We’re flirting with Fall over here. On Monday I biked in under a dense cover of fog, and started humming the Hobbit theme to myself. Later on in the week it started raining, hard. Which is a bummer for me since I so love to bike to work, and the rain will soon be a permanent fixture of the forecast. How does the rhyme go? ‘tember showers are such downers?

There are employees that will bike to work year-round, who just wear rain coats and gloves to keep themselves from freezing. Not quite ready to put my bike through that kind of punishment – the dusty bike trail is doing enough of a number on the gears, without the moisture’s help. We’ll see how good I can be at using the stationary bikes on the regular.

A big project of last week was getting the TV wall-mounted and all the cables concealed using plastic… concealer-thingies. You know, these things. I had picked up an inexpensive stud finder before heading out (thanks Dad!) and it was time to put it to work. That is, until it decided to go all non-deterministic on me. One minute it swears up and down that the stud is here, and then the next it insists it’s over there, three inches over. I was concerned because neither of those locations matched the common 16″-between-studs rule. I chalked it up to being above a fire-place in an older building, but in any case I needed an accurate reading before I could drill.

I ended up relying on advanced statistical analysis to determine the stud’s true position (read: moving the stud finder repeatedly over the area until it’d gone off enough for me to just do a majority vote). And… well my TV hasn’t fallen off the wall yet, so I guess I got it!

(Oh, funny anecdote – you’ve really gotta be careful when you say you’re “wasted”, I guess it can be taken the wrong way when you’re not in Utah. Long story, details not important, but a less-active member who called me up part-way through my installation job thought I’d just claimed I was incredibly drunk.)

Work is just more of the same really, consuming technical documentation ad infinitum. It’s like getting lost on TV Tropes, every document has links to five more documents I should read. I’m slowly but surely making a dent in my reading list. In the meantime, I’m getting in on technical meetings, and it’s fun, I think to myself, Wow, I actually understand like 80% of what they’re disagreeing over!

Oh, I had an old lab-mate over for lunch last week. He was in the area interviewing for a full-time position. He’d done an internship at Google HQ over the summer, while I’d been working in the lab on finishing up my thesis. I took him on a quick office tour, and became sorta glad I’d not done an internship in Mountain View like he had. See, my week of orientation had been kind of like visiting Disneyland. But imagine if you had lived in Disneyland for three months, then someone took you on a tour of Lagoon. You probably wouldn’t be that impressed. So I’m glad I can appreciate the workplace here – ignorance in this case is bliss.

(Another funny anecdote. This one really makes me respect the men and women in blue [gloves], who protect our airways with such vigilance. On my way to and from orientation week, I’d opted out of the full-body scan, and gotten a pat-down by a TSA agent, who also went over my luggage. On the return flight, my backpack was even flagged by the X-ray machine technician, so it got an even more thorough going-over. The agent opened it up, rifled through it, found a ton of coins I’d left in, and waved it through, stating it must’ve just been a false alarm due to the coins.

Well, after being back in Kirkland for a few days, I decided to clean out my backpack, and found out that had the agent looked just a teensy bit harder, he would’ve found one of Grandpa’s old pocket knives that I’d totally forgot was in there. Oops. Anyways, like I said, this really made me respect the TSA, such hard-working folk.)

Oh, what the heck, this post’s mostly just gonna be anecdotes. At some point in my second week at work, I noticed that the monitor opposite from me still had a sticker on the back, the kind you peel off the moment you get set up. I looked around, and nearly every monitor in the room still had its sticker. Shocking. I peeked around, and mine still had it as well. Not for much longer, of course. Still resisting the urge to walk around and collect everyone’s monitor-stickers. If they couldn’t be bothered to find it, they don’t get the privilege of peeling it off.

On Thursday I went to Institute. It was a pretty small turn-out, by Provo standards anyways. Interesting moment came when, at some point in the lesson, a guy named Hayden asked a question to the teacher, named Shauna. Eyebrow was raised.

I’ve been having troubles due to my addressing mistake I mentioned in my first week, thinking my address was the one for my complex’s leasing office. A few things have failed to arrive, including a package from my folks, which they’ve re-sent using my real one and hopefully it arrives soon. But what did arrive this week was my first real-life credit card. I signed up when I became a Costco member, figured I’d take advantage of some of those cash-back bonuses. It’s weird, using it. I’ve only ever used my bank’s debit card, which works as a credit card and pulls money straight out of my account. Now there’s this huge “buffer” where I’m spending money that’s not really mine. I know it’ll automatically get pulled out of my account at the end of every month, but in the interrim it still feels weird. I hear it does help build good credit, though.

On Saturday I headed down to the DMV to get my Washington state driver’s licence. This wasn’t me acclimating to the move, this was me wanting to stay on the right side of the law. I’m most of the way through a 30-day countdown before I need to have gotten a state license. They’re strict like that, I guess.

What’s neato is, you can get a special license that sorta doubles as a passport, at least when you re-enter the country by land or sea. Such an enhancement costs extra, but definitely makes sense when you just want to head up to Vancouver for the day.

I’ll have to let you all know later how the special license looks, though, since they were closed for the holiday weekend. Ah well, I was out anyways, figured I’d head off to the library to get a card. The libraries in King County (where Kirkland is) are all part of the same “network”, offering one unified service to residents.

Which sounds nice and all, but not if I can’t find the one book I really want to read right now, The Worthing Saga by Orson Scott Card. Not one of their forty-nine locations carries that book. Compare that sorry state of things to back home, where the Orem, Provo, BYU, and UofU libraries all carry a copy of the book. Now, it might have something to do with the fact that the book’s author is a pretty prolific Mormon.

Also, the libray system here does have it, but it’s in one of those new-fangled “electronic book” formats, and I’m kind of old-school with books. Hmm, I’m heading back at the end of this month, if I can finish my current book before then, I might be able to check out The Worthing Saga from BYU (where I’m technically still a current student), then get it back to them over the Christmas break. Hmmmmm.

After I got my library card, I chilled out in the library for a bit, just surfing around, then headed out to check out the nearby pier. I spied a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses witnessing at a table set up just outside the library. Don’t miss running into them in Australia one bit.

On the way to the pier I saw a) a pug puppy that couldn’t have been longer than 10 inches, and 2) a shop that 3D-scans you and then prints and paints a model of you. I saw other things, but those were the two most interesting ones.

On Sunday I met with my counterpart for my calling, who is not long for this world. This week she heads out to go start her final year at BYU-Idaho. I just wanted to get a brain dump of how she’d been running things, so I wouldn’t immediately reveal myself to be incompetent.

In Sacrament meeting I got sustained, along with others, including someone who’d moved in the same time as me, and who has a similar skillset. (He’s working in cybersecurity at Microsoft. I tried to get him as a roommate, but Kirkland was a bit far from his company’s HQ.) Anyways, his calling was Sunday School instructor. Well, let me tell ya, if I could trade callings with him, I definitely would not. Last time someone was inspired to have me teach a lesson in church was in 2012, and I think they learned their lesson. I do like teaching, but Sunday School / Elders Quorum isn’t the best place I guess, it just didn’t go very well at all. Wait, I think I’ve said too much – yes, I’m a very accomplished teacher, I wouldn’t learn a thing from having that calling, no way no how.

After Elders Quorum was over, I noticed that we did not kneel for the closing prayer. Not like that surprised me, it was a very unique tradition we had in my last ward. Which was a fun one, not because kneeling in itself was fun or anything, but because I kind of doubt there’s more than two or three people left in that ward that remember when the tradition was put in place. And I’ll bet they’ll continue to do it for years. Who wants to be the one to say, Hey everyone, I know it’s super spiritual how we all kneel for the closing prayer, but let’s just stop doing that.

After church I prepped for conferencing in for my cousin McCall’s wedding shower. All the cousins were there, it was so fun to say hi to everyone. I hear there’s talk of having Cousin Palooza 2017 up here in May, so stoked.

That night was a game night at a member’s house. She lives with her parents, and has lots of room for activities. There, I met someone who seems to be this ward’s “Cynthia”. A Cynthia, so-named from an old friend in a past ward, is a mover and shaker, someone who knows how to get things done to make an activity happen. One thing led to another, and I’m now a founding member of the Ascent Film Society Facebook group (named after my apartment complex) and our first viewing is this Friday. Woohoo.

After the game night, a group headed over to Seattle to a Catholic cathedral, where monks would sing Gregorian chant every Sunday night. It was open to the public, and inside were people – whoever couldn’t fit in the pews – sprawled out all over the floor, on picnic blankets and makeshift pillows. A very neat experience.

We got back, then had game night part 2. Finally got back to bed by 1:30am. Which wasn’t ideal, since I had been planning my own first activity, a nearby hike to Wallace Falls. Got a couple members to go with, who were childhood best friends, which was fun. (With each other, not me, I didn’t know a soul before heading up.) And, one of them invited their family to come with, which was fun.

After the hike, we decided to continue on for an hour or so and head to Leavenworth, a fun little German town in the middle of the mountains. It’s very touristy, like a larger version of Grand Lake. All I can say is, authentic Bavarian bratwursts are unglaublich lecker.

Got back in time for the tail end of ward FHE, which was a fitness class. Not that we needed it of course. Afterwards was volleyball. Someone was playing music, out of their phone’s tiny speakers. I ended up volunteering my aux-to-RCA adapter cable and got the music playing out of the building’s sound system. And that, kids, is why you should always carry an aux-to-RCA adapter cable. Not even joking, it’s so handy. Closely followed in handiness by an HDMI cable, with whatever adapter’s necessary for plugging in your laptop.

Today I biked in, since the forecast looked pretty clear. Worked, ate dinner, browsed a bit, then realized it was 7:45pm and I still had a long bike ride ahead. You know how, when you’re a kid, you stay out way late playing games, till Mom calls you in, and then you get in and wonder how in the world you were playing in that pitch darkness? It was sort of the reverse for me. Oh man, how am I gonna bike back in this? Totally gonna get mauled by a bear. … Eh, actually it isn’t that bad, plenty of light left. … Actually, nevermind, I’m totally gonna get mauled by a bear. Or a vampire for that matter, Forks is only like four hours away. Aw man, I’m totally the guy that gets taken out in the first five minutes of every horror movie.

Well, I’m back, and the take-away is to go get a dang set of bike lights. And start adhering to the horror movie survival guide.

To sign off, your friendly neighborhood pyro wants to demonstrate why it is never ever a good idea to pour gasoline directly onto a lit fire. Stay safe, everyone. Light responsibly.