The weekend before last Sarah and I went down to Gas Works Park in Seattle. Gas Works Park is a former Seattle Gas Light Company gasification plant now turned into a park with the machinery kept intact and found right on the shore of Lake Union. There's a large hill right next to the plant with an embedded art installation from which you get an excellent view of the park and the lake. Anyway a very cool place. Afer, we ate at Julia's of Wallingford where I stereotypically had the Santa Cruz omelet. Good food, nice place, nice neighborhood.
This past weekend was Halloween weekend. On Halloween at Microsoft parents bring their kids around the office buildings and collect candy from those who have candy in their office. See Matt's photo of one such hallway at Microsoft. The next day Sarah and I went to two birthday parties the second of which required costume. I went as House (from the television show House) by putting on a suit jacket and carrying a cane. Sarah wore scrubs to lend cred. to my lazy costume. Oh yeah and on Sunday Sarah bought a new car.
My previous window office was ripped from me when our team moved buildings but now I've got another. The photo is poor because I didn't get the lighting correct and it depicts the office before I've moved all my crap into it. I have a lovely view of our parking lot and freeway which Jane spun as an 'urban view'. At any rate I'm not complaining: I like knowing what its like outside and that there is an outside. The day after I found out about my office, I also got two new patent cubes. I didn't have any pictures last time so I took some now and blacked out their text for fear of laywers.
In my previous home, just after I moved in, my neighbor which was the city of Redmond's various city government buildings, decided to build a parking structure. This was maybe 30 feet from my window, lasted for at least a year and would regularly wake me up at seven or eight in the morning. Determined to not be so punctual for work, I got earplugs which meant in addition to not hearing the construction outside, I couldn't hear my alarm. I had an idea for a combination ear plug, headphone, alarm clock that I never did anything with, except to write down the phrase "earplug / headphone / alarm clock" on a list that I just now found. In retrospect, I think this problem might be too specific to result in my earplug alarm clock selling well.
The weekend before last was Sarah's birthday and as part of that, last weekend we took a trip to Victoria, BC. I've got a map of our trip locations and photos. Not all the photos are on the map but they're all in the trip photo set on Flickr. It turns out there's a lot of tourist intended activities right around our hotel which was in the inner harbor and downtown Victoria area. As such we didn't get a rental car and did a lot of walking.
On the first day we checked out the Royal British Columbia Museum which had some interesting exhibits in it and the Undersea Garden which was interesting in that its like a floating aquarium but was a bit grimy. There was a group of Japanese tourists next to us during the undersea show in which a diver behind the glass in the ocean would pick up and parade various animal life. The group all repeated the word starfish in unison after the show's narrator and one of the tourists was very excited to see the diver bring over the octopus. The diver made the octopus wave to us while it desperately tried to get away.
We flew in and out of the Victoria International Airport which is a smaller sized airport. Although we needed our passports we didn't need to take off our shoes -- what convenience! The US dollar was just a bit worse than the Canadian dollar which was also convenient. The weather was lovely while we were there and I only got slightly sun burned.
sequelguy posted a photo:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Columbia_Parliament_Buildings
sequelguy posted a photo:
Behind the main building of the Westin Kierland resort is a man made mini-lake with a large statue of someone holding a gold ring in the middle.