Podcasts - Escape Pod

Frank Fujimoto
Listening, Reading

If you enjoy science fiction and aren't listening to Escape Pod, you really should. It's a weekly short story anthology with a wide variety of themes and styles. The host, Steve Eley, reads many of the stories in addition to providing intros and commentary, but guest readers are not uncommon. It was Steve's blog entry about going on hiatus for a few weeks which prompted me to write about Escape Pod. I noticed last week that a new story hadn't gone up, so I went to check if something was up, and indeed there is.

Photo - Wild Horses

Frank Fujimoto
Photography

Every time we drive to Spokane we go by the Wild Horses Monument near Vantage, WA (where I-90 crosses the Columbia River). One year I decided to hike up to take a look. The time of day was just right to have a near-silhouette and the clouds were also cooperating. There are several horses in the sculpture, but as a whole the piece is actually incomplete. The artist had planned to have the horses spilling out of a bowl, like a cornucopia, but the funding still isn't available.

Bowling

Frank Fujimoto
What's Up

Since Alexander Limi (one of the original developers of Plone, a content management system with which Melody works) was in town, a bunch of Seattle Plone people gathered tonight for some bowling at Garage Billiards in the Capitol Hill neighborhood. Melody and I went along, and although she was the only person from where she's working (Web Collective), there were several people she knew from the business next door (ONE/Northwest).

World Series

Frank Fujimoto
Hobbies

It's tough being a sports fan in Seattle. As I'm writing this, he UW and Washington State football teams, the Seahawks, and the Oklahoma City Thunder (nee Seattle Sonics) have three wins - combined. That's out of 25 games. Needless to say, they're all at the bottom of their respective divisions. (In full disclosure, right now the scoreboard shows the Seahawks are way up at halftime.)

PRESS lunch, Olympic Sculpture Park

Frank Fujimoto
What's Up

Last weekend Melody and I went to a lunch downtown to celebrate the 500th client for PRESS, which is a real estate referral service. We became clients when we bought our home in 2002 and it worked out well for us. Jim Stacey referred us to a great agent, loan officer, and inspector, and then tagged along at the inspection to give us yet another point of view of the condition of the house. Since then, he's been a good sounding board for us when we've had questions about home maintenance or even doing a short plat with our neighbor (a topic for another post).

Podcasts - Grammar Girl

Frank Fujimoto
Listening

I consider myself a grammar geek because I like to take at least a little time to make my writing grammatically correct while not sounding stiff. I obviously have my good days and bad days, but either way, it's something I enjoy doing. I sometimes find myself re-reading email over a half dozen times before sending, moving a phrase here, selecting another word there, going between looking at the overall structure and scrutinizing individual clauses. After doing all that and sending the message, I notice that paragraph I forgot to delete which contains just a single unfinished sentence fragment.

Fish tacos

Frank Fujimoto
Food

We thought it would be fun to try making fish tacos for dinner, and they turned out really well. Sear-roasted mahi mahi (with ground pepper and lime juice), cabbage, tomatoes, avocado, cheese, and salsa on soft corn tortillas. They actually didn't take long at all to make, probably 30 minutes of cooking and toppings prep, including making the tortillas. They must have been yummy, since they were so messy!

Photo - Zip line

Frank Fujimoto
Photography

We met up with Melody's cousin and his family on our trip to Spokane in 6/2007. This zip line is in Lincoln Park which is down the hill from Rockwood Manor (where we usually stay). I was very lucky to get so close to matching Hans' movement as he went across.

Driving less

Frank Fujimoto
What's Up

I know it's trendy to drive less, but we've been racking up far fewer miles on our cars over the past several years. By how much? Let's just say we're planning to go down to one car, but some background is in order before I talk about that.

Photo - Kellen and Parkour

Frank Fujimoto
Photography

Kellen has been doing Parkour for a couple years now, and he thoroughly enjoys it. When we were in CA to celebrate my parents' 50th anniversary we were able to stay in town for the Fujimoto July 4th Picnic. While we were at the park, Kellen put some tape between the poles of a pull-up bar and was jumping between the tape and the bar, raising the tape after each attempt. I took some movies of him and split out a few frames from one of them to blend into one photo. You can see that he indeed was leaping up from the ground and cleared the red tape. The vertical supports moved quite a bit during his jump.

Book - A Romance on Three Legs, Katie Hafner

Frank Fujimoto
Music, Oral History, Reading

It was pure coincidence that I was recently reading A Romance on Three Legs: Glenn Gould's Obsessive Quest for a Perfect Piano by Katie Hafner, especially since I read about Henry Z. Steinway's death just as I was getting to the part of the book which talked about him. I found the book to be a quick yet entertaining read, especially since it dips into related topics such as the history of the piano, the artistic goals of tuning, and descriptions of how a piano is manufactured. As the title implies, the book centers around a particular piano, a Steinway which was labelled CD 318. Hafner tells how the piano was made during WWII and explains how it and Gould were finally brought together.

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