I need to back up slightly to Saturday night just for a brief moment, as in the several posts I shared over the weekend to cover the many things I did, I never had a chance to mention this: Shobhit suggested he and Beth and I go for a walk, just after 10:00 that night. Beth liked the idea of getting out in the cool night air for a bit, and pretty much as soon as we left, even though his intent was to get some steps in, Shobhit declared a new goal of walking to his new favorite dessert place for us all to share a dessert, at
R+M Dessert Bar.
They don't have indoor seating there, and it's an odd configuration where they face the inner area of an otherwise residential building's lobby, where there are signs saying you cannot sit in there to eat. We took the small triple chocolate cake Shobhit bought for all three of us to share (delicious) outside and just took a minute to eat it standing on the sidewalk before we walked back home.
I'd have given both Shobhit and Beth a Social Review point for Saturday regardless, just because Beth is still our house guest, but at least in this case we actually went out somewhere. Shobhit worked 5-9 p.m. that day and my morning and afternoon had been sucked up by when I went
on the architecture tour and then
out for lunch and then
touring the Cirrus Apartments building with Alexia that day, followed by a lot of time processing, editing, tagging and uploading that day's photos.
Most weekends, I don't post anything new over the weekend and just catch up with my Monday DLU, but this past weekend, which included an extra day off I took for Monday, just had way too much going on. On Sunday I posted about all the stuff I did with Alexia on Saturday; last night I posted
about the Museum of Illusions with Danielle and then having her over for lunch on Sunday; so today I only have yesterday to catch you up on—well, plus the little walk and dessert with Shobhit and Beth Saturday night.
— पांच हजार छह सौ सैंतालीस —
So, yesterday: a plan for the late morning and afternoon formed only as of Sunday, when Danielle was over for lunch and she suggested Beth and I meet up with her and Rylee for a bit of a hangout on Alki Beach. This was in spite of the forecast calling for rain yesterday, which none of us had any problem with. In fact we're happy to get all the rain we can get, especially in our increasingly dry summers.
It didn't even rain all that much or for all that long yesterday, but it still rained a fairly good amount in the morning. I was helping Shobhit set up for a live virtual audition, running lines with him, when Beth left, wearing a very nice black dress for her "appointment" downtown that meant we would have to meet at the Water Taxi on Pier 50 for its departure at 10:30—turns out her "appointment" was for a job interview! There's a whole lot more to
that, which we discussed on the boat, but they really aren't my details to share here. Well, except that the idea of her renting out our guest room was broached, and as of today it does not look like that will happen.
Anyway, Beth very nearly missed the boat. She has been charing her location with Shobhit and me indefinitely, so I was able to track where she was. I had very little faith that the boat would wait for her, but this was a slow Monday at 10:30 a.m., and I am
so glad I asked. I was able to show the guy scanning Orca Cards upon boarding that she was like four blocks away, coming as fast as she could, and to my genuine surprise, he called the captain on his walkee talkee, and they waited for her.
They even asked what color jacket she had on (none; she had an umbrella she borrowed from us and just the black dress). In the end, she made it onto the boat only barely late, at 10:31. But they probably still would have left without her had I not said something, so I'm really glad I did. She clearly was too.
When we got to the dock on the West Seattle side of Elliott Bay, we had only to wait maybe five minutes before Danielle pulled up with Rylee in their van. Beth and I got in, and we set about driving around to Alki Beach.
Since it was still late morning, we decided to drive by Harbor West, the building with
a condo Danielle was looking at on the Redfin website. And then Beth, being the wildly proactive person that she is, found a phone number from the listing link I texted her, called them up, and within minutes had managed to schedule a viewing with a realtor at 2:00.
This gave us time, then, to drive to a place for lunch; at Danielle's suggestion we went to a place I didn't think I had ever been to, called
Luna Park Cafe. (I finally thought to search my Flickr account this morning and it turns out I was mistaken: I had brunch there with Susan once in 2012!)
I should have thought to expect to go out for breakfast yesterday being out with all of them, but for some reason I did not; I ordered the cheapest thing I could find on the menu, which was the "two eggs" dish that came with country potatoes and an English Muffin. Okay I take that back, I
could have ordered two sides, one of two eggs and one of country potatoes, and that would have come to roughly $8 before tax; I ordered the "two eggs" plate anyway because I thought, fuck it, I want the English muffin too. And that added three bucks to my order. Anyway, Luna Park Cafe is a very fun diner I think even Shobhit would enjoy and I would definitely go back. Maybe in another twelve years after I have forgotten I have ever been there.
After lunch, we then went to the main attraction that had been brought up on Sunday: Alki Beach, where we basically just walked the beach, Beth searched for sea shells (which were sparse but she did find a couple), and all three of us adults took several photos. Beth commented more than once about how beautiful the view is, and that was on an overcast, gray day. Thankfully, by that time the rain had stopped, and it never did rain again the rest of the day.
The 2:00 viewing at Harbor West was a barely perfect appointment, and we drove up there and arrived at about 1:40, where we discovered the realtor was already there as well, as we got started on that early.
This was a very similar scenario to when Alexia and I toured the Cirrus Apartments tower on Saturday, only this time it was a potential dream home location for Danielle rather than for me. Harbor West had a second unit listed, and the realtor managed to show us that one as well. The one from the listing Danielle was all over is located at the west end of the building; the other open unit on the far east end, right by the shore. Both units faced north, but neither had views as great as the real estate listing would have you believe, plus the listing does this annoying thing realtors do with fish-eye lens shots of the rooms, making them all look bigger than they actually are.
The entire building is constructed on top of a pier, sitting on pilings. This
seems very cool on first sight, but it also explained the stunningly high HOA dues, which are $1,200 a month for the unit to the far west. Danielle did not understand this until it was explained to her what kind of maintenance a structure like this necessitates. On top of that, once we were all inside the building,
built in 1968 (!), is clearly in some stage of deterioration overall, and a lot of it felt a bit . . . rickety. That was the best word I could come up with for it.
No part of the tours really met Danielle's hopes for it: not the overall building, not the units themselves, be it their views or their layouts. They were both dual-level, and they also were annoyingly listed as 2-bedroom even though one "bedroom" was more of an open-air loft space that happened to have a closet but was about half the floor space of a standard bedroom.
In the second unit we looked at, the main bedroom on the second floor had the pull-down blind drawn, the kind that's a solid material and covers the whole window. I tried to pull it down slightly to make it go up so we could see out the window . . . and the entire apparatus crashed to the floor. Oops. That was pretty embarassing, but no one else seemed even to have noticed it happened.
— पांच हजार छह सौ सैंतालीस —
We barely had time after that for Danielle and Rylee to drive Beth and me back to the Water Taxi pier, so we could take it back to Seattle at 3:00. I figured out what time this would get us back home on our connected #12 bus up Madison Street once we got back to the Seattle Waterfront, and there was no point in taking it all the way home before meeting up with Laney for the Happy Hour I planned, at Beth's suggestion because she said she'd like to hang out with Laney. We'd have just had to turn right around and head back to Broadway again. So, we got off the bus at Madison and Broadway at about 3:45.
We walked the couple of blocks over to Pride Place, and Laney let Beth in and up to her apartment to use the bathroom because Beth desperately needed to pee. This way Beth got a brief glimpse of Laney's studio apartment with a surprisingly large bathroom and a pretty decent view of Downtown to the west.
We then walked the block and a half down Pike to Saint John's Bar & Eatery, which was Laney's suggestion for Happy Hour, which starts when they open at 4:00. Had I been working yesterday, we wouldn't have been able to meet there until 5:00. In the end, my taking yesterday off meant I was able to really make the most of some extra time, between the trek to West Seattle and back, and then Happy Hour.
Beth was already a bit tired by then, and she even told me, "If we didn't already have plans I'd suggest we skip it." And we had a perfectly lovely couple of hours, sitting in the covered outdoor seating in the back of Saint John's, although I kind of felt like Beth and Laney may have connected more had Beth not been as tired as she was by that point. Not that the didn't connect, per se; I just felt slightly more lulls in conversation than usual, is all.
Saint John's, we have discovered, changes up their menu regularly—so, the artichoke dip dish we had loved so much is no longer being served. All three of us ordered a side of their yukon gold potatoes, little discs instead of regular french fries, and that was really delicious. I also had two of the $8 Happy Hour "Lemomade Kit" cocktails, which was super tasty, if not very strong. I really don't need my cocktails to be strong anymore anyway.
Laney had two beers, and Beth had just one. Beth said she could feel it from just one beer and that she was a lightweight.
Home is only about seven blocks from there, which to me is nothing, but Beth really wanted to take the bus. Laney walked with us to the bus stop on Pine, and chatted and waited until the bus came. Once home, Shobhit was already gone to his work shift, again 5-9 pm. At Shobhit's request, Beth fried up the rest of the scratch-made tortillas for which she still had balls of dough from when she made us quesdadillas Sunday night, and Shobhit just heated up some Indian packets and beans to eat with them after he got home.
By then, Beth had gone to bed. So, there was no hanging out with all three of us together yesterday, which means no Social Review point for Shobhit for yesterday. He's already gotten six points since Beth has been here, easily pulling ahead of Laney in the #1 spot, so it's all good, I think.
— पांच हजार छह सौ सैंतालीस —
[posted 12:27 pm]
