God Bless Us, Every One

Dinner day two in Seattle was ten of us - some colleagues, some clients, and a few other interesting characters as well. I have been craving gnocchi for some unexplained reason and was thrilled to learn that this restaurant, in addition to specializing in gluten-free Italian food, also home-makes their own gnocchi from Yukon Gold potatoes, perplexing me briefly for the moment it took me to remember that gnocchi is made from potatoes.

While not focused on my gnocchi, I enjoyed the conversation of the group. We covered everything from sustainability to other aspects of sustainability and I once again made a mental note to actually learn something about this subject area in which I am asserting expertise.

One exchange that particularly tickled me went like this.

Me: If you could wave a magic wand and affect some change in the world in the service of solving global warming, without just directly solving it, what would you do?

DCTML: Are you familiar with "A Christmas Carol" ?

Me: Yes. So...?

DCTML: I would do that.

Me: [blank stare. what happened to all my gnocchi?]

DCTML: I would bring the Ghost of Climate Change Future to visit everyone in the present and show them the impact that they are having, but while there is still time to change their ways.


Isn't that simply delightful?

A colleague of mine then chimed in that fear is actually not the greatest motivator of human behavioral change and that smokers who were given antidepressants were able to quit because they were happier.

So it seems clear that the solution to global warming lies somewhere between reading more Dickens and putting the world on prozac.

A three hour tour

I got to go on a scenic cruise on Lake Washington last night as part of a conference that I am here in Redmond to attend.

All in all it was quite lovely. Setting sun, glimmering water, tree-lined shore. Seems like it would be an awfully nice place to live, and in fact the boat captain pointed out Bill Gates' house as we passed (there was a 'bouncy-castle' space shuttle inflated in the yard but I missed the explanation for why) and a few other Microsoft VIP's homes.

One thing that I re-discovered is that food on boats is universally and without exception horrible. Last summer on an otherwise really fun Hornblower dinner cruise in San Francisco I had a memorably bad meal that was, in all seriousness, completely uneatable. The pasta may literally have been made of Play-Doh, but not regular Play-Doh, some off-brand kind made in China which is extra toxic.

This boat food was about as good as food served to large quantities of people on a boat can be, at least in my experience. Nonetheless, it is still the kind of food where the only way to feel satisfied is through sheer volume. And that's not actually satisfaction, it's extreme nausea.

I've heard that cruises are known to have great food but they are also known to have that hideous bacteria and lots of people who enjoy cruises on them so I don't think I'll be trying that out any time soon.

One odd thing about last night: I could be wrong, but I am almost positive that the music they were playing on the boat is the same music that they make you listen to while you are on hold waiting for a conference call to start. And I think it had embedded subliminal messages about buying more Chinese Pla-Do.

Go that way really fast

One of the many adventures of this past weekend was renting a ridiculously powerful motorcycle and driving on it for many, many hours. We went north. We went south. We came across a down home country barbecue and chili cook-off and petted some friendly dogs. We zoomed like the zoomiest.

Check out our hot wheels:
The unexpected epilogue to our badass motorcycle weekend came this morning at the rental car counter when they upgraded me to a gold Mustang. Totally unsolicited. So this week I'll be cruising around Seattle in style.

That's life

Eric did the grocery shopping this week and that almost always involves a few surprises.

One of the surprises this time was the addition of Life cereal to the breakfast roster. This wasn't one of the staples in my house growing up so it was kind of a fun new face at the breakfast table. He got the kind that tastes like cinnamon in addition to tasting like regular Life.

Apparently, it is physically impossible to eat Life cereal for breakfast without saying, at least every other bite,

"S'good."

Eric was so enthralled with this childish phrase that he continued saying it pretty much all day and into the evening. On Wednesday, everything "s'good."

Towards the end of the night, sleepy-eyed and sort of muppet-y, Eric said it a bunch of times in a row, and then burst out laughing.

"Did you hear that?" he asked, wide-eyed and conspiratorial.

"Um..." I didn't get it.

"Squid!"

Further hysterical laughter ensued.

I have a birthday coming up. Just saying.

In anticipation of a lot of airport and plane time for the trip last weekend, I wanted to borrow a book to read. One of the books that I've heard is a "must read" for someone in my job is Daniel Goleman's "Ecological Intelligence". He's the guy who wrote "Emotional Intelligence" and I suspected this new book was just a search/replace of emotional for ecological.

I know that a lot of people in my office have read it, or at least skimmed it, and so I started asking around for a copy that I could borrow.

"Have you read Ecological Intelligence?"

"Yeah - a good read. You should check it out."

"Could I borrow it?"

"Oh. It's on my Kindle."

"Oh. I see. I don't have a Kindle. Hmm."

This happened several times just like that. Until:

"Have you read Ecological Intelligence?"

"Yeah - a good read. You should check it out."

"Could I borrow it?"

"Yes. It's on my Kindle. Let me get it for you."

"What? You're lending me your Kindle?"

"Yeah."

"Whoa - are you sure?"

"Yeah. Just give it back when you're done."

So I got to use a Kindle for the weekend and, I must admit, I am completely addicted. There are a few things I don't love - like you can't flip quickly through the pages to see how far to the end of the chapter or to the next neat graphic and you can't use your to do list as a bookmark. It also isn't as good a coaster on the coffee table. But all told, I think it is kind of a magic thing and I really like it. (Would it be awkward to admit that if I had one I think I would have a really hard time lending it out?)

Oh - and Ecological Intelligence is very much worth a quick read except that it is one of those books that makes you think about many scary things that would be much more comfortable not to think about. Even so - you should read it.

Un-giving up on the garden

The garden on my roof, also known as Rooty Rooftop, has been, how you say, a great learning experience. Let me bring you up to speed.

First, I built a garden on my roof from scratch:

Then I planted seeds in it. I had high hopes! I planted many glorious things like lettuce, cabbage, broccoli, tomatoes, cauliflower, chard, spinach, et cetera.

And lots of them grew!

And they grew and grew...sort of. You see, the roof is a very windy and miserable place in spite of getting lots of sun. The plants looked to be surviving, but they were paying a price: the spinach and chard were as thick as pennies and they had the texture of scrambled eggs when we tried cooking them up. Most of the other plants just looked generally traumatized all the time.

The wind howled relentlessly.

It wasn't long before everything had gone to seed or died.

It was sad and frustrating. I let it go wild for a while, stopped watering it, and then dug almost all of it up and sent it back to the compost heap.

I then proceeded to completely forget about it for a little while. Sometimes I'm not good with learning experiences.

But then one day I went up there to pick some of the sole survivor - cilantro, which had turned purple but was otherwise still sort of viable - and noticed something amazing: there were little tomatoes on the otherwise completely dead-looking tomato plants.
What a miracle!

So now I am un-giving up on the garden. I've started watering it again and I pulled out all the junk. Lettuce seems to be able to grow up there reasonably well up there so I planted a bunch and am now thinking about Rooty Rooftop as our own private, fresh - if limited selection - salad bar.

I'm learning.

Fan club

Yesterday afternoon I was sitting in my office, minding my own business, when suddenly the ceiling fan in my office turned on and started spinning.

"I have a ceiling fan?" I thought to myself. I'm fairly sure this is new. It's very shiny.

I watched it for a moment. It was on. Fanning away. I sat there and looked around: I was alone in the office and no one was near the door. I stood up, walked to the door of my office and peered outside.

Nobody.

It had been a little stuffy in my office, so I just nodded at the fan, sat down and went back to work.

Time passed. I got chilly. It was time for the fan to be turned off. But how?

I decided to ask our new office manager Linda who started last Thursday and was camped out in the office next to me. Because, having been with us for one and a half days, she was clearly going to be the best person to ask for help. More importantly, she was the first person I came across upon venturing out from my office.

I had barely gotten five words out of my mouth when she burst out laughing. Apparently, much earlier in the day and all the way across the office in the supply room, she and Emily had found a homeless remote control and pressed all the buttons, joking about how they were probably opening and closing someone's garage door somewhere.

She went and got the remote and we tested it: sure enough, fan on, fan off, fan on, fan off.

Case closed.