Stormy weather brings a blog post!

Mid-October Storm

Finally, the weather forecasters are right, bringing a pretty awesome storm into the Bay Area! Sure, I should be posting about other things like buying a house, knowing the sex of my baby, the Sharks starting their season, etc, etc, but not this time pal.

I have to admit that the commuters on Lawrence Expressway this morning were surprisingly with it, cautious, and courteous. Overall, drivers were doing the right thing in the heavy rain, which is opposite from what normally happens during nice weather. Before I go into what almost happened on Caribbean, a slight diversion.

When there is nice rain like this, Marco and I usually like to go out driving, looking for puddles caused by backed up drains, and driving through them while giggling. It’s good fun. This morning, as I was going the speed limit on Caribbean (45, officer), I noticed I was the only one in the right lane and most others were in the middle or the left. I didn’t notice at all the huge puddle that was maybe 50 feet long and covered 2/3 of my lane from the right. Needless to say, I hit it at 45, couldn’t see anything, and fought my steering wheel to keep me on the road. Let’s just say I respected the next large body of standing water a little further down the road.

And, I took the top off of my truck and parked it on a slight decline in the parking lot to see how much water it collects. Yeah, I’m like that.

And, if you were wondering about the wind…

I like that there are professional writers who are worse spellers than me

So, spelling has never been my strong point. I peaked, i think, in around third grade. I remember specifically being in the back of the room with the teacher and another student as we were the finalists for the class’ representative for the school spelling bee. My word was “loose” and I remember thinking that I knew how to spell that word, but spelling it right might mean I would then have to go to the next phase and possibly have to do this spelling thing in front of the room. I also thought about how my same teacher gave a student a hard time for asking him how to spell “Halloween” and he kept singing the song “h-a-double-l-o-w-double-e-n” and she didn’t like that. So I spelled “loose”, “l-o-s-e” and I lost.

Several years later, spelling checkers on computers came out and my spelling went out the door.

In my professional life, I was IM-ing someone and asked how to spell that word that meant transitioning from one thing to another, as in, “that was a good blank into the new topic”. He told me “segue”. I believe I asked how to spell the full word. There was some silly back and forth as I’m a Computer Science major and he was some English major or some such. Ultimately, I was the idiot when I learned that, of course, he was right and I was dumb.

All that said, I couldn’t have been happier when I read this AP article about Clinton going to North Korea (not unlike the old Vulcan proverb, “Only Nixon could go to China”) and saw:

Releasing the journalists would be a face-saving segueway into talks, they said.

Nice! Go editors!

An now I’ll stop procrastinating.

Crazy hot weather in Seattle thanks to The Big Green Stripe!

I’m reading about how my friends up in Washington are all suffering through crazy hot weather. Every once in a while, the normally very comfortable summer heats up and air conditioningless Washingtonians suffer. I took a look at the weather forecast on Yahoo! and discovered what’s going on. The Big Green Stripe! It’s so powerful it turns the ocean green and wipes out the terrain in its path!

The Big Green Stripe!

Expired

Day 5, 12 July 2009, originally uploaded by Kelly Hirano.

In life, there are certain things that you just have to keep up with. Paying bills, getting and opening the mail, checking email, getting gas, keeping credit and ATM cards up to date… let’s spend a minute on that last one.

As I discovered that I’m getting low on cash, I stopped by my local ATM on my way home. Inserted my card and it was rejected because it was expired. No problem, I figured, I’ll try another one from a different bank, since this ATM is surcharge free. Expired. Oh, well, I have another one. Hmm… this one has the activation sticker on it and I also have the expired one, which expired 8 months ago. The new one didn’t work either. Nice.

So, home I went to get online and on the phone to start to try to fix my problems. My smaller credit unions couldn’t do anything for me on a weekend, but my experience with Wells Fargo was awesome!

I have two cards: one expired one that I’ve had for a while and a second one that I got when Bernadette and I combined cards. An email Wells sent me last week said they recently sent me a card that I should activate. Upon calling, apparently, they sent me this card months ago and since I didn’t have it in my possession, she was able to cancel it and consolidate my new accounts on that single card and nickname all of them so they show up all human-friendly on the ATM screen. Awesome! In the past, I’ve gone into the branch to do something like stop a CD from automatically renewing and I had to fill out paperwork. For another CD, I called in and they took care of it on the phone.

No more branches for me! And, I need to more regularly check my wallet for old crap. I know, I know… stunning post here. And no, you can’t have that last minute of your life back.

Day 1 of 365

Day 1, 8 July 2009, originally uploaded by Kelly Hirano.

It’s funny, what this world of blogging has turned into. Back in the day of Yahoo! 360, I would blog about random things and my posts would vary in length from a paragraph to may paragraphs. Then 360 went away, my blog sorta disappeared, and my friends that blogged all went their separate ways. The big bloggers picked something like WordPress and some went to posting notes to Facebook or microblogging on Twitter or using Facebook status messages to accomplish the same task.

Now I have a new mission.

My mission, which I’ve chosen to accept and that starts today, is to take a picture of myself every day for a year and post it to Flickr. Of course, there are rules. What fun would this be without rules? Zane and I dreamed up these rules and already came up with some new rules for next year and the year after that. We’ll see how far we get on this one. And yes, I know this idea isn’t original or even new, but it seemed like a fun challenge.

And now, the rules.

1. One photo of yourself taken each day and posted to flickr in a set called “365 days”
2. You must be the primary subject and the photo must contain your face and may contain other people
3. “Day” is defined as between midnight and midnight *local* time.
4. Pictures must be posted to flickr at least weekly
5. Picture titles must contain the day number as well as the current date
6. No photoshopping!
7. Pictures may not be taken by another human. (mirrors, self-timers, traffic cameras: all ok.)

The span of time is July 8, 2009 – July 7, 2010.

So, my picture that’s part of this post is Day 1. Technically, I can stay up for another 4 minutes and take a picture for Day 2, but that seems cheap. Admittedly, I’ll use that trick at some point over the next year, but not yet.

And no, this doesn’t mean I’ll be blogging every day about the picture I took.