Back in Bellevue

It’s Sunday evening, and I’m home – in Bellevue, that is. One thing I’ve discovered is that in some ways, after living elsewhere for longer than I lived here, Fairbanks is still home. I kept looking around hoping to run into someone, anyone, I’d gone to school with in Fairbanks, but even after almost ten days, I didn’t. Granted, places like the clinic or Denny’s, where I took my grandmother for lunch a few times, might not have been the most likely places to run into people in their mid-thirties, like I am, but still, I had hopes. It’s hard to leave now, as I think my dad could really use my help here for another week, but while my manager at Microsoft has been very generous about letting me come up here for as long as I have, another week would probably be an unreasonable burden on my team.

On the good side, I’m an Alaska Airlines MVP from all the flying I did last year, and that means I’ve been upgrade to first class for my both segments of my flight home. I was also in first class on the trip up, so my pricey $730 coach flight (it’s a killer buying airfare on short notice) has become a pretty reasonably priced first class flight. If only I wasn’t getting back to Sea-Tac at 2am. If I’m keeping track of things correctly, I think I only need one more trip back to Maryland to reach MVP again for next year, so there are probably quite a few first class flights in my future.

After being away for ten days, there were tons of things I needed to get caught up on. My mailbox was incredibly full - enough that there was a slip in there that they were holding some of my mail (not the USPS, but the Pony Express place where I actually get my mail.) Except for a break to add to my Seattle City Walk project and dinner, I just ground away at a long list. I only finished about half of it anyway.

There was one other break this evening. The fire alarms went off in my apartment complex, all four buildings. What an incredibly obnoxious sound that was. My cat, Flicker, immediately ran over to me and was meowing piteously about the sound. I pulled out her carrier, stuffed her inside, and headed down to the courtyard. Only after I got down there did it occur to me that I brought her, but not stuff like my phone or my laptop. I'd had a conversation about that with Trevor once - what stuff do you own that you consider core. I'd figured I'd never leave either of those two items behind, since I can pretty much continue my present lifestyle with just that. But I guess when it comes to fire (or really, the horrible piercing noise of a fire alarm,) just getting my cat out of there was sufficient.

In the end, I think it was someone in the next building over that burned something in their oven, then opened the door to their apartment to try to keep their apartment alarm from going off. Instead, it set off the hallway detector, which triggers the entire complex' alarm system. Oops.

For now, though, I have to get to bed. I'm back at work tomorrow morning and I'm sure I'm going to have a long day ahead of me.