Month: December 2005

Over the course of the year, our substrate snail population had become a bit depleted. I think we lost a bunch of them when we removed 2/3 of the gravel in June, but in any case, with our pretty sand bed, it was time to head to the store and pick up a new crew.

I forgot how much of a kick I get out of them. I’m not sure if they’re nocturnal or just very sleepy, but for most of the day they bury themselves under the sand. They have an amazing sense of smell, and when it’s time for the fish to eat, they pop out of the sand with very little warning and, trunks forward, cruise over to the source of the food.

Frequently, they also engage in the folly of glass-climbing. They really aren’t cut out for it, so you see them go up, up, then their speed starts to fade, their snorkle starts to waver, and they go careening down the glass again. You can practically hear them shrieking mayday.

I don’t know why they’re so fun to watch since the behaviour is always the same, but seriously: endless amusement. It’s great to have them back.

Somehow I’ve managed to find another project for myself.

We’ve been in our apartment for nearly a year and half. The layout is a kitchen, living room, spare bedroom and spare bath downstairs, and our bed and bath plus a large “bonus room” upstairs. When we were looking (we flew out for a whirlwind weekend to find an apartment a month before we drove out to Seattle for good), we wanted a two bedroom apartment, on the theory that our computers needed their own room, and that we might want more space from each other than a 1 bdrm would provide. This was our favourite apartment by far, and it came with the bonus room (This seems to be a Seattle thing — I’ve never seen them before. For those unfamiliar with the concept, it’s an open room that doesn’t have a door of its own, usually open to the stairwell and on the second floor.) So we ended up with more space than we needed. And no real furniture to fill it, but we used the downstairs bedrooms as a sort of project-and-fishtank-extras holder and had both of our desks upstairs. A few weeks ago, Kevin cleverly figured out that the bedroom downstairs has a door and so would be a great place to move his xbox and music so that we could both listen to our own things, so we moved his desk and zillions of computer parts downstairs, and moved the futon upstairs, so that now the bonus room just has my computer and bookshelves and a nice big reading area. Win-win. 🙂 In this spirit of beautification, I started looking for footstools to go with our butterfly chairs (also in the bonus room). We have one Ikea chair with a footstool that I bought off one of his friends after college, and since we moved we’ve been carrying that footrest up and down stairs depending where we want to sit that day. It’s not heavy, but it is cumbersome and it seemed a bit dumb. However, after looking online for an afternoon, I remembered why we didn’t have a pair of footstools for the butterfly chairs already — they’re wildly expensive. Cheap looking ones start at $50 each and they go straight up from there.

Luckily, I am not afraid of a project (or unluckily, depending on how much you enjoy uncluttered carpet), and so I found two old barstools in the classifieds for $15 to convert into footrests. The guy was very conscientious about making sure that we realized that they were a bit rough-looking. I in turn didn’t tell him that I intended to saw them apart.

The saw has been getting a lot of use recently. I finished this up on Sunday night before Grey’s Anatomy…

… and then added a coat of paint:

The color didn’t come out at all — the picture looks sky blue, but really it’s periwinkle to match a throw that I bought a few months ago for the futon. I tried taking more shots at different times of day but didn’t have better luck.

Now, the final step is to make a round cushion for the top of each, and matching square pillows for the futon to tie all of the parts together. I have the fabric cut and ironed, and am waiting for a bit of sewing inspiration to strike. 🙂

We’re going to visit Kevin’s family in Pennsylvania for Christmas this year, so in spite of my regret every time I see beautiful trees like this, we aren’t going to put one up this year. 🙁 It didn’t make sense to have one up only to take it down two weeks later, or to leave it up unwatered while we were gone. Instead, we decided to get a pretty wreath of some sort. I found a lovely (and cheap!) one with all different kinds of evergreen at Lowe’s, and brought it home for our wall:

Then, while I was there, I asked for the sawed-off bottom of someone’s tree, which they gave me for free! After some heavy sawing on the front porch (though nothing like last year’s tree destruction), I went from this:

to this:

and this:

over the mantle and halfway up the stairs. And with enough left over for an advent wreath. 🙂 It was great to get to go through all of the ornaments to find the few I wanted to take out, and so now even if we don’t have a tree I feel very in the spirit.

So much for being done by Thanksgiving. 😛

I’ve been steadily knitting over the last two weeks and am about a third of the way through the second half of the front. I stopped the first front about 5/6 of the way through when the ball ended (just after the photo below was taken). The knitting is relatively exciting, given the amount of yarn that I have left, all of which is in the picture below. Ack!

Now that the ball has run out for the first front, and I can guess how much I’ll need for the second front, it’s seeming really unlikely that the scraps will be sufficient to finish… There’s still a shot that I could make it with an inch or two to spare, but in the meantime it’s definitely suspenseful.

I’ve called around to try to get the same die lot (#084), but no luck. I’m hoping that with the cables, any color difference won’t be too noticeable. Fingers crossed.

We’re definitely in candle season. Something about such short days and the cold, and I’m finally lighting candles again at night. Given that, I was particularly delighted when Carol (the aunt of the earrings) taught me a trick for getting all of the leftover wax out of the bottom of the candle holder: put them in the freezer. Come back in an hour or two and they pop out perfectly. How cool!

Evidence that it works: a before and after with my candle holders from the ski trip with Kevin’s family at Mont Tremblant:

Here’s to shiny-new candleholders and the little things in life. 🙂

Yesterday, I saw three things that I’ve never seen before. Huh. 🙂 In chronological order:

1. My job is to run daily tests (called BVTs) on software that people can use to make user interfaces (UIs): all of the windows, buttons, menus, graphics, media, text, etc. One of the things that we have to test is that all of the layout and items still work correctly in different languages and computer cultures. Windows comes in different versions for different languages, and so I regularly test on Turkish, Japanese, Arabic and Hebrew to verify the different alphabets and orientations work. Running the tests themselves isn’t super-difficult due to the tools we use, but working on a computer where nothing (the start menu, file names, dialog boxes, the “OK” button, the “send” button in email, etc) is in English is a challenge. It’s kind of like playing memory where you were a kid. You have to remember based on position and order (and sometimes icon) which buttons and links are which. It’s surprising how doable that part is. The problem, as people who have travelled internationally can attest, is that the KEYBOARD in other places is layed out differently and these international OSs expect that. All of the brackets, slashes and symbols are always different, and a lot of the letters aren’t in the correct place either. So you’ll be typing along on your English keyboard, and the most wonderful nonsense will be appearing on the screen.
Yesterday, for the first time ever, I worked on a Czech build. And thus the mystery: Where is the backslash??? I need to type “” about a zillion times to run my tests, and it just wasn’t to be found. Luckily, google saved the day on this one, and I was able to use this.

2. A bunch of my brown friends have been getting together weekly to make dinner. The week it was at our house, Jon Warman brought some garlic. (A bulb? It has three cloves left and is half gone. What do you call the thing?) I always just buy garlic pre-chopped in little jars, but he left it with my onions in the bowl on the counter. Imagine, then, my surprise when I looked in today and saw this:

Woah! Does this mean I can plant it? Will it flower? Does anyone know anything about garlic sprouting?

3. We have a new mystery item in our fishtank. I saw it peeking up through the sand, looking sort of flowerish, around the side of a rock. I tried to move the rock in front of it so that I could see it better, and it disappeared, so I started clearing the sand and it kept retreating. By the time I got to the base, it was clear that it could stretch a few inches, or else must be mobile. Here’s a picture of it in full retreat, taken from under the tank (the bottom is glass):

For scale, that’s about 3/8″ in diameter. A few hours later, once I’d stopped pestering it, it started to come out. (The glossy bubbles next to it are air bubbles from when I was using a turkey baster to clear the sand away.)

What in the world can this be? It doesn’t really look like Aiptasia. Some sort of nuisance anenome? Definitely a cnidarian, but what kind?

And in the meantime, it’s snowing on the Eastside. Huge beautiful flakes. It’s only mid-thirties, so they’re melting when they touch down, but it’s so peaceful looking nonetheless. Yay, snow.