Tonight we had one heck of a lightning show! I hadn’t seen any forecasts of the storm so it was a bit of a surprise to see the dark clouds roll in and the flashes of light in the distance. Many of the strikes were directly overhead, leaving us with some house-shaking thunder. The show lasted for a lot longer than most seem to around here. Somewhere around 2 hours. Early on I’d grabbed my camera and started taking both still photos and some videos. The photo to the left is the one decent one I captured from the still shots. The video turned up some more, but I never managed to get a photo of the really impressive ones, and there were quite a few.
Category: General
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What a show
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The Yard Working
I spent the better part of the day doing yardwork. Yeah, on Live Earth day I worked to mold nature to my designs. The irony isn’t lost on me. 🙂 While I was able to make the front yard look a lot better (edged the lawn, refreshed the barkdust by tilling it and re-spreading, levelled the bird bath, pulled weeds, etc) though nature will have it’s revenge… I’m already feeling sore, and I know tomorrow I’m going to be in pain. The real reason for all of the work is that we’re hosting a small BBQ tomorrow for family and friends for my sister-in-law and brother to celebrate their soon-to-be parenthood. Yup, pretty soon I’ll be "Uncle Ryan". Be scared, be very scared. Due to schedule conflicts, Kelly hasn’t been able to attend any of the other showers and decided that we should host a get-together at our place. The excuse of the BBQ has been good, as I’ve been meaning to work on the yard for several weeks now. Nothing like expecting company to spark action I suppose. Either way, I’ve accomplished a little over half of what I want to get done before the summer ends. Tired. So tired. *passes out*
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Past couple weeks…
I’ve managed to ignore the blog for almost 2 weeks. Damn. I’m a slacker! Here’s a quick-ish recap:
A week ago Thursday I met up with my brother and Ghost Dog at the Goose Hollow Inn for some beer and food on the patio. Had a good time, and of course had the reuben sandwich! It was good to go back, it’d been several months.
Last weekend was a "no plans" weekend. Kelly had a big nasty paper due, so I kept myself busy and out of her way by doing a lot of yard work, and getting caught up on some of the movies Kelly had seen but not sent back yet.
During last week I was out a lot; with Snooks at Kennedy School, with my brother at the Moon & Sixpence, and then the Goose again on Friday with Jen and Jason (who we’d not seen in quite a while). After dinner we went to Multnomah Village to see their new condo and meet their new kitten Tiki. Had a great night out, and it was good to see J & J. Need to do it again soon.
Yesterday was pretty busy. In the early afternoon Kelly and I had a BBQ to go to for some friends expecting a ‘little one’ in about two months time. We had a fun time (I ate way too much, but I couldn’t let those poor, lonely looking hamburgers go to waste :)). Then, we rushed home and ran down the street to catch a bus. Destination: Rose & Thistle. Ghost Dog celebrated a birthday last week, and had a bunch of people join him for some food, drinks, and later darts, to celebrate. Had a great time (even though my darts skills are poor, and Snooks, who wasn’t wearing his glasses, kicked my ass).
Today I got out and did a bunch of yard work, and did some much needed waqtering. I’m very tired now, and am soon going to attempt to watch a movie without falling asleep on the sofa.
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Day ’round the house
Today I went no further than a half-mile from my house, and it was nice. After last weekend’s running around it was good to just anchor down a bit.
Since Kelly had class all day, I had intended to sleep in late, but by 9am I got up and decided to have a full day. I fixed myself some coffee, had some cereal, and then spent some quality time with my new toy (the MacBook Pro). After a couple hours playing / tinkering / learning (and paying bills online, urgh) I set out to do some yardwork. This was at around 11am. Just as I was about to go outside, it started pouring down rain. Oh well, more play time! About an hour later the sun emerged again, so I got all ready to get outside and… rain again. Hrm. Ok, more geeking out. Finally, at around 2pm I decided I needed to do something productive, so I did a bit of grocery shopping at the local grocery store. After getting home and looking at the ominous clouds I decided not to bother going out and mowing my lawn, and instead decided to wash the car. This may sound foolhardy, but think about it… the rain helps wash the soap off! 🙂 However, I got the car washed, dried, and into the garage before any further showers. Kelly got back from class shortly after I finished washing the car, but needed some ‘decompress’ time, so I decided to detail the car pretty heavily (vacuum, wiped down all the vinyl & plastics, cleaned the windows inside and out, etc). After about three and a half hours of all that car cleaning nonsense (resulting in a super clean car) I got cleaned up and Kelly and I went out for some dinner.
We decided to walk to the Concordia Ale House (still within the half-mile range mentioned above), which we hadn’t been to in quite a while. I was very happy to see they were pouring the Terminal Gravity ESG (Extra-Special Golden), a delicious, light, summer-y golden ale. I also had a pint of Hales ‘Dublin Stout’, which was really good (creamy, not overly strong or bitter, somewhat remarkable for a Northwest stout). We also had some really good food… I had a turkey melt (with jack cheese and bacon, mmm), and Kelly had a tomato, pesto, cheese sandwich. We both had a nice relaxing time out, and then walked home. Good day. Feeling refreshed, though a little sore. Surprising what 3+ hours of car cleaning will do. 🙂
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The Fountain, the Walking, & the Garage
To follow up from Saturday, I spent most of yesterday playing with my photo gallery software, in an attempt to better link it with the blog. Kelly and I also watched The Fountain, which Snooks had recently metioned. It was indeed a beautiful film, and one that left me pondering afterwards (even now), and led me to some rather interesting dreams. At least I think so. I never seem to remember my dreams, but I distinctly remember waking up feeling rather introspective. Woah, that’s heavy man!
Work today was filled with meetings, mostly around upcoming work and planning the next release of the software I’ve been working on at SuperSweetCo. The next few weeks are going to be pretty nuts.
Fortunately I was able to get a good amount of walking in today, as the temperature has finally dropped to more sane levels. Early this morning I got few miles in walking from my house to a bus stop a bit further than I’d normally go to. During my lunch break I was finally able to do my three mile walk around the waterfront. Again, the weather (and workload) last week prevented me from my usual lunchtime walks. After work I went to my friend Jenn’s place (same spot as Memorial Day), to have some beers (Mount Hood Brewing’s Ice Axe IPA) off of her new kegerator (which she was supposed to have had by her party last week). After that I walked another few miles from her house to mine. In total I walked a bit over 7 miles today. Hooray!
Once I got home I helped Kelly unpack the espresso machine I got her for her birthday (which finally arrived today), and then tidied up my garage a bit. Kelly and I have some friends coming to stay with us in a few day (for about 6 days). Kelly has been doing a lot of work on the house itself, but the manly area that is the garage was a mess. It’s a bit better now. The looming guests have been a good exuse to finally get in and clean like I’ve been meaning to do for a while. There’s talk of renting a projector so we can play classic arcade games on a wall in said garage, while sipping on beers and talking about manly things. The garage is now a bit better set up for such manly / nerdy activities. 🙂
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Weekend Report: Backyard edition
Been a very busy week. So let me start off with…
Monday (Memorial Day): as Kelly wrote, my friend Jenn threw a big BBQ / Housewarming. I was there far too late and had far too much beer (from a keg of IPA from Pelican Brewery), but it was a blast. Though I paid for it on…
Tuesday: the final push week for a development cycle at work. The company has engaged in something known as a ‘release train’ model, whereby every 6 weeks the company will release a new versions of it’s products. In this model there are three weeks of development followed by three weeks of quality assurance testing. This means that at the end of the dev. cycle, the developers begin work on the next release, while supporting any bugs that QA finds. So basically, development and QA happen at the same time, just for different releases. Since we’re just now getting on this model, it’s been hectic. ANYway, it was a mad rush to try and get everything done by the end of the week. Fast forward to…
Friday: barely got everything done for a 4pm demo to the company. Following that, the company held a big happy hour bash. Since the company has gotten so big, it’s been decided that once in a while each department sponsors a happy hour, complete with a small budget for whatever it is they want to do. This first time out, the engineering department got the task, and decided to go with the theme "ice". The break room windows were blacked out, there were blue glowing things (both to wear, as well as set around the room), buckets of dry ice pouring vapor all over the floor, and images cycling on the big TV of glaciers, snow-covered mountains, and Vanilla Ice. Hehe. It was pretty fun, and I didn’t get out of the office until a bit after 7:15pm. Waited a painful 40 minutes for a bus to arrive and finally made it home a little after 8pm. Kelly and I sat in the back yard for a bit before I grilled up chicken (both real for me, and fake stuff for Kelly) and ate dinner. Then I fell asleep on the couch shortly after 11pm. This leads me to…
Saturday: Woke up just before 8am and couldn’t go back to sleep, so I shuffled downstairs, made coffee, and though of all the things I was going to try and get done today. Once I had a cup ‘o joe in hand, I went upstairs to my office and sat at the computer to read some news for a bit. Well, I got heavily distracted (mostly with this blog) and didn’t end up doing anything I thought I might get done. Oh well I guess, it was a fun nerdy day. You might notice one new feature of the blog, there’s now a ‘Random Image’ sidebar item that’s pulling images from my new photo gallery software (Gallery2). One thing I was trying to figure out was how to more tightly integrate that application with my blog. I’m a bit frustrated with one of the blog plugins (it’s not working quite as well as I want it to) but that led me to do all kinds of other things (more behind-the-scenes) to the blog software iteself. Still tinkering, but thought I’d write a bit here before I lose myself in nerdiness again. I’m finally sitting outside (now that it’s not so damned hot out), beer in hand. Ahhhh.
Other interesting tidbits: It’s been hot this week, very hot. It hit 90 once already, and it was still May at the time. Even today the temperature was about 13 degrees F above normal. We basically went from winter to summer with only a couple weeks of sprint-like weather inbetween. *sigh*. InfoWorld posted a positive review of the product I’ve been focusing on for the past several months. Also, as of next week, I’ll have been employed at SuperSweetCo for a year. Man how time flies!
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Happy Birthday Kelly!
Happy Birthday to Kelly! Everybody go 'round to her blog and say hi. 🙂
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The Return of the Ants
3:15am. Awake suddenly, moments later, I hear a smoke detector sound downstairs and notice light flooding up from the stairway. I rush out and downstairs, finding Kelly standing on an end table while the detector screams intermittently. I jump up and help disconnect it while ants are crawling up my arms and across the ceiling above me. Run to the sink and shake the detector while trying to quickly open the battery compartment door so I can disconnect the battery and end the horrible sounds. Finally disconnected, but the more I shake the thing the more ants fall out into the sink. Kelly tries to vacuum up the ones on the floor and by the ceiling where the smoke detector is embedded into the ceiling. This is the same thing that happened just over a month ago. Same location.
Needless to say, after Kelly killing the ants that were crawling on my back as I was trying to empty the detector, we finally went back to bed. However, after an event like that, I found it very difficult to fall back asleep. My sense of touch was on high alert. Everything felt like there was an ant crawling on me. Took me a good 40 minutes to finally doze back off. Though ruining my chance at a full nights sleep.
Going to cover the top of the detector with Terro and screw it into position in the ceiling, see if the ants take the bait up there. If this doesn't work I'm going to HAVE to pay Orkin for the exterminator service, because this can NEVER happen again. Ever.
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Finally, a post
Finally a followup to my last post since returning from London. The cold I got at the end of the trip lasted quite a while, much longer than I'd hoped (and then, sadly, I gave it to Kelly), and since then I've been getting back into the normal life.
Over the past couple weeks I've gone out with friends, visited with family, and have been very busy catching up with work.
I'm still working on adding captions to my photo site from the trip, though at this rate it's going to take forever to get it all sorted. I also want to set up a sub-gallery of the 100 or so 'top' photos of the trip. However, I suspect it may be a little while until I get it set up, so hopefully you all don't get too bored with the mess of photos that I posted.
Some potential good news (trying not to jinx things), Kelly's had a couple really positive interviews for a job opening that would be perfect for her. I'm keeping fingers crossed (and you should too!). 🙂
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Unghhh
What a week, and what a day.
The past week has been pretty crazy at work. SuperSweetCo is prepping a new version of the software that I worked on a few months back. The UI is changing a little bit, which means that there's quite a bit of work for me to do. I can only hope the changes are received as big improvements. Stress!
After work yesterday I decided to walk homeward for a bit, the weather was nice, and I needed the physical and mental break from the week. I ended up walking about halfway home (at little over 3 miles) before catching a bus. Once I got home I drank a few beers and watched some movies from Netflix that K had already seen during the week. One of them was a pretty good (and quirky) romantic comedy called Happy Accidents. In general, anything with Vincent D'Onofrio I like… and Marisa Tomei isn't hard on the eyes either.
Today I had to get up early to help my friend Jenn move. In general helping a friend move is relatively easy, not because I'm all that fit, but it's normally pretty straight-forward… move stuff from point A to B. However in this case my friend Jenn swapped houses with a friend who lived about 3 blocks away. This might sound simple, but it's not. It meant that myself and the 10 other hard-working blokes had to fill the moving truck for a couple hours (climbing and descending steps and stairs, weighed down with heavy boxes, furniture and appliances), only to get to the other house, unload all that stuff, only to refill the moving truck with the stuff from the other house… effectively starting all over. Despite a couple beers and a short pizza break, after four hours I was exhausted. I'm not used to that level of strain. Oh, and the best part was about half-way through it started raining. Whee! All my complaining aside, I was still happy to help Jenn move. Just hope I never have to help move a house-swap ever again. It's a bit like rubbing salt in a wound. 🙂
After getting home and washing the stink off, and spending a couple hours relaxing (and letting the soreness set in) K and I joined Mr & Mrs Ghost Dog at the Mash Tun for a fantastic meal and some delicious beers. One of the beers that both GD and I enjoyed was a brown ale called Turbodog from Abita Brewing Co. in Louisiana. It was a delicious, quality brown ale with a slightly sweet and bitter flavor. And, it's got a cool name! 🙂 Had a great night, but I'm feeling very sore. I suspect tomorrow is going to suck.