Last night when Tim and Miko dropped me off after dinner, I went through the main lobby of the apartment building just like always. Only this time, there was a guy in Carharts standing on a ladder with his head in the dripping ceiling. I laughed and got on the elevator and went on upstairs.
About 20 minutes later, just when the sun was finally going down, the ear piercing fire alarm went off.
I knew it was probably related to the sprinkler problem in the lobby, so I didn't panic. Instead I casually got a few important things together (MacBook Air, iPad, etc) and headed down to the garage.
My thinking was that if the house really was on fire, I wanted to be sure The Jeep was not in the basement.
Then I drove out of the garage and to the far end of the parking lot where I backed in to a spot and watched.
About thirty people filed out of the stairwells during the fifteen minutes that I was sitting there. The thing is, if that was everyone in the building at 8 PM (prime apartment living time, no less) then our building is less than 20% full. Even if 30% of the occupants were at dinner, that still means that we're less than 50% full.
So if we have so many vacancies, why is everyone's rent going up?
As it turned out, the nice firemen gave us all the ok to go back in, it was just a malfunctioning sprinkler system. Thank goodness for that! And thank goodness it only triggered the alarm and didn't start spraying water everywhere.
The picture is from my balcony, after they gave us the all-clear.
Tim and I are back from our trip to Scotland. It was a lot of fun. This post is mainly just a chronology of the things we did. Stories will have to come in other posts.
This was our first trip with a tour. We went with the First Church Travelers from our church. There were 21 of us plus about 20 from another group on the bus.
We started in Edinburgh, then made our ways to the Scottish Highlands, a few of the Scottish Islands and then back to Glasgow (The tour didn't actually go to Glasgow, except to use the airport). Tim and I then broke away from the tour and spent the weekend in London. And, yes, we saw Mamma Mia! (again). Some of you may know we've been trying to get to London since the wedding, but various things have kept us away until now. So I guess the honeymoon is over (but definitely not forgotten!)
More about the trip:
Our first hotel was right in the center of Edinburgh, with a view of The castle. It was in the Grassmarket section of town, for those of you "in the know". We spent two nights there, and wandered around for a full two days. We saw Holyrood (Mary, Queen of Scots, anyone?), Edinburgh Castle, the birthplace of Alexander Graham Bell, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's flat, The Elephant House, Oink, and three different Starbucks.
After leaving Edinburgh, we went to St Andrews, the golf capital of the universe, apparently. There were some cool ruins where Henry VIII leveled a Catholic Cathedral, but other than that, this little college town is all about golf.
From St Andrews, we headed up to Aviemore (which we only stopped at because it was on the way to somewhere else, like Gresham). After spending the night in a horrid ski lodge hotel, we made our way on up towards Inverness. We stopped at the Clava Cairns, the Culloden Battlefield and a touristy wool factory.
Clava Cairns is one of those places that stick with you. Or at least with me. It was a short stop, but was well worth the trip. Piles of rocks from 5,000 years ago are always interesting for some reason. It was a brief photo op, and between Tim and I we took about 80 photos. OK, I took 75 of them.
After the wool mill tourist store (where we only bought 5 or 6 things) we headed back through downtown Inverness and up to Thurso. We drove past a McDonalds and that's when the craving for Mickey D's Fries started.
On our way up to Thurso, we stopped for a photo break near a little graveyard on top of a hill overlooking the ocean.
Once in Thurso, we stayed at The Royal Hotel for two nights. The Royal Hotel had lots of character, and it was the first of the hundreds-of-years-old hotels we got to stay at. After picking up our room key at reception, we had to walk down the hall, through a door, up some steps, around the corner, up two more flights of stairs, back around the corner again, down the hall, through another doorway, up two more steps, down another hall, through another door, down 8 steps, make a u-turn and go down that hall to get to our room. We spent much of our free time in Thurso trying to find shortcuts in the hotel. We stayed there for two nights and used it as a hopping off point to go to the Orkney Islands.
The Orkneys were sweet. We rode over on a ferry and then made the rounds. They have a strong Norwegian past there, so many of the folks spoke English with a different accent than the one we had already started adapting to. We had a special Orkney Island tour guide who filled us in on all the history of the islands for the day while we drove from spot to spot.
The next morning we drove from Thurso back through Inverness to our next hotel in Ballachulish. On the way we stopped and Dunrobbin Castle, Inverness (where we finally got our hands on some sweet sweet fries at McDonalds – and ran into the other half of the bus travelers at Starbucks), and Urquhart Castle on Loch Ness. Tim said I ran around like an 8 year old, freshly energized and climbing on everything. Sadly, we didn't see Nessie on this trip. Maybe next time.
From Ballachulish, we had a day trip to the Isle of Skye for a day. We drove up and took the ferry home. On the Isle of Skye, we visited the Donald Clan Castle. I talked to a librarian about the family tree. She suggested that McKinney – after you put it through the twisted scottish accent and lack of formal spelling skills from 500 years ago – might be spelled MacKennon or even MacKenzie. Achk. We'll never find all the ancestors.
The last day, we left Ballachulish and headed to Drymen, about 30 minutes from the Glasgow airport. For some reason, even though there were two reasonably priced hotels at the airport, the tour company put us up in podunk – and made everyone get up at 4:30 am to be at the airport on time. Fortunately Tim and I broke apart from the tour and had a later flight, so we didn't have to get up quite so early. Our flight left at 9AM for London.
Too much happened in San Francisco to recap in any sane manner. We had dinner with Gary and Mari, a separate dinner with Tim and Camille, and breakfast with Sue. We rode Muni everywhere (the 71, the 38, the F Market, the Powell Cable Car, the California Cable Car, the Hyde Cable Car, the N Judah, the 22, and something on Van Ness who's number I don't remember.)
We checked off several of my favorite restaurants there, including the R & G Lounge on Geary, Sam Wos on Washington, Asquew Grill on Haight, Warkabune on Church (the best Sushi Boat place, ever). We also found a couple of new ones to add to the list for next time like the generically named Chinatown Restaurant on Washington, or the cook-your-own-at-your-table Juban in Japantown Center.
We had tea at the Embarcadero, tea at Moscone Center, tea on Market, tea on Hyde St, and tea in Union Square (actually just near Union Square), all at Starbucks, of course. Tim had coffee.
We watched the Wall Street Journal report live from in front of the Yerba Buena Center of the Arts where Apple was announcing The New iPad™. I bought a new iPad on an iTallian Street Car cruising down Market Street. It'll be here on Friday.
We even cruised through Moscone Center where the Game Developer's Conference was happening a time or two.
So All in all, it was a good trip. Time well spent.
Today we made it to San Francisco around 2pm. And then we walked and walked and walked.
We navigated to The City from the airport on BART – a real treat for me since BART didn't go to SFO when I lived here.
Then we spent the rest of the day hiking up and down Market street and meeting up with friends from all over the country. I showed Tim where both my offices were while we were walking everywhere.
The Game Developers Conference is in full swing with a jillion or so people everywhere. We did the obligatory pass-thru in the lobby and then went to find a Starbucks. :)
I think all in all, we walked several (4? 5?) miles today.
We finished up the day at one of my favorite Chinese restaurants, the R&G Lounge. It's the place with the tiny foyer and a ginormous dining room downstairs under Kearny street.
Adams is a lunar impact crater that is located in the rugged southeastern section of the Moon, near the lunar limb. It lies just to the southwest of the crater Legendre. To the northwest are the craters Hase and Petavius, and to the southwest is Furnerius. To the southwest of Adams is a system of rilles designated the Rimae Hase. The longest of these rilles follows a course to the southeast.check it out at Wikipedia for yourself…
I read that and immediately wondered how the moon can have a "Southeast" section. I mean, I kind of understand the south part, but east of what? Where did we decide everything to the right of the place was east? And when it's a whole globe, can't east always be?
Arbitrary. It's what humans do to make sense of things.
So I learned a new word on Sunday. Apparantly, it's what I am.
Paleotarian
Or more specifically, I appear to be on the Paleo Diet.
It appears to be all meats, fish, and vegetables. The thought behind it, I think, is that in the Paleolithic era, the happy paleoandrathals had no wheat or grains in their diet.
So the populist thinking goes. They also had no sugars, but we all choos to conveniently forget about that.
Out on a limb here, but they probably didn't have cancer, arthritis, kidney stones or thousands of other maladies that are today associated with eating wheat. I made the kidney stones part up, but have been told by various medical people that the other two are results of eating bread).
Personally, I'm not even sure if paleoandrathals is even a word. I'll have to see if the scrabble dictionary in Words with Friends allows it.
From the Urban Dictionary:
Paleotarian – A person who follows a paleolithic nutrition plan or eats a paleo/primal diet. Characterized by eating fresh fruits, vegetables, lean meats and rejecting gluten, grains, legumes, dairy, starchy vegetables, excessive carbohydrates and processed foods.
Seriously, it's been a long time coming. We started looking at things to do to the site last spring and after settling on a format and campaigning to get everyone on board, we got it launched.
There're still a few things to do to it – it is a website, after all – but it's there for the reading and updating now.
Weeeehoooooo!
Thanks to all the committees and people who have spent time working with me to get it launched!
Yesterday at church the flower arrangement on the altar was in our honor. Here're some photos of the arrangement, so you can see how pretty and just how big it was. I like that part of the arrangement is red cabbage! Click on the thumbnails to see larger versions.
So many people came up to us and wished us a happy anniversary at church that I lost count. People that even *I* didn't know (and I thought I knew everyone at FUMC) came up and wished us a happy anniversary in the hallway.
Here's the photo slideshow from our Wedding:
November 14, two years ago, was such a wonderful night with most of our friends and family gathered in one place. My face felt like it was going to crack (in a good way) from all the smiling and laughing. Truly an unbelievable evening, the best one in my life.
I love you Husband!
p.s. We're planning on throwing a huge party on Anniversary #5, btw, so save the date…
A month or two ago, Tim and I signed up for a tour of Scotland. I know, I don't usually go on tours (or like, ever, since that one time in grade school), but this one is lead by people we know and has lots of other people we know on the trip. So it'll be fun.
Also fun, is that when I went to go get our passports out of our secret safe, the safe wouldn't work. Wouldn't you know it – we'd opted for a cool digital safe instead of the old work horse with a dial. We can press the buttons, but we can't make them work.
The batteries had gone dead.
Dangit. The stupid safe design meant you had to have the thing open to change the batteries. That seems like a design flaw to me.
Of course, there's a fancy key somewhere, but there's no way we're ever going to find that.
So we hired a locksmith to come over and drill the safe open and let us get at our stuff. I'm happy to say he opened it right up, just like he knew what he was doing.
He needed proof from us that it was our safe, which is kind of funny because we don't use this address for anything besides Netflix. All our bills go to the PO Box, and if it's really important it goes to Tim's work. So we had fun trying to prove to the locksmith that it was our safe and it was ok to break into it.
So now I have my passport, I'm ready to go. Too bad the plane doesn't leave until April.
Last night when Tim and Miko dropped me off after dinner, I went through the main lobby of the apartment building just like always. Only this time, there was a guy in Carharts standing on a ladder with his head in the dripping ceiling. I laughed and got on the elevator and went on upstairs.
Tim and I are back from our trip to Scotland. It was a lot of fun. This post is mainly just a chronology of the things we did. Stories will have to come in other posts.
This was the view from our hotel room.
A month or two ago, Tim and I signed up for a tour of Scotland. I know, I don't usually go on tours (or like, ever, since that one time in grade school), but this one is lead by people we know and has lots of other people we know on the trip. So it'll be fun.
