The Goldfish Chronicles

We’ve been in Seattle for about 4 days or so now. We arrived on Saturday afternoon, rented a car, found our apartment for the next month, bathed the child and fell asleep. On Sunday we found a nearby supermarket, stocked up on food while wincing at the 50% increase over a Kentucky shop and checked out an apartment. Three days of apartment checking later, it’s still the top one on our list so we’ve gone ahead and let them know we’re interested and this weekend we’ll go organize paperwork etc. Bit odd to not be being pushed into making a commitment asap - gives you the feeling nowadays that something is wrong with the place. Maybe we’ve just found a keeper.

Each morning I’ve been walking to work. It’s a thirty minute walk across Seattle - which seems to have two characters, a sparkley shopping half and a grubby half. It’s also built on a hill, walking from 3rd Street to 1st Street is a very impressive incline - so as I figure things out I start to walk to work in a curve to circum-navigate the hill, rather than directly. Suddenly I find myself wanting to have GPRS set up so I can monitor the route I am taking. After four years sitting on my backside while a car takes me to work; it’s exhausting to do this walk twice a day, and yet a lot of fun. Sadly the apartment we’re going for will involve a bus ride - no walking.

Nathan has not taken to the timezone shift yet. He’s also probably not too happy at being dragged around town by his mother each day - after having had two months in which we were both home and I would pop up from the basement for a quick 5 minute play every now and then. However even when whiney, he continues to be a delight. Tonight’s desire to sit and code was destroyed when I decided it would be nice to put Nathan to sleep - something which always ends with the two of us lying asleep on our bed.

Work is busy, but going well. Generally I’m spending my time monitoring the output of tools that monitor various open source project bug trackers (the SASH ones), backporting fixes, becoming the build-manager (apparantly not everyone thinks build management is cool so the job remains vacant) and helping out with general “how to approach the community” questions on issues that pop up. It’s cool that what was once a hobby of no importance to my employers is now a major factor on my resume and day to day work, but I still need to work on getting real overlap between my Apache time and my work time. Currently I’m just getting more involved in projects I hovered on the periphery of before; nice but not an efficiency improvement.

We have a full cable package in this short term apartment. It was quite fun to show Nathan football again - he liked to point out the ball as it flew around then got bored when it went off-screen. An important lesson to the people running football - the players, the teams, the egos, the money; none of it is important compared to the ball. Apart from that it’s just been a case of watching Stargate repeats and on Friday the new Stargate and Battlestar Galactica episodes. So I continue to be in favour of not wasting on money on cable TV packages. Given that Seattle weather is pretty predictable, it’s tempting to try the broadcast channels out - but maybe the hilly nature makes the signals crap.

Generally life is exciting, but it’s easy to miss the old boring safe routine.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 2nd, 2006 at 3:09 am and is filed under Family etc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.