Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

So I’ve been sitting in front of my laptop for the last several days, its screen blank and its portability hampered by having to be tethered to a separate monitor, a monitor that does not fit in my off-to-work backpack.  Time now seems to be short, and if my laptop presents me with a living will, I’ll be duty-bound to unplug the monitor.

I went back to pricing a new Dell, as well as a new Macbook Pro.  The Dell will take about 10 days to get here from whenever I order it; the new Macbook is still hella expensive.  Then I remembered Craigslist, and its intoxicating capability to provide instant gratification, which alacrity seems prudent rather than rash in this case.  And there they were, several Macbooks in the price range of the new Dell.

I made an appointment with one of the sellers, and went to the bank to disgorge a chunk of currency to close the deal.  My wallet sort of looked at me in amazement, having never seen even one Benjamin (I don’t think), let alone a whole football team of them.

I arrived at the house to find an engaging young man who’d just moved here to take a job at Microsoft; they’d given him a laptop, surplusing his Macbook.  I posited that he probably couldn’t bring it on Campus anyway, but he assured me that there was plenty of Apple hardware socketed into the Borg.

He had “wiped” his Macbook when he moved (he said his previous employer had given it to him; I chose to believe him) and reinstalled the operating system, so there was no software to demo except for internet browsing.  But I was once again smitten with the Macbook, even this 2008 model.  I was about to release my Benjamins and scurry into the night with my prize when the kid volunteered to install a program so he could play part of a movie, just to demonstrate the speakers.

As the program installed, it asked his username and password.  And here came the glitch.  You know how we all have those one or two passwords that open the vault to almost everything we brush up against on the internet? He had decided NOT  to use one of those passwords when he “wiped” his Macbook.  And there was no way he was going to remember the one he used, struggle as he might.

We’ve all done this, whether it’s because a site’s “strong” password requirements precluded the use of our favorite, or because a pesky server requires a password change every quarter or so.  But I harbored a wee bit of schadenfreude upon seeing a 20-something with all his brain cells similarly come up blank.

So, I returned home empty-handed.  Except for those Benjamins.  I passed on the opportunity to return today, as the kid had found some cd’s and reinstalled the OS.  I’m still looking, but I think I want to have a little clearer idea of who actually owns the machine.

You’re probably in no mood to hear another Seattleite whine about how hot it is here.  So, I won’t whine.  I might describe plaintively, but no whining.   We are having a spate of high, and perhaps unprecedented, temperatures, and I know we sound like weenies when we complain about high 80s/low 90s temps.  I came here from Ohio, and I know what it’s like to be nailed down by heat, plus humidity that makes a sauna seem like a grocery store’s walk-in cooler.

I think what sets us off is that, just as when we get snow in the winter and the city comes to a grinding halt because we have no removal equipment, we have no generally dispersed infrastructure to deal with heat.  Sure, office buildings are air-conditioned, some to a point that you start to shiver if you’re not wearing a 3-piece suit.  That’s because, in our mild climate, the primary task of skyscraper HVAC systems here, even in the dead of winter, is to cool, not to heat.

But that doesn’t mean that our personal living apparatus is so equipped.  We’ve seldom felt the need, for instance, to consider air conditioning for our house.  It stays marvelously cool for most of the day, only heating up in the mid-afternoon when the westering sun hits the overabundance of glass that we have on that side.  And my car (a 1995 Honda) has been without functioning air conditioning for about a decade.  There’s a leak somewhere in the system, and it just doesn’t seem worth $1,500 to find it, repair it and recharge with ozone-eating Freon only to shun its use for 95% of the year.

So, today, I hit the trifecta, or maybe the 4-horse accumulator:

• My first stop was the dentist.  Air conditioning: check; welcoming environment that entices you to linger: not so much.
• Next stop: a client in a manufacturing warehouse that becomes an inferno the moment that rosy-fingered dawn caresses its fiberglass roof.  But I’m the controller, and no way would I recommend air conditioning this porous box.  (Somehow, they snuck heating apparatus in there last winter).
• Next, I hop in my non-airconditioned car and pray that 520 is only mildly afflicted.  It is, but I irrationally fret that, at 4:20, I should be able to cruise-control at 70 all the way home.
• Finally, I attend a board meeting of a non-profit kayaker-advocacy group.  Because it’s truly non-profit, and not the faux non-profit of hospitals and country clubs, their office is in a non-airconditioned building, afflicted with the same west-facing orientation as our house.  We sweat through sincere but distracted proceedings, and begrudge Robert his meeting-lengthening Rules.

We didn’t have air conditioning when I was a kid in northwest Ohio, but we did have a huge attic fan that pulled air in Herculean draughts through all of the house’s orifices and pushed it into the attic, where the Devil could reclaim it if he wasn’t being attended by demon medics for heat exhaustion.  When we remodeled our house here in  Seattle in 1981, I purchased a similar fan and installed it at the head of the stairs, thinking that, if it worked in the sweltering midwest, it would certainly suffice for our moderate climes.  Then, a perspicacious insulating subcontractor pointed out that my attic, with only circular birdblocks for vents instead of the capacious gable vents of my dad’s house, would not be able to handle the exhaust, Devil or no.  So, I removed it, and we’ve relied on benevolent clouds and marine air to temper our summer sun.

I’m looking through my rolodex, and have selected a client for tomorrow’s endeavors that I’m almost sure has air conditioning.  I may have to screw up something around 4:30, so I can stay after dusk to fix it.

I think all that was just this side of the Whining Wall.  Sue me.

Clouds as my plane approached Minneapolis last night (click to enlarge):

Home after a week in Milwaukee, working and sleeping in hotels.  I had packed my electric drill but, sadly, Erin Andrews was definitely not in either room next to me.  In fact, I believe that my hotel in Milwaukee is a ghetto for old white-guy road warriors.  I’ll spare you the video.

I did get out on my bike while I was there, as well as a couple of workouts at the nearby gym.  The weather was surprisingly temperate, actually about 10 degrees cooler than Seattle.

I haven’t posted it here (I have to keep telling myself that Facebook is not blogging), but I went with a group last Saturday to kayak in and around Deception Pass, at the north end of Whidbey Island.  It’s a narrow passage between two land masses, and builds a rousing current at each flood and ebb.  When the wind is blowing against the current, the result is standing waves that are sort of like riding a bronco.  We surfed the waves, and had some fun crossing eddylines.

A friend who decided not to paddle into the pass took my camera up on the bridge above the pass, and got some nice shots, including a series of me being rescued (I can’t yet to an eskimo roll) after a wave kicked my ass:

Here’s the GPS tale of the trip.  It’s amusing to click the forward arrow at the top and watch the marker trace our route, especially in the pass as I go around in circles.

In other news, the screen on my laptop has been experiencing blackouts.  I’d been thinking it was time for a new laptop anyway, and it might have picked up the vibes of betrayal.  When it first blacked out, I specked out a new Dell Inspiron 15, and was almost ready to type my credit card number when a guy I was working with that day said, “Whoa, read these reviews first!”  It was typical malcontent user-review fodder, but enough to make me wait a bit.

Then the guy suggested I look at a Macbook.  I’ve never considered Macs, simply because all the consulting work I do is with Windows software, but I was intrigued that it seemed, as I read about the Macbook, that the recent Macs can run Windows sessions pretty seamlessly.

So I went to the Apple Store to see one.  Even in jeans and Keens, I was the un-hippest person in the store.  I shook it off and allowed one of the swarm of eager salesfolk to give me the tour.  Reader, I was completely smitten.  Once I convinced the salesperson that I knew a little bit about computers, he passed me on to (God, and they do this with straight faces) one of the Genius Bar people.  This guy was able to show me the VMWare add-on that runs Windows in a concurrent session with the Mac OS, and I made it do a bunch of stuff.

In the meantime, of course, my laptop screen has been working, at least most of the time.  I have a quote in hand from The Genius, about $1k more than I was going to spend for the Dell, and my mouse finger is gettin’  itchy.  One more deep breath, and I’ll order one or the other sometime this weekend.

Quickly, since I’m at Seatac waiting for a flight to Minneapolis, and thence to Milwaukee:

I played some hooky on Thursday afternoon and did a kayak adventure, launching in West Seattle and paddling about 12 miles, as the drunken sailor lurches, on a gorgeous Seattle summer afternoon. Here’s the GPS story..  The cool thing about that link is that you can click the forward arrow and the little ballooney icon will trace my peregrinations.

Also, some photos, just to emphasize that the weather was fantastic, and it was worth sacrificing some chargeable hours to go out and bob around:

More as I switch to Road Warrior mode.

I’m sure every neighborhood sports these heart-rending Lost Pet signs, and you always wonder how many of them actually find their way back to their owners. I mean, once someone’s had the time to find and scan a photograph, print signs and staple them to the poles, it’s probably been a couple of days since the absence was discovered.

But I really wonder how many neighborhoods can say they’ve seen polebound pleas for the return of a pet shellfish? I’m suspecting this dude made his clicky-clack escape the moment he saw the lighted grill on the Fourth.  Knocked over the saucepan of drawn butter just for spite, then made the dive for the sewer grate.

Well, that’s only one of the singular sights we took in on our short jaunt down to Green Lake and back.  We soon came upon this tableau:

Then we encountered this fellow, who was also watching the quintet with more than a little curiosity:

We’ve seen him walking around the lake for at least 20 years, adorned in his “Spanish Lessons” pullover, usually walking along with someone and conversing, presumably en espanol. Neither of us had ever spoken with him (up until the last couple of years, we were usually running at the lake, not strolling as we do now), so tonight was a first. He asked me how the brass instruments made their sound, and I pressed my lips together and made my trumpet-player’s buzz. Wish I’d taken the time to speak at more length - I’m curious to know if he charges for his Spanish Lessons, or simply does it to further the multilingual cause. It’ll probably take me another 20 years to speak to him again.

And, to end the evening, a nice sunset shot as we headed up the hill to home:

I’m still alive, and I’ll leave it at that.  I’m done, for now, with what my in-laws used to call “The Organ Recital”.  The previous post did elicit a call from my mom, who declared that she wanted to be the first (among her, me & my bros) to go.  I told her I wasn’t about to race her.

The weather here has been, for the most part of the last month, idyllic, only rarely reaching up into the 80s, and when it does, tempered after a couple of days by refreshing marine push breezes.  I haven’t done much to take advantage, as in epic kayak voyages or wandering into the woods.  We usually just hang out in Seattle for the 4th, declining to fight the crowds on the way to anywhere.  If work doesn’t crash down on my head for some reason, I may try to do something with Thursday or Friday, especially since I’m off to Milwaukee next week.

I traveled to Eastern Washington last Thursday and Friday to do a software version upgrade to for a client in a town called Othello.  It’s not the Washington most people think of over there - it’s sagebrush desert, a sere landscape with fascinating landforms that, apparently were sculpted by a cataclysmic wall of water released Pacific-ward from a gargantuan ice-age lake in Montana.  If you have a claim on irrigation water, you can grow crops ranging from dry-land onions, potatoes, hops to apples, cherries and - gratefully - wine grapes.

Here are a couple of photos I took at the edge of town, looking westward over the Columbia valley towards the Cascade Mountains.  The tip of Mt. Rainier can be seen in the middle-left of each photo (click any photo to enlarge):

I’ve been puzzled, since I’ve been going to Othello, about whether there’s an actual Shakespearean connection with the town’s name.  I noted that there are street names like Hamlet, and Stratford-on-Avon.  Then I came upon this:

Interesting gambit, but somehow I don’t think it helped her.

The work itself was sort of prosaic. There are always surprises in a software upgrade - forms (checks, invoices) suddenly start printing differently, unwanted new features supplant features the client loved in the old version. The big trick on this trip was installing a new server, plus the upgrade, in a remote satellite office down on the Snake River near Walla Walla. Since there’s no way to fix anything at this location remotely, and it’s a long drive there, we had to stick the job on the first try. I hear today that their payroll ran just fine, so there’s a mercy.

I made my final “improvements” late Friday evening and started the 200 mile drive into a stunning sunset. Here’s a series of photos I took through the windshield as I headed west on SR26.  I was texting with the other hand, driving with my knees:

Well, as before, events simply overtook me down here, and I’ve just glided along.  We saw a great collection of bloody, funny, challenging, luminous drama, and got a couple of good hikes in as well.

As a bonus, our son came down with some high school friends, guys that he’s been coming here with since they were in middle school, and it was fun running into them around town, at the plays, and sharing a meal or two.

I have notes on the plays, and will spin out some thoughts later, when I ‘m not in the midst of the experience.  One funny thing: yesterday afternoon, we were seeing an old Italian comedy called Servant of Two Masters.  It’s derived from an old form of Italian improv called Commedia dell’arte, in which the actors all have a number of schticks in their quivers, a lot of it broad and physical, but requiring impeccable timing to work.  This play wasn’t improv, it was scripted, but there was some latitude.

At some point in the first act, one of the characters is starving and begins soliciting candy and sandwiches from the audience.  We’d been apprised of this, and brought along some of our saved airline snacks.  Our seats were in the front row in the cozy New Theatre, and this character, after importuning one man in the front row and coming up empty, turned to my mom on the other side of the aisle, sat down next to her and put his arm around her.  She was sitting across the theatre from us (it was “theatre in the round”)

She presented him with her airline snack, which seemed to take him aback a little, since I think he was expecting candy.  He opened it, pronounced it “trail mix”, and pretended to sample it.  Then he asked my mom her name, but she wouldn’t tell him.  After a couple of tries, he said, “OK, I’ll call you ‘Flo’”.  At various times throughout the play,  he’d refer back to her, calling her variously “Flo”, “Joyce”, “Barbara”, etc.  It was pretty hilarious, her 15 minutes.  We thought.

That night, we were in the outdoor Elizabethan theater to see Henry VII, and people kept coming up to her and asking, “Aren’t you “Flo”?”  I told her she was going to have to join Actors’ Equity.

I promised photos.  Here’s a pretty funny piece of video I took on the plane down here - it’s our flight attendant’s instructions to us before takeoff.  Ignore the video and concentrate on what she’s saying - she does a bit of improv herself.  She actually sang parts of it, which I regrettably missed:

Since we have to be out of our little cottage in 20 minutes, I’ll just link to some photos I posted on Facebook, and issue a rain check for better stuff later:

Our hike on Wednesday on Grizzly Peak east of Ashland.

Other photos, including a hike on the Pacific Crest Trail near Mount Ashland.

Sorry to be a drama queen.  I got my 3rd IV hit of antibiotic Monday morning.  Things didn’t look worse, I told myself they might be looking better, and I drove us down to the airport for our flight to Medford.

Right choice - the leprosy has been receding, and the arm looks nearly normal.

We got out on a nice 5-mile hike yesterday, and saw an outdoor production of Don Quixote last night.  Pictures and comments later - off to hike some more.

Thanks for your good wishes!

(click to enlarge)

So, as I’m flying home from Milwaukee Friday night, I notice that a scratch on my elbow that I’d been serially re-opening for a few days is suddenly swollen and sore.  Since I’d slept for a while on the MKE-MSP leg of the trip, I wondered if I’d whacked it against the arm rest, as we’d flown through some turbulence.

Saturday morning, I inspect the arm and muscles near the elbow are swollen and sore, and there are red patches spreading around the arm.  I ask Mrs. Perils for a second opinion, and she hauls me out of bed and sends me off to Urgent Care at our provider.

There, I learn that it’s a bacterial infection called cellulitis (thought that would happen on my thighs before my arms).  They told gave sold me a fistful of sulfa tablets and told me to come back if it spread beyond some GoogleMap-ish dotted lines they’d drawn around the red spots.

5 hours and two sulfa tablets later, I note that it has spread, and I’m feeling a little feverish, so back I go (stand in line, sign more releases, explain, explain).  This time, they call an infectious disease specialist, and come back with fistfuls of needles.  The doc wants to plunge his into my elbow to extract a sample for testing.  The nurse (nice woman, but still with the needles) is there to plunge an IV into my other arm and drip a dose of antibiotic so I’ll get a faster hit.  They give sell me a different antibiotic prescription, and tell me to come back in 24 hours for another IV if it looks necessary.  I have the option of having the IV removed, with the possibility of having to be stuck again on Sunday (I get the whim-whams about having needles stuck in my veins).  I opted to leave it in, and spent Sunday a little queasy about the thing just hanging off my arm.  No pain from that, but my elbow was on fire from the sample extraction.

I hustle from the ER to SeaTac to pick up my Mom, who was arriving from Detroit and, fortuitously for me, if not for her, an hour late.

I sleep well and wake Sunday feeling awfully good.  Some red spotches have disappeared, and my fever is gone.  I head up to the Urgent Care again and we look at the thing under good light, and it seems to have spread a little in other areas.  So, another IV hit and instructions to come back the next day.  I tell them I’m flying to Medford at 1pm for a week, and that it’s all paid for and much of it is non-refundable.  They say they open at 7am - come in then for one more IV hit for the road.

I’m hoping to see some kind of turnaround in the morning.  I’m thinking I’m going anyway, and correspond with them as they get test results back and figure out exactly which bug we’re dealing with.  I’ll take both sets of pills, and play it by ear.

More from the road.

On my way to Milwaukee again today, leaving probably the last remains of summer in Seattle.  Overcast today for the first time, I think, in about 3 weeks, mercifully obscuring the Cascades from my view as I fly out.

An epiphany of sorts - our son attended his 10th high school reunion yesterday.  Doesn’t seem that long ago that I’d arrange my morning departures to ferry him there.  I didn’t attend my 10th, didn’t make it until my 25th, by which time folks were really mellow and there wasn’t any detectable one-upmanship going on.  Not sure that would have been the case at the 10th, where newly-minted graduate degrees and promotions would have been on parade.  I’m curious what the kid’s experience was yesterday, but not hopeful about gleaning anything overly analytical

Hey, the kid’s a supermodel!  He got a free copy of the book out of the deal.

More from Cheeseland.