Christmas Good, Frustration Bad

This may be a tad late, but Merry Christmas everyone!

We spent the holiday with my parents in Washougal, and it was good. My brother from Colorado flew in on Christmas eve, we picked him up at the airport. We did all the usual things- cookies, church, gifts, dinner with my mom's family, etc. Nothing remarkable to report about Christmas itself. It was good, and I'm happy.

To spite the Christmas cheer, the theme for today is frustration. That nasty, body aching feeling has been hanging around with me for the past week as the wife and I have been pelted by a thousand little stupid issues. Not anything horrible, and many of them have come as the burnt edges of otherwise enjoyable cookies. Because I'm the one writing, and you're the one reading, I will elucidate my tales of frustration for you, and hopefully by doing so I'll shine some light on the bright spots as well. Keep reading, a lot has happened in the past week, and I'll try to make it not boring for you.

The Christmas Party

The Saturday before the big day we had a Christmas celebration with our friends, hosted by Admiral Dave. The Admiral and Admiraless came up with an ingenious party idea- a competition was held on the Wii, and the winner took home a mystery prize (turned out to be a box of See's chocolates). The champion of the contest would be the one who held the highest score in a combination of one round of target golf and exponential bowling, the Wii Sports way. I edged out the AK Dynamo in bowling, but totally flubbed the golf and dropped to something like 4th or 5th place. I was very frustrated over that.

But the party was good, and an old friend who I hadn't seen since high school made an appearance. He's going to graduate school in Pasadena, and in an odd way that made him feel like a part of my extended family. There's a level of intelligence in conversation that I associate with the brood on my father's side which he exhibited, and I've always attributed that sense to the fact that a good deal of the family has advanced degrees. To be honest, though I enjoyed seeing him again, he made me feel inferior (entirely not his fault). Not having a college degree, much less a secondary degree, has always weighed heavy on me, especially around my well-educated family. Among my friends I don't have that pressure. While they're all intelligent and many of them have degrees (or are on their way to earning one), I can taste a bit of success when I'm in that group because I work for a big company that pays me well, and allows my wife and I to live well. But on Saturday when our long-lost high school pal came around, I felt a little shrunk down beneath the might of his academic pursuits.

There's really only one answer for this frustration that has haunted me for a very long time- get my ass back to school.

The Selling of the House and the Cursing of the Interbay U-Haul

It's official, we are no longer home-owners. I've almost entirely not mentioned this on the blog, but we had some offers on our house, accepted one, and had a fairly smooth transaction. The new owners signed the papers today. There's nothing frustrating about this, but getting the final bits of our property moved out of the house was about the worst frustration we've had in a while.

It started last week when I took the Subaru to the Interbay U-Haul in Seattle to have a trailer hitch added. They told Katie an hour would be needed for the procedure, but I was told 2-3. Too long to wait in the middle of work day, and I had no transportation back to the office prepared (the bus and my feet were my eventual vehicles). Skip ahead a couple of days. On the drive down I-5 for Christmas a fellow highway traveler let us know that our taillights were out. So we took the car to the Beaverton U-Haul on Friday and a very nice man at the hitch center tried to fix our problem. He couldn't identify the cause, but pointed out that the Interbay U-Haul guys had installed an unnecessarily complex wiring package. His recommendation was to let the Subaru dealer fix the problem, and charge the issue to the Interbay office for screwing it up.

Without delay we went to the Subaru dealership where we bought the car, but at 4 PM on the Friday afternoon before Christmas it's hard to get a technician to look at your car. We agreed to bring it back on Tuesday, but the delay caused by the whole business caused us to miss my father's choir performance at The Grotto.

Fast forward to Tuesday, the day after Christmas, the day we planned to use to get out of the house and officially, fully moved to Seattle. We get up very early, leave Washougal with my brother and a spare car, and get our car to the Subaru maintenance bays by 7 AM. We went back to the dealer about an hour later when I realized I left my cell phone in the car, but by then they knew what the problem was. Apparently the headlight switch is bad, though a little playing with it got it operational for now. Only $90 for the examination and switch twiddling, but we can't blame the Interbay U-Haul dorks for the problem.

Next it was to the Beaverton U-Haul to pick up the trailer. U-Haul was supposed to call on Christmas Day to tell me which office to pick up the trailer at, but of course that didn't happen. The lady at the Beaverton office was very nice, and she found our reservation after a VERY long search. While that happened we tried to hitch up the trailer only to find that the electrical hookup wasn't working at all. Bloody hell, it was working on Friday when we had them look for the problem that turned out to be a bad switch... damn it all. Okay, back to the nice hitch guys, who pull out the wiring to find that the Subaru techs had completely disconnected it!

Somewhere around this point the wife, overwhelmed with all the problems, came looking for a shoulder to cry on. The nice U-Haul man got us fixed up, though he did so by clipping some wires that I'd rather he didn't. (Remember my earlier comment about the Interbay U-Haul idiots using the wrong wiring package? This guy kind of hybridized that wrong wiring box with the right connectors. I suppose what he did was better than a 2 hour wait or $75 for the right box. Wires can be replaced.)

Now, all that set up, we could finally get the trailer and get some work done. Make one last run to Goodwill with useless junk, deliver a couch to my mother-in-law, clean out the house, make a pile of garbage for our nice ex-neighbor to take to the dump, etc., etc. It was past 7 PM by the time we finished with all that and got on the road to drive north. Katie took the first shift, and it was raining heavily. She has less than two years of driving under her belt, so driving with a trailer attached for the first time in bad weather conditions made her extra cautious and extra slow. I was getting frustrated but didn't say much about the lack of speed lest I distract her and cause more problems. Of course, when it was my turn to drive, I got to deal with the bad freeway surfacing in Seattle- ruts and seams and all sorts of crap- in addition to the weather and a loaded trailer. Net result is that I spent a good deal of time white-knuckling it at 50 miles an hour, a stream of obscenities pouring from my mouth like the rain itself did from the sky.

But that's all over now. The last of our stuff is in the garage at the apartment, the house is sold, and we're happy to be settling into our new lives.

Operation Camera - Status: Complete

Okay, there's nothing really frustrating about this. It's good, happy news. Just before we left work on Thursday to head down to Washougal, I got a call from the camera shop where I ordered my lens. My lens had in fact arrived, or as the salesman put it on the phone, "Santa says you've been a good boy this year." I rewarded the camera shop by purchasing a camera body to go with The Lens. (I could've had a better deal from an online store, but they threw in a trip to Victoria and I was just happy to get it done with.) I went ahead and got the fancy one, because I'd always be pulling "what-ifs" on myself otherwise. I want to tell you how much it cost, but I won't because it's all hideously expensive. Just be happy for me, this thing really amounted to being my major combined birthday and Christmas present (glad it came in time), with a lot of present-to-myself thrown in.

Now I just have to learn how to use the damn thing properly. Digital photography is a much different beast from film and paper.

I've Got A Bluetooth Ache

Actually, that title reminds me- I have a real tooth with a cavity which I have, of course, been ignoring, and it's beginning to make bad sensations occur. Dammit.

One of my Christmas presents was a little memory card reader slash Bluetooth hub. Ostensibly this was to pair with the ThinkGeek Bluetooth retro handset that I didn't get. Shucky darn. In any case, I tried to get the thing working last night, but the software included (why XP doesn't have proper universal BT drivers I do not know) refused to recognize it. I was up very late trying to fix it, to no avail. Success finally came in the morning, mostly because the updated software I took several hours to download. But it's working now, and I'm happy. The thing glows different colors in a cycle. I've got it hung up on the side of my computer desk just out of my direct line of sight, and it's a little weird when the color changes and distracts my eyes.

Part of the reason I was up so late was because of another oversight on Microsoft's part which I tackled earlier in the evening. I've needed an external hard drive for a while, so during the November Woot-off I bought a 250 GB SATA drive. I fully expected a matching enclosure to come along during the Woot-off, as that's how the Woot-offs usually work, but I was stumped. My solution: trade in my 7 year-old laptop to NewEgg for a credit that amounted to 1/100th of the laptop's original purchase price, then buy an appropriate drive enclosure with the proceeds. Like my shiny new camera lens, the enclosure arrived just before we left for the Christmas weekend.

Last night I mated the drive with the enclosure and was ready to format. I need the drive to use FAT32 since the main purpose of the drive is for me to back up my burgeoning iTunes library (ie., MP3 versions of my horrendously fat CD collection) from my Mac at work, where I'm running out of disk space. (OS X can't write to NTFS, and HFS+ is out since I want to bring the files home.) The roadblock was that Microsoft does not allow you to format a drive larger than 32 GB as FAT32 from Windows XP. They fully admit FAT32 will support up to 8 TB, but they have some inane reason for keeping you limited to the smaller size. WinME can do it, and one of the recommendations found online was to simply obtain the ME version of the format utility. What I eventually found to solve the problem was this homebrewed FAT32 formatting utilty. It worked like a charm and had the drive done in seconds. Chkdsk, on the other hand, was dirt slow to verify that this little magic utility did it's job correctly. I'll find out how well this thing works next week on my Mac when I get it to work.

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That's it, folks. The tales are over. I thank you for reading. All three of you. God, how I wish that last sentence wasn't true. But what should I expect from a whiny blog like this? Not a big circulation, that's for sure. G'night.

Oh, Tannenbaum It!

As noted in the previous post, I was waffling on whether or not to get a Christmas tree this year, since it was getting late in the season and we were going to be away from home for a number of days around Christmas. We did get a small Douglas fir, and paid a hefty price at a grocery store tree lot. Last time we'll ever do that.

Putting lights on the tree was traumatic. My existing strings had many burnt out bulbs and half of each string wouldn't turn on at all. So we picked up some new strings at Fred Meyer. GE brand they were, and crap they are. Both of the 100-light strings eventually blinked off their second halves. Fortunately, this was before I got too far with the lighting.

At Home Depot, I picked up a string of 300 lights in HD's house brand. Fortunately, these have performed much better than the 100's. I had an awful time getting them strung, though (not the fault of the lights). Because the string was longer than we needed for this tree, I thought it would look nice if I ran the lights up the branches, especially in the bare spots at the bottom of our skimpy little tree. Affixing the lights became a bit of a problem- I was using vinyl tape meant for anchoring vegetable plants to support poles, and getting my hands in there to tie the short strips was a frustrating exercise. About a revolution and a half into this, the wife pointed out (without knowing what anguish it would cause) that I had neglected to run the lights out the end of the branches and the whole thing looked a little off. That sent me into a fit of despondency until I rolled up my sleeves and redid the whole tree with a hybrid approach- tie the lights at the back of branches I was going down, and wind them around the branches I was coming up. Combined with the traditional untwist-the-cord trick to slip the lights on the skinny outer fingers of fir, the lights ended up looking pretty nice.

We touched up the tree with ornaments, then settled down to watch A Christmas Story with a well-earned snack of eggnog and Christmas cookies. I am very satisfied.

On another Christmas-related note, I spent some time thinking about Christmas Magic, my favorite Christmas album. Now, I'm pretty much a Christmas music junkie, my collection keeps growing every year. (This year's additions: Vince Guaraldi's "A Charlie Brown Christmas" and Brian Setzer's "Boogie Woogie Christmas".) But no album has ever meant more to me than the choral tapestry Fred Waring weaved with His Pennsylvanians.

It may help if I explain the history of myself and this album. My father inherited a number of LP's, including Christmas Magic, from his mother when she died some 20-odd years ago. Dad converted most of them to casette tape, and that's how I came to know Mr. Waring. The album is a mix of traditional Christmas carols (O Holy Night, What Child Is This, etc.) and more obscure Victorian-era carols (Wassail, Wassail; O Bright the Holly Berries). I appropriated the tape when I was around 12 or so, and I'm utterly suprised that the reels and other parts held together through the many many times I played it. Dad had only labeled the name of the album on the tape, I didn't know that Mr. Waring and his forest denizens were the masters behind my holiday glee. It was just after Christmas last year that I found their name, thanks to a single track on a CD of my mother-in-law's. I was then able to track down the CD version of the whole album.

So while I was putting the lights on the tree yesterday, I wondered (as I wandered out under the stars... sorry... lyric flashback) why this album has such an effect on me, and why I have a preference for Victorian-style choral groups over crooners like Bing and Frank singing the modern Christmas classics (not that I don't like them, I just tire of them sooner) and a penchant for mixed male-female chorus overall. The answer is fairly obvious but not something I ever spent time considering- it's the music that defined the Christmas of my childhood. We didn't have any other type of Christmas albums in the house, and our family Christmas gatherings don't stray too far from the Victorian model: family, food, and gifts. So to me, songs like "Snow, Snow, Beautiful Snow" are what Christmas IS. The comfort of Christmas, that warmth of family and home, and the anticipation of a great celebration is all encapsulated in the harmony of this music. It brings forth from my memory the images of Christmas as a child, like the dark living room of my parents' house light up by naught but the Christmas tree. Christmas Magic IS the magic of Christmas for me.

This is especially important to me as those memories of childhood become more separated by time from who I am. My parents no longer live in the house I see when I think of Christmas. I don't even live in the same city that I grew up in anymore. I don't put Legos or Transformers on my Christmas list, or get up at the crack of dawn to plug in the Christmas tree and salivate at the mysteries wrapped in pretty paper and bows, straining with anticipation for sounds of my brothers or parents getting out of bed so that the bacchanalia of toy-unwrapping can begin. Okay... maybe I still do that last part.

As my wife and I forge new memories and I come to the realization that there will very soon be a day when my parents might not be around for Christmas at all, the music of my childhood gives me an anchor to remember how wonderful the Christmases of past have been and why this yearly celebration lifts our spirits at the darkest time of the year. It's pretty easily summed up by the music on Christmas Magic- it's family and friends, even strangers and friends-to-be, silently sharing the recognition how wonderful it is that we are simply on this earth and that we're not alone- we are humanity. Now, not to hammer the Charlie Brown point too much, but modern society has commercialized the celebration into a pretty bizarre holiday. Despite that, on December 25 everyone seems to be able to look through that and enjoy Christmas for the right reasons.

This is why I spend a lot of money on a Christmas tree I find little practical use for, and why I spend hours making it look pretty. This is why a single Christmas album can tug on my heart and make me feel better about my place in the Universe. Christmas proves that hope and happiness is alive and well.

Okay... dippy sentiment over. I've built it up too much, so here's your reward, a photo of our Christmas tree. Enjoy.

It's a Twista!

Blip... and then a week went by. Nothing exciting to report, I'm afraid. Lots of Christmas shopping done, which was actually a good exercise in exploring the malls out here. We bought a Christmas tree, despite the fact that we're going to be leaving in a week to go home for the holidays.

Today has been a blustery, wet day. The sun never really came out, the sky has been pasted over with thick, dark, grey clouds all day long. Lots of power outages around the Puget Sound area, but our apartment is still lit up. The meteorologists are predicting 60 MPH winds.

The bad weather combined with a rare midweek Seahawks game to make traffic crappy for the wife, who took the bus up to meet me after work (the plan being that by going north initially, we would miss the football-related traffic tie-ups to the south of downtown). I rewarded her herculean transit effort with some yummy sushi and gelato in the Fremont district.

That is all.

Christmas Shopping in Seattle

Thanks to a free parking pass Katie got at work, we spent the evening walking around downtown Seattle and doing a little Christmas shopping. Picture above is of the star affixed to the side of the Macy's (née Bon Marché) building, shining over a temporary carrousel set up at Westlake Center. Compared to Portland, there's an absurd number of indoor malls in downtown, and all of them are within a few blocks of each other. We ticked a few marks off our Christmas list, but we'll still have to go this weekend if we're going to get packages out to our family around the globe in time for the holiday.

Side thought- to "Christmas shop" is a regular verb. No one thinks about "Easter shopping" or "Fourth of July" shopping. For that matter, "Christmas shop" is a common noun. Just another oddity of the holiday, I suppose.

My mother bought a Christmas present for one of my brothers from a "marketplace" seller on Amazon. The product arrived damaged and without the original packaging, so she's going to send it back for a refund. I spent a while checking this guy out, and while he has a lot of good reviews, there's a handful of bad ones. He's responded to all of them, and his language has sort of a 12 year-old ranting quality to them. I'm not confident that this guy's son isn't running the show.

I've had decent experience with these marketplace sellers myself, though I always thoroughly check them out before putting down my cash/plastic. I want to have confidence in the people I do business with, and I try to behave the same way when I sell things online. It's nothing more than basic Golden Rule stuff, but it's still suprising how many people don't try hard to find a good seller or to be a good seller. So sad.

Ninja-related humor

On my commute to work in the morning I pass by a corner in downtown Seattle that's popular with the "drive-up" variety of panhandlers and their hand-lettered signs. I usually ignore their cardboard missives, but today a fella in a blue coat and stocking cap caught my attention. Eschewing the über-popular pity and guilt tactic, he instead grabbed at the drivers' funny bones:

My father was killed by ninjas. Need money for karate lessons.

After giving the rubes at the stoplight a minute to chuckle at his cleverness, he then turned the sign over to display this:

OK OK OK. I need the money for beer, pot, and a hooker.

I was amused. I like ninjas and ninja-related humor, and the reveal was good, albeit tired. However, even this attention-getting tactic still doesn't get money out of me. I'm not going to reward begging behavior in either humans or animals. There are social services that people in need should be seeking, whether it be for money, food, or counseling and medical services. Feel free to argue with me, but I also don't like tipping. I'm a damn cheapskate. (I'm not a heartless bastard. Today I plan on buying a Christmas present for the sharing tree at work. I prefer to deal with charity on my own terms. Don't call me, charity, I'll call you.)

December = Birthday

The hands of the clock have turned, November has ended, and I am now officially 29. Whoop.

Had a pretty good Friday, work was easy. We countered an offer on our house, and though official response hasn't come, the impression is that the buyer is going to try to finance what we want.

Katie and I went to dinner at The Rock, a wood-fired pizza place with a rock 'n roll theme and their own house brews. I had been there once after a soccer game and enjoyed it, and I've been jonesing for a good Hawaiian pie all week. I would go back to The Rock, but I didn't enjoy it much last night. Their version of the Hawaiian is skimpy on the toppings, and the sauce and crust is thinner than I had been hoping for in my ideal pizza. The beer was okay, nothing outstanding.

We didn't have a birthday cake, so after pizza we set off looking for a place open late that would serve dessert. We found a Claim Jumper at a mall nearby, and we went in, their desserts having been highly lauded to us. Again, disappointment. I ordered the chocolate chip calzone, expecting some sort of cookie treat, instead I was served a mixture of chips and melted marshmallow wrapped in a thin layer of pizza dough. It was like some 12 year-old budding culinarian's attempt at making a trendy dessert- too sweet and too gimmicky. Katie ordered the apple pie, and was first brought their apple-caramel "cream cheese pie", which we tasted- it's like light, sweet cheesecake, and we weren't pleased. When Katie's correct order arrived, a bowl lined with pie crust, filled with sauced apples and topped with crumbles and toasted coconut, the verdict was only marginally better. Our stomachs were suffering from the pizza and alcohol consumed earlier, so after only a few bites we got to-go boxes and the check.

After the disappointing food adventures of the night, I wish we had just done like Admiral Dave did and just got some damn shushi.

The evening was finished off on a much more pleasant note: presents! My love bolstered last week's gift of Guitar Hero 2 with a bevy of goodies from Think Geek, including an awesome Half-Life themed t-shirt. The crowbar is family, man.

So all in all, 29 is okay so far. 28 was an interesting year, 29 has the potential to be interesting but in many different ways. Or it could be quiet and mediocre. I'm going to wait until after the new year to find out, we're going to be far too busy until then.