We went to the Pike Place Market‘s 100th birthday (Photos!). The Iconics (mixture of musicians from the Posies, The Presidents of the United States of America, and Pearl Jam) played, and were emceed by the worst emcee ever.
We watched the White Sox play like second rate little leaguers and lose two games to the Mariners. The seats at the first game were comfortable. They would have been $45 apiece if Holiday Inn hadn’t given us seven for free. They also gave me two blue chairs (Photos!) taken out of the White Sox park in 2005 as well as a used ball from Game 3 of the 2005 World Series (longest game in World Series history, Mark Buehrle‘s only career save [since he’s a starter and they brought him in because they were out of pitchers after 14 innings]).
The Taphouse in Seattle has 160 beers on tap. Most of which I’ve tried. It was good. But E-Dubs (my BFF) got a grease pencil in with his food. That was neat, but it didn’t look particularly tasty.
The underground tour of Seattle is creepy because all of the sidewalks in downtown Seattle have nothing underneath (Photos!). And apparently most of the foundation beneath the streets themselves is horses and canoes.
Boy can Northwood drink a lot of beer. He’s learning to drink good beer, though. We got a growler from the Ram. He likes blondes.
Golfing with Northwood is always exciting. He beat me fair and square. He’s also a better golf cart driver than I am (here’s video evidence [42 mb, AVI format]). On that very same day, we dressed Grandma up as a pirate. She’s very patient, and more than a little drugged up (Photos!). Afterward, we spent fifteen minutes shooting the eyepatch like a rubber band, until it stuck in a light fixture and we decided to see how long it stayed up there.
We attempted a trip to Canada. We ended up in Blaine or some other little town, attending a motorcycle show. I don’t really know what else to say about that. *shrug*
Mom’s Birthday was faked on the day Northwood flew into town. KrisDi made dinner (Chicken Tortilla Soup and Chile Rellenos) as well as a made-from-scratch carrot cake (Photo of drunk Mom!).
I promised not to buy any more books until I’ve read enough of the ones I have to un-double-up the shelves on my “haven’t-read-yet” bookcase. This means I also must read the doubled-up-shelf’s worth of books that have overflowed from this bookcase into another. So I started giving some of them away. Ones that I didn’t actually buy or want, just books that migrated into my domain (Photos of books I haven’t read!).
Additionally, here are some pictures of the beer festival we went to last month.
—- Books —-
Neuromancer, by William Gibson. It sure sounds like a lot of the ideas from this book were used to make the Matrix storyline. Like the matrix itself. Rastafarian technorati. Zion. Although this book was way, way, way better. There were deeper characters. There were more characters. There were better characters. The story was more complex and interesting. It was a good example of the cyberpunk sub-genre. And as I just discovered that it’s the first in a trilogy. *sigh* Two more books on my list of books-I-can’t-get-for-a-long-time.
Lord of Light, by Roger Zelazny. I don’t really know an easy way to describe this. The premise is that technologically super-advanced humans went to this planet, basically conquered it, figured out how to transfer their personalities and memories from body to body (achieved immortality), spawned humanity on this new planet, and then oppressed it by setting themselves up as Hindu gods (near as I can figure). And they mutated so that they had new mental superpowers. I know it sounds really weird, but I really liked this book. I can’t remember if I’ve ever read a book and thought immediately, “I really need to read this a second time.” I did after this book. So I’ll have to read it again some time.