The weather here has been pretty wild this last week, involving hail, high winds and, of course, plenty of rain.
I attended a splendid soiree on Thursday night to honor one of my clients (and 99 other firms) at Qwest Field, where the Seattle Seahawks play football. I took this photo from one of the decks outside, showing the dramatic cloud activity on a particularly stormy night, when winds actually closed the 520 bridge across Lake Washington for a spell. I had spent 1 1/2 hours crossing the bridge back to Seattle from Redmond just prior to the closing (Click any photo to enlarge):
It was the first time I’d been at Qwest Field since it opened in 2002. It’s built on the site of the old Kingdome multipurpose stadium. You’ve probably seen the famous Kingdome implosion video. Here’s the view from the room where our soiree was held:
If I were ever to attend a Seahawks game, I think there couldn’t be a much better place to watch - the entire field in view, and the city skyline in the background, wine and canapes within reach.
Short on time, so I’m going to let some photos do the writing. Sunday afternoon, we got out for a stroll down to Gasworks Park (where else?) and Fremont. Gasworks was busy, and we happened upon two unrelated role-playing groups. The first we’ve seen before. They’re guys that dress up in Medieval garb and engage in various fight scenarios. The group on the right we’ve not seen before. They seem to be involved in some sort of anime scene (Click any photo to enlarge):
Wandering on to Fremont, we dropped into Puget Consumer Co-op to top off Mrs. Perils’ supply of Maple Butter, then down to the ship canal to watch boat and people traffic. This vessel I found particularly intriguing. Apparently, the boat is operated by a non-profit organization and operates educational voyages around Puget Sound.
The Burke Gilman Trail runs alongside the Ship Canal at our lounging point, so we also got to observe all manner of bikers and skaters. These two on the Segways, however, caught our attention in a negative sense. I know there are those who are downright messianic about the Segway and its supposed potential to get people out of cars for middle-distance commuting, but I just don’t buy it. The only people I’ve seen on them have been joy-riding. People who would be eminently better off walking or biking.
If Segways have so much potential to reduce car trips, then cut out a lane of car traffic on every arterial and devote it to the legions who are dying to Segway instead of drive. But allowing these things on already-inadequate sidewalks and bike trails is bad engineering and bad public policy. Right now, I see them as no more than JetSkis of the sidewalk, inconveniencing and endangering pedestrians.
A while ago I read some correspondence with the Seattle parks director to the effect that Segways, as motorized vehicles are not allowed on the Burke Gilman. I’m hoping that this is enforced, especially if they, like their brethren JetSkis, become more numerous.
On the way back up the hill, we stopped at the venerable Fremont coffee kiosk Espresso To Go. There are always tempting baked goods there in addition to the excellent coffee, and we engaged our inner poseurs as we lounged along the sidewalk. The treat, which we bought only for research purposes and merely tasted and then spit out, was a pumpkin cake with cinnamon or cardamon, raisins and white buttercream frosting.
On the way home, we noticed many households preparing for Halloween. This was a particularly creative presentation:
Light posting lately as I’ve been touring coast-to-coast performing as my doppelganger, the enormously popular middle-aged white rapper known as Travis T. Or not. More likely, I’ve been feeling that sort of lackluster that I get when I’m inundated with projects and phone-stalked by clients with justifiable grievances. And since a couple-three of them venture here sometimes, I feel funny about taking time to post when their projects are going begging. Not that I’m at all out of the woods right now, but I’m claiming the hours between 2am and 4am as my own, dammit!
So, a little summing up. Of course, I spent a lot of Saturday watching football. It was like Pickett’s Charge, half of the top 15 teams disemboweled and gasping on the greensward. The most stunning of which was Stanford’s regicide of USC. That game gave Jim Harbaugh, Stanford’s first-year coach and former Michigan quarterback, instant street cred and deflected some of the attention he’d gotten when he made these peculiar remarks about his alma mater. (An aside of astounding relevance: I delivered the Toledo Blade to Harbaugh’s house when his dad coached at my high school).
The Buckeyes’ game with Purdue was shown to 85% of the country, but here we got the unsightly spectacle of UCLA allowing Notre Dame to once again breathe air in the same time slot, so I sucked it up and bought the game PPV from Comcast. You’d think they’d make it easy for a strung-out junkie to buy a hit of ESPN crack, but nooooo. You can order all manner of depravity from the cable company with just a couple of flicks of your (unoccupied) wrist and the remote, but you can’t order ESPN Gameplan - you have to call Comcast. Which is what I did a half-hour before kickoff. It was a rude awakening to apprehend that they were woefully understaffed, and my only option was to accept a call-back in 40 - 45 minutes. I fumed, cursed, and did exactly what they asked me to do and paid them everything they asked me to pay.
I only missed about 4 minutes of the first quarter. When I watch a game at home, Mrs. Perils takes the cat and disappears to a safe room somewhere where the paint won’t peel when I scream. My companion for these events, oddly, is my 90-year-old mother-in-law. She spent a lot of Saturdays watching football with her husband, and I think it has a familiar feel for her. She’s got some cognitive issues, and it doesn’t help when I flick from game to game during time-outs. She follows it for the most part, though, and every now & then has a moment of clarity, like when I do a drive-by of a Penn State game, and she exclaims, “Is Joe Paterno still coaching?”
Then there was this priceless moment a couple of weeks ago. Mrs. Perils had alighted briefly among us, and I was saying something to her about a player. She said, “what year is he?” And my MIL grinned and said, “he’s a fifth-year freshman!” We looked at each other with a “where’d that come from” look, but it’s not that far-fetched. She (my MIL) has been pondering all the various increments of academic/athletic status like “red-shirting” and, one of her favorites, “true freshman”. She was a school-teacher and a parent of two valedictorians, and her view of academic progress is decidedly less malleable than that of a college athletic department.
I woke up the other morning with just an awful pain in my left foot. I’d been dreaming about - jeez, I don’t know, I rarely ever remember any of my dreams, but in this one I was walking down a sidewalk when several chicken-sized dogs ran at me out of some shrubbery, barking and apparently intent on biting me. They really did look like chickens, though, especially with the feathers. Except for the teeth. And the barking. Enraged, I started kicking at the closest one, but couldn’t make contact despite the fact that my foot appeared to be going right through its..chicken head. But it was barking, I tell you.
But anyway, I stepped forward and just started kicking the bastard as hard as I could. I woke up the second time I nailed the coffee table right on the corner. Damn, that hurt. I was hitting the coffee table instead of Mrs. Perils because I had bolted awake sometime during the night and wandered downstairs to read and crash on the couch. I suppose I was lucky not to have damaged anything on top of the coffee table. I was also lucky not to have been kicking Mrs. Perils. I probably wouldn’t be alive to type this.
Dang, in a couple of hours I’m going to be dragged kicking and screaming into October. And the weather is doing nothing to ease the transition - it’s turned from the benevolent warmth and sunshine of the previous post to a mean-spirited rain siege that forced us, finally, to turn the heat on today for the first time, I believe, since spring.
It’ll be another brisk work week. Month-end stuff added to regular workload. Here’s an amusing bit, though -Two of my clients have experienced bookkeeper turnover. For one, we have run ads, contacted personnel firms, done scripted behavioral interviews and had people complete testing. After 2 - 3 weeks of this endeavor, we have one candidate that we have only a lukewarm interest in, and we’re about to repeat the entire process this week with new ads, etc.
The other client precipitously hired a young woman that a friend of the owner met in a bar, where she was working as a server. She has a newly-minted accounting degree, but absolutely no work experience. When I arrived to give her some training, I smelled the perfume first, then saw the petite blond sitting there. I thought, “Cool!” and “Oh, no!” simultaneously, and steeled myself for the worst. To my delight and relief, she was very attentive, took meticulous notes and, most importantly, displayed good instincts for both accounting issues and the accounting software. That’s been the only training session she’s needed so far, though I’ll return for month-end and see how much clean-up has to be done. Turned out she just hated working in the bar, and embraced the opportunity to start working in her field.
Ya never know. I’ve hired my share of doozies (current readers excepted, of course!), enough to be fairly humble about my ability to judge accounting horseflesh. I’d much rather recruit over margaritas than resumes and cover letters, and I might not do any worse.
was tantamount to a Snow Day for school kids and teachers. It meant the server was down at a client site where I was pecking away at a programming project. Well, not really like a Snow Day where you turn off the alarm clock and snooze cozily as the whoosh of snow sifting against the window creates an insulating barrier between you and the world. I had plenty of other stuff to work on, but those items were not as deadline-driven, and it was fun to call a couple of clients and tell them I’d finished their tasks early as the day went on.
I’ve been taking off on my bike on these late summer evenings (hey, I’m an accountant - I know how to file an extension) to plummet down the hill from my house and cruise the Burke Gilman Trail, an in-city rail-trail that meanders past the University of Washington campus, then north along the Lake Washington shore. Large swaths of the trail are a bio-hoard of blackberries, and even at this late date, you can find rogue clusters of berries ranging from arrested-development-sour to incredibly-sweet to Mogen-David-fermented. The riders in the center are partaking of some of these late-season wonders. (One of the guys put me in mind, for the rest of the night, of Chris Farley disco-dancing in a bumblebee outfit. Click to enlarge)
I ride about 7 miles along the trail to Matthews Beach city park, stop for a couple of minutes by the beach to observe:
then turn back home, with a stop at the gym to do my cycle of Nautilus machines. I’m not sure what those waterfowl are - coots, maybe? - but I liked the pointillistic contrast of their beaks against their dark bodies and the water.
Folks on my Ohio State newsgroups are aghast at this revelation yesterday that our 3rd string quarterback, who had all but ascended to the 2-deep and had gotten most of the backup playing time in our nailbiter against Northwestern Saturday, was arrested after offering an undercover officer $20 for sex.
It’s not that they’re surprised that a teenager might evince a sex drive - they’re dumbfounded, and I think their pride’s a little hurt, that a Buckeye quarterback feels a need to pay for sex. The archivists are bloodying their nails searching for a precedent. I remember once when I was a student at OSU and experiencing some of that special loneliness characterized by animal head ornamentation, two really hot women walked into the lobby of my dorm, picked up the house phone* and cold-called the 2nd-string quarterback, Ron Maciejowski. (the kid got to start once a year when Rex Kern would take the Wisconsin game off.) Completely ignoring yours truly, who was no doubt picturesquely pretending to study. Dagger to the heart, that.
Another surprise for me is the apparent Seattle/Columbus exchange rate. Around here, $50 is a cheap dinner for two, and I wouldn’t bet on the chances of a cheap dinner getting you laid. Some on my OSU list were wondering if the deep discount might have been an NCAA violation if consummated.
The best reportage I’ve seen of the incident comes from the always-hilarious EDSBS (Every Day Should Be Saturday). They hit us where we live with the caption “I-O! H-O!”
* - The more perceptive of you will notice the absence of the terms “cell phone” or “texting” in this anecdote
So, fresh off the excitement of the extended weekend, I flew off Sunday morning to Milwaukee for the week. I usually space my trips so there’s a 4-5 week gap, but we had our board of directors meeting this week, so I had to return with only 2 weeks’ respite in Seattle. It actually works out well, since I’m continuing a project that I started when I was here the week before Labor Day, and it would have been harder to pick up on if I’d waited a month.
As you might have observed, my trips here serve to dull my senses and stultify my already suspect posting capacity. I’m not sure why this happens, since that ball bearing that’s always ricocheting around inside my skull (unimpeded by gray matter) doesn’t stop. It’s probably due to the fact that all my stimulation during these trips is related to work, and the work that I do is mostly uninteresting to people that I’m not billing for it, (and may actually repugnant to those that receive my invoices).
I’m a sole practitioner/independent consultant, but since I spend so much time with this client, I run the risk of plunging down the rabbit-hole in terms of commitment to/embedding with their organization. Obviously, I like them, or I wouldn’t countenance the disruption of my life that working with them entails. So, I maintain an arm’s-length relationship, despite the fact that sometimes I’d like to, and probably should, linger over a project.
Luckily, I have a lot of Seattle-area clients to keep me grounded (or run into the ground, as usually happens once I get back there), including one that’s been rivaling the Milwaukee client for billable time. And, despite some suasion I got early in the relationship, there’s not much short of a Lear jet and beachfront on Maui that would entice me to move to Milwaukee.
It’s a sort of strange, but awfully stimulating, workspace.
Ed: OK, I wrote that last week and it languished due to doubts that it deserved the space, but I need to re-prime the pump.
Our trip with my brother and SIL last weekend worked out perfectly - nearly everything fell into place as if it were scripted.
Here’s a little soundtrack for a post about a trip that includes the San Juans - it’s called The Pig War by a Seattle band called Minus The Bear:
[audio:http://perilsofcaffeineintheevening.com/wp-content/uploads/ThePigWar.mp3]
I picked up my guests at the airport Wednesday night, and we left Thursday morning for a ferry ride across Puget Sound and a short drive to Port Townsend on the Olympic Peninsula (Click photos to enlarge).
Port Townsend is a charming little town nestled in a bay off of Admiralty Inlet, the passage that connects Puget Sound with the Strait of Wanna Fu Juan de Fuca. If you click the link above, you’ll read of an interesting wrinkle in its history that ensured the preservation of some knockout Victorian housing stock. Our weather pattern for the weekend was morning fog which the sun chased away at its leisure over the course of the afternoon. As we walked around Port Townsend, fog moved in and out, and eventually settled into a sculpted bank offshore, secreting ferries, container ships and other shipping, and their alarmist honking.
We stayed at a nice little place on the water called The Tides. Port Townsend and environs was the setting for the filming of the movie An Officer And A Gentleman, and The Tides was the site of one of Debra Winger and Richard Gere’s liasons. The middle photo below is the parade grounds at Fort Worden where the cadets’ graduation took place. The filming provided me with my only movie star client as a CPA. Friends of ours lived and ran businesses in Port Townsend at that time, and I did their taxes. During filming, one of their daughters was selected to appear in the film (in the dinner scene where Gere visited Debra Winger’s family. Their daughter was one of the kids at the table.) Every year thereafter, she got a 1099 from Paramount, and I prepared a little 1040 for her.
Friday morning, we had reservations for a boat tour that left Port Townsend, wound its way through the San Juan Islands to a lunch stop in Friday Harbor, and engaged in some wildlife-ogling and orca-watching on the return trip. Below you see the most interesting of our wildlife sightings, each in their own way attempting to absorb as many late-summer sunrays as possible.
And the piece de resistance: Our tour boat headed to the west side of San Juan Island and slipped in among a throng of other boats who were watching the J and K pods of southern resident orcas feeding offshore. The rule for whale-watching boats is to keep at least 100 meters’ distance, and, remarkably, all but one of the boats were scrupulously observing this etiquette. The whales, however, are under no such restriction, and at some point started heading towards the boats. The video below was taken as a pair of them approached, then swam around, our boat.
This might seem heretical to whale worshipers, but the above video for me is eerily reminiscent of this scene from my brother’s pond in South Carolina. For a time, the pond was home to one small-mouthed bass that, for all intents and purposes, became a housepet to my avid fisherman brother. It would follow us around the pond as we circumambulated the shore. I mean, can you eat a fish once you’ve named it “Shamu”? Shamu died of natural causes last spring. Or so we’re told. Me, I think he’s still down there, waiting for his “Call me fishmeal” moment:
And, finally, the ostensible reason for their visit arrived Saturday morning - the game at Husky Stadium between our Buckeyes and the Washington Huskies. Mrs. Perils is not a football fan, so my bro, SIL and I walked down to the stadium, taking time to meander around UW’s campus and absorb a little collegiate atmosphere. Upon entering the stadium, we were delighted to see that there was a large contingent wearing scarlet.
Also attending was an a pep band from the OSU Marching Band alumni club. When they were soliciting players earlier in the summer, I considered playing, but ultimately felt that it was sort of inappropriate for non-students to be participating in a college athletic event. I mean, it’s one thing to have an annual reunion game at our stadium where we play jointly with the student band and they love us and welcome us. It’s quite another thing to start showing up at away games and, in my opinion, usurping the role that students should be playing, even given that the Big Ten schools either send an entire band or nothing. I don’t want them to start thinking that they can quit sending the student band to away games because the alumni are only too happy to play. Our job as band alumni is to shut up and write checks. So, my brother and I attended the game as mere citizens. Meanwhile, the alumni band did a great job of playing and rallying our fans, they were loved and welcomed, and I’d have had a great time participating. But, in retrospect, I’m content with my decision.
The photos below depict a celebration after we scored, the final score on the scoreboard, and the team assembled in the endzone after the game, facing the contingent of fans and singing the alma mater along with the alumni band. A thoroughly satisfying afternoon. (I hasten to add - those people in kilts are not the OSU alumni band - it was high school band day at Husky Stadium, and they’re getting a ground-zero view of a tradition-laden program, even if it’s not the one they came to see!)
Those of you who pay attention to these things may have noticed that Ohio State is playing at Washington on Saturday. That means HERE, in Seattle. My youngest brother and his wife arrived last night and will stay through Sunday. We’re headed for Port Townsend this morning just for a change of venue. We’ll stay there tonight, and tomorrow we’ve arranged for a boat trip through the San Juan Islands, with a stop in Friday Harbor and perhaps some whale-watching.
We’ll come back to Seattle Friday night and Saturday, of course, we’ll walk down to Husky Stadium to watch the football game.
The Buckeyes have played here twice before, and both times they’ve gotten thrashed, so I’m puckering up and practicing my cringe.
I’m taking my laptop and camera, so I’ll post from the road if there’s connectivity.
