Below are the most recent 7 friends' journal entries.

Sunday, December 27th, 2009
mrsloane	4:11p	I am a much better pilot than John Fiscus just to set the record straight. Like there was any doubt!!! (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, December 26th, 2009
stryper666	11:47a	Interesting... I just realized I haven't a cigarette in 6 days. I wonder how long this will last. I'm sure I'll blow it on New Years, but I'm not too concerned about that. Now that I know how relatively easy it is not to have any, I can do this again after the new year (it seems to be less about craving for me, and more about certain habit rituals). I puposely didn't bring any down to LA just to see how things would turn out (Cyn as well - she's also been smoke-free). I've also noticed the lack of smoking has been in conjunction to the lack of alcohol consumption. Hmmm... (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, December 25th, 2009
gkr	9:10p	Christmas 2010 at Swedish Medical Center At 12:07 this morning I got a call from my grandfather. When he calls, I answer. He’d passed out in the hallway and had called paramedics. He assumed they would take him to Swedish like they normally do. There’s a “normal” course of events when Gramps has a heart attack. This is his 5th or 6th in 13 months and he has another 3 or 4 hospitalizations in addition during the same time frame. So I did my normal course. Get dressed. Make coffee. Call Joe. Dawdle on the internet for 15 minutes. Then leave for the hospital. I got there 15 minutes before they did. I am always fine when I get the call. Driving up Lynn is fine. I start to get worried this will be the last time I see him about the time I get on the freeway. By the James St exit I am a wreck and near bawling. But I pull it together while climbing James St. And I’m all business by the time I get to Swedish. That is my “normal” progression. My main concern is Gram. She has dementia and stress makes her worse. So this morning I walked to meet her at the ambulance and took charge of her while the paramedics wheeled Gramps into emergency. They thought I worked there and were surprised I couldn’t tell them the access code for the emergency doors. Gramps was admitted overnight, though now it has stretched into 2. Gram cannot stay by herself though she thinks she is fine. So I am crashing on her couch for the second, hopefully less sleepless, night. The docs who downloaded his pacemaker data confirmed a heart attack. Without the builtin defibrillator, he would have died. It’s the 3rd or 4th time it’s saved his life. Cross-posted from King Rat (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009
gkr	7:38p	Snowpocalypse: setting the record straight The neologism making the rounds this winter is snowpocalypse referring to the big snowstorm that hit the east coast. The Lede a blog at the New York Times, attempted to track down the origins of the word snowpocalypse. They tracked it back to Seattle last year, and a few other places in 2007 and 2006. But they didn’t really find the origins. Someone on the Seattle Livejournal Community wants that community given credit for Snowpocalypse. And they certainly have a case for popularizing it during last year’s snow storm, though the Stranger’s Slog and other popular local blogs had a lot to do with it. But the term goes further back than that. DCist claims they first used it. In 2005. But they are wrong. Searching even further back I found a post by sea_colleen at Seattle Metblogs that used the term Snowpocalypse a couple weeks before DCist did. I didn’t use Google to find that. I knew it where it was because the origins of the term have come up before, and I know the term had currency in one Seattle group before 2005. Seattle Metblogs sea_colleen is Leenerella on Livejournal, and she was an active participant on the old Seattle Gothic message boards, hosted on ezboard. The word was used there a lot in the 2002 to 2004 time frame to refer to the local media’s hyperbolic coverage of various snow events. They’d imply that the city would shut down, but then we’d get ¼ inch of snow and life would go on. If we did get any snow, King 5 would send Danger Jim Forman outside to report from the most blustery location he could find. I don’t know who first used the term on Seattle Gothic. I don’t know where they stole it from or if that person coined it herself. But the folks there have a better claim than the other pretenders. Sadly, little remains of that message board. The moderators pruned message threads, particularly little content ones like Snowpocalypse!. Ezboard moved it from server to server, and lost oodles of discussion threads in various crashes. Versions of it were hosted by members both before and after it was on Ezboard. Ezboard became Yuku and some archives are there. The Wayback Machine has a few posts archived. Edited to add: Found a couple other references from Sea-Gothers that pre-date DCist’s claim. Here’s Prince of Happiness, another Sea-Gother, using snowpocalypse in December 2005 as well. And a snapshot from the Wayback machine of forum topics on Seattle Gothic from January 2005, one of which is SNOWPOCALYPSE 2005!!1ONE!!!ELEVEN!1!!. Cross-posted from King Rat (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, December 21st, 2009
stryper666	6:23a	SO LONG, STINKTOWN! (Comment on this)
Tuesday, December 15th, 2009
stryper666	9:49a	(4 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, December 14th, 2009
stryper666	7:18p	(7 Comments |Comment on this)