Hither and Yon

Seems like every week these days I’m in a new place.

Kirkland
San Jose
Davis
Kirkland
Newport Coast
Alpine
Sunnyvale
Kirkland

Skydiving, Stargazing, and Pretzels

For the first time since injuring my knee, I went out skydiving. Took some friends along and had a grand old time (they did tandem while I did a “recurrence jump” with an instructor, since it had been so long.) There were high winds and I didn’t manage to complete my landing turn, so I came down crosswind, moving across the ground at a good clip; but my vertical speed was great, so I just skidded into the landing.

We’d heard there was gonna be a meteor shower, so headed way out of town away from the light pollution and chilled in a truck bed till like 3am. Didn’t see anything, but good times were had.

A friend has pretty loaded parents so when their folks were out of town we went to their house to make pretzels and play VR.

The Bicycle Capital of America

Davis sure does live up to its name. One of my favorite parts of the trip was seeing just how much of Davis we could get to on two wheels. The main theme of the trip though was the dang good food. Hayden has a knack for sniffing out lovely places to eat.

While we were in San Jose we caught a hockey game. It came down to the wire and the local team lost in a shootout, boohoo.

Those crêpes tho…

Friendsgiving

Popped back to Kirkland long enough to have some long-time friends over for Friendsgiving. Had a bit of a scare getting meat for the thing since I put it off till the day of and Whole Foods was dealing with the labor shortage by shutting down their meat deli. But I discovered that Costco of all places has great meat selections, so everything worked out great.

Off to the Beach

Thanksgiving in California was a total hoot. Highlights for me were shuffleboard, the mall, beaches, Disneyland (!!), and Thanksgiving-dinner-that-wasn’t-on-Thanksgiving.

Back at the Ranch

Originally I was going to spend the entire winter in Utah, but then the Seattle ward turned out to be really fun, and I also got to expense a trip back by taking a detour through Sunnyvale for a couple of back-to-back work summits. Also got to go see a performance of Messiah in Salt Lake, and binge-watch Arcane on Netflix with Mattie.

Also got to go on a really fun date to the Springville Art Museum. That building is awesome.

When I was in Provo, my roommates had this game they were working on which was like a super-charged amalgamation of Werewolf, Mafia, and Bang. It was just a prototype, and I got a version of it to play in Seattle. Well this year they finally knuckled down and finished it. I met up with them and introduced them to some old Seattle friends, where we played a round or three. Good times.

Home stretch

Having two back-to-back summits in one week was kinda fun, felt like a real vacation from all my usual meetings. On the way back from there to Kirkland, a homeless man made some people in SeaTac nervous, so they locked down baggage claim and directed everyone to wait outside, in the balmy Seattle winter air. They eventually cleared other areas of the airport so they could let us in while we waited for the dogs to sniff all the baggage claim carousels.

For the last several months I have had four sound bars in my place.

The Vizio sound bar that I’d picked up when I first moved here five-ish years ago. It had been expressing some mild glitches, turning off at random times. Also it had always struggled with dialogue sounding muffled.
The updated version of that soundbar. Figured that in the intervening time, the engineers would have fixed the dialogue issues. No such luck, just as muffled.
The slightly-more-expensive Samsung bar, which also has dialogue issues, and on top of that, doesn’t support AUX input.
The slightly-more-expensive-than-that JBL bar, which seems to do the trick. However, if the input signal ever gets really quiet, when it picks up again there’s a half-second delay before sound actually starts coming out of the unit, which is really annoying. You just can’t win.

The two new-but-discarded soundbars have been sitting on my guest bed for a while just waiting for me to pack them back up. Took the time to do that on Saturday, being very careful to put everything back in its various sleeves. I was out of packing tape so I picked some up on the way to Costco so I could tape it all closed. Got to the counter and the lady working the desk immediately proceeded to undo all my hard work to make sure I wasn’t scamming them. Can’t blame them I suppose.

That evening I went on a date to a string quartet that performed a bunch of Disney songs, and had a blast. Darted from the end of that date to the tail end of a friend’s Ugly Christmas Sweater party, donning the sweater I had secreted in my trunk before heading out for the date.

On Sunday I decided to grill some Costco ribeye. Did a bang-up job. Then drove to a Seattle stake musical production where a couple friends were performing, and darted from there to mid-way through a Harry Potter movie night (Half Blood Prince). The dialogue in that movie was top notch, don’t think I’ve ever re-watched it.