A Visitor

I had a visitor today - quite an obliging one who hung around for his portrait and posed and preened. I thought that I should at least 'make him a Star' on the internet.

Found Art

Although we didn't quite have the nice weather predicted for the weekend, it at least didn't rain, and we weren't flooded in, so we took advantage and did some 'street hiking' in both Anacortes and Seattle. (Mark usually calls it 'street walking' but I don't want to give the wrong impression here of what we were actually doing.)

Of course we took the camera and of course we found interesting stuff to photograph. In Seattle at least one person has a positive view of city rats, painting their nuclear shadow on a parking garage entrance:


And in Anacortes, they paint their human population of yesteryear onto the sides of buildings, decorate their trash cans in honor of local canneries and find other useful ways to add art to function:

We did actually find the usual compliment of 'vistas' to photograph, lest you think the long winter nights and excess rain have gotten to us, but sometimes those aren't the most interesting shots. And some trips are just like that. (I am reminded of a strenuous trail in Jack London State Park in California that was so 'uphill' and so full of horse poop that we came home with a whole bunch of pictures of poop piles that we were going 'oversize' in photoshop to depict the mountain with us in miniature next to them, clawing our way up that horrible pile. Not that this weekend's outings were that sort of trip either.)

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... Which brings me to another digression (maybe the weather really IS getting to me.) I am reading a quite fun book about a guy who sets off on a road trip to rid the country of typos, misspellings and bad grammar - the sort of thing found on signs in store windows. Since I've been reading about dangling prepositions and misplaced or missing apostrophes I've had to edit and re-edit and re-re-edit this posting - quite possibly to the point of incoherence. (I misspelled 'grammar' - adding an 'e' and now having to put a dash in because I'm not sure where the comma would go in this instance, whether inside or outside of the quotes marks, which aren't really quotes marks as I prefer the 'look' of just one ' instead of two " - and had to completely restructure two whole sentences because of the preposition business. One should be careful about reading... And writing. And - ArghhhHH - I had to go back again because I didn't 'close' the parentheses.)

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Good grief.

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It's Sunday night. That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.

WAH and OOF (or is it WFH?)

We're home today - a national holiday for me, but a forced 'work at home' day for Mark because our valley is once again flooded and we can't get out. The 'over the river' part of his drive to work would be more like 'through the river' at this point - an impractical idea considering how deep are the floodwaters.

We live in a small, rural community that historically was an agricultural-based, red-neck sort of place but which has been transformed, by economics, into a bedroom community for Microsoft. So a whole lot of engineering-type geeks are stranded, as we are, unable to get to work, and not too happy about it. Of course they have banded together via the internet into a 'news group' and are sharing war stories, opinions and questions online about our common isolation problem. It could be noted that this 'conversation' seems to be absorbing a lot more of Microsoft's resources than, say, project data sharing, reporting writing, phone-in meetings and PowerPoint presenting. But I shouldn't note that. Suffice it to say that whether WAH (work at home,) OOF (out of office,) or WFH (work from home) there is very little actual work in evidence.

Being the geeks that they are though - even if a bit off-message - they seem to be focused on 'data' and the conversation has been informative about them as a group. One guy lives on a hill above town and is periodically posting digital pictures taken from his front window focusing on a little 'island' high spot in the flooded valley that is getting smaller and smaller with each posting. Lest you think that mere observation is a little too 'analog' for this group, let me tell you we have accompanying data about distance, time, aperture, equipment limitations and links to charts about historical flood levels. Someone else posted links to the traffic cameras and another person posted links to the water flow rates and distances from various measurement positions. We have data about rainfall around the region, data about relative elevations in the valley, flood progression, ground saturation, satellite weather reports, and the impact of flooding to fisheries (numbers and charts) from a wide range of contributors.

And yet another person asked about getting out of town via another route. Now maybe it's just me, but if you live here, shouldn't you know where the road goes? It's a small town, there is one road through it - north and south - and two connecting roads to the west, both of which have to go through the valley. You can't go east because of the mountains. You can't go north and south - or west for that matter - because those roads all sit, at some point, on the valley floor, now under water. It would only take you 10 minutes of exploration to discover this.

If you could get your nose out of your internet connection long enough to take that time.

Who ARE these guys?

We're WAH.