Sparkling Allison

Summer Events

allison — Thu, 03 May 2012 02:51:06 +0000

One of my friends said to me the other day that I “make everything in to an event”, and I think this is pretty true. Sushi in the Park and Sangria Sundowners are just every day hanging out with people that have made up names. The adoption of Chunk. Travel to various places. The beginning of Spring. Planting my garden.

Why not live life is an event?

And now that it’s May, it’s time to start prepping for summer events on our deck! I mentioned in my last post and Scott and I stopped by a full fledged plant nursery the other day to buy some new stuff for the pots on our deck. After buying plants from Lowes for the last 5 years, going to a real nursery with no time limit felt like a real treat! The selection was incredible — and I suppose I stumbled on the right area, because my basket quickly filled up with a bunch of different plants that would do well in pots. I was so excited about the plants, that I got up at 7:30am on Sunday and promptly went out on the deck to plant them. Here’s how it turned out.

Our man Clive has some new digs:

I also recently ordered and received some outdoor stemless wine glasses from Sur La Table, which will be great for lounging on our deck. We had two glasses break last year, which I’d like to avoid this season. I fear glass falling off our 10th floor deck and shattering on the ground too. This did not happen last year, but still! These plastic glasses will be great. I can’t wait to break them in with an “opening day” for our deck. Maybe in late May, depending on the weather!

“MINI” Road Trip

allison — Tue, 01 May 2012 02:49:45 +0000

Chunk arrived last week!! We’ve pretty much been driving around town since to “break it in”. The dealership told us to take it easy on Chunk for the first 1,200 miles or so which means no cruise control and no RPMs over 4K, which is very hard to do given Chunk’s who has a turbo, sport engine.

Obligatory photo of us standing next to the car at the dealership:

I was pretty tired and ready to go when this photo was taken. The entire experience at the dealership (finalizing the loan, going over the warranties and then getting a very full tour of the car itself) took 2.5 hours.

To log some miles, we took Chunk on a mini road trip (get it?!) this weekend to La Conner / Anacortes and the Tulip Festival. The Tulip festival is kind of a trip… I forgot how busy it gets. There was a ton of traffic, and people all over the place. The photos you see of the Tulip Festival are deceiving… Since nobody is allowed to walk in the middle of the fields, it’s fairly easy to capture photos with nobody in them. So, you see photos like this:

When actually it’s more like this:

We had fun, nonetheless, just driving up to and around the area. After visiting the tulip fields, we stopped at a nursery to pick up some plants for the pots on our deck and then got lunch in La Conner. To top it off, we went to Target when we got back to Seattle. (You have to remember that all of this is very novel to us… “We don’t have to return the car to its Zipcar parking spot by 5pm?! FREEDOM!”

Speaking of… I want to remember how novel it is specifically to park in our parking spot. We’ve been renting it out to a neighbor for the last 5 years, which has been very nice. The spot stopped feeling like ours after a while though, so parking there feels like a huge luxury right now.

Also incredibly novel: filling up with gas. Wow! I’m going to have to start paying attention to gas prices around town. (Zipcars typically have gas in them, so it was very rare that I had to fill one up. And even then, the gas was included and paid for with a gas card left in the visor of the car.) We’re now keen to the $.10/gallon discount you get by shopping at QFC, and I need to look in to which gas stations (or maybe all of them) give us cash back on our AmEx card.

Road Trip Planning

allison — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 01:09:38 +0000

Chunk gets in sometime this week (!!), so I’ve been diligently planning the road trip that we’re taking him on at the end of May. This article in Seattle Met inspired our destination — Northern Canada / Alaska! We are not doing the full route to Anchorage that is written up in the article. Instead, here’s the basic itinerary:

Seattle > Port Angeles
Port Angeles > Vancouver Island
Vancouver Island > Prince Rupert, BC Canada (On a 14-hour ferry, with our car!)
Dip in to Alaska at Stewart, BC
Dip in to the Yukon at Watson Lake
Dawson’s Creek, Canada
Home!

In researching, I came across this fun road trip fact. The average number of miles a person can drive per hour on a road trip is 52 MPH. I read in a forum comment by a former truck driver. He said no matter how fast you try to go, you’ll always end up average 52 MPH given bathroom and food breaks. I’m curious to test theory this out during our trip!

We’ll be covering 3K miles total. Some of it (about 300 miles) is on the ferry, leaving 2,700 for driving. That’s about 10 hours of driving according to the 52 MPH theory, which should give us plenty of time to see hang out with any moose we see along the road.

Fonts for the Silhouette Cameo

allison — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 04:22:09 +0000

Did I mention that I got a Silhouette Cameo?! I did, and I’m loving it. It cuts paper… perfectly. Here it is in suti on my desk in my office. (By the way, Scott says that I keep crazy in jars. It’s ribbon.)

So, after cutting out a bunch of random shapes for the hell of it, the second thing I did was scour my fonts for ones that would “weld” together nicely. These are my favorites (all free, by the way!):

Newest Latest Addiction: Triple Town

allison — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 04:43:02 +0000

Oh wow. Triple Town is awesome! A coworker of mine introduced me to the game and it is flat out addicting. I know real chess players would scoff at me saying this, but the game feels very much like chess. It can be very strategic. And at the same time, the game is crazy cute. The bears, which block your moves and are a nuisance, get annoyed and growl. And when the bears growl, the people scream.

I’ve been telling people that I’m so addicted to Triple Town that I keep trying to put three similar things together to make one bigger thing (this is the basic mechanic in the game). Like eyes, for example. Two eyes, plus one in the middle, makes one big eye in the middle of the forehead. Cyclopses!

Anyway…

I was so enamored by the bears that I bought one for myself on Etsy!

Where’s Chunk?!

allison — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 04:22:07 +0000

We were originally told 60 days from the time our car was ordered until it was here in Seattle, which would puts us currently at about 3 weeks out. We got antsy when the MINI Owners Lounge said that Chunk was on a boat, but didn’t give us any information about it. So Scott and a friend did some internet research and deduced that our car was on a boat called the “Glorious Leader”. I double checked with our dealer today, and they were right! (By the way, how strange are boat names… Glorious Leader?!)

By the amazing powers of the internet, we can track the Glorious Leader and Chunk as they journey across the Atlantic ocean, through the Panama Canal and up the West Coast. The boat’s last known location (four days ago) was at a set of islands outside of Spain. It is scheduled to arrive at Manzanilla (the Panama Canal) in five days.

The Big Climb 2012

allison — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 19:21:47 +0000

Scott wanted to do the Big Climb this year — a fundraiser for Lukemia where participants climb 1300 stairs (or 69 floors) up the Columbia Tower, Seattle’s tallest building. Being the ever supportive wife, I joined him… But Scott did all the work in fundraising and signing us up. Together we raised $1500! We matched everything that was donated to us out of our own pocket. To practice for the event we climbed the stairs off of Broadway together (it’s approximately 4x up/down), and I separately climbed the stairs at PopCap (approximately 5x up/down). Our time for the climb, which we did together so this time was really dictated by my huffing and puffing, was 20 minutes.

This was my first ever organized race. (We were on the “climb” side… there were others on the “race” side who ran up the stairs… Maybe next year.) I was amazed at how organized it all was… The bottom floors of the Columbia Tower were packed with people, but everything seemed to go very smoothly for everyone. We got there about 30 minutes early, signed in, got our t-shirts and goodie bags, checked our coats and bags, and waited just a few minutes before we were called to the starting line.

The race ended of course at the very top viewing deck, which was pretty crowded, but we got a change to look out at the sound and city. There were so many hot bodies up there that the windows were sweating… kinda gross, so we didn’t stay very long. The stairwell was decorated with photos of people who have had Lukemia, which was more inspiring than I’d initially thought it would be once I was at floor 50. There were water stations every so often, and paramedics along the route to make sure everyone was okay.

Here’s a shot of us just starting the climb! (The photo of us ending the climb didn’t show up in the official photo site, which is probably for the better.)

Hummingbirds in the Hood

allison — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 05:00:59 +0000

I love, love, love the hummingbirds that zoom around as I walk to the bus in the morning. I picked up on the sound of their chirping last year at some point, and now whenever I hear it I have to stop and look for the little birds who are usually perched on some very high point. I love it.

So, this post about our local hummingbirds on the Capitol Hill Seattle blog was pretty great to stumble across! It’s MATING SEASON!

“The Anna’s hummingbird, one of the more common birds in our area, has a courtship display that ranks among the most spectacular in the world — and the middle of March is one of the best times of year to see it.”

That means a lot more zooming about (and then some) to observe…

Image Source

Latest Addiction: Solitaire Blitz

allison — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 03:33:37 +0000

Luckily, I play video games for a living because I am addicted to Solitaire Blitz. Have you played it? A friend of mine did the art for it (which is adorable), and others I know developed the economy and balancing, but that does not make me biased at all. It’s blitzy! And fun!

By the way, I’m going to be re-posting some of my gaming content that I wrote last year during the MBA program. It’s going to show up in RSS feeds, even though it isn’t going to show up on my home page. There isn’t anything I can do about that, unfortunately, so enjoy! Hopefully you’re as interested in operant conditioning as I am!

Workout Playlist

allison — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 03:23:15 +0000

I’ve been practicing for the Big Climb coming up in a few weeks by climbing the 12 flights of stairs at work a few times a week. I generally like to listen to NPR when I work out, but climbing stairs in a boring stairwell requires music, so I’ve put together playlist. You can get it here!