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338 days ago
It’s December 23rd, and the biggest thing going on with most people around here is the 16+ inches of snow we've gotten since last Wednesday night. Seattle doesn't get snow too often, so it doesn't deal well with it. And there are a lot of people that have never driven on snow before who are driving on these roads. But the people that scare me the most are the ones who think because they're from <insert favorite place that regularly gets snow>, they can handle driving around here with no problems. They're wrong. The problem here isn't that it snows. The snow here is no more treacherous than most "first snow of the season"s that I recall: The ground starts out warm enough to melt the snow, but then it gets cold, so there's a layer of nasty ice underneath the snow. But that's how it was in Salt Lake City, and Pocatello, and I'd guess that how the first snow of the season hits, all the time. The trouble can be described mathematically, as 2 ratios: The number ...
594 days ago
A few nights back, we watched Die Hard 4. It was terrible. The movie was based on, as all the Die Hard movies have been, a handful of reliable stereotypes. My father-in-law likes to complain that they screwed the story up terribly by not having someone in worse physical shape play the lead role. Apparently that was one of the reasons he enjoyed the book so much: he found the main character more like a normal person. I guess American summer blockbuster movie makers would rather be able to apply a label to a person ("disgruntled estranged cop trying to make good") than actually try to do characterization. And Die Hard 4 was chock full of movie stereo types: Apathetic Hacker, Short-tempered yet well meaning law enforcement middle manager, jilted evil sociopath, and, most importantly, Evil Asian Kung Fu Hacker Woman. I've seen a number of movies that have significant roles modeled around this stereotype. While the movies aren't always what I hope for, the EAKFHW ...
597 days ago
My hair was getting out of control (I always let it get out of control), so I needed to get a hair cut. There are at least 3000 different places to get your hair cut in Shanghai (I actually don't think that's much of an exaggeration) I just went to the first one that I saw someone else actually getting a hair cut. I went in expecting a slightly different experience, because I'd already seen a YouTube clip by some guy that showed the basics of his haircut. Here's what happened: First, she put some shampoo in my hair, and then squirted some water in it. She worked up a good lather, and spent about 20 minutes giving me a very nice scalp massage. Then she started scrubbing my ears, which is a little weird. I've never had anyone scrub my ears before. She took me over to the rinse stations, and rinsed my hair out, then sat me back down in the chair. On the trip back to the chair, I saw a guy getting a neck massage in the chair. After I sat back down, the woman asked me ...
623 days ago
I left work very early today. My wife called me at about 10:30, barely audible through her sobs, and told me that my next door neighbor, friend, and overall decent human being had taken his own life a couple of days ago. I took a taxi heading home, where there would be noise & distraction to keep me from falling to pieces the way I did to the 2 poor individuals who I only met 10 days ago. Riding 13 miles in an unfamiliar city in a car with someone I couldn't communicate with was very surreal. I'm living among 20 million people, and I find myself missing one man who was 6000 miles away on Monday, and is gone, now. He was a good man who was always willing to help us, and was a very good neighbor. The world is worse off without him in it. I will miss him. I need to find something to do with these emotions, find someway to deal with them. It's too sudden, and too shocking. My only other close experience with death was when my older brother passed away so many years ...
624 days ago
I'm from the Rocky Mountains: small-town Idaho. I've lived in many random towns in Idaho, none of which had more than 50,000 people (at least not when I lived there). I think only 2 of them even had more than 10,000 people. If I had to pick one theme that summarizes my small-town lower-, then middle-class western upbringing (as in "west of the 'mid-west'" which is really the almost east to us westerners :-) ), it's self-reliance. Some acquaintances of ours from North Dakota have the same general attitude, which is why I extend the assertion to anything west of Ohio: If you can do it yourself, you should do it yourself. I can lay tile [self-taught], so I've tiled something like 800 sq ft of floor. I've remodeled a bathroom. I've painted probably more 20,000 sqft of wall. I mow my own lawn. I've scraped probably 1000 sq ft of (non-asbestos) 'popcorn ceilings'. I've built a bunk bed, a diaper-changing station, installed baseboard trim ...
