She Did Something

For a little background on our visit to the Seattle area, I did sort of try to prepare for Shaun & Susan’s family vegan members. In Albuquerque, I said to Jim, “Oh…my purse is leather. That might offend KT. I’d better buy a cloth bag”. Okay, so I wasn’t thinking real clearly. I bought the bag, wondering the whole time I was paying for it “why does Jim have that silly smirk on his face?” as soon as I was out of the store, I found out. “What are you going to do about the car?” he asked. It took a few minutes for me to figure out what he was talking about and then the light bulb. The entire interior of the car is leather. So much for having just a tiny bit of animal hide…I had a whole cow. I gave up on convincing him I also needed non-leather shoes and apologized profusely to KT when we got to Seattle. I guess I also forgot when we met for dinner because I ordered a hamburger. I just wasn’t thinking.

So, Susan says I’m a geeky tourist, hmmm, I will agree that as far as people go, I am rather geeky. I very seldom want to see real tourist attractions because then I have to admit that I really am a tourist. I know that sounds silly, but if I admit I’m a tourist then I can’t say “d*mned tourists” when someone gets in my way when I’m trying to look at something touristy. Not that I would say it out loud or anything, but Jim might. There’s never any telling about what he’d do. So, to Susan …pffft…I’m a geek, not a tourist. Your husband told me so and he never mentioned the “tourist” word.

Since I had no clue how long it would take to get to the gum wall or how long we would be at the folklife festival (because I was trying not to be too much like a tourist, I tried to hide the fact that I really enjoyed it…only the geeky parts like the percussion tent and the kettle corn…well the whole thing was pretty cool really) I started chewing my gum way early and made Jim chew some too. Contrary to popular belief, I did not make everyone chew gum, I simply asked Mimi for a piece of gum then asked her for one for Jim too. I didn’t know we would be chewing it for 4 hours either.

I also restrained myself from acting too much like a tourist at Pike Place Market, but I did try to sneak in a picture of them throwing fish. I just wasn’t fast enough and all I got was a blur. I would have sat on the pig too but I thought it would be rude to throw the little kids off of it so I pretended that it wasn’t so cool. Walking through the market was fun and trying all the different flavor pepper jellies was great. I never would have thought to make wine flavored pepper jelly. I think I prefer to drink my wine and eat the crackers with the garlic flavor jelly. Jim is getting tired of me trying to get him to eat the jelly so that he can have self-defense garlic breath. I don’t think getting garlic breath is a tourist thing to do so I’m still just a geek.

So, here’s the gum wall…or at least the part that has my gum on it. It’s a terrible photo. I think my problem was trying to eat pepper jelly with the gum in my mouth. It may have been a good idea to take it out, but that seemed like cheating.

The arrow points to my gum.

Someone else’s creative gum endeavor

Now, about visiting Microsoft: Well, I guess it could be deemed a touristy thing to do but Susan said that posing as a ballerina was a good idea. I didn’t really want to do. I was really worried about it even. I mean my shirt could ride up and my belly button might show and that could really scare some people. As a matter of fact, me posing like a ballerina should scare people. I did it. I looked deranged. The thought even crossed my mind that I am a deranged geek but I quickly got out of that line of thinking and started thinking about balls. What? Wow you have a dirty mind…not that kind of balls! I remembered looking at job postings at Google once when I was fed up with the family believing that since my office was at home, I really didn’t have a job. Of course, when I got to the Google job postings, I lost interest in actually getting an outside job where I couldn’t wear totally mismatched clothes and forget to brush my hair. But those balls and all the fun stuff they offer employees looked pretty good. My office can’t even fit another computer, let alone free-floating balls.

No visit to family would be complete without the parting family shot. This one had to be in front of the most important tour stop on my Seattle list. Susan’s infamous yellow wall. It’s the first one I mentioned to her and she didn’t even mention it in her blog post. So, here’s the family photo.

KT, Mimi, Shaun, Susie