I'll have to make this morning's post about yesterday a bit quicker, which should be fairly easy to do as yesterday was not quite as eventful as previous days this week—and it was sure as shit not as eventful as
Thursday, when I spent the whole say on trains to, in, and from Portland. I didn't even leave with Alexia for our Birth Week outing yesterday until about a quarter after 5:00, because she had to work all day. I'm sure she was very busy, too, as it was her first full day at work back at home again after a work trip to Phoenix all week previous.
This actually left me a lot of time to catch up on Birth Week writing, of multiple sorts; that alone was a lot of work on my part—that incredibly long post yesterday about my day Thursday literally took me the entire morning to get done; I woke up between 7 and 8 and, aside from a brief break to eat the eggs and toast breakfast Shobhit kindly made for me, I worked on that post until finishing at 11:20. This meant I was not done with my shower and getting ready until after noon, which is incredibly rare for me. At least I had the extra time for it.
After that, I spent much of the afternoon catching up on my draft of the "Birth Week 2022, Part Two" email that will likely get sent out sometime tomorrow evening. Even this involved a fair amount of work, as I research a lot and find links to relevant web pages to include—some of other photos I've uploaded to flickr; others to websites relevant to places I went or trains I rode. On the upside, having already written extensively about all this stuff for my blog (this usually goes the other way around), in some cases I was able just to copy and paste certain paragraphs, trying with usually only moderate success to edit the photo captions down a bit for the email.
By the time I was all caught up with that, I had less than two hours before Alexia texted me at 4:55 that she just needed ten to fifteen minutes to feed her cat, and then she would be ready to go. I fed my cats a little bit early myself, and soon enough I was out in the hallway and Alexia and I were headed to the Capitol Hill Light Rail station.
This year was the first in which Alexia participated in my Birth Week, and I suspect she will every year for the foreseeable future, barring her having work travel plans all week, or her dying, or least likely of all, us having some sort of falling out. She and I had actually been exchanging cat care for years before 2020, but it wasn't until stay-home orders that we really started to get to know each other as we took frequent long walks together, having nothing else we could do. We've gotten to know each other pretty well since, and we still get together frequently, now more often to watch movies than anything. (Just this morning, from her suggestion last night, I reserved the Braeburn Condos Theater for the afternoon of Saturday, May 21, to watch a double feature of
The Lost World and
Jurassic Park III in an effort to move through getting all the previous movies watched before the new movie comes out next month. Between her travels and my getting sick, it's the soonest we could get to the next movies, so we're making it a double feature.)
Even though it's the one train I already ride more frequently than any other, it seemed logical to make Link Light Rail one of the trains I rode this week, and when I first discussed it with Alexia, she said there were still a lot of Light Rail stations she hasn't seen, especially the newer ones. So it seemed a logical fit, and we made plans to joyride Light Rail together.
I've already done
several photo albums of rides on Light Rail before, most of them after station openings:
2009 with Barbara and Susan when the first line opened, at that time only
between Westlake and Tukwila Stations (looking back at those old photos, I'm struck by how much better shape the illuminated art installations at Beacon Hill Station were);
2016 when Capitol Hill and University of Washington Stations first opened; and of course
2021 when U District, Roosevelt and Northgate Stations all opened just this past October. Thrown in there is the
second 2016 ride I did with Laney, only a month after U Link opened, also as part of my Birth Week, in which we got off at every stop between University of Washington Station and SeaTac Station and took one drink of the alcoholic beverages we took with us. I made a smart plan that day, getting off at every other stop southbound, then doing the other stops on the way back, so there was never any single long ride.
It wasn't quite the same with Alexia, mostly because I selected only the stops I thought had the most interesting art and designs, and so we only got off and explored eight of what are now 19 stops on the line (Angle Lake Station, one stop south of SeaTac which serves mostly just as a park and ride with an adjacent, gigantic parking garage, opened in late 2016 and as of yesterday was still the only station I had never actually gotten out at).
Mostly because of both the extra time we spent at the very cool Northgate Station with its pedestrian bridge across the freeway to North Seattle College, and then about an hour detour for a Mexican dinner at Casa Patron just a few blocks from Roosevelt Station, the tour last night took us a lot longer than expected: we left at 5:15 and did not get home until 10:25—just over five hours. (For comparison, the full-line tour I did with Laney, for which we got off at every stop, took us about seven hours. We had already gone out for lunch before starting, though, so the meal isn't included in that time; that would likely take it to closer to eight hours.)
I knew that Northgate Station would take us the most time, as I wanted to walk Alexia across the John Lewis Memorial Bridge and show her the North Seattle College Campus Pond. Then, we even found a path that went under the bridge and then alongside the pond, in a grounds area that was far more landscaped now than the last time I went, so we went for a bit of a longer walk too. Because of that, and then coming back to the station proper to view the three main art installations, I took 11 photos at the Northgate Station stop alone, accounting for more than a full third of the 29 photos I took yesterday—the
full photo album has 32 shot in it, because I also included the three photos I took of the birthday card she sent in the mail and which I actually received last week. (It cracks me up that she sends my birthday card in the mail when she lives right next door. "It's fun to get stuff in the mail!" she says, and I suppose she's right.)
We rode to U District Station next, my favorite of the new stations with its artificial apartment windows lining the walls, and it was also there that I suggested Casa Patron for dinner: I met up with Claudia and Lewis there last fall, deciding we should go again sometime, but they just moved to Port Orchard where they bought a house! So, I went back with Alexia instead. I was really tempted to get a cocktail but didn't when I realized how easily and more cheaply I could do that once I got home. I did not realize then how late it would be before we got home, but, whatever.
After dinner, we returned to Light Rail, and got off at the next stop: University of Washington Station. After that we had four of the eight stops I had selected done, and the next one was Beacon Hill Station, eight stations south—bypassing Capitol Hill and downtown stations, which we were both already deeply familiar with. Next was Columbia City Station, two stations further south, and by the time we got there, at about 8:35, it was starting to get dark and I could tell Alexia was getting a bit tired. We had only two more stops after that, though, and Alexia indicated she was committed to going all the way down to Angle lake as planned.
We only had two more stops after Columbia City: Tukwila Station and Angle Lake. But, given the distance and the added ten minutes each time of getting off the train and back on the next one, this still took a good amount of time. It was 9:00 by the time we reached Tukwila Station, where we found we needed to give a wide berth to a couple of crazy people (who I don't think even knew each other) who happened to be there; and it was 9:20 when we reached Angle Lake Station.
It was a straight shot back to Capitol Hill Station after that, but that's still a 44-minute ride on its own. It went by fairly quickly, as even though we had a number of bouts of silence on the way down, we found things to chat about on that long ride coming back. Then we walked the half-mile home from Capitol Hill Station together, and went to the package room where she had new shoes waiting for her that she was very excited about.
I finally got back to the condo, where we parted ways and Alexia thanked me for including her, and I thanked her for doing this with me. I worked on uploading and tagging my photos on Flickr, and made myself a spiked hot chocolate with peanut butter whiskey. (Unsurprisingly, between that and the very heavy dinner, my weight is up again this morning—the weight I lost while being sick effectively reversed.) I got to bed at 11:41 and then woke up at 6:11 this morning, giving me time to write this post as quickly as I could before getting ready and then driving down to Olympia to meet with Dad for our perennial bike ride.
[posted 7:34 am]
