Inspired by someone else's lolbible, I NEEDED an icon.

I am now the owner of a pair of Keen Targhee II shoes. They're like 4WD for your feet, for walking downhill on the frosty soggy leaves. They're astonishingly cute, light, and comfy, and so far they do indeed seem to do what I need.



I kicked a lot of ass yesterday, but today I felt all full of grey and meh and decided to take the day off and do nothing productive. Interestingly, now, instead of winding down by slacking, I actually voluntarily dove into an early task review, and found myself in utterly the right mindset to pull it off, rather than the usual battle to drag my brain out of the day's details. I wonder if moving Task Review to a Day Off context would make it easier to pull off consistently? I've been trying to shoehorn it in to the end of the week, assuming I needed things fresh in my mind to best do it. What if I did it on say Sunday, as an opening to the week rather than a closing? The loading before sleep might even have some useful side-effects. I shall find out.

It is now Officially Cold and Dark.



Moving 800 miles North is an interesting thing. I've never lived this far North before, and it causes some interesting things to happen with the light. The combination of this far North and being basically surrounded by water makes for even more interesting things, and it's visually like living in an HDR world. In BC and the West Bay Hills area, everything was supersaturated, and during the wet season the colors ran together like an oily impressionist painting. The far North ends of CA and most of Oregon look more like Happy Tree Guy watercolors - the saturation isn't so bold, and the muddiness of the color bleeds is a little different the strokes are sharper and more assertive. As you move further up into the damper Northern end of Washington, your aperture opens wider and everything goes HDR. The blue of a clear night sky here is an intense ultramarine you'd swear only existed in Photoshop. The sun rises and sets with that extra dose of glory that comes from being surrounded by water - I remember that quality from Florida as well, except here you don't have the hilight of the hurricane-pattern clouds. The light varies amazingly over the course of even a given day, and the way colors look change dramatically with the lighting here. I'm pretty sure it's going to wind up changing my basic pallet. Already the playful pastels I wore so often in Palo Alto just feel...wrong. I'm leaning more to very intense and saturated colors that hold their integrity through a variety of lighting conditions, and the colors I'm mixing are spreading farther across the spectrum as an adaptation as well.



Anyway, back to the thing with the 800 miles North. I remembered from Colorado the sheer cognitive shock of the shortened days, not due to rain or weather, but due to the turning of the Earth itself. It's even moreso here. Things like Advent make A LOT more sense to me right now. A couple weeks ago, it seemed like the descent into darkness rapidly accelerated, and the sun dropped from rising at (time-adjusted) 6:30 down to nearly 8 all in a rush, and the sunset blasted from 5:30ish to shortly after 4 in the span of srsly just a couple weeks. The plants, which have been by and large doing unnaturally well, have started to look worn out and weary, and everywhere there's just this massive heavy everpresent sense of spiraling down into darkness. It taps that visceral hardwired archetype of "Winter" that I never really felt South of Colorado. There's this amazingly powerful sense of "logically, I know it's almost solstice and the sun will return soon, but you know, if it didn't, it wouldn't be more than a couple months at this rate before it would be a REALLY scary world". Makes you kinda want to participate in those rituals to quietly remind the Sun that it needs to come back again, those rituals where you add more candle-flames every night as Kali's great black tongue licks the poison from the world's wounds.



Weather-wise, Seattle is kinda a Boulder Creek Lite. You'll get the Real Actual Weather you'd get there, but you get the shorter, less severe, damped-down white people spicy version. Which is just as well, because apparently 2 days of "Real Rain" is enough to shut down a lot of things and cause floods and freaking outs here. Since you've got Weather Lite, large parts of the populace are able to remain utter wusses, unlike BC where you had to become Tough Mountain Folk or move the hell out. The snow was absolutely magical, and the best sort of snow - it falls, fresh and beautiful, you play in it, make a snowman, then later in the evening it comes down again with big thick flakes that won't fit on your tongue and everything glows and shimmers, then the next day it's all gone except maybe a small lump where your snowman was. I left all my outdoors plants out through the snow, and only the iris seems slightly the worse for it. (Even the fuchsia haven't gone dormant yet. I tell you, there's something REALLY WEIRD with the Seattle and the plants. You should see the crazy stuff unseasonally in bloom in West Seattle ZOMG! Also some stuff that usually requires A LOT of light just THRIVES some places here, and there's NOT much light here, so I have NO IDEA how that works. Ok, there's not much direct light, but there's often a very very nice diffused low-spectrum ambient light throughout the day. Wonder if that has something to do with it?)



It gets cold here, and it's a miserable wet cold that feels a lot colder than I remember that temperature feeling in Colorado. The winds aren't nearly as down-to-your-bones biting as CO though. There's usually not a lot of range between day and night temperature - usually only a 10 to 20 degree range. When it's cloudy, the clouds help keep the heat in, so it's extra-buffered. When it clears up, especially at night, especially if it's breezy, that's when it can get Actually Cold. Being clear during the day, in the winter, doesn't seem to bump up the temperature much, but I imagine a series of clear days and cloudy nights in the summer could make it Actually Pretty Warm briefly. The temperature range is again Boulder Creek Lite, especially with the relatively smaller deltas. So, for those curious Boulder Creekians, yes, you're already 100% equipped to handle what Seattle can throw at you. Palo Altans might break and/or melt though, so be wary.



(*Checks "Post about Seattle" off List, wanders off again*)

Where has Angyl been?



Well, I finally got a Nintendo DS Lite.



And I got the new Zelda game.



And, uh, well, yeah.



Sorry. I'll be back after I save the princess, AGAIN. Stupid high-maintenance princess.

What happens when you put on "Return of the King" followed by "Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert" as background noise in the same day?



Dreams of Elrond as a drag queen putting on an elaborate elvish version of an Abba show. Woooow.