Departures: Seattle 07 Mostly Eastside

It was autumn, and I was finally on my way back to Seattle after having been away for about two years. "Seattle" isn't quite accurate. I didn't spend much time in Seattle proper. Work was Eastside, a non-trivial fraction of my friends were Eastside, the Microsoft Puzzlehunt was Eastside. Uhm. It was autumn, and I was finally on my way back to the greater Seattle metropolitan area after having been away for about two years. There, that's better.

Ron, Sua, Lauren, Melody

My first week in town, I stayed with Ron B., Sua, and their twin daughters Melody and Lauren. It was an interesting time to stay there--they were preparing to move to a different house.

If I were a parent of young children, I'd already know this: The Laurie Berkner Band song "I'm Gonna Catch You" is pretty awesome. You can dance to it even if you don't know how to dance: it's all about spinning around and then chasing each other around the dance floor. Ron and Sua had a DVD of Laurie Berkner music videos. Some were good, some were OK. But "I'm Gonna Catch You" was a heck of a lot of fun.

Ron and Sua picked up another DVD video. This was a strategic acquisition, Barbie as the Island Princess. This was a video of great power, possessing Barbie, sparkly special effects, talking animals, and (SPOILER WARNING!!!) at the end Barbie finds out she's a princess. Who would unleash such a combination upon the brains of two impressionable three-year-olds? Well, Ron and Sua needed to pack up the house, paint some walls, move some furniture. If this video could keep the twins mesmerized meanwhile... it was worth an increased risk that they would grow up hoping to discover that they were hereditary members of the royalty oppressor class. This video came with some sticky songs, song with lyrics now lodged in the brain of the world's youth. I had to repeat my "I like choco-bars" mantra many times to keep those Barbian sentiments from burrowing too deep into my psyche.

I carpooled to work with Ron. Some mornings, we dropped the girls off at school first. One morning, we stopped by the new house, which was still being finished, pre-move in. Behold, I took photos:

Davina, Torrey, Eli

The first time I planned a trip to Seattle, I made a list of tourist sites worth visiting. In the intervening years/visits, I'd seen all of those except for one: the Seattle Zoo. So I was happier than you might guess when Davina, Torrey, Eli, and I went to the zoo. There were animals, sure. But also I was able to check the last checkbox on that mental checklist and then chuck it out. The high point for me was when Torrey used the word "diurnal" in a sentence without irony; the kid's got a vocabulary on her.

Nancy, Cedric, and Paul

I visited my Seattle relatives Nancy, Cedric, and Paul. Nancy and Cedric were preparing to babysit some friends' kids that evening. Specifically, they were assembling a crib which had been lurking in the basement for a while. I got to help assemble it, which was pretty fun. It's a good thing it was fun, since we soon found out that it wouldn't fit through a relevant house door. Thus, we un-assembled and re-assembled the crib to move it into the proper room. Afterwards, I think any of us could have field-stripped and reassembled that model of crib in 30 seconds. Oh, and we caught up on conversations and stuff.

JonM and Jiji

Matt A. and I had lunch with Jon M. and Jiji. Their house had been struck by lightning. Lightning can mess things up. It would be nice if houses could dodge lightning, but it turns out that lightning is pretty fast and houses are not.

I asked Jon if he had a cool badge from DEFCON. He said he hadn't attended DEFCON, but had attended another computer security conference, ShmooCon. It was on the East coast, close to Washington DC. Thus, there were more feds, "a bunch of young kids out of Annapolis." He said there was a friendlier vibe at ShmooCon than at DEFCON.

Buffy Night

Because they are sweetie-pies, Susan M. and Nick Gerner let me mooch a ride to a social gathering I'd heard about only in legend: Buffy Night at Vanessa Fox's place.

My previous trip to Kirkland, two years before, had been to mentor Vanessa, who was then our employer's first technical writer in Kirkland. As it turned out, she hadn't needed much mentoring, which was just as well since I'd gone home a week early. That was 2005. Now it was late 2007. A few months earlier, she'd quit to go work at Zillow. But she'd kept on talking to webmasters, giving pretty good advice about white-hat search engine optimization. I wanted to see how she was doing, having moved on to another job.

When she opened the door, she looked really tired. I feared the worst--had the folks at the new job figured out how competent she was, loaded her down with yet more crap to do? No--she'd just gotten home from a delayed airplane flight. When Vanessa's recovering from an airplane flight, she's still got twice the energy of ordinary mortals, and soon she was setting us up to look through the telescope at some of the local wildlife, figuring out drinks, and putting together a pizza order. And, of course, rattling off facts about Buffy. Tonight we would watch three episodes from early in Season Two. And she had their plots down cold. And the plots of the episodes that we were skipping. And references to previous episodes. And foreshadowing of future episodes. My head was starting to spin trying to track it all.

But to someone in the internet search business, the most wondrous part might have been the guest list. Two random Googlers. An engineer at a web app startup. (I won't call it a Web2.0 startup--this guy had a workable business plan with actual customers and stuff.) Two Microsoft Live Search product managers. Two web search journalists members of the press bloggers. There was also a handful of people who were there solely for the Buffy, mind you. Buffy was definitely the center. And yet there was a certain web search/SEO/webmasterly aura.

It was great. In the same way that it's better to read book reviews than it is to read books, this was definitely the way to watch Buffy. People knew what was going on; people had opinions. The conversation was lively. It was really a pity that it went on past my bedtime and that I thus faded out.

Work

I hung out with people at work. Mostly we talked about work, so I guess I won't write about that here. But it was fun to hang out with them nonetheless. Matt A. said that he got engaged, so that wasn't about work. I told Sella R. that I'd exhausted my tourist checklist and she suggested that I visit the Rose Garden.

Dance Dance

Joon, SooJeong, Helen, and Daniel came over to visit at Ron's. I got to watch a video of Helen's dance school's, ... uhm, recital? No, wait, what do they call a recital when no-one recites anything but instead everyone is leaping around? Dance performance? Uhm, her dance school's annual dance performance. I tried to replicate some of the dance moves and met with little success.

Kirkland

I walked around Kirkland a lot this trip. I learned a danger of fresh-water marinas: those darned water lilies grow everywhere. I found out how that construction project I'd seen during my previous visit had turned out. I saw a new construction project and wondered if I'd visit again in a while.

Geoworks Seattle Reunion

Reza had a party at his place for Patrick, who was going to go work in Japan for a few months. Many Seattle ex-Geoworkers showed up, and so did I. Some of these people I knew, and it was good to see them again. Some of these people I knew only as email addresses, and it was good to meet them. "Wait, this whole time your first name was 'Esteban'?" Jenn was there with her baby; she mentioned she'd be out on maternity leave for another couple of weeks.

Microsoft Puzzlehunt 11.0

I volunteered for Microsoft Puzzlehunt 11.0.

Covered Conveyor Belts Have Always Been My Weakness

I'd deliberately left Monday unplanned. I'd taken a vacation day from work. I figured that if I felt up to it, I could call up some Davina and/or some other Seattlite and see if they wanted to have lunch. I figured that I might not feel up to it. Some folks bounce back from all-nighters quickly; I am not always one of those folks. Monday, I was groggy and grumpy. Instead of hanging around with people, I took photos of the Pier 86 Grain Terminal.

Nothing to Do with Boris Grebenshchikov

On this trip, I made it to the aquarium. It was nice, but probably not the most interesting thing for an out-of-towner who's already been to plenty of aquaria. Anyhow. I took some photos. Here is one.

Ballard, Possibly the Off-Center of the Universe

I was downtown and there was a lot of street noise. I pressed my phone closer to my ear to make sure that I'd heard correctly. "What--Ballard?" Chuck said yeah, I should come out to Ballard and we could hang out. There were things to do in Ballard and since I was all out of activities from my initial tourism list, it was time to branch out. Besides, Chuck lived in Ballard and he knew there were some worthwhile things to do. I was skeptical. Then again, I didn't have any better ideas. My suggestion of "go hang out in the U. District" didn't seem so interesting--I was always hanging out in the U. District.

Soon, I was at Chuck's house. He was watching over an electrician, getting power hooked up to a hot tub. I got the quick house tour--a bookshelf full of interesting books and boardgames; a kitchen; a basement containing an extraordinary number of guitars and Lisa, who played guitar; hope for a future hot-tub.

Chuck was going to show me Ballard's sites of interest, and thus off he and I went to the Ballard Locks. I vaguely remembered having been there before--on a boat. It was different seeing it by foot. For one thing, there was a rose garden there. It probably wasn't Sella's Rose Garden, but we didn't know that, so we snapped some photos. Then we checked out the locks, the fish ladder, and the shiny public art.

We went to Archie McPhee. Archie McPhee is a physical store. It is in Ballard. I did not know these things. This was something like finding out Cloud-Cuckooland does in fact exist and everyone in, say, Fresno can go there any time they want to.

We went to Cupcake Royale. At the time California was enduring a cream puff fad, Ballard was into cupcakes. There were rival cupcake bakeries; people argued about criteria of a superior cupcake. I was cringing as I contemplated my Orange U Glad cupcake. The frosting is going to be so sweet that it makes my teeth hurt, I thought, That is a definition of a cupcake, and that is why cupcakes are awful. I bit in. It was good, the frosting not painfully sweet. It was if I'd moved sideways through the multiverse to an alternate reality in which cupcakes were marketed to grown-ups instead of to hyperkinetic eight-year-olds.

We went rock climbing, with... Oh, crap, now I don't remember his name. We went rock climbing with a friend of Chuck's. Brian? Brendan? Anyhow, this was my first time going rock climbing. If I ever do this again, I should remember: those rock-climbing shoes grip a lot better than you would think; when you're making that figure-eight knot, make sure that you put the rope through the belt, or else it won't do any good.

We went to Pies & Pints, a pub that served savory pies. Chuck and B______ were into brewing, so they appreciated the beer selection. Me, I was happy to let my fingers un-kink from the rock-climbing, eat a little pie, and listen to some live music.

We talked about what was on my mind: the Microsoft Puzzlehunt. It had been fun--maybe too much fun. There was a dearth of non-Microsfot puzzle hunts in the Seattle area. How much of that was the fault of the mineshaft accident and how much was the damned path of least resistance easing puzzlehunt creators to host events at Microsoft--though that made it hard for non-Microsofties to play? My own employer had recently hosted a puzzlehunt. I had mixed feelings about it--I wanted it to go well, but I wanted other SF Bay Area puzzlehunt traditions to thrive, too. I didn't want one to engulf the others. "For one thing, it's been a way to meet smart folks who I don't work with, you know?"

Chuck had worked at Amazon; he understood what it was like to work at a big company, big enough to become your world. He described his recent conversations with my co-worker Nori as nearly 100% about life at G_____ and that seemed sad--Nori's personality was too big to be contained in one corporate entity. (And now that I look at her site's recent blog entries, I think that Chuck was over-fretting; Nori blogs about doing some things outside of work, including going to Seattle and visiting Chuck.) Where was the work-life balance?

I wasn't sure what the answer was. But I was glad I was on vacation that day.

Left Behind

During Microsoft Puzzlehunt 11.0, I'd stepped in a puddle. Then I wore that same pair of shoes for another ~20 hours. This provided a long warm damp period of time for... whatever it is that grows in shoes after you step in a mud puddle. For a couple of days after that, I left the shoes in my room, disassembled, hoping that they would dry out. Yes, I hoped that they would dry out in the damp Seattle air. I am sometimes overly hopeful. I was glad I'd brought a pair of sandals with me. When it was time to pack up for the plane ride home, that shoe was a mold culture. I considered carefully packing it up, bringing it home, cleaning it, drying it out properly...

I tossed out those shoes, another sacrifice to puzzle hunt lifestyle. Soon I was on an airplane back to California, where burritos beckoned.

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