Month: October 2006

Kevin’s hamstring is finally getting better (he got cleared for the gym by his physical therapist! yeah!), and so we walked down to Kirkland for ice cream on Saturday. It was really a perfect fall day — such fun to have a sunny weekend after all of the recent gloom! The leaves are still mostly unturned, but the smaller ornamental trees are brilliant.

Here’s an orange tree:

And a red one:

And a picture of a deliriously happy lab — we stopped at one of the parks and hung out on a bench just watching all of the gorgeous crisp colors. This family was throwing a frisbee into the lake for this dog, who’d race out to get it, then bounce around onshore until they threw it again. Sadly, the bouncing meant that I only got his tail.

They made him sit before they’d throw it, but it was on the beach and I couldn’t see him. If you picture a soaking wet lab turning circles over the fun of coming back with the catch, you’ll have the idea. We gave up and headed for home before they did. 🙂

We had yet another gorgeous sunset tonight. To change up the inevitable photo, I walked up the hill one street over.

Ooh. 🙂

The only sad (depressing, really) part of it all was that this photo was taken at 5:40. The days keep getting shorter.

Finally, the sort of week I’ve been waiting for! Everyone was amazing, I finally played the right players, and I won 115-95. Wow. Neat.

QB
	Alex Smith, SF	9
RUNNING BACKS
	RB Marion Barber, Dal	11
RECEIVERS
	WR Deion Branch, Sea	20
	WR Terrell Owens, Dal	22
	WR Reggie Brown, Phi	28
	TE L.J. Smith, Phi	10
DEFENSE
	D/ST Seahawks	6
KICKER
	K Jason Elam, Den	9
BENCH
	RB Shaun Alexander	0
	RB/WR Laurence Maroney, NE (BYE)	0
	WR Jerricho Cotchery, NYJ	0
	WR Reggie Williams, Jac (BYE)	0
	WR Keyshawn Johnson, Car	4
	K Rian Lindell, Buf	7
	D/ST Patriots (BYE)	0
	QB Jon Kitna, Det	10

TO, with three touchdowns, got his act together (not that I expect it to last, but still good to see). Reggie Brown was awesome (and double points, since anything that’s good for the Eagles makes Kevin happy). Deion Branch finally got in the Seattle groove. And even if the Seattle defense wasn’t amazing, at least they weren’t negative. 115! And somehow on Monday night, despite the two touchdowns by the Bears D (which Ross had) and the 83 yard run and touchdown off the kick by the Bears special teams, I managed to hold onto the lead. What a relief. 🙂

I have no knitting to show — I brought some for the trip and never even touched it. So I’ll just have to revel in the football goodness for this week, with a crafty ending (hopefully) for next week.

While I was relieved to graduate, and while I don’t think anything could compel me to trade age 25 for 21, I have to say that going back to Brown is always wonderful. I wasn’t expecting to know anyone when I went back other than my brother, and yet I ran into all these people. I saw Crew Matt (nickname, not real name. also back to visit) on the way to Keeney. A kid who’d been a really boppy freshman in the CS15 section I TA’d senior year is now a grad student. A fellow CSer was recruiting with me. And I kept running into the interns from last summer who are now seniors, which was friendly and fun. I went to the Ratty for sunday brunch and read the BDH, lurked in a bunch of classes, scoped all of the new stores on Thayer, and sat on the green watching people swing by the tables set up to promote loving your body and valuing women (yay, college).

I think I felt older on campus as a senior than I feel now, which is kind of fun. Clearly I’m on the path to becoming a true alum — still feel like I belong. A kid in the stairwell invited me to a “don’t talk about your job party” in his suite for all of the seniors that haven’t decided what they want to be when they grow up — he didn’t seem phased to hear that I’d graduated and had one already. 🙂

Such nostalgia and good fun. I enjoyed cutting across Lincoln Field from Wriston — a constant for four years:

And worked late at night (on my slides, for the presentation I gave on Tuesday night about Content Publishing) in the CIT with my coffee and my music:

And met Dave for dinner at his favourite bar off Wriston (picture taken as he was saying “Suze! What’re you doing? No pictures!”):

Yay, brunonia.

I rarely seem to fly during the day anymore, since red-eye flights are always cheaper. But since Microsoft was paying, I decided to live it up and take an early afternoon flight on Saturday. The bonus of this was, even though Seattle was all cloaked in dismal low clouds, Rainier and its foothills were totally visible. I was completely entranced — 45 minutes of excellent entertainment. I used to have a computer background of the Appalachians — swell after swell of blue mountains rising from the mist. This was the plane/volcano equivalent. If you click for the larger version, you can even see the silver river winding towards Rainier.

The plane passed it, and just as I lost my view, we turned south, so then I had a view of Rainier’s east face, with Mount St. Helens behind it to the right (you can see the flat top still from the eruption if you click for the bigger version) and Adams behind to the left.

Gorgeous. 🙂

In the last round of east coast visiting in July, my wonderful suitcase finally gave up the ghost. The zippers had been failing one by one (you can see that the front pockets are held closed with safety pins), and the main compartment zipper gave its last zip when we got home (you have to admire the courtesy of that timing).

My parents offered me new luggage as a birthday present over the summer. When I found out that I’d be flying back to my college on the east coast to talk about my job at the end of the week, I got a bit more active about looking.

After many successes with their backpacks and bags over the years, I decided to go with LL Bean. The suitcase and flight bag showed up last night — they’re so pretty! Shiny and new! And they are dripping with pockets, which I think is so useful. There’s even one on the back!

I’ll be so stylish for my flight on Saturday! 🙂

Also, LL Bean sent yet another copy of their Christmas catalog. I was kind of miffed, since it still seems really early for Christmas and they’ve sent three already, until I turned it over and saw the cover.

Awwww. 🙂 Forgiven.

I’ve always posted in batches, but the habit seems to have gotten a bit more exaggerated of late… oops.

No good excuses, I’ve just been busy, mostly with work. They’ve been buying us dinner, so I’ve been staying long enough to eat, then going home and burning some midnight oil there. The futon/laptop combo is so appealing (especially since I can knit while I research. 🙂 and wear pajama pants while I knit.). There should be another month of craziness, and then everything ought to simmer down for a while over the holidays…

As for the posting, it feels an awful like when whatever teacher would check your journal at the end of the month in middle school to see if you’d been doing your daily entries. I always stayed up late that last night to write twenty of them at a go, and now isn’t any different. Rock on, procrastination. But it’s still that same feeling of achievement and catching up, and the blog is fun to me, especially as a personal reference. So the posting in batches will continue. 🙂 Hope you don’t mind reading a week’s worth or so at a time.

Week Five was another close-until-the-end matchup, that I once again ended up losing. I was playing Paul, our editor, and the final score was 67-78.

QB
	Alex Smith, SF	17
RUNNING BACKS
	RB Laurence Maroney, NE	3
	RB/WR Keyshawn Johnson, Car	12
RECEIVERS
	WR Terrell Owens, Dal	4
	WR Reggie Williams, Jac	11
	TE L.J. Smith, Phi	6
DEFENSE
	D/ST Patriots	12
KICKER
	K Rian Lindell, Buf	1
BENCH
	RB Shaun Alexander, Sea (BYE)	0
	WR Deion Branch, Sea (BYE)	0
	WR Jerricho Cotchery, NYJ	4
	WR Reggie Brown, Phi	15
	RB Marion Barber, Dal	10
	K Jason Elam, Den	9
	D/ST Seahawks (BYE)	0
	QB Jon Kitna	6

I’m feeling pretty good about, for the first time, having played the right quarterback. It’s good to see that the Raiders didn’t disappoint. 🙂 Laurence Maroney had the inevitable low week after last week’s 26 points, but it was good to see the Patriots’ D do so well.

The Philly game was difficult to watch, from a fantasy perspective. (though of course we’re all celebrating that the correct team won) TO seemed like a really iffy option (could be amazing or could self-destruct), but after debating it, I played him anyway instead of keeping Reggie Brown. Clearly, that was unwise. He and Bledsoe are just so far off — it’s clear that TO missed all of training camp, they completely don’t connect. LJ Smith had numerous opportunities to be great (including an endzone pass that bounced off his chest, and a long run stopped at the 1 yard line), but they were all near misses.

So, instead of pondering the choices that should have been made, I’ll leave you with a picture of the vest:

Not bad progress considering that we only watched the Philly game instead of all three!!

Fall is Seattle’s sunset season. The days are utterly dismal when you wake up, with low, dark clouds. Things clear a bit later every day (but usually by lunch), and then it’s an 80/20 mix of clouds and sun all afternoon, before the gorgeous sunset.

I love these photos in particular. The weather always comes from the west, and if you look at the Olympics from our apartment, you’ll know what weather will be arriving in the next three hours or so. This photo has the overhead clouds and the low clouds in the hills, but that clear break speaks to a starry night.

I love the way the mountain peaks emerge from that low bank of clouds.

We’ve been looking at real estate (90% seriously/10% recreationally, or vice-versa depending on what came on the market that day), and I’m already missing the Olympics. Perhaps a bit too proactive, but they’re completely my totem mountains. Most of the houses we’d look would be Cascades-oriented instead. It’s completely not the same thing. I love our sunsets now.

We didn’t do anything in particular to add or encourage starfish in our tank, but the little (1/4″ or smaller) brittle starfish have proliferated. They are supposed to consume detritus, so the more the better, in my opinion.

They’re wildly light-shy (not to mention camera shy), but after cleaning the tank, I found this guy on the rock and managed to snap a relatively clear photo.

He’s all curled up, but probably at max 3/8″ across in this photo. Most are smaller. When we clean the tank, we vacuum out the sand, and we always end up with scads in the waste water bucket. I always feel guilty about the prospect of flushing them down the tub drain and spend nearly an hour fishing them out and putting them back in the tank. (which, judging by body language, they truly don’t appreciate. ingrates.) I use a pipette to suck them up — when they’re shot back out into the water, they curl up into a ball and drop straight down, so that they can burrow back into the sand. Our fish are fraidy-cats and wouldn’t touch them, but it’s a neat survival instinct.