December 2007 Archives

(Primus)

And now I'm going to steal yet more stuff and use Kristin's style of making gallery announcements since I like the idea...

New gallery! Niagara Falls, 26 Dec 2007

This is the first full batch of photos from my new Nikon D80, and despite having only had a few days of practice with it (and a little time with Kristin's Nikon) I think most of the shots came out pretty well, and what issues they had were more to do with my composition skills than anything else.

Now I just need to pick up some UV and polarizing filters to deal with that pesky glare...

My new theme idea for the moment is to use song titles as my entry titles.  We'll see how long it takes until I either get bored with it or forget.  Tonight's title comes courtesy of Matthew Good and the album Hospital Music.

In what might have been the most exhausting day of travel I've ever been on which still managed to successfully reach its destination, I got back to Seattle tonight, getting in my door at about 8 pm PST after leaving my parents house in Buffalo at 5:15 am EST (and here it is now at 11 PST and I'm still awake, although only nominally so, and only until I finish typing this sentence and click 'submit'.)

Went to Niagara Falls and took lots of photos (to be uploaded later), went to another Sabres game (they lost), and now went to bed since we're leaving the house tomorrow at 5:30 am.

A song I'd forgotten about, and yet the timing of its return to my consciousness was impeccable.

While you were sleeping
The babies grew, the stars shined and the shadows moved
Time flew, the phone rang
There was a silence when the kitchen sang
Its songs competed like kids for space
We stared for hours in our maker's face

Elvis Perkins - While You Were Sleeping

UPDATE: And another...

Something filled up
My heart with nothing
Someone told me not to cry
But now that I'm older
My heart's colder
And I can see that it's a lie

Arcade Fire - Wake Up

Another Christmas has come and gone (well, in ten minutes it will have gone, at least from this coast.) Having missed the past two family Christmases I can't necessarily judge this one as being abruptly different, but people have slowly drifted off either due to death or work, and slowly people have grown older and the excitement surrounding the event has abated. Gone (at least for now) are the days where the kids clamored to open their gifts at the crack of dawn and a separate table was set in the kitchen to contain the mess. Now everyone is either exhausted after a few hours, or has additional family obligations at other houses and has to skip off quickly, leaving a dwindling crowd to pick at the remains of the meal and socialize.

On the plus side, most gifts these days are the cash/gift card variety, which also means gone are the days of waiting in mile-long lines at the returns counter.

One more full day for me in Buffalo; one more full day of recollections and memories; one more full day of the ghosts of familiar sights and sounds; one more full day of old haunts and old patterns; one more full day of flashbacks to my 21 year-old self.

One more day of living out of a suitcase in a guest bedroom in a house I once knew. I'm ready to go home.

My parents' church now shares its space with a Korean church, and tonight they held a joint candlelight service, with the groups trading off parts.

By far the strangest moment came when the Korean choir performed part of "The First Noel" in Korean.  Consider that -- a French carol, partially translated first into English, and then on into Korean.  I had a momentary flashback to my time on the boat, and the Chinese wedding band doing strange Engrish covers of Western songs.

Less than twelve hours until the Great Voght Clan Christmas Dinner Extravaganza (or at least what remains of it.)  It's my first time back for it in three years.

Attended an organized religious service ths morning with my mom, for the first time in about oh... three years?  (Aside from my grandfather's funeral service, but that's a whole different kettle of kippers.)  Needless to say it reinforced my feelings about most oranized religion , thouh I'll be back yet again tomorrow for the candelight service with the family.

After that we got a surprise phone call that my grandmother had been taken to the emergency room with chest pains, although after many hours there and a few tests they decided it was some issue with her sternum and not her heart, and a few doses of vicodin were in order.

Tonight the temperature has plunged from a high in the mid 50s at about 1 pm down to the mid 20s, and the winds are in the 40 mph range with gusts over 60, and changed from a steady downpour that melted all the snow into new lake-effect snow blowing every direction except straight down.  Nasty weather, and a ood niht to stay in and avoid the sure-to-be slick roads.  I guess it just wouldn't be a December for me without a wind storm or two!

Karen was in town for a few hours so we had an in-house family dinner for the first time in years.

Beyond that not much but I will mention this aside -- only in Buffalo would every bar in the Arts district switch from their regular activities to broadcast a hockey game, and not be met with derision.

The one hassle with Christmastime visits is that everyone else is doing likewise (and/or swarming into shopping centers), making it a challenge to find places to go that aren't swamped with morons.  Thus, lots of movies, and last night also the Sabres game (first hockey game I've been to in nearly two years!), which was a grand and raucous affair which they came from behind to win against Philadelphia.  Though there was only one fight (and a fairly disappointing one at that), it was a hard-hitting game and the crowd was into it the entire time.

I also caught a very late showing of Sweeney Todd, which was a fine mixture of Tim Burton and musical silliness (though quite macabre and full of blood, so be forewarned.)  I haven't seen the musical it was derived from, but the two people I went with did, and they both gave it good reviews as well.

Apparently it's now the weekend, though with my presently warped sense of time and space it might as well be June.

It's very strange walking into the two major grocery stores by my parents' house and discovering there is one brand with a grand total of four bulk coffee bins in either store: dark roast, light roast, espresso roast, and decaf.  Toto, I've got a feeling we're not in Seattle anymore.  Well, when in Rome drink like the Romans do, which means mediocre coffee and a lot of Labbatt Blue.

Today was fairly uneventful beyond the culture shock of returning to the grocery stores that sustained me through young adulthood.  Drove to the Southtowns with my dad, then drove twice across town with my mom to et something notarized by a family friend, and the annual family dinner since Karen is flying out tomorrow and who knows how her schedule will go with wild weather and reroutes being the norm rather than the exception in winter flying.  I guess the next few days are the real 'vacation' part of this trip, and then all the craziness resumes.

Nothing like starting a vacation like this.

Me (after the dog awoke me at 9 am): "Ugh, I need some coffee."
Mom: "Oh, I can dig out the coffee maker, I think there's some coffee still in the pantry."
Me: "You have coffee? How old is it? I can just get some at Tim Hortons."
Mom: "Well, I have some Folgers here somewhere, and it's on my grocery list."
Me: "So we don't have any coffee."
Mom: "I have Folgers."
Me: "So we don't have any coffee."

Anyway, it was good to hit up Timmy Ho's and get some cheap, strong coffee (and not have them look at you strangely when all you want is a drip), and then Karen and I headed to the Walden Galleria, a plan apparently shared by the entire rest of the city and half of Toronto. On the bright side, we were quite successful and took care of everything we needed in about three hours, but it still reminded me why I hate malls and the general greed and commercialism that has come to symbolize the American Dream. This year's big trick is apparently the "Buy one and get the second half-off" sale, because after you've spent $50 on a tie it helps to justify the insane cost by instead spending $75 on two, so they really only cost you $37.50 each. What a bargain!

From there I took a walk around the neighborhood. Although very little has overtly changed in the twenty-one months since I last set foot in the region, a massive and unexpected October 2006 lake-effect snowstorm wreaked devastation on the trees of the region, which had not yet lost their leaves for the year. The event was initially dubbed "the night the trees wept" by the Buffalo News, until it was pointed out that you can't weep when you're dead. Somewhere along the way it was re-christened "Arborgeddon" and that's the name it is now commonly known by, and yet somehow that is still an understatement. Some areas were without power for several weeks (my parents were among the lucky ones -- no damage to the house and only a week in the dark.) For a town that once prided itself on its tall, mature maples, elms and oaks, this set Tonawanda back decades, with many streets and neighborhoods looking like brand new developments -- only tiny saplings and shrubs now standing in place of the mammoth trunks that were violently hewn from the earth. Though the thousands of tons and millions of dollars of damage have been cleaned up and the power lines re-strung, the remaining trees stand like silent amputees, with broken and twigless boughs pointing up with angry jagged fingers toward the source of their lacerations. I did my best to capture a sense of these silent sentinels to last year's fury, although as is often the case, small photographs simply cannot convey the magnitude, both in severity and scope, of the event. You can view the shots (and find some links to sites with pictures and stories from last year during the cleanup) here.

Finally, I saw Beowulf in 3D this evening, which was quite entertaining from a 'check your brain at the door and enjoy bright shiny theatrical effects with scary monsters' standpoint. A few of the extreme close-up effects made my eyes water, but overall the 3D effect was quite impressive and it's come a long way from the crummy red-and-blue glasses of yesteryear.

As the jetway pulled away from the 757 at SeaTac (only an hour behind schedule) the pilot came on over the PA system announcing "Well, folks -- looks like we've got another brief delay."  (Groans from the cabin.)  "Seems they just found another cart of baggage that needs to be loaded onto the plane."

What an auspicious start to my eleven day journey!  Thankfully, aside from being absurdly cramped due to weird seat design on the plane, the flight itself was uneventful.  Delta has a nice new in-seat entertainment system with touch screens and live Dish Network television, so I was able to watch some news, catch a few interesting programs on the Discovery Channel, and listen to some good music (they even had the new Arcade Fire album!)

Strangely, the CRJ900 that I was on from Atlanta to Buffalo was not only much roomier than the 757, but also much more comfortable.  As an added bonus a heavy-set man sat down next to me carrying a large box of Kleenex and a big bag of Halls, and started coughing up a storm and groaning immediately, along with generally wriggling around.  Always a promising sign, but as abrupt as his arrival next to me was, he got up again and headed to the rear of the plane and never returned, so I had an entire row to myself.  Thank you good karma.  We'll skip the insanity that was the Buffalo airport (and the already-occupied landing ate and broken-down baggage carousel...)

Anyway, Buffalo seems to be covered in a mysterious white powdery substance, and I'm still trying to verify that the city itself is underneath there.  More excitement to follow, no doubt.

I'm mere hours away from an annoying and long adventure crammed into a tiny aluminum tube, so to help you pass the time when you'll all be without me (or if this is mom reading, to help you pass the time with me) I finally transfered many more albums to the new gallery and uploaded a bunch of new ones that were on my to-do list for a very long time, including for most of the foster cats.

This star-studded interpretation of Bob Dylan's life will leave you scratching your head. Although the posters attempt to convey that aspects of Dylan are being portrayed by a bunch of actors, it really doesn't become clear until about a half-hour into the film, whereupon you're suddenly realizing that you missed a lot of important details early on when you were trying to figure out what the entire storyline with the little black kid was all about.

While the acting is superb and many of the stars are impressive in atypical roles (look for a very mangy Richard Gere and a very French Cate Blanchett, for instance), the choppy nature of the editing leaves the storyline a battered mess for people who aren't totally up on Dylan's life. Compounding this, not only are the various aspects of his life portrayed by different actors, but they all have different names as well. In fact, with the exception of Alan Ginsburg and Woody Guthrie, EVERYONE in the film with  is portrayed by a fictitiously named character, leaving you preoccupied with guessing who they were supposed to be portraying rather than following the twists and turns of the plot.

In many ways, this film is a spiritual sibling of gonzo films like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, where imaginative reinterpretations and hallucinations of events leave you on a topsy-turvy ride that requires your full and careful attention, and often several viewings to catch all of the allusions and symbolism within... but unlike FLLV where there was an anchoring influence in the consistent characters, this movie jumps around so much in time, space, and character that by the time the credits roll you're left wondering what story actually got told in the course of the past two hours and fifteen minutes.

Seven sticky theatre floors out of ten, primarily for the outstanding acting. Though I like the underlying concept of exploring various parts of the psyche by assigning them unique characters, it needed just a little more introduction to prepare you.

Well this is most interesting -- I just left a set of keys with the man who will be sitting Jasper while I'm in Buffalo for the next two weeks.  I was able to get duplicates of my apartment door key, but the building key is one of those mammoth 'DO NOT DUPLICATE' monsters that apparently get hewn from iron ore by dwarfs in a secret underground cavern.  This wasn't supposed to be an issue, because the building also has a front-door intercom that calls your cell phone so you can buzz people (or yourself) in... however, despite submitting a request over a week ago and following up by email on Tuesday, my number still hasn't been programmed into it yet, leaving me trapped in my own house for the moment.  Thankfully like any good Seattleite I've got my emergency supplies so if necessary I can make it through the weekend without another breath of fresh air, although a few angry emails and phone calls should take care of any intercom issues quite quickly.

It reminds me a lot of leaving the Queen Anne house last month, where I had to lock up and then drop the keys back in through the mail slot.  There's a moment of hesitation, trying to remember if everything got removed that needed to be taken, and then the plunk of the keys mirrors the plunk of your stomach as you hope that you really didn't need to get back inside.

In the process of mucking around with some of my Google Account settings this morning, I stumbled upon the old Blogger-powered TCZ group blog (unfortunately, the link to the blog itself is currently dead) that saw its heyday from June 2004 through June 2005, and then faded out slowly after that. I'd totally forgotten about most of the posts I made there, including a hilariously out-of-date post from Aug '05 that simply read "I saw regular unleaded for $2.90 a gallon this morning. (several blank lines) Good."

Reading back, it's interesting to see how my writing style has evolved over time and how parts of it now make me wince... especially where I really forced the dryly humorous side of things. I'm going to go through and post some of them here over the next little bit, in part because the old blog is now dead and thus my readership finally out-paces theirs at one-to-zero.

Back in June 2006 I wrote a draft of the following post, but never actually published it... it's still sitting in the Blogger control panel in draft form, over eighteen months later. I've put it into the extended entry here in its entirety, with only minor style revisions.

The big public display might have been last Monday at the oral defense, but today marked the official end of my schooling.  At 1:30 pm Pacific Standard Time, I submitted my final and complete dissertation to the UW Graduate School office, with all necessary approvals and signatures.  After a few moments of checking margins, fonts and other technical details, the woman behind the counter handed me a receipt and said "Congratulations Doctor Voght, you're done."

I'm told that in about a month I'll actually come to appreciate this concept of 'done' and stop waking up in the middle of the night panicking about figure legends and referencing, but until then, if anyone comes across the hours and hours of sleep I seem to have been missing for the past two months, could you point it in my general direction?  I'll be the motionless lump atop the mattress.

It takes a long time to print 114 pages in triplicate, and then swap in several color inserts.

Apparently I stupidly and incorrectly programmed part of the configuration code when I set up MT4 on this new server, and thus the entire commenting system was broken (along with a few stray images.)  Not that I expect that anyone's actually tried to leave a comment since mid-October, but now you can should you ever find the mysterious urge.

We'll at least pretend that's the reason I haven't been getting any comments.  Now I just need to come up with a new excuse...

After a brutal fifteen days without proper internet access, the Covad tech guy finally got around to my humble abode today and hooked up the last three inches of phone wire that activated my DSL.  It's irritating to know that it took them seven days to get here after the time Qwest put the line in the building's junction box, and all that needed to be done was to wrap one wire around a post.  Thankfully since I'm already a Speakeasy customer who was just moving, I didn't have to pay for the install, because that wouldn't have been worth more than about $5 in labor.

Anyway, in the immortal words of Bender Bending Rodriguez, "We're back, baby!"

I've already downloaded about five gigs of data that was backlogged in my to-do list.  First up was a proper install of Debian Linux for the the laptop, which is suddenly shiny and new again, although a bit slow until I recompile the kernel for this specific processor.  But hey, I can actually work from anywhere in the apartment, instead of in one cramped corner of the dining table.  Whee!

The flooding south of Olympia has been nothing short of devastating, with I-5 between Olympia and Portland now closed for more than 72 hours and the only truck detour requiring an additional 450 miles of driving and two snowy mountain passes. This picture is from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer website this morning. Click that link to go to the related story.

Up here on Capitol Hill in Seattle things have dried out, and never got as bad as what happened to the north and south -- there was some street flooding and a few downed trees, but nothing that came up over your ankles or washed away bridges or homes.

Laptop blew up tonight with about a dozen blue screens of death (or is that blue screen of deaths?) immediately upon bootup... this after a weekend of slight instability but nothing critical, so I was able to still get through the defense talk without issues.

Anyway, thankfully I was quite paranoid about backing everything up for the thesis, and from what I can tell now that I'm back on the system using a Linux live CD, I can still access the hard drive, which suggests that the windows installation was corrupted somehow, and I should be able to rescue all the important files off of the system before reformatting and starting fresh.

Of course this little thing's been running without any serious problems ever since I bought it back in summer 2002, it's done quite well, all things considered.

As anyone who watched the national news tonight discovered, we've now had an absolutely insane first three days of December, weather-wise.  More precipitation than the entire month of November, with mudslides, flooding, and hurricane-force winds knocking down trees and knocking out power all over the state.  I-5 closed between Olympia and Portland, the entire downtown area of Woodinville underwater...  Here on Capitol Hill at a nice high elevation (and on the third floor!) things are quiet and dry, but over by the boat there was a big mudslide that threatened some condos and closed the main road.  Outside it's once again pouring, and rain remains in the forecast for the rest of the week.

Oh yeah, and apparently I successfully defended a thesis dissertation this afternoon.  All that remains is to make a few final revisions to the document and turn it in to the graduate school office, and then after slightly more than twenty-four years of schooling, I'm done.

Wow.

I'm sure in another week or two it'll finally hit me, but for now... wow.

With all the other furniture out of the Queen Anne house, Jasper took to whatever high ground remained in his efforts to avoid the commotion going on all around. Fear not, though -- he's been successfully reunited with his yellow pillow on the couch now that we're at the place. (Click image to enlarge)