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I think I'm going to start with yesterday and work my way backwards.
I was
supposed to go to Golden Gardens Park with Tracy last night, as part of her celebrating her birthday on Wednesday. But, I should have known better to try and plan something with her two days in a row; she was meant to come pick me up at 5:00 p.m. and I got this text at 3:46:
Hey, I need to cancel our plans for tonight. I've out extroverted myself and need some quiet time. Sorry for the last minute change!
I just responded with,
Okay. I hardly had any good reason to be super annoyed by this; I had just hung out with her the very previous day, after all, and we'd been together a good five or six hours. I can't pretend to be thrilled by it either though, mostly because, unlike the millions of people out there who
love it when their social plans get canceled, I don't like having plans canceled with no backup in place. On the upside, this still worked out well for me last night, as it left my evening open to get all of my Blue Angels photos uploaded and captioned, and Shobhit and I were able to watch a bunch of television: episodes 6 and 7 of
The Sandman on Netflix; last night's episode of
Westworld (quite a tonal shift, I must say); and last night's episode of
Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.
Furthermore, I know Tracy prioritized mental health, which I do fully support, and good for her for sticking to whatever boundaries she needs even if it's unfortunately at the last minute. I don't put her in the same category as other friends who I felt were simply flaky. I do think, however, that I should resist trying to make plans with her twice in the same weekend, or particularly two days in a row. That really increases the chance she will wind up canceling, and I'm still going to do what I can to prevent that from happening.
So, the Big Social Outing yesterday was watching the Blue Angels do their Seafair air show. This was the first time they did it at all—like basically every other major community event—since 2019, and
that year I went with Gina and Beth while Shobhit worked. They did the Park & Ride thing at Angle Lake and then took Light Rail northbound, and I took it southbound, to meet them at Mount Baker Station, and we walked the mile or so to watch from the beach at Mount Baker Park. The whole plan worked out very well.
Shobhit, for his part, had not seen the Blue Angels show in
five years, because we didn't go in 2018, but he and I did
in 2017. As it happened, 2019 was the first year they no longer closed down the I-90 floating bridge for the show, which meant that 2017 was the last year we could go out a little ways into the middle of the bridge. (I had actually used that as a selling point to get Gina and Beth to come in 2019, but the option we did have still worked out fine.) It was really cool, 2017 being the second of only two years I managed to get out onto the
middle of the bride for the show. Both that year and in 2019, we got there by 1:00, about two hours early, to get a good spot and beat the worst of the crowds.
Well, Shobhit and I took a different approach yesterday, waiting instead to get there just over an hour early. We left home around 1:30, and parked on 31st Avenue South at about 1:50. There's a small bit of park area there, just above the tunnel that makes the west end of the I-90 bridge, called East Portal Viewpoint, about three blocks down a steep hill from where we parked (one block actually has a staircase to get up and down).
What we discovered, though, was that with the bridge open for traffic during the airshow, that also left the cycling/footpath along the north side of the bridge open—this was always closed to the public when they closed the bridge down to vehicle traffic. I won't be surprised if some year soon authorities stop allowing this, as it did leave a path about half as narrow for actual cyclists to get back and forth between the people on the bridge, but for now, Shobhit and I actually walked down there a little ways, basically as far as what put us directly above the western shore of Lake Washington. It was a great viewing spot, and since we did bring a small blanket tote with us from the trunk of the car, we did set it on the ground, folded into about a quarter of its full width, so we could sit on that and lean against the concrete barrier as a wall.
The Blue Angels airshow is pretty much the same every year, but especially since I don't go every single year (like the Washington State Fair, every few years or so seems to work best, so I don't tire of its sameness), I still always enjoy it. And I try to find new ways to get interesting photos. The shot at the top of this post is easily my favorite of the
forty that I saved from yesterday—the most I have taken any year since the first year I ever went, 2005, when I got sixty shots.
This was actually the seventh time I've gone, since that first time in 2005. It was the
eighth photo album I uploaded to Flickr, though, because in 2006 I saved the photos Stephanie S had shared, taken from the outdoor deck at the home of a friend.
Once we got home and I could see the photos enlarged on my desktop computer screen, I was quite pleased with the results—taking photos through my binoculars is often a real challenge, especially when trying to capture moving objects. But, once I had cropped these photos to my satisfaction, much like in 2019, they turned out far better than any of the shots I could get from just a camera itself in previous years. The only exception would be the couple of video clips I took, which I could not easily take through binoculars, so those are taken just from the phone, albeit using what zoom was available. They still turned out pretty cool, I thought.
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— पांच हजार दो सौ इक्यावन —
Okay! Let's shift back one day, to Saturday. Shobhit worked his usual noon-2:00 shift, and Tracy came over to the Braeburn Condos theater to watch
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. We had watched
The Fellowship of the Ring with me in February, so it took six months for us finally to get around to the second installment of the trilogy. We both feel relatively confident we can get to the third (and best) in less time, at least by the end of the year.
She had never seen of the Special Edition versions, which average around four hours, before. To my amazement, she can always recognize the scenes she knows she's never seen before. I love these movies so much that whenever I watch them I insist on watching the Special Editions, their length notwithstanding.
Tracy wanted to order pizza for lunch, and I suggested Palermo because they are tasty and also close by. We shared a medium pizza, which they said would take an hour to arrive, but we couldn't have been more than half an hour into the movie when it did arrive. The guy forgot her soda though so had to go back and get it, which took a while; we finished eating, and then he arrived again, offering two sodas instead of the one she ordered, as a sort of apology.
We must have broken for at least an hour to eat our lunch out in the Community Kitchen (which is still required to be booked in tandem with a theater booking, which works fine for me as booking them separately was always awkward, resulting in walking through someone else's event in the kitchen just to get to the bathroom). We finally got back into the theater, where I also popped some popcorn, which I ate quite a lot of. Just for shits and giggles, I took
a brief video of the popcorn popping. Just for anyone looking for a sense of The Braeburn!
I really enjoyed watching the movie, as I always do, and so far as I could tell Tracy did too. Soon after I went back upstairs to the condo, and I told Shobhit I was interested in this new series that had been released on Netflix on Friday called
The Sandman. He seemed reticent at first, but as often happens after he finally gives something I suggest a chance, he got super into it: we binged fully half the season—five episodes—on Saturday night. Shobhit wanted to keep going all night but I was too tired and needed to go to bed shortly after 11 p.m.
There's a lot to pique my interest in that show anyway, even though I have never read anything by Neil Gaiman, the author on whose eighties comic book series the show is based. But, there was a movie based on a novel of his back in 2007, starring Claire Danes and co-starring Robrt DeNiro as a gay pirate, which I liked and which I even re-watched with Ivan while he still lived with us last year. I would expect a movie or show based on other works of his to suit my interests. Furthermore, there's a raven character in
The Sandman on this show voiced by Patton Oswalt—a favorite comedian of mine—whose name is MATTHEW. Ha!
By complete coincidence, Gabriel actually texted me a video clip of his TV last night, featuring Matthew the raven, and including the closed captioning reading thus:
[Matthew the raven] Fuck it! Let's go to Hell. I replied that we were seven episodes in and really enjoying it, and he expressed surprise, both that I was into the show, and that even he was giving it a shot (which I think is objectively more surprising, actually).
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Okay so now let's shift back to Friday. I never posted a standard Daily Lunch Update that day, because I decided the "
Twenty Years of What PCC Means to Me" photo retrospective would suffice for the day. I actually have posted another post this past weekend, however: the next day, I did post about the
20th Anniversary Party Eric threw for me in the midafternoon on Friday. So, both of those posts had to do with my reaching twenty years at PCC, and you can follow those links to read more if you haven't already. (I actually wrote up and posted that post on Saturday after the movie with Tracy, and before getting to the show watching with Shobhit.)
On Friday, though, by the time Shobhit and I got all the sodas and leftovers down to the car, I had about half an hour left of my work day. I left at 4:30, and instead of heading south and east as usual to go home, I walked due north, to meet Laney for our first August Happy Hour at a park, a first-time at Centennial Park. This proved slightly confusing at first, because it used to be called Elliott Bay Park, and both the Maps app and Google Maps still uses both labels, making it look like Elliott Bay Park is north of Centennial Park. But, the whole strip of parkland even down through Myrtle Edwards Park—which is directly across the railroad tracks from the PCC office building—used to be called Elliott Bay Park, the Myrtle Edwards stretch being renamed thus
in 1976, the year I was born.
Myrtle Edwards Park is maintained by Seattle Parks & Recreation, though, and this was how I learned that some Seattle city parks are maintained by a different agency: Centennial Park, connected to and directly north of Myrtle Edwards is maintained by the Port of Seattle, and that stretch, apparently still called Elliott Bay Park at the time, was renamed Centennial Park
in 2011.
The annoying thing is that, right now, I cannot find a complete park map, by either Seattle Parks & Recreation
or the Port of Seattle, which makes it clear where Myrtle Edwards ends and Centennial Park begins. I suppose I could go by where signs are posted, but I wasn't thinking to when walking through the park—which, functionally, is all just one continuous park—and just trying to figure out where "Elliott Bay Park" was and thus where Laney was expected to be. I still couldn't even tell you where Centennial Park ends to the north; only that the map shows green parkland as far north as Pier 90, about half a mile north of where I found Laney.
In fact, when I found her, I was just looking at my phone and noticing I had walked a bit further north than my Maps app was telling me to go for "Elliott Bay Park," and a second later she texted me her location. I thought it meant I had overshot my mark by more than I did, and I texted her as I headed back—only to find her in her collapsible chair in the grassy area next to some trees moments later.
It was rather breezy there, so we tired to move to the other side of another couple of trees to cut it down, which didn't really work. But, once I got the requisite photo and we settled into our chairs, we didn't even think about the wind again, which we realized a couple hours later, as we were packing up to leave, had actually completely died down anyway.
I had made myself a margarita in a thermos in the morning before work, so I could just take it directly after work, and I also took leftover samosas and pakoras (also what I brought for lunch today) to have as a picnic dinner there. Laney might have hung out longer than just two hours this time, but she was dog sitting and getting worried about the animal, so we packed up and walked a fairly surprising distance to a parking garage that apparently was built by Expedia, which has a beautiful new headquarters building right there, and the garage has free four-hour parking for park patrons. How awesome is that? I'd definitely go back. The view of Elliott Bay, as always, is stellar.
Anyway, Laney then drove me home, after a wonderful outdoor happy hour as usual.
[posted 12:25 pm]
