Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

As briefly mentioned earlier, Prairie and I went out to see Star Trek on Friday evening, and, long story short: given the unenviable and potentially disastrous goal of reinvigorating a much-beloved but floundering and stagnant franchise that most people had written off as long past its prime, J.J. Abrams and company managed to beat the odds and pull it off with style. In the many long months leading up to the release of the film, I’d wanted it to be good, I’d hoped it would be good, and as we got closer, the many outstanding reviews gave me hope — and for once, I wasn’t let down.

Non-spoilery Rambling

The biggest question, of course — beyond even the redesign of the Enterprise and her big nacelles, or how well the story would mesh with established canon — was whether recasting characters that we’ve known for so many decades would even work. Could they manage to be the characters without either slavishly aping the original actors, or fall into parody? Would Kirk be Kirk without Shatner’s (not quite) inimitable delivery?

Thankfully, the answer is yes. As I’ve been thinking back over the film over the past couple days, the biggest thing that stands out to me is just how incredibly well the cast did at inhabiting the essence of the characters and their personalities without falling into the trap of mimicking the original actors. Pine, Quinto and Urban as the “holy trinity” of Kirk, Spock and McCoy likely had the toughest jobs in making us believe in them as the characters, but all three of them (along with the rest of the primary cast) managed to make me a believer.

Given that much of what was done in this film was necessary to ‘reset’ the franchise so that they could move forward from here without being trapped by canon — really, I don’t quite understand how people can be upset about the device used to reset things, as without that, we’d know the future of the characters and there wouldn’t be much long-term suspense or real sense of danger — I am really looking forward to seeing where we go from here on out.

I want to see this movie in the theater again, I want to have it at home to watch again, and I already can’t wait to see what this team can do with the sequel, when they’re free to move forward.

More thoughts under the cut, as they’re going to be more than a little spoileriffic…

Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

First off, the good news: we’re not being affected by the current weather craziness hitting the northwest. While we’re near the Green River, which is pretty high at the moment — the National Weather Service Advanced Hydrologic Prediction Service has one checkpoint on the Green River, near Aburn (just south of us), which shows it at ‘Action Stage’ but already crested and predicted to drop (check other NW area rivers here — it doesn’t look like it’ll be flooding in our area.

That said, this is nuts! This stormpocalypse hit us in two stages: first the snowpocalypse, and now the floodpocalypse (yes, the nomenclature is silly, but that’s part of the fun). I’ve been watching #waflood on Twitter, and it’s been fascinating watching all the updates appear.

It’s also neat seeing just who all is involved with this method of awareness and communication. In addition to all the “normal people” giving updates, the Washington State Department of Transportation is using WSDOT and @terpening (as well as their Flickr account, the city of Bellingham, FEMA (a far cry from Katrina!), the Red Cross, King County, and probably plenty of other official organizations are joining in. Lots of good information coming out…even when the information isn’t good:

Washington Transportation Secretary Paula Hammond says Interstate 5 at Chehalis could be closed for four days.

The Transportation Department is monitoring the flooding. The DOT says I-5 is closed from US 12, milepost 68, to Grand Mound, milepost 88 in Lewis County due to the rising water in Dillenbaugh Creek south of Chehalis.

Hammond says the flooding is similar to the December 2007 flood that caused a four-day blockage on the main north-south route in Western Washington.

Hammond says when the Chehalis River crests Thursday night, officials expect water to be 10 feet deep over the highway. After the water starts falling, crews plan to use pumps and breach a levy to help the water drain out.

Hammond says about 10,000 trucks a day travel I-5 and the financial impact of the closure on freight movement is about $4 million a day. That’s made worse by the closure of the three major Cascade passes.

In fact, according to an early morning WSDOT tweet, “There are no north south routes available between Seattle and Portland, or east west routes from Western WA to Spokane at this time #waflood”. Unless you want to go to Canada, Seattle and its surrounding metro area is essentially completely cut off!

Crazy stuff, and I’m counting myself quite glad to not be directly impacted by any of this — though it came close, as Prairie’s dad sent us a shot of the Lewis River just outside his house in Woodland (in southern Washington, just north of Vancouver, which is just north of Portland).

The river holding, the rising has slowed, four feet to the top of the bank, then four feet to the main floor. Am watching close, a fireman rang the door bell, said be ready to evacuate, have been planning but have taken no action, hope that I don’t have to scramble.

It sounds like the river didn’t get quite high enough for evacuation, but that’s pretty close!

So…what’s going to be Stormpocalypse Part III?

Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

We have so many books in our apartment!

For a few years now, I’ve been using LibraryThing to track my book collection. Ever since Prairie and I moved in together, we’ve been occasionally talking about adding her books to the listing, but it always seemed like such a monumental undertaking that we never actually did anything about it. However, with us both on a bit of a holiday break, we decided that the time had come, and we’ve been plugging away at the collection, putting about a shelf a day into the database on my computer and then uploading the day’s entries into the LibraryThing database.

And now, the project is done: our entire library — all 1,465 books — is cataloged!

It’s a fun library, too. Between Prairie’s years in English Literature classes and love for the classics, my science-fiction collection, our mutual love for good children’s literature, and many other influences, we’ve ended up with a collection that goes all over the place.

This also gave us a good chance to get a look at how we’re doing with those authors we’re making a point of collecting: Agatha Christie, Anne Rice, Dean Koontz, Roald Dahl, Stephen King (a full set, we believe), and others.

We do love our books!

Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

I’m a little bit early on this one, sure, but Prairie and I are about to head to bed, full of a great New Years Eve dinner (which to most people would look suspiciously like the traditional Thanksgiving dinner). Perhaps it means we’re getting old, but we’ll most likely be celebrating the turn of the year with snores instead of noisemakers and fireworks.

However you are celebrating (or have celebrated) the new year, enjoy it, and here’s hoping we all have a good 2009!

Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

I keep hearing and seeing people grumble about this Holiday season. Between the economy sucking everyone’s spare change away and Snowpocalypse 2008 (that Flickr set is now updated with the rest of my snow photos, by the way) burying the entire Northwest coast under more snow than has been seen in a decade (or more), it seems like nobody’s happy.

Well, just to buck the trend, we’re not doing too badly here. It’s actually been a very nice Christmas this year. Not that these things didn’t affect us — we had to scale back on our presents a little bit, I lost a couple day’s worth of pay from work on days when we shut down, and Prairie’s been going a bit stir crazy from being cooped up in the apartment (the school’s on its winter break, so she’s not working, and she let me use the car to get to and from work, as my Alaskan-trained driving skills — mad skillz — served me well) — but it certainly hasn’t been the WORST. CHRISTMAS. EVAR. that it seems to have ended up being for many.

When we decided not to go for the HDTV, that freed up a chunk of budget for presents. So, we got a couple “big” things (I got a new stereo, so that when we do replace the TV, we’ve got a stereo that can handle the HDMI switching and all that gibberish; Prairie got a very pretty new shiny to wear) that didn’t add up to nearly as much as the TV would have been, then went to Goodwill and picked up a huge pile of books for each of us for right around $30. Once those were wrapped, plus a few other things we’d picked up here and there (dollar stores are great for silly little stocking stuffers, by the way), we had a huge pile of presents under our tree for around half of our original Christmas budget. Not bad!

Short sidenote: I love going digging for books at Goodwill. I’m a fan of sci-fi short story collections, and will pretty much grab ‘em when I see ‘em whenever we’re digging through cheap used book selections. This time, I found a real treasure: a 1958 edition of The Year’s Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy that includes a special section titled “Science-Fiction becomes Science-Fast—Sputnik and beyond” and on the back notes that it includes “A novelette called ‘The Fly’—one of the great horror stories of this or any other year…soon to be a great Twentieth Century-Fox picture in CinemaScope and color.” As much fun for the era it was published in as for the stories inside!

Prairie’s been on her winter break for almost two full weeks now. The company I work for gets really slow and pulls back to a skeleton crew over the holidays, and since I’m “just” the receptionist/admin assistant, I’m not part of that skeleton crew, so I get about a week and a half off of work, from the 25th through Jan. 5th. Lose a little pay, but it’s really nice to have a bit of a Christmas break! So we’re both enjoying having a little mini-vacation time.

I’ve got a couple projects lined up for my downtime: I’m going to try to get caught up on processing photos (I’ve got a fair chunk of stuff from October and November to get through), and Prairie and I are working our way through her shelves of books, adding them to the database and formally combining our collections. We’re at almost 1,000 books so far, and expect to be fairly easily somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 once everything in the house is entered in.

And that pretty much brings us up to date. Enjoy your holidays, everyone. We are!

Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

A couple weeks ago, while planning ahead for our expected Christmas purchases, I asked whether to Blu or not to Blue. Turns out, contrary to the Bard’s already-mangled quote, that wasn’t the question. After some reviewing of finances and priorities, Prairie and I decided to stay in Standard Definition for the time being, and save our purchase of a fancy-schmancy new HDTV set for some as-yet undetermined future date.

The really fun part of this decision was rejiggering our plans for presents. Such jigs have now been re’d, and after a day of shopping around our old haunts in Northgate (which not-so-coincidentally also involved visiting and lunching with Hope and Peter) and an evening of wrapping presents, we’ve got a big ol’ pile o’ presents under our tree!

I did want to thank all of you who contributed thoughts and advice while I was researching the available options. Hopefully I won’t need to call on you again down the line when prices have dropped enough for us to feel comfortable diving into the HD pool with all you cool kids!

Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

For Christmas this year, Prairie and I have decided to treat ourselves and upgrade our TV set from the one I bought when I moved to Seattle seven and a half years ago (!!!!!). It’s a nice enough TV (a Sony Wega 27”), but it’s huge, heavy, and while still in good shape, it’s old tech. The original plan was to wait until it died, but between Sony’s generally good longevity (my parents had a little Sony 13” TV that went for almost thirty years) and my geeky techno-lust, Prairie surprised me by suggesting that we go ahead and upgrade to the new hotness.

So, the hunt is in progress. At this point, I’m pretty much decided on a 32” Samsung, most likely either the LN32A550 or the LN32A650, depending on where prices land in the weeks between Black Friday and Christmas.

Of course, with the jump to an HDTV comes the jump to HD programming. Day-to-day entertainment will come courtesy of Comcast — we’re already getting our cable through them, so we’ll just upgrade that to the minimum possible digital/HD package. For movies, though, we’re doing a bit of back-and-forth (though, to be honest, Prairie’s on the “back” — that is, staying with what we have — while I’m on the “forth” side of the discussion).

My movie-loving, technology-geeking little heart tends to go all a-pitter-pat at upgrading to Blu-Ray. I jumped onto the DVD bandwagon as soon as it dropped into the realm of affordability, loved the jump in video and audio quality from my old VHS tapes, and have been looking forward to the next step forward.

Prairie, however, doesn’t really see what all the fuss is about, and her approach is one that I’m having an amusingly tough time arguing against: if we can see the show and enjoy the story, than what’s the big deal? She never saw a big difference between VHS and DVD, doesn’t really care about surround sound (a moot point at the moment, as living in an apartment building means that standard stereo at reasonable levels is far more realistic than full surround and gut-thumping subwoofers — something we really wish our neighbors would realize…), and just doesn’t see the point in adding another piece of electronics and another remote to the stack we have to keep track of already.

I’ve gotta admit, it’s hard to really say, “But…it’s better!” without realizing just how foolish that sounds.

Not that I don’t try. I’d have my geek card revoked if I didn’t at least try.

(And on a not-unrelated-at-all side note, I think it works wonderfully that our respective geek levels generally balance out into reasonable end results. I don’t know how couples made of dual übergeeks can manage!)

In any case, I think part of the conversation is simply the fact that we don’t really know how much of a change we’re going to see when we upgrade. Sure, I’ve looked at all the numbers and can see the mathmatical difference between SD 640x480 and FullHD 1920x1080, I’ve done simple little experiments looking at resolution increases, and I’ve been working with digital photography long enough that I can get a feel for the difference betweeen a .3 megapixel image and a 2 megapixel image (the approximate difference between SD and FullHD). But running numbers and reading webpages is no substitute for actually seeing what happens when we plug it all together.

So I tried a little experiment today, and tossed out two questions on Twitter…

You who’ve moved from “old school” TV to a new HDTV (pref. w/some form of HD feed): is it really that big of a difference? Turned up to 11?

Same question, part 2: Along the same lines, how about the DVD to Blu-Ray transition? Again, is it that much visibly better?

…and got the following responses:

• axsdeny: DVD to Blu-Ray: yes. If you have even a 720p TV you can tell the difference. It’s beautiful.
• lyracole: i don’t notice the difference between my standard and hd, but sir does. also, fuck blu-ray.
• stoppableforce: w/r/t the difference between SDTV and HDTV: YES. YES. DEAR GOD YES. The difference in clarity is A-FUCKIN’-MAZING.
• stoppableforce: w/r/t the DVD-to-Blu-Ray thing: Not so much. We’ve got both, Blu-Ray looks slightly better, not enough to make me buy a PS3 yet.
• mellzah: I hate to admit it, but blu-ray looks great. DVDs don’t look sharp on my TV— non-HD projection 50ish inch—but Blu-Ray movies do!
• skyler: Huge difference. I attribute most of it to HDMI, actually. Clearer interference free signal. Xbox 360 + 1080p is great w/DVDs.
• antifuse: short answer? Yes. Longer answer? Depends what you watch. Plain DVDs upscaled by Blu ray look fab, and many shows look great too.
• wnalyd: Finally answering your HDTV question: Heck yeah there’s a difference bwtn HD + SD. Turned up to 17. Wouldn’t go back.

So the final consensus (admittedly, since I used Twitter, drawing from a very weighted sample of at least somewhat geeky-type people), while not clear-cut across the board, seems to be that yes, there is a difference, ranging from “better” to “A-FUCKIN’-MAZING”. We’ll just have to wait and see where we fall along that spectrum with the equipment we have (we’ll have the HDTV and HD cable from Comcast for the pretty pretty pixels, and a non-upconverting DVD/VHS combo deck for movies), and maybe see if I can find anyone with a Blu-Ray player for us to borrow for a night to help us decide if we want to add that piece, too (of course, if the Blu-Ray players don’t drop into affordability, that’ll make the whole point moot as well).

Did I miss anything?

Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

It took a while, but I finally got my photos from the Puyallup Fair processed and uploaded. Prairie and I went on a whim late in the summer, and had a really good day wandering around the fairgrounds. We didn’t go on any rides, but did play some of the carny games, got some cotton candy, looked at exhibits, and had a blast watching the Mutton Bustin’!

Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

It’s Prairie’s birthday today!

Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

Yesterday afternoon, Prairie and I got a call from her sister Hope offering us tickets to the closing night show of The Phantom of the Opera at the Paramount. She’d gotten sick earlier in the day and just wasn’t up to going out, so she and Peter decided to see if we wanted to go. We, of course, were happy to take them (after passing on our sympathies, of course), and headed out for an unexpected but not unwelcome night out at the theater.

I’ve grown up with Phantom, from having the soundtrack nearly as long as I can remember to owning the behind-the-scenes book The Complete Phantom of the Opera to having performed a few of the numbers during my days in the Anchorage Children’s Choir, and this was my second time seeing the show. While not unfamiliar with the show — its nearly impossible to have an interest in modern theater culture and not know about Phantom — this was Prairie’s first opportunity to see it on stage.

The show itself, while enjoyable for the spectacle, wasn’t at all a great show. The performances were good, though I wouldn’t really rate them much better than that, and much of the spectacle felt a little rushed, like you didn’t really have time to appreciate the moment before being whisked off to the next scene. There were no flubs, it certainly wasn’t a bad performance, and we both enjoyed the grandeur of the whole thing. It just wasn’t stellar.

Additionally, we’re curious if we might be more appreciative of the less-expensive balcony seats for our next show at the Paramount. Each time we’ve gone to a show and splurged for floor seats, the sound mix in the theater has been surprisingly bad, with the actors overly loud compared to the music and many of the group numbers turning into a muddled, unintelligible mess. We don’t remember having this issue when we’ve seen shows from the balcony, though, so we’re curious if the acoustics in the Paramount happen to favor the balcony. For our next show, we’re going to stay away from the floor and see what we think.

Lastly, two points that I’ve touched on before but that, unfortunately, still need to be addressed (and, realistically, probably aren’t going to change in the foreseeable future):

It’s truly distressing how few people think of theater as Theater (with a capital ‘t’). Both Prairie and I were brought up to see a night out at a show as something special. It’s not something that happens every day (or even every week or month), and so it’s not something to be taken completely casually. It is something that should be dressed for: I’d argue for good business work clothes at the minimum, if you’re not actually going to take the time to dress up. Above all, jeans and t-shirts? Not acceptable!

The crowd at last nights show, admittedly, was a bit better than we’ve seen at other shows in the past. That said, I still hold that ratty jeans and tracksuits should be unacceptable at the theater.

One last thing: a standing ovation should be given for extraordinarily good performances. Not for every performance you happen to be at. Not for slightly above average performances. And certainly not for performances with flubbed lines, broken props, and bad sound. I’ve noticed this trend a lot lately, where it’s more rare to be at a performance that doesn’t get a standing ovation than to be at a performance that does. That’s really not how this is supposed to work, folks. A standing ovation is something special, to be reserved for those truly stand-out performances, not used for every performance you bother to attend.

Prairie and I just sat in our seats last night. The people around us probably thought we were being rude (ironic, given that I had to shoot the twit on my left a few glares when she started singing along with the show), but it just wasn’t an ovation-worthy performance. Good, yes; worthy of applause and appreciation, yes; worthy of a whoopin’ and hollerin’ standing ovation? Certainly not.

Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

A few weekends ago, Prairie and I went down to visit family south of us: her mom and sister in Vancouver, WA; my brother and his family in Corvallis, OR; then Prairie’s dad and grandpa in Woodland, WA on our way back up to Seattle.

I’ve finally finished putting all the photos from the weekend up in a photoset. Here’s my nephews Paul and Noah to kick things off!

Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

Last weekend, Prairie and I went on a round of family visits, seeing her mom and sister in Vancouver, WA, my brother and family in Corvallis, OR, and her dad and grandpa in Woodland, WA. While we were in Woodland with Prairie’s dad and grandpa, Prairie took a few minutes to poke around the house and collect some old glassware to bring home. While she was exploring, she found some fun old currency, some of which we recognized, some of which we didn’t. I’ve scanned them in and done a little Wikipedia research, and here’s what we came up with.

1935G “No Motto” $1 Silver Certificate

Silver Certificates were printed for a time in the United States as a form of paper currency. They were produced in response to silver agitation by citizens who were angered by the Fourth Coinage Act, which placed the United States on the gold standard. The certificate was matched to the same amount of value in silver coinage. For example, one fifty dollar Silver Certificate equals fifty silver dollars. Note the Series 1935G came in two varieties, with motto (“In God We Trust”) and without motto. The with motto demands higher premiums than the without motto.

1953C $2 United States Note

The United States two-dollar bill ($2) is a current denomination of U.S. currency. When U.S. currency was changed to its current size, the $2 bill was issued only as a United States Note. After United States Notes were discontinued, the $2 bill later began to be issued as a Federal Reserve Note. The denomination of two dollars was first used by the United States federal government in July 1862. The denomination was continuously used until 1966 when the only class of U.S. currency it was then assigned to, United States Notes, began to be discontinued. All small-sized $2 United States Notes with a red seal and older large size notes are obsolete and are collectibles.

Series 481 (6/20/51 thru 5/25/54) Five Cent Military Payment Certificate

Military Payment Certificates, or MPC, were used from the end of World War II until the end of the Vietnam War, between the years 1946 and 1973. MPC’s utilized layers of line lithography to create colorful banknotes that could be produced cheaply. Fifteen series of MPC’s were created but only 13 series were issued.

1917 Cinq Francs Note

The franc (represented by the franc sign ₣ or more commonly just F) is a former currency of France. Between 1360 and 1641, it was the name of coins worth 1 livre tournois and it remained in common parlance as a term for this amount of money. It was re-introduced (in decimal form) in 1795 and remained the national currency until the introduction of the euro in 1999 (for accounting purposes) and 2002 (coins and banknotes).

Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

In happier news: first photos of the new apartment!

Here’s what you see when you walk in the front door. Bookshelves along the rear wall, the deck (which has become our favorite spot for breakfast and dinner, thanks to the patio furniture that Prairie’s dad gifted us with), our new couch and chair (brand-new furniture, right from a furniture store — we’re really turning into adults, aren’t we?), the fireplace, entertainment center, and dining room.

Another view of the living room, this time from the door to the deck. The three bookshelves on the right will gain a fourth as soon as we can add one, every shelf on those is double-stacked with books.

My office. In the last apartment, my office doubled as the guest room, but now it’s primarily just my office, only acting as a secondary guest room when we have enough guests to need it.

That’s because with a three-bedroom apartment, Prairie now gets an office of her own, instead of having to camp out in a corner of the living room, and her office is now the main guest room. It’s also very girly and pink, which is just the way she wanted it!

There’s also two bathrooms — but those are bathrooms, and not terribly exciting to take pictures of — and our bedroom, which we don’t feel needs to be broadcast to the world. That’s our room, after all.

We’re really enjoying this apartment. Lots of space, not nearly as cramped, and as we specified wanting a corner or end unit, we’ve got enough windows to get a good breeze keeping the place cool at all times. Since we’re on the third floor, the trees outside keep things nice and private, so we don’t have to worry about people peeking in the windows at us (a pretty common occurrence at our last complex). The deck looks over a small playground, so there’s almost always kids playing out back.

Joke all you want about living in Kent — and I’ve already heard more than a few cracks from Seattleites who don’t get why we’d want to be in the suburbs — but so far, we’re liking it a lot.

Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

Finally — after far too much sturm und drang — we’re back up and running! Well, mostly. The most important parts, at least.

As of the last major update, I’d told Speakeasy to take a flying leap. After getting done with that, I called Qwest to see what they could do directly (our other option is Comcast, who I just can’t trust my ‘net service to). Qwest was quite helpful, and told me that they’d be able to have a DSL ‘net connection and DirecTV service installed and active on Wednesday the 30th, with VoIP phone service up and running a few days after that. That sounded reasonable to me (it was the same timeframe Speakeasy would have given me if I’d been willing to give them yet another chance), so I gave it a go.

On Monday, Prairie and I got to talked, and decided that it’d be a good thing to make sure the DirecTV install tech was going to bring a tripod mount for the satellite dish, as we’re not allowed to mount anything directly to the building. I called DirecTV, verified that a tripod would be in the truck, and then the service rep told me that if I wanted, I could upgrade one of the DirecTV receivers to a DVR version for free. Free is always a nice price, so I said sure, go ahead.

Wednesday was supposed to be the “go” day: DirecTV between 8am and noon, a Qwest tech on site to do the physical connection by 5pm, and the DSL modem hardware arriving sometime that day (it’s sent directly from Qwest, rather than having the tech bring it with him). Prairie went off to work, and I sat here at home and waited for the DirecTV tech.

And waited. And waited. And eventually, noon came and went, and there’d been no sign of the tech. I called DirecTV, and things immediately went all pear-shaped, as the first person I talked to told me that she could find no record of me in the system, and dumped me off on someone else who was in another department and was of even less help. I called back, got a different representative, and they were able to find me — only to tell me that, though I hadn’t been informed of this during the call, when I upgraded to the DVR receiver, the rep had had to cancel my original install and reschedule it for Sunday, Aug. 3rd. There’s nothing I can do about this, unfortunately — and I was quite vocal about this being a pretty sour first experience with DirecTV — so that will be happening Sunday morning. Still, the TV is the least important of the three pieces of the communication puzzle.

After venting to Prairie for a few minutes, I took a walk to calm down and check the mail to see if the box from Qwest with the DSL modem had arrived. It wasn’t in the mail, but when I got back to the apartment, there was a Qwest truck sitting in our parking spot. The tech had just finished up hooking up the DSL connection, and he said that we were live, all we needed was the DSL modem. Qwest ships those by UPS, so it should show up before 5pm. So far so good — I knew that at least part of the process had worked correctly — so he went on his way, and I waited for UPS.

And waited. And waited. At 5pm, I went down to check to see if UPS had given them a box for me without putting a note on my door. Nope, no go. Back home, and by 5:30, I was back on the line with Qwest to see what the story was with the hardware. The guy on the phone clicks around a bit, and then tells me that there’d been “a delay” with the package, but it was in UPS’s hands and should be arriving Thursday (the next day). Well, okay — not terribly thrilling, but at least it was on the way, and he was able to give me a tracking number so that I could check up on it if I could find a way to get to Qwest’s website.

This morning, I used the WiFi network at Prairie’s office to check the tracking number. It turns out that according to UPS, they picked the package up at 7:35pm in Denver, CO. This would have been just after I got off the phone with the representative who’d told me there’d been a “delay” — apparently, the “delay” was simply not sending the package out on time, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he’d been reading the tracking number to me off the bill on the package before running it down to the mailroom!

On the bright side, though, they did ship the box next day air, so it arrived at the apartment complex while I was coming back from Prairie’s office. As an added bonus, the box had the VoIP modem as well as the DSL modem, so after a few minutes plugging in cables and fiddling with configuration details, I was finally back online, and able to place telephone calls without chewing through the minutes on my pre-paid cell phone. It took two weeks after physically moving into the building (and a month and a half after starting the original service transfer process with Speakeasy), multiple friendly and not-so-friendly calls to the various companies dealing with various screwups, bailing out of one company and getting set up on another, and burning through at least $50 worth of pre-paid cell phone minutes, but it’s done.

So. Two pieces down — internet and telephone — and one to go — DirecTV. We’ll see how that goes come Sunday.

Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

So last night, about 5:30pm, as I’m working in Aperture, the power dies. Odd. Just us? Nope, the hallway lights were out too, so it was at least our whole building. I had to drop off the rent check anyway, so I grabbed it and wandered over to the manger’s office. On the way, I peeked in the front door of one of the other buildings and saw that their hallway lights were on, so it looked like it was just our building that had lost power.

When I got to the office, the on-site manager was trying to get a call in to City Light to let them know, but couldn’t get a chance, as her phone kept ringing with calls from people across the complex. These buildings are so old that they’re apparently wired semi-randomly across two city circuits, so while our entire building was out, the other buildings were half-out — one had power in the halls but not in the apartments, the one with the manager’s office had power in the office, but none in the halls, and so on. Prairie and I had actually run into this a couple years back in our original apartment here, when we lost power in half of our apartment. Weird stuff.

In any case, since they were calling City Light to figure out what was going on, I wandered back to the apartment and puttered around for a bit. I cleaned off my desk, went through my desk drawers and filled a garbage bag with old crap that I don’t need to move. Since the apartment was starting to get pretty muggy (no power means no fans), I wandered out to the pool to take a dip and cool off while waiting for the power to come back. After a while, though I was nicely waterlogged, nothing else had changed, so I got out and went to ask the managers if they had any word. “The only word you’ll get is when the power comes on,” they told me. “Is City Light even around?” I asked. “Around here? Naah. I think they’re poking around down in Lake City somewhere.” Great. Not encouraging.

Since the day was getting on, and Prairie normally e-mails me to let me know when she’s leaving work, I figured it’d be a good idea to let her know what was going on. I originally planned on walking down to the Panera at the Northgate Mall to use their WiFi, but then remembered that there was a Starbucks in the QFC a few blocks closer. I walked down there and stood outside to see if I could pick up a signal on my iPod, but while I couldn’t see one for Starbucks, there was an open network called ‘ampm’. Really? I tried to connect, but the signal was too weak. Curious, I went across the street to the AM/PM gas station, tried again…and connected! So, I sat my butt down underneath their sign, e-mailed Prairie, sent Ping.fm a note to update Twitter, LJ, and all other such things, and marveled at AM/PM having free open-access WiFi. Just in case you need to check your e-mail while you’re filling your tank, I guess. Weird. Weird, but very appreciated. On the walk home, I got caught in a thundershower — I’d been hearing occasional rumbles echoing across the sky, but just happened to be out when the rain started coming down. Big ol’ fat raindrops, too, so I as soaked as when I got out of the pool by the time I got home.

When Prairie came home, there still wasn’t power. We dug out our flashlights so they’d be ready when the evening got too dark to see and headed out to eat at Claire’s Pantry in Lake City (short review: good food, hit-and-miss service). When we got home, there were four City Light trucks in various places around our house, with at least one parked next to an open manhole cover, so it was obvious that they still hadn’t figured out what was going on. So, we lit a bunch of candles, each grabbed a book and a piece of chocolate fudge cake that we’d picked up on the way home, and had a very nice evening of dessert and reading by candlelight, listening as the thunder rolled across the sky from time to time. A bit before eleven, we decided it was time to crash. I put my book down, grabbed a flashlight, leaned over, blew out a candle…and the fan next to me spun up, the refrigerator motor kicked in, and the light in the office turned on. Just in time for bed!

What’s fascinating me is that the thunderstorm that started yesterday afternoon is still going on. I had to get up to use the restroom about forty minutes ago, and when I laid back down, there was a good sized thunderclap. A few moments later, I caught a flash of light through my eyelids, and just a few seconds later, another thunderclap hit — this one loud enough to wake Prairie up, too. She went back to sleep, but when the third thunderclap hit a few moments later, I realized that I was a bit too awake to get back to sleep (growing up in Anchorage, thunderstorms are a very rare event, so I get pretty exited by them). So here I am — it’s 6:15 in the morning, and I’m awake and blogging. Rain’s coming down outside the window, and the thunder is still coming in every couple minutes. Pretty cool.

I just hope I can get a nap before I head off to work this afternoon.

Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

On this day, 60 years ago, The New Yorker published “The Lottery,” by Shirley Jackson.

People flipped…out—cancelled subscriptions, wrote bags of hate mail. The story was banned outright in South Africa and, according to Wikipedia, ranked seventeenth on Playboy’s list of books most banned by public high schools in the U.S.

This was the only Shirley Jackson story I’d read until I met Prairie, who is a huge Shirley Jackson fan. I was probably in high school when I read it last, so I re-read it a couple of years back, and it’s still an incredibly powerful story.

If you haven’t read it, you can do so here.

(via The Slog, who really should have chosen a different title for their post — there are people who might not have read the story yet, after all.)

Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

It’s official — Prairie and I have a new apartment! We’d been keeping an eye on Craigslist over the past few months as I got closer to graduation, looking for places in the Kent/Des Moines area that fit what we were looking for: two or three bedrooms, two bathrooms, reserved parking, washer and dryer, and if at all possible, a pool (we’ve gotten quite spoiled by having a pool available here during the summer months). By Friday, we had a list of four places we wanted to check out, and we headed off to see how they compared to their on-paper representations.

(I was quite proud of myself for getting us all organized: on Thursday, I’d called the places, set up appointments at each, printed out their Craigslist listings, Google Maps directions from each to the next in order, and a little sheet of questions we wanted to be sure to ask, and stapled them all together into individual packets. As anyone who knows me can attest, this is not normal behavior for me!)

The first apartment was nice, but not quite as close as we wanted; the second apartment had gorgeous grounds, but the 2-bedrooms were too small, the 3-bedrooms too expensive, and it was right off a street that was pretty seedy (think Aurora in Seattle, or Mt. View in Anchorage) and didn’t feel safe; the fourth had a gorgeous view of the Kent valley and was a huge 2-bedroom layout that would have been our pick if we hadn’t already been through the third.

The third place ended up hitting all our “gotta have it” qualifications (3 bed, 2 bath, nice layout, washer/dryer in unit, assigned parking space), our “would be nice if” qualifications (third floor corner apartment available, fireplace, deck, good storage, swimming pool in the complex, right on the bus lines), plus a bunch of other goodies that sold us (nice location next to a golf course and park with lots of bike paths to go walking/skating/riding on, right next to the Green River, about five minute drive from Prairie’s workplace and my future school, exercise room, indoor racquetball court, and a decent neighborhood). Plus, they had fresh-baked cookies still warm from the oven for us! It’s pretty hard to say no to fresh-baked cookies. Ingenious!

After looking at all four choices, we had lunch, then went back to our favorite and put in our application. They called back yesterday to confirm that we were approved, so Prairie will be running over there during her lunch break today to drop off the security deposit and get the final details (official address so I can initiate the moving process with Speakeasy, the actual move-in date, and so on).

One interesting side effect is that this means that after seven years, I’ll be moving out of Seattle. Admittedly, not very far out of Seattle — the Kent-to-Downtown-Seattle drive is only a few minutes longer than the Northgate-to-Downtown-Seattle drive — but still, I’ll no longer have a Seattle address. Something of a milestone there.

More details of the move and all will be posted as things progress, but we should be all moved over in roughly three weeks or so.

Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

Well, it’s official (aside from actually receiving the certificate in the mail): I can now, if I wish, sign my name ‘Michael Hanscom, AA’. It’s a little silly to do so, so I’m not going to, but I can.

Short updates have been appearing semi-regularly on…well, everywhere, if you happen to be following me on the web (Twitter, Plurk, LiveJournal, and a number of others, thanks to the multi-site-update magic of Ping.com), but let’s see if I can back up a bit and fill in a few more details (photos from each day’s festivities are linked to on the day’s name).

Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

After class this morning, I wandered across the street to the bus stop. I was a little annoyed at myself for leaving my bus pass at home, but since I had a few ones, it didn’t matter too much. I got on the 75 and picked up a transfer, rode to the Northgate Transit Center, waited there for about ten minutes, and then took the 41 to our apartment. As I waited for the bus to roll to a stop, I peeked out the windows and scanned our parking lot for the car to see if Prairie was back from her morning jaunt with Hope. The car wasn’t in the lot…

…oh, wait. Crap.

I drove to school this morning.

Prairie hasn’t been able to stop giggling for the past half hour.

On the bright side, I didn’t have to catch the bus back to school, as Prairie was able to call Hope and have her drive us up to the school to rescue the car. Which I’d forgotten. Left behind.

I am such a dork.

Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

As Prairie’s mentioned, work on moving into the new apartment continues, and we’re making progress. I’ve had to work just about every day (though I was able to get most of yesterday off to help), and Prairie and her family crew have done the lion’s share of the work so far, so in this case saying that “we” are making progress is really only strictly true for certain values of “we”. But still…progress is being made. At least I’ve got a day off tomorrow to pitch in all day long.

One side effect of all this is that both Prairie and I are going to be essentially out of touch for the next two weeks or so. As we use Speakeasy for our ‘net and our phone connection through VoIP, we need to get that transferred over to the new apartment…and, unfortunately, Speakeasy says that that can take up to two weeks. Not what I was hoping for, but pretty unavoidable, as all of this has happened so quickly.

We do have our laptop with WiFi access, so we may be able to check in from time to time, but it’s pretty much safe to assume that we probably won’t be reachable via e-mail or phone for the next two weeks, and certainly won’t be responding to messages in a timely manner. Not ideal, but that’s what it is.