Evan Dodds – Non-work-related blog

I’m pleased and impressed that someone saw my initial posts and found them worth reply (thanks CaTiE)! Good times!

 

Living in Charlotte, I never spent much time at the NC beaches though. Hope you enjoy the rest of your summer!

This is the first in what will hopefully be many “Seattle” themed posts.

 

See, Jodi and I moved to Seattle (from, let’s say: Charlotte, North Carolina) back in March/April. She had lived her whole life in the south (Texas and then the Carolinas), while I had grown up mostly in the upper-midwest. The south was nice, particularly moving to a “big” city like Columbia, SC or Charlotte, NC… but it was also very hot, and very “traditional”.

 

By “traditional”, I really mean that it was “steeped in tradition”. And cutting through the euphemisms still further, I mean that it was frequently unwilling to move forward. Dragged, kicking and screaming into the present. Tradition is all well and good, but sometimes I found that my friendly neighbors in the south were so stuck on tradition that it got in the way of progress.

 

And I like progress.

Very much.

 

This isn’t really out to be a negative post. The south is great, the northwest is just, uh, great-er! And with that, Seattle!

 

I was out and about this weekend and as I was returning from some errands, the street in front of our condo was blocked off and a policeman was directing traffic away from where I needed to be. “Oh no”, I thought… “there must have been a terrible accident in front of our building” (or something like that). In any event, I was curious and apprehensive about what was going on.

 

Turns out it was a parade. And not just any old holiday parade; a “unity” parade. Now, we seem to have lots of parades in Seattle. For instance, the other week there was a big pride parade up in Capitol Hill. The one this weekend was a unity parade. I guess there’re different, but to me it seems like they’re serving roughly the same purpose — getting folks out for an hour or two of fun, to celebrate something interesting. The parade was cool, and folks seemed to be having a good time in the great weather. In any event, it is cool to be in a place where people like to celebrate pride, unity, togetherness, friendliness, whatever! Celebrate this stuff all you want, I say!

 

Then, afterwards I patronized my local independent bookseller and bought the new Harry Potter book. Read the heck out of it (finished it, in fact) and then on Sunday we hit up Volunteer Park just in time to see a few minutes of Shakespeare. By that point, we were getting cold and tired, so we had a great dinner at Deluxe Bar and Grill.

 

All-in-all, a very good weekend!

I created this “spaces”… uh… space/blog/whatever way back last year when MSN Spaces first went online. I’ve had my blog at http://blogs.technet.com/evand active for a year or two now, but I’ve always treated that one as a very work-related and technical blog. I was thinking perhaps I would use this “space” for more non-work-related postings.

 

So I set it up. And I launched into trying to figure out how to use blogjet (my posting program of choice, which I paid $$ to register) to post into this great new personal blog. And I looked all over — mind you, this is right after spaces came out — and found nothing. Now, of course, there’s a bit more info and Dare has even posted some of the upcoming plans on his blog.

 

I’m glad that I’ll eventually be able to use blogjet with my space, but perhaps I’ll be enthusiastic enough for a bit to use the web interface.

 

In any case, a big welcome to the blog. To both of us.