Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

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.

(Here’s the rewrite of the post I lost earlier today)
I was lying awake at 4 am the other morning, listening to some evolutionarily ambitious specie of bird that somehow was sensing the first sparse photons of the sunrise that I would spend the next two hours awaiting, chirping madly in hopes of lascivious egg-sex, or a regurgitated meal or some other inscrutable avian reward.

I was awake because at 2:30 I’d been roused by Mrs. Perils’ swift exit from the bed to investigate some noisome disturbance in the street in front of the house, which found both of us on the front porch in our risible 50-something sleepwear.

This was definitely an unusual level of vigilance, engendered by the fact that some meth-hungry twit had, the previous night, broken into our ‘95 Civic and separated the steering wheel from the steering column in an apparent attempt to steal the car (click photos to enlarge):

The note taped to the window was penned by our son, who still remembers how to write using pen and paper. And he’s right - it was an incredibly amateurish hack-job of an attempt to heist an eminently heistable car. Just as you don’t want to be the first heart bypass patient of a rookie surgeon, you don’t want to be the first victim of a rookie car thief. I mean, I’ve always been a big supporter of education, and everybody has to learn his trade by practicing it. But, jeez, you’d think these guys would have enough respect for their profession to spend a portion of their two sentient daily hours at the library doing some research in a Chilton’s manual.

Because the front wheels wouldn’t turn, the tow truck guy had to go through some extended maneuvers to get the car onto the truck. On the positive side, it provided an hour’s entertainment for a couple of neighborhood kids, and their parents.

Well, I just lost a post that I’m sure wasn’t as clever as I remember it in my bereavement.  I’ll rewrite it when my anger subsides.

However, I will note that today Mrs. Perils and I will, if we remember it this evening, celebrate the Vinyl Anniversary of our wedding.  Technically, our Vinyl Anniversary won’t be for another 122 days, when our nuptials will be 33 1/3 years old.  Still, if you play it at 33 instead of 33 1/3, it’ll sound only a smidgen slow.  Like us.

I’m having a “downtown” day today.  It starts with a visit to my dentist in what was fastidiously called “The International District” for most of our residency in Seattle, but is now just as often referred to as “Chinatown”.  Presuming that nothing untoward happens to me in the dentist’s chair, I have a couple of appointments in separate office buildings in the downtown core as I interview banks for a client that has outgrown its current banking relationship.

I used to work downtown and relished the kaleidoscopic workday parade, from tattooed bike messengers to high-maintenance Ann Taylor lovelies.  Especially them.  I forsook those blissful sidewalk climes in 2001 to start my own business, and my clients tend to be located in outlying areas.  Outlying, like Milwaukee.  Now, coming down here, I feel more like the Geico cavemen, dressed a little funny and befuddled by both missing buildings and buildings that didn’t used to be here.

The dental appointment went fine.  Our dentist is a woman we met some 30 years ago at a party, just after she graduated from dental school.  She’s always very meticulous - cleans our teeth herself instead of delegating to a hygeinist - but this time she seemed to be especially attentive to detail.  It puzzled me a bit until I realized she was sporting some glasses that I hadn’t seen before, with some special lenses protruding from the bottom.  I asked her if they were new, and she said they were, and had cost her over $1,000.  I pay $10 for 2 pairs of readers that I grab from the bin at my local hardware store.  I’d love to see what $1,000 would do to ameliorate my presbyopia.  In any case, I believe that solves the mystery of her extra chipping and scraping.

The banker sessions were fun.  Their offices were each above the 20th floor of their respective buildings, and I took the opportunity to unabashedly gawk at the view of Puget Sound, even if it was too cloudy to see the Olympic Mountains.  And, it’s always pleasant to deal with people who are trying to sell you something.  Things may be different when their beady-eyed underwriters finish crunching the numbers, but that’s for another day.  Today, though, and for the next couple of days as I do a few more presentations, I’ll get the fawning obsequies, and that’s a welcome break from the more mundane world of execution and exposition.

OK, not much inspiration for actual content, so I’ll post some pictures from our walk down to Gasworks Park last night. It was a lovely, summer-y (!) evening. Strolling through the Seattle Tilth garden, we saw this hummingbird flit around, then perch brazenly about 10 feet away. They’re usually a lot more skittish than that

(Click any photo to enlarge)

Further down the hill, there was a car festooned with refrigerator-magnet words. I’m not sure if it was an invitation for passers-by to compose something, and I wasn’t willing to risk the ire of its owner by doing so. The reflection of Mrs. Perils is sort of interesting, though. I totally planned that.

Down at Gasworks Park, it was Prom Night for one of the area schools, with a photo session on top of Kite Hill. I’m tickled at how they’re standing in rows facing each other. In the picture on the left, the girl seems to be considering whether she needs to obey the sign on the fence.

These guys are definitely not headed for the prom:

I know you must get tired of this view, but I like these photos so well I can’t let them moulder in obscurity on my hard disk:

It may be the result of a slow news day, but both of Seattle’s daily papers carried the story of a bear who swam Friday from Maury Island in southern Puget Sound to Salt Water State Park on the densely-populated mainland. (Thanks to Janet for calling my attention to it) The story piqued my interest because I’ve done the same crossing in my kayak, launching from Salt Water Park and paddling the two miles over to Maury and back. You have to deal with currents, and pay attention to traffic because it’s a major shipping lane.

Salt Water State Park is about one of the few places on the mainland where the dude could have landed with some cover, but I can’t imagine that was his intended port of call when he plunged into the water. It’s hard enough to navigate when you can see where you’re going.

Bear’s Eye View: On the left is Maury Island, with the Point Robinson lighthouse in the distance, from which the observer quoted in the article tracked the amphibian. On the right is what the far coast of the mainland looked to the bear as he departed Maury (Click either photo to enlarge).

Guess I’ll have to think about mounting bear bells fore and aft.

I arrived home Friday about midnight, and my most signal accomplishment so far this weekend has been catching up on my sleep. I still wake up at weird times, and may have to go wandering, but it’s luxurious to be able to return to bed, eventually, and slurp long draughts of sleep, as if I were dipping a bowl into a fountain of it and pouring it into my mouth and dowsing my head with it. Talking post-noon arousals both Saturday and today.

I’ve been reading Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar, although my reading of it has been as fitful as my sleeping, and I’m not that far. In the first chapter, an aging Hadrian laments the elusiveness of sleep for the superannuated:

It does seem odd how we take sleep for granted in our youth, and actually spend a lot of energy strategizing against it, only to have it abandon us at just the time when we’re best equipped to show it the most fawning hospitality.

Hope you’re all having a restful holiday.

I hiked over to that health club near my hotel that I mentioned below, and it turns out they’ll let me pay $12 per night instead of making me buy some kind of membership package.  I was delighted, as it’s a really nice facility, with a squadron of bikes and treadthings, a pool, and enough weight machines that I can replicate my Seattle Nautilus workout.

I started with 20 minutes on a bike, riding hell-for-leather into a horizon of 5 TV screens, each with a different station and subtitles going.  There was ESPN milking the NBA draft lottery into a 2-hour program, an episode of Seinfeld, SportsCenter and (hiss!) Faux News.  I’ve never spent a lot of time watching subtitled TV, and I found it sort of hilarious.  They must use a software program to translate (I can’t imagine a basement full of cloned Archie and Mehitabels somewhere offshore, typing away as the program drones on).  At one point in the SportsCenter show, the anchor was talking about a quarterback who had transferred to USC, and the text on the TV said, “and he’ll have three years of jibbletts left.”

I’m working here with a woman who does the manufacturing scheduling for my client, and she starts work at 6:30 am.  That’s 4:30 am for me, for those of you keeping score at home.  I’m a stay-up-til-midnight person at home, and it’s nearly impossible for me to be in bed by midnight when I’m in eastern climes.  I was shooting for 10 pm tonight, looks like I’ll overshoot by an hour.  Good thing I’m not real fussy about how I look for work anymore, I can get outta here pretty fast in the morning.

As I worked with this woman today, I realized that she was one of those people with so much accumulated knowledge capital that you want to hire a Hummer and a driver to transport her around town, with an armed guard to escort her between the building and the vehicle.  I quietly called the state AG’s office and invoked Article XLVIII, wherein an employer can override an employee’s living will and require extraordinary means of prolonging her life, agony or no.  Didn’t know we could do that, didja?

11:02 - Nailed it!