Vacation Part One: Dissipation in Seattle
Day One:
It all started with the usual United delays: forty-five minutes sitting on the plane at the gate because they needed extra time to load the luggage. The pilot asked for our patience, claiming it had been a long day for everybody. At first, I was disinclined to comply, but then I figured that if I were being cheated out of my pension I’d take a long time loading luggage, too.
After that, the flight to Seattle was uneventful. There was some problem with the Sea-Tac runways, so we took a long circle around the Puget Sound area, and I was quite impressed by the sight of the Port of Tacoma from the air. I was worried about delaying Scott (who was picking me up at the airport) and Sei and Christine (who were flying in from San Francisco a half hour earlier), but when I landed I discovered that Sei and Christine hadn’t even left the Oakland airport yet (supposedly due to the aforementioned Sea-Tac problems), and we were in for a two-hour wait.
Scott and I decided to pass the time at the Denny’s in Tukwila, Washington. We had a very nice waitress, whom I stiffed on the tip because I was too tired to do math. The odd thing about this Denny’s was that it had a section that doubled as a seedy bar, which was a popular late night hangout for a raucous if small contingent of Tukwilaians.
Sei and Christine arrived, we drove to Scott’s and we all slept, after marveling at the massive and yet still growing size of Scott’s DVD collection.
Day Two:
I woke up way too early. I think I only got four hours of sleep, but my circadian rhythms were still in Chicago. If memory serves, shortly after waking I tried a serving of Scott’s famous Greens First. In short order, I discovered the full name of the product should be “Greens First, Browns Second.” Five servings of fruits and vegetables in about four ounces of green liquid—I won’t elaborate further.
While Sei and Christine continued to sleep, Scott and I made our way to Fred Meyer to prepare for the evening’s Fry Daddy Fest. It was at this point I made the unfortunate decision to place a package of breaded clams in the shopping cart (more on that later). My main memory of Fred Meyer is that they have a very complicated self-checkout procedure. The clerk had to come over several times to tell me to stop taking items out of the bags, to swipe my credit card in one place instead of the other, etc., etc. She was also very insistent about checking our ID’s for the party pack of Rainier longnecks we were buying.
When the Lee-Kims finally roused themselves, we went out for breakfast at a restaurant in the Ballard neighborhood. I forget its name, but we had a short wait before we were seated, so I wandered off down the avenue in search of a Post-Intelligencer. I ended up walking several blocks, and when I returned Sei, Christine and Scott were already seated and had begun a lengthy discussion about various medical implications of strenuous workouts.
I had recently noticed rainier cherries for sale in Chicago at $6.99 a pound. After breakfast, I requested we stop at a market in Seattle, under the assumption the cherries would be much cheaper locally. My assumption was correct; we found a big bin of rainier cherries for sale—today only—for $2.49 a pound. I bought a couple pounds along with some Santa Rosa plums. The happy vibe was ruined when I mispronounced “Krusteaz” in casual conversation, visibly disturbing the kind lady tallying up my purchases.
We took a turn around Green Lake, which is a very nice urban park on the north side of Seattle, and then headed home to await the arrival of Melissa and Mac and Paul, Kanako, Emi and Nelly, who were driving up from San Francisco in separate cars.
The P/K/E/N car arrived first. I hadn’t seen Emi since she was only a month old, and I was surprised to see she was quite a fat baby. And she has a crazy tuft of hair that, more often than not, is sticking straight up toward the heavens. Paul and Nelly, after a brief visit, headed northward to Whidbey Island.
We passed the afternoon watching the Chapelle show. Melissa and Mac arrived, and they watched the same episodes of the Chapelle show while I attempted napping. My hazy drowsiness was periodically interrupted by Melissa’s strenuous gasping and guffawing from the basement.
And, then, at long last, the Fry Daddy emerged from its twelve-month slumber. First lightly bathed in the calming sea of peanut oil were the mushrooms. Then came the onions, both pre-breaded and Krusteaz breaded. Sei wanted to do a taste test between Walla Walla and Vidalia sweet onions, but he seriously biased the results by picking out the most moldy and putrid Vidalia he could find.
Then the pork loin was submerged. And then the bratwurst dove in. And then the tofu. We enjoyed all of the above with A1 and Bulldog (pronounced correctly, I’m told, as “boolldoughgoo”) dipping sauce. My stomach was telling me no more at this point, but yet to be fried were the impulse-purchased clams. And, yes, the clams were terrible—as someone pointed out, it was more like breaded breading, with maybe a little clam juice thrown in. The majority ended up going into the garbage, I’m ashamed to admit.
At some point during this period, we squeezed in a game of five-hundred. Sei and I easily dispatched Scott and Melissa, who spent most of the game doing much more than simply “tasting the hole.”
Later that evening, we finally clarified the rules of Continental (not completely to my satisfaction), and again I won easily against a table full of rueful opponents. It was here, however, that my luck in cards on the vacation was to end.
Day Three:
Once more, I awoke much too early in Scott’s light-filled living room. After some typical dilly-dallying, the bulk of us took off for Thai Ku restaurant (again in Ballard) while Kanako and Melissa stayed home to watch the baby. I had a good plate of larb chicken, although it could have stood to be much more spicy. The standout of the meal, however, was the excellent plate of greens in garlic sauce, which was shared by everybody. On the way home, we stopped again at the friendly produce market to restock our rainier cherry supply. Amazingly, they had extended their “today only” cherry sale by an extra day. (Seeing their slight duplicity, I felt a little less guilty about the Krusteaz gaff.)
On arriving home, we rallied the troops for the activity of the day—a trip to the Tulalip outlet mall and casino. As we always do, we fought traffic all the way northward to Tulalip on I-5. And, of course, there was a huge back-up (compounded by a stalled semi) at the off ramp to the mall. It was a relief to exit the car and head for the Nike store. But, upon entering, my entire being revolted against the strident consumerism on display (or something like that). The crowded aisles of chattering teens, the loud music, the boxes and boxes of sweatshop produced sneakers being sold at a hundred times their value—I hate to sound like an annoying granola-crunching Luddite, but it seemed to be a microcosm of everything that’s wrong with this country. A huge mall stranded at the very edge of a large metropolitan area, packed with people consuming for no other purpose but to consume—I wanted to get to the relative sanity of the casino as soon as possible!
I found companions with the same priorities in Sei, Scott, Mac and Melissa. We wandered through a dead zone of newly laid sod and cyclone fencing to begin our ritual of voluntary reparations. I quickly gave twenty dollars to the Tulalip tribe by playing video poker, and then I joined Mac and Scott at a friendly blackjack table in the non-smoking section. Fortune came my way, and I felt good to have twenty extra dollars in my pocket after stepping away from the table. Feeling the fates were with me, I placed all twenty dollars of my winnings on red at the roulette table. A minute later, and I was back to where I had begun.
It was time to meet our friends back at the mall, and we needed to pull Sei away from his blackjack table. With the gleam of the devil in his eye, he fiercely insisted that now wasn’t a good time for him to be stepping away—but I’m proud to report matrimonial duty won out over gambling vice, and, after his initial mania, he meekly submitted to walking back to the mall.
A plan was hatched to grill out—and was given extra impetus by the arrival of the heretofore standoffish sun. I suggested buying some tequila at Fred Meyer, but had my bright idea dashed by arcane Washington liquor laws. Eschewing a trip to the nearest official Washington State liquor retailer, Sei, Scott and I contented ourselves with wine and beer at Fred Meyer. I also purchased an eggplant to grill and mash up with butter, lemon juice and garlic. This is my one talent with eggplant, but it went awry somehow and wasn’t ready until dessert. It made a rich, if too savory, cap to the meal.
Instead of making an evening trip to the Muckleshoot casino, we settled in for a friendly game of poker. Well, supposedly friendly. We had a couple of innocent faced card sharks at the table (not naming names, but Christine came away with a large portion of the winnings), and I had a long, slow slide into oblivion. If I can avoid it, I won’t be playing Texas Hold-em again any time soon.
Day Four:
Early on, the bulk of the party headed for Whidbey Island, leaving myself, Sei, Christine and Scott to carry on in Seattle. We had pho for breakfast, which we discovered should be pronounced “Fuh” and intoned like a question. It’s harder to say that way than you might think. I also tried a young coconut juice drink that didn’t taste anything like a Mounds bar.
In spite of the lack of tennis rackets and, on my part, tennis shoes, we decided to play tennis in the afternoon. We stocked up on cheap rackets and shoes at the local sporting goods place, and we headed for the courts. After a couple days of eating rich foods and drinking lots of beer, it felt good to run around the tennis court. I launched a couple balls into the ravine just to the south of the courts, but I need to record that I was not alone in doing so.
From there, we headed north to meet Christine’s cousin for a dinner at a local northern Chinese restaurant. Christine’s cousin keeps bees, and we stopped to see his apiaries before heading to the restaurant on the shores of Lake Washington. We were enjoying the fried chicken wings and noodles in black bean sauce, when the conversation turned to jokes. I attempted to tell the joke my Aunt Donna had told me just a couple weeks before (about two daughters of Texas oilmen), but I got confused before the punch line and muddled it up. Christine’s cousin told a funny knock-knock joke about an impatient cow.
The intense smokiness of the bar attached to the restaurant reminded me that I had two coupons for free Pall Malls burning a hole in my wallet. We first stopped at a 7-11, where I was told that they wouldn’t take the coupons, so I ran across the street to Safeway. A friendly clerk told me to get in line and she’d take the coupon from me—but I made the crucial error of stepping into a shorter line. That clerk told me that, in all of King County, it was against the law to give away cigarettes for free. Chagrined, I folded my coupon up and slipped it back into my wallet.
We were soon on our way to Muckleshoot casino, which is farther away from Scott’s place than Tulalip, but has a much better vibe. It’s a weird combination of blue-collar Northwesterness and typical casino flashiness, with a heavy dash of Asian influence thrown in. In addition, because we always go there near to the Fourth of July, the parking lot just to the north is filled with rundown shacks selling illegal fireworks manned by the type of salesperson usually found at third-rate carnivals, who, in spite of the large quantities of explosives on hand, have no compunction about shooting off a segment of their wares as a form of advertisement.
I had one of those brain-flashes one only gets in casinos—I’d play slots long enough to get enough money to risk safely at the blackjack table. Christine and I sat down at several slot machines, and my losses added up quickly, but luckily I was only betting a nickel at a time. At one point, I heard a yell from the craps table, which was apparently Scott having some good throws on his way to winning big.
After the no-armed bandits sucked up five of my dollars, I decided to make a stab at blackjack. Similar to Tulalip, I was lucky, and I walked a way with fifteen friendly new faces in my pocket. But, again just like Tulalip, I took a high risk bet on one more hand of blackjack at a ten-dollar table. I lost ten dollars in fifteen seconds. So subtracting the five I had lost initially, I walked away even again.
It all started with the usual United delays: forty-five minutes sitting on the plane at the gate because they needed extra time to load the luggage. The pilot asked for our patience, claiming it had been a long day for everybody. At first, I was disinclined to comply, but then I figured that if I were being cheated out of my pension I’d take a long time loading luggage, too.
After that, the flight to Seattle was uneventful. There was some problem with the Sea-Tac runways, so we took a long circle around the Puget Sound area, and I was quite impressed by the sight of the Port of Tacoma from the air. I was worried about delaying Scott (who was picking me up at the airport) and Sei and Christine (who were flying in from San Francisco a half hour earlier), but when I landed I discovered that Sei and Christine hadn’t even left the Oakland airport yet (supposedly due to the aforementioned Sea-Tac problems), and we were in for a two-hour wait.
Scott and I decided to pass the time at the Denny’s in Tukwila, Washington. We had a very nice waitress, whom I stiffed on the tip because I was too tired to do math. The odd thing about this Denny’s was that it had a section that doubled as a seedy bar, which was a popular late night hangout for a raucous if small contingent of Tukwilaians.
Sei and Christine arrived, we drove to Scott’s and we all slept, after marveling at the massive and yet still growing size of Scott’s DVD collection.
Day Two:
I woke up way too early. I think I only got four hours of sleep, but my circadian rhythms were still in Chicago. If memory serves, shortly after waking I tried a serving of Scott’s famous Greens First. In short order, I discovered the full name of the product should be “Greens First, Browns Second.” Five servings of fruits and vegetables in about four ounces of green liquid—I won’t elaborate further.
While Sei and Christine continued to sleep, Scott and I made our way to Fred Meyer to prepare for the evening’s Fry Daddy Fest. It was at this point I made the unfortunate decision to place a package of breaded clams in the shopping cart (more on that later). My main memory of Fred Meyer is that they have a very complicated self-checkout procedure. The clerk had to come over several times to tell me to stop taking items out of the bags, to swipe my credit card in one place instead of the other, etc., etc. She was also very insistent about checking our ID’s for the party pack of Rainier longnecks we were buying.
When the Lee-Kims finally roused themselves, we went out for breakfast at a restaurant in the Ballard neighborhood. I forget its name, but we had a short wait before we were seated, so I wandered off down the avenue in search of a Post-Intelligencer. I ended up walking several blocks, and when I returned Sei, Christine and Scott were already seated and had begun a lengthy discussion about various medical implications of strenuous workouts.
I had recently noticed rainier cherries for sale in Chicago at $6.99 a pound. After breakfast, I requested we stop at a market in Seattle, under the assumption the cherries would be much cheaper locally. My assumption was correct; we found a big bin of rainier cherries for sale—today only—for $2.49 a pound. I bought a couple pounds along with some Santa Rosa plums. The happy vibe was ruined when I mispronounced “Krusteaz” in casual conversation, visibly disturbing the kind lady tallying up my purchases.
We took a turn around Green Lake, which is a very nice urban park on the north side of Seattle, and then headed home to await the arrival of Melissa and Mac and Paul, Kanako, Emi and Nelly, who were driving up from San Francisco in separate cars.
The P/K/E/N car arrived first. I hadn’t seen Emi since she was only a month old, and I was surprised to see she was quite a fat baby. And she has a crazy tuft of hair that, more often than not, is sticking straight up toward the heavens. Paul and Nelly, after a brief visit, headed northward to Whidbey Island.
We passed the afternoon watching the Chapelle show. Melissa and Mac arrived, and they watched the same episodes of the Chapelle show while I attempted napping. My hazy drowsiness was periodically interrupted by Melissa’s strenuous gasping and guffawing from the basement.
And, then, at long last, the Fry Daddy emerged from its twelve-month slumber. First lightly bathed in the calming sea of peanut oil were the mushrooms. Then came the onions, both pre-breaded and Krusteaz breaded. Sei wanted to do a taste test between Walla Walla and Vidalia sweet onions, but he seriously biased the results by picking out the most moldy and putrid Vidalia he could find.
Then the pork loin was submerged. And then the bratwurst dove in. And then the tofu. We enjoyed all of the above with A1 and Bulldog (pronounced correctly, I’m told, as “boolldoughgoo”) dipping sauce. My stomach was telling me no more at this point, but yet to be fried were the impulse-purchased clams. And, yes, the clams were terrible—as someone pointed out, it was more like breaded breading, with maybe a little clam juice thrown in. The majority ended up going into the garbage, I’m ashamed to admit.
At some point during this period, we squeezed in a game of five-hundred. Sei and I easily dispatched Scott and Melissa, who spent most of the game doing much more than simply “tasting the hole.”
Later that evening, we finally clarified the rules of Continental (not completely to my satisfaction), and again I won easily against a table full of rueful opponents. It was here, however, that my luck in cards on the vacation was to end.
Day Three:
Once more, I awoke much too early in Scott’s light-filled living room. After some typical dilly-dallying, the bulk of us took off for Thai Ku restaurant (again in Ballard) while Kanako and Melissa stayed home to watch the baby. I had a good plate of larb chicken, although it could have stood to be much more spicy. The standout of the meal, however, was the excellent plate of greens in garlic sauce, which was shared by everybody. On the way home, we stopped again at the friendly produce market to restock our rainier cherry supply. Amazingly, they had extended their “today only” cherry sale by an extra day. (Seeing their slight duplicity, I felt a little less guilty about the Krusteaz gaff.)
On arriving home, we rallied the troops for the activity of the day—a trip to the Tulalip outlet mall and casino. As we always do, we fought traffic all the way northward to Tulalip on I-5. And, of course, there was a huge back-up (compounded by a stalled semi) at the off ramp to the mall. It was a relief to exit the car and head for the Nike store. But, upon entering, my entire being revolted against the strident consumerism on display (or something like that). The crowded aisles of chattering teens, the loud music, the boxes and boxes of sweatshop produced sneakers being sold at a hundred times their value—I hate to sound like an annoying granola-crunching Luddite, but it seemed to be a microcosm of everything that’s wrong with this country. A huge mall stranded at the very edge of a large metropolitan area, packed with people consuming for no other purpose but to consume—I wanted to get to the relative sanity of the casino as soon as possible!
I found companions with the same priorities in Sei, Scott, Mac and Melissa. We wandered through a dead zone of newly laid sod and cyclone fencing to begin our ritual of voluntary reparations. I quickly gave twenty dollars to the Tulalip tribe by playing video poker, and then I joined Mac and Scott at a friendly blackjack table in the non-smoking section. Fortune came my way, and I felt good to have twenty extra dollars in my pocket after stepping away from the table. Feeling the fates were with me, I placed all twenty dollars of my winnings on red at the roulette table. A minute later, and I was back to where I had begun.
It was time to meet our friends back at the mall, and we needed to pull Sei away from his blackjack table. With the gleam of the devil in his eye, he fiercely insisted that now wasn’t a good time for him to be stepping away—but I’m proud to report matrimonial duty won out over gambling vice, and, after his initial mania, he meekly submitted to walking back to the mall.
A plan was hatched to grill out—and was given extra impetus by the arrival of the heretofore standoffish sun. I suggested buying some tequila at Fred Meyer, but had my bright idea dashed by arcane Washington liquor laws. Eschewing a trip to the nearest official Washington State liquor retailer, Sei, Scott and I contented ourselves with wine and beer at Fred Meyer. I also purchased an eggplant to grill and mash up with butter, lemon juice and garlic. This is my one talent with eggplant, but it went awry somehow and wasn’t ready until dessert. It made a rich, if too savory, cap to the meal.
Instead of making an evening trip to the Muckleshoot casino, we settled in for a friendly game of poker. Well, supposedly friendly. We had a couple of innocent faced card sharks at the table (not naming names, but Christine came away with a large portion of the winnings), and I had a long, slow slide into oblivion. If I can avoid it, I won’t be playing Texas Hold-em again any time soon.
Day Four:
Early on, the bulk of the party headed for Whidbey Island, leaving myself, Sei, Christine and Scott to carry on in Seattle. We had pho for breakfast, which we discovered should be pronounced “Fuh” and intoned like a question. It’s harder to say that way than you might think. I also tried a young coconut juice drink that didn’t taste anything like a Mounds bar.
In spite of the lack of tennis rackets and, on my part, tennis shoes, we decided to play tennis in the afternoon. We stocked up on cheap rackets and shoes at the local sporting goods place, and we headed for the courts. After a couple days of eating rich foods and drinking lots of beer, it felt good to run around the tennis court. I launched a couple balls into the ravine just to the south of the courts, but I need to record that I was not alone in doing so.
From there, we headed north to meet Christine’s cousin for a dinner at a local northern Chinese restaurant. Christine’s cousin keeps bees, and we stopped to see his apiaries before heading to the restaurant on the shores of Lake Washington. We were enjoying the fried chicken wings and noodles in black bean sauce, when the conversation turned to jokes. I attempted to tell the joke my Aunt Donna had told me just a couple weeks before (about two daughters of Texas oilmen), but I got confused before the punch line and muddled it up. Christine’s cousin told a funny knock-knock joke about an impatient cow.
The intense smokiness of the bar attached to the restaurant reminded me that I had two coupons for free Pall Malls burning a hole in my wallet. We first stopped at a 7-11, where I was told that they wouldn’t take the coupons, so I ran across the street to Safeway. A friendly clerk told me to get in line and she’d take the coupon from me—but I made the crucial error of stepping into a shorter line. That clerk told me that, in all of King County, it was against the law to give away cigarettes for free. Chagrined, I folded my coupon up and slipped it back into my wallet.
We were soon on our way to Muckleshoot casino, which is farther away from Scott’s place than Tulalip, but has a much better vibe. It’s a weird combination of blue-collar Northwesterness and typical casino flashiness, with a heavy dash of Asian influence thrown in. In addition, because we always go there near to the Fourth of July, the parking lot just to the north is filled with rundown shacks selling illegal fireworks manned by the type of salesperson usually found at third-rate carnivals, who, in spite of the large quantities of explosives on hand, have no compunction about shooting off a segment of their wares as a form of advertisement.
I had one of those brain-flashes one only gets in casinos—I’d play slots long enough to get enough money to risk safely at the blackjack table. Christine and I sat down at several slot machines, and my losses added up quickly, but luckily I was only betting a nickel at a time. At one point, I heard a yell from the craps table, which was apparently Scott having some good throws on his way to winning big.
After the no-armed bandits sucked up five of my dollars, I decided to make a stab at blackjack. Similar to Tulalip, I was lucky, and I walked a way with fifteen friendly new faces in my pocket. But, again just like Tulalip, I took a high risk bet on one more hand of blackjack at a ten-dollar table. I lost ten dollars in fifteen seconds. So subtracting the five I had lost initially, I walked away even again.
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