It’s foggy and forty (5 °C), even here in the slightly higher elevations of the city where I am on Capitol Hill’s 15th Avenue. I took the picture at 10.00 pm on Friday night.
Thursday/ going home
It’s been a tough work week for me, and I was very happy to drive out to San Francisco airport Thursday afternoon. Our flight was on time, and went without incident, which I am always thankful for. The guy right next to me brought a large pizza on board for dinner. A woman in front of me had her hair dyed in three colors. Hmm, I thought. The two shades of brown look great, but that reddish brown is one color too many. But none of my business, right?
Wednesday/ not so epic
The snowstorm of Monday and Tuesday in New York City and Boston turned out not to be so epic after all. ‘Only 10 iinches’ (still a lot) of snow fell in the city. There was more up in Massachusetts, with 2 feet and more reported in some places. Here in the Bay Area in California – after a wet December – there has been almost no rain. The driest January on record is expected for Northern California.
Tuesday/ it’s a unicorn!
Tuesday
made for a loong day. Some of my team’s Functional Specifications were wayy overdue, and so I and two colleagues had to draw a line in the sand. We sequestered ourselves into a conference room with no distractions, and no one allowed in – just so that we could wrap those up once and for all. ‘Man! This one is a unicorn!*’, someone said, of the method that we had to deploy for calculating unit costs for work that had been completed. ‘Unit’ can mean several things; and the calculation is not standard SAP functionality, so we had to understand how several custom programs work, and adapt our project’s solution to it.
*A very unusual creature to find in the woods .. and an unusual requirement that we have not run into, in previous SAP implementations in all our travels around the USA and the world.
Monday/ taking all day
I went to the dentist in Seattle downtown this morning, then home to pick up my suitcase and to catch the taxi out to the airport. We were not directly impacted here on the West coast by the massive snowstorm in the Northeast, but our departure from Seattle was delayed by 90 minutes, nonetheless. Two bolts were found to be missing from one of the wings (!) and it took time to track down the exact right parts in the warehouse to fix it. It was 4 pm by the time I left San Francisco airport in my rental car, and of course then traffic through the city to get to the Bay Bridge is everywhere. I should have taken BART (the train), but I had conference calls to dial into and the train is so noisy, that that would not have worked. Ah well. I made it in to work at 5.45 pm just to say hello to everyone before we wrapped it up and went to the hotel.
Sunday
We had blue sky and balmy weather (63 °F/ 17 °C) here in Seattle today. Unusual, because it normally gets cold when we have no cloud cover. Meanwhile there is a massive Northeaster blizzard bearing down on New York City and Boston, projected to easily dump 24 inches and possibly as much as 36 inches (yes, three feet) of snow there from Monday to Wednesday. I am sure they are ‘battening down the hatches’ and stocking up on food !
Saturday/ Gone Girl : the ending is gone, as well
We watched ‘Gone Girl’ (2014) last night. The plot from WIkipedia : The day of his fifth wedding anniversary, Nick Dunne returns home to find that his wife Amy is missing. Her disappearance receives heavy press coverage, as Amy was the inspiration for her parents’ popular Amazing Amy children’s books. Suspicions arise that Nick murdered her, and his awkward behavior is interpreted by the media as characteristic of a sociopath.
So here are my own notes .. the movie is a blend of say, Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct and the American media* covering a sensational murder (such as the Scott Peterson case; Scott is on death row in California convicted of murdering his wife Laci, and their unborn son in 2002). But back to the movie. After several twists and turns, it turns out there is no ending, really. The real ‘ending’ happened some time before the end! The movie examines what love and hate is (two sides of the same coin, right?) and how bizarrely twisted and dysfunctional a marriage can become.
*As frequently happens with mass media, missing the truth by a mile.
Friday/ SkyMall no more
The shopping catalog of the sky (‘SkyMall’) has filed for bankruptcy. I paged through it many times to ogle the offerings inside, and chuckling at the weirdness – but I have to think long and hard now to remember when the last time was when I saw one in the back pocket of the seat in front of me.
Thursday/ the Yerba Buena Island Tunnel
My colleague and I shared a rental car and he drove us to the airport. We always drive through a tunnel on the way there and today I finally checked out the San Francisco map to pin down the location of the tunnel. It’s the upper deck of the Yerba Buena Island Tunnel, in fact. Yerba Buena is named for an abundant plant in the area, an alternative name for hierba buena, literally meaning “good herb” in Spanish.
Wednesday/ kill Notes
We (all of us at my firm, but especially the IT support group) are trying hard to kill our internal e-mail and database application called Lotus Notes. It is not easy to do. We are stabbing at it with our steely knives* – but we just can’t seem to kill the beast. The latest news in the internal company-wide project with the aim of moving us over to Google Mail and Google Calendars (yay!) is that we are going to have to use the two applications side-by-side for a few months with no integration between the two. Hey, if that’s what it takes, I’m all for it. (The little KillNotes program on my desktop removes Lotus Notes from my computer’s memory. It sometimes hogs the memory and impacts the system’s performance if even after one has logged out of it).
*A reference to the classic Eagles song ‘Hotel California’.
Tuesday/ the State of the Union is .. ?
President Obama delivered a feisty and upbeat speech in his state of the union address. I only saw parts of it but watched an extensive discussion afterwards. The economy’s improvement got a lot of attention, as well as a proposed capital gains tax to pay for tax cuts for the middle class and several other proposals such as free community college tuition for deserving students for two years. The administration’s foreign policy and all the problems in the Middle East and Syria did not get a lot of airtime at all. And with Republicans now in charge of both the House and the Senate, I think none of us that follow politics, is too optimistic that anything big will get done in the next two years.
Monday/ to San Francisco
It was Martin Luther King Day here in the United States today – a federal holiday, but we traveled out to the project site anyway and made it a workday. It was quiet at Seattle airport this morning, but the airplane was full as usual.
Sunday/ the Seahawks have it
Oh, I cannot watch this any longer, I thought, as the Seahawks were down 0-16 at half-time. Let me get my errands done before it gets too late. (I fly out to San Francisco in the morning, hope my ear is going to be OK). Then in the 4th quarter I learned that the Hawks were rapidly catching up and going for broke. By the time I got home they were up 22-19. The Packers put in a field goal to even at 22-22. Time was up, and now it was into overtime. Three minutes in, Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson threw a perfect ball 35 yards down the middle to Jermaine Kearse for the winning touchdown.
Saturday/ Go Seahawks!
Here’s a bird’s eye view* of the city of Seattle, looking south with the ’12th man’ (Seahawks football team supporter) flag atop the Space Needle. Other tall buildings sport the blue and green colors of the team as well. The action on Sunday at 12 noon is in the stadium at the top right of the picture, where the Seahawks play against the Greenbay Packers for a spot in the Superbowl.
*Maybe a seahawk?
Friday/ a hungry hippo and a song
I saw an amazing clip on TV today
of a hippo chasing a boat with tourists in Zambia. I found it on the Huffington Post Live’s website, here. The hippo is Africa’s most dangerous animal : more so than lions, leopards and crocodiles.
My other on-line quest was to find the singer of an ’80s song called ‘Everything is Coming Up Roses’. A brand-new song on iTunes 
with the same name triggered the memory. Nah, I don’t like this new one, I thought. But who sang that song that I remember? Can I buy it? Turned out no – the 1987 version sung by ‘Black’ (Colin Vearncombe) is not for sale on iTunes, nor on Amazon Music. But I did find it on YouTube, as a music video, and I would have to listen to it that way.
Thursday/ the swiss franc shock
There were shock waves in the international currency markets today with the news that the Swiss National Bank had abandoned the cap they had placed on the swiss franc since Sept 2011.
The Bank had aggressively intervened since then to keep the franc ‘pegged’ at 1.2 Euro. Today they threw in the towel, and the franc shot up 15% against most major currencies. Why? Well, since the 2008 crisis everyone with money had gone to Swiss banks with it.
The situation today though, may make the Swiss, or those with Swiss bank accounts, feel ‘richer’,but the move is universally bad for business and tourism in Switzerland. Food giant Nestle’s stock is down by 15%. As one analyst noted, it’s as if the state of Virginia here in the USA has a dollar that’s worth 15% more than anywhere else in the country. Would people travel there, or buy goods and services there – that’s 15% more expensive across the board? Not if they had other choices, or if they are on a budget.
Wednesday/ I liked my tabbouleh
I’m hardly ever home on 
Wednesdays, but tonight I was – and I could go out with my friends for a bite and a beer. I had falafels with tabbouleh at the Elysian Pub tonight. Tabbouleh originated in Syria and Lebanon, and has become a popular ‘American ethnic food’, says Wikipedia. The version of it that I had, had pita bread, falafel, cherry tomatoes, couscous, feta and cucumber. It was very good !
Tuesday/ out of the office – but not out of touch
I am out of the office this week – but my colleagues have many, many ways to get a hold of me. We use e-mail, texting, phone calls, voicemail and WebEx conferencing (to share the presenter’s computer screen over the internet). I used all of those on Tuesday, actually. Still, nothing beats being there in person. One has to see if the faces are smiling or frowning at you, and what the body languages are signalling. And when someone gets up and starts drawing an impromptu diagram on the whiteboard, that is trouble for the remote attendee.
Monday/ staying put
No, this is not me! I
t’s passenger Chris O’Leary, tweeting that he was the only one on a 76-seater Delta flight to La Guardia airport in New York City. (One more passenger actually boarded right before the door closed, though). Hey – no screaming babies, and I can lean my seat back all the way at any time, he said afterwards.
As for me : I had canceled my flight to San Francisco for Monday, since I was still battling the nasty cold that had started on Wednesday last week.
Sunday/ football overdose
It was a BIG weekend for the National Football League with four play-off games. Looking back, I am a little shocked to realize how much football I had watched ! Probably more than I have watched all season, yikes. The Seahawks beat the Carolina Panthers here on our home turf on Saturday to go through to next weekend, where they will meet the Greenbay Packers from Wisconsin.
