Three-day weekend catchup
Jul. 6th, 2004 11:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
annathepiper+/-0: This past Friday was my last day on my contract as a software tester for the Windows Media Group. Everybody on the team made "we'll miss you!" noises, which was nice of them, and both my lead and the FTE I was working with on a daily basis made noises about being quite willing to have me back in three months if they can (dependent on whether they have the work, the headcount, and the budget), which was nicer. Another of my teammates thought they should break my arm just so they could return me the same way they'd gotten me; I declined the offer. ;) And since Friday was my last day, last week was pretty easy in general with the workload; Thursday and Friday, really, I mostly spent chatting with the new girl to give her pointers about what to do and who to ask for help when she got stumped.
+1: Friday night was the opening of
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solarbird's art show at the Pitcairn Scott Gallery downtown. This was mostly pretty cool, with a whole lot of our local friends showing up: risu and mamishka from the household, spazzkat, kathrynt and llachglin and a friend of Q's named Alanna who may well be on LJ but whose ID I do not know, darthhellokitty and kingchiron, brombear, a non-LJ but long-term local friend named Jeff, Fritz and Kyra (local friends from the Rvl crowd), and wrog and emmacrew and their little Phillip, who has gotten a lot bigger since the last time I saw him! While Dara did the art-geekery thing, I mostly hung out and chatted with folks. Roger and I had some nice writing-geek conversation; Fritz and Kyra and I talked about moving and what that's going to entail for us, and they offered sage advice; Brom and I writing-geeked as well.
And boy, was it cool to see my lifemate's art hanging on a gallery's walls. Gods at War got a lot of positive reaction, as did Grasslands, at least from where I was sitting!
+2: Saturday afternoon was mostly devoted to balancing the checkbooks. Rah.
+3: Saturday evening: poker! Poker poker poker! Well, at least for Dara and Paul and Kathryn and Erik and
jessicac; me, I worked on writing stuff on my handheld, as mentioned on my last Writing post. It turned out to be half editing and half planning another story, and all mellow on the grounds of having had two Mike's Hard Limes and an apple tini. Which was enough to make Anna very mellow indeed. ;)+4: Sunday afternoon was mostly devoted to going through my Inbox and trying to clear out my backlog of logs waiting to be posted to the TM web page. I cleared out ten of them, and put a nice dent in my Inbox in the bargain.
+5: SPLODY! Dara, Mimi, Paul and I all went down to Lake Union to watch the fireworks explode. We got down there well over an hour early, scarfed a seat on the waterfront a little ways west of Ivar's, and had a pretty great view on the whole even accounting for the big boat in our way blocking the low-level stuff. Mimi brought her Harry Potter Uno deck, and we went through several hands of that to amuse ourselves while waiting for the splodies to start. All very relaxed and groovy.
Aftewards Meems and I went to IHOP for sundaes, which were tasty, and we MUSH-geeked, which was fun.
+6: Posted three more logs after I got back from the splodies, too.
+7:
fleetfootmike gets a giggle for wishing me, in email, a happy "Get Rid of Us Brits" day. ;)+8: Yesterday was all about the zoo. Dara and Paul and I went, and we had a marvelous time. Perfect weather, all very sunny and bright but not overly hot; the crowds were, well, large and crowded, but not overly cramped. We saw lots of children in strollers and wagons, and several of them were very charming in their reactions to the animals. Paul took several pictures and posted them over on his journal.
Animal lineup, in no particular order:
Most of the big furry animals were napping in the shade: the jaguar, the lions, the bears. About the only big furry critter we saw who wasn't napping in the shade was the tiger, and we only got a passing look at him before he dived behind the rocks in his enclosure; we heard sounds that suggested feeding time. It was pretty cool to come into the viewing area by the bear pen, though, and see the bear curled up with his back right up against the glass and startling small children by his proximity. ;)
LOTS of monkey mileage. The gorillas were very interactive with the crowds, which got lots of approval. There was an older one sitting there by the viewing glass with a very benignly weary, resigned sort of expression that said "Yeah, okay, today's round of hairless apes, get on with the staring, you guys"; a couple of younger ones, juveniles, kept rolling around in the dirt and being cute and playful. I'm pretty sure it was in the gorilla pen, too, where one of the babies came up to look sort of eye to eye through the glass with a little girl. Hee. The orangutans were also very friendly--as with the gorillas, a lot of coming up to the glass and looking back at the people who were looking at them; we made jokes about the orangutans being scientists and hanging out by the glass for eight hours conducting extensive observation, since the signs around their pen DID say "Orangutan Research Station". I learned, too, that the word "orangutan" apparently means "person of the forest". Cool.
The cobra won, hands down, for Coolest Animal Observed--just because it was active and moving around for once and I had NO IDEA COBRAS WERE THAT DAMNED BIG. Boy, that was a lot of snake. Makes Rikki-Tikki Tavi all the more cool a story.
It still makes me giggle that the wolves are living right next door to the elk.
We passed by the raptor house and were amused to note that while there were signs out that said there would be no raptor display that day, there were in fact two zoo employees out with several birds. Go fig. I was impressed by the woman wearing a glove that reached almost all the way up to her shoulder, for purposes of handling the bald eagle.
There were several zoo employees out and about this time through--again, possibly due to it being feeding time for a lot of the critters as we were coming through. We spotted a woman in the zebra/giraffe/hippo enclosure, pushing around a big wheelbarrow full of feed, and over by the raven cage there was a woman who pointed out the raven up in the very top corner of the cage.
Two of the elephants were out, and we read some of the articles hanging up about Raja, the young bull they've been trying to set up with a female in the last couple of years--an effort which has apparently paid off, as the female is now pregnant and there's going to be another baby elephant at the zoo next year. Yay!
We did the Day and Night exhibit, and the rain forest birds exhibit (wherein we giggled a great deal at the weird noises coming out of one of the birds, which kept sounding like a drill or a jackhammer or other random things like that; had to be the mockingbird), and the new exhibit with the spiders. The lesser cats like the cougar and the ocelot and the clouded leopard were, like their larger cousins, deeply snoozy.
Paul gets the humor award for surmising that if the penguins get any visitors from the local bird population stopping by on their island, the greeting from them must go like this: "Hi! Flightless, huh? That's gotta suck. BYE!"
And, after I suggested that if any squirrels got into the lion pen they would surely say, "Brian, we've taken a desperately wrong turn," taking the joke and running with it as the lion slams a paw down on the squirrel: "Gotcha! Gonna let you go--no I'm not!"
We had zoo food for lunch and zoo food for snackage all the way around the zoo, and it was expensive, but well hey, it was zoo food. Paul remarked to Dara and me that he considered it 'paying for the enclosures'. Hee hee.
All around, a nice afternoon indeed.
+9: After much post-zoo nappage, and some Chinese food, I went back out last night to go to the Crest with Meems and see Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Neither of us had caught it during its initial run, and we were both very glad we took the time to go see the movie. Because it was very, VERY good, and simultaneously a very fucked up story as well. This makes three films I've seen Jim Carrey do dramatic roles in, and I'm definitely solid now on preferring him in his dramatic roles. Kate Winslet was also excellent, as were the supporting cast, even if every time Elijah Wood was on screen I kept thinking, "FRODO! NO!"
I have read that people should not know what this movie is about coming into it. So to preserve this I am not going to say a damned thing about it in this post, except to emphasize that it is WELL worth a viewing if you appreciate a story with depth, one which will actively make you think to follow along, and which will simultaneously intrigue you and make you recoil and wonder what the HELL some of these characters are thinking.
And, apparently because we just weren't done with cinematic amusements after that movie was over, we came home and watched The Mask of Zorro on the DVD player. Because mmmmmm Antonio Banderas. ;)
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Date: 2004-07-06 12:05 pm (UTC)"NASSSSTY hobbitses!"
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Date: 2004-07-06 05:42 pm (UTC)You should go look at the zoo. It's cool. Especially the new jaguar run, even if we didn't actually see the jaguar doing much besides snoozing in the shade. ;) Kitty has LOTS and LOTS of space now, at least!