2-28-01 ***earthquake****

Sitting at my desk today around 11 AM, I heard a large truck go by, rattling the windows. They rattled for a long time, and the sound got louder and louder until I stood up and looked around. Everyone else in the office was standing up, looking around in alarm. It was clearly not a truck, someone bolted for the door and we all followed, jamming up at the single exit door and bursting out into the short hallway leading to the street. We streamed down the stairs onto the road. In seconds, the entire block had emptied into the street. We stood with our legs wide apart for balance as the ground rocked beneath us. I kept glancing nervously at the buildings dwarfing our narrow street, wondering if the 60 year old 20 story building across the street would shake apart on top of us. I moved over to the side of the street furthest from the tall building and stopped between two parked cars. The cars swayed back and forth on their shocks in an arc of at least an inch. The ground vibrated with a soft persistent pulsing motion as time stood still. I have no idea how long we stood there. It was the kind of "earth shaking" moment that is so far out of the ordinary that one is "shaken" to the core. Sorry, I couldn't resist those. The motion subsided gradually to a gentle swaying motion like a ship at sea. I fought off a brief feeling of sea sickness as the motion subsided to nothing. We stood gaping at each other, grinning foolishly in the quiet streets. All the traffic had come to a halt, cars stopped mid turn in the intersections. After 5 minutes of calm, we trouped back in to work. My boss called out from his office that it was already on MSNBC. Somebody stayed at their desks, he hollered.

2-27-01

Skated at lunch today on the public waterfront esplanade known as Ruston Way in old town Tacoma. It was so warm out I was able to skate in my shirtsleeves. I've had a little trouble getting my rhythm going on the streets around the house and was very pleased to find it had returned. Whenever I saw a clear stretch of side walk ahead, I surged into warp speed, leaning over and propelling myself with long sweeping strides, my arms swinging in front of me with that peculiar manner rollerbladers have when they are in a zone. It puts a smile on my face every time. Yesterday I drew for a total of around 3 hours; one hour at lunch in my car, listening to my talking book and sketching a building out the window of the parking garage, then again at night out in the garage doing a preliminary pencil sketch of my next still life set up. At work I went through a large web site, adding alt tags to all the images, header text and buttons to make the web site more accessible to people with disabilities. It was a lot of typing without the back up of spell check.

2-24-01

It's a beautiful day out today. Feels like early April. Sue and I walked the beach at the mile long Purdy spit. The warm afternoon sunlight was streaming down across the 40 mile long fetch of Puget Sound. The salt water is crystal clear as far out as you can see on the rock and gravel bottom. We are lucky to live in such beautiful country. Sue asked me why the weather has been so dry...were we having global warming or something. A cold dry spell in February is normal, but most of the winter has been this way. My cold is getting quite a bit better. I had my first uninterupted sleep last night in 5 days. Getting up to cough for an hour every night had me dragging.
      Finished projects so far this weekend:

• fixed the broken spray attachment to the kitchen faucet
• built a framework out of one and one quarter inch steel plumbing pipe to replace the broken metal foot to my universal gym
• mounted a pull up bar to one and a half inch angle iron coming down from the ceiling in the garage

2-23-01

Did my usual walk around the hills of Tacoma on my lunch break today. Down by the 11th street bridge I stopped and gawked up at one of the crusty old 15 story buildings. They're grand old structures. Many of them have charming stone work, especially up near the roof. Some have brickwork or cracks running up the sides. The climber in me likes to speculate about stepping up them like a cat burglar. As I stood staring up the side of the building with the lunchtime traffic roaring by in a steady stream, I felt the breeze in my hair and became aware of an odd sensation...what could it be? Was I hungry? no, didn't feel like that; was I getting dizzy...no not that. What was it? I pondered for a while and realized that I was becoming overrun by a feeling of well being. I was simply glad to be alive. Spring is in the air, even though it snowed last week. I've escaped the evil swing shift printing business. I'm working dayshift in a high tech job where my bosses actually seem to like the work that I do. Everyone in the family is reasonable healthy for a change. We might even take a Sunday drive to see a lighthouse or something. I'd like to get out of the house for a day.

2-22-01

Nothing much new to report tonight. Work has been going pretty well. I've been writing a lot of html and recently have spent a couple days perusing large projects making bug logs in a database. Later the bug log will be assigned to the appropriate people for fixing. On my way home from work, I stopped in to see my old friends at my last job, J & D Printing. They just got in a 5 color GTOVP. G. had just finished running the first job on it when I strolled in. It brought back memories of my glory days in Seattle, running the 4 color and working 3 twelves. I miss printing once in a while...but not enough to want to go back. It's reassuring to know that I have a skill to fall back on if the bottom falls out of the internet again. There was still light in the sky when I got out at 6pm today. It's exciting to see the days getting longer. I am looking forward to taking my new rope up to the cliffs this spring.

2-18-01

"Why should I stay around this boring house if you're just going to be out there painting all day?" Sue fumed.

"You were gone most of the day yesterday at the mall, and now you're leaving again," I said.

"I'm trying to find something for Lisa's birthday", she said righteously. Lisa, standing nearby nodded in agreement.

"Oh never mind", I said, "I just had this silly dream that my family would be around on the weekend, I don't see all that much of you guys during the week."

The're gone now, and I came in to take a break from my painting. I have my keyboard up on a tall table so I can type standing up. I need to get a softer pillow for my easel stool. I seem to spend far too much time sitting down in my new lifestyle. We could have gone cross country skiing, but we can't afford new skis and boots for Clint and Lisa and Sue has been limping around with a sprained back. As I paint, I'm listening to a talking book by W. Somerset Maugham called "The Moon and Sixpence". It is based on the life of Paul Gauguin the painter, and tells the story of a stockbroker who abandons his wife and family to paint. Several years ago, after being laid off from my big bucks printing job in Seattle, I decided to paint for a living, except I chose to stay with my family. I had a couple months of ready cash saved up from overtime and began painting full time. After a month, I was painting at the professional level and began to build up a series of very sellable landscapes just as it started to rain in late November. I arranged a show at a good gallery during their next available month, which was in March. Meanwhile, the money ran out and I fell back into printing to make ends meet. I figured I could work swing and paint in the mornings. But the easy money and the long hours sucked me in and I began sleeping late in the morning. I was once again a weekend painter.
     Now, I take a much more casual approach to painting. I love my family and all the interesting things we do together like rockclimbing and backcountry skiing. Watching my children grow is enjoyable in a way that defies words. But painting does grab hold of one. Making marks on the cave walls has always been important to certain members of our species. Some of us were born to make lots of money, and some of us were born to make beautiful things, whether stories or music or pictures. We can't fight who we are, but we can, and probably should use moderation in all things. Of course, what do I know? Perhaps the only way to truly develop as an artist is to live a chaotic life. I had a good start on chaos in my teens, but my solid grounding in common sense got the better of me. When I returned to painting after a 15 year absence, my family was surprised. I had waited so long to show any talent, my 99 year old grandma's cataracts prevented her from seeing my work, she could only hear about how good I was getting. She made me promise shortly before she died that I would never stop painting. I still have my dream of painting in my spare time, and slowly building up my skill to the point where, perhaps five or ten years down the road, I can live on it. It's not beyond the realm of possibilities.

2-17-01

Everyone is gone except Birdy. He has been exiled to the back bedroom for obnoxious screaming and doesn't count. I have a new Microsoft keyboard hooked up to this laptop. It is the latest version with 19 extra (and silly) buttons across the top. I bought it because it has a usb input which lets me plug my touchy Kensington Expert mouse into the ps2 port. This keyboard has a very subtle spring or softness to the keys that makes it a pleasure to type on. It snowed 4 inches 2 nights ago. These photos are of our cars, parked at the top of our driveway on the culdesac and of a couple of the neighbors houses. Our house is not photogenic, being down a long driveway surrounded by the tall fir trees you can see in the pictures. Both the kids and Sues schools were canceled giving them a 4 day weekend.I drove to work, past about 8 cars in the ditch along the way. People who don't ski never seem to learn the simple secret to driving in the snow: drive like a near sighted old lady. Here are a few basic rules that have kept me out of the ditch in over 23 years of skiing and commuting in black ice conditions:

• Triple the normal stopping distance
• Test your braking traction on a flat, straight empty road at low speed, and drive accordingly.
• Maintain your control going down hills by going half the normal speed limit.
• If the hill has a corner, slow to a crawl so you can avoid hitting the cars in the ditch.
• On the freeway, don't go above 50 and stay in the right lane, let the idiots with the 4 wheel drive take the left lane, and don't forget to wave as you pass them in the ditch later.

I am starting to get a little better cash flow. My paychecks have been getting bigger due to the overtime from some of the rush projects I've been working on. In about a year I figure we may recover from the year I spent in college...that is, we will have all our Visa bills paid off again and have a reserve saved up for emergencies. I think I can wrap up my still life painting this weekend. I can't wait to start the next one.

2-13-01

Walking back from the parking garage at lunch today I saw a large pile of old rags heaped up in the doorway of the sleazy bar next door to our office. Sticking out from the bottom of the pile was an old pair of beat up work boots. They twitched suddenly and I realized with a shock that a homeless person was trying to sleep amidst all the honking horns, wailing sirens and jackhammers. He or she had pulled the largest rag up over his head and tugged at it ineffectually as if to shut out the noise of traffic and my passing footsteps. I wondered about trying to give him some money. But my overdrawn bank account, and the empty wine bottles argued against it. I asked about him in the office and wasn't surprised to hear that the "vagrants" are a periodic problem. Our parking garage is probably a prime sleeping area with it's wide open, unguarded entrance and 24 hour lighting. The doors to the roof are stuck open, as are several service rooms in the top floors that are inaccessible to the casual prowling patrol car. To an observant stroller there appear to be hundreds of dry, sheltered sleeping areas downtown, often strewn with the debris of homeless persons nests.
      Several lifetimes ago I was hitchhiking around the country along with several million other confused, long haired, unwashed hippies. Each evening we would all migrate toward the dry spots, usually under bridges or freeways, if not in abandoned buildings. It was a time for growing, and discovering some elemental truths about idealism and its basis in fact and fiction. Lisa seems much better. She got her stitches out this morning and had her teeth fine tuned by our real dentist, back from his trip. Sue has taken the brunt of this latest disaster, as she does with most things involving the children. Her school district job, with its paid family and sick leave, not to mention her seniority and the union, is a godsend. I have no idea how single parents can manage career and family. It's hard enough with two parents.

We have been doing some amazing work in my web design job. Over about 3 working days, we have built an entire medium sized web site, almost from scratch, that works in all the browsers, both the IBM platform and the Mac, and even both browsers on the Mac. We have 3 JavaScript wizards who methodically tackle one problem at a time until there are no more problems. In the beginning of this rush job, I had serious doubts that it would ever work. But they pulled a rabbit out of the hat every time. Their latest bit of cunning was dynamically generating a custom linked .css file if a Mac user logs on with Netscape. I had written the .css file custom tailored to IBM font display. Macs, for reasons that are nebulous at best, display 8 and 9 point fonts (only in Netscape) too small to be readable. On the IBM platform, these font sizes are a tolerable compromise. I had to write a .css file aimed specifically at the Mac/Netscape platform. I made my smallest font 10 points and went up from there to get the same look as 8 point and up on the IBM. The script looks at the browser and machine accessing the page, and depending on who you arrive as, links a different .css file.

2-10-01

My daughter had an accident yesterday morning. She fainted while pouring milk into her cereal at the kitchen sink and hit her face on the counter on her way down. It's almost too painful to write about other than the superficial details. We have become resigned to the likelyhood that Clint will have an accident jumping his bicycle in cement skate parks. But how could we have prepared for our healthy 12 year old daughter dropping at the breakfast table. She doesn't remember it, and Clint, the only one in the room, was across the table with his face in his own cereal. He looked up as she walked in, but couldn't tell us much, other than that she looked tired standing at the counter. He looked down to take a bite of cereal, looked up again and she was dropping to the floor, twisting slightly as she fell. The thump and the following screams woke me up and brought us both running to the kitchen where I found her clutching a handfull of bloody paper towels to her mouth. The dentist and the oral surgeon did some excellent reconstructive work. But this is a very image conscious teenager and I am afraid we will be living with the aftershocks for some time to come.
     The doctor was very thorough at her examination today, even giving her an EKG. She said fainting is surprising common amongst young teenage girls. It even has a name, which I've forgotten, and is caused by dehydration and less than optimal nutrition. But bad eating habits aside, this is a very active teenager who plays co-ed soccer and cross county skis with a carefree grace. She runs the tread mill for entertainment, and laughs at me doing my 50 sit ups a day while she does 200. The doctor said there appears to be nothing wrong, but if it happens again to bring her in for further testing. It's quite a shock. You like to think your kids are safe when they're at home...that all the dangers are outside in the streets, or in the rough neighborhoods at night, or in the adrenaline sports like climbing or skiing or bmx jumping. Only old people get hurt at home you think, getting out of the tub and breaking their hips. Think again.

     I worked late last night until almost 11:30. We have a huge remake of a web site due on Monday. It was kind of fun, taking the customers print concepts and finding ways to make it pretty in html. I created a style sheet first, so we could easily change the appearance of the entire site if the customer didn't like my font choices. After that I used the one test page he had approved, converted it from the temporary old style local font tags to the linked style sheet. Then I used that page as a template to make 7 more pages, grabbing images and content from our resources files, word documents and the existing site. I'll have to say it looked pretty good. It's not art, but it can still be a neat job, and it's day shift.
     After my morning bike ride, I spent most of the day taking the instrument cluster out of my 82 toyota. Some of the lights had gone out and the only way to replace them was to start unscrewing things until I could get at the back of the cluster. I got halfway though the job last weekend and ran out of time. When I went by Toyota to get a couple small parts and some friendly advice, I asked what they would charge. $120 dollars they said...an hour and a half of labor. It took me about 10 hours of laying on my back in the tiny cramped space by the foot pedals, peering up into the mass of wires and steering column supports. I almost had to remove the entire steering wheel. But when I finally pulled that instrument cluster out of the dash free and clear, I had a grin from ear to ear. My still life is almost done. Another 8 hours or so ought to finish it.

2-8-01

My still life out in the garage is finally coming together. My paintings always seem to go through the same stages. I enjoy the initial drawing in black and white. Then when I am happy with the drawing and have the values close, I start throwing color at it. Especially with still lifes, I tend to make all the wrong choices in local colors and wind up walking away from it for a few days for fear of tearing it up. It stands out there on the easel, lonely, beckoning to me like a horse that accidentally threw me out of the saddle...come over here, I'm not so bad, we could do beautiful things together. Until I decide, well, maybe a half an hour before bed wouldn't hurt...it's a lost cause anyway. And slowly, over a few days, I begin to find some definition in the shadows, drop some highlights in just the right places and find a hue that works in the midtones. And one morning, I walk out there to use the weight machine and I see a nice painting on the easel. It's a strange game, but one I love deeply.

2-6-01

Life can sure be a bitch. I am getting in trouble every other day for being too slow. As we say in printing, the honeymoon is over. In my last career, I could cut corners with the quality of my printing in order to speed up. Any pressman can get his quality up around the 90% level. I would frequently try to get up to 100%. My bosses (and our customers) alternated between loving me for my careful eye, and despairing over the time it took. Usually I was able to strike a balance between production and quality. After a few months, I could distinguish between the jobs that needed to be done well and the ones that needed to be done quickly.
     In my new job as a web designer, I was hired primarily to work on one customer. The person who hired me has gotten extremely fast at working on this customers projects. Now that I am working on large pieces of these projects, the customer wonders why things are taking so long. He doesn't care whether there is a new guy on the job, still struggling up the learning curve, he just wants it done fast and accurately. My boss also knows exactly how long it would take him to do the work. He takes the heat from the customer and naturally some of it spills over on me.
     When things heated up in printing, I had the experience to cut some corners and speed up on demand. But with complex html, specifically nested framesets nested within other nested framesets calling and switching each other out in various combinations, combined with the file management structure that keeps it all logical, my fragile new found confidence crumples under the stress and I find myself staring at a computer that might as well be a brick wall. Thankfully these moments are brief, but they leave me wondering whether there is room in this industry for a mind like mine. I am a hands on learner, and this stuff is so complex, it can only be learned by doing. I can see the progress I'm making, but the customer only sees that his jobs are taking twice as long as they used to. My dreams of getting into an industry where my creative mind would be an asset looks like so much smoke in the wind. Hmmmm...it looks like I am taking my job home with me. What's an online journal without a little despair?

2-3-01

Bought a new climbing rope at REI today. I've had around 10 ropes since I began climbing in 1977. This one is a 60 meter by 10.5 mm made by New England Ropes. When I first walked in I wondered around the store for a while, lost in memories. I've shopped at REI since 1968 when they had one little store on Pine Street in downtown Seattle. Dad took me up there to get some downhill ski boots. 10 years ago they began a large expansion across the country and now have stores in most of the states. Sue and I made many expensive trips there as we began our long exploration of the outdoors. Today she and Lisa rode up in the car, but had me drop them at the Sea-Tac mall across the street. When I finally decided to get the rope and leave, the only climbing clerk was waiting on a beginner who wanted to try every harness on the shelf and half the rock shoes. I hung around for 15 minutes before wandering upstairs where I could read while I waited. From the balcony I watched him patiently strap her into the harnesses, lead her over to the rope hanging from the ceiling and let her hang while she tested the comfort factor.
     As I watched I thought back to the first apartment Sue and I shared in '79. I had a pull up bar hung from a high beam in the ceiling over the foot of our bed from which I would do pull ups every day to stay strong for climbing. Sue brought a new harness home from REI and tried it out by tying a length of rope from the new harness to the pull up bar. It was the Whillans brand which lets you step out while still tied in. She liked the feel of it, but had to get out in a hurry to answer the phone and left it hanging at the end of the rope. That evening a couple of our friends came over and saw the harness hanging from the rope over the end of the bed. We all had a good laugh, but I don't think they ever really believed our story about checking out the new harness. But back to REI; looking over the balcony after twenty minutes in the book section, I could see the beginner was still prancing around in her socks with the bemused clerk standing nearby, chatting with her GI husband. It began to look like a bad situation. I walked down and saw the store manager working the registers. Matt is an old acquaintance of mine from the late 70's when we would see one another every weekend at the cliffs in Leavenworth. He was several years ahead of me in skill and has remained so to this day. Probably the only reason he ever noticed me was because Sue was always with me. These days many women climb, but back then, it was a man's world. I walked over to Matt, and without acknowledging that I recognized him, asked if he had any cheap ropes. From the way he immediately sized up the situation with the beginner, it's clear why he's now the manager. He found the rope I was looking for, even knocking the price down because the cheaper 50 meter rope I really wanted was out of stock. Another clerk rang me up, but he walked over as I was leaving, clearly remembering me and asked if I planned to do much climbing this year.
     I got pretty hungry on the trip back, a good sign. I've realized that feeling hungry is not an indicator to eat. Rather, it is a sign my stomach is empty and my system is falling back on reserves of fat, just what I need. I am learning to enjoy the hunger, or as the athletes say, embrace your pain, become one with the hunger, etcetera. I am down 8 pounds and falling.
     My Palm Pilot PDA web site is pretty well wrapped up for a while. This week I've been working on a nice variety of projects. I mastered Dreamweaver's layer menus with the help of one of our patient programmers. Toward the end of the week 4 of us were working out the navigation system on the new web site for one of our biggest clients. Our client has an excellent graphic design firm in charge of their business identity. Incidentally, I used to do press checks for this design firm in my last job as a press operator. Now they are extending their ideas to the internet. In Flash, we truly can come close to the control of print, but in html it is much more difficult. We can make it work in IE5 at 1024x768 but everything else requires the expertise of our programmers. I watched in amazement as they tweaked the code over several days until the link layers were displaying almost perfectly in both browsers at all resolutions and even on the Mac.

Go to last month