Okay I have literally ten minutes until midnight and I really want at least one Birth Week update posted for today's date so I have to be really quick about this one.

I got my requisite semiannual haircut yesterday at 11 a.m. It took until close to 12:15 to finish. I walked home and colored my hair with the do-it-yourself box I rode my bike to QFC to get in the morning just before the hair appointment. I packed for my eventual stay in Olympia with Dad and Sherri last night.

Shobhit got off work in the U District at 3:30, and I took the bus up there so I could drive him from that job to his shift at his other job starting at 4:00 in Interbay. Along the way, I gave him my Orca Card so he could bus to work today, and swtiched the garage door fobs on our keychains so I could actually get the car back into the garage today, because even after switching out the battery, for some reason my fob won't open the door.

I drove the car home. Fed the cats. Grabbed the packed backpack, got in the car and drove to Water's Table, the restaurant at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Renton on the south shore of Lake Washington where I had 6 p.m. dinner reservations with Danielle.

I got there at about 5:50; Danielle, who was coming straight from work, maybe ten minutes later. She's on a 30-day diet with no carbs and got a burger wrapped in lettuce instead of a bun that predictably fell apart and I had gnocchi that was somewhat bland but with a helping that surprisingly justified the $22 price. The service was terrible and we had to walk into the bar to ask someone to run our cars before we went out to walk along the waterfront for a bit.

Okay now I have a confession. I really did post this entry at 11:58 -- but only up until this paragraph. I could have finished writing this and just backdated it, but if someone were actually checking my blog at 11:58, they would have seen this entry! Well, most of it. And that's what counts!

Anyway right next to where the Hyatt Regency Hotel is, which is the hotel which houses Water's Table the restaurant, is a lovely city park with a nice, long boardwalk called Gene Coulon Memorial Beach Park. Danielle, who needed to go to Patrick's to pick up the girls, only strolled over with me far enough to check out a little island with a footbridge to it and a boardwalk through it that was the only place you could walk on it. It's called Bird Island and is apparently a protected area. We got a few pictures.

And then she had to leave. So my time with Danielle for this year's Birth Week was pretty limited, although we were together a couple of hours. We talked a bit about how things are going and our travel plans together later this year. I then walked a little ways up the boardwalk and got more pictures. You can see the 24-shot full photo album on Flickr here. I didn't keep walking more than about twenty minutes as even I needed to get back to the car; I wanted to get to Olympia by about 9:00 so Dad and Sherri would not be asleep when I arrived.

I can tell you about the visit with Dad and Sherri in my next post, tomorrow.

[posted 11:58 pm]