Jennifer was supposed to visit this weekend, and then had to cancel because on Thursday she tested positive for covid. We had tickets to the Northwest Chocolate Festival yesterday, and reservations for drinks at the Fog Room downtown last night. I really didn't want to waste either of those things, so naturally I set about finding contingent companions.
I went to the Northwest Chocolate Festival with Danielle, who really should have been who I contacted first. Instead, I contacted Alexia first, who was headed back from a work trip to Portland on Thursday, headed out for a vacation trip to England soon, and so she declined as she wanted some alone time at home or a bit. Totally understandable. I then texted Tracy, even though I knew that in all likelihood she would have other plans, as she often does on Saturdays.
So, my next approach was this: I looked at my latest
Social Review just to remind myself of which people I hang out with the most often. Shobhit is always #1, of course, and if he hadn't been working yesterday, he'd probably have already had his own ticket anyway. Laney was out because she would not want to be at a crowded indoor event with a bunch of unmasked people. Karen would not have been an easy sell, and likely also already had plans; most of the other high-ranking names were part of our biweekly Action Movie Night and a) I don't know any of them well enough to invite them to something like this; and b) they would not be likely to have a great amount of interest anyway.
But then it finally dawned on me: Danielle! Now, she has a work schedule that has her working over the weekend every other weekend, so I did already know that the chances of her availability were at best 50/50. I lucked out, though, and she was both available and very interested.
She said she wanted to see if Rylee would want to come along, and if she did then Danielle would just buy her a ticket. But, Rylee is doing this project for school where she takes care of this mechanical baby doll for four days (no eggs or sacks of flour these days), and she's too embarrassed to take it with her to public events, so she declined. Danielle told me a fair bit about how Rylee is doing with the project, though, and it sounds like she's actually taking it very seriously—she wants to get a good grade—and I thought that was very cool. Good for her! Apparently every time the baby exasperates Rylee with its cries, Danielle says something like, "See, maybe you'll think twice before you let a penis anywhere near you."
Anyway, with Danielle coming from Renton, I told her I was fine with busing over to meet her over there at the Medenbauer Center in Bellevue, rather than asking her to come and pick me up in Seattle. That would be a lot less driving for her. We decided to meet there at noon. Because Danielle is never on time for anything, I deliverately chose a #550 Sound Transit express bus scheduled to arrive at the Bellevue Transit Center at 12:10. To my astonishment, Danielle was actually in downtown Renton before I was. But, it took her so long to find parking that I still managed to walk the two blocks or so from the Transit Center and then wait at the Meydenbauer Center until about 12:30 before Danielle arrived, having had to walk several more blocks than I did, from her parking spot.
It was fine. This yielded my
second photo album of Northwest Chocolate Festivals, the last one having been with Shobhit in 2018. Unlike in 2018, though, when I uploaded 40 shots of the event,
this year's photo album has all of 25 shots, only 17 of those from the actual event.
Most of the large conference room where the event takes place is just vendor booths for different brands of high quality chocolate bars. There is slight variation here and there—and there was a Topo Chico booth handing out free bottles of sparkling water—but that was the vast majority of it. And typically, they have little bowls of tiny pieces of different flavors of their chocolate, either with a spoon or little tongs for you to pick up a tiny bite and drop into your hand. At some booths, the vendors dropped the piece into your hand themselves. Either way, those tiny samples are very deceptive—you still try so many samples, after a while the seemingly impossible occurs: you get chocolate-d out.
It happened with Danielle sooner than it did with me, maybe two thirds of the way making our way through the booths. I have a feeling Jennifer would have lasted longer, both in sampling stamina and in overall interest. We've already agreed to plan to try again for her to visit for this festival again next year. Hopefully she doesn't get covid again.
It was still a good time with Danielle, don't get me wrong. And she was patient while I still wanted to make my way through the rest of the booths. Even then, there were several we passed over, due to a variety of factors, like how interesting or tasty they looked, or how crowded a given booth was, or just the difficulty of finding an efficient route that hit every booth in there. We tried doing the outer perimeter first and then made our way through the island rows of booths in the middle.
There were large photos of chocolate in different forms mounted along the walls along the perimeter of the room. Once one of them was cleared enough of people standing near it, Danielle indulged me or a selfie in front of one. I was quite happy with the resulting shot.
We had gotten inside the conference room at about 12:30, and we left at roughly a quarter after 2:00—so, we spent an hour and forty-five minutes in there. We both had some time to spare, and even though Danielle knew I had drink plans later in the evening, she suggested we go somewhere for a drink there in downtown Bellevue.
The amount of construction going on there was astonishing. It seemed like every other block had pedestrian detours due to construction. In fact, right outside Meyenbauer Center when I was waiting for Danielle, this lady got confused and passed me actually saying, "This is so ghetto!" Seriously? What an incredibly suburban-white-woman thing to say.
Anyway. We both looked up places on Yelp for nearby ideas. We settled on a place that Yelp said had outdoor seating and was currently open—only to discover they were not open yet. We then settled for this place called Forum Social House, which we had no idea was also a miniature golf place until we got to it. It's on the third floor of Lincoln Square, which is across the street from Bellevue Square—who large, neighboring shopping centers in downtown Bellevue. We decided we should come back sometime and actually play some miniature golf.
We were both incredibly amused by the neon sign there that read WASH YOUR BALLS. I recorded the Live Photo as a video because the couple of seconds it captured of Danielle pretending to put the sign in her mouth cracked me up. Flickr must have some kind of algorithm that identifies potentially offensive content because it automatically uploaded that clip as a private upload, and I had to change it back to public in order to be able to embed it into this post.
We took that picture on our way out. We were the only people drinking at the bar on a Saturday mid-afternoon, for about an hour. Their restrooms had an eggplant emoji on the men's room door, which really cracked me up. It made slightly less sense to me to put the peach emoji on the women's room. "A peach is supposed to be a butt," I said. Danielle said, "Well, people like women to have a juicy booty, I guess."
Either way, I suppose either way you could call the use of these emoji, amusing as they were, a bit regressive. Trans women who have penises would still be using the women's restroom. This was underscored by when I wanted to ask where the restroom was, and the bartender lady's back was turned when I said, "Excuse me?" and she replied, "Yes sir?" Within moments, she actually apologized: "I should not have assumed your pronouns." she said. That was sweet, even though I truly wasn't even thinking about it. I just said "That's okay" and moved on. I did think about this later, though: if I were, say, 25 years old, I probably would care a lot more about it. I'm too old now to waste the energy on giving too much of a shit. Or any shit at all, really. I don't owe anyone clarity on my gender identity, and I emboy that in practice by literally not even thinking about it.
I had a strawberry margarita and it was pretty tasty. I took an additional eight photos at Forum Social House, which was what put the "
Northwest Chocolate Festival - Bellevue 2023" photo album up to five shots. That included duplicating one Live Photo into a video, and having Danielle test me the lovely selfie she took with me at the bar.
Soon after that, I was back on the 550 bus to Seattle. I finished reading
Arostotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, the best novel I have read in over a decade, on that bus. I really wished the book had been longer, I loved it so much. Actually, I may have finished it while walking home from the bus stop downtown. I spent some time on the bus exchanging texts with Jennifer on Facebook Messenger, who said she was feeling a little better. At Shobhit's suggestion, I offered to pay her the $40 for her Northwest Chocolate Festival ticket. She suggested that, instead, I just buy her a cocktail or two the next time she visits. Sounds like a deal.
I was home long enough to feed the cats, Shobhit was just home from work, himself. I actually could have asked if he'd want to come out for drinks in Jennifer's stead at the Fog Room. But, then I'd have had to pay for both of us. I spent less by going out with Laney instead—I asked if she wanted to go because she had initially wanted to join Jennifer and me for drinks, but then backed out when we found out we couldn't reserve patio seats for more than 2, and she didn't want to be inside at dining room seating. Well, now it was down to a reservation for 2 again, and Laney jumped at the chance to join me.
Shobhit had found something else to do anyway: there was a screening at Northwest Film Forum of a 1975 gay porn parody of
The Excorcist called
Sex Demon. Had I not already had other plans, I absolutely would have gone with him. He later told me about how much the audience, which was not sold out but was close to it, laughed at it. Apparently a couple next to him had not realized what they were in for and left after the first scene. The movie is apparently 60 minutes long, which is actually kind of an eternity for porn.
Anyway, I'm digressing. Back to the Fog Room! Laney says downtown Renton is super sketchy at night and she didn't want to be walking home from the transit center alone—her building only being a few blocks away notwithstanding—so she drove her van up to Seattle and actually found a parking spot on the street on Capitol Hill. And, I met her on the platform of the Capitol Hill Light Rail station. The southbound train was just pulling in when I stepped off the elevator, but I saw Laney immediately and sprinted right up to her, nearly startling her. We rode the one stop down to Westlake Station and were up on the street level at 6:30, fully half an hour before the reservation. We were only two and a half blocks away.
Well, our table was just made ready for us when we arrived anyway. But, it was right next to a glass railing, and Laney has an increasingly difficult time with heights right next to a ledge. I asked if she wanted to ask to be moved to another spot on the patio, and she said yes. We moved over to the communal table with the coals that light up in flames when it gets cold. That was exactly where we sat the last time we had drinks there,
back in 2019. I misremembered that visit as having been in midsummer because it was not dark, and last night we were there, wonderfully, through sunset. But, I had forgotten that we actually went to the Fog Room in October back in 2019 as well—October 13, in fact. But, they had reservations earlier in the day back then, and we had gone there at 3:00 in the afternoon. Last night's reservation was at 7:00.
We actually decided we'd go back again this winter, maybe in January. We can still sit out on the patio, warmed by the coal flames. I really like this idea. And I can find new angles of photos to take. It was nice to get sunset photos this time around, even though my
Fog Room 2023 photo album only has 10 shots in it.
I actually had dinner at home before leaving, with barely enough time for it. It was a cost saving measure. I still had a Bavarian pretzel with cheese dip along with the one cocktail I ordered. I had initially budgeted $75 for the Fog Room. In the end, that combined with Forum Social House set me back about $66. The pretzel was very good. It was also what Laney ordered, with an order of fries as well. She had two drinks, both beers. It's too bad I don't like beer, what with it being so much cheaper than the cocktails I always order. Oh well.
We were up
there maybe an hour and 15 minutes. We chatted a bit with a lady and her friend sitting next to us, who were staying there in the Charter Hotel and set to leave on an Alaskan Cruise today. Laney and I walked from there back to Westlake Station, got off at Capitol Hill Station, and I walked her to her van. She was parked all of two blocks from my building, so I declined her offer to give me a ride home.
Shobhit and I then caught up on some television: the night's PBS airings of the lovely Judi Dench sitcom
As Time Goes Bye from the nineties, which they air two episodes of every Saturday night. And also the fourth season finale of
Sex Education on Netflix.
[posted 8:24]
