eub: (quiz)
Eli ([personal profile] eub) wrote2004-03-29 01:33 am

backlog: family visits Seattle

Oliver flew back down that Sunday, but the rest of the crew came up to Seattle on Monday -- J and B just for the day. They stopped at IKEA, and then got lost trying to follow my directions to my place. (I did offer the can't-miss directions, where you get off 5 at 85th and then come forty blocks back....) We went to quiz night at the Irish Emigrant, along with the usuals, and had eleven people total, in two teams. House of Quack actually won the B division. Josh got to drive the borrowed Jeep home that night in the rain with a flat-packed wardrobe sticking out the back, but I gather they made it.

In the morning we walked down to Fremont for bagels. What used to be called Bagel Oasis turns out to be closed until May for some construction work. We got sandwiches at that place advertising wheat-free waffles near Kwanjai Thai, then sprouts at PCC for my demonstration of how to make pad thai for dinner, which they say will give them great pleasure and save them millions of dollars; went on down to the canal, saw the bridge draw up with excellent timing, came back. They liked the neighborhood, its hilliness and backwaters and what people have done in their yards. As we walked we remarked on remarkable rosemary shrubs and things in flower.


I think that afternoon we put up the plant shelves outside the balcony. It's a toy balcony, floor six feet by one -- it demands outrigger shelves. They're cedar planks, sitting on arms made for roughly this purpose, whose feet are supported on heavy galvanized steel strips meant as two-by-four ties, which are lashed to the outside of the balcony horizontals with wire twist tie merely for getting it all up without the assistance of octopuses; once it's up, the strips are pinned hard and not going anywhere.

The prisoners and light switch problem has been going around again. I'd seen it a few years ago, but couldn't reconstruct any solution. My dad put together one, and we looked up a cleaner one, and I have a generalization that might be faster in which they can pass numbers greater than 1.

The night before the day people arrived, and then the morning before, I unpacked the nonfiction. The way I assorted them onto the shelves is adequate, though it's no Kohonen map. That's the last of the books. Almost moved in.