I last updated on Saturday morning, it's now Monday evening, and hooo boy, do I have a lot to update you on! And for organizational purposes, I'm going to separate them out into separate entries by Birth Week event.

So today, the first of those is . . . boating with Heather and Tim! (That's a link to the dedicated full photo album on Flickr, all tagged but none yet captioned, though I hope to have them captioned soon -- 29 shots, 26 photos and 3 brief videos.)

Heather and Tim are new additions to my Birth Week festivities this year -- sixteen years in. Heather has also been officially planned to be a part of it since I shared the photos of last year's Birth Week in the requisite photo digest emails, when I revealed that I already knew what my 2019 theme would be: nautical. Get on boats! Heather wrote back and said, "You have to let us take you out on our boat!" I was like, "Okay!"

In fact, now that I think about it, Heather wound up being the only person who was put on my calendar on a particular date a year ago (in this case, Saturday April 27) and never had to reschedule. Even Laney, who can be counted on to keep scheduled plans, had to be reschuled through no fault of her own; it was just because the Fremont Brew Cruise would not go out on any day besides Fridays this early in the season.

So now for the part I thought could be tricky. Heather is a broker I know through work. I have never actually socialized with a broker before, outside of something that involves other people I work with and was probably paid for by the brokerage company as opposed to a private individual. (For instance, in 2003 I wound up getting offered an extra ticket another brokerage offered a bunch of us at the office, to see that seasn's interation of < href="https://machupicchu.livejournal.com/302083.html">Teatro ZinZanni. Even back then tickets were like $99, and it was a large table, so we're talking quite the pretty penny there.) That would not necessarily give me pause, except that when I still thought Shobhit would be joining us, Heather had said they would take us out to lunch, and I had to write back to her to be careful not to spend on us in excess of $100.

I mean, I have no idea what kind of gray area we're getting into here when the generosity of a broker is totally outside the context of work except that work is how I happen to know her. I just know that the whole tequila bottle fiasco with another broker made me a little uneasy about that kind of offer. Now, granted, there is no way Heather spent anywhere near the value of that tequila bottle ($400 with tax!) on me, but . . . collectively, did she spend more than the maxiumum $100 value of gifts allowed from brokers?

Again, this was all private time, and the thing with the other broker was a gift handed to me literally at my desk at work. I really don't know what kinds of lines of distinction the powers that be would draw about such things. That said, Shobhit wound up with a shift to work that afternoon and could not make it, which actually made things simpler, honestly -- I was going to keep driving his car south to Shelton afterward, and Shobhit would have had to take Light Rail back home. In any case, even without Shobhit, Heather sure showered me with a lot of generosity that day.

She brought snacks that we never even needed to break into while on the boat, although she did give me four sample packets of "Louisville Vegan Jerky" that they just started representing, as kind of a parting gift at the end of our time together when we got back to Des Moines Marina -- along with the bottle of rosé that we never opened on the boat either. She also bought my lunchat the restaurant we went to in Gig Harbor (called Tides Tavern; I should have taken a picture of it from our boat on the dock; I don't know why I didn't); and later even presented me with three slices of cake from their Burien location (I have gotten birthday cake from them in the past from their Capitol Hill location, all of about five blocks from home). And why did we never open that bottle of rosé? Because she also brought all the ingredients to make me Moscow Mules, complete with copper mug!

I don't usually drink so early in the day, but Heather assured me time is different out on the water. I left home at about 9:15 Saturday morning to meet them at the Des Moines Marina at 10:00, and she probably poured me two of those drinks -- with unmeasured, pretty heavy pours on the vodka -- before we even reached Tides Tavern for lunch. I was pretty buzzed all through lunch, and it only occurred to me today that my memory of lunch itself is now kind of fuzzy. I do remember saying at one point, "I'm pretty buzzed right now."

I had a personal pizza with salad on top of it that was excellent. Also, I'm pretty sure I had never actually been to Gig Harbor before. I've heard the phrase many times, but that's about it. It sure was fun getting out there, though.

Going by a count that starts with the "Birth Week Prologue" day trip from Saturday the previous weekend, when Shobhit and I took two separate Washington State Ferries to San Juan Island and back, plus the Fremont Brew Cruise boat on Lake Union that Laney and I took this past Friday, Heather and Tim's boat makes the fourth "Birth Week Boat" I got into -- and also, thus far anyway, by far the smallest: 23' when counting the engine. I asked them if they had a name for the boat, and they have a rather creative one: Reinheitsgeboat. They add the A at the end just to make clear how it's pronounced; the word reinheitsgebot apparently referrs to a 516 German “beer purity law,” saying it can only include water, hops, barley and yeast. And they like to drink on their boat.

I spent maybe five hours with them, late Saturday morning and early afternoon. It gave me time to get to know them a bit, find out how long they've been married, the many places Heather has lived, how they live only about a mile from Des Moines Marina, and they apparently take the boat out regularly year-round, even in the winter when they just bundle up really heavy. In the summer, they said, they take the boat out pretty much every weekend, and this time of year is about when that frequency begins.

And as it happens, of all the days of my Birth Week, this past Saturday was the only one where the weather was somewhat in question. They came very prepared -- with extra jackets, blankets, the works. The weather worked out beautifully for us on the way over to Gig Harbor, and got a little bit drizzly along the way back -- which actually made for some very good pictures, especially when it was not raining exactly where we were but we could see it falling in the distance.

Still, with clouds gathering in the afternoon, they kept giving me extra jackets to wear. Consider this shot of me, in which I am wearing, if you count the lifejacket, five jackets:

I had already come in layers: my red hoodie beneath my light black jacket. Heather later gave me a silver down jacket to wear on top of that (you can see the hood of that jacket here), and then, when the clouds gathered and it became notably cooler, they added the read over-jacket. By the time the above shot was taken, the camera was pointed toward a clearer bit of sky, but as I recall it was still pretty cloudy in the other direction -- and it was pretty chilly at this moment.

It was still generally great weather though and I had a blast. They talked about taking me out again when Shobhit could join, and even said we could take Light Rail down to Tukwila and they could boat us up to Seattle and drop us downtown. Although as long as we have our own car, I don't see why not just drive down again. Then again, getting a boat ride straight to the Seattle waterfront sounds fun too.

[posted 8:44 pm]