Nik visit!

(Pink Floyd music playing:) "Hello... (hello)... is there anybody out there...? Just nod if you're still reading... Is there any new post...?"

("There is no ping, you are receeeeeiving...")

So! Helloooo, Mr. Internet! Sorry I've been so neglectful of you these days, things have started to pick up in this here grad school. I was starting to wonder when the work was going to come rolling in, and lo! There it is. I'm also starting to discover that blog work is a little bursty; I'll go through brief phases where I want to post half a dozen new missives at once, then suddenly hit dry spells of 2 weeks, where basically all that's going through my mental observation centers is the sound of wind on the prairie. Not very interesting reading, I can tell you (believe me, I've been reading it!).

In not-so-recent news, Nik was up here two weekends ago, Saturday Oct 8 through Monday Oct 10. And she brought beautiful weather with her! She got here Friday evening, just in time for Alissa and Alan to come get me, and then swing by the airport to get her, and then take the four of us out for dinner and drinks. We went to Bahama Breeze, an island-themed place with live Ukelele music, where Alissa worked when she was saving up for school. Mmmm, fruity mixed drinks... :) Poor Nik had just finished a long and sleep-deprived week, however, so a nice long flight and a couple of alcoholic beverages were enough to put her out for the evening, and we went to bed relatively early.

The next day we got up early enough to walk down through the sunshine, crisp air, and gold-and-red, leafy streets to a farmers market just a few blocks from my house. We only bought a couple bottles of cider, and mostly just wandered around smelling the fresh flowers and sampling the jams. I did pick up a jar of some unusual lavendar-scented jelly for Amy, though, our resident lavendar lover.

After the market, we spent the rest of a liesurely day window shopping and touring the UW campus. I think that since Seattle is a bit more coniferous than, say, the Midwest, for example, you don't get quite the dramatic autums here than you would there. But I really like the mixture of elegant, pointy pines with fat, fluffy deciduouses. The pic here is 18th ave where I live, along my walk to school in the mornings.

That evening, we met up with Marty Stepp, who got his MS in CS from the UA, and is now teaching intro CS classes at the UW location in Tacoma. He's Mike Stepp's older brother, for those who know Mike. :) Nik, me, Marty and his friend Amanda (also from the UA, now working up here at Google) spent the next couple of hours wandering around the various stores on capitol hill, stopping once for sushi, and later for coffee. Capitol hill is sort of the resident "colorful" spot in Seattle, where you'll find a lot of rather unusual stores and even more unusual people wandering around. Of the shops we walked by, there were a *surprising* number of halloween-themed ones! I started to remark on this when Marty informed me that, no, not all of these have anything to do whatsoever with halloween -- they're just located on capitol hill, which means what we were seeing we would pretty much see year-round. Wierd. We stopped off in one of the larger halloween-y stores, and I think I found a nice getup for an evening out sometime... that's me in the yellow feathers there, I think I'll save it for a special occasion -- the opera, or something.

Sunday Nik and I again took it easy, wandering around the neighborhood, and this time buying some cold-weather shoes to trade in our perpetual flipflops for. I actually have boots now! It's been a while since I couldn't look down and see the color of my toenail polish, but maybe it's better that I can now walk through puddles in comfort, instead of having pink toes. That evening we met Alissa and Alan for dinner again, and went to a local Moroccan restaurant, where we got some lovely food. I have some pics that I'll put in a separate post, to keep things broken up a bit.

The weekend had really gone swimmingly and Nik got to relax a bit, until Monday morning when the trip ended up a little bit longer than she had planned. I saw her off to the airport early that morning, but then got a message a couple hours later that her layover in Denver had been delayed because of snow. And delayed... and delayed... and delayed! Finally, all flights out of Denver were cancelled. She ended up having to spend a snowy night in a local hotel (missing all of Monday's class), to arrive back in Phoenix early Tues morning. In the end, all turned out well, but it's one of those things you wish you could know about ahead of time, so I could have just kept her here for that day. But c'est la vie!