An "ah-ha" moment.

I was flipping though this week's Fortune magazine when I spotted this offhand citation, in an advice column to a worker with a demanding boss:

"Realistically, you probably can't change your boss, so you have to ask yourself whether you want this job badly enough to tolerate the long hours," says Roseanne Badowski, who has worked nonstop as Jack Welch's executive assistant for 13 years and wrote a book called Managing Up: How to Forge an Effective Relationship With Those Above You."

Yikes. That gives a whole new spin on the Welch era at GE. Perhaps Jeffery Immelt isn't doing as well as he might not because he's being compared to Welch, but to Badowski?

Like I say, a kremlinologist kind of moment.

Birthday weekend.

Yesterday, June 28, was my 40th Birthday.

It is, as they say, a milestone, but to me the bigger one is coming later, in the fall. On Sept. 25 I will have lived longer than my dad, according to his official birthday. (As in many things about my dad, there is some dispute as to how accurate his official birthday is.)

I've been taking many pictures obver the weekend, and would love to share, but I take them at full resolution (3MP), and I haven't found a quick tool for both scaling them down in bulk, making thumbnails, and rotating the portrait ones the right way up. You'll just have to use only my words for now, poor though they may be.

Up, as Mr. Pepys says, at noon(-ish. Ulrika had already been playing Bounce Out, and we lingered a bit over my presents, which were two books: Moab Is My Wapshot, by Stephen Fry, and Celebration, USA: Living in Disney's Brave New Town by Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins. Fry's always been interesting to me, and Celebration raises some real questions about architecture and urban planning.

Then it was off to Jack's Fish Spot, in the Pike Place Market, for fish'n'chips. (This was a day I was off-diet.) I took photos in black & white, which just seem to work better there -- it's very 1940's somehow, with its tight booth in stainless steel and stools.

Next, we wandered over to Schmitz Park. It's really more of a preserve these days, containing as it does some of the last old growth forest in Seattle. It's a great place to hike around, and Sarah-the-dog had a lot of fun sniffing up everything.

I like boats. I like being out on the water. So we took the ferry from Fauntleroy to Vashon Island. It's only a 15 minute ride each way, and it was done more on the spur of the moment than anything else.

Vashon Island was interesting to drive around. It very much feels like rural countryside, and was one of the inspirations for the novel Snow Falling on Cedars by Guterson. Poking about the small town in the center of the island, I went into Vashon Bookshop. I was browsing over Gordon Parks' autobiography, Voices In the Mirror, and recognized his third wife, of whom there were many pictures -- Genevieve "Gene" Young, who Helene Hanff writes quite a bit about in her more autobiograhpical pieces. I just never knew Gene had been married to Gordon Parks, is all. The shop owner and I got into a conversation about this. I ended up buying Noel Perrin's book, A Reader's Delight, which the blurb tells me is about how the author, "...thinks it's a shame that serious reading is generally limited to the recognized classics even though there are countless literary gems that, for one reason or another, have fallen from view." He then goes on to champion them. Great stuff, can't wait for the movie, but still, a book that fairly screams Hal all over it.

Taking the ferry back to West Seattle, we then went up to Mashiko. We were extremely lucky -- we were asking the hostess how long we might have to wait for stools at the bar in front of Hajime, the owner/chef, and she was politely telling us there was no way to know... when a couple got up and left. "How about those two?" I asked.

Hajime did his sushi jazz thing that he does so well. Ask for octopus, and instead of getting octopus slices on rice, one gets a pile of various sized chunks with tiny whole octopi, lightly covered in a sauce. Or a skipjack tuna, this time in slices, yes, but on top of a dungeness crab salad with a salsa-like salad/sauce on top. And much else, besides, including banter with Hajime and the two sets of other patrons seated next to us (in series).

And so, home.

Today, we went to St Edward State Park, for the Midsommarfest put on by the Skandia Folkdance Society. This was much fun, and as Ulrika put it, I earned much Swedish street cred by being one of the brawns participating in the majstångresningen... which is to say, leveraging the 55-foot-high May pole up into place. In fact, as I look at the pages I just linked to, I see they've already turned the Midsommarfest page over to announcing the one for 2004, and the picture on the splash page for Skandia features the effort we made earlier today. I can barely pick out my red hair at the base of the second klykor support pole on the left... I leave it to you to see if you agree. :)

We then went home-ish, and went out to see Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle. Which was fun, in a comic-book-ish way, and pretty much argued that Drew Barrymore may have a future as a producer. Cool.

So, books, movies, fish'n'chips, sushi, boats, photography, forest primeval, Swedish phallic symbols, admiring flickan... pretty close to an ideal birthday weekend.

Blix on his last day of work.

From the Reuters feed at Yahoo:

"Well we still don't exclude that they can find things but the longer time passes, the less possibility perhaps," said Blix, executive chairman of the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC).

"But I think we were vindicated in the prudence that we showed. We consistently maintained that unaccounted for is not the same thing as saying things exist. They might exist, they might not exist and I think everything shows that that was wise," he said.

Blix believes Iraq may have destroyed most of its dangerous weapons (note that this doesn't say when -- hal) but questions why Saddam Hussein did not produce data showing he had disarmed.

He speculated that Saddam might have wanted to create the mystique that he still had weapons of mass destruction -- on the theory that big boys like big toys.

Or, as I've said, because he wanted to keep the Iranians guessing.

But, all in all, remarkably close to what I've been writing here.