The rest of my weekend with my sister ended up being very fun and nice, involving, as it did on Friday, a trip to the aquarium where we saw the octopus, duh, and the Pike Place Market where we ate, respectively, a pierogi and a hombow, proving that all cultures appreciate the culinary genius of wrapping something in bread and then making it really hot so you get burned right through your paper napkin on the street, causing you to hop up and down like an especially entertaining variety of peevish and hungry marionette. We did see an absolutely horrible movie that night, true, but the content was more than made up for by the fact that we were staying up past ten thirty, which, in my head, proved to my supply spry little sister that her big sis can still roll with the big dogs.
Saturday we went to Golden Gardens Park, right near my house. You’d think I’d have been there before, and maybe I have, but I didn’t remember a thing when we went there. Beck and I discussed the many many differences between the beach at home and the beach at Golden Gardens as we waded in the tide pools. For example, beach at home = warm. Beach at Golden Gardens = less warm. But still pretty warm. (Maybe it’s more accurate to say that beach at home = burning melting hot and beach at Golden Gardens = bearable temperature for humans.) Beach at home = not quite sugar sand but still the kind of sand that gets everywhere. Also, tar. Beach at Golden Gardens = just plain regular sand that brushes off pretty easily. Beach at home = sargassum weed. Beach at Golden Gardens = kelp. Beach at home = SHARKS THAT WILL KILL YOU AND EAT YOU IT SAYS SO RIGHT ON THE
DISCOVERY CHANNEL. Beach at Golden Gardens = starfish that, although they do eviscerate, do so slowly enough that you can probably make your escape. You can see there was a lot to discuss on this topic. I’m not even telling you the exciting parts, like beach at home = place where nameless people made out with other nameless people during that one party and beach at home also = you made out with who? and also beach at home = so, did you have sand just everywhere and what did Mom do to you when you rolled up at four in the morning?
We were stupidly thrilled to see the starfish, actually. Maybe because we’d spent a long time petting them the day before in the touch tanks at the aquarium. We saw about five in different colors and took some (sadly non-digital) pictures of ourselves pretending to have them stuck to our faces and so on. There was a really cool twelve-armed one too, what they call a sunflower star. Our sunflower start had only eleven arms though, but he was very cool nonetheless. It was just all around awesome except that there was this one group of people who seemed to just be harvesting live starfish. Just picking them up and taking them home. It wasn’t like they had just one, either, they each had a couple, it seemed. We both really wanted to say something and this other family who showed us the sunflower star really wanted to say something too but none of us did. We all gave them the stink eye though. I don’t think it worked, however, as we saw them merrily tripping back to their cars with dead echinoderms in their grasp. It was really sort of depressing.
Nothing that lunch on Market Street and a trip to the freaky downtown library coudn’t cure. I hadn’t been there before and wow, it’s just really weird. It’s weird architecturally, it’s weird that all the escalators and elevators are painted the sickliest imaginable shade of fluorescent yellow, it’s weird that you can’t find anything anywhere, it’s weird that the books go on a conveyor belt to be sorted and the librarians wear wireless badges to allow them to seamlessly mind meld or something. Becca is studying to be a librarian so she was very interested in the details of how everything worked, but I elected to meet her by the coffee cart over by new fiction. That was an innovation of which I heartily approve. I got a couple new books and had a very pleasant half hour waiting for my sister, who was chock full or observances of why that library is really really weird when we met up and headed out to the airport.
I managed to get her to the terminal in one piece and only had to turn around and head back once after she called to tell me she’d forgotten her sweatshirt in the backseat where it’d been drying after she dumped it by mistake into a tide pool. It took me about five hundred hours to get home on 99 and I was just enjoying the second hour of my nap when I heard a heavenly voice from downstairs calling “Hey, dinner’s ready! You want some?”
My dear friend Kat was in town, you see, and she and her brother and John and Treasa had gone berry picking that day and they brought home seven pounds of blueberries and a pie was in the oven and also fish was being fried up in our deep fryer. All I had to do was pull up a chair and put my face directly onto a plate. I love that. It was wonderful to see Kat as always and even more wonderful to see her while eating hot blueberry pie with ice cream out at the café. That’s what I’m calling our back porch now, the café. For the longest time the porch was the repository of this huge cardboard box that John’s TV came in and also various pieces of furniture and just general stuff no one wanted in the house but no one knew what to do with either. Treasa worked her magic and we now have a café out there, with two tables and a bunch of chairs and a couple of blankets in case it gets chilly. It’s great. I love the café. Does your house have a café? No? How sad for you.
Yesterday was another lovely Sunday and though I was sad that Becks hadn’t been able to stay longer and thus be able to choose open-air strawberries and carrots with me, I was very glad for a great walk and my usual fun time at the market. Between the starfish and the strawberries I am really starting to miss having a digital camera, man. Sigh. I spent the rest of the day alternating between being really lazy abd really productive, which I guess is a good mix for a Sunday afternoon. I don’t know what it is about this house and this neighborhood but I just love Sundays, digital camera or no digital camera. I am always surprised and delighted at how satisfying they are. It is so cool.
I am off to bellydance in about two seconds and I have a short week because I’m going to New York on Wednesday night. That’s likely to be a little stressful, involving, as it does, my Italian-American family as well as the machinations of the Top Secret Plans (remember those?), so I’m super glad to have had such a lovely weekend before I go.