My So Called Life

Business Ventures

/ Shane / Leave a comment

I don’t remember where I heard about this, but I remember hearing about someone who came up with the concept of 3 legged underwear. The brilliance of the underwear is that you could wear it for 4 days by using the first two legs, then the second two legs, then flip the underwear inside out and repeat.

I wanted to know if this really existed or if it was something that we came up with in conversation, so that, if possible, I could quickly steal this brilliant idea and make millions of dollars. After poking around a little while, I came across a reference to it here, which pointed me to the Wall Street Journal. (You can find the article here, but you have to have an account to read the entire thing, which I don’t)

So, okay, no dice on that one, I guess someone has that out there already. Actually, he was smarter than me anyway, because he put the legs in a circle, rather than the straight line I was imagining, which allowed him to get a total of 6 days out of them. Kind of reminds me of that old SNL commercial for 3 legged jeans. I tried for hours to find a link to a video of that, but it proved too elusive.

Anyway, I might not be able to make my millions off of that, but we did have many hours of entertainment speculating on things like: what is the upper limit on the number of  legs you can add? Adding one leg (for a total of 4) gets you 8 days, adding two gets you 10, etc. but eventually you would have too much fabric in your pants. This sort of mathematical musing eventually led into story problems, such as, how many pairs of underwear and how many legs on that underwear would you need to make a trip of X number of days, or, if a man leaves on a train from New York at 6 p.m. with a 4 legged pair of underwear, what city will he need to do laundry in?

But back to the problem at hand, how am I going to become rich? Sara had a brilliant idea; travel sized Nicorette. The packs could be maybe 1 or 2 pieces, as opposed to the regular 100 pack, specifically to be sold by flight attendants on airplanes. They wouldn’t be able to print our money fast enough. Not to be outdone, I added several  more lines of business, such as movie theater concession stands. Those of you who haven’t spent time around heavy smokers don’t realize how hard it is for them to sit through movies. I have heard people say that they just don’t go to movies anymore because of this.

So look for “travel Nicorette”™©®, coming soon to a theater near you!

Kids can embarrass you in weird ways

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I’ve mentioned before that I spend a lot of time listening to music on youtube at work. Well, the other day I was minding my own business, listening to music, and a senior guy who is sort of an outside consultant came over to ask me a question. As he was staring at my screen, I was forced to bring up the webpage and pause the music, so I could hear him. The problem is, I was listening to a Laurie Berkner song, and though he couldn’t hear the music, the video was clearly a kid’s video, with little animated bumble bees flying around, etc.

Now it could have been a lot worse, lord knows there are plenty of uncomfortable visuals in music videos. So I probably shouldn’t be embarrassed about listening to the same music as my 2 year old, and that guy has kids anyway, so I’m sure he can understand how badly kids music gets in your head. But still, I’m sure he was like, “What the?” when he saw what I was listening to. Very embarrassing.

So here it is, in all it’s embarrassing glory. Feel free to watch at work.

Anybody else ever do something like that? No, probably just me.

Seattle Part Three – Seattle Propper

/ Shane / 1 Comment

As soon as the work was done (great conference by the way, learned a *ton*) we were off to downtown Seattle to hit up the major attractions. We hit up Seattle Center and, though we didn’t actually go up in the Space Needle, we got a good look at it. We did check out the Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum.

The museums were okay, but nothing special. Granted we couldn’t spend as much time there as I would have liked, since Evie was getting restless, but after we left, Evie managed to get us to buy some tickets to the carnival rides outside. It quickly became apparent that all of us would have enjoyed the day more if we had taken the money for the museum and just let Evie blow it on the rides. Add in a trip to the children’s museum and I have to say that Seattle Center has Navy Pier beat for fun by at least a factor of 10.

We ate possibly the best meal of the trip at a creperie of all places, 611 Supreme. My crepe was better than I imagined a crepe could be, they let us just get a side of shrimp for Evie at the “extra topping” price, and the toasted almond bread with goat cheese and olives was awesome. Don’t even get me started on “Le Chocolat”, our desert crepe.

The next day we hit up the aquarium and Pike Place Market before eventually relaxing with some friends at the corner of Love & Loss in the Olympic Sculpture Park. The aquarium was kind of small, but we still had fun. I liked the giant octopus (you can just see the evil in his eye) and Evie liked sitting in the jellyfish ring: “There’s jellyfish under my bottom!” Pike Place was pretty much exactly as I expected, but still well worth the trip. We saw the requisite people throwing (and catching) fish and the original Starbucks (can you imagine, at one point it was the only Starbucks in the world?) as well as some unexpected things like cheese making, lots of weddings, and a cat wearing a sweater. I also saw an unrelated dog riding in a bike basket, wearing a hat. The sculpture park was actually pretty cool and even if you’re not into modern sculpture, the view was breathtaking.

Finally we were off for home, with a short layover in “Kansas Silly” (Evie’s words, not mine) we made it all the way back to Chicago in time for bed.

Overall, my impression of Seattle was very favorable. It is pretty small for a big city. I am used to looking at a Chicago map and the scale of the Seattle map kept throwing me off. Despite that, there is so much to do there, and the city is so hip, that it feels much bigger. The views of the ocean and mountains were spectacular, although, growing up in the Midwest, it doesn’t take much landscape-wise to impress me. In Indiana we were impressed with just a hill. The people of Seattle have a very distinct sense of style, unlike anything I’ve seen anywhere else. I got the impression that a lot of people were trying a little too hard…there were no half measures. If you were punk, you were punk. At home I’ll see maybe one person a week that I think, “whoa, did you see that guy?” or “what the heck was she wearing?” and in Seattle I would think that easily once per block. One major downside is the city is just crawling with homeless people. On the other hand, though there were a lot more there then in Chicago, they didn’t harass me for money the way the ones here do.

One last tale to report, our downtown hotel had a sign stating that the pool was closed due to “unfortunate circumstances”. That means dead body, right? Can that mean anything else?

Part One | Part Two

Seattle Part Two – Work Interrupts

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The second part of the trip was a little less interesting because I had to attend to what I was really in Seattle for; work. Let me start by saying that Microsoft is a crazy, crazy huge confusing place. It is as big or bigger than any university you have been too, complete with tons of young people walking and biking all over the place. I was not prepared for the size of it all.

Since I had to attend a training / conference, Sara and Evie took Seattle and the surrounding area by storm. Without poor old dad, they hit up the zoo where Evie got to feed a giraffe (seriously, how did they manage to get “zoo.org”, were they like the first zoo with a website?), the Pacific Science Center, a children’s museum and a full tea service. The coolest part was that our existing Chicago zoo and museum memberships got them into the first two completely scott free.

We also managed to hit up our first really good meal of the trip at Pomegranate in Redmond. Not only did everybody get something that was delicious, they had a really cool kids meal that seemed very fancy, but was really things like mac and cheese and carrots underneath.

As a side note, our rental car was actually very enjoyable. Usually I always end up with something awful, like a Purple PT Cruiser (no seriously, I had one), but this time we landed a nice, respectable Ford Focus. It was small and zippy, the perfect size to fit all of our stuff, and we averaged around 32 mpg. I had some trouble with how small it was until I figured out the manual pump seat adjustment thing, but after that I appreciated the smallness for parking and navigating. It also had this really sweet dash option that gave you minute by minute updates on how your driving was affecting your fuel economy, which was pretty cool. All in all, probably the best rental car I have ever had. Of course I would never buy something non-GM, but I guess buying any new, American car right now can’t hurt.

Unfortunately, the rental car led to another theme of the trip, which was the dreaded Elmo CD. For her birthday, Evie got an Elmo CD that is customized to say her name. I thought it was really cool, at least at the time. More and more Evie was excited that Elmo was saying her name. “He’s talking to me!” It all came together in the perfect storm on the trip when Evie insisted on listening to the CD over and over again, every time we were in the car. Sara had it worse than me with all the side trips, but we probably listened to it a hundred times. It became torturous and the songs would haunt me in my sleep. I can tell you for a fact that hell is listening to Elmo on an endless loop.

I apologize for this part of the trip being less than exciting. Maybe Sara can expound on some of the fun stuff I missed in the comments. Or you can go back and re-read Part One.