Disneyland!

Sort of... Yesterday I went to my type of Disneyland... a cute neighborhood (Queen Anne) in the States where I could get Peet's Coffee, Top Pot Doughnuts and hang out with good friends. I was so excited the night before I had trouble getting to sleep.

(I cannot stand Walt Disney's Disneyland - it should be razed and turned into a giant doughnut factory.)

I zipped down to Seattle to see friends and enjoy a beautiful summer day. And when I say zipped, I mean I zipped down to the border where traffic slammed to a stop for an hour as four thousand other day-trippers and I waited to cross into America.

Being Canada Day - imaginative title, eh? - lots of people went south to play. Canada Day is much like the U.S.'s 4th of July - a holiday spent grilling meats, lighting fireworks and getting shitty drunk in your front yard.

The weird thing is, they take the day off right there in the middle of the week. No 3-day weekend where you have a whole other day to stay drunk then another day on top of that to recover before you have to go back to work. No, you get that one day to live it up and make the most of your holiday before you call in sick to drag your ass into work the next day.

The guy behind me at the border made the most of his holiday by hosting his very own Nostril Drilling Festival. I wish I hadn't seen this but unfortunately I did, and it was a fantastic disaster.

He had no shame. He went to town on both nostrils oftentimes using both the index finger and the thumb. When I first caught sight of him in my rear view mirror I thought he was going for a quick grab and it would be over in a flash. It was amazing to see him keep going at it like a booger-loving badger. Ah-mazing.

A strange way to start the holiday, but my excitement for Peet's could not be dampened. On top of getting a delicious cup of java, I also got to see an Andrew Wyeth exhibit at the SAM, enjoyed a lovely mojito at Shmick's and later, a satisfying maple glazed old fashioned at Top Pot. Yup - Disneyland. Thank you Linda, Alan & Miriam - wonderful day!


t-bird headed south




"Likeaflex Superzoom" late 1970s
Ceramic w/ glaze, metal and leather strap
Fred Bauer, American, born 1937


bootleg phone photo of the exhibit (shhhhh)

Are We Still in California?

snow on highway 35, 2001

Woke up this morning to radio reports of road closures due to snow! And of course, now I want to drive down those roads to go see the snow.

I could totally do it, too. I have an AWD wagon O fun.

Working for Uncle Ben

My other half joined the Family Lucas this week and is a producer on an upcoming blockbuster game. All that BS at his last job was a wonderful gift. Had that not happened, he may not have thought about moving on at this time, so, thanks guys!

We took a walk around the LucasArts campus last weekend and afterwards I told David it's been really nice and to write when he could. If I worked there I don't think I'd come home very often. It's a gorgeous place. Makes EA's "campus" look like a mental asylum, which it was some days, but mostly it was fun.

Our group had BBQ's in the parking lot with lots of sidewalk chalk and bizarre drawings; found giant blanket penises on chairs, courtesy of a fellow producer with an incredible gift for fabric origami; and created the [insert name here]-cam in the hallway so we could see when a particularly annoying product guy was on his way into our department; and then my favorite bit of shenanigans...

There was one guy in marketing who made it his job to ruin every day for me, to be a total pig asshole about everything, all the time. We used to call him Fred Flinstone because not only was he just as stupid as Fred, his head was just as block-shaped. One day I came back from meetings and told everyone what a total dick he'd been to me, again.

My coworkers were (and are) a fiercely loyal group, and if you mess with one of us, you've messed with all of us. They'd become as fed up as I was at how this guy was treating me and our group's role on projects. They consoled me and I felt better for having such good people around me, then I headed home.

The next day I came in and heard a wonderful story about Fred's sudden computer trouble. Fred came in that morning and fired up his machine and instead of seeing the classic Farrah Fawcett poster on his desktop, he saw a gorgeous, sweaty gay porn model wearing only a towel - over his shoulder.

And all of his desktop files had been renamed to things like NAMBLA, men_on_men, and so on. Things that would surely disturb this block-headed, homophobic, MCP.

Confounded by the state of his computer, he called IT to "fix" it. He didn't realize all the changes were cosmetic and he may have hoped IT could find out who played the prank. While IT combed through his files to see what was accessed and how, they found a certain pornographic story that had been accessed at the same time the changes were made.

When Fred realized his dirty little secret wasn't secret anymore, he backed off on the idea of lodging a complaint. But he did come by our department on the verge of tears to demand that our programmers be punished, which of course they weren't, because all they'd done is balance out the karma a little. It was one of the best days ever.

After he left we read his story - which we'll never know if he downloaded or tried to write - and it was so bad, we cried from laughing. I mean, if he wrote it, good for him for trying, but on your WORK computer? That was our Fred. If he didn't write it, whoa. Just because it's online doesn't mean it should be downloaded.