Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

The continued good weather here engendered more hooky-playing yesterday as Mrs. Perils and I took an “urban hike” over to Queen Anne Hill. It sits about halfway between us and downtown Seattle. At its top is a slightly bowl-like depression about 2 miles in diameter that provides a convenient hideaway for one of Seattle’s more self-aware and cohesive neighborhoods.

Traversing around its perimeter, one is afforded spectacular views  - north/northeast, you get Lake Union and the Cascade Mountains, west you get Puget Sound and the Olympic Mountains, and south you get downtown Seattle and Mt. Rainier, if the weather’s right.

As always, click to enlarge any photo.

Our walk over there takes us down to the Fremont Bridge, across the Ship Canal and then steeply up to the top of Queen Anne hill.  On the way to Fremont, an old favorite of ours had some new items on display.  I don’t know who buys this stuff, but I can’t imagine they have more fun with what they buy than the manufacturers do.

Up on Queen Anne, a glance down this street briefly gave me a start, like maybe The Day The Earth Stood Still.

Several little parklets scattered around offer terrific panoramas.  This looks northeast towards Lake Union, Gasworks Park (center, green), the University of Washington and the Cascades.  All the volcanoes were distinctly visible - Mt. Baker, Glacier Peak and (below) Mt. Rainier.

This is looking south, and is pretty much the view from Frasier’s apartment, no?

Couldn’t resist playing with the new telephoto.  The roof of Safeco field is in the center foreground

Art shot, wasting sunlight by filtering it through a glass ornament.

These photos will have to last me a week - I leave for Milwaukee again tomorrow morning.

After months of gray drizzle, we can’t get our eyes adjusted to the sunshine splashing profligately about the last couple of days. I snuck my kayak out yesterday afternoon for a trip around Lake Union.

Yes, it’s Gasworks Park again. Sue me. I’m sure that by Sunday the papers will be issuing dire drought warnings.

OK, here’s something that just has to warm the cockles of your heart - a spelling bee contestant in Nevada was wrongly ex-spelled from the contest and has now retained counsel and may sue the school district.  The student wants to re-open the contest and replay the final round with two other contestants, to see who represents the school district in the state competition.

I wonder if the Seahawks can sue to go back to any one of three or four pivotal points in the Super Bowl where they might have been victims of bad calls by the referees.  I can hear the ref on his microphone from the field now: “Please reset the clock…no, reset the calendar…to February 5, 2006 at 6:25 pm PST.  Also, refill your beer glasses to the level they were when the whistle blew…Still 2nd down. (whistle sounds)”

A version of this happened to me back in the fourth grade.  As a culmination of classroom spelling contests, a group of us advanced to compete in a school-wide spelling bee in the grade school auditorium.  Mom, you’ll have to help me out here, I don’t remember whether it was at night with parents in attendance, or during the day with just the schoolkids and teachers.

Anyway, it came down to two of us left standing - me and a sixth-grader, Kathy Cunningham.  I was given a word and confidently spelled it “j-u-d-g-e-m-e-n-t”.  I couldn’t believe it when Mr. Nichols, the principal, said I was wrong. “j-u-d-g-m-e-n-t” made no sense at all.  I looked it up in our dictionary when I got home, and saw that my spelling was permitted (although a less preferable “variant”). 

I remember thinking it was more than a little unfair.  I’d much rather have gone down, if at all, on a much harder word.  I took losing that contest pretty hard.  I probably bitched and moaned like the girl in the article above, but my parents apparently had better sense than her parents have.  Either that, or they couldn’t afford a lawyer.

I hope Kathy Cunningham went on to do something with her life.

Nancy, our Salon blog-buddy in North Dakota who’s in the extreme final stage of being in The Family Way, seems to be getting a little cranky about it.  And, she’s employed her resources as an attorney to post an official Eviction Notice to the increasingly unwelcome tenant of her uterus, threatening progressive levels of unpleasantness if she (”The Alien”) does not vacate by tomorrow.

What Nancy may not be aware of yet is that The Alien has retained a public defender with contacts in the office of North Dakota Senator Byron Dorgan.  The defender, surprisingly, has enough juice with the Senator that he has introduced legislation known as the New Homestead Act of 2005, to wit:

The New Homestead Act of 2005 includes a number of new tax incentives and other financial rewards for those individuals and businesses that are willing to locate in high out-migration rural counties. This legislation would give people who commit to live and work in high out-migration areas for 5 years added incentives…

Five years, Nance.  Plus, the public defender contends that The Uterus is old enough to qualify as rent-controlled habitation (if not historical property).

We’re here for you, Nancy.  All of us who’ve been parents have gone through periods of difficulty.  Just not this early and with such vehemence.  Good Luck!

I just finished making my first-ever batch of guacamole to take to a Super Bowl party at a house across the street.  I have to confess that I’ve never really gotten “into” the Seahawks - I don’t own a shred of Seahawk gear to wear to this thing.  Part of it is that I probably exhaust all of my partisan energy on Saturdays chasing the Buckeyes around the tube.  Also, the Ken Behring ownership era made me actively hostile to them, and wasn’t ameliorated when Paul Allen bought them and, as a condition of “rescuing” the fair franchise from that cabal of dirtbags, shook us down for a new stadium to  the tune of half a billion dollars.

So, I didn’t hop on the bandwagon this year when they inexplicably started winning.  I mean, a year ago you couldn’t give away a ticket to their games, and the only way they ever got on TV was to leave town or have some local benefactor buy up all the extra tickets.

So, I’ll take my goopy and decidedly bland offering over to the party and catch up with the neighbors.  I may watch the halftime show this year, but not for the Strolling Bones - a friend of ours from our online book club lives in Detroit, has been working with the Super Bowl committee there for the past year, and will be dancing on the field (along with a cast of thousands, I’m sure).  She assured me everything will be buttoned up tight.

David Horsey, the political cartoonist for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, has been in Detroit all week and has published a really amusing series of cartoons related to the game and atmosphere surrounding it here.

OK, gotta get my game face on.

I haven’t had time to go anywhere picturesque to try out the new toy, but yesterday I grabbed it and wandered around the neighborhood just because I couldn’t stand seeing it sit on my desk anymore.  I didn’t venture beyond “point-and-shoot” mode.  I was just getting used to using the viewfinder and zoom.  Unlike my S300, the viewfinder in the S2 IS is digital through the lens instead of optical, so I have to recalibrate my expectations - the actual photo will be much better than what I’m shown in the viewfinder.

Just to demonstrate what the zoom can do, the following three pictures were shot standing in the same place (no, that cute piece of gingerbread is not Chez Perils):

I was kind of astounded when I sucked these onto my laptop and looked at them.  I think this is gonna be fun.

On the photography front, I’ve done an upgrade.  I’ve been enamored for a while of the keen photographs on display by my fellow northwesterners over at New Dharma Bums, especially the breathtaking closeups of wildlife in their yard and on strolls around the area.

I’ve been using a Canon S300, a 2.1 megapixel with 3x zoom.  It’s been just great for most of the photos I want to take.  Its compact size means I’m more likely to have it strapped to my belt when opportunities arise, and I have a waterproof case for it that cost almost as much as the camera, that I use when I’m out kayaking.

However, my close-up shots, even only using the optical zoom and not the faux “digital” zoom, are often annoyingly fuzzy.  I found out that the Bums’ camera is a 5 megapixel Panasonic with a 12x zoom lens, but is not that much more bulky than my S300.  It’s one of a class of sub-SLR digitals - the SLRs being, I think, of such a size that I would balk at carrying it around much.  I started nosing around a couple months ago and became fixated on a similar camera, the Canon S2 IS. It also has a 12x optical zoom lens, and adds to the Panasonic the ability to record movie clips in stereo up to 1gb.

Reader, I bought it. 

I ordered it online on Saturday, and obsessively clicked FedEx’s package tracking window to follow its route from Newark to Indianapolis to Seattle to the delivery truck on Wednesday morning, and worked fitfully while waiting for that thrilling ”thump” on the front porch.

I haven’t really had much chance to use it, as I’ve been pretty much chained to my desk all week.  But every now & then I’ll pick it up, turn it on, open the manual and learn about another feature.  I think the damn thing’s more complicated to use than the Space Shuttle!  I mean, you can ignore all the buttons and levers on it and simply point and shoot with it, but I bought it in order to overcome the shortcomings of a pretty nice point-and-shoot camera I already owned, so I’d better put in some time learning to use those extra features.

I ventured out in the yard hoping to espy some wildlife upon which to visit my awesome new zoom and capability, but there was nothing - nothing - moving in the depressing afternoon drizzle.  Later, Mrs. Perils came in with news of a dead robin on the front steps, but she dispatched it before I could compose what I thought would be a humorous anti-Bums natural tableau.

So, watch this space.  I’ll have a little time this weekend to actually leave the house and search for blogworthy photos.

as a blogger.  I know it, you know it, the American People know it. 

I was simply uninspired during my week in Milwaukee, and since my return Friday night, I’ve been working almost non-stop.  Even though I don’t practice as a CPA any more (I’m an accounting software consultant), all of my clients are doing year-end stuff they only do once a year, and they often can’t remember how they did it last year.  So they call me, thinking I’ll remember.  Hah!

Anyway, I completed a Joshua Tree post that had been stuck in the chute for a couple of weeks.  If you like the photos here, I’ve put a much larger collection on a different website here.