Greetings from Golden Gardens

Good Yom Tov! We are at the moment having a low-key celebration watching Shazam with Daniel, who hasn't seen it, after dinner from Amazon Go, the local grocery store where you scan an app when you walk in and then take your groceries without having to check out. I ate leftovers from Luna Park Cafe because I was still stuffed from lunch at Katsu Burger, which has Japanese deep fried burgers/tofu and phenomenal spiced fries, which is where we went after a morning at Volunteer Park, which has a conservatory and outdoor gardens plus a water tower with great views of Seattle, and is adjacent to Lake View Cemetery, where Bruce Lee is buried.

After lunch, we went to Golden Gardens Park, which is still more green than golden though the trees are starting to turn and the water in Puget Sound is quite cold! We walked to the pier to see the crabs and seagulls, but it started to rain hard enough that we headed back to the car and drove to Ballard Locks. There were enormous tankers being pushed through the locks by tugboats, but the real excitement there were seals and sea lions in the locks looking to catch the salmon swimming through the fish ladder, something we've never seen there before! We walked through Amazon central on the way to get dinner, including the Spheres:

Greetings from Snoqualmie

Skyping with Adam from Daniel's apartment, so quickly: woke to drizzle but had mostly gorgeous day in and out of Seattle, despite a near-disaster with rental car and Hertz doing everything in their power to be unhelpful at the corporate level (franchise at convention center far more useful though, get this, could not give us a new vehicle because they had too many cars with flat tires).

Once we got things sorted, we went to the Issaquah Salmon Hatchery and Fish Ladder, lunch at Coconut Thai in Issaquah, then Snoqualmie Falls, where we had drizzle but also clearer views of the waterfall than last time in the fog! From there we went back into the city to the always spectacular Chihuly Garden and Glass, walked around Seattle Center, then went to Bambino's Pizzeria for dinner before coming back to Daniel's apartment to watch Aquaman since son hadn't seen it!

Greetings from Tukwila

We spent a delightful day in Seattle with Daniel, mostly at the amazing Museum of Flight, which I wasn't sure at first was worth the money given that we have Udvar-Hazy and the Air & Space Museum near home, but it is extraordinary -- four enormous sections, one on historic aircraft with a focus on Boeing planes since the museum is on Boeing's airfield, one on aviation in the World Wars including newsreel footage and hundreds of models, one on the history of aviation in Seattle, and one -- a massive exhibit behind the indoor museum -- a pavilion of transport, military, and civilian aircraft, most of which can be boarded, including the Air Force One that Nixon flew to China.

Since the weather was lovely and we weren't far from Alki Beach, we went there for a while, walked on the beach and visited a couple of stores in this lovely hippie beach town, then we went to dinner at the Luna Park Cafe, built near and named after an amusement park that hasn't existed for more than 100 years but containing the remaining decorations and fantastic diner food including lots of vegan options. Now we're back at Daniel's apartment watching Detective Pikachu, which he has not seen, and I am trying to recover from how much I've eaten in the past day! A few photos:

Greetings from Belltown

We are in Belltown a few blocks from Daniel's apartment, just back from dinner at the Melting Pot for his birthday! Most of the day was taken up with travel; we flew out of Dulles a little after noon, landed here a little after 3, and met Daniel when he finished gaming with friends since he'd taken the day off. The weather has been gorgeous, low 60s and overcast, though apparently we may get more typical Seattle fall drizzle the next couple of days. Just a couple of pics:

Poem for Thursday and Artsfest Nauticalia

Music when Soft Voices Die (To --)
By Percy Bysshe Shelley

Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory—
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.

Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heaped for the belovèd's bed;
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.

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It's gorgeous and cool again and I had a lovely travel-planning day, though there were things like laundry and shopping to contend with. (It's all good, I started watching The Big Short while I was doing the living room stuff and was enjoying it enough to want to see the end, some I made a pair of earrings out of old glass beads.) Plus I did a couple of raid hour raids and caught a shiny Giratina.

We watched the first competitive episode this season of The Masked Singer, which I enjoy as the crack it is, the only show I really like following on Twitter while it's airing, then we watched the first episode of Stumptown, which succeeds mostly on the strength of Cobie Smulders' performance. I love Annmarie Garden's Artsfest in part because there are so many nautical-themed crafts on display:

Poem for Wednesday and Flag Ponds Beach

Love After Love
By Derek Walcott

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

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It's gorgeous and cool but I am sleepy from waking up when Paul got home at 6 a.m. and from cats who were restless all night, so I will keep this short. My day was not very eventful -- a lot of it was spent watching and reading the news, which was very eventful concerning two world leaders who very much deserve not to be world leaders and some women who know the law better than they do. I went to the park to walk and do two Giratina raids, plus I finally got my Jirachi!

We watched this week's Succession, in which Shiv is being treated like crap while her idiot brothers get away with a ridiculous amount, then the first episode of Emergence, which I would feel good about if it was an eight-episode limited series but seems like it's going to drag (possibly with no endgame) as a fall network show. By the time it ended, the Nationals had clinched a postseason spot! From Flag Ponds last weekend, here are some pictures of the beach and Chesapeake:

Poem for Tuesday and Action Figures

From The Anglo-Saxon Rune Poem
Translated by Bruce Dickins

The thorn is exceedingly sharp,
an evil thing for any knight to touch,
uncommonly severe on all who sit among them.

The mouth is the source of all language,
a pillar of wisdom and a comfort to wise men,
a blessing and a joy to every knight.

Riding seems easy to every warrior while he is indoors
and very courageous to him who traverses the high-roads
on the back of a stout horse.

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Apart from a Mewtwo raid at Locust Grove followed by a walk around the nature center with frogs and chipmunks, my Monday was not at all exciting. Paul is sleeping in a medical facility because he is doing a sleep study, and now that my kids live on the west coast, this is the first time I am staying completely alone in this house (apart from four cats who are far more distressed about this than I am -- they were convinced they would not get their nighttime meal because he usually gives it to them).

So I have been watching Crazy Rich Asians, What a Girl Wants, and other things he would not want to sit through again since turning off the baseball game he had on before he left, and Kate and I had been discussing the size of our action figure collections, and although she has some far nicer items than I do -- I don't get anything that costs much more than $10 -- I do have an appalling number of Marvel Norse gods, so without further ado (and please don't scroll if you don't like Marvel or Norse gods):