Amy singing “At Last” at a chorus banquet, recorded by iPhone. Picture by a chorus mom via Amy’s friend Annick.
Press play to listen.
[Edit 05:35 UTC to correct photo origin]
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About an hour ago, my mom left for the airport after a short visit. It was an eventful visit though. After months of research, she made the final decision on where she will live when she moves out here, and put down all the necessary initial deposits and such. So it is all set! Her new place is a 16 minute drive from our place. By comparison, it is a 37 hour drive to her current location… So this is MUCH closer! The exact date she will be moving from Ohio to Washington State is not yet set, it is dependent on exactly when the sale of her house closes, moving company availability, etc. But the expectation is that it will be before the end of February. So very close now… Just a few weeks. It will be good to have her here full time. I missed noting the anniversary the last couple of years, but as of the time this posts (10:11 UTC) it will have been exactly 7 years* since I started with my current employer. There have been ups and downs during those years, but for the most part it has been a good experience. It is hard to believe it has been that long though. * I started at 17:30 UTC on Jan 11 2006, but since years are not an even number of days, the time of the anniversary shifts every year.
On Saturday, we took a little trip into the mountains. (Photo above by Amy.)
We went so we could take Alex to ride on the Santa Express, run by the Mt. Rainier Scenic Railroad.
With his iPhone in one hand, and Mommy in the other, Alex was ready to go!
Amy was ready too!
They had these cool antique cars.
But Brandy wanted to sit in some less cool cars because the seats were more comfortable. Alex was not impressed. OK, maybe that was me that was not impressed. I was bummed that the car we were in was less cool than the others, plus the windows were much dirtier making it basically impossible to take pictures out the window.
But that didn’t last all that long, because Amy discovered a place between the cars with the top half of a door open, so you could actually just essentially be outside with no window in the way. That was MUCH better.
There were lots of views like this.
Of course Amy took lots of pictures.
At this point, Alex had not yet been convinced to leave his seat. He just wanted to sit and watch Thomas the Tank Engine on his phone. But he was ON A TRAIN! So this would just not do.
So I insisted, and took Alex to the place he could look out. He was just tall enough to look out standing tiptoe. He barely left that spot again for the rest of the train ride.
There were of course more pretty views.
And some horsing around.
Much of the ride looked like this. With Alex and Amy together, checking out the views.
They really do have lots of fun together.
Then, as it was starting to get dark, the train made the first of several stops. The crew was investigating a problem. As we would soon find out, the generator that served the front half of the train was acting up…
But there were still some good views. This is looking back toward the steam engine that was pushing the train.
As it got darker, photography out the window becomes more impressionist.
But Alex maintained his vigil.
Then, suddenly, there was snow! And then, and then… it was time for… SANTA! Now, I was an idiot. Looking at the screen on my camera it seemed like it was just too dark, and the movie was going to come out without you being able to see anything. Now, obviously, it turns out you could see things just fine. But I panicked and cut the movie short and switched to stills with a flash. The video and stills from the video were much better than what I took after. And you could of course see how the whole thing played out. But I missed the second half because I stopped the video short. I missed the good part… In the next few seconds, Alex actually did manage to have a short conversation with Santa, and got his courage up, and told Santa he liked trains. This was a big deal for him. He’d been talking about talking to Santa for weeks, and had chickened out several times. This time he managed it. Of course, I cut the video off too soon. (And frankly, I missed some of the actual event myself as I was fiddling with the camera instead of paying attention.) Sigh! I can’t tell you just how annoyed I am at myself… Anyway, back to the stills…
When he first sat down Alex was not too sure of this whole thing, and really just wanted to watch his show on his phone. But then he turned up, he smiled, he almost laughed… you could see that part on the video.
He was actually getting almost comfortable as Santa asked him about what he liked and what he wanted for Christmas.
Alex accepted a candy cane from Santa, but told Santa he didn’t want a sticker.
Then it was right back to Alex’s favorite spot!
Of course, they never had fixed that generator. The last three cars on the train were in complete darkness, and with no heat. Oops. Of course, Alex and I were just hanging out between the cars without a window between us and the outside world anyway, so it didn’t make much of a difference to us. But it probably did to some of the other folk…
Then the train pulled back into the station…
And it was time to disembark…
With a final look back at our steam engine, it was time to go home. Another big day for Alex. He was asleep long before we made it home. It was a good day. And he made sure Santa knew he wanted trains for Christmas. Which is very important. Cause otherwise how would Santa know?
The dots are individual readings taken approximately daily (with some gaps) showing the percentage of the previous 7 days I spent sleeping. The red line is a smoothed trend of those first data points. I said a few times that I did the election stuff mostly in “time I otherwise would have been sleeping”. You can see that quite clearly here. Although the red line, the average of the average as it were, only dipped to about 21.3% (about 5 hours and 7 minutes per night), the lowest individual reading was on October 15th. On that day, I’d only slept 17.5% of the previous 7 days… or an average of 4 hours and 12 minutes per night. The reality was that although I slept a decent bit more than that on the weekend, but a lot less than that during the week. It was brutal for a little while there. I just couldn’t sustain the not sleeping. I was starting to be less functional and less efficient during the time I was awake, both on the election stuff and at work. Even worse, I was starting to have to fight to not fall asleep on my commute back and forth from work, which was downright dangerous. So that’s why as we got to the last week and a half before the election, I started taking some time off from work. First some half days, then actually fully taking off the few days right around the election. Much better to actually take the time off than try to sustain doing everything with so little sleep. That just wasn’t working. Once I made that change, my sleep started to recover. Once the election was actually over, it recovered dramatically. The trend lines seems to have peaked now, so I thought it was a good time to post. At the beginning of December, I actually got to the point where there was a 7 day period where I spent 31.6% of my time sleeping (about 7 hours 36 minutes per night average). That is the best I’d done in well over a year. It still isn’t the over 8 hours I’d really like to see, but I just don’t think that is going to happen again any time soon. In any case, I just thought it was remarkable how clear an impact my election activities had. I really was doing it in “time I otherwise would have been sleeping”.
Last Tuesday, there was a scheduling issue in the morning, and my only option to get to a morning doctor appointment on time was to take Alex with me instead of taking him to school. So we had a fun day…
He got a lollipop at the Doctor’s office. (Oh yeah, routine checkup, nothing exciting.)
Then he went to work with me, which was very exciting. He got an SES sticker.
He got a snack and got to look out the windows from the ninth floor at the traffic. This was fun and he spent quite a few minutes just looking out the window. One of the things he saw was the “Purple Train“. He’s been asking to come ride the Purple Train since he first saw it months ago on a previous visit to the city. Once he saw the train, he was ready to go, and specifically wanted to go ride the train as soon as possible. He had to wait through a couple hours of me working first though. Including going with me to a meeting with some coworkers. He was very good, sitting in the corner for most of the meeting playing with Lego. I had told him that when the meeting was over we could leave and go ride the train. So as the meeting was breaking up, he makes a big gesture to all the people at the meeting and says “Me go ride purple train. You friends come ride purple train too?” My colleagues at the meeting politely declined his offer. But he thought it was important to invite them.
The streetcar actually comes in several colors. The green train came first, but Alex didn’t want to ride the green train, so we waited another 15 minutes or so for the purple train.
It was very exciting. We rode from one end of the line to the other. Then rather than just ride back on the same train, Alex wanted to get off. He wanted to wait to ride the green train back. But it was a bit chilly, and he was getting cold, so he settled for the red train. Half way through the ride back, we needed to stop for a potty break, so we ended up catching the green train for the last bit anyway. So three colors! When we got back, he pointed out that the Monorail was right there too, and that we really should ride on that too. So after a quick stop for another snack, we got onboard the Monorail and headed to Seattle Center. Once there, instead of just getting right back on to head back, we decided to wander a little first. An older man with a long Santa beard heard me talking to Alex about the train, and came over and mentioned that there was a model train exhibit right now in the Armory… about 100 feet from where we were standing. So…
Alex was enthralled. He stood and watched the trains. And watched the trains. And watched the trains. And he watched and watched… And then he realized that he could follow the trains! So he followed the trains around and around and around…
Until the man running the trains asked Alex if he wanted to come DRIVE one of the trains. Alex was a little unsure at first, but then when he realized what was going on, he bravely got up and listened carefully to the instructions.
And then he drove a train!! Alex got to drive for several minutes. It was very exciting. After we were done, we rode the monorail back to the other end, and were going to head back to my office to get in my car and drive home, but Alex begged for one more ride on the purple train. So we waited for it (in the rain) and took one more ride. Except it was the green train. It was a dark now though, and so a bit less to see. And Alex was getting tired.
Then one time when the train stopped Alex lost his balance and bumped his face on the chair in front of us. He wasn’t happy about that.
After a few more minutes, as the train was gliding along, Alex put his head down and fell asleep. It was a good day.
As of the time this is scheduled to post… October 20th at 08:18 UTC (1:18 AM Pacific, 4:18 AM Eastern)… Amy will be exactly seventeen years old according to my calculations. Happy Birthday Amy!!!!! As of when this posts at 19:17 UTC (12:17 PM Pacific, 3:17 PM Eastern) I will be exactly 41 years old. Woo!? Now, nominally my birthday is the 16th, not the 15th, but with properly taking into account leap days and the exact proper length of a year, etc, this is where it ends up. So I get to celebrate a day earlier than folks would perhaps normally think. Exciting, huh? |
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