a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
It’s summertime, and today was very pleasant and mild outside. There were rain showers in the forecast, but there were certainly none here where I live in the city. The sun sets after 9pm, which means I can have my dinner and still go out for a walk. (I am supposed to make it out to the gym, but what a production it is to get one’s kit together, get down there, work out, and all that. I will go tomorrow!).
Whoah! Check out the wasabi root – and how expensive it is! – I thought when I spotted it on offer in the vegetable section of the Uwaji-maya grocery store in Seattle’s International District on Sunday night. Wasabi root has an extremely strong flavor and in this form is finely grated BUT : it loses its flavor after just 15 minutes if left uncovered! The plant grows naturally along stream beds in mountain river valleys in Japan, and is also cultivated, but it is difficult to do so. Japan imports wasabi from China, Taiwan and even from New Zealand. Wasabi is sometimes called Japanese horseradish, but horseradish is a different plant.
Happy Father’s Day to all the dads – and especially to mine! The picture is from Google’s home screen. Looks like the dad is taking a coffee break while tinkering in his garage.
The long summer break for schools here in the USA have started. So for many parents the typical day of getting the kids up out of bed, into the car, to school, work until school gets out, taking care of everyone’s needs until bedtime, and then sneak in a few hours of work or personal time late at night, is upended. It’s three months of unstructured ‘chaos’ ahead. School calendars in the USA are on the low end of number of school days (180), compared to as many as 240 in Japan. The shorter number of days in the USA is compensated for somewhat by longer hours of instruction -but there are many other differences. In the USA each state determines its own curriculum while in Japan (and many other countries), the government decides what each school must teach, how to teach it, and even what books to teach it with. Less choice, but far fewer disparities in student education when the time comes for a student to compete nationally to qualify for higher education after school.
I was a little worried about my checked bag that I had to leave at Pittsburgh airport last night after changing my flights to Seattle at the last minute, but I discovered that Delta’s smartphone app lets one scan the bag tag (the sticker you get when you check the bag) to determine its location : pretty neat. So the bag was pulled last night from my original Pittsburgh-Minneapolis flight and put on the one this morning. The airport at Minneapolis was crowded, with lots of families traveling. The US airlines expect the most fliers in five years for 2013 – but not quite reaching the all-time high volume of some 217 million travelers that flew in 2007, the industry’s high point.
I thought I was home free since the very large storm system here in the Midwest was moving east and I was going to fly west .. but no : too many flights in Atlanta and Chicago have been canceled or delayed. I was going to make it from Pittsburgh into Minneapolis only by midnight, with no connecting flights left to take me to Seattle. So I decided to stay put in Pittsburgh, walked over to the Hyatt hotel that’s right here and I will make an early start out in the morning when the skies are clear and friendlier.
My firm’s Pittsburgh office is located in the US Steel Tower in downtown Pittsburgh, so off I went this morning to get my notebook fixed up. I found the building easily, but had to search for a parking garage close by. Then – miraculously- a spot on the street just big enough for a Toyota Corolla opened up. I was in luck : my rental car for the week happened to be one! So I squeezed it into the parking spot, walked just a block or so, and went up to the 52nd floor of the US Steel Tower. Jason the IT support guy snapped out the solid state hard drive out of my coffee-spilled machine, popped it into a new Lenovo T430 shell, and presto! I was back in business.
Alright, so the deepwater horizon oil spill it was not – just a major coffee spill all over my workhorse lenovo t430 notebook computer shortly after lunch. i jumped up, turned the machine sideways so that the coffee drained off the keyboard, mopped it up with a towel, and went to the washroom and tried to dry it out further with the powerful dryers our office building has in. one of the usb ports was wet inside, got that dried out, but i still don’t have a shift key. CAPS LOCK can get me uppercase characters, but i cannot get the symbols that i need to log onto my lotus notes e-mail. lotus notes does not allow me to cut and paste from Word into the password field either. other keys are sticky now. got to use the keyboard. so .. off i am tomorrow to the pittsburgh pwc office to get some help. they tell me they can do a shell swap – just install this machine’s hard drive into a new shell. that will make me very happy.
We are at it again this week with work sessions to get ready to construct the new SAP system 
that we will implement for our client company.
Back at the Marriott hotel across the street (very convenient), I picked an Iron City Beer to celebrate the end of the day. From the http://www.pittsburghbrewing.com/ web site : ‘Iron City Beer is a classic American lager established in the rich traditions of Pittsburgh, PA. Built on 150 years of brewing experience, Iron City Beer boasts scents of sweet corn and wheat, smooth crisp pale malt flavor, and a dry finish with very little bitterness.
I’m out in Pittsburgh again, and I arrived via the Minneapolis/St.Paul airport on Delta Airlines.
The MSP airport is a lot nicer than Chicago’s O’Hare (sorry Chicago ..) : not as crowded, more modern inside, and with nice stores and food offerings.
Here’s a t-shirt I saw on Saturday. It shows two face-to-face T-Rexes and the phrase ‘T-Rex hates high fives’. Aww. Turns out there is a whole slew of T-Rex is trying to (do something for which it needs longer arms). Check out the link below the picture for Morgan German’s collection of pictures. Some of the ‘T-Rex is Trying’ memes are very funny! http://pinterest.com/morganrosegerms/t-rex-trying/
On Saturday night we tried to get into the Rione XIII restaurant here on 15th Ave (a reference to Rome’s 13th district), but we were turned away. We need reservations; they only keep two open tables, explained the host at the entrance. So off we went, and ended up at Coastal Kitchen a few steps away. I had a black bean burger and everyone else had something fishy with even a fresh oyster thrown in.
It was another very early start to the day for me with a 6.30 am flight out of Pittsburgh airport. I almost did not make it onto the flight. The check-in area was swamped with people when I got there at 5 am. I just had to drop my bag at United, but there was no bag-drop line. So by 5.45 am I was still in line and I yelled as politely as I could ‘Ma’am! I’m on the 6-30 to Chicago!’ . That got me to the front to dump my bag and I was off to the security line. Mercifully my return flight was marked ‘TSA Pre’ as well, so I could scoot through there in a few minutes and make a dash for the gate.
.. the ‘thing’ being my Prius rental car that makes no vibration, no peep, no nothing as it sits at the traffic light. Put then you step on the ‘gas’ (cannot say that, have to say step on the ‘accelerator’), and it moves. It’s magic.
We’re done with the workshops for the week, and heading back home. My flight out to Seattle with a stop in Chicago is early Friday morning.
The beer! Grab the beer! says the guy in the leaky boat to his diving bud. ‘Lower de Boom1‘ is an 11.5% strong a/v beer from the 21st Amendment Brewery2 from San Francisco CA. (I didn’t drink any, just took the picture in the Giant Eagle grocery store here in the Pittsburgh area).
1Belgian-born ship owner Cornelius DeBoom set sail for San Francisco in the fall of 1848 when the news of the discovery of gold in California arrived.
2The Twenty-first Amendment (Amendment XXI) to the United States Constitution repealed the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution on December 5, 1933. The 18th Amendment had mandated nationwide Prohibition on alcohol on January 17, 1920.
I have facilitated two days of workshops with one more to go (yay), and by tonight (Wednesday) I feel that I can come up for air for the first time. We have participants from Sweden and the UK that came in on Monday night, so while I felt the three hour time difference from Seattle on Tuesday, they had to deal with even more jet lag. But everyone was in better shape today.
It was a shock to my system to roll out of bed at 3.30 am after a fitful few hours of sleep to get ready for my 6 am flight out to Chicago and then on to Pittsburgh. It helped that I was selected for ‘TSA Pre’ treatment at the airport. ‘TSA Pre’ is a program for frequent travelers that allows them entry into a special lane at the security checkpoint. The traveler gets to keep on shoes and jacket, and liquids and computers in the bag. Wow! But don’t get too spoiled! It will not happen every time even if you travel a lot.
It was a gorgeous day here in Seattle, with the sun out and the temperatures mild and perfect for a walk outside.
I went up to Seattle’s University District on Saturday afternoon in pursuit of my out-of-print and not-on-Amazon book from 1966 that the Central Library said they would have here – but it turned out they did not, either. But it was all worth the trip because I bought two nice books at the Half Price Bookstore close by. I will write about them in a later post.
Is there such a thing as a black flower? I wondered as I found some on the sidewalk Friday night that certainly appeared black. Alas, no – there is not – says Interflora’s web site. ‘Black’ flowers merely have very dark shades of purple or red. So soot-black flowers are the stuff of fantasy and fairy tales.
It’s been a week since the collapse of the Skagit River Bridge on Interstate 5 north of Seattle. Washington State Department of Transport (we just call them ‘wash-dot’ here on the news) has dredged up the bridge section and vehicles from the river, and is getting ready to put a temporary section in place. I see Wash-DOT splashed out on Yahoo’s photo site (called Flickr) with detailed pictures. Here is the link http://www.flickr.com/photos/wsdot/sets/72157633665218854/
