Holiday Weekend, Day 1
Dec. 20th, 2004 10:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
terryclothI spent the weekend with family. I didn't travel to meet them -- well, I traveled across the city -- but they took up the entire weekend regardless. Somehow, my mother's learned to stay up until midnight, when visiting her kids...
As always, we didn't get all that much done. It isn't quite as cumbersome to get Stevie (Anna's kid) ready to move as it was when he was an infant, but it's still a pretty slow process, and we're pretty slow to move as a group even without considering that.
The first day, we spent most of the day setting up a christmas tree. Alex got a real tree, about five feet tall, which fit nicely on top of the table they were planning to set it up on. They forgot to shake it out before bringing it inside, though, so as we were trying to maneuver it into the stand, loose needles and spiders shook down into our hair...
Anna and mom and I were working the stand, but after fifteen minutes or so had made little progress. Alex stepped in to help, but still... eventually, we had to concede that the stand was dead -- the screw holes were all stripped, so you couldn't bore the screws into the tree to hold it in place. So they got a new stand, with a big-ass spike, and Alex drilled a starter hole in the bottom of the tree, then hammered it into place. It was a little crooked, but no one wanted to start over AGAIN, so we just designated an angle from which it didn't look too tilty as the 'front'.
Alex did the lights -- they were special lights with 'motion effects', the best one being 'pikachu epilepsy' mode -- and then all of us hung ornaments. Then, when we were done, Anna and mom carefully located all the ornaments I'd hung and moved them to better spots. Apparently, my Feng Shui is weak. 9.9
After that, we headed out to see the city before it got too late. For speed, Anna and mom and I went out first, with Alex planning to follow along with Stevie once he woke up from his nap. We drove downtown, trudged through the incredibly frustrating and horrible traffic, and eventually found our way to the Pacific Place Center to park, then headed to the new library, which Anna wanted to show us.
The library was kind of cool -- it's walls are interlocking triangles framed by metal beams and set with glass, tilting this way and that -- it reminds me of the ship from The Black Hole after being sucked through the black hole and horribly deformed. The inside is spacious, with lots and lots of comfy chairs, and laptop tables with power strips and such, and wide open reading areas with sixty-foot ceilings...
Not too many books in it, though. And it isn't aging well -- the bright neon elevators are scratched and smudged, and the foam rubber chairs are tearing. Anna said she could have told them that it wouldn't age well, but did they listen to her? NOOOO!
So we wandered up the stack spiral for a while, stopping to read a very old issue of Scientific American (From 1842, with articles like 'New advanced horseshoe technology!' and 'Christian missionaries analyze Chinese resistance to their religion!' etc. etc.) and for mom to go to the bathroom. We only got halfway up before mom got tired, so we took the elevator to the top, where the 'reading room' had *more* desks and chairs and lack of books, then Alex tried to call in to mom's cell phone, only to be foiled by the faraday cage of metal beams surrounding us.
So we went outside, and wandered back towards Pacific Place while Anna chatted on the phone -- arguing with Alex that he HAD to take Stevie downtown to see all the lights, that was the whole POINT of going downtown -- and tried to navigate. There were a few false stops and turns, but we got there, and waited around in the dungeonlike basement until Alex arrived with Stevie in tow.
We took him to see the lights and the carousel set up by Westlake Center. The line for the carousel was rediculously long -- like the sort of line you'd see at Cedar Point for a *good* ride. We didn't ride it. Stevie did have fun laughing and watching the spinning animals go past, all lit up, though... we had a snack at Starbucks on the way home (mmm, peppermint hot chocolate), let Stevie look at the fishes in Nordstroms, and the traffic from the connecting bridge on the third floor, saw the fake indoor soap-bubble snowfall, waited in line forever and ever to pay for parking as the cashiers listlessly inserted the tickets into the machines and made change, sat in traffic for an hour trying to escape from Pacific Place (which seemed to be the epicenter of the horrible downtown traffic that night) cursing at people who dared to change lanes, just to spite me, and stumbled back to Anna and Alex's place, where we ordered greek takeout.
And then we opened a few presents. I got a bag of goodies -- some lego stuff, some little plastic animals, etc. Anna and Alex got the Bone brick from me (a last minute gift picked up at Wonderworld, where I'd stopped on the way over to pick up my weekly comic order), and a high-tech egg-beater from mom. Mom got an I-Pod, which all of us had gone in together on. She loaded it up with songs from Alex's mac -- which she'd lose as soon as she synced it to her own machine, of course, but that was okay. The plan was to give her a DVD with the songs she'd like for her to take home with her. She was excited about the present, and listened to it a lot (even though we were just inside the house talking, and she's *already* hard of hearing), but then discovered that it was broken -- the fast forward button didn't work!
And so we'll begin day 2.
As always, we didn't get all that much done. It isn't quite as cumbersome to get Stevie (Anna's kid) ready to move as it was when he was an infant, but it's still a pretty slow process, and we're pretty slow to move as a group even without considering that.
The first day, we spent most of the day setting up a christmas tree. Alex got a real tree, about five feet tall, which fit nicely on top of the table they were planning to set it up on. They forgot to shake it out before bringing it inside, though, so as we were trying to maneuver it into the stand, loose needles and spiders shook down into our hair...
Anna and mom and I were working the stand, but after fifteen minutes or so had made little progress. Alex stepped in to help, but still... eventually, we had to concede that the stand was dead -- the screw holes were all stripped, so you couldn't bore the screws into the tree to hold it in place. So they got a new stand, with a big-ass spike, and Alex drilled a starter hole in the bottom of the tree, then hammered it into place. It was a little crooked, but no one wanted to start over AGAIN, so we just designated an angle from which it didn't look too tilty as the 'front'.
Alex did the lights -- they were special lights with 'motion effects', the best one being 'pikachu epilepsy' mode -- and then all of us hung ornaments. Then, when we were done, Anna and mom carefully located all the ornaments I'd hung and moved them to better spots. Apparently, my Feng Shui is weak. 9.9
After that, we headed out to see the city before it got too late. For speed, Anna and mom and I went out first, with Alex planning to follow along with Stevie once he woke up from his nap. We drove downtown, trudged through the incredibly frustrating and horrible traffic, and eventually found our way to the Pacific Place Center to park, then headed to the new library, which Anna wanted to show us.
The library was kind of cool -- it's walls are interlocking triangles framed by metal beams and set with glass, tilting this way and that -- it reminds me of the ship from The Black Hole after being sucked through the black hole and horribly deformed. The inside is spacious, with lots and lots of comfy chairs, and laptop tables with power strips and such, and wide open reading areas with sixty-foot ceilings...
Not too many books in it, though. And it isn't aging well -- the bright neon elevators are scratched and smudged, and the foam rubber chairs are tearing. Anna said she could have told them that it wouldn't age well, but did they listen to her? NOOOO!
So we wandered up the stack spiral for a while, stopping to read a very old issue of Scientific American (From 1842, with articles like 'New advanced horseshoe technology!' and 'Christian missionaries analyze Chinese resistance to their religion!' etc. etc.) and for mom to go to the bathroom. We only got halfway up before mom got tired, so we took the elevator to the top, where the 'reading room' had *more* desks and chairs and lack of books, then Alex tried to call in to mom's cell phone, only to be foiled by the faraday cage of metal beams surrounding us.
So we went outside, and wandered back towards Pacific Place while Anna chatted on the phone -- arguing with Alex that he HAD to take Stevie downtown to see all the lights, that was the whole POINT of going downtown -- and tried to navigate. There were a few false stops and turns, but we got there, and waited around in the dungeonlike basement until Alex arrived with Stevie in tow.
We took him to see the lights and the carousel set up by Westlake Center. The line for the carousel was rediculously long -- like the sort of line you'd see at Cedar Point for a *good* ride. We didn't ride it. Stevie did have fun laughing and watching the spinning animals go past, all lit up, though... we had a snack at Starbucks on the way home (mmm, peppermint hot chocolate), let Stevie look at the fishes in Nordstroms, and the traffic from the connecting bridge on the third floor, saw the fake indoor soap-bubble snowfall, waited in line forever and ever to pay for parking as the cashiers listlessly inserted the tickets into the machines and made change, sat in traffic for an hour trying to escape from Pacific Place (which seemed to be the epicenter of the horrible downtown traffic that night) cursing at people who dared to change lanes, just to spite me, and stumbled back to Anna and Alex's place, where we ordered greek takeout.
And then we opened a few presents. I got a bag of goodies -- some lego stuff, some little plastic animals, etc. Anna and Alex got the Bone brick from me (a last minute gift picked up at Wonderworld, where I'd stopped on the way over to pick up my weekly comic order), and a high-tech egg-beater from mom. Mom got an I-Pod, which all of us had gone in together on. She loaded it up with songs from Alex's mac -- which she'd lose as soon as she synced it to her own machine, of course, but that was okay. The plan was to give her a DVD with the songs she'd like for her to take home with her. She was excited about the present, and listened to it a lot (even though we were just inside the house talking, and she's *already* hard of hearing), but then discovered that it was broken -- the fast forward button didn't work!
And so we'll begin day 2.
