a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
I’d better enjoy coming home this Thursday night, because for the next several weeks we are going to have to stick around until mid-day on Fridays. We are pushing hard to get all the design work for our project done before the disruptions of Thanksgiving and Christmas (good disruptions nonetheless!) are upon us. The year 2013 is running out on all of us. Yikes !
We had a nice team dinner on Tuesday night at a restaurant called Willie G’s, a seafood and steak place. I had some halibut and vegetables with a nice white wine. It was quite a walk down there from the hotel, but I am sure the ‘exercise’ was good for me. And I got to check out the Denver clock tower (also called the Daniels & Fisher tower) from up close.
P.S. Soo .. the US Government is set to open in the morning, and the debt ceiling has been raised from its $16.7 trillion level to some level that will pay the bills through Jan 15 next year. Hooray?
It’s good that it’s a short walk from the hotel to my office building. It has suddenly become cold here in the mornings (29 °F/ -2°C). And : there some snowflakes in the air coming down from by lunch time. Nothing that stuck on the pavement or streets, though.
I was on United 244 as is usual these Monday mornings. We left on time at 5.40 am but the pilot had some turbulence to deal with at the landing in Denver. I noticed four or five emergency vehicles next to the runway, which made me wonder if there was a concern that some airplanes could skid off the runway.
The green in the trees here in Seattle are turning into reds, oranges and yellows, as they are across the United States.
So why are leaves green to begin with? asks Wikipedia in its article on chlorophyll. Wikipedia : ‘It still is unclear exactly why plants have mostly evolved to be green. Green plants reflect mostly green and near-green light to viewers rather than absorbing it. Other parts of the system of photosynthesis still allow green plants to use the green light spectrum (for example, through a light-trapping leaf structure, carotenoids, and so on). Green plants do not use a large part of the visible spectrum as efficiently as possible. A black plant can absorb more radiation. For more, check out Wikipedia : Chlorophyll
On Saturday morning we did a little tour of historic downtown Ellensburg (the established in 1883). We stopped for a short time at the Kittitas County Farmers Market as well. Then we went to Central Washington Univeristy’s Tomlinson Stadium for a football game. The CWU Wildcats took on Dixie State University (from Utah) in its annual Homecoming contest. Homecoming is the tradition of welcoming back alumni of a school.
Bryan and I drove out to Ellensburg on Friday (two hours and some from Seattle, depending on traffic). Bryan’s dad Dale received a Distinguished Alumnus Award from his alma mater in Ellensburg, Central Washington University.
Thursday’s trip home from Denver went without a hitch. There was a shortage of Yellow Cab taxis at Seattle airport, though. The driver told me that they are sometimes kept away from the pick-up points, and then three or four flights arrive at the same time.
Wells Fargo became my bank after my home mortgage had ended up with them some 10 years ago. (This was after the initial mortgage that had been issued had changed hands 3 or 4 times between short-term mortgage brokers. I am very sure all of this was unnecessary, and symptoms of the US real estate bubble of 2007). The bank has been around a long time, founded during the California gold rush in 1852. It survived the collapse of the California banking system in 1855, and hey – it also survived the US financial crisis of 2008. It is Warren Buffett’s favorite bank and getting ever larger (which is not necessarily a good thing!). It has assets of $1.44 trillion and deposits of $1.01 trillion. It’s difficult to comprehend how much money that is!
Soo .. how is the USA today? Well : never mind that it’s day #8 of the US Government shutdown. 1. The debt ceiling deadline is approaching. Will we breach it? What will that do? Here’s erstwhile large animal veterinarian Ted Yoho, now a Tea Party congressman from Florida weighing in today : ‘I think, personally, it [not raising the debt ceiling], would bring stability to the world markets’, since they would be assured that the United States had moved decisively to curb its debt. 2. There’s a story on the front page of the USA today of a 9-year old boy that slipped through three layers of airport security, and got onto an airplane from Minneapolis to Las Vegas. How was that possible? 3. The new $100 bills are officially out. Over lunch time I actually went to the giant branch of Wells Fargo Bank to see if they have the newly designed $100 bill for me to trade for an old one. (No. Maybe by Christmas, said the teller).
I had a window seat this morning and slept all the way to Denver. There was snow in the city and at the airport on Friday (it’s early for snow here), but not a trace of it remained by this morning.
My friend
and colleague Gus arrived in Seattle for a few days of work here this week, and invited me out to lunch today. Since it was a blue sky sunny day, we picked the Seattle downtown waterfront to go to and ended up at Elliot’s Oyster House on Pier 56. Hey! We can order Oyster Rockefeller, said Gus. I did not know that’s a baked (or broiled) oyster. It’s quite good. (I’m too squeamish to eat raw oyster). We also ordered Dungeness crab cakes. I learned something new about the Dungeness crab as well. They are named after Dungeness, a small coastal community right here in Washington State.
I took out the DVD for the recent sci-fi flick ‘Oblivion’, and we watched it on Saturday night. I would have to agree with the ‘Rotten Tomatoes’ website that says its consensus is that the film is ‘visually striking but thinly scripted’. I have trouble latching onto any Tom Cruise character emotionally anyway, but I he did a good job to carry the movie. I see the film was shot in the summer in Iceland, so the spectacular scenery of black lava rock and snow is actually real and not visual effects. It is hard to say what is real and what is not in movies nowadays!
This picture is from Thursday’s taxi ride out to Denver airport. I looked up, and there it was : a cobalt blue horse out on the plains – so out of place it looks like an alien creature. Turns out it has been there for five years already, and despite criticism is likely to stay, as NBC’s Today website reported here.
I don’t come in ‘too late’ from my trips to Denver on Thursday nights (about 10pm), but it’s hard to just step into the house and go to sleep. I’m too excited to be home; there’s a mailbox full of junk mail; and I can make something to eat if I missed dinner. I can also check if there is any worthwhile news of the government shutdown (no, none), or .. I can watch the pandas on Atlanta Zoo’s panda cam on the computer. I sleep like the one on the right, but I love the way that other cub is sleeping on its back. Aw.
Here’s Denver depicted in Starbucks coffee mug format. There is snow for the mountains in the forecast for Friday, prompting speculation that some of the Colorado ski resorts may open earlier than usual this year.
(So the United States government has shut down at midnight last night, and ‘Obamacare’ is open for registration).
Here on the oil company project in Denver we are keeping our heads down and working away to complete the design phase of the project. The PwC project manager came into my office today with two ‘new’ PwC members in tow, introducing them just by name. After I greeted them, I asked :‘And what will you guys do on the project?’ not disrespectfully; but in a chummy kind of way. Oh, said the project manager, Ryan is the quality assurance partner and Reed is the client partner for the project. ‘Ah, very good’, I said, feeling a little awkward that I was so informal with them. Oh well – how was I to know, is that not right?
Mondays start very early for me with the travel out to Denver – so I don’t want to spend too much time waiting for my food at a restaurant on Monday nights. So that’s where the Vietnamese noodle (phở) place here on 16th Ave in downtown Denver comes in. They serve up a quick, hearty bowl of noodle soup and I have already been there three or four times.
That Washington circus that we sometimes call the US Government is at it again. Not Washington State, Washington DC .. and to be fair, the circus is in the House of Representatives, not so much the Senate or the rest of the government. Right now it looks like the US government will shut down at midnight on Tue Sept 30th – which is surely some kind of joke. How long will it stay ‘shut down’? Will the armed forces stop their work? (No.) Will Medicare and Social Security payments stop? (No.) Will the National Parks close? (Yes.) Will the government offices close? (Yes.) The Tea Party Republicans just cannot get over ‘Obamacare’, for which registration officially starts Oct 1. Just this Monday a woman across the aisle on the airplane from me told her seat neighbor: ‘I know what they (the Government, the Democrats, the President) are doing, and it’s socialism’*.
*No, it is not. It is helping the citizens of the country to buy more affordable health insurance. It is democracy. It helps everyone compete in a capitalistic system on a more level playing field. Socialism is an economic system characterized by social ownership of the means of production and co-operative management of the economy [Wikipedia]. And Republicans that support corporations and business throw the word around at a time when ‘social ownership’ of the economy is at a 50-year low. Wealth is more concentrated at the top than ever. Fortune 500 corporations sit on tens of billions of dollars of cash. Unemployment is still way too high.
We are having a ‘big weather event’ (as the meteorologists like to say) here in Seattle this weekend : lots of rain with gusty winds at times as well. The first big storm of the season can make trouble and bring down tree branches and there was indeed a power outage in parts of the city.