I know I wrote about this plenty back in June, that by the end of August, my "Seattle Pride 2024" collection of photo albums on Flickr would have a record eleven albums in it, but somehow, over the past month and a half or so, I actually forgot about it. So still, when I returned to that collection after adding the Alki Beach Pride album (32 shots) to it, I was kind of like: Damn!

It would seem that, between the beginning of June as Pride Month and Alki Beach Pride happening at the end of August, each year it's a solid three months before all the annual Pride events have occurred. Granted, there's only one in July (Tacoma Pride Festival) and one in August (Alki Beach Pride), leaving eight events in June alone (the eleventh is the requisite "Random Hot Guys" album, two shots from which were added from yesterday), but they still count! Of course, four of the albums are from Pride Weekend at the end of June alone, but there were three new ones this year never included in the Seattle Pride collection before: Seattle Pride ArtWalk; Seattle Pride Flag Raising Ceremony (which I was not actually at but Shobhit was and he took a bunch of pictures); and Fleurs de Villes: Seattle Pride.

Oh, what the hell? Why don't I just list all of the Seattle Pride events / photo albums for 2024 here!

1. Seattle Pride in the Park 2024: Saturday June 1
2. Seattle Pride ArtWalk 2024: Thursday June 6
3. Seattle Pride Flag Raising Ceremony 2024: Friday June 7
4. Fleurs de Villes Seattle Pride 2024: Thursday June 27
5. Trans Pride Seattle 2024: Friday June 28
6. PrideFest Capitol Hill 2024: Saturday June 29
7. Seattle Pride Parade 2024: Sunday June 30
8. Seattle PrideFest Seattle Center 2024: Sunday June 30
9. Tacoma Pride Festival 2024: Saturday July 13
10. Alki Beach Pride 2024: Saturday August 31
11. Random Hot Guys: June 1 - August 31

The previous record number of Seattle Pride photo albums had been eight, which was reached both last year and the year before, when 6 had been the record before that.

I'm really getting slaphappy with the holiday events anymore, basically once every six months: Pride in the summer, and Christmas in the fall and winter. (I actually tried to pull back on the Christmas photo albums last year, managing to go down from the record 20 in 2022 . . . to 18 in 2023. When Alexia finally moves to Idaho in a year or two, I might find it harder to find someone to go to all those holiday events with me, although between Shobhit and Laney and even Tracy, I should be fairly well covered.)

Anyway! The thing with Alki Beach Pride is, it's kind of more of a "beach day" that happens to have some largely Pride-related vendor booths along Alki Ave SW than a strictly "Pride event." That is, even though there is indeed a performance stage set up—that's where the photo taken at the top of this post was taken. But, we only stayed a couple of hours, and I'm guessing more involved live performances occurred later in the day.

Instead, we found parking in a stunningly great spot with shocking swiftness once we got there, probably seconds after it had been vacated, and we just meandered up Alki Avenue through the booths, and then part of the way back. We waited in line for a few minutes at a newer public restroom building with very cool Dozfy murals on all four sides, on the first walk to the end of the vendor booths. On the way back, not far from that same restroom, we found a place on the beach to sit and eat our lunches. Shobhit and I brought sandwiches we brought from home; Laney brought some nuts to snack on but also got a side of beans and rice from a nearby Mexican food truck.

Laney sat in a little, light folding chair she set up in the sand. Shobhit and I laid out a light blanket tote. Shobhit and I had put too much heavy stuff into an insulated tote with three different compartments in it, which at first glance seemed very cool—he got it for free from somewhere, I forget now, maybe SAG-AFTRA?—but it turned out not to be very sturdy, and while the handles did not tear clean off the thing, the fabric around them ripped several inches on both sides. I tossed it in the garbage as soon as we got home.

Shobhit and I both took a turn getting our feet wet in the water. Bear in mind this is salt water, and Washington State, so it was fucking cold. My feet felt numb after just the minute or two I stood in it.

All told, we spent about two and a half hours in West Seattle yesterday, maybe half of it browsing booths and maybe half lounging on the beach. It was lovely, and although I could have stayed longer, we were all fine with heading back once Shobhit suggested it.

We've got quite beautiful weather for this Labor Day weekend. I still don't know what I'll do today—Shobhit also has today off so I made no plans, aside from doing laundry—but presumably we'll get outside again.

Shobhit wanted to stop at Costco on the way back, and Laney didn't mind, although she went to sit at the Starbucks about a block away rather than walk the concrete floor with us. I finally got a replacement bottle of Irish Cream, yay!

We drove Laney back home (when Shobhit decided he'd like to go to Alki Beach as well, we decided we would just drive her, rather than us all taking the Water Taxi and either walking or bussing), and then Shobhit and I went home and unloaded groceries. Then we binged the last six or seven episodes of season one (the only season yet available) of Severance on Apple TV+. We really just spent the entire rest of the day watching TV, to an almost psychotic degree in my opinion. But whatever, what are you gonna do! We finished that and then watched this week's season four premiere of Only Murders in the Building on Hulu. It had been so long since we watched anything on Hulu that I had to re-log into the account on our TV.

[posted 10:02 am]