Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

I was headed east across the 520 bridge yesterday to visit a client in Kirkland and got a call from my Milwaukee client that something was awry with some sales reports that I wrote and maintain.  (I have a wireless Jabber-a earpiece, so skip the sermon.)  I knew what the problem was, and that I could fix it pretty quickly if I could only get online for a few minutes.

As yesterday was MLK day, the bridge traffic was relatively light, and I arrived in downtown Kirkland about 20 minutes early.  I espied a wi-fi-equipped cafe, and decided to take a shot at repairing my SQL query over a fresh macchiato.

As it turned out, my Milwaukee client’s server was malfunctioning, and my shot at the repair fluttered like a Bret Favre desperation pass.

On top of that, in my rush to grab my laptop from the car and hustle into the cafe, I must have interrupted some subliminal car-driver rhythm, because I realized, after shutting down my laptop, that I’d locked my keys in the car.

Thus began the Talks of Shame: the first, a call to my Kirkland client, who was gracious enough to drive down and pick me up at the cafe (I had 3 hours of parking, and maybe more if there was no enforcement on MLK day); the second, to the freshly-awakened Mrs. Perils to inquire as to her availability to drive over to Kirkland with an extra key, so I could avoid the God-knows-how-much cost of a sarcastic and condescending locksmith.

In retrospect, my attempt at levity when Mrs. Perils asked where my car was (”parked outside my girlfriend’s condo”) could probably have been phrased differently.  Mrs. Perils is, however, a great humanitarian, and she braved the wilds of the Eastside to rescue me.  I didn’t even have to buy her coffee.

This article about Google’s new Seattle workspace has generated a bit of discussion. The article leads off with:

It’s amazing that Google employees can get any work done.

Between the three daily catered meals, on-site massage therapist, free gym membership and game room (complete with air hockey, darts and Foosball), Google’s new development center in Fremont boasts amenities that rival some resorts.

Just in case there aren’t enough entertainment options, kayaks are available so staffers can go for a midday paddle on the nearby Lake Washington Ship Canal. There’s even a “quiet room” — complete with lava lamp, massage chair and wonderful views of the water — where Google employees can presumably dream up the next great Internet application while their muscles relax.

The place sounds more like one of those minimum-security federal prisons where they send Republican congressmen and white-collar criminals than a workplace. I’m surprised, actually, at the absence of an X-rated holodeck, but maybe that’s reserved for an elite of some kind, a west coast version of the old executive washroom. This place (Fremont) is just downhill from us to the southwest, and one of our main walking routes takes us right past the building (as does one of my favorite kayak trips). Here’s the setting Click photos to enlarge:

Coincidentally, last week when I was walking home from the sports bar where I watched the BCS NC game, I espied this opulent gameroom in an office building next to the Fremont Bridge, and photographed it (grainy cuz of high ISO). The sign on the building says “Getty Images”, but, in reading the article I’m assuming it belongs to Google.

The workplace has come a long way since I joined the workforce at a CPA firm in Toledo just out of college.  The profession had just recently quit requiring its employees to wear hats, and had just begun to hire women.  We had one in the tax department, where she wouldn’t be all that visible to clients, and one in the audit department, too, but she was always assigned to “girls’ jobs” like United Way and some other non-profits.

Often, an audit team I was on would wind up work at a client’s at 8 pm and we’d all head over to Brenda’s Body Shop for a refreshment involving “live girls” and dead beer.  I don’t think that happens much any more, at least as an organized activity.

I remember one meeting (all guys) where someone made a dumb comment, and the manager running the meeting turned to him and said, “you know, you’ve contributed about as much to this meeting as pantyhose did to fingerf**king.”  Don’t think that happens much any more, either.

I think it’s great that the workplace has achieved some human scale, and I think that women entering the professional workforce in numbers had a lot to do with it.  I’m not sure the Google culture is the climax species, or is even replicable, but it’s an interesting story to bubble out of a week of bleak economic news.  Mrs. Perils was skeptical, however - she’s certain that it’s nothing but a scam to keep their workers from ever leaving the building.  And it’s true that this fairy-tale is not likely to trickle down to the minimum-wage service economy any time soon.

I’m still here, haven’t slit my wrists over the BCS thing.

After not taking my kayak out for months, except for the short, scenic paddle on new year’s, I went out with some folks last Saturday and did 10 miles, a stirring re-introduction. The weather gave us one of everything - rain, 15-knot wind, brilliant sunshine, glass-like calm. I didn’t get many photos, but managed this short video of a quirky, fascinating wind machine that was attached to a floating home on Lake Union:

I’m starting to be unhappy with this bag I bought to protect my camera on the water. Canon makes some really nifty waterproof cases for many of its cameras, but won’t make one for the S3 IS. The bag works fine as a protective device, but it’s nearly impossible to work any of the controls on the camera in a timely fashion and, as you can see from the video, it’s hard to keep the camera oriented properly. Maybe I just need more practice.

On not-so-dry land this week, I headed out to work one morning, pressed for time as usual, and encountered a formidable scraping job on my car windows. Made for a couple of nice photos, though:

That’s all I gots right now.

There was enough snow last night to make my evening commute home from Redmond brutal, and then it pretty much stopped as I pulled into the driveway. Still, hearing cars slowly crunching by in the wee hours raised that little-kid hope that I wouldn’t have to leave the house today.

No such luck - I just got an email from a client that I have an appointment with saying that “9:30 is fine”, which means that she’s already at work from a commute no more perilous than mine. So, off I go. So far, my month has been a lot like this:

That was pretty ugly. Some have been saying that, yeah, but it wasn’t as bad as last year. To them I say, what’s the difference if you’re on a plane that crashes and you’re burned alive and your skin melts into the seatcover, whether there were 100 or 300 people on the plane?

Anyway, there were a few moments of fun before all 4 engines failed:

At least, the crew was kind enough to keep serving drinks as the fuselage headed toward dead vertical.

The rain held off, so I had a nice walk home, going up over Queen Anne hill and down through Fremont. When I arrived home, I told Mrs. Perils, “we won’t speak of this again.”

The video above is hosted at a place called vsocial.com. A kayaker that takes lots of video told me about it at the New Year’s Eve party we attended. Advantage: the quality of the video seems to be a lot better. Youtube seems to be pretty random about the quality of its replays, and it doesn’t seem to matter what the quality of your upload is. Lemme know what you think.

In more redeeming news, I seem to have started reading again. Books. Bound books, dead-tree-books. I posted earlier that I finished Middlemarch a couple of weeks ago, and I just finished Ian McEwan’s Atonement over the weekend. And, believe it or not, I carried The Brothers Karamazov with me on the bus to the sports bar last night, and even read a few pages. It’s for a book group discussion due in a couple of weeks. Man, that thing is huge, and dense, like a lead ingot of erudition. It’s my first Dostoevsky. No way I’ll be able to finish it in time to say anything intelligent about it.

I enjoyed Atonement quite a bit. McEwan has a rich prose style, but it’s still clean and translucent. He lingers lovingly on his set-pieces, to the point where I found myself staring around me, trying to see how I could get 3 pages out of mundane street scenes in front of me. And the best part about finishing Atonement is that now I get to see the upcoming film with Keira Knightley. Arrrrgghhhh!! Avast!

Here’s a nice bit about the writing process:

It seemed so obvious…a story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page,she was able to sent thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader’s. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it…You saw the word castle, and it was there, seen from some distance, with woods in high summer spread before it, the air bluish and soft with smoke rising from the blacksmith’s forge, and a cobbled road twisting away into the green shade.

You’ll go away from here, and after a while you’ll forget that I quoted McEwan - you’ll just remember what good writing there is at Perils of Caffeine.

I am reminded from time to time that there is a football game being played today between Ohio State and Louisiana State, reportedly for the National Championship. Oh, who am I kidding? I’ve been counting the days. Still, I’m nowhere near as ebullient as I was when we played in the NC game last year, when we were undefeated and looked like Team Destiny after beating Michigan to end an undefeated season. As you may remember, Florida handed us our asses in a 41-14 beatdown.

OK, time to gin up some enthusiasm with a clip from my OSU band:

[audio:http://perilsofcaffeineintheevening.com/audio/Buckeye Battle Cry.mp3]

Since the game starts at 5pm PST, I’ll probably cease working about 3:30 and catch a bus down to a sports bar near the Space Needle to meet up with our local alumni group. This isn’t a game I want to watch among infidels.

Later that day…

OK, I’m shutting down the laptop and heading downtown.  Talk to you (hoarsely) tomorrow.

As the New Year unfolded Tuesday, with everyone vivisecting goats, reading tea leaves and consulting their Farmers’ Almanacs to try to see what the new year would bring, I was confronted with this ominous portent through my bathroom window as I stood passing my final 2007 imbibations into the first frigid light of 2008:

A bike hanging from a cherry tree in one of the back yards behind us. I mean, I’ve never even seen any people back there in the last 25 years. Whatever this portends, I’m going to keep presuming that its message is not directed at me. Hesitantly, I looked beyond the tree to the house’s foundation, thinking I might see something like this:

But, no, there was only the bike.

Two short weeks makes work a little crazy, especially when so many of my clients are in a frenzy of year-end tasks. Instead of being able to tiptoe quietly into 2008, Wednesday slapped my right upside the head with a flurry of phone calls from people printing W2s, doing year-end procedures and trying to get everything sequenced properly. It’s always an adventure. I guess I shouldn’t have goofed off so assiduously during the long weekend.

A quick post to wish you all a happy and fulfilling new year. We’re off to a party at a kayak shop down by Lake Washington. Earlier in the afternoon, I went out paddling with some of he folks who will be at the party. Inexplicably, the day was simply gorgeous. Chilly, for sure, but gorgeous. I’ll let the camera do the talking Click any photo to enlarge:

We launched from Magnuson Park on Lake Washington and paddled north along the shore. I spent about 45 minutes gabbing and working on my stroke (shut up) without ever looking behind me. When I finally did, I was awestruck to see Mt. Rainier, which had been obscured behind a peninsula when we set out:

More pics in this slideshow.
Have a festive and safe new year’s eve celebration, if you’re so inclined, and check in with me next year.

Days are brutish and short around here at the winter solstice. Any of you who tuned in to the Seahawks-Ravens game today to see Troy Smith’s first NFL start at quarterback got only a glimpse (he’s a rookie, and was Ohio State’s Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback from last year). Up to a point, we can substitute caffeine for sunlight here in Seattle and come out even, but after Thanksgiving, the curve straightens out asymptotically, leaving you in the 3:30pm dark with a buzzing in your ears and a case of the shakes.

At a certain point, other beverages, reminiscent of sorties to more hospitable climes, need to step up where caffeine leaves off (click any photo to enlarge):

I happened to be browsing back through my Photoshop collection and ran into photos from my kayaking trip to Baja in 2003 about this time of year. I remember thinking, at the time, that I was going to do something like that a lot more often. Here I am 4 years later, wading through the brutish and short.

Just performing a public service here.  Hope that warmed you up!

It’s nice to be back in Seattle, and I’m home for the rest of the year. The first best thing was to fire up my espresso machine Saturday morning, after drinking hotel drip all week. Cartersville, GA, where I was working, is over-church’d and under-Starbuck’d.

The next best thing was to be able to lounge in bed and read, and, finally, after a nearly 4-month siege, I finished George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Our online book group discussed the book in August, and that’s when I started reading it. It’s a wonderful book, perhaps the best I’ve read in 2 - 3 years, but it’s just under 700 pages long, and I read slowly. Eliot has a marvelous ability to both discern and convey nuance in relationships and psychological states. Here she’s describing a fellow who had assumed that his work as a physician would lead him to renown as a medical researcher, just as he perceives that financial fetters would keep him far closer to the ground:

and it seemed to him as if he were beholding in a magic panorama a future where he himself was sliding into that pleasure-less yielding to the small solicitations of circumstance, which is a commoner history of perdition than any single momentous bargain…We are on a perilous margin when we begin to look passively at our future selves, and see our own figures led with dull consent into insipid misdoing and shabby achievement.

Here’s another, coincidentally (because I’m just randomly checking the numerous dog-ears with which I’ve defaced the book) referring to the same character:

Among our valued friends is there not some one or other who is a little too self-confident and disdainful; whose distinguished mind is a little spotted with commonness; who is a little pinched here and protuberant there with native prejudices; or whose better energies are liable to lapse down the wrong channel under the influence of transient solicitations?…Our vanities differ as our noses do: all conceit is not the same conceit, but varies in correspondence with the minutiae of mental make in which one of us differs from another…How could there be any commonness in a man so well-bred, so ambitious of social distinction, so generous and unusual in his views of social duty? As easily as there may be stupidity in a man of genius if you take him unawares on the wrong subject…

Just one more, drolly describing the discovery of an inconvenient will codicil:

Who shall tell what may be the effect of writing? If it happens to have been cut in stone, though it lie face downmost for ages on a forsaken beach..it may end by letting us into the secret of usurpations and other scandals gossiped about long empires ago, this world apparently being a huge whispering-gallery…As the stone which has been kicked by generations of clowns may come by curious little links of effect under the eyes of a scholar, through whose labors it may at last fix the date of invasions and unlock religions, so a bit of ink and paper which has long been an innocent wrapping or stop-gap may at last be laid open under the one pair of eyes which have knowledge enough to turn it into the opening of a catastrophe.

It’s not for everyone, perhaps, this luxuriant density of prose, but, like attending a Shakespeare play, your ear attunes to it if you let it work, and rewards you with its richness.

Mrs. Perils was so enamored of Middlemarch that she greedily acquired every scrap that Eliot wrote, and there was a melancholy couple of days when she’d finished them. There they are, on my nightstand.

The last best thing was to get down to the gym after 7 days in which I’d done exactly 15 sit-ups and 15 push-ups, and congratulated myself for walking from the terminal to D-concourse at ATL instead of taking the tram. The crowd I work with in Cartersville likes to head straight to dinner from work, obliterating the time when I usually get my exercise in. And, our hotel there is on a busy highway in the middle of nowhere, offering no opportunity for walking or running. A younger me would have frenziedly manufactured the opportunity for exercise; the contemporary me, embroiled in a surprising struggle to maintain my grip on my physical self, let another finger slip. Looking for better things this week.