Father Mark, AB, Pat and assorted friends
It’s dark outside, we’ve just finished a bowl of soup and toast for dinner, and we’re settling in for more work after dinner. We’ve had an awesome day, in fact, an awesome week! We just love being here in Seattle. There’s never a dull moment, and there’s always something or someone to see. Pat’s got a long, long time friend named Father Mark, who very often comes out to Seattle from New Jersey for Halloween. I first met him last year after our 2006 cycling adventure, and we were lucky enough to overlap with him again this year. FM, as he’s known to friends, is great fun.
He took us to dinner at Julia’s in Capitol Hill on Friday night, where we met Alex Jackson and Rod, followed up by a visit to Purr, a happening nightclub, where AB joined us, and where we met Jay Sandel. Check out the photos in the photo gallery. Then we had another treat on Sunday – we got to have dinner with Pat, Carlos, and FM in Chinatown. The food was great and the leftovers were still great! We laughed our way through both nights. Father Mark gets our Hero of the Day for both of those wonderful evenings!
Meanwhile, we’ve had great fun staying up and talking to AB and Pat at night, catching up on a year’s worth of adventure. AB has just closed on a condo in Seattle, over near the airport, so he’s completely excited, and we are now talking about move scheduling. Chelsea and I have offered to help pack and move, since we are experts in that category – lots of experience!
Haircuts!
Alex Jackson is another Hero of the Day for us. He managed to arrange and sponsor haircuts for Chelsea and me – haircuts that were badly needed. I had included a photo of myself on our photo gallery, showing my hair just before heading out to get the haircut, but I just couldn’t bear to have it out there like that…I’ll wait and do a funny long range photo album of just our hair shots and how they change over time. Meanwhile, we are incredibly delighted with Alex for doing that for us. The experience was wonderful – a short massage, aromatherapy, a beautiful salon (Aveda), and Megan, who was a great conversationalist, as well as doing a great job on our hair. Again, check out our photo gallery.
Getting to know Seattle
Seattle is a really beautiful place. Not only is the diversity wonderful, but there’s a big emphasis on art in public places, and a great sense of whimsy in others. We’ve spotted statues in unlikely places; murals; the parks are beautiful, like the one right near us with the reflecting pool and fountain; and we love the water everywhere. Downtown has just about every high-end store you could hope to see, and there’s an unbelievable variety of restaurants, from funky and elegant. And, of course, there’s the famous Seattle coffee. It’s hard to walk more than 2 or 3 blocks without running into at least 2 coffee shops, and the coffee shops are mostly full!
We are staying up on Capitol Hill, which is a completely wonderful place to be. Talk about diversity! We can walk a few blocks in almost any direction and get to an incredible range of shops and restaurants. On Sunday we walked all the way down to Pike Place on the waterfront for our haircuts, and wandered our way back through town, enjoying every bit of it. Wednesday we walked down past Broadway to the public library and hung out for a few hours, before walking back up to 15th Ave. We spent several hours meeting in a coffee shop with Alex Jackson, who’s giving us help with public relations and marketing, and then we headed off back to the apartment to get ready for the Halloween party down at Broadway Grille.
Halloween
Halloween was absolutely entertaining. The Broadway Grille holds an annual costume party and contest – I was lucky enough to attend last year, too. Here in Seattle – the Capital of Diversity – everyone goes all out for Halloween. I only wore a mask, but Chelsea got dressed up in a zebra striped catsuit, and wore a red and gold boa with a feather mask. She wasn’t anything in particular, but she looked great, and had a lot of fun dressing up. Pat went as Big Al from South Park, and AB went as an enema nurse. Check out our Halloween photo gallery when we post it – we are waiting for some photographs from Pat before we post it. It’s really hard to describe in words how amazing most of the costumes were.
We ended up never even being seated at the event, as it was so crowded. Pat finally fought his way through the crowd to the bar and got us each a drink, so we held onto that and just watched the crowd for several hours. We stood the entire time only a few feet from the door, so we got to see everyone come in and everyone go out. It felt like having front row seats, except that we were standing. Pictures, especially in this case, are worth a thousand words, so check out the photo gallery – I hope to have it posted by Monday.
Website
We have made great changes to the website while we are here, thanks to Brian Schlittenhardt, one of Pat and AB’s friends. He’s a student in web design, and he did a new banner for us – you’ve probably seen it when you logged on. We are really delighted, as the banner was something we just couldn’t do by ourselves. Brian managed to do the whole thing in a few hours, and gave us a new background as well. He sure gets our Hero of the Day for doing that for us!
Chelsea discovered that we can now put a slideshow from Picasa right on our front page, so she did that, and we will now keep up the slideshow by posting our latest photos on the front page. We’ve moved our Google map to the Maps page, and have changed the boring blue balloons to beautiful green bicycles, to mark our progress. We have more changes planned, but it takes a lot of time just maintaining and updating the site, never mind making big changes. With the new banner and some of the other changes, we have finally effected the full change to our new look, and now we’ll just keep improving it!
After putting in a long day working on the site, we’re headed out in a little while for pizza and wine tasting at Alex’s, so I’ll sign off for now.
Signing off from Capitol Hill, Seattle WA