Slumberland

I warned you it was going to be slow around here. Yep, it’s the house stuff again. The situation was featured on the KOMO-TV4 five o’clock news Sunday evening. Jason did an excellent job of speaking for us. They edited me right out, so I might not have done so well. We will have the video online for you as soon as we can.

We finished tearing all the carpeting out of the living room, finally. Perhaps it’s silly, not knowing if we’ll get to keep the house, but it cheered us up to see that beautiful wood floor, scratched and dented as it may be. We put some big (but really cheap) rugs down and the place actually looks relatively nice for once.

The final decision on the house is tomorrow. If you live in Seattle, please express your opinion and help save our house. The contact info is on our house page.

Thanks, and I’ll try to add more links later, if I have time.

Need to make dinner but all you’ve got are stale bread, moldy cheese, dill pickles and a can of anchovies? I-Cookbook to the rescue — “bachelor cooking made easy,” if not palatable.

In eight lessons you can learn how to cuss in Swedish like a sailor. This could come in handy when visiting Ballard (a Seattle neighborhood, once mostly Scandinavian, where my maternal grandparents lived.) Want insults in other languages? Try The Alternative Dictionaries.

OK, I couldn’t resist this one: what an old IBM PC is good for. I made one into an art project once, using spray paint and chalk.

I’ve (mostly) lived in Seattle since I was a month old, and since I was young I’ve had a pretty healthy interest in Seattle history. The Seattle Times carries a great weekly column by Paul Dorpat, Seattle Now & Then. (These online excerpts are on the Seattlesquare.com site, not at the Times.) It shows a historic Seattle photo, next to a current photo of the same location. Often, the modern version is no improvement.

Well, the house thing is still going on. Thanks to those who sent letters of support or showed up at the library board meeting yesterday to help. There’s still a lot of work for us to do in the next six days before the final decision is made, so site updates might be sporadic. I’m sure you understand.

Steve Hawley forwarded a link to a site with Japanese Pocky commercials, in QuickTime. Pokki wa oishii desu!

Sorry it’s been slow lately. See the 19 feb entry for the reason why. Today we go to a library board meeting and try to present our case one more time.

A few days ago I posted a link to a Pocky site. If you’re unlucky enough to live in a place where Pocky and other nifty Japanese snack foods are scarce, The Japanese Snack Factory might fulfill your craving for Pocky, Yan Yan, the intensely delicious Kasugai Gummies, and the unfortunately named Collon.

Meet Mr. Etch A Sketch. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer introduces us to a construction worker/Etch A Sketch-artist who spends from six to 20 hours on each of his aluminum-dust creations. I just wish they’d given us a better photograph of his work.

I hate to bring this up here, but… our home (and four others) is in danger of being taken away from us in order to build a library on our block. We love libraries, but not at the price of tearing down five wonderful, affordable old homes and forcing 15-20 people to move.

If you live in Seattle, please make your voice heard on our behalf, either by writing to the City Council and Library Board, or by attending and speaking at the upcoming library board meetings. The decision is scheduled to be made on 29 Feb. Information on meeting times and whom to e-mail can be found on our house page.

Thanks to Sheila and Jessamyn for mentioning this story in their weblogs.

Bye bye PointCast. I remember using PointCast a few years ago — it was great for a news junkie like me. Why did I stop using it? not for any of the stupid reasons listed in this article. I stopped using it because it crashed if you looked at it cross-eyed. Maybe if they’d fixed the bugs, the service could have survived.

Who needs Dr. Pepper when you can have Dr. Chek, Dr. Kist, Dr. Phizz, or Dr. Becker?

Marketers keep trying to narrow the generations more and more. From the article Gen i: Tuned in, logged on, cashed up at Yahoo!:

Snowball, which is planning an initial public offering in March, is one of many sites targeting the 13- to 29-year-old crowd. According to Snowball, Generation Y plus Generation X equals Generation i.

So now not only are generations down to sixteen years, but sixteen years is enough to cover two generations? Maybe some marketing folks should look up “generation” in the dictionary.

Remember the haunted painting I mentioned a couple of days ago? The images are no longer working on the original eBay page, but I found another copy of ‘em.