Year 0 F.E.
January 29, 2009
That’s F.E. for Furniture Era, the period in which I finally have something to sit and eat on. It’s been a long time coming. I recently went to the closest Ashley Furniture store and furnished almost my entire apartment: couch, love seat, chair, ottoman, end tables, coffee table, dining table, chairs, bed frame, dresser, and night stand. It’s all going to be delivered tomorrow morning. I can’t wait! I hope nothing is delivered damaged or otherwise has to be returned. I want to sit on all of it now. Yes, even the night stand. I’ll post some pictures when I get a chance.
Moving In
January 28, 2009
I finally posted online pictures of moving into my new apartment. When I took these, my boxes had just been delivered, so nothing was yet unpacked. My apartment looks sparse even now because I still don’t have any new furniture, but it looks a little more lived in with the boxes unpacked.
The entire apartment building is five years old, so everything feels new and seems in good condition. Everything was well-cleaned on the day I moved in. My windows look out on a courtyard formed by the U-shape of the building. I can see a tiny sliver of Lake Union from my living room windows. The building is LEED-certified, so the windows are double-paned and the walls are well-insulated. The walls absorb a lot of sound; it’s quite amazing to walk into the hallway and not hear any of the music I’m playing inside. My entire apartment, except for the kitchen and bathroom, is carpeted light-tan, and it feels good on my feet.
My apartment comes with two snazzy blue lights that hang from the ceiling over the counter, which the other apartment that I toured here didn’t have. All my stuff is in the boxes on the left. The track lights overhead provide adequate lighting for now, but I’ll have to get some lamps eventually to better light up the area for reading and whatnot. There’s electric heating, but I’ve only had to use it a couple times. My apartment stays room temperature on its own most of the time. It might have something to do with being on the top floor, or the LEED stuff.
The black counter tops that rim the kitchen are granite, but the regular kitchen counters aren’t. There seems to be plenty of storage room for dishes, plates, pots, pans, utensils, devices, and so on, although the cabinets are only about a foot wide, which is too narrow to fit wide things like my crock pot, sadly. My crock pot rests comfortably atop the fridge. The appliances are still in great shape.
The den, or office area, is next to the kitchen. It’s big enough to fit my desk and computer and a few other things. I plan to put a bookshelf in there at some point for all my books. There are two closets, not counting the one in my bedroom, so I have plenty of storage space. I still haven’t filled it up.
My short hallway connects the living room, the bedroom, and the bathroom. There are also doors for another closet and a small, square room that contains my stacked washer and dryer. Thankfully I won’t have to run to a laundromat once per week, although the washer is pretty noisy and it always stops in the middle of the permanent press cycle.
My bedroom is oddly shaped. It has six sides that roughly form a triangle. I moved my bed since I took this picture to sit against the right wall to open up more floor space after I put in a dresser and a night stand. The window looks out on the same view as the living room windows. The fire alarm in here is brutal on my ears, like a shrieking banshee straight out of hell—in my brain.
My bedroom closet is a walk-in, although it’s not big for a walk-in, and it’s curiously also roughly triangle-shaped. Notice the plastic bag just inside the closet door—I use lots of bags when moving.
My bathroom is pretty sweet, I like it a lot. The shower has lots of places to put things like shampoo or whatever, and there’s lots of storage for bathroom and linen things under and next to the sink. The mirror is huge and spans almost the entire wall. I have a spiffy towel, rug, and shower curtain set that all match, but I somehow lost that picture. Go to Bed Bath & Beyond and you’ll see it.
Neighborhood Thief
January 25, 2009
I went shopping at the Costco in Seattle for the first time today. They didn’t give me any bags or boxes in which to carry my stuff, so I had to carry a few items at a time from my car to my apartment. On my first trip, I put together an armload of provisions, and thought I could add to it a two-pack of Clearasil facial cleanser, but it was too much. I had already closed the trunk, so I set down the two-pack under my rear bumper and pushed it back a couple feet.
I was gone no more than two or three minutes, and returned for my second armload to find the two-pack gone. No one was in sight; it was just gone. I was shocked. I hadn’t thought that anyone saw me hide it, nor that a passerby would see it, nor that anyone was likely to pass by in the short period that I would be gone. But I was more shocked that someone would rip off a $10 two-pack of Clearasil facial cleanser.
Really? Clearasil? If you’re going to sully your dignity by stealing from a neighbor, I would think you’d do it for something more valuable. I suppose this is a good lesson to learn early; thankfully it didn’t cost me more than $10.
Filed in Reflections, Stories, clearasil, costco, garage, home, neighborhood, robbed, seattle, thief
Still Here
January 22, 2009
It’s been a while since I’ve posted. Things have been busy and it’s been hard to find the time to blog.
In case you haven’t heard the news, Microsoft laid off 1,400 employees today, 800 of them in the Redmond area. The layoffs reflect the worsening economy and were announced in conjunction with the quarterly financial report released today, which showed that profits are down compared to the same quarter last year. 3,600 more employees will be laid off worldwide over the next eighteen months, for a total of 5,000 employees. Fortunately I wasn’t among the 1,400 laid off today, but I was sweating it for a while after I got to work this morning and read the news and some internal e-mails. I’m the newest member on my team, so I figured I’d be the first to go if someone had to be cut. It seems that today’s cuts have come from other teams and product areas, but it’s not known where future cuts will be made. It may be that my department just hasn’t yet figured out how it will reduce its costs, and will eventually find me. I’m crossing my fingers and hoping for the best, but at the same time thinking about what I would do if it happened to me. My heart goes out to those who lost their jobs today. This job—my first—helps me appreciate how much a job can be a part of one’s life and what a shock it would be to lose it.
Wake Up Call
January 11, 2009
Since I moved to Seattle, I’ve wanted to reduce my Coke consumption so that I could sleep better and earlier, and because it’s not healthy. I broke down while at the store last night and bought some Coke. I drank three cans’ worth in a glass with ice—and it was good—starting at 9:30 PM, so I was hopped up on caffeine for the rest of the evening, and I didn’t get ready for bed until about 2:30 AM. I was listening to my iPod when a shrill screech seemed to pierce my ear drums. I thought my iPod had malfunctioned and tore the ear buds from my head, but the sound wasn’t coming from them, it was coming from my smoke alarm.
I was already in my pajamas, so I hurriedly redressed, grabbed my keys and jacket, and locked my door. I was startled to find that all the fire doors had closed automatically; it seemed real enough. I opened the closest fire door, then realized I should take the stairs and went the other way. The alarms were so loud I had to tilt my head as I passed the shrieking smoke alarms as if I were crossing a gale wind. I finally exited the building and stood around with other residents at the front entrance as a couple of fire engines arrived with sirens blaring and lights flashing.
It was a false alarm, of course. It took them only ten minutes to finish checking and turn off the alarm, shorter than I expected. The air was cold outside, but I had my jacket, so I was fine waiting. Many people were wearing just jackets over pajamas and flip flops. It was the first time I got a sense of the kind of people that lived there; younger than I had seen or assumed. We reentered the building, and as I passed a fire fighter I heard him say that they had temporarily disabled the elevators. I tramped up the stairs to my floor, but found they ended at a locked roof access door. It took me about ten minutes to wander around the floor below to find another staircase that opened onto my floor, and I happily changed clothes again and fell into bed. Surprisingly, the caffeine didn’t keep me awake and I dreamed.
Apricot-Glazed Pork Roast: A Tragedy
January 9, 2009
My parents gave me a really good book of crock pot recipes for Christmas, and I thought I’d try one out Wednesday night. I went to the store for the ingredients the night before, and woke up extra early the next morning to put it together. I didn’t have a proper lid for my crock pot then, but I had a heavy metal one that was the right size, so I figured it’d work just as well. When I got home from work, I was greeted by a lovely aroma, but found my dinner burned to a dry, black, simmering crisp. I had been worried about leaving the crock pot on while at work because I couldn’t be home to turn it off on time, but I had hoped the juices would keep things moist like they do for other crock pot recipes. Not so. Sigh. Back to the drawing board.
Airing Of Grievances
January 7, 2009
I flew from Seattle to Sacramento on Saturday, December 20. I reserved a flat-rate taxi ride from my apartment to the airport, and it started to snow as I approached the airport terminal. When I later glanced out a terminal window, the tarmac was carpeted with snow, and more was still falling. Earlier flights were delayed, but fortunately my flight was delayed only thirty minutes, so I grabbed a beer. We boarded without further delays, but we didn’t depart until hours later. It seemed like one problem after another conspired to keep us put. Deicing the plane took three tries because the fluid tank ran empty. Then other airlines hogged a vehicle they needed. Then the plane next to us backed away from the terminal just after we did, then parked in our way for several minutes, as if they saw us leaving and didn’t want us to get in their way. We were delayed about three hours.
I was gone for two weeks, and I figured that by the time I got back, the worst of the weather would be past. My plane departed on time from Sacramento on Sunday, January 4, at 4:30 PM: plenty of time to get home and relax. As we left, it began to snow in Seattle, which no one had forecast. The snow reduced the rate at which the Seattle airport landed planes, and the geniuses at Southwest forgot to put extra fuel in our tank, so we couldn’t have sustained a holding pattern while waiting for our turn to land. We diverted to Spokane, on the other side of Washington, to refuel. The Spokane tarmac was carpeted with snow too, but it wasn’t snowing. We circled in the plane on the ground near the terminal for a half hour before a gate opened up. They refueled the plane, and we waited until 10 PM to confirm our place in line to land at Seattle. At 9 PM the crew suggested we deplane and eat something before we left. Most of us deplaned, but they held us standing at the terminal entrance for ten minutes while they wrung their hands and deliberated whether to actually let us leave since they might need to recall us early. They finally let us go, and I stood in the food court about a minute before they paged us to return to the plane. We departed Spokane and arrived in Seattle.
I got my bags and waited at least forty-five minutes outside in the cold for a taxi in a line that had about a hundred people in it. I had canceled my flat-rate taxi ride in Spokane, which would have cost me $30, and paid $45 to get home in a regular taxi. The taxi’s credit card reader didn’t work, so we had to stop at an ATM so I could get cash. The driver helped himself to a $5 tip without mentioning it.
I got home at 2 AM, making it a 9.5 hour trip. I’m so glad I missed the worst of the weather.
Filed in Stories, airplane, flight, grievances, ice, sacramento, seattle, snow, spokane, taxi, weather