Yeah, it’s been a while. Turns out, in Seattle, when summer hits and the sun comes out, things start happening, stuff goes down, E’s are vited, dead meat gets cooked, optimistic goals are undertaken, and a hairy man in in a uniform with a bullhorn comes around shouting “step away from the computer! It is unknown at this time how long this weather will last! You have been found deficient in Vitamin D, and have been sentenced to two point five months of activity!”. So I’m going to try and make a few posts to get caught up here.

First, you’ll notice a new “Photos” link on the sidebar. I’m trying to get some of my recent photos online, starting with a trip to Mt. St. Helens I did with Bryan and Greg, and various friends, and a canine, back in June. We car camped the night before, did some fishing, got up at 6am, and had slogged our way up to treeline by 10am. It took another four hours or so to make it to the top, mostly hiking on snow with a couple of nice steep sections. I sort of live for that moment of summiting and the time spent on top; you can see so far that the world seems small, which does wonders for one’s ego.

Coming down involved 3,000 feet of what the French call glissading, which translates to wearing slick pants and sliding on your ass.

Photos are in the new gallery. Note that not all photos are exposed to the unforgiving Internet; you need to be logged in to see them all. There’s a link to register on the sidebar.

More posts soon.

And that’s about it. There are around twenty other people living in the building, and I could get into a bar brawl with any one of them and never know the difference. So much for Fred Roger’s neighborhood.

The one exception is Mark, who lives across the hall from me, and his wife, Annie. My cousin, Brady, was helping me move in when he recognized Mark and called him out. Turns out he’s Ellensburg like us.

Since then, I’ve had the chance to chat with Mark a couple of times. Back in the day, he was with the Screaming Trees, Ellensburg’s claim on the grunge scene. Now, he’s doing the local musician and sideman thing and making a life out of singing and songwriting.

Last weekend, I finally made it out to his show at the Tractor in Ballard. I was blown away. Check out “Let Me Down Easy,” a cut from his new album:

Opening the show was another Ellensburger, Star Anna, much younger and clearly very talented. Catch her tomorrow night at the American Legion. Following her were I Hate The Fucking Eagles, whose I love because of their name (which could only be more awesome if it was “Man Come On I Had A Rough Night And I Hate The Fucking Eagles Man”), and also because they do garage rock covers of Martha Reeves and the Vandelles.

Spend your money on them.

In other news, I now have two SL1200mkII’s. If you know what those are, then you know you’d better watch out ’cause I’m-a go onna tear.

The wedding was short, sweet, and very Methodist. It worked — when it was over, the beautiful couple was much more married than before.

Then, as it turns out, I was charged with not only deejaying swing music for a five-hour reception, but emceeing as well. Also, it turns out that I’m extremely insecure about my microphone voice. So there I was, trying to hit “play” while announcing a wedding party and trying to get the phonetics to line up proper. I struggled through it, dances were had, speeches were made, glasses were ding-dinged, and that which had been given by various mamas was shook. The reception was over by 4pm, the bride and groom off to do married couple stuff, and we headed back to Pittsburgh. Rick is a tenor and baritone saxophone playing side man for several bands (including touring with the great, late, great Maynard Ferguson), and so is used to driving his ass all over for various gigs, which allowed me a blessed couple of hours of sleep, crammed into the backseat of a Honda Civic, drooling on my duffel bag.

For those not keeping track, at this point my lower back felt like somebody had implanted a joy buzzer soaked in distilled capsaicin between L5 and S1. But Lisa and Rick dropped me off at Nick and Kate’s place, and Nick and Kate fed me good scotch, took me to the Brillo Box, surrounded me with old friends, and Matt, Gil, Loring, Caroline, Clark, Mark, Jean Marie, and Tamar fed me East End beers and caught me up on their goings-on, and I was reminded that damned if I don’t knows me some awesome people.

Slept like a champ, and caught up with Jenny’s Dave and Dave’s Jenny over breakfast and flew home while Eli and Plax baby-faced their way to a Super Bowl title. Today, a quick 1,000 milligrams of the blue pill erased all memory of back pain, leaving nothing but a pretty sweet weekend trip behind.

* Dead Man’s Clothing, a.k.a. my suit from the thrift store.

–David James Duncan, The River Why

Am hoping this goes away, as am annoying myself.

Anyway, the shower afterwards felt great. I find it easy to forget that enjoyment often comes from contrast. If I don’t work out, a shower is just a shower. If I wasn’t working hard, a vacation wouldn’t mean much. If I had never felt lonely, I wouldn’t appreciate much the nice things people sometimes say.

I have a friend who is doing her Ph.D. research on well-being, and I don’t pretend to understand her work but I do remember that she once told me about the result of a massive survey she helped with. They found that a sense of well-being was uncorrelated to the amount of enjoyment in one’s life, but was highly (inversely) correlated to toil and hardship.

I sometimes feel like I’m slowly but surely wearing myself down. But that’s okay, isn’t it?

This photo was taken using an eight-second exposure from across the street.

I call this one “Pioneer Square Smokestack; Olympics.” Taken from the dizzying heights of my friend Erica’s parking garage.

Grew a beard. Then, removed same. I may grow it again (rumor has an “Abe Lincoln on the Mother!@$% Moon” themed bachelor party in the works for later in the summer), I may not.

Synapse landed a big contract to re-engineer, in very little time, a failed project for some big-name company or another and put me on the project, so I’ve been working on my CRT tan quite a bit lately. The more I work there, the more I love my job at the little company with the big heart that just may grow up into something very special.

Starting to work out vacation plans for early spring, hopefully involving snow. Suggestions welcome.

Apparently, not really into using subjects in sentences lately. Hoping this corrects itself soon, as am annoying myself.