04-28-05

Anthony at Coffee Crew had his baby! Beautiful!

Shane took this

My old, old man
 Ohhhhh Jalen. He's pretty rough around the edges these days. To say the least. He normally doesn't have his tongue sticking out though - don't worry. He had just woken up.
He's still happy and purring and cuddley, it's just that he's also clumpy and dirty and stiff, and baths don't fix it. I hate leaving for work for fear that he'll die that day, while I'm away.
It sucks having geriatric pets. We've been through this before.

Sally's new haircut
On a lighter note! Sally got a super haircut! She told her hairdresser that she could give her any cut she wanted! That's because she's shaving her head next week - one of her friends has breast cancer and they're doing a solidarity shave.
Okay that wasn't really a lighter note. It was supposed to be.
I'm eating a Toblerone and I love Toblerone bars! Yayy! Chocolate! Lighter note!!
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04-27-05
My night

baking cookies
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04-27-05
Hey if someone has an extra Flickr Pro invite, can you please send it to porkbone at comcast dot net?
Thanks.
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04-26-05

Mr. Turtle

Feeding time
J-A? This isn't the neighbor's turtle, Eddie. This is Mr. Turtle, who lives with Geoff. I know it isn't exactly who you were asking for, but this picture? LOVE LOVE LOVE. The claws! The smirk! The long legs! You couldn't make a better muppet. And the fish are just there because I love my fish.
Sunday I was all crafty but I can't really talk about it yet. I can tell you that I rock, though. Further rockage will have to wait.
Yesterday Caitlin went out to run some errands for work, and she called me from her cell to say "OHMYGOD LOOK OUT THE WINDOW IT'S ENCINO MAN" and I grabbed my camera and ran to the window - sure enough - here he is. He walks FAST. I had to skip over to Mary's window to get a picture and Mary said "What are you doing?!?" and I said "Uh, taking a picture of the barefoot caveman dude." Like that made sense.
Do you remember when Us magazine did that article about the dude at the Olympics in Greece who looked like Brad Pitt with dreads? Then a few weeks later they exposed who the guy really was? And he's a guy who wears a fanny pack? Does anyone remember this?
No?
Oh.
Well anyway the Encino Man looked like the guy-who-looked-like-Brad-Pitt-with-dreads-if-he-was-shorter-and-wore-a-fanny-pack.
Then today Todd W's mouse finally arrived and he was happy to get rid of his old mouse that worked, but worked suckily. I'm unloading the supplies in the supply closet and he saunters over to throw the sucky mouse in the pile with the other computer parts and I said "Isn't that mouse sucky?" and he said "Well, yeah, but it still works" and I said "Why would we keep a sucky mouse? They cost ten bucks! It needs to be destroyed so no one accidentally ends up with a sucky mouse" and he got this Office Space glint in his eye and grabbed a hammer. So I ran over to my desk and exclaimed to Caitlin and Lauren "Todd's gonna kill a mouse with a hammer!" and skipped off with my camera in my hand, and left Caitlin and Lauren with horrified expressions on their faces.
Cary and Todd did good work, by the way. And Caitlin and Lauren got over it.
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04-23-05
Saturday was rather nice as well

Knitters
Woke up early-ish to meet up with the knitting girls at Starbucks and finally finish Shane's scarf (then I finish Mom's scarf). Yayy! Scarves! Just in time for summer! Unfortunately finishing Shane's scarf is easier said than done. Well that's not really true. It's easily said and done, but it's time consuming because I have to sew in all of the ends, and when you do stripes, there's two ends for each stripe. And that adds up. And I have little patience as it is. Especially for a scarf that's taking as long to finish as it took to knit.
But it was nice to catch up with the girls.
After this I met with the Seattle Photobloggers at Carkeek Park.

Tara and I fight with our knitting

Phil's happy siamese rocks

Seattle Photobloggers

This trail was kinda iffy

Manuel photographing the train as it goes by

Daring

Cool culverts

Jeff, Me, Manuel

Jeff photographing the slug
Man, you guys, I took a ton of pictures today. If you want to see the bunch of us at Carkeek Park today, see the whole batch on Flickr. Much, much better pictures were taken by Steve - see his pictures here.
(Hey other people that were with us today? If/when you load your pictures from today, can you put the link in the comments? Thanks.)
After this I chilled at home for a while then we headed across the street to Kim & Bruce's for dinner with friends. We also celebrated Patty's birthday! And discussed outsider art, Donald Trump's hair, and Sean as much as we could.

Bruce made pizza

Patty, Dianne, Michelle

Eleanor

Maddie & Kim

Petey

Benson & Patty

Sylvia & I (who I house-sat for!)

Maddie smiles!

Attack of the killer cherry blossoms!
Again, too many pictures! Check out my Dinner at Kim & Bruce's Flickr set. (Thank you, Tara, for the pro account!)
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04-22-05
Friday was a very good day
(You can always tell when Todd has the camera)
Todd's pretty excited because he know where he's gonna be on May 21st - the Sri Chinmoy Harmony Concert! Playing the flute! And the thingie! Sad that you're missing out? You can listen to Sri Chinmoy music here.
We walked to the new Blue C Sushi in University Village to have some sushi on a conveyor belt (not to be confused with Tsunami Sushi in Vancouver, where they feature a floating bar with the sushi on boats!)*
And those of you who know me know that I don't like sushi! But it was sushi on a conveyor belt! Who could miss that?! Besides, when they were walking out the office, they asked if I wanted to join them, and I was all "meh... sushi" and Andrew said "It's okay! They have food for white people too!" and then I decided to go. I'm so glad I did.
See those circles on the wall on the left? Each circle has a price in the center of it. When you grab a plate off the conveyor belt, the color of the plate determines the price. Some plates are $1.75, others are up to $4.25. Some plates just have one cookie or a cream puff on them. Funny!

Cold sushi

Hot sushi on candles
See that button on the bottom left, in the metal? When you tap that button it becomes a blue light and a server comes to your table.
I tried sushi! I didn't like it! But I tried it! I think I could sorta maybe handle it if you aren't supposed to eat the whole thing in one bite. I still found lots of yummy food though - they had edamame (soybeans) and fried tofu sushi and sesame noodles and panko fried fish and tempura veggies. I could have grabbed another four little plates if I wasn't full. Plus I was getting dessert.
When your table is done eating you stack all the plates and the server counts how many plates you have of each color and writes the total.
On the walk back to work we visited with a Cavalier King Charles puppy! It was so cute! But Todd had my camera so I didn't get a picture of him.
After work I went to the Fiber Gallery's Invite Only sale, for the 50 best customers of the year (I'm embarrassed to say - I was one of them) and rifled through some yarn and patterns while enjoying the free appetizers. Then I stopped by Ken's Market to buy some broccoli and came home just in time for Sean to finish dinner.
(Ranch chicken)
After dinner, Shane came home and proclaimed it was "Party Time!" and unpacked his booze to make us a smashing pitcher of Sangria, made with the rum he bought, plus other stuff he found in our kitchen, including some red wine, some fresh pineapple, and frozen strawberries. This was awful so he added the juice of a fresh orange. This was more awful, so he asked us if we'd be okay with him dumping the whole pitcher of it down the drain, and since I don't really drink alcohol and Sean doesn't like Sangria (not that it was really Sangria!), we were okay with it. Shane, on the other hand, was quite dejected. Apparently this had been his spectacular plan for quite some time. Which for Shane means probably about 7 minutes.
*Totally weird - I was doing a search on Flickr for the floating sushi bar at Tsunami Sushi and came across those photos and thought I'd look through the other photos by these people - and lo and behold - I saw Stephanie! With her girlfriend Michelle! Wow! It doesn't say their names but I know it's them! I used to go to Stephanie's site before it went off the air a couple years ago. And I visited her once at Urban Fare. Man. Small world!
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04-21-05
It's been sunny! And Adrianne before you get mad, consider that it was gorgeous in February into the first week of March, totally throwing us off, then the weather plunged back down to its usual Seattle-rainy-cold-windy weather. It was such a tease! But now the sun is out again and nobody wants to take it for granted.
Kyle was visiting for lunch and we were discussing the architecture firm where he had his second interview, and he really liked this firm out of all the firms he interviewed at, and the table kept referring to Balance Associates and this flew right over my head. Then Andrew said "who interviewed you?" (the world of architects is tiny) and Kyle said "Scott LaBenz" and I yelled "SCOTT LABENZ!" and

Kyle (visiting JA), Lauren, Me, Cary, Andrew, Sara
actually slapped the table. Then I did it again "SCOTT LABENZ!" and I was really much more excited than I should have been because, like I said, it's not that incredible that I knew Scott LaBenz. So they're all looking at me like "yessss?" and then I realized I was a dork and said "I know him." But man for a second there, it was like the most incredible fluke in the world and I was totally jazzed about it.
(And Kyle got the job, too!)
Last night was the Seattle Blogger Meetup, which I went to briefly while Sean made dinner.* It's a combination of computer geeks and blog geeks. I adore them.

Todd Waffner in the sun, with my camera

Checking out this Tablet

RArrrrr... Manuel

Jeff & I

Jhames and Chris Pirillo
CONGRATULATIONS TO THE NEW PORKBONE FAMILY!!
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* Dinner? Rocked.

04-18-05
LAUREN'S GOING AWAY PARTY!

Wheee!
I think I've spent more time with my co-workers this month than I have for the past three years put together. Not that it's necessarily bad, but I feel the need to spend time with my other friends now.
I have other friends, don't I?
Ray and Mary are back from Mexico - I was hoping to blog about a big party that we had at the office and set up a picture of a bunch of us with a keg in the conference room, but I never got that organized. (I was too busy! On a week that the bosses were away! What a waste!)
Shane's in town, therefore Sean and Shane are presently in the garage refinishing the giant table. They do this for fun.
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Other pictures from Lauren:
  And that concludes "Work Week".
Thank you.

04-17-05
Sean and I were lounging in bed Saturday morning and we heard this woman's voice - it sounded like she was directly on the other side of our bedroom window.
She kinda was.
IN THE RAIN this time. These people are DEDICATED to learning about our ditch, I tell ya. No tour bus this time, just umbrellas.
IT'S A DITCH, PEOPLE.
Ryan's First Birthday Party.
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04-16-05
Lauren's Going Away Lunch at Ruby Restaurant
Chris Brown is in town! And it was Lauren's last day at JA, so we decided to take her to lunch. We made reservations at Ruby Restaurant.
I remembered this place as soon as I walked in - it's where I had the vaginal mussels years ago.
The server was fine - he did pretty good considering there were ten of us. But then when we were finished, we sat there for quite a long time with dirty dishes in front of us while the server smoked a cigarette behind the bar.
I had to ask him to print our bill.
I also asked him if we should just give him our credit cards and tell him how much to put on them, and he said "Well, I really don't want to run that many credit cards, I mean, I'll do one or two, but no more than that." Which really had me floored, because is a restaurant able to limit how many cards they'll take per transaction if this rule isn't listed on the menu first (we weren't even asking for seperate checks)?
THEN he brings the bill and it's $145 which seems WAY too high for ten people eating $8 meals. So I ask him "Did you put your tip on this?" and he says "Yes". But note that he didn't write down that he put his tip on the bill - only what we ordered and the total. So it seemed like he was hoping that we wouldn't know that his tip was included and we would add a tip on top of that. Which made me angry.
Plus, still - $145? Something wasn't sitting right.
I asked him for a copy of our check and he re-wrote it.
I took it back to the office and added it up, and sure enough, we were overcharged $14. So I called Ruby Restaurant. And he answered. And I asked to speak to the manager. And he said "Why?" And I said "Because I need to speak to the manager, please" and he said "What for?" and I said "I'd like to make a complaint" and he said "Well I can help you" and I said "No, actually, I asked for a manager" and he said "We don't have a manager" and I said "Oh so you just showed up one day and started working?" and he said "Pretty much, yes" and I said "Can you give me the name of your manager?" and he said "No, I'm afraid I can't do that" and this went on, back and forth, for a few minutes, and finally I just hung up on him. Did he think I wouldn't pursue this?
So Sean called much later that night to get the manager's name (who isn't working until Tuesday - he also manages Flowers on the Ave.), and not only am I asking that the $14 overcharge be credited, I'm also asking that the 21% tip be credited as well. Asshole.
P.S. For a restaurant to automatically add a tip to a check, it has to be stated on an obvious sign in the facility or printed on their menu, or it isn't legal.
EDIT!
I spoke to the manager today (Tuesday) and he listened to my whole story and was genuinely horrified. He gave me $36 out of his pocket - the amount that was overcharged and the whole tip. He also wrote me a card for two free dinners.
I think our server will be out of a job.
I walked through the office giving everyone $4 back. (I had to go to the bank to break it up into 36 ones!)
Abort Google Bomb attack.
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04-15-05
Where I use a LOT of dashes
 Lauren's Going Away Get-Together # 3 Thursday evening. A bar in Fremont (a neighborhood in Seattle) called Brouwer's. Avoid it. Maybe they will be "ready" some day, but they had been open for three weeks when we were there, and twice I heard the server say "We don't have that in yet - we've only been open for three weeks." This included his response to my request for root beer. Root beer. There are plenty of distributors in Seattle that can get some root beer stocked in a restaurant within three weeks. Strange.
The fish & chips were doughy, Sean's long, skinny steak was such a weird and chewy and stringy piece of meat, we referred to it as "beef penis" (we were picking beef penis strings out of our teeth for the next couple hours), and the majority of the menu was heavy and show-offy. The frites were good but nothing to rave about (meaning, nowhere near the perfection of Frites). After we paid, the manager tried to save face by telling us that he'd buy us a beer (mmm my favorite) next time we came in. No card, no coupon, no discount given. Forget it.

Kyle

Sara, Lauren M., and I, laughing
 We still had a good time though - good company. A few people tried the beer wine. Strange. But I find all beer gross so whatever. (I will be sad when Lauren Woodward leaves JA, because we will no longer have a reason to go out 4 times a week.)

View of Seattle from Westlake Starbucks (on the way to the show)

Beer Wine
The Premiere? It's okay. Once they figure out how to run a venue, it could be decent. In the meantime, they have two cutesy girls running the front door for a big show, meaning ticket-holders were standing outside (it was cold) for about 30-40 minutes before they could even walk in. One big room with a bar/restaurant on the left side with windows/open spaces along the left wall. Sound was okay. Decent amount of bathroom stalls.
But Throw Rag? Eee gad they were just so dumb - I mean, I understand the concept of novelty bands (see:"Cake" and "the 80's"), but opening for a good rock band like Queens of the Stone Age? Wasteful. And embarrassing.
Man boobs were funny like, once. And the guy who played the washboard (I am so not kidding) made a big deal of demonstrating his man boobs. Fat is rarely funny. It worked for Chris Farley. Then he died of a heart attack. And it wasn't even a hearty, rotund, Dan Conner fat. It was a 40-year-old-still-trying-to-punk-out, simply-out-of-shape-from-too-much-Taco-Bell fat. Then to annoy me more? They point it out on their website, like it's his claim to fame.
And they kept taking their clothes off, which is just childish.
Too bad, too - the lead singer is HOT.
So here we've been, watching this dumb band play a loooooonnng opening set, and then the stage change, then another sound check, then Queens come on. Now, keep in mind, I had staked my claim to a Very Good Focal Location, and had been standing there for well over an hour. And I had cramps. And one song in, I gave up. I went into the separate room to site down. And there was Sean. And he sat down with me. And there we watched them through the window, sitting at a table, kinda nonchalant. One of my favorite bands.
The keyboardist* drove me crazy. She reminded me of a goth chick circa 1991. Tall, skinny, one (dyed black) sideways ponytail and tight arm warmers and black eyeliner. And doing this totally dorky spider-muppet neck-side-to-side Walk-Like-An-Egyptian thing, and HELLLLOOOOO *keyboardist?!? In Queens of the Stone Age? This plus Nick Oliveri being replaced by "some dude" was just too much for me. They sounded fine, the crowd loved `em, they rocked, and Sean and I left. No reason, really, we just.... left. I'm jaded. And I was tired. And a bit grumpy. And I had to work the next day. And I'm going to see QOTSA again in like 7 weeks at End Fest.
As we walked out, I told Sean, "Geez, if I just walked out of Queens of the Stone Age, I might as well just start having your babies."
Am I bitter? I don't know.
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