We actually did quite a lot with Jennifer and Matthew and Jennifer's three kids over the weekend, but the main event was Afternoon Tea at the Queen Mary Tea Room, which I had never even heard of until Jennifer found it a couple of months ago, after Ian said he wanted to do Afternoon Tea for his birthday. (His actual birthday is today, as I write this; he's 20. As of now, all of Jennifer's kids are now in their twenties. Their ages are always easy for me to remember because I know they were born two years apart in 2002, 2004, and 2006; thus, Hope is 24, Chase is 22, and Ian is 20. Or at least they all will be once they have their birthdays this year.)

This now makes five different places Shobhit and I have had Afternoon Tea at, and the second in Seattle; I didn't even realize there was any other when Shobhit, Alexia and I did Afternoon Tea at the Fairmont Olympic Hotel downtown in March of last year. But, guess what? We've already got the next one planned, and it's going to be Albuquerque, of all places! That will also mark the first time we've done it twice in a single calendar year.

We were talking about Afternoon Tea places in the living room yesterday, and Jennifer looked it up, and found the St. James Tea Room in Albuquerue, noting that on Google Reviews, it averages a rating of 4.9 out of 5 stars, averaged from 1,659 reviews. That's a stunning average, and Jennifer knew to note it because Shobhit was trying to downplay the idea of doing the "Ride & Dine package" at the Ten 3 Restaurant you ride a tram to, because the restaurant itself is only rated 3.3 out of 5 stars on Yelp, but Jennifer and I want to do it anyway. She and Matthew noted a lot of the complaints are stupid and have nothing to do with the quality of the food.

But Jennifer pulled an effective move by noting the rating at the St. James Tea Room, although we spaced at first that she had only mentioned Google Reviews and not Yelp. So, I checked Yelp: 4.6 out of 5 stars, averaged from 252 reviews. (I'm beginning to wonder if we should rely more on Google Reviews, actually; there's a lot more there, and we noted that the more the reviews, the more reliable the average rating.) So that's pretty comparable.

It had certainly never occurred to me to do Afternoon Tea in Albuquerque. But hearing that, I said, "If we're all into this, I certainly am." And within minutes I actually had a reservation made for four at 6:30 p.m. on Saturday, October 3.

We've actually got quite a lot planned for that trip already—so much so that I'm thinking I should slow my roll on packing planned things into that trip. We have a "Mass Ascension" of the hot air balloons early in the morning one day that weekend, not to mention lots of other festival activities to choose from; the Afternoon Tea later that day; the Biopark Botanic Garden and maybe exploring the Old Town neighborhood sometime that weekend; and hopefully the "Ride & Dine" experience Monday evening. Before that on Monday we plan to drive for a day trip to Santa Fe, the State Capital, an hour away; there we'll tour the State Capitol building and probably also go to the Meow Wolf Immersive Art Experience.

This actually leaves Sunday mostly open, which I would kind of like to keep that way. I don't want to over-schedule this trip.

Anyway! Back to the Queen Mary. I have to say, every place I've done Afternoon Tea, the food has been excellent; it's the tea itself that has really varied—admittedly, perhaps partly because of the specific tea I chose. But when we did Afternoon Tea at the Fairmont Empress Hotel in Victoria on our anniversary in 2022, I was incredibly impressed by the tea, and haven't been nearly as much at other places since—until the Queen Mary. I chose the Creamy Earl Grey, and it was amazing. Shobhit, on the other hand, chose the Assam Mangalam Estate Black Tea, because the description was so specifically speaking his language with "the scent is reminiscent of freshly baked bread." But, once he got it, we both agreed it tasted like pretty standard, generic black tea. He asked if he could choose another, and they happily let him replace it; he then chose Coconut Pineapple Oolong Tea, which he was much happier with.

In any case, the tea was as good as the best I've had elsewhere, and the food was predictably excellent. The other thing that really gave the Queen Mary the edge over other places was the decor and embiance—it would probably be fair to call this place busy on a visual level, but it was also very well put-together. An older, very elegant lady stopped by our table at one point to see how we were doing, and Shobhit said, "Are you Mary?" It wouldn't even have occurred to me to assume Mary was a real person, but the woman said, "I am indeed!"

So we peppered her with questions, and learned that she does the decorating herself, and changes it with the season. She noted that she really does it up for Christmas, which made me eager to return; this seems like the perfect place to bring up to Alexia. I asked Mary how long the place has been open, and instead of just giving me a direct answer, she said, "Probably since before you were born?" A bit incredulous, I said, "Fifty years?" She said something like, "Pretty much!" I told her I've lived in Seattle since 1998 and was amazed I had never heard of this place until my cousin found it just a couple of months ago, and she replied that she has never done any advertising, and her customers' word of mouth is all she ever needs—she doesn't know the first thing about social media, but her customers do that for her (I already did my part). She noted that she is always completely booked up. (I looked up the reservations page online and discovered at most you can reserve three months in advance; if we wanted to do December, I'd probably need to mark my calendar with a reminder three months prior to our target date. With the Albuquerque place already booked for October, though, I'm leaning toward this as a Christmas 2027 idea rather than this year, but we'll see.)

When I later went to the bathroom, in the small hallways toward the bathroom doors there is a chair for waiting, and right next to it is an open magazine article about the Queen Mary and Mary herself, and it notes right there that the place actually opened in 1988. You do realize the most important takeaway from this, right? It means Mary thought I was 38! That made my day, almost as much as the experience at the Queen Mary itself.

Every one of us ordered a different tea, which was easy because there are so many teas available it can be very hard to decide. Most of us really liked our choices. Shobhit and I appreciated that a separate, vegetarian food tower was brought out for us; two other towers were brought for the rest, one with food for three and the other with food for two.

Hmm, I wonder if I should see if there is Afternoon Tea anywhere in Provincetown, for when Shobhit and I go there for our anniversary next year? Not a bad idea!

Anyway, Jennifer covered the bill for all of us, something that made Shobhit deeply uncomfortable even though Jennifer made a fair point that we saved them a lot in hotel cost by letting them stay the night with us. Not only that, but I won a $100 gift card in a drawing at work a couple of months ago for Tutta Bella, and we used that when we took them all out for dinner Saturday night, thereby cutting the overall bill by roughly a third. I think between those two things, we're basically even. So Jennifer took the bill when it was time to pay, and of course I was wildly enamored with the pen provided, featuring a crown at the top end.

I had also really loved the Orange Pineapple Apricot Marmalade that was on the table, and I asked Mary if they sell it; she said they did indeed, down at their Tea Emorium store just half a block down the road from the restaurant. I bought both a jar of that and one of the pens—which came in several colors; I got the glittery purple one—when we went over there after we were done. Mary happened to be over there when we arrived too, which allowed us to chat with her even a little more; Shobhit got out of her that she used to live on Captiol Hill but now lives on Alki, which she really loves.

When we were first talking to her at the table, I asked if I could take her picture. She immediately said, I think slightly misunderstanding, that we could take a picture when the meal was done, but I had already asked our server to take a group picture of us. I said I just wanted a picture of her. She then, kind of oddly, she went over to Matthew, who was sitting to my left on the other side from Shobhit, and said, "I'll tell you what, how about I take a picture with him?" So, I got a photo of her with Matthew.

Matthew said, "That's the second person to put hands on me today." I guess someone else had done the same while he had gone on a walk with Shobhit as the rest of us watched a movie at home in the afternoon, and they wound up chatting with someone at Taylor Shellfish at Melrose Market, because Taylor Shellfish is actually based in Shelton.

So I guess now I'll tell you everything else we did with Jennifer & co. over the weekend.

They drove up from Union (outside Shelton) on Saturday morning, but did not get to our place until about 2:00. Another thing Ian had asked to do for his birthday was the Seattle Underground Tour, which I have done a couple of times over many years and saw no need to join them for. Their tickets to that were at noon. They apparently left home an hour early and still only barely made it, because in three different spots south of Seattle they had to detour due to road closures. I was texting her through some of this, trying to see if I could help her find alternate routes. I'm not sure if I was much help.

Shobhit did note that it might have been easier for them to drive to Bremerton, going north from Union rather than around Puget Sound through Olympia, as then they would have taken an hour ferry ride and gotten right to the Seattle waterfront from the Peninsula. He's probably right about that, but I think they just didn't think about it; my guess is they just followed the directions, which always show going around the Sound as the fastest route. I tend to favor the ferry crossing myself when visiting them, only because it means an hour less spent actually driving. It does cost more but whatever. Maybe they'll consider this next time.

Eventually Jennifer texted me at 11:55 that they had made it—as I said, barely. Shobhit was later trying to decide how best to deal with lunch. We went to QFC and later to the Franz Bakery outlet store, where I got six fruit pies for 50 cents each, thinking we could offer one to them, but they came with macaroons instead; I now have six fruit pies to burn through. Oh, the humanity! Anyway, we also bought some bread, and considered offering to make cheese sandwiches using the excellent cheese we brought back from Amsterdam. But, then Jennifer texted me at 1:17 that they were eating lunch now, so that question was rendered moot.

I had made dinner reservations at Tutta Bella at 8:00 p.m. only because the online reservation page had no availability for a party our size (7) between 5:00 and 8:00, and I knew 5:00 would be way too early. Maybe not technically for Jennifer, but definitely for Shobhit, and I didn't really want to be rushing out to dinner right after they all arrived and settled in anyway. A server later told us they had been super slow all day, which was kind of annoying; why could I not make a reservation at, say, 6:00 then? Shobhit said it was because they needed smaller tables for reservations at peak dinner time, which was probably right. An even bigger party was seated right next to our three tables set in a row, arranged the same way, and they arrived only 10 minutes after we did. So suddenly the place was under staffed at about 8:15.

We all drove to the Day One Parking Garage, which is free evenings and weekends, and we walked the six blocks or so to Tutta Bella from there. I have to say, the food at Tutta Bella is excellent, as were the desserts we had—Shobhit and I shared a cannoli, mostly because I did not want the coffee-flavored tiramisu that Shobhit would otherwise have wanted. Jennifer and Matthew shared a "tiramisu for 2," though, and could not finish it between the two of them; they have the last quarter or so of it to Shobhit and he was delighted. He really likes to over-do his grunts of ecstacy when eating something he loves: "Mmm. Hmm. Mmm. Hmm." It kind of drives me crazy but I guess I'll live. He commented on how delicious he thought the tiramisu was at least three times after he finished it. I almost tried a bite, but when Jennifer said it really did taste like coffee I changed my mind. Blech.

Shobhit and I also shared the gnocchi with pesto sauce, which was amazing. I could not remember what I'd had when I ate there with Karen for my Birth Week last year, and I had to check my blog: oh, guess what? We also shared an order of the gnocchi with creamy pesto! Which, I wrote at the time, "was incredible." My fucking memory. I didn't remember that at all.

The serving size was shockingly large too, especially for a meal as dense as gnocchi. I was pretty stuffed by the end of the evening. Shobhit even asked for an order of bread, especially after he was told they use their pizza dough to make it. It really was very good. Oh, we also shared a bowl of minnestrone soup with our gnocchi, although the gnocchi was brought out to us first which was a little backward.

The "gift card" I was given at work was just the card number in an email, which made me a little nervous. But, when the server (a woman with really dark hair but a haircut and body build that rather made me think of my sister, Gina) entered the number in the little machine used for bills, it totally worked. So even after adding a $50 tip at Shobhit's suggestion, after the gift card it came to about $210. I had already budgeted for this to cost me $200 after the gift card, so that worked out almost perfectly.

We had some time between their arrival and going to dinner on Saturday, and we watched a movie—we watched one movie each on both Saturday and Sunday, actually. On Saturday we watched The Drama, a movie I think is excellent; the kids thought was "pretty good"; and Shobhit declared "awful" only about a quarter in. Jennifer just wanted to know what Zendaya's character was supposed to have done that was so awful (a kind of sticking point in the plot: she only ever planned it but never actually went through with it). Yesterday, in between breakfast and going to Afternoon Tea, Shobhit and Matthew went for a walk to the Farmers Market and around Capitol Hill while the rest of us watched E.T.. That one I had to rent for four bucks from Amazon; it was the only thing everyone could seem to agree on. (Apparently Ian doesn't like action movies. I don't know how they ever agree on something to watch as a family.) Jennifer didn't think she'd seen it in twenty years; I already knew I saw it with Tracy only four years ago when we went to the 40th-anniversary re-release together. It was still fun to rewatch; they were all rapt and clearly enjoyed it, E.T. being one hell of a weird looking creature notwithstanding.

Because the shots from it cover nearly three quarters of the album, I simply titled my photo album for the weekend Queen Mary Tea Room 2026; this makes it easier when being categorized, say, in the "Afternoon Teas" collection of photo albums (totally five, until Albuquerque). But, there are 11 shots in it from Saturday, from when Shobhit and I gave them a tour of the five rooftop terraces in our two-building condo complex (and this was the first time I had seem then all finally finished after renovation; they look fantastic), and then dinner at Tutta Bella.

And yesterday, there's a couple of shots of the pancake breakfast that was Shobhit's idea, and doing it in the Braeburn Condos Community Kitchen was my idea. No one was using the kitchen yesterday morning anyway, but I still reserved it between 9 a.m. and noon anyway. This gave us a lot more space to spread out and enough plates; I noted on Friday that we broke one of what had already only been six large plates, now leaving only five, and we had a group of seven.

In fact, it occurred to me yesterday that this was almost certainly a record number of overnight guests (5) we have ever had. I did plan to try reserving the "Guest Suite" in the West Building for them, but I did not get it in time once the weekend was confirmed; someone else had it booked. We made do with having them all stay in the condo, even though we only have one guest room (thank god we also have a guest bathroom). It also helped that we have a hide-a-bed in the living room, though according to Jennifer they have refused to share a bed with each other since they were kids, so only one of them slept in the hide-a-bed. They got it all figured out quickly, though: Ian slept on the hide-a-bed; we gave the three couch cusions to Chase to set on the floor to sleep on; and Hope slept on the love seat, even though she is taller than it is long, but she insisted it was okay. Must be nice to be so young and not worry about a horrible muscle strain—which, incidentally, Shobhit woke up with on Saturday. It made him cranky at times, in ways that really irritated me, but he was later genuinely apologetic about it, and thankfully it was never in a way that interfered with having a great time with Jennifer and her family.

In fact, this seems worth mentioning: given some slight tension historically between Shobhit and Jennifer over the past decade or so due to differing approaches to politics—to the point where I insist they do not discuss politics—I was slightly nervous about taking a trip with Shobhit, Jennifer and Matthew to Albuquerque together. But, it seems time heals all things (to a degree; I still think we should avoid talking politics), and this weekend kind of served, I realized about halfway through it, as a trial run for that trip. And we won't even be sharing the same space on that trip, we'll have separate hotel rooms. We will be sharing a rental car but that'll be fine. In any case, after this weekend I feel much more confident about the trip to Albuquerque going well. Which is nice.

[posted 12:33pm]