Well Actually, I Am Pretty Much Just Whistling Dixie.

Ok, this is the last one for a while, I swear.

Lately it seems like if it weren’t for boring plane rides, I wouldn’t have time to do any blogging at all.  Then again, I usually travel a lot less than I have been lately, but most of that is my own fault.  This time around, I am somewhere in the middle of a 4 1/2 hour plane ride down to Atlanta, where my brother will be getting married in a couple of days.  Presumably we are currently flying somewhere over the Midwestern United States (South Dakota, it appears), but there’s really nothing to see out the windows right now, the screens on the plane are showing some random movie I’ve never heard of, and even if there was something besides clouds out the window I’m in the middle of the plane anyway.  At least the center seat next to me is empty, so things aren’t too crowded.

All in all, I guess this isn’t too bad.  The flight is a non-stop so there aren’t any random airport layovers to worry about, and the plane isn’t too crowded.  Which is a far cry from what I usually end up with on these cross-country flights.  Most of the time I seem to end up on some jam-packed redeye on a creaky old MD-80 in seat 38D.   Usually they throw in a three-hour layover in Dallas or Chicago for good measure.  Even then, something inevitably gets delayed, and pretty soon it turns into a five hour layover.  By the time I arrive at my destination on a flight to the East Coast I’m usually running on at least 24 hours of no sleep (as I’ve discussed before, I seem to be completely incapable of sleeping on any moving vehicle smaller than a cruise ship, and even that one can be iffy sometimes,) which means I typically get to spend the next day alternating between trying to stay awake and being completely wired.  A good night’s sleep usually fixes that, but I don’t think I’ve ever arrived in Florida without being sleep deprived.

A couple of weeks ago when returning from the short cruise I went on with my friends, we took the train back from Vancouver to Seattle.  I’ve taken the train before, but the last time I did (same trip, but in the other direction) I was in Business Class, which had even bigger seats than normal.  Nonetheless, even in coach the train is still much nicer than most planes I have flown on.  The seats are nice and wide (four per row instead of the six you would get on a plane,) you have more legroom than you know what to do with, every seat had power outlets, there isn’t a seatbelt anywhere to be found, and you can move about freely almost whenever you want (except during the Customs inspection at the border.).  In fact, I might be inclined to consider the train for more of my trips if it wasn’t for the fact that it takes at least twice as long to get anywhere as the same trip would take even in the car.  The train is a good way to go for a four hour short haul trip, but I suspect I would probably find myself a bit less enthusiastic about a 36 hour ride to LA  (or worse) on the thing, especially when I can make the same trip in 2 1/2 hours by plane.

And even in a really nice car, I don’t handle long car trips well.  Currently my job involves testing stuff that’s going into an upcoming 2014 model luxury car, and we currently have one at the office for testing our stuff.  Last Saturday (have I mentioned that work had been a little busy lately?) we spent the day testing stuff in the car, which basically turned into the equivalent of a ten-hour road trip to nowhere.  Even with all the cool bells and whistles I kind of wish my car had, spending all day in the car was still a serious pain.  I actually don’t mind a road trip every once in a while, but I’d much rather be the one driving if I can help it.

In theory, I’m supposed to be keeping an eye on my e-mail for work right now, but a last-minute plane change left me on a flight that doesn’t have Wi-Fi on it.  Even if it did, there isn’t enough room for me to use my work laptop anyway, so I’ll just call that a convenient excuse.  Which means that one again, I am typing this post up  (or whatever the equivalent thereof would be on a tablet) on my Kindle Fire.  Surprisingly, it actually works pretty well compared to some of the alternatives thanks to the built-in Swype keyboard.  Which is interesting, because I have it on my phone too, but could never get used to the thing on there. Maybe it just needs more screen space to be used effectively.  Either way, I would much rather have an actual keyboard to type on, but this is actually pretty reasonable too.  Not that I plan to write any novels on this thing anytime soon, but it’s certainly a lot more usable than my iPad was for the same task.

To make a long story short, yeah I’m still traveling all over the place, I expect to be doing less of it soon, and there are probably worse things I could be doing right now. To be honest, I’m kind of looking forward to things settling down some for a bit, but I suspect I will be doing more traveling sooner than I think.

How to Conveniently Ignore the Usual Crises for a Weekend or So

In what seems to be turning into an oddly recurring pattern lately, once again the past couple of weeks have seen me alternating between being on vacation and being incredibly busy at work.  This past week saw me getting off a cruise ship in Vancouver on Monday following a three-day trip up the coast, then working 49 hours in the next five days (including 11 hours on Saturday) as the team I’m on remains in crunch mode trying to get stuff out the door.  Somehow, I suspect that if I hadn’t spent the weekend on a cruise ship I probably would have spent much of it at work anyway, but that’s another story.  Fortunately, I’ve only got one more iteration of this recurring pattern to deal with, as I head for the Deep South for a few days for my brother’s wedding in Atlanta, followed by a couple of days of wandering around the area, then things settle down for a while (and by “settle down,” I suspect I mean that they’re going to get even busier at work.)  On one hand, it’s kind of nice to be able to have the ability to travel as much as I do.  On the other hand, a lot of traveling means that I’m spending a lot of time getting from one place to another.  Fortunately most of it is flights up and down the West Coast which are relatively easy, but the trip back home from the cruise (itself a  3-day ship ride, but after sorting out all the various conveyances involved in the cruise, we figured it went something like this:

• Drive a car to an offsite airport parking lot;
• Take a shuttle bus from there to the airport;
• Take a plane to LAX;
• Take a taxi to the cruise ship;
• Ride the cruise ship up the coast from Los Angeles to Vancouver over the course of three days;
• Take the Vancouver Skytrain from the ship to the train station in Vancouver (after walking most of the way there and back to the cruise terminal while wandering around to kill some time);
• Take the Amtrak Cascades down from Vancouver back to Seattle;
• Take the Light Rail back to the airport;
• Catch another shuttle bus back to the parking lot;
• Drive home.

For what’s supposed to be a relaxing vacation (in theory, at least) that sure seems to be a lot of running around.  And that’s just a 3-day weekend getaway.  Me and some of my friends are already in the process of looking into a potential 12-day Mediterranean cruise next Summer, which I suspect will turn out to be considerably more complex.   Of course, we do also have an entire year to plan that one,  so there should be plenty of time to figure things out.

As for the cruise itself, it was, as usual, a nice little getaway, although with only three days, it certainly felt short.  Not quite as short as the somewhat ill-advised 1-day trip I took a couple of years back where it seemed like we spent almost as much time in the security line at Canada Place as we spent actually on the ship, but certainly not like a full 7-day cruise either.   As seems to be the case with a lot of the Coastal cruises I’ve been on, the weather at sea wasn’t all that great, with much of the trip spent in fog, and not much opportunity to spend time above decks.  On one hand it was a bit of a shame because we had received a really nice  upgrade to a Caribe deck balcony cabin with one of the larger balconies to be found on the ship (not bad for having booked an obstructed oceanview cabin) and didn’t get much chance to take advantage of it.  As I’ve noted on some of the other cruises I’ve taken, when there’s fog at sea the ship’s horn is sounded at regular intervals, which can get a bit annoying after a while.  On the other hand, there was enough going on elsewhere on the ship that this wasn’t too big a deal.  Nonetheless, as much as I enjoyed the trip, I’m pretty sure I’m going to be going somewhere warm for the next one.

As for the ship itself (the Island Princess,) it was a nice shape in good condition, but I do have to admit that it took a little bit of getting used to.  I’ve been on six other cruises on four other Princess ships, but this is the first time I’ve been on one of the two Panamax ships in the Princess fleet (the Island Princess and her sister ship Coral Princess spend much of the year doing Panama Canal cruises when they aren’t in Alaska),  and although all of the various Grand class ships in the fleet share a substantially similar layout, the Coral and Island Princess very quite a bit from the others.  For example, the Horizon Court buffet is located on the forward section of the Lido Deck instead of the aft where you’d find it on a Grand class ship.  Similarly, the entrances to the two main dining rooms are located at the forward part of the ship’s atrium instead of the aft part where you’d find them on the other ships (there’s also a third dining room on the other ships that isn’t present on this one.)  And even though there’s plenty of stuff that’s different between the Panamax ships and the other Princess ships, there’s also plenty of stuff that’s in similar locations as well.  As a result of this, it took me a couple of days to get my bearings and to stop going the wrong way down the hallways trying to find our cabin.  I’m pretty sure the next time I sail on one of these ships I’ll have figured things out already and this won’t be an issue anymore, but it’s definitely something to keep in mind when you sail on one of these ships.  Then again, most people who sail aboard the Island Princess tend to have more time than we did to figure things out (the ship spends much of the year sailing 10 and 14-day Panama Canal trips, and it spends its Alaska season going back and forth between Vancouver and Whitter Alaska (a small town about 60 miles away from Anchorage) on alternating 7-day one-way trips.

Anyway, in spite of whatever difficulties may have arisen in finding one’s way around, the staff was friendly, the service was good, the ship was clean and well cared for, and things were overall quite nice.  Boarding was also quite simple and painless, which probably owes a lot to the fact that a third of the passengers on the ship had boarded at Fort Lauderdale and were continuing onward to Vancouver, so there were fewer people there to board the ship than one might normally expect.  Even if the ship was full (as it usually is), it never really felt crowded, which can be a bit of an unusual experience compared to some of the larger Princess ships (the Island Princess only holds 1,970 passengers and 900 crew, while the Crown, Emerald and Ruby Princess hold 3,080 passengers and 1,200 crew each, and the soon-to-be-launched Royal Princess will hold 3,600 passengers.)  Tables in the main dining room were easy to come by, as were seats in the theater (something of a sore spot for passengers on some of the larger Princess ships.)  Competition for deck chairs was virtually nonexistent, probably owing mostly to the fact that the weather wasn’t particularly conducive to spending much time outdoors.  All in all, it was a nice little getaway from what’s been a stressful few months at work, and I’d gladly do something like this again.  Nonetheless, I’m pretty sure I’m thinking Caribbean again for the next one, preferably when there’s some weather that I need to get away from.

Yes, Lutzes are Still Cruise-Taking Nerds.

For someone who has frequent flyer cards on three different airlines, I really don’t travel all that much.  Nonetheless, it sure seems like I’m doing a lot of traveling these days.  Once again, I’m blogging from an airplane as I had down for the second of three trips in two months (the third coming up in a couple of weeks when I head down to Atlanta for my brother’s wedding and apparently a bit of aimless wandering around the Deep South.)  Nonetheless, for as much traveling as I have been doing lately, I never quite seem to completely get the hang of it, and always manage to forget something.  This time around, I managed to completely forget to bring any chargers for my phone or Kindle.  Given the fact that I don’t really plan to use either of them much for the next few days, this probably isn’t a big deal.

If you’ve been reading this Blog for long enough, you’ll know that I tend to spend a lot of my vacations these days either at Disneyland or on a cruise ship, and since I just did the other one a couple of weeks ago, you can probably guess which one I’m doing this time.  It’s just a quick three-day trip up the coast from LA to Vancouver, but with as busy as work has been lately, the respite is certainly welcome at this point.  It also provides a chance to try out a type of ship I haven’t been on before (I have made plenty of trips on the various Grand class Princess ships. But this will be my first time on one of the two Panamax ships in the fleet.)  This particular trip doesn’t stop anywhere, but we will have a little bit of time to spend in Vancouver between getting off the ship and taking a train back to Seattle.  So far, I don’t think we have any idea what we’re supposed to do there, but I’m sure we’ll figure out something.

There’s already talk of doing a 12-day Mediterranean cruise next Summer as well, but at this point that seems so far away that it’s hard to think to much about that one.  I haven’t been to Europe in over 20 years since I went to Germany for three weeks back in 1993, so that sounds like an interesting way to go see the Old Continent.  Then again, I hear those Mediterranean itineraries are pretty packed with ports almost every day, so that might not exactly be the best cruise to relax on either.

Ever have one of those vacation where you feel like you need a vacation from your vacation by the time you’re done?  For some reason that seems to happen a lot for me lately.  Then again, this one has been planned well in advance of any of the other recent trips (I believe we booked this back in November) so the other ones might be the stressful vacations you take just so you have an excuse to take a relaxing one.  And since this cruis has no stops, there should be plenty of time to do whatever I want, up to and including nothing. In just a few short hours I plan to be doing plenty of that for a while.

OK, What Next?

As seems to be the case on a fairly regular basis, I’ve been quiet here for a bit lately.  It’s not that I haven’t had things to write about (I’ve still got a whole Disneyland trip to go over, plus another trip coming up next weekend,) it’s just that I’ve been busy not only with work (which continues to take up a disproportionate amount of my time,) but also with some personal challenges I have going on right now.  Although out of respect for those involved I feel that I should avoid discussing the details here, the short version of is that I am currently in the process of dealing with a rather significant setback in my personal life.  It’s nothing that I can’t get over, and I feel that all involved (including myself) have handled this about as well as it can be handled, but at the same time it also leaves me having to do some pretty serious reevaluation of where I am right now, and where I plan to be in the future.  I already have some of this coming up with the need to figure out where I’m going to be living in a couple of months (having to deal with apartment leases every year gets to be a serious pain after a while, but in the end it’s mostly just background noise in the bigger picture,) but recent events constitute a pretty significant change of plans for my indefinite future, one that I had not expected to have to deal with at this point.

To be honest, although there is definitely a significant amount of disappointment involved here, in some ways that’s the easiest part of the whole thing to deal with.  Yes, it’s true that things have not gone the way I had hoped they would for me in this case, but nobody is immune to that type of thing, and it serves no useful purpose to obsess over it or to make a bigger deal out of it than it really is.  On the other hand, I think the part of the experience that’s most difficult for me to deal with is the uncertainty that comes with this.  For years now, I’ve just had a general sense that I’ve been “running behind” on life in general.  If you had told me fifteen years ago that I’d be where I am now, in some ways I’d be quite happy about it, but at the same time I’d also have to tell myself that there are some goals my 20-year-old self would assume that I would have figured out years ago which remain unfulfilled at this time.  I know that one way or another things will all work out eventually, but I tend to be impatient about these things.  Then again, knowing what I was like back then, I suspect that my 20-year-old self would have dealt with this particular situation much differently than I am dealing with it now, and not in a good way.  Looking back at that time, if there’s one thing I’m thankful for, it’s the fact that I’ve been able to (mostly) grow out of the cynicism and pessimism that tended to dominate my mood during my earlier years.  It does still manage to creep back every once in a while, but I’ve learned to mostly ignore it, and when I can’t ignore it to keep it to myself.  Having a bad attitude about things rarely does much besides get people into trouble.  I suppose some people might call this type of thing maturity, but I suspect that even now I still have a lot to learn.

In particular, the most frustrating of the challenges I still face is the fact that, at age 35, I am still single with little idea of how I’m going to fix that.  Sure, I’ve managed to carve out a reasonably comfortable and stable niche for myself where I am, and by most accounts I’m doing pretty well in most areas, but finding the right person to spend the rest of my life with (and beyond) just still seems to elude me for some reason, and it makes it difficult for me to be completely happy with where I am right now.  Then again, given the consequences that arise when people end up getting that particular decision wrong or rush into it without proper forethought and planning, I firmly believe that this is the type of thing that you do not rush into.  I’ve seen far too many instances where making bad decisions here can lead to all sorts of problems and complications down the road (especially when children get involved in the process.)  I suppose everyone gets their own set of challenges and trials to deal with, and this seems to be one of the bigger ones on my plate, but I do imagine I’ll manage to figure this one out eventually.  Sooner than later would be nice, but at this point I’m mostly just hoping I can manage to not have to deal with teenagers when I’m 60 years old.

I apologize for being vague about all this, but I feel it’s best that I keep the specifics of what happened off the Internet.  In the end I’ll be OK and I’ll probably manage to learn some valuable lessons out of the whole process, but I suspect things will take a bit of time to sort out, and in the meantime I just need to deal with things as they happen.  I wish I had some idea about where all of this is leading me, but if I knew that there wouldn’t be any point in going along for the ride, right?

Fun With Ridiculously Early Airplane Rides

You always know you’re in for a fun time when you’re setting your alarm clock to wake you up at 4 am and standing in an exceedingly long airport security line at 5.  It’s something I try not to make a habit out of, but for some reason, it seems like airline schedulers are all morning people.  I suppose it’s still easier to deal will than the ever-popular East coast redeye flight, mostly by merit of not leaving you crammed into a tiny catch class airline seat for six hours at a time.  Given my apparent inability to ever sleep on an airplane, one of those usually means I’m looking at spending a good 36 hours nice and sleep deprived just so I can be extra fun to be around when I get to my destination.

Then again, I suppose I really have nothing to complain about here.  As usual, I’m on my way down to Disneyland, with an hour layover in Vegas along the way.  It occurs to me that a lot of people only ever manage to make the trip there once, or don’t ever get the chance to go at all.  Since I started going to Disneyland back in 2006, I’ve spent a total of 20 days there, including 14 days since I got my first annual pass back in 2011.  I’m sure that some people manage to get thoroughly sick of the place in just three days, but for some reason I just keep coming back.  Then again, given the fact that my Mom spent quite a bit of time at Disneyland while she and her family were growing up, I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised about that one.

Even though I have gone on several of those trips by myself and enjoyed them (there are some distinct advantages to traveling solo at Disneyland over going with a group, although at the same time it gets a whole lot easier to completely overdo it and leave yourself completely wiped out at the end of the day,) it’s always nice to have some good traveling companions to share the trip with as well.  In particular, the two friends who I have taken several of these trips with over the past couple of years are especially fun to be around at Disneyland, even if most people would think we’re just a little bit on the weird side when you get all of us together.  Then again, if there’s anywhere on the planet you can get away with being just a little bit weird, it’s Disneyland (well, just as long as you’re not weird in any particular way that would get you hauled off to Disney Jail at least.)

In particular, one of our favorite pastimes on our trips is to come up with the silliest ideas for ride photos we can think of and do them on Splash Mountain and the Tower of Terror.  For this trip, we made a trip out to the dollar store prior to the trip and picked up a number of cheap props to take along with us.  Somehow I suspect we may get an eye roll or two from the bag check people on the way into the park, but then again,it’s not like we’re trying to sneak any really dangerous stuff into the parks like chewing gum or Pepsi.  There should be a few surprises along the way too…

Anyway, it looks like we’re getting close to Vegas now, so I’ll probably go ahead and wrap this up.  I wonder if there’s anywhere at the airport there where you can get married on your layover?  Somehow I doubt it, but I don’t think I’m the first person to get the idea.  Something tells me there might actually be a market for it…

Selling Out to the Mouse (Again!?)

Somehow, I suspect that these next couple of months are about to get really busy.

This evening, I have been simultaneously getting stuff in order for this weekend’s trip to Disneyland, while simultaneously trying to sort out details for another trip coming up late next month for my brother’s wedding.  This weekend’s trip is, fortunately, pretty easy to figure out.  Then again, with as much time as I’ve spent at Disneyland over the past few years, I’d say that I’ve got a pretty good handle on the place by now, although they really make the whole thing easy enough that I don’t know how you could even manage to complicate it.  In a nutshell, it’s pretty much an instant vacation; just add a few hundred bucks.  Of course, with at least one, possibly two more additional trips planned for this year with various people, I’m once again finding myself in annual pass territory.  This is a bit odd, since I was pretty sure that back when I bought the first one in September of 2011 that it would be a one-time thing to get it out of my system.  Apparently it didn’t quite work out that way.  The main problem with that is that I managed to inadvertently convince some of my other traveling companions that the annual pass was actually not a bad idea, which means that now there’s several of us buying them.

In my experience, there’s no such thing as a cheap Disneyland trip, and even though we’re saving a pretty decent amount of money by not needing to pay for a hotel this time around, by the time I’m through paying for the plane ticket, the rental car and the annual passes, I think I’m looking at pretty close to $1,000, which is a little bit on the high side, but not far off what would be typical for when I go on a solo trip.  If I figure out how much I spent on the trip last June when I managed to get into Cars Land before it opened to the general public, I think even with the annual pass already paid for I still ended up spending at least $650 on that trip, not counting food and incidentals (around $200 in airfare, another $150 or so for four days of a rental car, and around $300 for three nights in a hotel.)  If I hadn’t had the annual pass, that would have been another $275 for the 4-day ParkHopper, plus I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to visit Cars Land early.  Even with the annual pass, that opportunity came only by sheer luck;  Only a relatively small number of annual passholders even got into this in the first place (last time I saw a statistic on it there were over 1 million people with Disneyland annual passes, although most have the cheaper Southern California resident passes) and I basically had to plan and book the trip without knowing whether or not I’d even get the chance at the preview.

I would have taken that particular trip regardless, but getting into the preview made for a nice bonus on that.  Since I don’t expect Disney to be doing a whole lot of billion-dollar overhauls of their parks in the next year or so I probably won’t be taking a trip like that again, but with at least one more big trip on the schedule (which would count as the de facto annual trip, currently planned for sometime in October) and a good excuse to sneak in at least a couple more weekend getaways, somehow I suspect I’ll be spending a decent amount of time there again over the next year or so.   Fortunately, I’ve got good traveling companions to keep things interesting  (especially the one I’ll be spending this trip with) and even though there’s no such thing as a relaxing Disney vacation, there should be no shortage of memories to be made along the way.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to finalize plans for our silly ride photos and figure out another round of Disneyland Fact That are Not True…  Plenty more to come, and most likely a “bored on the plane ride down” Blog post coming up later this week as well.

 

Fun With Insomnia: Hello Darkness, My Old Friend

Don’t worry, I’m not planning on getting all creepy and/or depressed here, it’s just a song lyric.  For some reason, Simon and Garfunkel’s The Sound of Silence has always seemed to me to be an especially appropriate insomnia song.  Granted, it was released in the early Sixties right around the time things really started getting weird (although, as the Wikipedia article on the song notes, it was written just a few months after John F. Kennedy was assassinated,) but for some odd reason, I seem to have picked up a bit of a taste for at least some of the various psychedelic 60s music out there.  Even though I have no intention of ever abusing various recreational controlled substances for fun and profit, occasionally a little bit of Grateful Dead, Byrds, Animals, or even a bit of the out-and-out druggie music just hits the spot  Incidentally, if you ever find yourself trying to figure out the meanings of some of these songs, something I’ve found to be a useful exercise is to just start randomly replacing various nouns in the song with the word “drugs”.  This song makes for a particularly good demonstration of this theory.

Anyway, as you can probably tell by now, I am currently awake at nearly 2am on a weeknight, not particularly thrilled with this fact, and probably a little bit loopy to boot.  Come to think of it, it’s been quite a while since I’ve done one of these Fun With Insomnia posts.  Not that I’ve necessarily been sleeping any better than usual, but lately I just haven’t done nearly as much lying awake in bed as I used to.  I’ve been pretty good about avoiding caffeine lately (which I pretty much have to do, since pretty much any amount of caffeine will keep me up half the night and send me flying up the walls in the meantime) but even without that, every once in a while I try to go to sleep and find myself completely wired for some reason.  Tonight seems to be one of those nights.  Granted, I might have gotten myself just a little bit more sugar than I really needed this evening, but usually that alone isn’t enough.  It’s probably the combination of that mixed with anticipation.

Earlier this evening, me and my friends spent some time sorting out details for some of the upcoming trips we have planned.  In just a couple of weeks me and one of my friends will be headed to Disneyland for a badly needed weekend getaway.  Yeah, I know that I seem to end up there a lot for some reason, but with as hectic as work has been lately, I’ll take any excuse I can get.  Given the fact that once again there are multiple trips planned throughout the upcoming year, it looks like I will also be renewing the Annual Pass I bought about a year and a half ago.  As I’ve found through quite a bit of experience, there’s no such thing as a cheap trip to Disneyland (unless you’re a local, then you might actually be able to manage it every once in a while) and it’s looking like this one won’t be any exception, but I actually found that the Annual Pass can be a pretty good way to save a few bucks if you know you will be going often enough to justify the cost.  The included parking alone on the Premium Annual Pass is $15 a day that you won’t be paying at the gate, and amounted to over $200 in savings by itself on last year’s Annual Pass.  On top of that, the discounts in the parks on food and souvenirs can add up.  The only real problems with the Annual Pass are the blackout dates (if you get the Deluxe version instead of the Premium version) and the steep initial cost.  Either way, it looks like I’ll be getting one again, and it looks like I’ll need to find some excuses to use it.

After that trip, it will be only a couple of weeks later that me and my friends are taking a 3-day cruise up the West Coast from Los Angeles to Vancouver.  Shockingly, it’s been over a year since my last cruise at this point, and I have no idea when the next one after that will be (although there’s been some talk of a European cruise next Summer.)  And then a couple of weeks after that one I’ll be heading to Atlanta for a weekend to attend my brother’s wedding.  I still haven’t sorted out all the details for that yet, but since it’s a part of the country that I’ve never been to, that should be an interesting (if brief) trip as well.  After that…  Who knows?

Anyway, I should probably try to get some sleep now.  And I should probably stop writing words on the subway walls and tenement halls too.  Be sure to tune in next time I can’t sleep for more fine quality semi-coherent rambling and pointless drivel.

The 30-minute Seattle Vacation

As I’m sure you’ve heard me mention and/or complain about a few times in my recent Blog posts, work for me has been quite busy lately.  This means that even as the weather starts getting nicer and Spring starts settling in over the land, I haven’t had a whole lot of opportunity to take advantage it.  Normally I try to get out of the office for a walk each afternoon to provide myself a bit of a break and to collect my occasionally scattered thoughts, but I haven’t been as good as I might like at doing this lately.  Then again, sometimes when you’ve been going at full tilt for a while there comes a point where you just need to get away from it all, even if you can only manage to do so for a half hour.  This is what I did a couple of days ago.  The weather outside was simply too nice to ignore, and the Spring blossoms have recently begun to come out in force.  Working in the more touristy part of Seattle means that several of the popular Seattle landmarks are easily within walking distance, so if I feel like getting away from things for a bit I can always just go wander out and impersonate a tourist for a little while.  Thanks to the miracles of modern technology I’ve even got a convenient camera built into my Smartphone to take a few photos (nobody is going to notice, right?)  This combination of ingredients makes for the perfect opportunity to go out and take a little 30-minute Seattle mini-vacation.

Naturally, in the tradition of seasoned tourists everywhere, I’ve come back with all sorts of pictures and a story or two, and I can’t wait to bore people senseless with them.  Since it’s kind of hard to find a slide projector these days. I figure I might as well do it here.  After the jump, you’ll find some of the highlights of my 30-minute mini-vacation in Seattle.

A Change of Season, A Change of Scenery

Coming soon to a biome near you.

If you’re reading this right now, there’s a good chance that you’ve just managed to survive yet another Winter.  Not that this has been all that rough a Winter in the first place, but to be honest, I’ll take “not Winter anymore” any day and twice on a Sunday in mid-January (where that’s unfortunately not an option as of the last time I checked.)  On the other hand, now that Spring is here, Winter seems to be making one last attempt to assert itself in the form of a storm front that’s bringing some heavy rain, some reasonably strong winds and even some potential for a bit of snow in the forecast.  In a way, this most recent bit of weather seems to be the meteorological equivalent of an unmotivated teenager suddenly realizing he’s basically spent the last three months on the couch in the basement playing video games, and is now making a halfhearted effort to look productive before Dad tosses him out and tells him to go get a job.

Nonetheless, even with snow (sort of) still in the forecast, the signs of an impending Spring are beginning to appear.  Although it seems like a lot of the trees have hit the snooze button on waking up this year, there’s a few of them here and there that have started to blossom.  It’s hard to put into words, but there just seems to be a general sense of Springiness in the air, even if the forecasts are still basically Winter warmed over.  Scattered between the usual 47 degree overcast and rainy days that seem to be the norm around here during this part of the year, there have been a few days here and there that have actually been fairly nice.  And although I’ve never been a big fan of the lost hour of sleep that comes with Daylight Savings Time, it’s always nice being able to leave work in the evening and actually still have a usable amount of light outside.

Of course, another thing that comes with the arrival of Spring is the now obligatory (well, sort of) Spring Cleaning.  Back when I was still living in my parents’ house, Spring Cleaning was something generally to be dreaded, mostly because it meant cleaning just about everything in sight, and cleaning it thoroughly.  With my own apartment and (currently) no oversight that would mandate such things I tend to regard Spring Cleaning as more of an optional thing, something that should be applied on an as-needed basis.  Then again, there have been a few things in my apartment that have been bugging me for a while now, mostly in terms of general clutter.  Given the fact that I have limited space here clutter is inevitable, but it still seems like I could be doing a better job of managing it.  In particular, my computer desk has been bugging me lately.  When I moved into this apartment, I set up what had been my work table in the den/office at my old apartment in the bedroom as a temporary desk until I could get something better because my old desk was much too big to fit anywhere in this apartment.  Eventually I did get another desk, but for some odd reason it ended up in the living room, where it has admittedly done nothing but accumulate various crud.  I’ve made a couple of attempts to use it as a workspace, but the placement just doesn’t agree with me for some reason.  I also don’t have enough space in the bedroom for it, so ultimately I just ended up keeping the cheap table I had in here until it started getting a bit too splintery to really be all that useful (I hear cheap Ikea stuff has a tendency to do that sometimes).

Finally, last weekend I decided it was time to do something about this problem.  Fortunately, I found out that Ikea now makes a Galant table in the same size as the Vika table I was replacing.  There’s nothing particularly fancy about the Galant series, but in my experience it holds up a lot better than some of the alternatives, and it does also come with a 10-year warranty on the off-chance that something does break.  After I took this home and put it together, it occurred to me that instead of having the desk right up against the wall, maybe I could do a bit better by turning things around a bit.  When I tried this, I found that not only did it actually look a bit better to do it that way, but it also gave me a bit more space between the desk and the bed and freed up enough space along the wall that I could probably even manage to fit an extra shelf in there, which might help out with the clutter.  It also makes it a lot easier to leave the shades open while I’m on the computer to enjoy the view out the window and get some more light in here.  When I had the desk up against the wall, I found that if I tried to open the shades the glare would be problematic (my eyes tend to be a bit more sensitive to that type of thing than the average person’s eyes would be.)

When all was said and done, this is what I ended up with.

So far, I’m quite happy with the result, and wondering why I didn’t get around to trying this out sooner.  After all, sometimes all you need to get a change of scenery is to turn around and look in a different direction.

Random Thoughts: Slouch Forward

Officially we are still about a week away from the Vernal Equinox that marks the official arrival of Spring, but the signs of its arrival are already beginning to appear.  Granted, the Winter we got around here ended up being pretty tame even by Pacific Northwest standards.  In fact, the weather has been so uneventful this Winter that University of Washington Meterology professor Cliff Mass proclaimed this to be “The most boring Winter in Seattle history“.  With virtually no snow at all in Seattle or Bellevue, no significant wind events, and not a lot of unusually hot or cold temperatures, there just wasn’t a whole lot going on around here this Winter.  Friday and Saturday of last week turned out to have some surprisingly nice weather though, with temperatures approaching 60 degrees (which would be considered ridiculously cold around here if they happened in August, but in March that’s practically shorts weather.)  Of course it went right back to the usual overcast-and-rainy just a couple of days later, but at least it looks like there’s a decent chance that Spring might actually happen this year.

With the change of the season also comes Daylight Savings Time, which seems to be one of those things that’s nice in theory, but it’s a bit of a pain in practice.  Given my night owl tendencies, it tends to mean that I lose an hour of sleep, and it takes me a few days to catch up with things.  The fact that I’ve been working long hours at work for much of the past week  (including 13 1/2  and 12 hour days last Thursday and Friday) probably hasn’t helped much.  Things are slowing down just a bit now (aside from some random surprises here and there) so my Blogging time has been a bit short.  Since I haven’t had a whole lot of time for this lately, I think I’ll go ahead and share a few recent odds and ends.

I’ve mostly gotten everything back the way I want it set up on my new computer now, and I’ve had plenty of time to mess with things and run some benchmarks.  This, for example, compares the old 500GB storage drive I had in my old system with the Samsung 840 Pro SSD I’m using as my system drive now.  Granted, this isn’t quite an apples-to-apples comparison (a more apt comparison would be between the SSD and the 10,000 RPM WD Raptor I was using as the system drive in the old system) but this should give you a pretty good idea of just how far we’ve come between now and then.  Of course, even the new storage drive (a Seagate 3TB drive) is nearly 6  times faster on the sequential read/write numbers than the old drive with twice the IOPS, but even that’s pretty soundly blown away by the sheer speed of the SSD.  It’s kind of nice being able to go from hitting the power button on the system to seeing the Windows login screen in 12 seconds, and not having enough time for the Loading Windows animation to even finish.  I’m still not completely convinced about the long-term reliability of SSDs in general, but you certainly can’t argue with the speed.

A couple of weekends ago was Emerald City ComiCon, and as I have for the past several years, I managed to get over there for most of the day on Saturday.  As I’ve discussed before in earlier posts, I’ve never been big on comic books, which means that a good portion of the show is largely Terra incognita for me.  On the other hand, I did get a chance to see the Wil Wheaton\Paul and Storm and the Adam West\Burt Ward panels, and even if you’re not big on comics there’s usually plenty to see while just wandering around.  Of particular note this year was the Lego display, which was headlined by an incredibly detailed 400,000 piece model of Hogwarts (more info here and lots of photos here) and a gigantic model of a Borg cube from Star Trek TNG.  As usual, PAX is more my speed these days, but ComiCon isn’t a bad way to spend a weekend either.

And as usual, I probably spent way too much money on stuff I didn’t need.  Here are (most of) my ill-advised purchases from the show.  There’s still one other shirt that ended up over at my friends’ house which I still need to pick up at some point.  The pickaxe, which probably has no discernible real-world use, has found its way to my cubicle at work, where it serves as a universal debugging tool (which it probably does a lousy job of, since everything is still just as buggy as ever.)

I’m probably not going to bother doing as full-fledged Easter kitsch roundup this year because there’s just not really all that much interesting new stuff (“interesting” or otherwise) out there this year on the Easter merchandising front to really warrant it, but there are a couple of things that stood out when I wandered around a bit.  As seems to be the case with the various other holidays, Easter candy seems to be getting bigger and bigger, which has now resulted in this 2-pound chocolate Easter Bunny.

As you can probably imagine, the nutritional info isn’t a pretty sight.  Actually the nutritional info is never a pretty sight with this kind of thing, but this one’s worse than usual.  4,800 calories, 8 times the recommended daily allowance of saturated fat, and 560 grams of sugar.  Fortunately, I doubt most people’s kids would be able to finish one of these in one sitting, and if they do, then at least they’ll have the benefit of a valuable lesson about what not to do with excessively large amounts of Easter candy.

This, on the other hand, looks surprisingly reasonable in comparison, at only 1,320 calories, 209 grams of sugar, and no fat.  I seriously doubt you’ll be seeing either of these in an “Eat This Not That” book anytime soon though (at least not unless they start adding a “Don’t even THINK about eating this, ever.  EV-ER.” section to the book) but when a giant 1-pound gummy rabbit start looking like one of the more sane options on the shelf, then things might be just a little out of hand.

Then again, I’m starting to get the sneaking suspicion that the Easter Bunny has been slipping a bit lately anyway.  If I started finding these hidden in the yard I’d probably be just a little bit suspicious…

Yes, this is a Walmart, why do you ask?  Not to reinforce any stereotypes or anything like that…

And a couple other quick thoughts to close this out

- I’m scheduled for four days of jury duty at the Redmond District Court in a couple of weeks.  Given how hectic work has been lately, that’s actually starting to sound like a nice little break from things.  Then again, I haven’t ever done jury duty before, so I really have no idea what to expect.

- May, on the other hand, is looking like it is going to be a bit on the busy side.  My brother is getting married later in the month down in Atlanta, and I still have no idea how I’m going to get down there for that.  Me and my friends are also booked for a 3-day repositioning cruise from Los Angeles to Vancouver earlier in the month, which I’m looking forward to, but kind of wish I had time for a longer one.

- Currently stuck in my head:

I’m not sure why, but lately I’ve been on a bit of an Ambient Techno kick for some odd reason.  The fact that my job currently has me testing music apps means that I seem to be spending a fair bit of time listening to music at work, but even with all that this one kind of came out of left field.

- OK, I’m here…  Now what?