The Neighborhood Lights
The three photos you see in today's DLU are from my walk with Alexia yesterday evening; we left at about 5:15 in search of Christmas light displays. My initial idea had been to walk amongst the large houses we already walked around on Halloween evening, presuming people who got that elaborate with Halloween might do the same for Christmas. I suspect that may still be the case, and we have agreed to walk again in that direction in the near future.
As for last night, though, I had high hopes because I had found this link online to an interactive map that purportedly identifies where there are light displays worth seeking out. I narrowed it down to Capitol Hill, and found it had four locations noted. This kind of excited me and I texted Alexia with the suggestion we go to these places, although that one fourth spot at the far north end of the neighborhood we did not end up walking to.
The odd thing is, this is a user-generated interactive map, where people can add locations themselves, and whether or not the marked spot is really that much worth the effort to get to turns out to be, in generous terms, pretty objective. We walked south first to those two locations closer to the Central District, and while the first spot was fairly worthwhile (with little Christmas Trees even projected onto the front of the house), in the second case there were other houses nearby that were better decorated than the one at the exact marked spot. But whatever, I still got some nice photos—though none of them as nice as the third and final spot we went to, on First Hill, which turned out to be Seattle First Baptist Church, a beautiful building in its own right that was pretty elaborately decorated. (It's also the first and middle image in this very post.) That alone did make the walk in that direction worthwhile, and in the end I did get a good fifteen shots out of the evening. And I hope to add to that photo album between now and Christmas, both with a second walk northward with Alexia, and I also hope to get Shobhit to drive to a particular holiday display destination on the north side of Seattle at some point.
This also cements the seven photo albums I'll have for my "Christmas 2020" collection of albums on Flickr, also knowing we have the Merchandising Holiday Happy Hour scheduled on Zoom for Tuesday next week, which makes me very happy. I had been so bummed by the idea that pandemic restrictions would lessen the photos I could take for the holidays, but in the end that didn't really happen at all. Hooray!
Anyway, Alexia and I walked back home, and Shobhit got home from work literally seconds after I returned. I helped him a little with prepping for dinner, and then he indulged me in letting me play the first episode of The Flight Attendant on HBO Max. I found it eminently entertaining; Shobhit wasn't as into it. I really just want to find new shows for us to watch together, which you would think he would appreciate, but, whatever. I'll be watching the rest of that miniseries on my own, I guess. I'll probably burn through one or two of the episodes tonight.
I suppose I could also work on captioning recent photos I've uploaded to Flickr. So few of the holiday-season ones have gotten captioned, I've been so busy with other stuff. I also have other year-end posts to start working on drafts of, though.
I did start a new book yesterday as well, one that is unsurprisingly somewhat divisive: White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism, by Robin Diangelo. I've actually had it on hold at the library since not long after it was initially published in 2018, halfway through President Fuckwit's term, and the events of 2020 have somewhat complicated both its existence and its legacy. I'm still only in the introduction at this point, but I must say I am already finding it compelling and I suspect in the end I will feel it was worth the read.
[posted 12:35 pm]