From Flatstick to Bellevue
I was quite busy all weekend, much of it without Shobhit, as he worked Friday evening, Saturday evening, and most of Sunday afternoon and evening. Friday, starting it all, was a meetup with Laney and Jessica for November Happy Hour at Flatstick Pub.
We were going to go to the location I went to with coworkers as a Merchandising Department excursion back in January, but when Laney realized there is a Pioneer Square location she could take Light Rail to and not have to park, she asked that we go to that one instead. So, I walked straight down the waterfront from work—quite delighting in the city newly opened up by the absence of the Alaska Way Viaduct—and met up with them down there.
The Pioneer Square location feels much more closed in, as the main entrance is down a staircase to a basement level, where we spent half an hour on drinks and Laney and Jessica had food; the miniature golf at that location is down yet another level, where each of the nine holes is also much more packed together. It's kind of hard to see, but seven of the nine holes spell out each letter in SEATTLE; only the first and last holes are not letters, and the last one is at the model of the Space Needle that reaches up to the ceiling.
They don't sell mixed cocktails there, just a huge array of beers, a couple of wines and a few ciders on tap, so I had three different ciders, of varying quality; one was delicious.
It was pretty busy down there at Happy Hour, and the many people playing mini golf created a bit of a bottleneck around the letter A, so at one point we'd have to wait for two groups ahead of us to finish before we could advance to the next hole. It was fine, though, and we all had a great time. Laney even said she was open to trying the South Lake Union location at another time. The interior is all decorated with very cool murals by the same artist, featuring animals with eyeballs of mismatched size that make them all look drunk.
On Saturday morning Shobhit decided we'd go out for brunch, and for some reason he wanted to go to Americana on Broadway. So, first we went shopping at QFC, where we were so adept at applying sales and coupons that I spent about fifty bucks and saved $95! And with PCC moving its membership benefits program next year from a monthly 10% coupon to an annual dividend, which is very bad for people who shop the way we do (my PCC letter said that if the dividend program had been in effect last year, I'd have gotten back a whopping $34—we regularly save way more than that in a single shopping trip, combining the monthly coupon with my staff discount), we're poised to shop this way at other grocery stores a lot more often going forward.
Anyway, we shared two egg dishes at Americana, a delicious vegetarian benedict and the "eggs in a basket" (eggs fried in a hole in slices of bread) dish that was on special. We had to wait more than half an hour to get seated but we had just enough time to get back home so Shobhit could get ready for work.
I then took myself to see Pain and Glory at the Egyptian, which was very good; I then walked the six blocks back home and wrote the review. After that I spent essentially all late-afternoon and all evening working on the calendars I gift people for Christmas. I thought I was all set at the end of the day, but both yesterday and today I discovered something new and time-consuming I needed to do, which is getting frustrating. It doesn't help that if I don't save my work on a near-constant basis using Costco's web interface, which is kind of shit, I lose all the changes I have made and I have to start all over from scratch, which happened to me once yesterday and once today already. I am trying Costco's service for the first time this year because it allows for pickup and I don't have to add shipping expenses. It also has one feature I always wanted which the Apple calendar program does not. Overall, though, I'm finding that the Apple service was far more reliable. Then again, if I just get used to how the Costco process is done, I'll figure out how to make the same time-consuming errors in future years, hopefully.
For now, though, these calendars have sucked up many hours of my time and been a bit of a pain in my ass. I still enjoy making them though!
Yesterday's big event was my visit with Auntie Rose and Uncle Imre, in Bellevue at the home of Valerie (their daughter, my dad's cousin) and Scott.
I kind of want to say it was an ordeal getting there, but it really wasn't. I just had to pay a lot more attention along the way, and I didn't get nearly as much of my library book read as I would have otherwise. I did miss my connecting bus in Bellevue, but that only meant I was delayed about half an hour getting to the house. I got there at 4:30 instead of 4:00. Big woop.
Still, there were things I should have known to check, and thus could have foreseen. Shobhit was already pretty convinced my bus might be delayed because of the Sounders game. I didn't really take him seriously, but so far as I can tell, that absolutely was the biggest source of the delay. By the time the Sound Transit #545 actually reached me at Olive & 8th downtown, it was so packed it was standing room only, which was why I could not read my book. I needed both hands free to hold onto things so I did not fall over onto people.
Another thing I was not counting on: the bus's reroute. Highway 520 was closed over the weekend, so when I first went to the bus stop at Olive and Boren, I only knew the bus wasn't arriving because the One Bus Away app was telling me how delayed it was. I only barely managed to see in time that there was a notice posted at the stop that the 545 would not be stopping there over the weekend, and people needed to backtrack to the previous stop on the route, at 8th Avenue. I rushed the four blocks or so down there, and the bus arrived within minutes of my getting there. About 25 minutes delayed. I could easily have missed that bus just by not noticing the reroute, but thankfull I did in time.
And then? Instead of crossing Lake Washington on the 520 Bridge like normal, the bus then had to take I-5 south to then cross the lake on I-90, to turn north again up I-405 on the Eastside to get back up to Highway 520 over there . . . all in the midst of occasionally bumper-to-bumper traffic, created both by the 520 bridge closure and, presumably, the Sounders game having ended not long before. All of this only added to my delay.
So, although my itinerary said I would arrive at the 520 & 51st Street stop in Bellevue at 3:13, and then I could catch my connecting King County Metro #245 bus at 3:39, it was closer to 3:50 when I arrived at that stop. So, I had to wait for the next 245, set to come at 4:09.
It really wasn't that big a deal. I did two three stops ahead along the #245 route, stopping at a curious combination 7-eleven / Chevron station (not sure I've ever seen that before) in the hopes of finding a bathroom to use, which they said they did not have. I walked one more bus stop ahead from there, which was in front of a fairly thick bunch of wooded trees on the other side of which was part of Microsoft Campus. I walked in there and, feeling far enough out of sight of anyone, peed in "the woods." It was really just a jumble of trees between a road and a parking lot, but it worked.
The next #245 came by only a few minutes later, so I never felt like I was really waiting all that long. That second bus only took nine minutes to get to my final stop, from which I walked about a mile south along 132nd Ave NE to get to Valerie and Scott's rather confusing driveway: down maybe a quarter mile of a dead end street, their drive way is off that to the left, itself nearly as long. Their house is basically in the middle of the woods—or so it seemed to me, anyway; no neighborhoods are like this in Seattle proper anymore, really. But on the outskirts of Bellevue, even though this was technically a neighborhood with many houses round, they are all separated by many trees in between them, barely visible from the main road.
This was my first time at Valerie and Scott's current house, even though apparently they moved into it in 2001. I had seen the house they moved into in Marymoore in 1992 the summer I spent time with Grandma and Grandpa and Auntie Rose when I was 16 years old, and it was a very nice, spacious, large house. They had just moved into it when I saw it, and I remember telling them how nice I thought it was. I sure was taken slightly aback when I walked up to this current house and saw the exterior of it, though. To put it as tactfully as I am able, with the possibility that anyone in their family might see this (I'm suddenly remembering I did tell their daughter Eva the URL of fruitcakeenterprises.com when Valerie noted that I write movie reviews), these guys are definitely within the highest tax bracket of anyone in my extended family. Both Valerie and Scott worked for Microsoft in the eighties and early nineties, I believe, and Shobhit thought he remembered Scott had once worked for Google, so given the timing and the employer, that kind of tells you all you need to know.
Still, of course, it's all a matter of perspective. Shobhit and I live in a two-bedroom condo that is 1100 square feet, and Valerie and Scott's house is nearly six times the size. I'm quite certain no one in Valerie's immediate family would regard their home as a mansion, but that's sure what it felt like to me. All I could think about was what it must be like to clean all that space.
I keep thinking of last week's episode of Modern Family, though, in which one of Claire's employees visits the Dumphee house and she keeps talking about the house like it's a mansion. At one point the employee brings out a bottle of wine and says, "I got this from your wine cellar," and Claire's retort is, "It's just a basement, Margaret." It's a very upper-middle-class gag for a clearly, at the very least, middle-class target audience, and the Dumphee house, while I have never thought of it as a "mansion" either, is also quite a lot bigger than my condo. It's definitely smaller than Valerie and Scott's house, though. Also, Phil and Claire live on a suburban street with small plots and many houses per block, very standard middle-class Americana, whereas Valerie and Scott's house is comparatively secluded. I was so confused by Google Maps when she gave me their address, because it appears as a location with no roads leading all the way to it, that I asked over text whether people park on the nearest street and then have to hack through foliage with a machete to get to their house.
And of course, Valerie's two kids grew up in this house, never knew any different, and no doubt think of it was totally normal, perhaps even average. I found myself wondering what the average home of their friends and classmates look like. I have no idea how much they've ever even thought about such things, if at all.
I'll never forget reading about how when it comes to wealth, no matter how rich people are, they tend to think of themselves as not rich merely by virtue of the existence of other people with way more money. Howard Stern once said to Cyndi Lauper when she was a guest on his show, "You're rich, right?" and she immediately said, "No, I'm not rich." Turns out her net worth was $35 million. That's not rich? By the same token, to my eyes, Valerie and Scott are pretty wealthy. I doubt they think of themselves that way, though. And this goes in the other direction: I have far more money than my brother does, so on average his five kids probably think of me as wealthy. I'm comfortable, and it's also worth noting that I could find a much larger place in another region for the same value Shobhit's and my condo has, but you sort your priorities, and being in Seattle, and in particular Capitol Hill, is one of mine. I truly don't need more than the 1100 square feet of space I've got anyway. We don't have children, or even dogs. We just have cats.
All of this is just to say that, when I arrived at that house, it was just something far, far larger than I am used to. And I must say this to Valerie and Scott's credit: they are the very opposite of snobby, and have never once, in my entire life, given the slightest indication they felt they were better than anyone else. That, for sure, is a credit to Auntie Rose and Uncle Imre in Valerie's case, and presumably to Scott's parents in his case. I have been around Scott several times over the years, but never had a real conversation with him that I can recall. I did last night, though, particularly with his many questions about PCC which made Valerie kind of apologize on his behalf because she thought he was leaning on it too much I guess, but I truly didn't mind at all.
Also, their house is very homey, very lived-in. I don't mean to suggest that it was messy, which it really wasn't, but neither was it, you know, polished, with every single thing in its place, the way an outsider might imagine the inside of a house that looks like that to be. It may have been incredibly spacious (almost cavernous, at least for someone used to a small-ish condo), but it was easy to feel comfortable hanging out there. They're fine, regular people—so much so that, while playing the word game Quibbler that Auntie Rose loves so much, both Eva and I were genuinely shocked when Valerie let a "Fuck!" slip out of her mouth in front of her mother. Valerie was a bit self-conscious about it for a while after that, often playfully trying to call others out when, say, I said the far less shocking "what a bunch of crap."
And that's just about Auntie Rose and how conservative she is, something I have always gone out of my way to respect. Granted, she isn't my mother. And come to think of it, I probably still use fouler language around my own mother than she would prefer. Parent-child dynamics are different, I suppose. Still, it's interesting to observe how very much less conservative Valerie is than her parents are.
As for Auntie Rose herself, the whole impetus for the timing of this visit was that, today, she starts radiation treatment on a benign tumor they say is affecting her mobility. It's why she was quite slowly moving around the house using a walker, and I guess they're staying with Valerie and Scott at their house for a week or so as she gets a few rounds of treatment. Shobhit came to pick me up around 9:00, and he came inside for a couple of minutes. At that time, I asked whether the hope for the treatment would be that she would become less reliant on the walker, and Valerie basically said no—that it was possible, but mostly the purpose of the treatment was to stop the further decline of Auntie Rose's mobility. She did clarify that because the decline has been so rapid thus far, there may be better chance than usual for her to regain some of it after treatment. But, the sense that I got was, if that happens, it will be a bonus. The main purpose now is to stop the further decline.
I keep having to remind myself that Auntie Rose is now 82 years old, the same year Grandma McQuilkin—her older sister—was when she died in 2011. Of course I would love for her to last another many years, but it's maybe not realistic to expect such a thing. Valerie is often much more pessimistic about how Auntie Rose is doing, whereas Auntie Rose herself, in conversations and particularly in emails and letters to me, continues to write about her many activities and walks she goes on and such, as though she's fine and expects to be fine. She'll still tell me things going on in her life, even health-wise, but never with a particularly negative outlook on it.
I do also feel compelled to note that, even though when Auntie Rose would get up and try to walk around, it made her seem very frail and old, when she was sitting at the table and talking and playing the game, she still seemed much less so. Grandma McQuilkin had a rapid mental decline of dementia the last couple years of her life, of which I see no hints, thankfully, in Auntie Rose. She has long also been hard of hearing, but beyond the physical limitations, she seems basically to be as mentally sharp as she ever was. And she has told me so many times over email about playing this Quibbler game, she was clearly happy to have me over to play with them. Scott and Uncle Imre did not join us for the game, which we played after we all sat for a dinner made by Valerie of stuffed bell peppers—a meat version and a vegan version (Eva is vegan, as was her friend who had dinner with us as well), substituting the meat with quinoa and tomato sauce. I had never had that dish, which Valerie said was a "Hungarian specialty" (Uncle Imre is from Hungary, and still has a pretty thick accent; I often cannot understand him). It was quite delicious. Uncle Imre also made another Hungarian side dish that was made mostly of sliced cucumber with paprika, and it was . . . well, it wasn't awful.
Anyway, for the game, which had ten rounds so it lasted a while, it was Auntie Rose, Valerie, Eva and me. (If I remember right, Valerie and Scott's oldest, Nick, is away at college somewhere in California. I think Eva herself just graduated high school maybe last June.) I got the sense that Valerie was relieved just to have someone new in the mix after playing the game so many times with Auntie Rose.
And, it was indeed a lot of fun. We walked about me coming back to play again, hopefully with Shobhit next time, which I would love to do. Once the game was over, there was less than an hour before Shobhit was expected to arrive; Valerie found a super-old photo album once kept by Grandma McQuilkin, who herself I think got it from her parents, and it was full of Furister ancestry (that being Grandma and Auntie Rose's dad's ancestors) dating back as far as the Civil War. There's a lot of question of identification on most of the photos, and Valerie thought perhaps Auntie Rose could help with some of them. Not a huge amount of progress was made on that front, but it was still really cool to look through it.
There's more I could tell about my weekend, but I should maybe get some actual work done today.
[posted 1:35 pm]