Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

Finally at the end of my week in Milwaukee. I’m chillin’ in the Milwaukee airport waiting for a slightly delayed plane and hoping that my Seattle connection in Minneapolis will still be good. As much flying as I do, I really haven’t had much trouble that hasn’t been self-inflicted.

The week started off with a jolt (or the Jolt That Wasn’t) when I pulled up to a coffeehouse close to my client’s offices that I’ve relied on for the last four years, including as recently as last month, to find the place deserted and weeds already pushing up through the asphalt in the parking lot:

(click any photo to enlarge)

I was pretty sad, since I’d come to like the family people that ran the shop, and they knew my drinks and quirks. If there’s any difference between the two. They had opened the shop in an old gas station, getting some tax credits or other emoluments in exchange for fixing up a “brownfield” site. I presume that whatever essences still seeped from beneath the floor only added to the impact of the coffee and quality of the crema in my drinks.

Before this place opened, I actually carried a nifty little Capresso mini-espresso maker on business trips. Just about the time this shop opened, the steamer wand on the mini broke off from too many bendings and straightenings due to airline baggage mishaps.

Fortunately, espresso has percolated into the cultures of even the most stoic midwestern venues, and I’ve found a worthy replacement shop not too far from the hotel I use. One good early sign - they seem to have a whimsical sense of humor. Here’s the front door handle:

Yeah, I know I owe this blog a post about the rest of the Ashland trip, and I’ve been ruminating on it in the spare moments I’ve had this week as I try to transition from vacation to servicing clients in Seattle to trekking to Milwaukee (which I’m doing today). I promise I’ll have something to say for the archives - I’ve brought my Bloom along to Milwaukee - but I want to continue the conversation parallel to Ashland, just to get something posted.

Traveling is interesting today. I’ve made a little game of counting how many folks I’ve seen on the concourses and in the Northwest Worldclubs reading the just-released Harry Potter book. So far, it’s 13, and I haven’t been really invasive about my investigations. Most of the airport bookstores seem to have ample supplies of the book to sell. I wonder how much extra fuel is being expended by our already-financially-strapped airlines in transporting this weighty tome around the country today.

Last week was a dramatic turnaround from the unseasonable heat of the week before. I’d gotten to the point where I didn’t think I’d ever hear water pouring through the downspouts again. And then, there we were experiencing May weather in July.

The alternating moisture and heat are great for our garden (I know I’ve been pretty silent about it). I think we may actually get corn, if we get some August heat.

Meanwhile, berries of various species have been appearing on bushes and in the local farmer’s markets, and our resident (and only) son baked a delicious raspberry/blueberry pie last week.

He reduced the recommended amount of sugar, and the result was the almost-unalloyed taste of the berries.  Plus the vanilla ice cream that we glopped onto it just because we could.

It’s taken me 4+ years, but I’ve finally sunk to employing the cat-blogging meme. But I can’t resist posting these photos of our cat Rico ensconced in his summer hideout under the Japanese maple (click to enlarge):

We’re at the airport waiting for our flight to Medford, OR.  We see two plays today - Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard and William Saroyan’s Tracy’s Tiger.  More when I alight somewhere in Oregon.

Despite the fact that it’s a holiday week, it’s been pretty harried for me. I believe I’ve mentioned before that we’re headed for Ashland, OR on Sunday for our annual haj to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and, since I took a long weekend last week, I’ve been humping work pretty seriously this week in order to slip out of town.

Something new I started doing this week is using my bike to commute to work. Since I’m a computer consultant running my own business, I often have to flit around town from client to client, and that kind of itinerary does not lend itself well to either using transit or biking. For the last year or so, though, I’ve been doing a lot of work for a client over in Redmond, and the trek over there from my residence here in sorta-urban Seattle requires a trip across Lake Washington on one of the two floating-bridge freeways that connect Seattle to the eastern suburbs.

As the region has grown, these bridges have become nightmarish commuting bottlenecks. Any little glitch during prime commuting hours can consign all of those behind to a hellish commute. I often wonder how traffic backups get started. I continue to presume that I’m a victim of the timid, the unskilled and the just plain stupid.

Anyway, I’ve been driving this commute 3 - 4 times weekly when I’m in town, after years of studiously avoiding it, and I just cringe when I approach a backup in either direction. Yeah, I’ve got an iPod I can plug into the stereo deck, but it’s just such a waste of my prodigious talent to sit in traffic for a couple hours a day.

Then last weekend during our camping trip, I was talking with someone who said he also commuted to the east side, and rode his bike to the bus pickup on the west side of the 520 bridge, put his bike on the bus’s rack and bused the rest of the way to his office. I’ve lived here for nearly 33 years, many of those as an avid cyclist, and never once have I put my bike on a bus. I think that’s because, in the city, I can usually bike faster than most bus routes, with their frequent stops and spotty timeliness. But, with this casual conversation, a light went off in my head, and Tuesday morning found me screaming down the hill on my bike from my house to the western terminus of the 520 bridge.

The first bus that came by was actually the one that I’d set my sights on, but the first reality of bus-biking arose when all three slots on the bike rack were already filled. Someone told me that , since that route also served Microsoft, the bike rack was often full. I was saved moments later when the second reality of bus-biking presented itself - a bus that was out of operation and heading back to its base stopped for three of us bikers who’d been awaiting a lift. Dead-heading buses can blow by passengers, but they have to pick up bikers waiting to cross the bridge.

Anyway, it worked great that first day. Once we debarked on the east side, a nice young woman who was headed for Microsoft guided me through the labyrinthine byways to a bike path that ran to within a half-mile of my workplace. I glided into our parking lot, parked my bike and swaggered into the office feeling like I’d accessed life from a completely new portal. Bike commuting significantly lowers the bar for the concept of “business casual”, but my perspiration and hyperventilating seemed to engender more admiration than disdain (it’s an outdoor equipment manufacturer, after all).

I did the same commute on Thursday and Friday. The interesting thing about Friday was that the Sound Transit bus that picked me up was equipped with experimental WiFi capability. It’s only offered, interestingly, on the route that drops you off on the Microsoft campus. As I boarded and looked for a seat, a good number of folks had their laptops, Blackberrys and whatever else out and were diligently keyboarding.

I popped my laptop out of my backpack and booted it, hoping to send an exciting blog-post from the bus, but my ride was only about 10 minutes long, and, although I was able to obtain a connection and an IP address, I couldn’t coax it to let browse the internet, so I shut it down and awaited my stop at the Microsoft campus.

I had a vicarious thrill getting off at Microsoft, with the “It’s a Small World After All” crowd that you find there, and at so many meritocratic high-tech venues, but my failure to gen up an internet connection on the bus is probably a metaphor for why they strolled on to their cubicles, gourmet cafeterias and stock options, while I strapped my helmet on and rode off to the lower echelons of Redmond.

We had a fine long weekend on San Juan Island. It didn’t start out looking very promising, as it began raining just as our ferry left the dock at Anacortes:
Click any photo to engorge

We had a brief respite upon landing in Friday Harbor on San Juan Island, and we dawdled around, ate lunch, shopped for groceries and headed for the campground. We got our tent set up and walked over to some friends’ campsite just as the sky opened up with a hellish downpour. Fortunately, these friends had just set up a large awning tarp, and we sat glumly while a seemingly impenetrable wall of water imprisoned us there for the better part of an hour.

And then, it was over, for pretty much the whole weekend, and we enjoyed a very pretty evening, as the sun peeked out in time for a misty sunset.

I was startled to see this FedEx truck pull into the campground (that’s our blue tent in the background). I hadn’t been expecting a package. I knew they were good, but it was rather beyond the call to track me down on an island campsite. Actually, the driver just pulled in to use the rest room.

There were something like 20 adults and 16 kids in our loosely-affiliated group. The connections between us were a combination of kayaking, and a Seattle elementary school where most of the parents had met each other. The kids were well-behaved and their parents were very attentive, and they formed their little coalitions as kids will. The log below was a sort of impromptu playhouse. Kids would tell their parents that they were going off to play with so-and-so, and the response was often, “You can go to The Log, but not to the beach unless you’re with an adult. An adult you know.” There are actually three distinct kid ecosystems in the log picture below left: the upper left group just jumping off, the group underneath, and a slightly older group upper right. It was a really versatile facility.

I love the picture on the lower right, all the guys yukkin’ it up and roughhousing (I think the girls are preparing for a post-prandial talent show). They’re waiting for marshmallows, chocolate and graham crackers to make their appearance.

The sunset Saturday night was pretty spectacular.

On Sunday, the weather improved such that we could see the Olympic Mountains. Mrs. Perils and I got out for a sweet little voyage before we broke camp and headed for the ferry.

On the ferry ride back to Anacortes, Mt. Baker was visible from time to time as we weaved between islands.

This seems to be the essence of my blog experience the last few days.  It’s not Novell’s fault - but I’m puzzled by the celebration of a time-out error:

If you’ve had problems connecting to this site in the last month or so, I apologize. My web hosting company, powweb.com, has somehow screwed up a service that I was really pleased with for the first year I used them. They’re apparently having trouble with their MySQL servers, where this blog resides, and the performance is all over the place, from instantaneous to non-existent. I chose them because they allow 20 gb of storage in their basic package, and I have a bunch of photos and video. Other hosts offer lots of bandwidth but not so much storage. Until you guys get your friends and relatives to obsess over reading me, bandwidth will never be a constraint here.

I’m going to give them another week or two, and then I’m going to move the domain somewhere else. Whatever I do, it should be pretty transparent to you. If you’ve got the time, though, I’d like to hear when you have problems getting here. I guess this is a little taste of what will happen if the telecoms are allowed to dismantle net neutrality.

Sorry for the hassle.

Editor’s Note:  I just upgraded my Wordpress to version 2.2.  I’ll have to rebuild my blogroll and banner pics, etc, but (wishful thinking?) it seems to be a little more responsive.

Pressed for time - I’ll let the camera do most of the talking. As I mentioned earlier, Mrs. Perils’ brother and two daughters have been visiting, and we’ve had a really nice time. Tuesday night we went out for sushi, and Wednesday we did the “tourist thing”.

The nieces wanted to go to the Space Needle and the Pike Place Market, and we threw in the Seattle Aquarium as an additional attraction, since it’s just down a long stairway from the Market. The Space Needle is always a problematic destination, because they charge $16 apiece just to ride the elevator to the observation deck. It’s a terrific view, but with 5 adults, you’re talking $80. You can get postcards at the drug store for much less and, depending on the weather, the view might be better.

The nieces asked if there wasn’t a rotating restaurant there, and we said that there was, and the elevator ride is free if you eat there. The nieces then evinced a strong preference for eating lunch in the revolving restaurant, so that became our plan. When we walked up to the reception desk for the restaurant and asked for lunch reservations, they mentioned that there was a $30/person minimum food charge. I asked my BIL if he still wanted to do it, but he at that point was pretty much checkmated, so up we went.

Reviewers consistently pan the restaurant at the Needle, but we thoroughly enjoyed both the food and the view. We’d completed almost 3 revolutions by the time we finished.

(Click photos to enlarge)

Below is a comparison of the view in 1974 (left) when we first arrived in Seattle (and the elevator ride was quite a bit cheaper) and on Thursday. In the 1974, you can barely see the Kingdome, under construction and nearing completion.

Next, we parked near the Market and waddled down to the aquarium.

I became mesmerized by a clear circular exhibit called the Circle of Life that featured moon jellyfish, and made this video. I find I can’t embed Youtube videos for some reason today, so just click the link. I think you’ll be mesmerized, too. Really, you should check it out. Put your speakers on.
Other attractions at the aquarium, in rapid fire:

Finally, we hit the Pike Place Market just as they were closing up. That was OK, as we got to see all the sights and vendors, but there wasn’t the usual crowd. Back in 1985, there was a campaign to sell tiles to raise money for the Market, and we bought one. Ours seems to have escaped the depredations of time cited in this recent article:

Battening down the hatches, preparing for an invasion of in-laws today. Mrs. Perils’ brother is arriving from Chattanooga with two almost-grown daughters in tow, whom we haven’t seen in easily 10 years. He’ll visit us (my MIL lives with us) for a few days, then head to Idaho to visit their sister. They’re staying in a hotel, so, unlike other visits, my insomnia couch will be free for my nocturnal wanderings if necessary.

[audio:http://perilsofcaffeineintheevening.com/wp-content/uploads/every-sp.mp3](Sing along with Monty Python)
Father’s Day is coming up this Sunday. It’s not a big deal to me, and I’ll be traveling anyway. I only bring it up because I ran across this incredibly clever paean to the sperm in the NYT by Natalie Angier (it’s not premium content, but you’ll have to log in, I think). There’s also good dose of scientific information:

men have the overwhelming quantitative edge in the gamete games. Whereas current evidence suggests that a human female is born with all the eggs she will have, and that only about 500 of her natal stock of one million will ever ripen and have a shot at fertilization, a male from puberty onward is pretty much a nonstop sperm bakery. Each testicle generates more than 4 million new sperm per hour, for a lifetime total of maybe 12 trillion sperm per man (although the numbers vary with the day and generally slope downward with age).

So Dads, if you find yourself the object of harassment as you lounge in front of the tube, perhaps even idly scratching the area in question, you can respond that you’re actually incredibly busy.

The other day, I received an email announcing that a young woman who has worked for me in various situations since she was 16 was promoted to be the corporate Treasurer of the company she’s been working for, and it gave me more than a little tingle of pride.

I first hired her when she was on summer break from college, to do some filing and data entry.  (No, actually I think the first time I hired her was to babysit our son when she was in high school.)  I had worked with her mother at a CPA firm, and that was the connection, but I saw that she picked stuff up really fast, so I kept offering her employment whenever she was around.

She eventually became my accounts payable, then payroll person and, after I’d made a couple of dubious hires for the assistant controller position above her, I threw up my hands and let her do that, too.  I moved on to other positions, and almost always seemed to have something for her to do.  It’s not that I was a great mentor or anything like that - it was usually more like my ass needed saving, and she came in, figured out what needed to be done and did it.  Along the way, we’ve developed one of those lasting foxhole friendships.

And now she’s all growed up.  One of the more gratifying things she’s told me as she moved into supervisory roles is, “I don’t know how you put up with us.  The next person who comes into my office in tears I think I’m going to brain with a box of Kleenex.”  As I said, though, I’m not taking any credit.  I feel more like Forrest Gump, upon first apprehending his child, stuttering hopefully, “Is s-s-s-he s-s-s-smart?”

So, to appropriate the exuberant slivovitz toast of a Latvian co-worker (who ended up stealing blank paychecks from us and forging a few of them), “I drink you!  I drink you! (roll the ‘r’s)”  All I ask is that you keep me in mind for that receptionist’s position.  I promise I’ll keep my armpits shaved if I wear tank tops.