied with this weather report.

I know there have been periods when I missed the bus on blogging.
Lately I have been trying to fit it in while carpooling, and occasionally from home.
I had written three posts, uploaded, and just assumed they actually posted.

Oops.

Apparently I hit some wall for storage of pictures.

That has been rectified now.
And the last three posts are as written originally – no post post editing here.
Except that somehow I posted them in reverse order.

I hope to get this rectified today, and then move on to work.

Happy Veterans Day for all those of you that read this that are veterans (I am guessing about 1)

Morning is looking bright. Other than work my mind is on the neighborhood meeting I plan to attend tonight. In our neighborhood. To discuss whether we will have the pleasure to pay to park in front of our house.

This is a more complicated issue than it might seem on the surface. I was opposed to this in the past, although some other nearby blocks have had an RPZ for several years now.

Factors that will sway me towards another annual bill include the pending loss of parking on the arterial at the end of the block, in favor of a split off bike lane. There’s already a bike lane. Coupled with lots of new apartments with little or no parking, and being close enough to the university to have hide and ride parking. (Drive to our neighborhood, park in a free spot and take a local bus.)

This is largely due to the light rail stations currently under construction nearby, which I heartily support.

A few weeks ago I was home during the day and realized the 2 hour RPZ parking limit during the day meant lots of parking. Blocks like ours were full.

The other side is the proposal to add parking to both sides of our street ( currently just one side) which I oppose. Adding the RPZ would limit the results of adding parking, where parking hours are limited.

The restaurant on the corner would benefit because their patrons don’t usually hang around more than 2 hours. Maybe they should pay for the RPZ permits.

We’ll see.

Carl had a red letter day yesterday. O-negative in particular.

While he was out doing a public service, I was home sawing logs. A protracted session.

I came home early from work on Friday, not feeling well. It helped that I had not carpooled that day, and reached my 40 hours well before I snuck out the door. (I didn’t really sneak, I did tell customer service support (our new term for our receptionist).)

When the morning eventually dawned I was feeling much more myself. Made some coffee and settled down to do some family arithmetic. Receipts, checkbooks, a few bills. I have caught up with Carl’s Phoenix trip and we are on our way to having Mariners season tickets again. (Just try to discourage us with your losing season.)

By afternoon it was time to go out and socialize. I should preface this to say that I really did feel better than the day before. We met several of one of Carl’s old teams to rally for a teammate who is battling cancer. I don’t know his real prognosis, but he looked good and said he is tolerating the chemo, but very tired.

Our next event of the day was a Broadway traveling musical. It considered two life courses possible from one decision made in something like Central Park. Who knew that a central character could be a city planner.

Yes, the lead was that woman of “Let it Go” fame from Frozen. And she does have quite a voice. Perhaps it was the show being set in New York with young women finding their way, but Carl said he could not help but think of Ashlan during the song titled, “What the F**k?”.

It’s a rainy weekend in Seattle, baseball season is over and the Seahawks have a bye, I think a day of newspapers and soccer viewing may be in order.

My mind is a blank.
Not really, but it is crowded with things that just need to get done, both at work and home.

And with only so many hours in a day, it is hard to believe I will still waste time on unimportant diversions.

Oh, and I finished a book, The Martian. Great book, and now I can go back and read Mark’s blog on the subject. And to be clear, I don’t place reading in the unimportant diversions. But this book was of the variety that encourage me to read longer and later than is good for jumping out of bed the next morning.

And now too many to do items in my head means my mind is a blank. Unless you want to see the list.

On another list, we have several folks scheduled to stop by the house for an evening or two. One, then five, then two. Not in all that quick succession, just a cluster of scheduling.

On a read carefully noted, one (or five) wrote they were coming to see the Who. Until I followed their link, and it was Dr. Who, at the EMP.

Makes more sense.
We may even join that expedition ourselves.

Fall foliage

And now I must stop this ramble to look up when they are cleaning off the gum wall today.