blog.circusgeek

a personal blog with nerdy bits thrown in

Tag: snow

  • PDX Snowmageddon: Ice

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  • PDX Snowmageddon: traffic map edition

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    Snow hit Portland today. The mass exodus began around noon. Wheeee! Waiting this out at the office for a few hours.

  • OMG it’s 2010

    OK, so, I gave up for the past 3 months. Guess I lost the love. It’s not that I don’t love the 3 or 4 of you who actually read my blog, but I just lost the love for spewing out nonsense for no particular reason. It affected my Twitter-ing too. I just felt no need for it. I could barely keep up with consuming everything coming my way (outside of my work-related duties), and just didn’t care to add the burden to myself or anyone else.

    But I’m back, baby. (for now)

    Here’s a recap since my last post (when I was happily relaxed on the Big Island).

    At the end of October I had a birthday, and I turned 25 (again), and had the good fortune of having friends and family over to celebrate. I had a great time (I think, can’t quite remember since it was so long ago). Looking at the photographic evidence there was a lot of time spent bowling on the Wii, drinking beers, and eating fondu and other delicious treats that Kelly (and others) had made. Again, let me reiterate, I turned 25. Not 35. Nosirree. Nope.

    Around mid-November, my company sent the Engineering team down to Napa Valley and San Francisco for a day/night to celebrate the latest release of our software. Had a fun time, despite the fact that I don’t have any love for wine. However, some awesome coworkers had my back, and picked up some cans of Guinness and Boddingtons for me to gulp while on the bus. Thanks guys!

    Shortly after the trip to Napa, I got sick with what I can only assume to be the dreaded pigmanflu (given the fever, aches, etc). It wasn’t much fun.

    Guinness is back on tap on the Kegerator (yay!).

    Christmas time! Kelly and I got a nice tree this year from a daycare up the street from our house (proceeds go to help the daycare, so that makes it extra festive). Our evil cat Arthur Guinness took to climbing it repeatedly. Stupid cat. We went out to my folks place on Christmas day (as is tradition) and ate too much and opened gifts. A couple days later we went to my aunts and exchanged white elephant gifts and again ate a bit too much, and got to hang out with some of my cousins.

    A couple days later I got sick again, this time with a more common cold (I blame this on Kelly, since she had it first). Sniffles, cough, bleh.

    The other day, out of nowhere, it snowed a bit in PDX. And this one was unexpected and caught everyone off guard. It started around 2pm or so, and by 5pm, there was a little over 2 inches of snow in our neighborhood. Watching the news of the rush-hour traffic, the roads were a mess, especially since nobody was prepared for the conditions and loads of people got stuck trying to get in or out of town. People, including my brother, spent 8 hours or more trying to get from point A to B.

    That same night, Kelly and I attended a Squirrel Nut Zippers concert in Southeast Portland (at the Aladdin Theater) which she had bought for me as a Christmas gift. We weren’t sure if we were going to bother going out or not up until an hour before the show, however I’m glad we braved the roads because it was a really fun show. We hadn’t seen them in about 5 years (since their hiatus), and they put on a really good show, putting some stylistic twists some of their old songs, and performing them all with all the fun that I expected from a SNZ show.

    Tonight we celebrated New Years at our good friends T & S’s place (who fortunately live just over a mile away from us) which meant for the first time in many years we didn’t host the party. This was good primarily since both Kelly and I are still recovering from our illnesses. However we came home pretty quickly after midnight, and here I am.

    Here’s to hoping that 2010 will be a better year all around than 2009.

    And for some Way Back Machine-ing, here’s a quote from the Counting Crows song ‘A Long December‘ (watch the video for a younger Courteney Cox, back when she dated Adam Duritz in 1997):

    And it’s been a long December and there’s reason to believe
    Maybe this year will be better than the last

    Happy New Years all!

  • The past few weeks

    Yeah, it’s been a few weeks since my last post, which means it’s recap time!

    Work has been keeping me plenty busy. Many long hours and late nights. It’s been good, but very exhausting.

    We had a petty nasty wind storm a couple weeks back. The large tree in front of the house lost about five 8-9 foot long branches. The front yard looked like a war zone. Branches, twigs, and needles blanketing everything. It took a good few hours of sawing and raking to get it mostly cleaned up.

    On the morning of Obama’s inauguration I had to rush into a dentists to get a filling replaced (one that’d started breaking loose from a molar a few months ago). It wasn’t what I would call fun, but it’s all good now.

    Portland got a bit more snow earlier this week. Just enough that my bus got stuck trying to go up an incline (the bus wasn’t chained up). After getting stuck, I got off and walked back home and worked from there for the rest of the day. The strangest part was by 5pm it was 40 degrees and all the snow was gone.

    My kid brother C turned 24 this week, and he and brother T came over to my pub (my garage) for a few beers, some pizza, and some dart throwing. Happy birthday C!

    Tonight Kelly and I met some friends at the Goose for some dinner and beers. Yum.

    I picked up a Roku (used for $80) earlier this week. So far I’m pretty impressed, the streaming quality is pretty good. Kelly’s watching An American in Paris as I write this. She’s quite excited.

    Oh, and I got another keg of Guinness today (after the last one ran dry about two weeks ago). I swore I was going to get something different, but I couldn’t help it, Guinness is just too delicious. Yum!

    Other than that, I’ve been watching Lost and Battlestar Galactica now that those are both back on, and as I said above, working.

    That pretty much covers it, I think.

  • The dreaded last day of vacation

    Well, it’s finally come, my last day of my two weeks off. And as usual, it seems to have flown by faster than seems possible. In that time there’s been a big snow storm, Christmas, and New Years, so it’s been an eventful couple weeks, yet somehow I still feel like I’ve only had a couple days off.

    My sadness is made somewhat worse because the next couple weeks at work are going to be pretty stressful (lots to get done, lots to wrap up for the next release, lots to start on for the next release). This probably means I’ll go silent on the blogging again for a bit. It’s nothing personal. 😉

    Right now I’m pretending I still have loads of time before tomorrow morning comes around, and chuckling that it’s snowing again.

  • Christmas with the family (finally)

    Finally had Christmas at my folks place today. The snow in Portland is pretty much gone, and it had finally melted enough in my hometown that the family thought we all might manage to get to my parents house safely. Even then, there was no way I could have driven my car up there (there was still over a foot of snow on the ground and lots of deep slushy roads) so Kelly & I met my brother C in town a few miles away and left our car. This year we’d all agreed to do a small Christmas, with the goal of making things more than buying things. This lead to some nice gifts (Kelly made jars of cookie mix with attached recipies, my mom knitted stocking caps, that kind of thing). It was very nice and relaxing. We also had a large brunch and I ate way too much. Still full.

  • I’ve added a photo gallery of all the snow

    I’ve added a gallery of photos, documenting the snow storm that Portland has had over the past week. Most are of my house and the local area, including some photos I took while Kelly and I walked down to Kennedy School a few hours ago. It’s funny to see the progression from last week, when I was taking photos of a light dusting (as if it were a big deal), and then to see where it is now (12 inches or more of snow).

    I’m now sitting home, sipping on some beers, just having eaten a delicious chicken korma dish Kelly cooked up (yummy!) and listening to Christmas music. Nice.

    Anyway, enjoy the photos!

  • Wintry weather, and some well earned vacation

    Snow in NE Portland, 2008The past week has been very wintry here in Portland, unusually so. We had snow over last weekend (as Kelly mentioned), some 24 degree days, and again over the past day or two, more snow! I always love the snow, makes the world feel a bit softer somehow. We had more yesterday, a bit of a warming today, and then more snow tonight. I got home to a white neighborhood again. Love it.

    Work has kept me insanely busy over the past few weeks, which explains why I’ve been ignoring the blog. I’ve been working late hours (more than a few 1 AM night, and one 16 hour up-til-4 AM code-fest, urgh), trying to get a bunch of feature work done for SuperSweetCo’s upcoming release. The late hours were partially because I really wanted to get something added that wasn’t officially planned for, so the only way to do it was to work late nights. We did a demo today, and the release is really coming together and looking fantastic. Mad props to everybody involved. I’m super excited to see this next version launch in a couple months.

    Fortunately (for my sanity) I’ve got the next two weeks off of work. I look forward to lots of sleeping in, gaming (Team Fortress 2 and Call of Duty, here I come!), and generally doing nothing (except the usual holiday season activities). Hopefully I can get some shopping done, finally.