Saturday, December 31, 2011

To Yakima for NYE with family. Fresh snow on the pass but the roads are wet only. Scotch and live webcast of Phish at Madison Square Garden last night with friend Ryan. Having second cup of coffee in the car. The end of another year.

Thursday, December 29, 2011

reblogged from this isn't happiness

Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Best of India 2011

IMG_5558Monkey Temple FlowersIMG_5571IMG_5646IMG_5604IMG_5585
IMG_5581IMG_5584IMG_5536IMG_5708IMG_5727IMG_5730
IMG_1654IMG_1790IMG_1724IMG_1723IMG_1703IMG_1699
IMG_1673IMG_1671IMG_1666IMG_1653IMG_1637City Palace

Best of India 2011, a set on Flickr.

Here is a slideshow of the best of our India photos. Click on the link in the preceding sentence and then click the slideshow button on the upper right.

Friday, December 23, 2011

Merry Flying Spaghetti Monster Holiday

For my fellow Pastafarians, may his noodly
appendage touch you this Holiday.

Tuesday, December 20, 2011

Tracy House for Sale



 

The Tracy house - the single Frank Lloyd Wright house in Washington (in Normandy Park, no less) - is for sale.  It speaks for itself, so I won't add some trite commentary about how great it is from my perspective.

Instead, I am writing to put everyone on notice that until this house sells I will do anything I think I can get away with in order to come up with $1.1MM.   Anything.  If you have any easy-to-liquidate assets, watch yourself and lock your doors.  If you have any "indecent proposals," now's the time to make them.  I'm ready to go all Daniel Plainview for this thing.

Sunday, December 18, 2011

Saturday, December 17, 2011

Every Family Christmas Letter

Impersonal Greetings!

Here's a sentence about how the year is almost over, in case you don't know how the Gregorian calendar operates. Here's a trite phrase about how quickly time passes, probably stolen from a friend's Facebook wall. Here's an attempted joke that doesn't work.

Let's talk about the hubby. The dad in this family probably got promoted and now has additional responsibilities that the letter writer sincerely hopes will make you question your choice of a life partner. The rest of this paragraph will highlight regular stuff that every parent does, like coaching a little league team or building a shed in the backyard. After briefly mentioning some award received at a convention in Orlando or wherever, it's time to make this Superman appear more human, so... Snarky comment about how the dad didn't beat his marathon time from last year because he did something stupid like hurt his toe during training!!!!!!!!!!

Let's move on to the kids, who are better than your kids in every way. These ways will be listed and categorized by child's name, age, and some personality trait that nobody but the parents of the child actually sees. If a child had a minor health scare or got banged up while biking or something, it will be milked here for maximum sympathy, perhaps focusing on how hard it was for the letter writer to make it through this tough time. If applicable, the letter will now veer off into a diatribe about how the city should make things safer for young bicyclists. The point will be made at the end of this paragraph that the letter writer is no different than any other concerned parent or citizen, thus clearly implying the exact opposite.

Now let's blow some kind of minor family problem into a full-blown tragedy. The death of a pet, perhaps. Some kind of costly household repair due to a storm would work nicely. If nothing else, this paragraph should focus on how the family has struggled coping with world events, such as the Japanese tsunami. Obstacle stated here. Explanation of how the family overcame said obstacle here (in the case of Japan, the solution will be prayer and the family moving on to some other issue). Now, here's the poignant end to this section of the letter. While these events would have ripped a normal family like yours apart, the letter writer's family came together and is now stronger than ever before.

(This is the blank space between paragraphs that make no mention of the husband's affair with a co-worker in Orlando or the fact that the parents haven't slept in the same bed since February.)

Now's the time to mention a friend of the family or a distant relative who did something remarkable, like climb a mountain or meet Michelle Obama at a fundraiser, in order to make the entire family look interesting.

Self-deprecating apology here about how this letter is so long, cleverly implying that your family could probably just summarize the year on a notecard.

Oh, well! Or another mindless statement meant to abruptly end a letter! Mandatory holiday greetings, almost as an aside.

(Family name in script font)

- Tim Seidell

Friday, December 16, 2011

Christopher Hitchens, 1949-2011. 

Police clear out Occupy Olympia camp

Wednesday, December 7, 2011