The Spark Between

I drive from north of Bothell to south of Kirkland. It only takes 20 minutes in light traffic. Today was the worst yet at about 1 hour 30 minutes.

On Tuesday there were light flurries, which was enough to freak most Washington natives out for some reason:

That didn’t make much sense to me.  So I went to work, and again on Wednesday.

Then I woke up this morning (Thursday) to the following:

You’ll note that the truck in red is stuck.  Blocking half the exit to my parking lot.  Of course, there was only one thing to do:

Build a snowman!  And then, of course, listen for interesting sounds of stranded vehicles.  Who would have thought to catch this one so early?

That’s right.  “Neither rain, nor hail, nor sleet, nor snow…”  Not to fear, a rescue operation soon ensued, involving a special courier delivery of a spiffy set of tire chains and two grunts to shove the truck out of the rut after wrestling the chains on:

Don’t worry, he made it.  Oh, and the snowman?  He was buried by 3:30PM…

Yeah.  I think I’ll work from home today.  Did I mention that the entire King County only owns 27 snow plows and 15 dump trucks for over 2100 miles of road?  Compare that to Dane County, WI, which employs 58 plows for county and state highways alone.  Oh, and that’s not counting the “170 pieces of equipment” used by the city of Madison…

Obviously very different in terms of yearly snowfall, but still.  Can you blame me for staying home?

Well, I know I’ve done a poor job keeping folks up to date with my goings-on, as several of you had to call me in Seattle just to get me to let you know that I had arrived there.  Sorry about that… lots on my mind :)

That said, I had a pretty successful weekend.  I found an apartment up on a hill near downtown Bellevue, but yet not in the city.  Here’s a map.  Before saying any more about it, here a few pictures… (on a geeky note, I’ve been itching to try out ZenphotoPress, the plugin to integrate my new photo gallery with WordPress.  It seems to work quite slick, except that it takes you to the gallery instead of showing a lightbox.  I’ll work on that later.)

The apartment should be about 15 minutes to work with no interstates.  It’s probably not the best bargain or the newest place or in the location with the most culture in walking distance, but it should be a reasonable spot to start my career in Seattle.  I picked this place over some others I had looked at for its proximity to work without being on the campus, its proximity to Bellevue (which seems to me a little more active like Madison versus the giant suburb of Redmond), and also because it is up on a hill, which attracts me for some inexplicable reason.

I did not pick the place for its internet access, which I initially feared was a shared T1 for the entire complex, but have since come to find is actually cable-based, up to and including allowing me to use my own DOCSIS modem.  That’s reassuring, though the jury is out until I see it in person.  That cable modem might still be fed by too small of a link to the premesis.  DSL is also available if I dislike the cable internet for some reason.  This probably shouldn’t be such a concern for me, but then again, I’m a nerd and like my interwebs to be fast when I want to use them.

At any rate, I think it will be a good spot to start out at, and when I find some better options for living or even for setting up something with roommates through work or whatever down the road, it will be much easier to look into that when I’m doing the looking from the city in question, instead of from 2000 miles away :)

For good measure, here’s a few more pictures from the few days my mom and I were out in Seattle: