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Cody got attacked and I got yelled at. Just another day at the dog park I guess. Apparently it’s impolite for your dog to defend himself and win the fight, of all things.

Our mutt needs regular exercise. Lots and lots or regular exercise. What that means for us is the choice of taking up running or going to the dog park a lot. Personally, I prefer the dog park.

It has become our daily, or twice daily, routine now to go and take a couple laps around the park. I enjoy it. It’s a nice point in my day to get some fresh air and chat with some new people. Though it’s getting to the point that these aren’t new people anymore, but actually familiar people that we know in the community.

Most of the time I’m quite impressed with how much attention these owners pay to their dogs. More than just feeding, walking, and playing with them, they also seem to understand their behaviors and moods. Generally this also includes an understanding of normal behaviors at the park, and fights from time to time.

Unfortunately, today I met one of the owners that doesn’t fall into this category.

First off, Cody isn’t an angel that can do no harm. For the most part, he’s a pretty good dog, but his play can get fast and rough at times. An added concern to this is that he doesn’t always take breaks from the play, as other dogs do, to let the tension drain. So, if we’re not watching, the play at times can escalate into a fight.

This leads to today. A woman arrived at the park with two dogs. Cody started playing with one of the dogs and it was getting a bit rough. I was watching, but I wasn’t really concerned at this point. Both of the dogs were taking breaks from the play and then coming back to it together.

The woman’s second dog apparently didn’t approve and started being aggressive towards Cody. He would run up and hit Cody with his body, cutting in between the two playing. The first couple times this happened Cody just ignored him and the two dogs went back to playing. But the new dog wouldn’t let it be and eventually pushed Cody to the point that he turned around, put his hackles up, and gave the dog a good snarl and bark.

Here’s where the other dog really started in on Cody, ultimately to his detriment. It was a quick fight, and no one got hurt, but Cody was pretty obviously the winner.

To this point I had just let it all be. From my point of view, Cody was being picked on by a bully and had stood up for himself. Apparently the other owner didn’t see it that way and started screaming at me to control my dog, without actually doing anything herself to end the fight.

I put my hand on Cody’s collar and walked him away. A few moments later, once the other dog had been walked away a bit, it was back to play as usual.

Sigh… another day at the park.

Hello my friends. Welcome back.

It’s amazing how life seems to get ahead of me sometimes. I have been putting off this update for a while because I’ve been getting overwhelmed with the amount of information that I would have to post. But of course, the longer I wait, the more life moves on and the more there is to tell.

I’ll try to hit the highlights here. These are not going to necessarily be in order of importance or time.

We’re engaged! Beth and I finally made it official and got engaged. Relationship wise, it doesn’t really mean any major changes. We’ve been dating now for… hmm… almost 6 years. I asked her to marry me last summer while we were in downtown Portland, OR. It was a beautiful sunny day and we had been out at the local weekend arts market. It was getting towards the end of the day and we stopped on a bench in front of some cafes. I gave her the ring, asked her, and she obviously said yes. The wedding planning has started, but the event won’t be until the summer of 2009. Hopefully this will give us lots of time to set the details at our own pace.

We’ve moved! Our second, also expensive, piece of news is that we have moved to Seattle and bought a house. Well, not exactly a house, and we don’t exactly own it yet. We found a great little townhouse in West Seattle. It’s new construction and because of the housing market it was an upgraded unit that we were able to buy for the same price as a base model. So we’re really happy with a nice new kitchen that I can finally cook in, great appliances, and upgraded flooring and finishes. The location is working out very nice for us too. We’re just 10 minutes from downtown Seattle, 20 minutes from the airport, and 30 – 40 minutes from work.

We’ve adopted… a dog! The other biggest lifestyle change is our new dog. Cody is a medium sized mutt. When we picked him up from the shelter they thought he was a collie and hound mix. But really, he’s got a lot more mutt than that in him, and probably some greyhound or whippet. He’s very smart, but also tons of energy. If we don’t run him twice a day we pay for it that night.

That’s probably about it for the major points. I’ll check in again in a bit and cover a few more of the more minor things that have also been going.

Ta-ta for now.

We were given a bird feeder and a stand for Christmas.  It has been a real joy watching the birds coming to our porch and the trees around our windows.  I don’t think I really understood how many birds we were attracting until I looked over the railing yesterday and noticed the substantial mound of sunflower seed shells that the birds have let fall to the ground.  Sorry neighbors.  I hope you don’t mind too much.

Since the bird feeder is out on the porch we’ve begun leaving the curtains open a lot more often and now that the weather is turning warm, the door as well.  It took us a couple months to really notice it, but we have a fairly large space out there.  It’s probably a larger area than we have for our kitchen.  Our latest project has been to turn this area into another living space for us.

It’s turning into a very tranquil spot.  We’ve got a lot of potted plants last weekend, and this weekend we put up a trellis along the railing.  When we’re in the living room, the trellis now blocks most of the view of the other apartments.  The final touch that I have been working on is a little water garden with a small waterfall. 

We’re off to the pet store tonight to get a few goldfish for our little pond.  I think Beth has already named them.

I’ve found a new distraction for my time. Or rather an old distraction once again.

I’m a pirate! Yarr!

A couple years ago, while I was still in college, I started playing Puzzle Pirates. It’s a great game that you can spend a little or a lot of time playing. And in my case I spent a lot of time. It was so much fun that I got to the point where I had to give it up so that I could graduate.

It’s an addicting game to say the least, where you run around and do all the pirate like things that you should, but each activity is performed by playing little games and solving puzzles.

Even better though than just the games is that you can play the basic game for free.

It’s an online, multiplayer game, with all of the social aspects of that, but each person is performing an individual game and task that adds to the overall ability of the crew and boat that you’re sailing with.

At the end of the day, when you’ve made your fortunes pillaging the seas, you can come back to the islands and relax in your house. If you’ve got some more energy, there’s still money to be made working in or running shops and table games to play with other pirates at the Inn.

Spending all that money isn’t a problem either. There are lots of shops to order clothes, furniture, weapons, ships, and anything else you might want. You can even trade in that shack of yours for a huge mansion.

If you want to play, do me a favor and use this link: www.puzzlepirates.com It will give you a few extra bucks of game money for being referred by a player and it will also put you into the same ocean as me so that we can play together.

I just pulled this information out of the website access report from last month:

It seems that drag queens are a popular search topic out there on the web. Or at least my website is becoming a destination for it. I count 5 of the top 20 search results having to do with queens, including the number one result.

I looked into it a little closer, and wouldn’t you know, but I found two different posts on this site about drag shows I was in, and one whole picture gallery.

Things we’ll do for charity, eh?

Update: I’m a geek, and this is really funny: http://www.xkcd.com/c26.html

It’s very odd who you will run into and where these days.

When I was waiting to get onto my flight in portland I ran into a group of my friends from college. They just happened to be in town for a conference and were leaving to go home at exactly the same time that I was flying out. We managed to snatch some time to have a nice chat and catch up a bit.

A couple days later, I’m hanging out, having a nice time in Vietnam, and just happen to go onto facebook. I haven’t been on facebook for a long time and randomly I click on a picture of a friend of mine. You wouldn’t believe it, but the first message on their wall was “How are you enjoying Hanoi?” No shit…

Long story short, I looked em up and was able to go out and have a nice evening last night with them.

So, like I said, you never know.

When you make a living installing multi-million dollar instruments you come to expect the unexpected snag in the process. Installing the first new TEM in the entire country of Vietnam adds a whole new layer to it though.

Of all the things that come up all over the world, South East Asia probably has a few of the more unusual possibilities for trouble. Our microscope was delivered to the site sometime last year, but the room wasn’t ready for some time, and the system had to sit in storage for about a year. On the first day of the install I opened the main electronics cabinet for the system and discovered it was full of animal bones.

The fragments appear to be from a fairly large animal. Probably one of the local dogs or some pig scraps from a rubbish pile. It will be interesting to find out what the conductive qualities of bone and rat urine are.

There are a lot of managers and supervisors on the e-mail chain for this one. I can only imagine the consternation that my first day’s report must have caused.

I feel like death.

The whole of the country of the Netherlands is infected with some sort of evil pox or flu.  I managed to avoid getting sick right up until the end, but it finally got me.  This is sure going to make 4 days of back to black flights a joy.

There’s nothing quite like a miserable sinus cold at 40 thousand feet.

I passed my course.

I’m at the end of my first week in the Netherlands.  I think I’m mostly over the jetlag by now, and everything is going pretty well. 

It has been a nice week touching on all of the basics for my job.  Training thus far has been a bit hit or miss.  I believe that I’ve been learning a lot of important bits, but the class has reminded me of a few things so far that I’m not as strong with yet.  I’ve got one more week here with this class, and then the next 5 years of my life to really get good with these microscopes.

We took a day trip down to Belgium today.  With the other guys in the class, we borrowed two of the company cars and headed over to Brugge.  It’s a pretty little town that’s been around since the 9th century. 

We climbed to the top of the clock tower for a little history and a great view of the town.  That is a heck of a trip.  The stair starts out winding and reasonably wide, but as you get higher the turns get tighter and tighter.  This is the first time I’ve been able to encounter both vertigo from heights and claustrophobia at the same time. 

Along the way there were a few rooms to poke into and rest.  A couple of them had some pieces of history and explanations of how the tower had been used in the past.  At one time the clock tower used to be the strong room for the town; it was used as a place to store the treasury and other important documents.  But the coolest room was definitely the clockworks.  The tower not only was a clock but also had a full set of bells that could be played with the clockworks or by a musician in the room above. 

We happened to be climbing the tower near the top of the hour, so we waited a few minutes in the room with the clockworks and got to see how the chimes are played on the bells.  It was really quite amazing to watch all of the gears and wheels whirling as the time was kept and announced.

After that it was off for a fantastic lunch at a cafe nearby and some shopping.  There’s a great little shop in Brugge that has chocolate that is out of this world.  I’m not at all ashamed to say that I’ve bought quite a bit of it to take home with me.