The third installment begins in a familiar place--inside a room inside the Seattle Grand Hyatt. I like staying in the Hyatt. I guess that's pretty much a no-brainer. For the last night of my stay, my next door neighbor was Alison Bales, a Center for the WNBA team Indiana Fever. She's a big girl. The picture is of the hallway just inside the door to my room. You'll have to read installment four to see what other famous person I encountered. Or, if you are reading my blog entries in reverse order, you already know.
This is the couch that was in my room, and the chair. And a table. And a lamp. Getting back to Alison, the stats on her web page on the Indiana Fever site say she's six feet seven inches tall and weighs 218 pounds, which I think is both taller and heavier than I was at her age. I walked by her a couple times as she was going in and out of the hotel actually. I decided not to ask her to let me take a picture of her to put on the blog, even though I am sure it would have been a nice picture to have here.
The desk where I worked from my room, when I did that. I'm not big into sports. I didn't know who she was the first time I saw her, which was on an elevator with four or five of her teammates. It was basically them and me on the elevator. Alison was getting off on our floor and I was on my way to get ice.
This is the hall in my room between the room with the desk, the room with the bathtub, and the room with the bed. It's kind of a skinny hall, but maybe not as skinny as it looks in the picture. You can have ice delivered at the Hyatt, by the way. But I don't, I just go get it. There was an ice machine two floors above me and two floors below me.
The vanity in my room. I had hit the down elevator button to go down to the ice machine below my floor. So the elevator door opened, and I moved to get onto the elevator and one of them helpfully offered that it was going up. I backed away and then Alison got off of the elevator, and then it occurred to me that it didn't matter whether I went up or down, so I got on the elevator and told them all it didn't matter whether I went up or down.
A picture of the shower door and a bathrobe. The room had two bathrobes in it, but not nearly as many towels as my room in Orlando. The fact that I said it didn't matter whether I went up or down got me some puzzled looks. I explained on the way up that I was going after ice, but that didn't seem to help. They just stuck to their original impression that I was strange or weird for not caring whether I was going up or down on the elevator. Or at least that's the way it seemed.
I don't get a lot of use out of the bathtub, but here it is. It seems pretty big. Maybe I will try it out sometime. I got my ice and went back to my room. I am a clever sort, and when I see five tall, athletic-looking women on an elevator, I can put two and two together. So I sat down at my laptop, sitting on the desk up there, and googled "wnba seattle july" and found in short order that the Indiana Fever were in town to play the Seattle team, whose name I would know if one of their players had stayed next door to me also. But that didn't happen.
The TV in the bedroom part of my room. There was another TV by the desk, but I didn't take a picture of it specifically. You can see part of it in the picture with the desk. The Indiana Fever web site scrolls through pictures of the players on its roster, and it wasn't too long before I recognized a number of the women from my elevator trip. The Internet is a good thing.
The bed in the aforementioned bedroom, again with the pillows. If you've read my earlier blog entries, then you know what I think about all those pillows. If you haven't read my earlier blog entries, then you should. Maybe I should have referred to Alison as Ms. Bales through most of this, but we were neighbors, and I know when she was born, where she grew up, how tall she is, how much she weighs, where she went to school (high school and college), what her majors were (cultural anthropology and biology), the names of her father and mother, and her brothers and sisters. Plus I'm older than she is. So I think first names are appropriate. Sure, I didn't say word one to her and I know all of this because it's in her bio on the Fever web site, but I figure that's irrelevant. I didn't catch that one of her majors was biology on my first read through. If I had, I probably would have talked to her about that.
I was gone for a good long time on this trip, too long to pack enough to wear and still be under the weight restrictions on luggage imposed by United. When I was in Orlando, I had two floors of washing machines in my hotel. I think one of them was just one or two floors under me. So did I wash my clothes in Orlando? Nope. I waited 'til I got to Seattle. The Hyatt is great, but people who stay there pay to have laundry done. Or they do what I do, namely truck their dirty laundry in their luggage to the nearest laundromat, which is about a fifteen to twenty minute walk away, mostly uphill. There are like two laundromats in all of downtown Seattle. So now you know where the term "grunge" came from. Shirts I can get away with wearing twice, maybe, but not my undies. Here they are, tumbling away.
So I thought I would try something new, and take pictures of the view at night outside my window since there were many highrise buildings with lots of lights nearby. I don't particularly have the right kind of camera to do that, but these are some pictures out my room window at night.
If you can boost the gamma of this picture, you might just be able to make out what the menacing dark objects are in the foreground of this picture. Here's a hint: they are in other pictures here, albiet arranged differently. Stacked, as it were. If you research my earlier Hyatt blog entries, you'll find that's a dead giveaway.
This picture has the archway that covers the entrance to the convention center all lit up. It was also taken from a different window than the other two.
In this picture, the buildings actually look like tall buildings with lights lit up at night.
There is nothing better than relaxing in the evening with a nice glass of . . . well, Welch's grape soda. It seemed like kind of a shame to never use the stemware, so I figured that was close enough.
Find yourself wondering what these buildings looked like in the daytime? Then you are in luck. Here is the Sheraton, another nearby hotel.
Here is a tall building with a flag on it. The eloquence of my prose is boundless.
The street leading to the convention center. I forget which one. The street name, I mean. The convention center is the Washington State Convention and Trade Center. That I remember.
The view to the extreme left out of the window I took this picture from.
My room had a lot of windows. In the distance here you can see water, which I think is Puget Sound.
From this one you can see the Roosevelt Hotel.
The Sheraton again. And a tall shiny building. These are the buildings that turned out like buildings in the night picture up there.
Once again, looking left, but from a different window.
Looking as far left as we can look from here.
A picture of the arch covering the street. I guess it is an arch.
In spite of my not mentioning it until now, I was in Seattle for TechReady5. Even though most of my blogs are about stuff outside of work, I spend a whole lot more time working.
The registration area, where I spent most of my time in Seattle, at least while I was awake. And with that, the fourth installment waits to be written and the third installment comes to a close.
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
Category: Jobs, Work, Careers
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