Webb Family Blog

We have been planning a “big” vacation for quite some time, and it has finally come about. Our vacation begins by a flight to Seattle, Washington. I have never been to Seattle, nor the State of Washington. The trip begins and ends in Seattle, but is primarily a cruise to Alaska; somewhere else I’ve never been. Yesterday was the beginning of our trip. Our flight was aboard Alaska Airlines from Sacramento to SeaTac International. Our flight departed at 7 am, but prior to departure, Kellie and I upgraded to First Class; my first experience with First Class. We were the first to board the plane and we sat in the first row. Prior to departure, our attendant asked us what we’d like to drink and if we wanted the standard yogurt and bear claw (breakfast pastry). In my seat, I had plenty of leg room while our two seats occupied the side-to-side space of 3 coach seats with a moderate sized divider. Once airborne, our attendant brought us our yogurt and warmed bear claw; I had never seen such a large bear claw… at least 1 foot long! He refilled my drink several times throughout the flight. We flew past several mountain peaks, such as Mt. Shasta in California, Crater Lake, Mt. Bachelor and his Three Sisters, as well as Mt. Hood in Oregon, and several peaks in Washington, such as Mt. St. Helens, which is still quite an obviously active volcano. We landed at SeaTac, picked up our luggage and took the shuttle to Enterprise Rent-A-Car.

After we picked up the rental, we left our luggage at our hotel, the Best Western Airport Executel, and headed up to downtown Seattle. We went to the famous Pike Place Public Market and strolled around. I used my brand new video camera to record some of the sights… I muted the audio, as it was quite distracting.

It was very busy in the market place because there were many events going on, including the Inaugural Rock & Roll Seattle Marathon. The market place is home to many famous shops, such as Beecher’s Cheese, Piroshky Piroshky Bakery, and the original Starbuck’s Cafe.

We are now about to return the rental and head back to the airport to meet up with my sister Vicki and her family, as well as my brother Richard. After leaving our luggage at the pier, we will be heading for the underground tour of Seattle before boarding the Star Princess.

I am drained and exhausted. I wouldn’t say that any of what I did today constituted hard physical labor, but I feel like I accomplished a bit and I’m now tired. They day had me waking up around 7:30 AM. Not that early, but on a day off, I wasn’t planning on getting up at this time… I’m a night person. Anyway, I had decided to make æbelskivers again for breakfast and we invited Kellie’s parents over for breakfast.

During breakfast, I found out that Kellie’s grandparents rely on an antenna for their television and they had purchased digital converters, but had a problem with one. They had a decent antenna on the roof and it was pointed in the correct direction. I found it odd that they said one worked OK while the other TV didn’t work so well. I did a digital scan on both converter boxes… one picked up 20 channels and the other picked up 12. The one with 20 channels had a nearly perfect signal on every channel, yet of the 12 being received on the other, the signal was very iffy. They told me that a neighbor had helped them with hooking up their antenna and the wiring was all new. I decided to inspect the wiring system. It all looked good, so I decided to unplug the antenna from the bad converter box… just to get a closer look; this is when I discovered the root of the problem. The antenna cable was a high-quality quad-shield RG6 wire, but as I tried to unscrew the antenna, the wire came out of the connector; great wire, terrible connection. Thankfully, I have quite a bit of experience with placing F connectors and had some of the best connectors at my house with all the tools for installing them. I made a trip home and grabbed the supplies needed and placed a compression-type F connector on the wire. When I plugged it all back in, I got the same 20 channels as the other converter box with the same nearly perfect reception. Granted, some of the channels received were Spanish channels and they were not interested in Spanish-language channels, but they now get more channels than previously. On one of the televisions, they had the converter box feeding the converted signal on channel 3, but the TV had a composite video input as well as stereo audio inputs, so I connected the converter box via composite connection. This connection removed some static from the picture, increasing the picture quality to better than the grandparents could have imagined. Granted, it is nowhere near the quality of HDTV, but for a 5+ year old CRT television, it is pretty good.

Upon completion of this job, I headed over to Kellie’s parents house. Recently, Kellie and I had purchased a Nintendo Wii gaming system with Wii Fit and several other exercise-generating games. We showed the parents the Wii Fit and they decided to buy an identical system. I was called to help install the system over there. After a bit of moving a heavy entertainment center and messing around with wires, I finally got it set up. I set up wireless Internet as well, so both of our machines could communicate with each other. I finally got it all connected, installed the latest firmware and started some play. On the Wii, you create an avitar called a Mii that you play as when gaming. You can share your Mii with other systems, so you can play yourself when you play on another system. I transferred all the Miis from our system to their system, as well as all the saved game statuses to their game. After playing a little Wii, we ate dinner and had cake, celebrating Father’s Day, Kellie’s grandfather’s birthday and her parent’s 35^th wedding anniversary.

After dinner, I watched the last few minutes of my favorite basketball team, the Los Angeles Lakers, win their 15^th NBA Championship, with Phil Jackson setting a record as coaching for 10 champion teams (6 with the Chicago Bulls with Michael Jordan and 4 with the Los Angeles Lakers and Kobe Bryant.) The Lakers beat the Orlando Magic 99-86 in Game 5 of the NBA Finals.

I’m going to bed a tired boy now.