Discovering Loop Trail
I did something fairly photogenic yesterday evening, and astonishingly, I did not take a single photograph. What the hell has come over me?
Maybe I just subconsciously felt like I took enough photos lately. I created a dedicated photo set for both last Sunday spent at beaches, and for Morgan's 14th Birthday Dinner on Friday, after all. That's not necessarily a good reason not to take any photos. And it would have made sense especially to get, at the very least, a group selfie with Jamie and Alicia from work, as it was the first time I joined for the weekly Tuesday hike around Discovery Park.
Jamie and Alicia drove there separately -- Alicia arriving first. I rode my bike there -- a four and a half mile ride. Then, we walked the 2.8-mile Loop Trail. Although, there's a lot of trails there so I couldn't say whether we walked precisely 2.8 miles or not. Then I biked the 7.2 miles back home. That's a total of roughly fifteen miles, a lot more than I am used to. I was fucking exhausted when I got home. And once I reached Capitol Hill, I really thought I might have to get off my bike and walk. But, I just geared down to 2 instead of 5 being my usual lowest on that leg of my ride home from work, and I managed to keep riding the whole way.
I don't go to Discovery Park often at all, but it does have a key place in several moments of my personal history. Let's go through them!
In 2002, Danielle and I took take-out from Bamboo Garden there as our spot for her to "make amends" with me as part of the Step 9 part of the 12-step program she was doing through Al-Anon. That was in July -- the 27th, to be exact. Holy shit! That's two years, to the date, before Morgan was born.
In 2006 and 2007, I did two separate "Seattle Parks Tours," each year visiting Seattle's largest parks, from largest to smallest among them -- 15 official stops each time, with what appears to be at least one "bonus" park with each group. Discovery Park is by a long shot the largest of Seattle's city parks, at 534 acres (about .83 of a square mile), so it was the first of all these parks I visited, usually with Barbara but in this case with Shobhit, in 2006. It was pretty early in the year, too -- February 19. For some reason I have no captions on the photo set from that year, which is disappointing, but I did provide some detail in that LiveJournal entry.
In 2016 -- March 5 -- Danielle and I did a "nostalgia tour" that I had been talking about wanting to do for a while, in which we went to five key places around town and recreated photos of the two of us from our past that I always really liked. One of these included Discovery Park, where we recreated the photo we took there in 2002, 14 years before. In the 2002 photo, being between our birthdays, I was 26 and she was still 25; in the 2016 photo, we were both still hanging on to 39.
The thing about those Discovery Park photos taken with Danielle is, when we returned in 2016, we could not for the life of us figure out exactly where the spot was that we took that photo, standing atop a short, stone wall. I have no idea which parking lot Danielle and I went to back in 2016, but I'm guessing it was not the East Parking Lot, located where the Visitor Center I didn't even know existed is, and where Jamie and Alicia and I met there yesterday. But, once we got going on the Loop Trail, we went through a clearing that looked very much like the one behind Danielle and me in the 2002 photo, and I get the sense I might be able to find that little stone wall one of the next times I go there.
Anyway. What's the second-largest Seattle city park, you almost certainly were not wondering? That would be Magnusen Park, which I went to by myself on February 26 in 2006. I'm not sure I've ever been back there since; I have no more recent photos of it. That park is a little ways northeast of the U District and on Lake Washington, in an area of the city I otherwise never have any reason to go to. It's 350 acres, so roughly 2/3 the size of Discovery Park.
By the way, I just spent way too much time listing all of Seattle's 30 largest parks, in order of size, on the Seattle Parks Tour collection page I have on Flickr. I wish I'd had that done to share information with Jamie and Alicia yesterday.
It was a very pleasant walk in the park itself, and was over before I knew it. I was almost startled when we returned to the starting point at the East Parking Lot, and discovered I no longer had time to take even one picture. I suppose I could have right there, but there was no particularly photogenic background at that exact spot. I should have done it in the clearing where there is a spectacular view of Puget Sound -- Discovery Park has an elevation of 340 ft at its highest above sea level. It also has trails down to the beach, which perhaps we'll do another time, but did not do yesterday; we stuck with the Loop Trail.
Even much of the bike ride was photogenic, especially on the way back, as I chose to go down the bike path that eventually runs through Myrtle Edwards Park, which is very scenic. Once I reach Broad St, though, it was the standard route home from work -- with a lot of steep hill climbing.
This would have to be one of the coolest days, if not the coolest, on which I went ahead and wore shorts to work. I did today because the forecast still said it would get to 78° today, and this pair of shorts has one more wear in them before I'll wash them. (As a general rule I wear jeans or shorts three times before washing them). It sure was cool this morning, though -- barely 60° -- so even with shorts on, I wore my red hoodie for my bike ride to work. It's stuffed into my shoulder bag now, because I know I won't need it for the ride home.
I did need it for eating my lunch out on the patio, though. It was still all of 63°. Cloud cover remains, presumably that being what's keeping it cool -- evidently they will start to clear out this afternoon.
I ate the final two of the last of the samosas. In all likelihood, Shobhit won't make them again until Christmas. Maybe at that time I can finally do a video showing how they are made, from start to finish. They were delicious as always, but I'm also kind of glad they're finished. None of these foods are especially protein-rich, and I get the feeling it's starting to affect me a bit. I had samosas for lunch yesterday too, and have had flatbreads with Indian vegetable dishes from leftovers pretty much every evening since Friday. Yesterday afternoon I was feeling light-headed combined with an odd headache, and I had a theory it might have to do with the food I was eating. I found a protein bar in the work pantry and ate that, and it seemed to make a legitimate difference.
I'm okay today though, so far anyway.
After last night once I finally got home, close to 8pm, I had my dinner and then Shobhit and I began our A Star Is Born series: the original of them, from 1937, starring Frederic March and Janet Gaynor. I did not have any idea until reading the trivia page for the movie on iMDB.com that Gaynor, as it happens was the first-ever recipient of the Best Actress Academy Award, for a 1927 movie called 7th Heaven. Gaynor would have been 21 when she won that award, and 31 when she was in A Star Is Born. That alone suggests she was a pretty big star in her time.
There's a scene in this original A Star Is Born in which Gaynor's character, Vicki Lester, accepts an Academy Award. It must not have taken long for the Oscars to take hold in the American public's imagination, as less than 10 years into its history, A Star Is Born makes it pretty clear it was already a big deal. I wonder if any other movie before this had a fictional depiction of the Oscars ceremony? Incidentally, apparently Gaynor used the real Oscar she won for 7th Heaven in that scene.
Shobhit was surprisingly into A Star Is Born, and kept commenting on how realistic the depiction of Hollywood was. I was slightly taken aback by how little Hollywood has evidently changed since the thirties -- so much stuff has existed since then that still exists now; it's just that a lot of it is done in more sophisticated ways. But even back then, apparently, they held test screenings at which audiences were asked to provide feedback on movies. I also had no idea that both the Hollywood Bowl and Grauman's Chinese Theatre existed that long ago -- having opened in 1922 and 1927, respectively. So by the time A Star Is Born was released, both were already iconic symbols of Hollywood, even though one was only 15 years old and the other 10. Vicki Lester is even seen visiting the theatre and delighting in the footprints and signatures of Hollywood stars in the cement. No wonder even Sunset Boulevard, which came out in the forties, manages to draw on a rich Hollywood history that spans at least a couple of generations.
Shobhit commented that he has a feeling of all the versions of A Star Is Born, he'll like this one the best. We'll see. That one has a 77 rating at MetaCritic (based on 5 reviews). The 1954 version, though, seems to be the most beloved: its MetaScore is 89 (based on 7 reviews), it starred Judy Garland, and was the first to turn the story into a musical. It looks like the 1976 version starring Barbra Streisand got a much more mixed critical reception, with a MetaScore of 58 (based on 8 reviews). So it sounds like that version, which came out 22 years after the previous one (itself only 17 years after the first), comparatively fell a little flat. By all accounts, the Lady Gaga / Bradley Cooper one coming out this fall -- 42 years after the Streisand version -- really only has to concern itself with being stacked up to Judy Garland, from 64 years ago. I don't expect it to be great, to be honest, but I suppose you never know. I hope it's good.
[posted 12:35 pm]