I think I'm beginning to understand why Shobhit never wants to smile in selfies I take with him anymore. He doesn't any wrinkles to show. I mean, he's now 45 and a half; compare his face in the above shot to my 43-year-old face! My crow's feet have their own crow's feet! Well, whatever. I'm willing to suffer the consequences of a life that keeps me smiling a lot. Take that, brooding dark cynical younger Matthew! I WON! I mean, my face is kind of losing BUT I WON!

Anyway Shobhit and I rode the Goodtime III, an Argosy Cruises boat specifically designed to be barely thin enough to fit even through the smaller of the two Ballard Locks (and we did indeed go through the smaller one), yesterday. Of any single thing I paid money for during my Birth Week, this was by some distance the most expensive -- $79.87 for two, and that's wih a 20% AAA discount. (For comparison, the second-highest Birth Week expense, the car and drive plus passenger on a Washington State Ferry to San Juan Island -- which actually occurred a week before my official Birth Week but whatever -- was $63.55.)

Well, guess what? It was worth every penny! I think even Shobhit would agree: we were on the boat, after having gone through the locks, and at one point he specifically said, "I'm glad we did this." He clearly had a really good time.

For a while I was honestly afraid I might not. I still don't know what caused it, but since I am pretty well fine again today, I think something I consumed on Thursday must not have agreed with me, rather than it being something like an onset of a cold or flu, which I was really worried it might be. I think maybe the mix of different wines I tasted at the wine tasting with Shobhit at Total Wine & More early Thursday evening may have been the culprit, but I really couldn't say for sure.

All I truly know is that I woke up in the middle of the night late Thursday night / early Thursday morning, and was really hot, and felt something vaguely like the sickly feeling of dehydration after too much alcohol. I actually had very little wine, but maybe it was the mix of several very different kinds? I have no idea. But I did not feel well at all when I got up yesterday morning, and had planned to wait to have breakfast so the omelets Shobhit intended to make would qualify as brunch. I thought maybe eating would make me feel better and was glad when Shobhit started preparing the eggs and I helped a little bit with chopping onions and toasting a bagel we shared.

And when it's something like an actual hangover, usually eating some eggs helps a great deal. I really kind of worried yesterday morning though, because once Shobhit had prepared my plate of eggs with sauteed vegeables and half a toasted bagel, I could barely get it down. I can't say I quite felt nauseated at any point, but I still felt very strongly like, say, if I ate it too quickly, I would likely throw it up. It was very stange, this strong aversion to even eating something I usually love eating. And I only got about half of it down and then basically gave up. Shobhit suggested I pack the rest of it to eat for lunch on the boat, and so I did.

The boat was to launch from Pier 55 at 12:45 and they said they board 15-20 minutes before that, and Shobhit and I decided to walk the mile and a half, mostly down Madison Street. We left around noon, and I still felt wonky but slightly better, and was able to walk.

I'm going to back up just slightly now, to say that in my earliest vision for my 2019 Birth Week, today was going to be my "official Birth Week day with Shobhit," when I aimed to take the San Juan Island Clipper with him. That particular plan morphed into the day trip to San Juan Island via the Washington State Ferry from Anacortes that was took on Saturday, April 20. But also in that earliest vision, when Danielle was still working her previous position and back then she had Fridays off, I really thought I could get her to take this Argosy Cruise Locks Tour with me.

Well, the best Danielle could do, in the end, was plan for dinner on the Lake Washington waterfront in Renton on Wednesday. I was still dead set on taking the Argosy Cruise, though -- how could I not be, with Birth Week Boating as this year's theme? Thankfully, Shobhit agreed to go with me. So basically, with both last Tuesday's pedal boat on Greenlake on my actual birthday, as well as this morning, Shobhit was my only activity companion on three different days of my actual Birth Week -- and, when you count the April 20 "prologue," that actually makes four days.

It was fun to go with him yesterday though, and he went out of his way to tell the captain who greeted us when we got on the boat that we were celebrating my birthday. "Is it okay if I embarrass you?" she asked. I said, "Sure." She eventually did two things, actually. First, after I had staked out two seats on the bow of the boat, she came up and presented me with a tub of popcorn. "I'm not authorized to give you alcohol," she said, "but I got you this. Happy birthday!" And then later, when we were closing in on the Ballard Locks, as she was addressing everyone over the loudspeaker, she called me out by name as a person celebrating a birthday on the bow of the boat, and had everyone say "Happy birthday!" in unison. I smiled and waved.

The tour on the whole takes about two hours, and only goes one way, presumably because going round-trip would have taken four hours and that's too long. So the boat left Pier 55 on the Seattle Waterfront, runs alongside Magnolia, goes through the Locks and then along Salmon Bay and through the Fremont Cut into Lake Union, then toward South Lake Union before docking at a pier to the east of South Lake Union Park. You can either pay a little extra to get on a bus that shuttles you back to the waterfront, which Shobhit and I did not need, or you could purchase one-way "Stay and Play" tickets, which was what Shobhit and I did.

This tour had the most specific points of interest along its route, including, among other things, Pike Place Market; the Sleepless In Seattle houseboat (of course); the Deadliest Catch boat; and of personal interest to me, a truly great angle on the PCC office building, as well as the Golden Gardens Bathhouse where Shobhit and I got married.

And, in the end . . . we have a new record holder! The full photo album on Flickr has 85 shots in it (78 photos, 8 videos, mostly of the locks opening and closing), now beating the Bellingham set, which had 80 shots, covering two different days (well, one evening and the next morning) and multiple locations visited. Suffice it to say that the Argosy Locks Cruise is very photogenic, and I would very much recommend it.

That captain lady was also pretty cool. She was very nice and when she saw Shobhit and me walking between a fence and the shuttle bus everyone else was going on, she waved and called out to me, "Bye Matthew!"

I'm going to end this post with three different embedded Flickr videos that almost certainly won't work. Why would I do that, you perhaps find yourself wondering? Well, presumably they will work, eventually -- I just don't know when. For a couple of months now there has been info on the help forums for Flickr that there is a assive server change happening, and it's affecting the video playback. For a long time, videos weren't even playing on Flickr itself -- they are now. So, if you browse the photo set there, you can see the locks videos there, if the ones below refuse to work.

We also got kind of lucky with some wildlife sighting, such as two seals lounging on a bouy -- I got a great shot of that through the binoculars we brought, a trick I started with last year's trip to Yellowstone National Park. I did that several times with this tour, including with the photo above of the Golden Gardens Bathhouse.

Once we were off the boat again, we made our way over to the South Lake Union Streetcar, which we rode to Westlake Center, and then we went down into the Westlake Station so Shobhit could add money to his Orca Card. We came back up to the street level to catch a #11 bus back home.

We had been talking about going to see Avengers: Endgame, which I was fine with not seeing in theatres but Shobhit wants to go see. Thankfully I remembered we had tickets, which we purchased last fall, to see Bill and Hillary Clinton last night -- we both nearly forgot!

So, we did not have a huge amount of time at home before it was time to leave again -- just an hour and a half or so. Seeing no sense in driving, we took Light Rail from Capitol Hill Station down to International District Station, to make our way to Seattle Theatre which is between CenturyLink Field and T-Mobile Park. Shobhit kind of cracked me up with this, because when it's something I'm really interested in, he finds no real necessity in getting anywhere super early -- but when it comes to his beloved Hillary Clinton, he was all about any and all contingencies. Knowing there would be security, we left so we would arrive nearly an hour before they were supposed to go onstage.

The show was supposed to start at 7:30 and it was nearly 8:00 before the former President and the former Secretary of State finally came onstage. And the third person, hosting and asking questions, was . . . Bradley Whitford. Hmm, that's interesting.

Bradley Whitford started by saying, "I'm going to quote my own character from The West Wing: What . . . the hell . . . is going on?"

The talk thereafter was . . . all right. I'm glad I went; it was interesting, if hardly illuminating; they got a lot of predictable applause lines from an audience that clearly adores them -- including Shobhit. Was it worth $69 a ticket? That part I'm not so sure. And when we left and were walking to Pioneer Square Station at Shobhit's suggestion in an effort not to wind up missing a train that's too packed, I asked him, "Did you think it was worth it?"

He basically just shrugged. I was kind of struck by that, considering how much Shobhit loves Hillary Clinton. But, he is so disheartened by the state of the country now, he's actually stopped watching much of his previously daily-watched MSNBC political talk shows. Now I know why he also lost interest in Real Time with Bill Maher: "It's too depressing," he said. No wonder he's just watching a lot of schlock on the SyFy Channel now.

Shobhit told me last night that "There's a 90% chance [Trump] will win" in the 2020 election. I think that's a rather high percentage, and you know what? We could be surprised! There was an 80% chance of Hillary winning the last election at one point; down to around 70% on election day. And guess who won? Shocks can happen in both directions, you know. I don't think we live in a world anymore where single indicators -- like, say, our supposedly strong economy -- can be reliable predictors.

But, as I said to Shobhit last night, this is just because he is a pessmist. I am not. I know how to make the best of things, because the way I see it, what's the alternative? Make the choice to be miserable? Fuck that! I will do the important things when called to do so, but I will also go out of my way to have a good time for as long as I can!

Like, say, riding a tour boat through the Ballard Locks.

[posted 7:23 pm]