She passed the long interview and the principal has decided she is a good fit. She even called in for references

to Zoe’s current preschool. Ms Uzma said Zoe is a very well-behaved, polite, articulate girl. Never have to repeat directions, she does everything asked of her by teachers. LOL! I am amazed how Zoe is managing to keep so many people fooled all the time!  She is probably an angel with teachers, but has no respect for parents! LOL!

Seattle area saw an unusual Thanksgiving weekend.  There was no rain and 3 out of 4 days were sunny!  We cooked a 14 lbs. turkey with the usual side dishes.  Zoe ate the mash potatos and salad.  She thought the turkey was yucky.

 I finally got all the leaves off the lawn.  I bought a Makita leaf blower a couple of weeks ago and could not use it due to rainy weekends (good excuse for not cleaning up the leaves).  It’s a 4-stroke model; very quiet compared to the typical 2-stroke models.  I didn’t bother with ear protection.  Olga found a good deal on a used Honda mower on Craigslist.  I finally gave the lawn its last mowing until next spring.  Now the place looks tidy like the rest of the neighborhood.

On Saturday evening we braved the crowds and went to Fry’s Electronics in Renton.  I wasn’t brave (or crazy) enough to attempt it on Black Friday.  I overheard people saying that earlier in the day the checkout line was 3 hours!  I was there late in the day and it was only about 10 minutes.  Of course, I missed out on all great deals but still managed to come home with a few pieces of hardware for a soon to be built Windows Home Server.  Zoe added another soft-toy penguin to her growing  collection of stuffed penguins.

Sunday was sunny and cold.  I took the dogs for a walk at Juanita Bay Park in  Kirkland (above picture).  The park is on Lake Washington and is a great place to view waterfowls and other aquatic wildlife. 

Zoe has a strange sense of humor, sometimes she surprises us with very sarcastic remarks. here are some examples:

1. When I was interviewing this summer I passed some rounds of interviews successfuly, and others I did not do so good at In particular Nat and I had many conversation about all day Google interview which I thought I didn’t do well on the last couple of rounds and was kind of upset about it. Finally I got some offers and accepted an offer from Microsoft. Microsoft send Zoe a wellcome to Seattle package with some Microsoft toys and a Microsoft hat. I asked Zoe if she wants to wear a Microsoft hat. She looked at me with a sneaky smile, laughed and said:

“No, mom! I want a Google hat!”

2. Zoe really likes penguins she has about 10 different pet penguins of differend size. 2-3 of those are her favorite and she carries them around with her all the time, sleeps with them, feeds them, talks to them, throws them across the room, throws them down from the second floor in the house, etc. One time I asked her why she throws her penguin, he might get hurt! Zoe looked at me in a very condescending way and said: “MOM! He is a fuzzy penguin! He is a TOY! Toys don’t get hurt!” and rolled her eyes.

 3. Today Zoe wanted a fresh piece of paper to draw on. I couldn’t find where Nat put the paper. Zoe insisted it was there in the cabinet where I couldn’t find it. Finally I found the paper and exclained “Oh HERE it is!” . Zoe laughed and said “You a a genious, MOM!”

week of 11/4-11/10:

2 showings by realtors with clients, one preview by realtor for a client

week of 11/18 to 11/24:

1. Fri Nov. 23 @ 12:30-1:00 PM PST

I have never lived in a place where the forecast for rain is 100%.  That is saying something about the rain here.

I drove up to Mill Creek to have lunch with Chris Dahl, the recruiter that placed me with Intermec. We met at Thai Rhapsody, a Thai restaurant in the newly built Mill Creek Town Center.  The town center is a ‘planned’ downtown area.  It did not develop out of some old part of a town like ‘real’ downtowns.  It has many restaurants and shops and made for walking but with plenty of parking, too.

Chris is a very pleasant guy, probably is his 40’s. We talked quite a bit about New Mexico and Tucson. Apparently he came very close to buying a second home in Tuscon area. He has visited Santa Fe and spent some time in Silver City, NM. He was bitten by that ‘romantic’ image of the Southwest. I gave him my take on what it’s like to live there. I pointed out to him that my perception of the area really changed after I became a parent. It may be fine if you want to retire there and not have to worry about raising a family.

After lunch I drove to Renton to buy a cordless phone at Fry’s. I had to quickly figured out that you can’t just buy any cordless phone, not when your house has a wireless LAN. The associate was sort of helpful, and told me that 5.8 GHz digital phone will work fine with WLAN. However, she not point me to the latest wireless phone technology, DECT 6.0. I found that on my own. Then, the associate mentioned that it will be cleaner than 5.8 GHz digital! Maybe they were trying to unload all those 5.8 GHz phones sitting on the shelves? There were fewer DECT 6.0 phones than the other types. Life is more complicated these days for us consumer of electronics.

I found 3 images from a webcam session on the evening of October 22, 2005. The best image was mars12.bmp. I processed it with Photoshop 6.0 Unsharp Mask. Here’s the settings used:

Click here to see it.

Zoe mentioned on the ride home that there are more teachers at her school as compared to one teacher at her old school.  She mentioned that she likes the newest teacher.  She mentioned that she can’t remember Thali, a classmate in Santa Fe.

She talked about one of her classmate’s mom not going to work.  It sounded like the woman stayed around to read after dropping off her child.   I am not sure, it can be difficult to understand her while driving.

Tonight, after requesting peanut butter, Zoe wanted cucumbers to dip in them.  She referred to it as putting it (cucumber slice) into a mud puddle.  Out of curiosity, I tried a slice with some peanut butter on it.  Not bad.

Redmond, WA. Front yard. Transparency: 2-3 out of 5, Seeing: 3 out of 5

Time 12:05 A.M.

Perseus was on the meridian at the time of observation. The were some light clouds to the southeast.

I used a C5 on a Bogen tripod with geared head. The comet was visible to the naked eye just to the north of Mirfak. In the 6×30 finder, it was a large, round, nebulous object.

At 41x (19mm Panoptic), the first thought that came to mind was it looked like a jellyfish! The object was large but I did not try to estimate its size. The shape was a disc that was not quite round. One side of the ‘disc’ was slightly irregular. The center was brighter than the rest. There was no tail. At 78x and 112x, I did not detect any additional discernible features.

Some clouds moved in, cutting the session short. I was able to pick out Mars through the thin clouds with the C5. At 112x it was quite small, andI could barely make out some dark features on it.

It’s still clear and sunny today at the Microsoft campus…

I thought it was going to be grey and raining every day Oct - April?