Mad Times

Bad day for a fur coat

The record high temperatures we've been subjected to these last few days are not welcomed by the kitties. At all. Theo keeps yelling at us and we can tell he just wants us to turn down the heat. The flash makes the fan look stopped. It really is blowing on him. Even as I type this.

Transportation choices

Of course we didn't just leap from total auto dependence to our current relatively car-free state. Over the years we've made a number of choices that have resulted in a lifestyle that more easily lends itself to this kind of adventure.

• We live three flat miles from my work place. I have biked to work most days for the past 15 years (both at this job and my previous job in Santa Clara, CA).
• Becky isn't currently working in a job she has to commute to.
• Our house is near Issaquah's downtown (three or four blocks to a grocery store, the library, a dozen good restaurants).

The point I want to make is that none of these factors just happened. They were choices we made.

People say to me "oh that's nice that you live close enough to work that you can bike" as if it's some kind of fluke.

I don't mean to sound self-righteous. There are lots of other ways to live. People choose to live where they live for reasons that make sense to them. This is just what makes sense for us.

This is cutting close to one of my pet peeves. People complain about traffic. These complaints drive me crazy. People talk as if "traffic" is some unavoidable force of nature like the weather.

Traffic doesn't bother me at all. I don't even notice it.

If traffic is bothering you, then you are traffic. Traffic is too many people all driving their cars to the same places at the same time. Every single one of those people made a choice that resulted in them being there in each other's way. Complaining about it is a way of saying that you think other people's choices are less valid than yours. You can't change the choices other poeple make, you can only make your own. Choose differently or accept the consequences.

Okay, I'm taking deep breaths. Sorry about that.

I'm sure there's stuff I complain about that you all could throw that "choice" argument right back at me. Like I could choose not to let other people's complaints about traffic bother me. I'll have to work on that...

Bag boy

Theo likes to ride around in bags. Or just hang around.

Car-free

Back on March 6th, our car suffered a mishap. No one was hurt beyond the inevitable soreness. The repairs would have cost a couple hundred dollars less than the current value of the car so the insurance company totalled it. We'd had the car for a couple of years in which time it had depreciated by about $3,000. We were still paying on a small loan, so between paying that off and our $1,000 deductible, we ended up with no car and a check for something like $4,000.

Apart from the financial loss we weren't particularly traumatized by this event. We'd never really bonded with this car. It was just transportation.

But even so, it was our only transportation.

Take a look at that last sentence. Nothing shocking about it. No reason to question it. No car = no transportation.

Of course, it's completely untrue. We have proven this repeatedly over the last two months because we have not replaced our car. It has taken some effort and some compromises, but we've managed to live in Issaquah without owning a car.

Shocking, I know.

I've been mentally composing a grand epic article about our experiences living car-free in the suburbs of Seattle. I know enough about myself to realize that if I keep on thinking of it as a grand epic then it will never get written, so I'm going to try to write it in little pieces. Stay tuned.

Lost Glove #50

This is almost surely the other half of yesterday's.

It's also the same kind of glove and in almost exactly the same place as #44.

Lost Glove #49

Tome cat

Another of Alice's standard poses. Not very conducive to Becky's reading.

Lost Gloves #48

These are the nicest gloves I've seen lost so far. This street serves only one office so I think it's likely that their (the gloves') owner will go through here again soon and find them.

I had my 35mm camera with the 28mm lens on with me so I took some shots with that too. This picture is from the OptioS4.

05/07/05

Five, seven, five comes
only once per hundred years...
let's write bad haiku!

Or read good ones.

I suppose the Europeans should do it on July 5th...

Update:

Here's some haiku translations of Shakespeare's first twenty sonnets.

Synchronized siblings

Ah.

Every once in a while I see a hit on this page in my referrer logs that resulted from someone searching for the string "ahhhhh". I always wondered why anyone would search for such a thing (I often wonder this while looking at my referer logs), and one reason that came to me was to determine the frequency of occurrence of the various possible spellings of ahh.

With the internet, no question must remain unanswered (except maybe for the question of why I have such a hard time doing anything useful with my time?), so I spent a little time doing google searches for all the possible numbers of H's in the word.

One unlooked-for lesson learned in the process is that Google doesn't index words longer than 128 characters.

As for the frequency, as you'd expect, it's rather logarithmic. Here's the graph:

(The strange x-axis labels are a byproduct of the combination of excel's brain-deadness and my own.)

The zone from 25 to about 35 is pretty interesting. Can't come up with a theory to explain it. I expected to see a major spike at around 79, but it's not there.

Here's the raw data from today if you want to do further analysis or animate it over time or something.