Leaving Seattle

For the most part, I wrote these blogs on the road using the wordpress app on my iPhone. I’ve been back for three weeks now, so I should probably start doing something about uploading them… Apologies in advance that they get absurdly detailed on rather boring details. I was passing the time, alone, and wanting to document everything so I’d remember later. I’ll probably be editing to add in various details and hope to add photos to later entries. I’ll also roll them out over time a bit so as not to overwhelm anyone who will actually take the time to read these.

FYI, my flight left Seattle at 6:35AM, was set to arrive in NY at 3:00PM. The second leg departed from NY at 6:00PM to arrive at about 7:00AM in London.

On the flight to New York. Won the first round of trivia on the plane. Now watching Mythbusters on satellite about yawning contagion. Yeah, can’t stop yawning. The 3.5 hours sleep last night probably isn’t helping. Ideally I would stay awake for this flight then sleep on the flight to London arriving at 7AM. In reality, if sleep wants to happen, I should probably let it.

I just paid $6 for a movie on a tiny screen. Milk. Must pay attention.

Movie is still on, but I just wanted to point out I can see Chicago from here, over Lake Michigan right now.

There certainly are a lot of peanuts and peanut products on this plane. Seems so strange now.

Finished the movie just under the wire. Starting descent. Have to turn off phone momentarily.

This is so weird. I’m at JFK. I got an automated phone call telling me the flight is one hour delayed. The internet tells me it’s one hour delayed. Nothing at the airport indicates any kind of delay. Charging phone and the reserve charge thing.

That was a very enjoyable if not productive second flight. The plane departed late because it was going to be a shorter than planned flight. Apparently they can’t land at heathrow before a certain time. They left an hour late and arrived early. The plane was a 2-3-2 configuration. I had a window in the back. An 18 year old guy sat next to me. I assumed he’d be annoyed by anyone not in his age group and assumed I’d be left alone to try to sleep or to play with the games or watch the free on demand movies. He looked oddly familiar to me. I’m not sure how we started up the conversation, but we ended up chatting for hours. And not in the “will you please stop talking to me” way. You see, he’s a shockingly well travelled, educated, and knowledgable teenager. Turns out he’s been to over 60 countries and has grand plans for more. It took a lot of encouragement for him to believe I really wanted to hear his travel stories. It was neat to see someone else able to rattle off names of African nations while pointing to a blank map of the continent. Anyway, it was fun to hear the srories. He did enjoy the conversation too, BTW. He was so pleased by all of his travel so far that day including meeting rapper Ludacris at the airport in Miami and loaning him a dime. Heh. He still had another long flight to Helsinki to go.

But it meant little time for sleep. I played a couple movies/tv shows and curled up in uncomfortable to my neck positions. I wasn’t aware so much of the sleep, but apparently I got some. I woke up to find that they had served breakfast. My seat mate had grabbed one for me, thankfully. Large dinner, breakfast, free games, and movies. I love international flights.

So with still little sleep under my belt for the equivalent of two nights I finally arrived in London at about 7am.

Crazy

Turns out I can blog on my phone from the plane. Obviously I can’t post it, but I can write on the wordpress app while in airplane mode. Airplane mode rocks.

This is my seventh flight in the last month. The fifth that is of the five/six+ hour variety. You’d think I’d be burnt out by this, and you’d pretty much be right. I’m more worried about ending it though and going back to the mundane day to day routine. It’s hard to go back.

I’m good at travelling. Honestly I wouldn’t mind this so much if there wasn’t a kitty at home. Luckily I have bitterkat’s brood to thank for keeping him a very happy kitty. In fact I have reason to believe he likes their visits more than me being there. I don’t blame him. He probably gets more focused attention from them than me and he is an attention whore.

It’s kind of weird, but all this travelling just makes me want to travel more. During my most recent stint at home I found myself looking up prices. I’ll soon have enough miles to go to Europe during peak season for free. Well, assuming there are any openings. All I found during a brief search were first class seats through September. I don’t have that many miles…

It’s hard to make a decision on where to go next. One of my two longest running Europe interests are to wander around the island of Great Britain. Mostly around England and Scotland though. Train trips to get around. I’d like to visit some areas where my anscestors came from. (That’s almost entirely England. Scotland is for other reasons) The other is to wander around Italy. I’m also open to visiting other places. Really I’d be happy to wander the trains all over Europe. Those are just the longest running. New Zealand is another, but obviously it’s not in Europe. Newer goals in other regions are Southeast Asia and Tanzania. Those will certainly be more outside my comfort zone, so it’ll take some more psyching up from my end.

For now I’ll just stick to one of my favorite pastimes. Doing Internet research. Hotels, transportation, destinations…

My two past Europe trips were only six months apart. The travel bug hits, it stays. And it’s a big bug.

What? Read on that tiny thing?

It’s still new to me so I still enjoy reading on my iPhone. It will probably get old and start to bug me, but it’s not as bad as I expected. (Kind of like writing blog entries isn’t nearly as bad as expected.) I have been tempted by Amazon’s Kindle. Obviously the technology is far superior to a backlit screen. However, aside from economic concerns, I just don’t read enough to justify it. Having just made a rather questionable economic decision in my new phone, I have decided to exploit it as much as possible.

Stanza is a neat little app that I have been using to read free public domain books. Still with Kindle drool regularly, when I got word this morning of the Kindle for iPhone app, I rushed right out to download. I set it up tonight.

Overall right now, I think Stanza is better, at least for what I am looking for. There are so many classics I haven’t read. The catalogs are huge. Having direct access within the app is a big plus here. For the Kindle app you have to go to Amazon’s site in a separate browser to purchase. The syncing process is automatic and I can see the benefit if you also have a Kindle.

I “purchased” three books from Amazon so I could compare. One was Pride and Prejudice for direct comparison to Stanza. I do think I like the text layout a bit more in the Kindle app. There is some white space around the text which is nice. The entire book is scannable on the screen via scrollbar. That’s actually a little cumbersome when there are over 4000 pages. Stanza is scannable within the current chapter only.

Strangely the navigation on the Stanza app is more like Kindle navigation than the Kindle app. For either you can swipe like other iPhone apps, but Stanza allows tapping the left or right edge of the screen to navigate between pages.

Other features the Kindle app doesn’t have are ability to change the background and viewing in landscape mode. Both of these could easily be added in a later version. The lack of background change is a definite negative for me, so I hope they change that.

What the Kindle app does have going for it is an enormous library for purchase. Since I’m mostly in it for the free stuff so far (read: bad customer) this is less important for me.

I’ll spend some more time with both and cross my fingers that the Kindle app has some updates to make up for my concerns.

Kelly + iPhone = love

It makes sense that my first blog post since getting the iPhone is being written on it. The wordpress app is my latest download of many. It’s interesting learning to trust the smart keyboard. Not bad actually. I thought I’d give a quick list and perhaps mini-review of the apps I have downloaded so far.

Facebook: I’d say this is a “duh” app to download. My biggest gripe so far is that I don’t have the live feed view I’m addicted to on the real thing. I did my first mobile upload today. All seemed to go well.

Twitterfon: There are lots of twitter apps out there. This seemed the best fit from the reviews of the free apps out there. Tweetie seems the best for pay apps, but I’m not going there, at least not yet. I might check out twitterific soon as well.

Google: Favorite part is the speech recognition. It makes it far less painstaking to search. I’ve only had one miserable failure on that when I said a long string and it decided I had said “India”. Um… Overall it’s great.

Flashlight: Mostly it just made me laugh.

Stanza: This is an eReader which has direct access to several online catalogs including Project Gutenberg. I’ve dowloaded a number of classics already and am on chapter four of Pride and Prejudice. I’ve used the settings to turn the background grey which helps a bit with eye strain. I love this, especially that it’s free with such a large free library.

Google Earth: Kind of a duh for me as well. I love maps and love having the world satellite view at my fingertips.

Shazam: This identified recorded music it hears. It’s a fun little app.

Urban Spoon: Mostly it’s just fun to shake and watch it act like a slot machine for dining choices.

ShoZu: I’m trying to figure out a good app to transfer photos to flickr. I don’t know if this is it, but my test run seemed to do the trick. I’ll probably try out some others before settling in on one.

IcanHasCheezburger: Duh. It has the whole Cheezburger network for my perusing pleasure.

Geocaching: Probably the most expensive app I’ll buy. It was $9.99 and is only one of two I’ve paid any money for. I quite like the real time instant access to nearby caches though. I haven’t gone hunting with it yet, but I can’t wait.

iLCARS: Yes, this silly app is the other one I spent money on. It basically looks like a Star Trek TNG panel, makes appropriate noises and sounds, and pretends to scan people and the environment. I love it except for all the annoying spelling errors and typos. The huge geek in me had no problem with the $0.99 price tag.

WordPress: Seems good. This has taken awhile though.

I’ll perhaps review the games later. I have seven right now. We’ll see where I’m at when I get around to it.

ETA: Bolding to app names, done from computer.

Organizationalitude continues

Now about 2.5 weeks in and I’m still cleaning every day. I’ve spent a week split between bathroom/back bedroom, a week in my bedroom, and am now three days into organizing the living room. I think a big part of my success to date is the mindset I was in when I started. I was fed up and ready to try something new. I think the reason I’ve managed to stick with it is the change in scenery each week thanks to zones.

I’m getting to the point where I average at least two 15 minute intervals on weekdays, more on the weekend. I’m still impressed by how much of a difference each one makes. I’m sure they’ll get harder as I repeat zones after getting rid of the easy and obvious stuff the first time around. I’m now getting sucked into the idea of buying more storage containers. So far I’ve resisted other than a much needed new file box, but odds are I’ll give in sooner or later. Ideally purchase number one should be a nightstand so that I can repurpose the two empty bins I’m currently using for that purpose.

This whole thing has been weirdly contagious too. Even places that aren’t in the current zone seem to become incrementally more organized as I go, as if by magic. And I’ve gotten organized in my shopping and meal planning. I’m becoming a grocery ad reader and a coupon hunter. It’s weird.

I think next week is supposed to be a zone for front porch, entry, dining room. Not sure what I’ll do with that. Part of that is the same as living room and there’s only so much I can do on the front porch. I guess I’ll figure something out…

Getting organized

Ooh, a blog post from the elusive Kelly…

(Yeah, Twitter has pretty much killed my blogging unless I have something long form to talk about.)

My house has gotten out of control. Not that it was ever particularly *in* control to begin with. Even when it’s been “clean”, that always involved the stashing of stuff out of the way, quick cleaning the obvious areas, etc. It frustrates me that despite my OCD tendencies, I never managed to pick up the cleaning part of it. Instead, I see crap piling up, I stress about it. I want to do something to fix it, but the overwhelmed “where do I even start” thing generally leads to nothing happening to fix it and it just gets worse and worse.

I’d heard about this Flylady system from a few places before. They all used the caveats that they liked the ideas behind them, but not so much the delivery. I wholeheartedly concur on that. It’s mostly geared to stay-at-home moms who feel bad about themselves for not being able to keep up. I totally understand the need for that (having witnessed my own inability to accomplish anything during my bouts of unemployment), but it certainly doesn’t fit where I’m at right now. For example, I don’t have a hard time managing to get dressed in the morning, what with the whole job thing. A lot of it feels very “southern” and makes my skin crawl.

Also, the website is insanely overcrowded and confusing. They want you to sign up for an email list, but they clutter your inbox with approximately 3,453,874 emails per day. (Note, I do get the emails, filtered to a separate folder, and I’ve figured out which ones to delete instantly.)

But, like I said, the underlying principles are good. So, I started this thing exactly one week ago. So far, so good. I feel like I’m reclaiming my house a piece at a time. The main takeaways I’ve gotten from what I’ve read:

1. Don’t think of yourself as behind. You’re just starting from where you are. Appreciate the progress you make, don’t dwell on what you haven’t done yet. You’ll get there.
2. It didn’t get this way overnight, it’s not going to get cleaned up that fast either.
3. It’s important to establish new routines. It takes about a month of doing something every day for it to become a habit.
4. Babysteps. Don’t try to rush into doing everything right now. In order to establish those routines, just add small bits at a time.

As for what to physically do:

1. “Shine your sink” is their first step. Basically, really clean your sink, take pride in it. Don’t ever let things stay there after that. (I’m surprised how much this has helped me.)
2. Set a timer for 15 minutes and declutter as much as you can during that time. Every day.
3. Special assignments, such as setting a timer for 2 minutes to clean off a “hot spot”.
4. Work in zones. Each week is set for a different area. Decluttering should be focused here (and later, detailed cleaning). There are also cleaning tips for each day in that zone that come via email. Last week was bathroom and junk room. Next week is master bedroom. Following week is living room. It loops around each month.
5. Once per week (they call this “weekly home blessing hour” Blech.) Set a timer for 10 minutes and vacuum (it’s OK to vacuum around stuff). Then 10 minutes for mopping. Then 10 minutes for dusting. Then cleaning mirrors and doors, etc. So a total of 1 hour, with set time. (I’ve realized I need more time for vacuuming and less for some of the others, so I trade off the time a bit.)
6. Daily routines about unloading dishwasher (which is so not a daily task for this single girl), starting a load of laundry, “swish and swipe” in the bathroom, etc.

It’s surprisingly empowering to do the 15 minutes, know I’ve accomplished something, and feel OK with rewarding myself with laziness. I’ve been astounded by how much I can accomplish when I’m rushing through my 15 minute intervals. That corresponds to almost 2 hours a week. However, if I just decided on Saturday to work for 2 hours, I wouldn’t get even remotely this much accomplished. The renewed eyes thing helps, but the 15 minutes almost makes it a game. It’s been fun to watch little bits of my house getting reclaimed. I also have two big boxes of stuff to donate now. (And I wish the trash/recycling thing could happen more often during times like this…)

So far, the changes are in less-obvious-to-everyone-else areas. I look forward to the living room week for making it more presentable. But still, I’m in no hurry. The last thing I want to do is a stash-and-dash type clean. But it will be nice to get to a point where I can feel comfortable having people over. Another thing I liked about the intro on Flylady is the “Are you living in CHAOS (can’t have anyone over syndrome)?” Oh, yeah…

Those Pink boys…

Warning: I’m in genealogy mode again. It happens to me about twice a year, when I become engrossed in research.

My great grandfather’s name was Pink Walker. His twin brother’s name was Rose. Yes, Pink and Rose, twin boys. It confused the census takers too. So, Pink was born in 1869 and lived in North Texas outside Dallas-Fort Worth. He died in 1959 shortly before his 90th birthday.

Sometimes I leave the confines of ancestry.com and give old google a try. A search for “Pink Walker Texas” brought up a rather surprising discovery.

There’s a book about the family of a boy named Pink Walker, born in 1870, who lived in North Texas, outside Dallas-Fort Worth, who died in 1964. It’s historic fiction but based on the life of a real person, told by a descendant. Pink is the main character. It’s called Flowers For Milley: Adventures of a Pioneer Family on the Frontier of Texas.

Needless to say, I had to buy it, even though it’s not “my” Pink. Mine was born in Texas and moved to Arkansas, the other was born in Arkansas and moved to Texas. Mine lived west of Dallas, the other east, though not far for either. Just such a bizarre coincidence. I had to look up the other one in the census too, and found the family in 1880.

I read about 4 pages of the book when it arrived on Saturday, but now it’s with my dad. Vicarious family history. Funny.

Belief-o-matic

Every once in awhile, I take a spin on the Beliefnet quiz to see what religion it thinks I should be. These are my results today. Note that 100% does not equal perfect match. The best match is simply assigned 100%. Basically, it’s a religion quiz on a curve. The quaker one surprises me. None of the others are that surprising though. (I do wish Scientology were lower though…)

1. Unitarian Universalism (100%)
2. Liberal Quakers (97%)
3. Secular Humanism (91%)
4. Neo-Pagan (89%)
5. New Age (86%)
6. Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants (83%)
7. Mahayana Buddhism (69%)
8. Theravada Buddhism (67%)
9. Reform Judaism (65%)
10. Nontheist (64%)
11. Scientology (58%)
12. Taoism (56%)
13. Baha’i Faith (55%)
14. New Thought (55%)
15. Sikhism (47%)
16. Orthodox Quaker (45%)
17. Christian Science (Church of Christ, Scientist) (41%)
18. Jainism (38%)
19. Islam (29%)
20. Orthodox Judaism (29%)
21. Hinduism (29%)
22. Mainline to Conservative Christian/Protestant (25%)
23. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) (22%)
24. Eastern Orthodox (21%)
25. Roman Catholic (21%)
26. Seventh Day Adventist (15%)
27. Jehovah’s Witness (6%)

Following Matt Harding

I saw Matt Harding again. He announced on his blog that he’d be speaking at Wide World Books & Maps. This is a fascinating little store in Wallingford that I had never heard of before this announcement. They specialize in travel books, accessories, and all kinds of maps. I absolutely have to spend some quality time there before my next trip, whatever that may be.

Now, his story has been fascinating to me, I love the videos, I love his writing, I absorb everything he publishes one way or another. Honestly, I didn’t expect to hear anything new beyond my previous absorbances, but I nevertheless love hearing him speak about these things and enjoy his dry humor. To my surprise, there were numerous things that he spoke about that I hadn’t heard him cover. He passed around a couple of his passports. Yes, he has several. All filled up, all with extra pages, a couple were concurrent. This wasn’t done in a “hey, look how many stamps I have!” sort of way, it was to answer a question about needing extra pages. This led into another story about him getting stuck in Madagascaar (I believe) when he ran out of room for a stamp. It was quite the ordeal that Melissa had to get him out of. I did not get to see the passport with the Antarctica stamp either.

The evening was pretty good. I’d estimate 40+ people in attendance. He started off curious if everyone had seen “the video”. I think it’s funny how “the video” has been defined differently over the years. Now, it means video number three. I think a couple of people hadn’t seen it. Some had seen it only once. We watched it. The high def version is beautiful.

I don’t remember the question he was answering, but he asked if anyone had been at the gasworks filming. I raised my hand. I believe a couple other people behind me must have as well. He jokingly looked in our direction, waving, and said, “hi guys.” (Not really pretending to remember us.) It was kind of fun. Awhile later, someone asked if he had to get permission or releases for people in the video. He started in on explaining everything, and motioned in the general direction of those of us who were there, saying, “as these guys will remember,” then he paused, looked at me more carefully, and said, “I remember *you*… Kelly, is it?” I was floored. “Yes!” I then mentioned to him that he had used my photos for his blog about that day. He looked nervous, “did I give you credit?” “Yes, you did.” He then proceeded to actually answer the whole permission question that he had started.

There is really no reason he should have remembered me at all, much less my name. Seriously, only about 4 sentences were exchanged between us on the dancing day. I was mostly just hanging back, listening to the other conversations. There were 181 people there that danced, including a lot of family and friends he hadn’t seen in a long time. After I got home and uploaded the photos, I sent him an email with a link to the photos in case he wanted to use them. I gave him the quick “thank you” for doing what he does and sharing it with us. He responded with a couple sentences, thanking me for having pictures of him getting lifted up. That’s pretty much it. I have no idea how he would remember me three months later. Still, it’s pretty cool, even if it was a bizarre experience.

When asked if he’d thought of doing a book, he had some news in that department. He just signed a deal with a publisher a couple weeks ago (I think he said). He’s supposed to have a book out in May of next year, I believe. He was excited for the format. It will basically be stills from the videos and standalone stories from each. There will be no connecting narrative. That sounds like a nice thing to just be able to pick up here or there and read a random page or two.

Oh, and randomly, here’s a blog from a guy who was so excited to be there.

33.333333333333333333333333333…

That’s right, today is my 33 and 1/3 birthday. I wish I could say I came up with some grand way to celebrate today, but mostly it was a day to get caught up with chores (well, some) and nap and make some too-salty baked mac & cheese and that’s probably about it. Tomorrow I celebrate, but nothing particularly commemorative about being a third of a century.

So, this is also my first post directly on wordpress. All others before this were originally elsewhere and have now been imported to their new home. I like the site overall pretty well. I looked at a few other hosting sites as well, but this was the winner from my brief search. Hopefully I’ll continue to feel that way as I figure out my way through all this.

So, what have I been up to lately? Well, a number of things. For one, I’ve realized I’m reliving 1988. OK, not really, but a couple things are coming together that make me think twice anyway. Back in the summer of ‘88, I took my first flight to California. It was also my first solo flight. A little traumatic for me as well since when I got off the plane at LAX, my brother was not there to greet me. I didn’t know which way to go, I didn’t have his phone number or any way to contact him, etc. I started walking slowly but with little confidence of my path. Before long (though it seemed like an eternity) I saw my brother booking it through the terminal toward me looking terrified. I’ve never let him forget it. That was also the first and only time I’d been to Disneyland until this year. In June of this year, 20 years later, I went again and had a great time. I honestly think I enjoyed it more this time.

The second 1988 flashback harkens back to an activity I performed on a certain road trip to a great place. That year, I rode up to Washington from Houston with my mom and my aunt. We took a leisurly path, stopping at various attractions along the way. It was a really fun trip and the only real road trip I’ve ever been on. On the trip, they started my license plate obsession. I had a little note pad and we’d keep track of every state license plate we saw on the trip. During the course of the trip, we saw 48 states and DC. I know we didn’t see Vermont, but I don’t remember the other one we didn’t get. I know it wasn’t something obvious like Hawaii or Rhode Island. We had those. Well, this year I randomly decided to keep track again. I started on July 1st. I never really turned off the whole paying attention to license plates thing that started in 1988, so I recognize many states very quickly and don’t have to work very hard on it. No, the tricky part these days is remembering which ones I’ve seen long enough to remember to check my list and mark them off at the next stoplight or the end of my trip. So far, I’ve been really surprised at how many I’ve gotten, and how quickly, in particular with all the gas prices and economic issues, plus I’m staying in Western Washington. So far, I’ve seen 45 states, 3 Canadian provinces, government plates, a US military plate from either Germany, Italy, or Spain, and a Puerto Rico plate. My remaining states are Kentucky, South Carolina (which I’m nearly positive I’ve seen but haven’t marked off yet), New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Delaware. It’s been almost a week now since I’ve marked off a new one. Ah, well, I’ll get there.

Yep, this is how I entertain myself. I live a life on the edge.

Recently I spent about a week being broken. Clearly a sign of getting old when I can somehow manage to injure myself through the act of driving home from work as nomal. My shoulder and neck started hurting. It just kept getting worse each day and I’d wake up from the pain as the ibuprofen would ware off over night. Not fun. Well, I eventually went to the doctor, thanks to snarky kat for driving me there. They gave me some meds that made me feel sick when I took them together. (Turns out the muscle relaxer says to not take narcotic analgesics with it… um…) But, I think taking the muscle relaxer for long enough helped me a *lot*. I improved pretty quickly after that.

So, I’m feeling better, and actually have a day today with no plans or other obligations. I have energy even. So, I’m using it to start making up for all the time spent not doing my chores. Luckily it’s even seemed fun today. That doesn’t happen very often.