I have so much to catch up on, but for now, let me tell you about Friday -- which was both the 15th anniversary of Shobhit's and my first date (a decade and a half together! can you believe that shit?) and the 6th anniversay of our for-real wedding. (You can read the whole saga behind that here.)

The original plan, as I have already stated several times over the past week, was to go to Portland. There were two reasons for this. First, it's a low-key trip not too far out of town, much toned down from the scale of our anniversary trips the past four years (Oregon Coast; Chicago; Vancouver, B.C.; Yellowstone National Park) because of the sheer amount of other travel I already had planned for this year. Second, we were bound to be locally available because my niece, Britni, and her fiancé, David, got married in Chehalis yesterday. So, Shobhit's idea was that we spend a couple of nights in Portland and then attend the wedding on our drive home from there.

And that whole plan got thrown out the window after Shobhit threw his back out pushing shopping carts at Total Wine & More. That was last Sunday, and he hasn't worked since. He finally goes back to work today. By Tuesday, he was suggesting we scrap the Portland trip, he was still in so much pain. I wanted to wait it out before making a decision. He seemed on the verge of changing his mind on Wednesday, but ultimately never did.

I later suggested going to Portland for only one night instead of two, but Shobhit feels it's only a trip worth taking if we stay two nights. I disagree, but he actually was still in a fair amount of pain even on Thursday, so even though I was then on the verge of convincing him to go for just one night, he said he wasn't up for a car ride that was 180 miles one-way. Damn it! And I was so looking forward to getting some good photos of Multnomah Falls.

He suggested we do "something fun locally." So what did we do, then? Well, we spent a few hours late morning and early afternoon just doing the requisite shopping with my paycheck from that day. Nice and efficient use of a day I took off work, huh!

But then we did go out to dinner, using a 50% deal Shobhit found on Groupon, an Italian restaurant in Magnolia called Mondello Ristorante Italiano. The salad we ordered was not worh the price but the mushroom ravioli and the gnocchi gorganzola sure were. Both those dishes were spectacular, and the waitress volunteered to take the above photo of us with our dishes when she saw me trying to take a selfie.

And from there, we drove to Golden Gardens Park -- long my favorite spot in Seattle, it's where I held my end-of-Birth-Week potluck picnic party between 2003 and 2009; the Golden Gardens Bathhouse was where we had our wedding in 2013; and we returned there for our 1st/10th Anniversary Party in 2014. I have sporadically gone for return visits in the meantime -- lunch with Shobhit on my birthday in 2015, brief visit there with Becca, Tyler and Tristen in 2016 -- but, this time around, I had actually not gone there in two years: not since Shobhit, Ivan and I drove out there on my birthday (and also Ivan's birthday) in 2017. In fact, it looks like 2018 was the first calendar year since I first started going out there in which I never went!

So, I guess in a sense, it worked out well then. Shobhit's and my 15th year together seems like a nice, round number to return to the spot that hold so much meaning to our relationship, after a brief break. So even though it was even more low-key even than a weekend trip to Portland, I still got a 34-shot photo album out of it, largely because I suggested we go out there at sunset. Nearly half the photos are DLU worthy for future Daily Lunch Update posts, although I'm already burning my favorite of all of them in this very post, as you can see in the sailboat sun-reflection photo above.

We weren't even there that long. The park was packed, and there was even a huge crowd of kids packed around and cheering apparently several fistfights on the beach. Most people around just thought it was funny. The crowd was way too thick to see any of the actual violence in the middle of it, but honestly I was still a little creeped out by it. I really figured police would end up coming eventually -- and indeed, when we started walking out of the park, we did see cop car lights flashing in the distance. Shobhit figured they were just looking for people to fine for DUIs, and he may have been right.

Still, it was otherwise a spectacularly beautiful day. I would have happily stayed until the sun went down completely, but Shobhit got chilly -- which I told him I would not listen to him bitching about after he refused to take his hoodie out of the car when I quite smartly grabbed my jacket -- and he also wanted to get driving back home before it was completely dark. I don't see what that has to be such a big deal; apparently Shobhit is 80 years old all of a sudden.

We had tried finding parking in the main parking lot, which I knew was probably naive but I thought we should try anyway. We went under the railroad tracks to another parking area just slightly up the hill and pretty easily found parking there anyway. It did not take too long for us to get back from the beach, where we had found a park bench painted pink to sit on, before we went down to the shoreline to take some sunset pictures.

And I got a lot of good ones, some of which I managed through the binoculars we brought, as the last time we were at Golden Gardens Park was before I figured out that trick at Yellowstone National Park in 2018. It may have yielded the smallest anniversary photo album since the honeymoon itself, but for being there barely an hour or so, 25 shots taken at the park itself isn't half bad at all, especially since they're all pretty great.

Now I really need to shift my focus to the shit ton of photos and videos I took at Britni's wedding yesterday. I want to put them all into a video I can post to YouTube, and my hope is to spend the entire day today getting that done. We'll see how far I get.

[posted 11:04 am]