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Shout out to the La Fontana Sicilian restaraunt in Seattle. Superb stuffed chicken paired with a 2008 Zenato Amarone. Excellent service.

2nd & Blanchard

At the BMES meeting in Seattle thru Saturday. We’re presenting some of our latest work around biomarkers of multiple sclerosis severity. Friday morning in the Systems Biology track — 8:00 am, ouch!

Thank heaven for Starbucks.

Wood was wet. I asked at least twice before he came, Are you certain this is seasoned and dry birch?

Yes yes yes.

When he finally arrived at ~6:30 I walked outside, shook his hand and looked in the back of his truck. Crap. I pushed my forefinger into the rotted center of a 12″ round and just looked at him. “Dude, this will not burn. It’s neither seasoned nor dry.” I pointed to other pieces just like it.

It sucked that he had to come this far to learn this, plus having to deal with the hassle of a broken down trailer, which he’ll likely have to leave roadside until Monday, the first chance he’ll have to find a spare tire. Then drive back to replace the tire and drive back home again. I felt his pain and gave him $40.00 for gas.

Oh well, dinner out and wine with friends was fun, finished off with a dip in the hot tub.

Back to Anchorage tonight.

 

Down at our Nest in Seward this weekend. Happy Wife found a message in a bottle during her walk with the dogs on the beach. After we got the Police song out of our heads and let the paper dry out, what was legible suggested a poetic goodbye to love lost. Some dude named Jesi. We’re assuming he’s a he. Hearts, some broken, had been drawn on the back of the message. Happy Wife taped the pieces together and kept it. How often do you find a message in a bottle?

Presently waiting on a firewood delivery. A cord of white birch that the seller assured me is seasoned and dried. He was supposed to be here at noon, then he phoned at noon and said he was still in Kenai (~100 miles away) dealing with “fuel issues,” and now it was looking more like 3:00 pm. He texted me at 3:30 and said he’d been delayed by road construction. Made sense — so were we on our way down from Anchorage yesterday. It’s now 4:45 pm. I just texted him again. He replied that he just had a flat tire in Moose Pass. Weird, since Moose Pass is before the road construction not after it. Hmm.

Perhaps it’s time to get desperate, a message in a bottle maybe: “Anyone out there seen my firewood?”

Update: 5:45 pm. Now he had a flat on the trailer tire! He called and said he will offload as much wood as possible into his pickup and bring it here, but he’ll have to make several trips back ‘n forth to the crippled trailer to get it all. Poor guy. I called a number of likely places in Seward to see if they had a trailer tire but everyone’s closed for the night. Friends of ours down the beach road have invited us out to dinner tonight, AND they have a bottle of wine they want to share with us. You do what you have to do.

Got an internet bandwidth upgrade today. The flow into the house had been 1.0 Mbps, now 10.0 Mbps. Imagine you’re in your backyard, frustrated, trying to water the flowers with a nozzle pressure akin to a ninety year old urethra when suddenly, upstream, somebody undoes the kink in the hose. Sweet Jesus!

Let’s back up.

It all started with a phone call to Amazon customer support wherein I wondered why the movie I’d just ordered from them would not start. Downloading downloading downloading ….

Sir: We recommend >=3.0 Mbps for HD video. Have you tried the SD version?

Why no, I hadn’t.

Refund.

I purchase the SD version. Downloading downloading downloading ….

Email: Uh, yeah, me again. No go with the SD version either.

Re: Sorry to hear you experienced problems with Amazon Prime Video.

Refund.

I go to the web site. FAQ says: While we support 1.0 Mbps for streaming video, we recommend >=1.5 Mbps for SD.

Here, “support” means we’ll answer the phone and disappoint you by saying that 1.0 Mbps really isn’t enough bandwidth for streaming movies.

Ugh.

But I love Amazon so the following day I visit our ISP to upgrade our bandwidth. The man behind the counter raises his eyebrows when he brings up my account, “Okay then, 1.0 Mbps, wow, looks like you’re due for an upgrade.” His look of dismay akin to that of a dental hygienist when you haven’t brushed in four years.

Now, instead of bits entering the house through a straw we have a hose. Want a drink, get a bath.

All that was left to do was to reroute the Cat5 cable I’d run from the Blu-ray player, under the living room rug and to the internet wall outlet, through the crawl space instead. This, because Happy Wife had rhetorically asked, “Is that wire going stay there?”

Why no dear, I have a solution!

I drilled two holes through the floor, one through the cherry wood floor in the living room, and you want to have all your wits about you when you drill that one so it is in fact just one and not two or three because you mis-measured the reentry point for the cable. This precision required repeated round trips into the crawl space and back upstairs again, and now I understand why it’s called a crawl space.

This morning I’m experiencing a sharp pain in the general area of my 2nd Chakra, which, who knew, is essential to the proper function of my creativity, sexuality, finances — finances? — and other psychological mysteria.

Polar bears devour what’s left of a whale harvest. Kaktovik, Alaska.

Dogs during a mountain hike yesterday. Fall color just beginning to emerge up here.

Extra credit for readers who know why this place is called Powerline Pass.

BIGGER.

Selfie of Happy Wife at Snow City Cafe breakfast bar this morning. If you ever hear me talk about the lemon sucking look, this is what I’m referring to.

Amusing review of a compendium of really bad prose.

I realize I’m a blogger of comparatively zero significance, in terms of the influence my posts have in shaping or changing the mind of any blog reader out there, and maybe I deserve my place in the flyover of the blogosphere, either owing to the low quality of my posts or because they generally lack any intellectually provocative content — I mean really, beyond my mother & father (Hi Mom!) who cares what Happy Wife and I had for dinner last night. I get that.

But with regard to the Syria thing, can somebody explain to me why we, the USofA, are the only country in the entire world with the proper motivation and military chops to carry out a punitive missile strike on Assad’s assets, specifically the places where he either stores and/or produces chemical weapons? Why isn’t anybody talking about — and if someone is and I missed it please provide a URL where I can be so enlightened —  the one exception that seems abundantly obvious to me — Israel!

Obvious for two reasons: 1) moral/humanitarian motivation, and 2) military practicality & feasibility. As I’ve said elsewhere on the internets, Can you think of a population of people who should be more thoroughly & morally outraged by the government directed murder of innocents with poison gas than the people living in the modern Jewish state of Israel? Secondly, practically speaking, Israel borders Syria. Damascus and all other places within Syria where poison gas stores/facilities reside are geographically very close to Israel, closer even than the Mediterranean Sea where I suppose the US military would position its carriers from which we would launch our missile-laden strike fighters. And clearly Israel has the strike fighters and missiles to surgically disable said stores/facilities. The Israeli Air Force recently demonstrated this capability inside Syria where they obliterated stockpiles of weapons headed for Hezbollah in Lebanon.

So Mr. Obama, why is it again you say the U.S. is the only country in world properly motivated and capable of doing this?

I can imagine one objection to the Israeli option: “Are you daft, Nibbe? If Israel were to take out the chemical weapons facilities with strike fighters it would provoke a regional war, draw Iran into the conflict, greatly destabilize the region and put “our” oil supplies in jeopardy.” But as I just pointed out, Israel has already deployed strike fighters against weapons targets in Syria, no middle-east-wide war ensued and the price at the pump was unchanged. Besides, the only middle eastern country the U.S. imports a significant amount of oil from is Saudi Arabia, and even that represents only 18% of our net annual total. So even if an area wide conflict erupted if Israel took care of this, we (USofA) could simply use our power to protect Saudi Arabia and keep the shipping lanes open. Seems like a much better and more justified use of our military power than provocative bombing in Syria.