Here’s the beautiful Granite Building here in lower downtown Denver. We had wood-fired pizza just across the street from it tonight.
From the Denver Post : It’s the four-story presence that looms over the southwest corner of Larimer and 15th streets, boasting a history that is appropriately rich, given that it was constructed stone by multicolored stone in 1882, just 24 years after gold prospectors founded Denver.
It was Monday, Memorial Day of 2014, here in the United States today (a national holiday honoring fallen soldiers in the country’s wars); also the considered the ‘unofficial’ start of summer. We still have cool temperatures here in Seattle, so it always comes as a surprise to me to realize in May that the longest day of the year in the northern hemisphere is less than a month away! Check out this infographic that explains the history of Memorial Day here in the USA that I found on-line.
It is a long weekend here in the USA with Memorial Day on Monday .. so I could relax and not start preparing for my weekly trip to Denver. We spent time on the Seattle Waterfront today, even though there was a steady drizzle all afternoon.
My new fence is up! Yay! So this on the north side of my property. It’s a little higher than the old fence. And I have finally run out of excuses – like not enough sun – to put some ground cover thingies and other green in at the back, so I will have to get to that. The green bush was a lot bigger prior to the work on the fence, and will grow back to fill up some of the space as well.
I made it home on Thursday night, thankful that our flight out of Denver was not delayed by the weather.
On Friday my contractors Bryan and Paul completed the installation of a new fence on the north side of my property, as well as installing a ‘Nest’ internet-connected, smart thermostat inside the house for me. The device has a very elegant look, and can be controlled from anywhere with my smart phone. (Or it can just be left to ‘learn’ one’s typical daily and weekly schedule with its built-in activity sensors).
Yes, my old Honeywell thermostat was programmable, but there are holidays, daylight savings-time shifts, and simply times when one comes home ‘unexpectedly’ (vis-à-vis the programmed thermostat schedule). With remote access and control to it, I can warm up my house ahead of time so that I don’t step out of the taxi cab and into an icebox.
There were more warnings of tornadoes in the Denver metro area today, and an hour later, that was followed by a severe thunderstorm with lightning and hail just as I was heading out to the airport.
(Hail damaged six Frontier Airlines aircraft at Denver International Airport on Wednesday, forcing them to cancel some 16 flights. Wow. I wonder how hard it is to fix a fuselage or wing surface with hail dents in. Surely a hair dryer or letting it stand in the sun will NOT do?).
The little Prius taxi cab I was in took quite a pummeling from the cats-and-dogs-coming-down kind of rain, with some hail mixed in as well .. but thankfully none that would damage an aircraft !
We had some mild excitement this afternoon in the office when severaI of us got tornado alerts on our phones from the National Weather Service, and an announcement by the building management. So we moved to the elevators and stairwells for 30 mins or so, until the coast (the Denver plains?) was clear.
Later on I walked down to Union Station to check on its remodeling progress. The work on it still needs a few more months, though, and I could only admire the exterior.
We had a team dinner tonight, and managed to steer clear of discussing work – for the most part. We all have travel stories and consulting ‘war’ stories to tell. We even retold – for those that did not hear it – one of the best ones, of the time one of our colleagues from Germany managed to clear everyone out of an entire Frankfurt Airport concourse in a classic cheese bomb incident. (Here is a similar story I found on the website Mother Jones, where I borrowed the phrase from : cheese bomb incident). He had bought a soft flavorful cheese in Russia, and at Frankfurt airport was questioned for the third time during his trip back about the suspicious substance in his carry-on luggage. ‘Open your luggage’ please, said the security personnel. Fed up, grumpy and probably feeling that’s he is German and should be trusted by his fellow citizens, he announced ‘Why should I? There is a bomb inside’. Whoah. Of course that triggered a major security alert, and everyone had to leave until the cheese was inspected properly. (Cheese not only looks like plastic explosives, some cheeses have vapors similar to the signature vapors of explosives). I don’t think our colleague spent time in a German jail, but he got in some serious trouble, alright.
I made it out to Denver with my usual early morning flight. I went for a walk tonight after dinner, to the Denver City Hall – forgetting that I have been wanting to go and check out the recently remodeled Union Station (train station) here in downtown. So I will have to do that tomorrow or Wednesday.
The Rubik’s cube is 40. It’s shocking (that it is that old), but I do remember that I was still in school when it first appeared. My younger brother could solve it in under 2 minutes .. while I never did get the hang of it ! Invented in 1974 by Hungarian mathematician Ernő Rubik, it is the world’s top-selling puzzle game, and widely considered to be the world’s best-selling toy. Google is celebrating the anniversary with a virtual Rubik’s cube on its home page (picture on the right; it takes a little imagination to see ‘Google’ written there!
And how many permutations of the cube color positions are there? 43 quintillion. The number is so large that the packaging simply says ‘billions’ of possible permutations.
I am doing a (late) spring cleaning of my stuff in my study, and found these Southern African tree post cards. I want to frame them, but will have to get to it next weekend ! My favorite tree? It has to be the legendary boabab.
*ESPN is a television sports network here in the USA.
I brought a set of silver spoons back from South Africa : a gift from my mom (that belonged to my grand-mother). While checking them out a little closer today, I noticed the letters EPNS-AI stamped on the back. Turns out the EPNS stands for electroplated nickel-silver and the AI stands for superior quality (the thickest layer of silver). So how to clean silverware (made of silver)? One way is to simply use a glass bowl lined with kitchen-grade aluminum foil, filled with hot water and ordinary salt. The electrochemical reaction (exchange of electrons between the aluminum and silver) will clean the tarnish. I also recall ‘Silvo’ that we used on occasion in my parents’ house – a mild liquid metal polish that originated in Britain at the turn of the last century.
We walked by this Chevrolet Corvette Stingray on the way to lunch today here in Denver. It’s brand new and has to be a 2014 model. It must have set its owner back some $60,000.
Most of the time it’s nice to go and relax and go grab a bite with my colleagues .. but tonight was one of those where it took way too long. We picked the Yard House, a popular place that offers 200 kinds of beers on tap. Tonight it was bustling with people. (There’s probably a convention at the Colorado Convention Center going on again). So what was supposed to be a 15 minute wait turned into a 40 minute wait, and then it took another 30 minutes before we finally had our food on the table. But hey, I got to get a spectacular panorama picture as we left, and just as the sun was setting.
I read a few pages of my TIME magazine this morning on the plane to Denver – about the recent tragedy on Mount Everest. (Sixteen sherpas were killed in the single most deadliest incident on Mount Everest when giant pieces of ice broke loose higher up). I remember when I first learned of Mount Everest as a schoolboy that I liked that the height expressed in either meters or feet has some pattern to it – 8,848 m (29,029 ft). P.S. Check out the price tag for an individual undertaking an expedition on the second graphiic.
Monday was a spectacular blue sky day in Seattle. I postponed my usual Monday morning trip to Denver to Tuesday due to a bad cold. I think I will be OK to travel tomorrow. (I see they had snow there in Denver today .. it’s very late for snow!).
P.S. Here’s alinkto Seattle Art Museum’s Deco Japan exhibit to go with the picture below. There’s some pretty cool graphic design posters in there.
Paul, Thomas and I went for dinner at the Old Bamboo Vietnamese Restaurant in Seattle’s International District. It’s the new incarnation of the Spring Garden Restaurant, but in our estimation not quite as good. Afterwards we went to a bakery-cafe to pick up some dessert. I picked the red bean mousse cake. It reminded me of the red bean-filled buns I used to buy at the 7-11 in Hong Kong.
I ran some errands Friday morning, but then had I to go home and answer a dozen e-mails that came in from the Denver project. Technology brings the work e-mails to my smart phone, but I cannot pull up full screen work sheets and applications on a tiny phone screen!