Entry 625: Celebration Extravaganza

It's celebration season here at the G & G household. Both the kids have August birthdays, as do I, and the in-laws' 50th wedding anniversary came and went yesterday. It's been a lot of sweets. We had ice cream cake a few nights ago, cheese cake last night, and we're getting something tomorrow, as well. Maybe cookies. My sister got a box of fancy cookies -- the big, soft, elaborately prepared kind -- while we were visiting a few weeks ago, and they were really good, so I thought maybe we would do that here. I think S knows a good place.

I might get a toothbrush for my birthday. I've been wanting an electric toothbrush for, like, 30 years, but never wanted to spend the money on it. Now, however, I can't seem to find a toothbrush that I really like for some reason, and I can't think of anything else I want, so why not get one? A toothbrush -- there's the difference between adult birthday gifts and kid birthday gifts. My boys are at the toy store right now, as I type this, picking out their gifts.

Well, some of their gifts. They got a bunch of stuff -- probably too much but whatever. The big item is that Lil' S1 got an iPhone. S's mom wanted to upgrade, so she gave him her old one. I'm cool with it. He already has an iPod that pretty much has all the "bad" functionality of an iPhone (e.g., access to the internet) without the "good" stuff. This way at least we will be able to keep tabs on him, and he can contact us if there's an emergency. He's probably going to be doing a lot more on his own this next school year, such as walking to and from school, so having a phone is not a bad thing.

Of course I never had one when I was a kid, but society was structured differently back then. There were these things called payphones all over the city, on which one could make a call if need be. But those devices pretty much no longer exist. In fact, it's quite remarkable how quickly they disappeared from the landscape. I can't think of anything else like that. Well, maybe Blockbuster video -- movie rental proprietors in general. Growing up, we had at least five storefronts dedicated to video rental in my relatively small city, and that's not counting the kiosks at every supermarket.

I kinda miss video stores, but not too much. I miss Netflix mail-in service more, to be honest. Streaming is cool and convenient and all that, but there's something satisfying about getting the discs in the mail and holding them in your hands. I used to "binge watch" series this way, and I liked having to strategize my watching/mailing schedule to minimize down time. I had a two-disc subscription, and I could usually do it so that the second disc would arrive with the next set of episodes, just as I was finishing the first one. On more than one occasion I walked around town to find a mailbox that hadn't picked up yet because I need to get a disc out that night. Sundays were always a curveball, and sometimes there would be a random disc in the middle of the series that was delayed, which was supremely annoying, but for the most part I had things humming like a well-oiled machine.

It could be that I'm reminiscing more about that time in my life than I am about Netflix mail-in service. I was working on my dissertation almost 24/7, and those moments in which I took a break to watch something were joyous reprieves. Also, I watched some great shows -- The Wire and Six Feet Under, in particular. Both were spectacular.

On a somewhat related note, I saw the movie Hustle somewhat recently, and I made an actor connection. As I've mentioned before on this blog, sometimes when I'm watching something, and I recognize somebody but don't remember from what, I will intentionally not look them up, so as not to deprive myself of that a-ha moment when it eventually comes to me. In the case of Hustle, I was trying to figure out what I know the jerk owner from, and it finally dawned on me: He's the psychotic brother from Hell or High Water. The actor's name is Ben Foster, so I looked at his Wikipedia page, and it turns out he was also the broody emo kid, the daughter's friend, from Six Feet Under, AND he played Eli, the mentally challenged kid, in Freaks & Geeks. Hey, how 'bout that? Those are two of my favorite series of all time, and I totally didn't recognize him from either of them. But, to be fair, he was playing children in both of those roles, and he's now a middle-age man. So, I won't be so hard on myself for lack of actor recognition.

Okay, that's just about all for today. I'm tired because I stayed up late watching the Mariners game on Apple TV. It was one of the free games for the week, and I so seldomly get to watch them (and they are pretty good this year!), so I watched the entire thing, even though it went into extra innings and didn't end until 1:30 am EDT. It was worth it though, as they won in walk-off fashion! They could have just as easily lost, and I'd be cursing myself for staying up late just to go to sleep disappointed. But that's the beauty of sports. There are real (pretend) stakes on the line!

Until next time...    

Entry 624: Week 5 In UP (Back In DC)

We are back home in DC after our five-week sojourn to the shores of Puget Sound. It was great to go; it is great to be back. No matter what I do or where I go or whom I see, it always feels good to be back in my own house and sleep in my own bed. Once the return date starts to get close, I start getting antsy -- S does too -- and we start to wish we had booked our trip a day or two shorter. But as S rightly pointed out, it has little to do with our actually trip length, as we do it when we go visit her parents for just a week too. I think for me, it's mostly the anxiety of travel. I just want the return trip to be over with, and so my mind subconsciously does the first part of the logic and concludes that it would already be over with if we had left yesterday. But it doesn't then do the second part -- the obvious deduction that were that the case, I would have just felt the anxiety I'm feeling now a few days earlier.

And to be honest I don't really mind flying. Although I do sometimes get stressed out by the auxiliary tasks -- getting to the airport, going through security,* getting home from the airport, etc. Provided we have a direct flight, I'm good once I'm on the plane. It's my movie watching time. I messed up this time though. I rented Miller's Crossing, one of the few Cohen Brothers movies I had never seen, without knowing what it's about. Turns out it's an old-timey mob movie, which would have been fine, except I the other movie I got was The Many Saints of Newark, the prequel film of The Sopranos. I put it on after Miller's Crossing ended and was like Eh... I don't really want to do another two hours of this right now. I should have gotten a comedy or at least a different type of drama -- anything that didn't involve rackets or snitches or shooting people in the head. I turned it off after ten minutes and spent the rest of the flight vacillating between attempting to sleep, listening to podcasts, and trying to read the ESPN crawl one of those tiny-ass airport-seat screens.

*The security line was so freaking long at Sea-Tac for some reason. In the many, many times I've flown out of this airport, I've never seen it like it was. It actually went down a set of stairs and back up a different set and ended on a skyway near the parking lot. It was insane. For as long as it was, it went relatively quickly though -- about 45 minutes. Still quite long, but when I first saw the line, I was worried about missing my flight, and I had 2.5 hours to spare. (There was no traffic on the way to the airport, surprisingly, and the rental car return was super quick, which is why we were there so early.) S has TSA-Pre for her and the kids, and she always tells me I need to get it, but I haven't yet because the vast majority of the time you only save a few minutes, but I guess this is why she says that. They all got through security in less than half the time I did.

Anyway, it was great to see my family and spend so much time with them, and I definitely think we will do another extended stay at some point in the future. And we went from one family to the next, as S's family, parents and sister, were here waiting for us when we returned. They are staying with us for three weeks, with a trip to Iceland in the mix. (Yes, we are going to go to Iceland in a week. I would have liked a little more buffer time between two big trips, but S has to go for work, so we didn't get to pick the date.) Sw (S's sister) just lives up the street, but she's staying with us for a few nights, because she's leaving her dog with us for a bit, and she wants him to get used to the house while she's here before she goes. I don't mind. I kinda like the full house. Why have it, if you're not going to use it? Almost every sleepable surface in the place is being used -- S and I in our bed, Lil' S2 in his bed, Sw in the guest bed, S's dad in Lil' S1's bed, Lil' S1 on the basement sofa, and S's mom on the foldout sofa in the living room. If only we had a reason to break out the inflatable bed.

Alright, that's enough for now. I'm going to post some pics and call it and entry.

Until next time...

[Owen's Beach at Point Defiance. I like the clouds -- very Tacoma morning-y. I took this picture around 9:00 am, and there is often a marine layer at this time that burns off around noon or so.]

 

[Owen's Beach in the opposite direction later in the day.]

 

[Two final shots from Chambers Bay. I never tire of its vistas.]

Entry 623: Week 4 In UP (Fleeing the Country)

Our trip to Vancouver, BC came and went with the only really hitch coming at the US-Canada border. It was s-l-o-o-o-o-w both coming and going. I miss the good old days when you could just flash a driver's license and rock across the border. I'm talking about pre-9/11, which is literally the last time I visited our northern neighbor. Now, it's not too involved a process -- it only takes a few minutes once you get to a border agent -- but that added time accumulates and turns what used to be a wait-time of maybe five minutes into one ten times that.

It also doesn't help when you get stopped on the way back into the US because your car set off some sort of radiation sensor. That's what happened to us. It was never fully explained to me exactly what happened, but they said I was parked between two sensors for too long, which ultimately set them off. I was like, Bitch, if I was parked anywhere for too long it's because of your slow asses! Well, that's what I was saying in my head. Outwardly, I was being polite and compliant, just wanting to get on with my life as quickly as possible. And I did. The whole thing took under ten minutes (they had to wave our car down with a wand), and I got to go pee, which I had to do anyway, so it worked out fine.

The trip itself was super fun, if brief. Vancouver is a great city -- so beautiful and such a cool vibe. The hotel we stayed at was not so great, but it worked. S and Y -- we went with our friends JW and Y and their three boys (ages 5, 3, and 3) -- booked it after they tried a bunch of other places first. It was all we could get on relatively short notice. It could best be described -- to use a word from my youth that is surely problematic now -- as ghetto. It was old and understaffed and not very clean.

The first morning we were there, about 6:00 am, S heard somebody screaming in the room next to us -- things like "get away from me!" and "stop it!" -- so, she, very bravely, knocked on the door, while I watched from the hallway ready to call the police if need be. In retrospect, it probably made more sense to reverse those roles, but I honestly wasn't even fully awake and wasn't thinking straight. In fact, it later dawned on me I didn't even know how to call the police in Canada.*

*But actually I did. I looked it up, and it's just 9-1-1, like here. Plus, I bet if I pressed the Emergency button on my iPhone it would put me through to somebody.

Thankfully, it didn't come that. A woman came to the door and explained her special needs child was having an episode, and she (the mother) was having trouble calming her down. That's not a good thing, of course, but short of people rehearsing a play or having a (consensual) BDSM session, it's about as reasonable an explanation as you can hope for in that situation. Also, S saw the woman and her daughter later that day, and they seemed normal and unharmed and even suggested a place where we rent bicycles, which we did the following day. We rode around the Seawall which is a beautiful loop.

But not as beautiful as the views from Grouse Mountain, which is where we spent most our time. We did a ropes course,* looked at grizzly bears, watched a lumberjack competition, and then hiked back down the mountain. We took a gondola up, but the line to get back down was super long, so we decided to foot it, even though it's nearly three miles down rocky, rooty terrain, and we had two toddlers in the mix.  

*Just JW, Lil' S1, and me. The other kids were too young, so they went to a play area with the womenfolk.

We made it, but it was quite taxing. I had a toddler in my arms for about 75% of it. It wasn't the weight; it was the awkwardness of how it's distributed. Plus, I was nervous about falling, so a few times I kinda accidentally-on-purpose slid to my butt, lest I take a worse tumble. JW had his technique down where he could hold a child on his shoulders and navigate the terrain with just his legs, but I needed a free hand for balance, so I did a curled-bicep-to-the-shoulder carry. I gotta admit, it did make me feel pretty manly, and if you want to woo women, carrying tired children long distances is a great way to go. I could tell S was impressed. Also, little dude straight up zonked out on my shoulder, which was adorable.

The only thing I feel like we missed out on is that we didn't get to sample the Vancouver nightlife. We didn't even go out for dinner (S packed a bunch of food in a cooler). C'est la vie when you have young children and a wife who goes to sleep at 9:00 every night. But we hit up Bellingham for lunch on the way back, which was awesome. I love that city. I need to go there more often. I could live there again happily, I think -- at least during the summer. It's pretty wet and gray there the other seasons. We ate lunch at a beer garden, where craft brew is served on-tap by a heavily tatted burly chick in boots and a tank top, all the food is cooked at an on-site food truck, and you can hear The Strokes and The Shins coming through the speakers. I turned to S and said, "Well, if nothing else, you're getting a quintessential Bellingham experience." I could tell she didn't appreciate it the way I did, but that's okay.

 

 Until next time...

Entry 622: Week 3 In UP (Island Hopping)

Of the many varieties of rabbit hole into which I enjoy delving, Tacoma-area geography holds a special place in my heart. It's the nostalgia. For example, I remember learning about Galloping Gertie as a schoolboy, so it was the perfect subject for a deep-dive a few years back. Lately, I've been trying to identify all the major islands and landmasses S and I see during our walks about the shores of Puget Sound. There's something satisfying to me about matching all these locations with names I heard bandied about growing up. Plus, S is super impressed (read: annoyed) by me pointing out that those two islands to the left are actually one island, called Vashon, connected by a narrow, unseen strip of land. (I've since learned the body of water that nearly separates the island is called Quartermaster Harbor.)

I've been running the loop around Chambers Bay regularly, and I've finally gotten all the islands and landmasses straight there. I knew Gig Harbor, which is easy to see and identify, since it's the non-Tacoma end of the Narrows Bridge. And I knew McNeil Island because you can see some buildings on it that I think are associated with the old prison (made famous to me by the quite bad movie Three Fugitives, which opens with Nick Nolte being released from there). More recently, I learned that Fox Island is the ritzy looking one next to Gig Harbor, and Anderson Island is the more rustic looking one next to McNeil.

Then there is one other little island tucked between Anderson and the shore that my dad told me is called Ketron. It turns out to be the most interesting one of all, because a plane thief named Beebo Russell crashed a stolen Bombadier Q400 there in 2018. I have no idea how I missed this story when it happened, but it was a great rabbit hole to dive down last night. Seriously -- if you missed it like me, I recommend reading this Rolling Stone article and watching this YouTube clip. Also, you can see a short video of him commandeering and taking off the stolen plane here. (Although, it really just looks like a normal plane taxiing and taking off.)

Speaking of islands, we are headed to Vancouver tomorrow for a few days. True, we are going to Vancouver the city, which is (somewhat confusingly) not on Vancouver Island, but I needed a segue. That's why I'm putting this post up now (I doubt weekend blogging is in the cards), and why I'm going to wrap it up very soon. Before I go, however, I will leave you with some great pics I took.

[That's Ketron in the distance]

 

[Tacoma Narrows Bridge]

 

[My new personal favorite: Lil' S1 climbing a big toy with Rainier in the background]

 

Until next time...