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We had a pretty full weekend. Yesterday we went to The Puyallup Fair (thefair.com). It seems like it is the state fair (at least for 4H), with dozens of rides, and dozens of dozens of food booths.
The real highlight of our weekend:
Mt. St. Helens from Johnston Ridge
We’ve been talking about it for a while, and finally set aside the day (possibly one of the last good days of the year for it). We drove south on I-5, making the 3 1/2 trip to Mt. St. Helens. There are many observation points along the way, but the highlight is the Johnston Ridge Observatory.
The site is just amazing. In the picture above, we are about 5 miles from the peak of St. Helens. You can clearly see the crater left from the 1980 eruption. The volcanic memorial site is way bigger than I had expected. There seems to be mile upon mile of hiking trails, even down into the valley. Had we been properly prepared, we would have ventured on a little further.
I highly recommend the trip. Just an amazing site. Beautiful scenery on the way, and you get to witness the true power of the earth.
Speaking of which (another recommendation coming). Last night we watched “Galapagos” from the BBC. Wow. The documentary itself was beautifully shot (we watched the Blu-ray version). The subject mater, just amazing. I feel privileged just to have reservations to visit the Galapagos next year. To see the origin of “The Origin of Species” and to witness first hand how evolution has played out through adaptation, will be a once in a lifetime experience. I clearly have lots of studying to do before we go.
Yesterday we took another little road trip. We drove out east (about 40 minutes) to Snoqualmie. The highlight of the trip was the waterfall.
The falls are 268 ft high. It is quite a drop. They falls aren’t very wide (although we hear they are fuller at different times of the year). Probably most impressively, the water seems to just hit the surface below and just scatter all over the place. This creates a lot of mist, which was supplemented by rain yesterday.
There is a nice observation area at the top of the falls. Then there is a 1/2 mile trail that goes down to the river. The trail is pretty steep, but it was a fun walk. At the bottom, there is another observation platform. And then…. you have to walk 1/2 mile uphill gaining 268 feet of elevation. It was a fun hike both ways, but the rain was really pouring down on the way back up.
We got into the car and headed back towards the town of Snoqualmie. On the way we passed a cool old train, and thought – hey, can we ride that? It turns out that you can. So we went to the Northwest Railway Museum, bought tickets, and rode the train to North Bend and back. The train also goes to the top of the falls, great view.
The train ride was followed up by a very yummy (and a little spendy) dinner at Woodman Lodge in Snoqualmie. It is actually a really nice restaurant, and we’ll keep it in mind for a place that we can take future guests.
In other exciting news… Rocky and Bullwilnle and Friends is now on Hulu - http://www.hulu.com/rocky-and-bullwinkle-and-friends. I know the show isn’t for everyone, but I like it.
I went to the Mariners game tonight (a work function). It was an exciting game! The Mariners won!
But more exciting – the moose came up to our section to dance during the 7th inning stretch!
I also rode my scooter to the game – man that is a convenient way to get places. Easy to park free and close. After the game, you can zip right out of there.
We managed to have a pretty productive weekend!
We both did various work things Saturday. I’ve been working on some research at home, trying to ramp up a second area of on-going publishable research. This is difficult as my current employment involves a lot of original work, and greatly restricts the areas that I can publish in.
Saturday afternoon was Yoga time. This week there has been lots of time to work on inversions – my headstand (Sirshasana) is getting much better. I can hold the pose for about 15 breaths, but still have trouble getting upside down without the assistance of the wall. Will get there… it is always a journey.
Sunday – some more work.
The day started with a Vespa ride! I scooted up to Mae’s Phinny Ridge Cafe to pick up a couple of their frozen cinnamon rolls. They are very good, but pack a lot of calories. I made it my breakfast and lunch! Maybe next week we will take a Vespa ride onto the ferry – we haven’t had a chance to do that yet.
I did some bug fixes and made a big performance improvement to CascadeLMS. It was against my first judgement, but I de-normalized some data in the database, leading to duplication (of just a 32bit integer field), but greatly improving performance. Some pages render 20% faster because they don’t have to recursively query the data any longer. Today / tomorrow is a bit of a stressful time. Miami U. will really start working with the system tomorrow as classes start this week. The install at https://my.csi.muohio.edu had 1736 users during the spring 2009 semester. I’m not sure what the user base will be like this fall, but I am hoping for an equally strong showing. So far, we have 40 courses set up for fall 2010, and I expect to see more this week!
Sunday afternoon-ish: we gutted the office! Our office on the bottom floor is combination of mine and Cortny’s desks and office stuff. I have a bunch of (like 8 shelves worth…) of books. Most of these lived in my office at Miami, but they are in our house now. I keep promising that when I have an academic position again, the books will go back into my office. I was able to get rid of a bunch of stuff, always a good feeling. But, also a bad feeling – as in “I moved this 2000 miles??? why?” I did keep 1 crate of “outdated” technology – I still have an Apple Newton, an original iBook, 3 other 800Mhz G3 iBooks (I plan on incorporating these into some research at some point…), and Tapwave (a 3rd party PalmOS device). There was a lot of stuff I just didn’t need anymore – and it is now gone.
We also disassembled my giant desk. It was just taking up too much room. We moved the iMac to one of the book shelves. It is really just our Web server, music service, and sometimes use computer. This opens up the center of the room. We now have a better open space for home Yoga and room for someone to sleep down there on an air mattress.
Then we headed down to my office. I brought in a bunch of stuff to sell on our for-sale list. Tomorrow, I will be selling an Atari 7800, a Nintendo GameCube, a pets.com sock puppet, and giving away a bunch of books. Feels good to lighten the household load.
And now – bedtime. Full week of working coming up. Actually 8 full weeks of work until I take half a day off… Just realized that I don’t have a full day off until the day after Thanksgiving.
I got my August Comcast (Cable, Internet, and Phone) bill today. My bill is normally $148, but today it was $209. That is quite a big jump…
On the bill, there is an explanation of the pro-rating, and change in service. It says, based on your change in service.. blah, blah, blah. It also says that I changed from plan “A” to plan “A.” Hmmm, I didn’t call to change anything, but my service changed to the same service that costs $40 more a month, with a $30 pro-ration charge…. fail.
So I called. The first guy tried unsuccessfully to convince me that I had agreed to a 12 month promotional rate. Seems odd, because I have been a customer for 19 months now, and didn’t sign up for any promotions.
I explained that my previous bill didn’t tell me that my rate was going to go up, and my current bill did not tell me why my bill went up, and why this is an unacceptable and disappointing customer experience.
Anyway, I talked to the first customer service guy for 5 or 6 minutes with no success. I had him walk through all my options, but all of them were either a substantial reduction in service, or not much savings at all. Eventually, I had to get mad, loud, and threaten to switch to satellite. Well, those are the magic words.
I was transfered to a higher level of customer service. This new person game me all kinds of excuses. She tried to explain how they transferred all their good-paying customers to this extra level that is $10 more and then took the $10 off, and then, oh-no that’s not what happened. So, I had to get mad, loud, and complain and complain and complain. Eventually, I was able to get 12 months of $10 more a month. I will also be returning my second cable box to get it back down further.
So, not an exciting story. But what am I really trying to say?
Comcast did not want to keep me happy until I threatened to not do business with them any more. I don’t feel like they care about me as a customer, but just want to keep my checks rolling in every month. This is the problem, customer service is dead.
As long as I was calm, nice, and reasonable, I got no traction. I had to become audibly angry in order to get results.
Note to Comcast, and everyone else out there. Treat your customers with respect, and like people. When you screw up (or sometimes even if you didn’t) a happy customer will stay with you longer than one than one who you temporarily appease after they express their anger.
I guess it has been almost a month since I have last blogged.
Shortly after my last entry, we hopped on a plane and headed back to Cincinnati for a few days. We got to see lots of family and friends, but would always like to have more time to visit. (Feel free to come out west!)
We flew back on a Wednesday, landed at 11am, and I was at work by 1. That is how busy things are right now, and the absence of my blogging
Just a few normal weeks – work, yoga, work – sometimes that is all I get done in a day.
We have had some time to relax – we had a cookout at our house (the green egg did great), and attended a cookout at a friend’s house. This also involved the longest game of Killer Bunnies and the Quest for the Magic Carrot. 8 players spend 3 hours destroying each others bunnies with items such as the “quite irrascible, defractable cheese balls.” Some day we will have to introduce them all to Killer Bunnies and the Journey to Jupiter.
Fast forward today. Today we went out east (to North Bend) for the annual Amazon.com picnic. A good time was had. We made it the second year in a row for picnic + outlet mall trip. Not the best outlet mall in the area, but it works. We will be making a trip to outlets up north in a few months to hit up the lululemon outlet. (If anyone wants to randomly send us lululemon gift cards or clothes, that would be awesome.)
We have booked some future travel – we have our plane tickets for cancun (yoga teacher training) and a post-holiday trip back to Cincinnati. That will make it 5 months between visits, but still 3 times this year. I’m trying to save up some vacation time for next year, so that will be it for me this year. Cortny may travel east on her own.
That is all I have for now – will try to get back here before too long.
We’re going to the Mariners/Yankees game tomorrow, so I may have something to say about that.
We had a pretty busy weekend. Saturday we went to the Sounders FC vs Chelsea FC game. It was a good match, but the Sounders lost 2-0. After the game, we rode the new light rail (on opening day) from the international district to the airport, and then back to downtown. It was really crowded, but fun. More importantly Seattle is finally catching up to the other major cities of the world. Here is a video I snapped while waiting for our train to arrive.
My current mat, a Prana Eko Mat is showing some wear. It is a good mat, but it is almost a year old and is showing some wear. I’m pretty rough on a mat, using it 4 to 6 times a week with some serious sweating. I do use Yogi toes (anti-skid towel), because I have never been able to use just a mat.
So I was looking for something a little stronger. I decided to go with a set of Manduka products.
I ordered
I went with the Black Mat, because it is supposed to be the most long lasting, heavy duty, non-slipping or bunching up-est mat out there. The bag for… transport? I’m going to be carrying my mat onto a plane twice in the near future, so I needed a bag. The towels, because you can never have enough towels for hot Yoga. This will be the second mat towel in my collection, and my first real hand towel (that isn’t a bathroom hand towel). Now, I won’t have to do laundry every night! With my current yogi-toes and new mat towel, I can do the laundry every other night. I already have enough Yoga clothes for 4 days without washing, with quite ranging outfits, but 4 days none-the-less.
I will update with how everything works out.
Very exciting – our light rail service opens in 6 days. Unfortunately, the route means that I won’t be riding it very often. The trains will initially run from downtown to 2 miles from the airport (opening to the airport before the end of the year). They are offering free rides next weekend (for the opening), maybe we’ll check it out.
The reason that I’m posting – the Seattle Times has a cool photo gallery of the train, the stations, and the artwork along the route. So – next time you visit, we may be picking you up at a train station, or meeting you at the airport and riding the train together. We’ll see.
View the gallery at the Seattle Times.
