Poem of the Day

Motion came silently
Behind my back
And as I turned to her,
She was music.

She told me:
“Music is the better part of a simple atom
To bridge chaos into a symphony.”

Music gave the star its twinkle
And she gave me my first smile.
Creation stands in honor to her melody.

Music told me she is the glue of happiness
And she is the mind
Behind particles in motion.

She fell like raindrops on my ears,
On the east side of an early morning
And on the west side of my private moon.

Her aroma keeps my heart alive
Like flowers in heaven
And the orchestra of a single rose
In early autumn.
                      (Unknown)


From Ned, of Bolder Won fame.

Comics

I don't know why, but several of the comics in the Sunday funnies got a laugh out of me this morning. Pearls Before Swine, Zits, Doonesbury and Dilbert all hit my funny bone.

Wedding Bells

Went to a wedding last evening. It was held on the umpteeth floor of a high-rise in downtown Portland. Tremendous view of downtown and Mt. Hood. Mt. Hood was looking a little brown for once. You can just make it out behind the tree covered hill on the horizon. I think I spent a good half hour just enjoying the view.

It was a small party. The rites were officiated by a diminutive young woman dressed in black. Later I found out she was a judge. Maybe she wasn't so young after all. Upon completion of the vows the groom took a glass wrapped in a white cloth, placed it on the floor and stomped on it, whereupon the happy couple cried  "Mazel Tov". Being as this seemed like something that you would see at a Jewish wedding, I wondered if anyone here was Jewish, but no, they just thought it was a cool thing to do. Well, Mazel Tov to you, too!

Not a cello, and not a cellist.

Our lady pedicab driver was wearing boots. 

The bride and groom are about my age (old), however they have known each other forever. They were neighbors in Pennsylvania when they were children. They grew up, led their separate lives and somehow reconnected just recently.

We had a guy there playing an instrument that at first glance I assumed to be a cello, but it's not. It's a viol. I had never heard of, much less seen one before. It has seven strings (a cello has four), frets, and most importantly, the bow is held underhanded instead of overhanded.

Happy couple being pursued by the paparazzi.

After cake and champagne we caught a pedicab over to Paley's Place for dinner. Actually, it was a small fleet of pedicabs and they had been arranged before hand. It got a little exciting when the streetcar came up behind us as the cabbies were hauling us up grapevine hill. Fortunately there was a big driveway into a parking lot so they were able to pull over before we were crushed by the wave of progress.


The groom is an artist, a painter, from Marin County, California (just North of San Francisco). The bride is a big-wig in the medical profession, Director of West Coast gas operations or some such. I don't know where they are planning on living, but they are adults, I'm sure they'll figure it out.

Airline Tickets

My wife is usually the one who buys the airline tickets around here. Not too surprising since she does most of the traveling, but earlier this year she had to go someplace and it was left to me to arrange air transport for younger son's sojourn to Norway. Anne had started negotiations with a travel agent, but after I talked to this agent and reiterated that we needed a flight to Bergen, not Oslo, and she sent me a second itinerary that still went to Oslo, I said enough of this and pulled up Expedia on my computer, and that's when it got interesting.

John (aka younger son) wants to stop off in Washington DC to visit some friends. Since Washington is approximately between here and Bergen this seemed like a reasonable request. I mean, it may not be directly  on the great circle route from Portland to Bergen, but it's not like it's in the completely wrong direction, like Hawaii would be, either.

One thing I have learned about airlines in my many years is that one way tickets cost just as much as a round trip ticket, or at least they used to. Things change so much and so fast it's hard to tell whether the knowledge you have is "hard won wisdom" or obsolete as yesterday's news. Anyway, "round trip tickets" is  what I was thinking, so I figure I'll book him a round-trip ticket from PDX to Washington DC, and a second round trip from Washington to Bergen. Prices look reasonable: less than two grand all told. There is a bit of a layover in DC on the way back (like 18 hours), but hey, it works and it's cheap enough, and maybe his friends can entertain him during the eternal layover, so I buy the tickets.

Now we hear that Grandpa and Grandma are coming to visit. They are only going to be here for a few days. John's return flight will be happening at the same time, so his extended layover in DC is going to cut into the time he would get to spend with the grandparents. This isn't good, so I attempt to rectify the situation.

First off I call Expedia to try and get the last leg of his flight changed from DC to PDX. I call, they tell me to leave my number and they will call me back. 30 minutes later the return call comes in, but the battery in my cordless phone is dead so I miss the call, so I call again. More of the same, but I eventually get connected. I spend what seems like an eternity on the phone with the agent. Eventually she figures out how much it will cost to change the ticket. Are you ready for this? $4200. That's more than twice as much as the original ticket. Thank you, but no. John will just have to suffer through the layover in DC.

OK, that didn't work, but how about if I just buy him a one way ticket from Toronto to PDX? Just forget about flying to DC and all that. So I check Expedia and it looks like such a ticket will only cost $350. Shoot, that's almost affordable, and it would get him home 24 hours earlier. I discuss my findings with my wife and she agrees, so I proceed to buy the ticket. Except. I made a boo-boo. I asked for a flight date in November instead of December. When I put the correct date in the price jumps to $500. Grrrr. Do we still want to do this? Well, we don't see the grandparents very often, so yes, we'll bite the bullet and spend the extra $150.

I log on to Expedia, select the flight we want, double check the date and time, enter all my credit card info, check all the check boxes, go back and fix the places I missed, and press the go button. Bzzzzzt! Wrong! Error! Try again later. Bah. Go away, come back the next day, go through the whole rigamarole again and get the same result: no can do. Well, this isn't good.

Older son suggests Google Flights, which I have never heard of, but sure, why not? So I go through the same process with Google, same flights, same prices, an extra little hiccup because the price is in Canadian dollars because the flight originates in Canada and I am paying from America so we have to do this currency conversion thing. Go through all this and, Bzzzt! Wrong! Error! Same result as with Expedia. What's going on here?

This one stupid change to this ticket has consumed two hours of my time over a period of two days. I am now determined to get this ticket if it's the last thing I do. So I call United. I am on hold for a long time. I finally talk to an agent and I get put on hold again. It's a speaker phone so I don't have to hold it to my ear while I am waiting, but they are playing some really obnoxious ads at very high volume. I am on hold for so long the battery starts to run down, so I have to change phones. Twice. I am on hold so long I can look up the owners manual for the phone online, download it, and look up the section that tells you how to turn down the volume on the speaker phone. Amazingly I do not get cut off. Eventually the agent is able to things sorted out and I have purchased a ticket. I was on the phone for an hour.

Well, I think I bought a ticket. I was expecting an email with all the gory little details, but it hasn't shown up. I imagine this is going to require another phone call.

All this could have been avoided if I had just noticed the little checkbox on Expedia's page labeled MULTIPLE DESTINATIONS. Who'd of thunk it? Not me, evidently. Google Flights doesn't seem to support this feature either.

Update: I was able to get the flight information off of the United website using the confirmation number. Not only was I able to see it on the website, I actually got them to email a copy to me. Will wonders never cease?

MPC

I'm impressed. The machine in this video is an Akai MPC2500 Beat Production Station. Prices seem to vary from $500 to $2500.

Drawbridge Dream

Evergreen Point Bridge, Seattle Washington

I am riding in the back of a car (a taxi, perhaps?) with one other guy and two women. The guy is sitting on my left and the girls are sitting on my right. We are in the right hand lane of a heavily used multi-lane road in an urban area. The road is flat and straight. The sun is shining. Traffic slows because there is some kind of drawbridge up ahead and it is opening, or rather closing. It closes and traffic starts flowing, but then it inexplicably opens a few of inches, which causes a hiccup in traffic.

The bridge mechanism works by sliding two sections apart, nothing goes up or down. The opening in the bridge runs at a 45 degree angle across the roadway. The closer end of the slant is in our lane and it slants forward as it crosses the other three or four (or five) lanes of traffic. There is about a six inch gap between the two sections of roadway. You can see the water through the gap. There are no gates or warning signs of any kind. The bridge stops moving and people start driving across the gap.

I am sitting forward on my seat and I turn to look at the woman sitting next to the passenger side door. I want to see what she looks like. She is an attractive blond, but not beautiful. I am smiling at her, but she doesn’t return my smile. Matter of fact she looks rather cool. I am surprised. I don’t look at the other woman, who has brown hair, presumably because I can see what she looks like well enough because I am sitting next to her.

We pull into an area where there are bunch of (like a hundred) communal sinks. There is no one else there. The sinks are like counter height tables big enough for three people to wash their hands on each side. Each table has one big sink that takes up the whole table top. There is a trellis structure running the length of the table that contains the valves and faucets. It is maybe a foot or two high with a six inch gap or so underneath where the water comes out. There are some legs that hold it up off the bottom of the sink.

The faucet nozzles are hidden inside this structure. They have some kind of clamshell mechanism that allows them to open wide for spraying or close down for a stream. I reach up under the trellis and flip the two nozzles closed and that fixes the problem with the bridge.

Update September 2017 replaced missing picture with something similar.

Jolly Roger

California Bob is overhauling his espresso maker, and Michigan Mike suggested Espresso Parts dot com where I found this most excellent logo. This must be pirate week, or something.