Okay, first things first. This is a pretty great photo of me, yes? Not bad for a selfie. I'm a little fixated on that white dot on my lower lip, though. What the hell is that? Let's take a closer look. Hmmm . . . it sort of looks like maybe it's the sun shining through a tiny hole in my glasses? Except I don't believe there are any such holes in those glasses. It looks more like I just ate something and forgot to use a napkin. Except this was taken at 10:32 a.m. and I had not eaten anything at all since around 6:30 this morning. No crumb is going to ride a lip for four hours.

This is going to keep me up at night!

Well, anyway. I finally saw the Bothell PCC store today, two years after it opened -- and just about a month and a half after the Burien store opened. Bothell was the farthest away and I am up there so seldom, there just wasn't much opportunity to check it out. Scott had said several times he would take me up there sometime when he was driving there from the office, but that never happened either.

But now, a couple of months ago an email was sent out to company staff about these summer "Store to Farm" bike rides, the second Sunday of every month. I couldn't do the ride from Issaquah on June 10th because Shobhit and I were in Wallace, Idaho. I decided very quickly I would not do the Septemer ride because 29 miles one way is too fucking long -- I did a 35-mile ride round trip with Dad once and felt like I was going to die. No thank you! But, I was more interested in both the July and August rides.

And the July one, as you can see, was set to leave from the Bothell store. Finally, I'll get to see it!

I had no other plans today and neither did Shobhit, so I took the car. I took the front wheel off my bike and stuffed it into the trunk and through the opening over the lowered back seats, last night. I was well prepared. I got out of bed not long after 6:00 this morning. I slathered myself with sunscreen before I even left.

I left at 8:45, arrived at the Bothell store at 8:40. Hey, look at that -- it has the new PCC logo on it now! When did that happen, I wonder? I thought the new Burien store was the only one.

No other cyclists were there yet at 8:40, but since that still left twenty minutes I didn't think much of it. I locked my bike at the bike lock just outside the store entrance and walked inside. It's very spacious. I feel like the aisles are wider, even than the Greenlake Village store, and that one only opened in 2014. (It was only then that I stopped shopping at the Fremont store, as Greenlake Village is much easier to get to.) I suppose I could be wrong and it's just a matter of perception.

As soon as I saw the cash registers, Bryan, who used to work in the office and went to work at Edmonds in May (I couldn't believe it had been that long already), spotted me. He was cashiering. He was so delighted to see me he came up to give me a hug. He asked how I was doing, and we caught up a bit. Then I asked if he knew anything about this store-to-farm bike ride -- and he did not. Neither did either of the other staff nearby. No one in the store seemed to know anything about it.

I went to use the bathrooms. The Bothell store not only has a gender neutral bathroom, but even has signs on each of the men's and women's rooms that say YOU ARE WELCOME TO USE WHICHEVER BATHROOM ALIGNS WITH YOUR GENDER IDENTITY. I don't think I'm getting that verbatim but it was something close to that. Another thing I thought was just new with Burien; apparently Bothell has it too. Strange that the Seattle proper stores, which are a tad more likely to get gender-variant traffic than those in the suburbs, are not yet thusly updated.

The men's room stall was occupied. Into the gender netural bathroom I went.

I walked back out in front of the store. Still no cyclists. I even walked around to the back of the store, to see if maybe there was a gathering back there. Nope.

For a moment I thought this might mean I would just have to pack back up and ride back home. And then I thought, fuck that! What use was there in wasting my sunscreen? I decided I would just use the Google Maps app on my phone, and ride out to the farm on my own. Otherwise even the car trip would be a senseless waste.

I remain disappointed that no one else showed up (or, that the event was canceled and no one bothered to tell me -- I need to get clarification at work tomorrow), but I had a good time even by myself. I'm really glad I did it.

I did ask Claudia on Facebook Messenger yesterday if she was going this today and she said she had other plans -- but, now that she knew I was considering them, she would commit to the ride in August. So now I guess I need to find out if that one is even still planned at all either.

So anyway. I got 28 photos out of it. You can click that link to get much more detail in the photo captions, which I wrote up before starting this blog post. I keep wondering if I would have managed even that many photos if there were other cyclists, a group perhaps preventing me from stopping to get certain photos on my own time. Perhaps I would have, and some of the photos just would have been different. Surely I would have gotten at least a few shots of other cyclists. From the perspective of someone looking at the photos, more scenic shots probably hold more appeal, I suppose.

Once I got there, I turned ito a long-ish gravel road. At the end of this road there was a parking lot, and also a small stand where you weigh and buy the fruits and vegetables you’ve picked. There was a young girl working that stand, apparently the only employee there at around 10:30 a.m. At this point I still thought, well, maybe the farm people still had some expectation of a farm tour arriving? The answer: nope. The girl (maybe she was a young woman of 20 and I’ve just gotten so old that 20-year-olds now look 15 to me, who knows?) knew nothing about this. “Is there anyone else around who might know?” I asked. She replied, “Just me.” So I asked if it was all right if I just walked around, and she said yes. So that’s what I did.

Out of the 28 photos I took today, all of fourteen of them were taken in or at the farm itself -- an additional four show the farm from a distance. The other ten were taken either on the bike ride there or on the bike ride back. Only three of them were on the way back; I was increasingly exhausted after I returned -- the first few miles of the return were up quite long hills. I did manage them without ever having to get off my bike and walk, though, so I'm pretty proud of myself.

I finally got back to the car, took the front wheel of my bike off so I could pack it in again, and drove home, which I arrived at, at 12:34 pm. Shobhit had lunch ready, which was very sweet of him. I edited, uploaded, and captioned the photos; wrote up the email photo digest to be sent out from work tomorrow morning; set about writing this blog post, and here we are. You're all caught up.

[posted 3:12 pm]