Okay. Iâve been up since about three thirty this morning, so weâll see how I do here. Itâs been a busy weekend, much in contrast to my last several weekend, when I was all listening to KEXP for hours on end and sewing multiple projects and sighing little sighs and talking to the cats a little too much. Thatâs all in the past, my friends, because this weekend I began to kick it in to high gear. Well, high gear for me. Which isnât really all that high, relatively speaking. High gear for me.
It all started Thursday night when I foolishly supposed I could go to an 8:30 bellydance class and still pick My lovely and talented Friend Ashley up at the airport at 9:00. I stayed for half an hour, and the airport is forty minutes away. I donât know. As an added bonus, her plane had come in an hour early and thus she was sitting very nicely waiting for me in the Alaska baggage claim area (an area Iâve gotten to know quite intimately in the past four days) for about an hour and a half.
It didnât matter though. I got her, got her stuff, got us into the car, got us home, got her into the purple futonâŚthat three hour time difference is pretty rough, you know, notwithstanding my inability to tell time or to gauge distance. She fit right in to my little hobbit hole. The cats loooooooove Ashley and not only did Spike not bite her but also slept on her bed both nights. Spike doesnât do this for me, not ever. She occasionally will refrain from biting me but she never cuddles with me anymore, and I even bought her some salmon treats as a bribe. I donât get it. Ashley blows in from out of town and all of a sudden Spike has a new best friend. Unfair. I mean, I canât hardly blame her though, because Miss Ashley is pretty darn cool and holds a special place in my heart for being the first Key Girl to come out to Seattle to visit me. She and her husband actually came here for Thanksgiving three years ago but I didnât have my own place then and also they went on a road trip while they were here so we didnât have as much time together as I would have liked then. It was just so fun to have her on the futon. This last week was pretty hard for me in terms of freaking out about Stupid Burning Man, as I am now calling it, as well as about the fact that Carl was going to be coming home. Having her there was sort of novel, like when we were walking around the Market I was all, âHey! Weâre in Seattle walking around! Instead of at home, like we usually are when we walk around! Weird!â At the same time, as it always is with good friends, it didnât matter that we hadnât seen each other since Christmas, we just got right back into it and had a great time together, all weekend.
Friday I just worked a half day and she went to go spend time with the bride for whose wedding she was techinically here forâŚof course, you and I know she was here just to woo Spike into being a good cat and into not bitingâŚand at noon she came to pick me up and we went, of course, downtown to the Pike Place Market, as pretty much required by law when your friend from Orlando is coming to visit. Think about how bad it must be for her, though, living right near Disney. âHey, weâre going to Disney, can we stay at your place instead of in a hotel?â I personally like going to the Market because I like pretty flowers and I like yummy food and they have a lot of both those things there, and any tourist attraction based around those two things canât be all bad. We had lunch and talked, then walked down to the Market and talked, and got Ashleyâs husband a present at the fish thrower stall, as well as a smoked salmon sample from a very cute fish thrower. They really are all hot boys there who throw the fish. Itâs quite uplifting, especially on a gorgeous day, to see a cute boy in orange rubber waders and an armband tattoo throw a couple of fish around. Itâs quite nice. We oohed and aahhed over the gorgeous dahlias and chrysanthemums at the flower markets as well, and then went to the Italian deli for some of my preternaturally expensive but extremely yummy favorite cookies. I had heard that there was a new gelateria and wouldnât you know it, it was just around the corner from the Italian deli and itâs owned by Italians (I was too shy to bust out any of my very patchy language skills though, Iâm sorry to say) and Ash had a tiramisu and I had a panna cotta and we sprinkled the amarettini on top and boy was it the best ever. Gelato is the best. It was Ashleyâs first time having it and I was so proud to be there with her for that special gelato moment. From now on, anyone who comes to visit me, weâre going to pretend like itâs 1998 and that me and Marah are in Italy for two weeks and having gelato twice a day. Marah will be surprised, upon reading this, to notice that I didnât get lemon gelato as I always did when we were on our trip. She was all bold and experimental but I was boring and stuck to the best flavor. Panna cotta with amarettini though, that gives lemon a run for its money, I have to say. We called Miss Marah while we were there and told her all about our creamy Italian frozen treats we were havingâŚand I tell you, the only thing that could have made that day any better would have been if there was a full quorum of Key Girls instead of just half of us.
The wedding people were having a picnic at the lovely Magnolia Park, to which Iâd never been, so we went straight there from downtown and spent a little time going âWait, is this the right Magnolia Park? Are you sure? This looks like a park to me, what about you?â while we waited for all the wedding people to show up. I had met the bride and groom a couple of times before, once when I went to visit Ashley at college during a heartbroken Valentineâs Day weekend my senior year, and once at Ash and Thomasâ wedding, during which the current bride and groom, Andy and Kim, sat at my table at the reception. That was pretty much it, thoughâŚthey were really nice to let me come at all, I thought. âYeah, hey, um, Iâm Ashleyâs date and Iâm going to be here at your wedding, is that all right with you? Whereâs the cake?â
It was a ton of fun meeting all of Ashâs college friendsâŚsheâs not in touch with them the way I am with mine, and so it was really cool for her to see everyone and it was really cool for me to see a different side of her. All the friends were really nice and I felt quite welcomed. We ate yummy food and watched some antics of the brideâs family and then went home and pretty much straight to sleep, as we had to get up early the next morning to catch an early ferry.
Ash is going to run a half-marathon soon, and so she got up even earlier than I did and went for a run while I made us some steel-cut oats and then we packed up all our stuff and booked it for the ferry. The fee to park at the ferry is eight dollars. We had seven dollars. We rushed around and found an ATM and got change and got tickets and ran back to the carâŚclearly I am not running a half marathon anytime soon because, damn, I got all winded after running maybe a couple hundred yards or somethingâŚand then I was running up the walk-on ramp and I thought I was going to make it but then they shut the automatic doors but I pounded on them and they opened them again and I stumbled onto the ferry and off we went.
Youâll be happy to know that we had to wait two hours at the ferry landing for some wedding people to come pick us up and take us to the (gorgeous) house at which the wedding was going to be held. Fortunately there was a little farmerâs market/craft fair right there and so we wandered around and I bought some marionberry jam. There was a guy selling sugar scrub for twenty dollars there. It was pretty good (he gave us a sample) but really, twenty dollars? No way. There was a woman with a spinning wheel who was selling yarn from her sheep or something, and I was tempted by a really nice natural undyded brown thing of wool, but I figured since Iâm still working on my basketweave scarf and since I made a big mistake in it I canât seem to rectify, I shouldnât be buying yarn until I actually finish a project.
We got to the house and feel down on the floor from how gorgeous it was, right on the water with a driftwood beach, banks and banks of hydrangeas, plus yummy biscotti for snacks. We changed and Ashley went to go practice the song she was going to sing in the wedding. It was pretty cloudy while everyone was gatheringâŚbut then, just before the groom walked in, the sun came out! Yay! Good omen!
The wedding was very nice. Ashley sang a Norah Jones song and everyone fell on the floor again (we were doing a lot of falling on the floor, apparently) from the wonderfulness and then the bride and groom said their vows and would you think less of me if I told you I teared up a little at the vows of people I didnât even know? I did. It was very nice. It was very apparent to me, as an outsider, that they love each other very much and that their friends and family love them very much too. It was great. So great, as a matter of fact, that Ashley and I decided to stay longer than weâd originally planned. We were about to get in the van that was taking us to the ferry when all of a sudden we were all âHey, this is fun! Letâs stay more!â So we went down to the driftwood beach where there was badminton and a bonfire and more than one cute boy frolicking winsomely in the cold cold water. We saw fish jump too, that was good. I spent some time talking to a very nice step-sister of the bride named Ambar, who is seventeen and in high school in Cedar Falls, Iowa, and is gorgeous and talented and very nice. We talked about college and boys and God and all that stuff. I was neither gorgeous nor talented when I was seventeen, but I did empathize with her spiritual struggles. It was weird to feel like I could empathize with her and that I maybe had good stuff to share with her. We sat and talked with lots of good people and watched the aforementioned boys (they were wet with surf, is what Iâm saying) and enjoyed the bonfire and generally felt that there are few things finer than sitting on a driftwood beach doing all of the abovementioned things.
The next morning we had to get up early again to get Miss Ashley back to Orlando on time, and I donât know who were more upset to see her go, me or the cats. Having her here distracted me from being lonely, obviously, but it also allowed me not to think about Carl coming back. I was going to drop her off and then hang out near the airport (I ended up going to Target for a while because the bookstore didnât open until 9:00) and then pick Carl up and come home. I was glad he was coming home, you understandâŚitâs just that it felt weird, too. Like, he was gone and completely out of touch for two weeks and even though I missed him, I got real used to it real quick. I kept thinking about how much time I had for, like, sewing. I got used to being single. I also felt, if I may admit so here, a little resentful that he got to go off and do fun things while I was at home putting stuff in piles all day and all night for Stupid Burning Man. Even though we talked about it beforehand and agreed that he absolutely should take this opportunity to do something he lovedâŚbecause seriously, he loves that glacier stuff. Loves it, loves it, and I love him, and I want him to do what he loves to do. But six weeks in my little world was a long time, is all Iâm saying, and not all of it was spent thinking joyful thoughts of reunion. And so it was that I was waiting in the Alaska baggage claim, not completely sure how to feel. The escalator from the terminal is mostly hidden when you come down to baggage so you can only see folksâ legs at first, and you have to kind of guess if those are your sweetheartâs khakis coming down the pike or the khakis of a dad with a toddler and a cellphone. There were some girls who were dressed in elaborate Seahawks cheerleader paraphernalia and were planning out a little routine to do when their friend came on down. It went âSeaHAWKS? No! Seeeeeeeeeee Shannon!â and there was a sign that said the same thing that they were holding up. They had pompoms too. Their friend came and left, and the baggage from the flight came and left, and I began to seriously wonder if, you know, maybe he wasnât on the flight.
Well, he wasnât. I called his mom and she had a number to call so she called that while I drove home, all shaky and sniffling and going âBut I do want him to come home! I do! Oh let him be safe! I was just thinking that Iâd been getting used to not having him hereâŚdidnât mean I didnât want him home or anything!â and freaking myself out. After a lot of calling around I learned that theyâd been snowed in for about five days and that they werenât sure when theyâd be able to helicopter out because of bad weather and that they possibly were going to fly him to British Columbia (uh, hello!) where he could take a bus to Skagway and then a ferry to Juneau and then maybe come home Wednesday or Thursday. Well, there went Stupid Burning Man, as far he was concerned, because I know when I get home from grueling weeks on the glacier and have to spend three days traveling across the wilderness by bus, what I like to do immediately afterwards is to get into a car and drive to a desert. A desert filled with people covered in glitter. I called the ABL and talked to Dawn and Anna in a hysterical rage and said I was pretty much going to sell his ticket and come on down by my ownself in ye olde Corolla. I was not toooooo excited about this, folks. Not at all. But what was I going to do, not go because of weather in Alaska? I have spent so much time and energy on this and I got the skirt hemmed up and Iâd bought five or six pounds of baby wipes and it all just seemed like such a waste.
And then! While I was on the phone with my mom telling her pretty much that paragraph up there, there was a call waiting! AND IT WAS CARL! Calling me on a satellite phone! Telling me he would be in Juneau that evening and that his flight would be coming in at four this morning! Hallelujah!
It was so good to hear his voice. It was so weird. He called me again when he got to Juneau and I was just stunned by technology that allows you to talk to your boyfriend when heâs in Alaska any time you want. It was great. I didnât even care that I had to get him at four in the morning, I was just so happy he was coming home. All of a sudden a sixteen hour delay felt like nothing. I plopped into bed at 8:30 a happy woman and woke myself up at 3:30 a happy woman, and hopped into the car and tootled down in the abovementioned Corolla back to the abovementioned Alaska baggage claim a happy woman. I still was feeling some of those weird âOh, youâre back?â feelings but they were way, way overshadowed by the fact that he was coming home.
I got there and waited by the Legs First Escalator. Lots of legs. Legs legs legs. No legs that looked familiarâŚ..and then! I know those legs! I know that belly! And chest and shoulders and face andâŚdude, you have a beard?
He does. I donât care. He and his hiking boots and skis and ice axe are all home safe. Iâm so glad to see him, you have no idea. No, seriously, even after reading this whole entry, you have no idea.
