Birth Week 2019, Day Five: Pedal Boat on Greenlake

Since my Birth Week Activities started on Friday, I rode a boat of some kind or another each of the first three days of my Birth Week: Fremont Brew Cruise on Lake Union on Friday; Heather and Tim's "Reinheitsgeboat" from Des Moines Marina to Gig Harbor on Saturday; the Washington State Ferry from Port Townsend to Coupeville on Whidbey Island on Sunday. An if you count the playground Victorian ship I got my picture taken in on the Port Townsend waterfront on Sunday, I still averaged one boat per day for the first four days. Either way, with about half of Monday spent on the waterfront but never in a boat in Bellingham, there was no boat ride on Monday. It was the first day of the week with no boat ride. Well yesterday -- the actual day I turned 43 -- I did get back on a boat, this one the smallest so far (and will probably be the smallest of the entire week): a pedal boat on Greenlake. Shobhit and I went there and did that in the afternoon, after I took the bus to meet him in Northgate when he got off work at 1:30. Traditionally, I try to spend the actual day of my birthday with Shobhit. And although that was indeed what happened this year, it was not the initial plan for 2019. This was partly due to my initial plan to be coming back from Bellingham yesterday instead of Monday, but in the very beginning of my planning for this year's Birth Week, it was actually because of what I wanted to do with Shobhit: I had wanted to do the Clipper boat ride to San Juan Island with him. That only runs on weekends, however, and so I had scheduled it for Saturday, May 4. And that made me feel a little more justified in planning to spend the day of my birthday with Ivan instead, as it's also his birthday. But! As I already wrote in probably far more detail than anyone would be interested in, in yesterday's post about my time in Bellingham, other factors came into play that rearranged all this stuff. Instead of spending two nights in Bellingham, I only spent one, and came back to Seattle on Monday. I could not find anyone else to do the pedal boat with me, and I really wanted to include that boat since it's pretty affordable ($24 for an hour) and was an easy, unique type of boat ride to add to the year's theme. And that Clipper plan for May 4 wound up getting scrapped for driving to Anacortes and taking a much cheaper ferry to San Juan Island from there instead, which Shobhit and I did on Saturday April 20 instead, so he could be scheduled for a work shift on May 4. Shobhit only had his early-day work shift yesterday, and had the afternoon free. Perfect! Doubly so, when I realized it would be a recreation of our third date. In fact, when I looked at my Flickr archives, I discovered I totally forgot Shobhit and I did it yet again a year later, in 2005. I later took Nikki and Becca on them in turn for different summer weekend visits they had, in 2007 and 2010, so as far as I can tell, I've done it five tims in the past decade and a half. I put all their respective photo albums into a collection on Flickr. This makes the third time Shobhit and I have done it together, though -- the last time having been 14 years ago. It was certainly a beautiful day for it yesterday. Shobhit even asked me why I didn't wear shorts; I said I was still so used to it beeing cooler weather that I didn't even think about it. I just looked it up though and the high yesterday was 66° -- plenty warm when Shobhit and I ate our picnic lunch at Greenlake Park before getting on the pedal boat, but it would not have been comfortable for shorts wearing for very long. Anyway, I got to Shobhit's work just a few minutes before he got off, and so I spent that time in the car putting on sunblock. I didn't have time for it at home; I barely succeeded in getting all the stuff for the picnic in my rush to get out and catch a bus downtown as it was. My post yesterday about visiting Bellingham was quite long and time consuming to write, and I truly finished it at the very last second before I had no choice but to leave. I packed two PCC Deli salads, which we bought when grocery shopping on Monday after I got back, into a tote bag. I also added a couple of forks, a couple of paper towels, a couple of sodas (only I drank one), and the box of two Bakery Nouveau cake slices that Heather had given me on Saturday. I had all that with me in the car when I just finished up putting on sunblock as Shobhit came out of work. And then he decided he wanted to go see if there was anything on clearance still worth buying at JCPenney right over at Northgate Mall, as JCPenney closes for good on Friday. So little stuff was left that there was nothing worth buying. The only stuff downtstairs even available to buy were fixtures. We deliberated several times about whether to buy certain tables, but nearly all of them were too big to fit in the car. Shobhit didn't want me to spend $17 on a Zipcar van to transport a $10 table. I didn't particularly want to either. So we finally drove to Greenlake. I was somewhat surprised at how packed the parking lot was, being 2:30 or so on a Tuesday afternoon. I suppose I should have known better on a day this nice, even if it was a weekday afternoon. Still, after driving circles around the relatively small lot only two or three times, we finally came up behind a guy who was leaving and we got ourselves a very nice spot. We grabbed the folding blanket tote from the trunk and went to find ourselves a lovely spot of grass. We ate our lunch, which included two "Happy Hour" $3 peroshkis we'd gotten at Northgate Mall -- which were far tastier than the Deli salads and would have sufficed as lunch on their own. Shobhit fell asleep and napped for maybe half an hour, as I caught up on Twitter. he snored. Finally we went over to rent the paddle boat, and we were out on the lake for just under an hour. When I re-read one of the old journal entries about pedal boating there, I had written that we barely made it halfway across the lake and we used up the whole hour just to get back again. This time, we aimed to go straight across to the little island in the lake near the opposite shore, which I discovered later is called Duck Island, and we rowed all the way around it before heading back again. There were crew teams practicing rowing across the lake, with a motorboat running alongside them. We crossed paths with them twice, and we'd get rocked a bit with the waves in their wake hitting us. One interesting thing about the experience was how perception of movement changes with scale -- really far from shore, it was hard to feel like we were going anywhere. There was the occasional buoy ball floating in the water that we would pass, though, and we'd see that we actually were moving. Also, the steering bar is something you have to get used to, as you turn it in the opposite direction from where you actually want the boat to turn, but it was also very easy to over-correct. Shobhit kept complaining about the job I was doing, and then without fail, when I offered to let him steer, he never did anywhere near as well as I had managed. The kids working the Greenlake Boathouse sure were young, but maybe not as young as they looked to me. I might have guessed high school age, except I just realized that would have to have been at school at that time. They must have been college aged at the youngest. A very young man worked the cash register and checked out the lifejackets all boaters are required to wear to us. A young woman helped us in and out of the boat, and I asked her to take a picture of Shobhit and me in the boat just before we de-boarded upon our return. Shobhit had suggested earlier that we walk the path all the way around the lake, but he was so tired from the pedaling after the boat that he changed his mind, and we decided to go looking for dinner. We tried two places where we wanted to use coupons we got through Vegetarians of Washington that fell through: Snapdragon Cafe's coupon was lunch only; Wedgewood Vegetarian Thai on Broadway would not let us order takeout. "Dine-in only," the lady said -- the same lady, incidentally, who had refused to let each of us use our own coupon the last time we were there. The coupon says nothing about this, by the way. Why is it so important that we dine-in to use it? Others might I suppose, but we certainly would not have spent any more by dining in. We got like four of their coupons, and Shobhit is saying w should just "ditch them" now. I think that's dumb; we can still save money by eating there another time. Still, they all expire on May 30, so it's unlikely we'll use them all regardless. So we did a little bit of shopping across the street at QFC, using digital coupons. We got a couple of frozen pizzas and baked one of those to make for dinner at home. We ate while watching the HBO Sunday shows we still needed to catch up on: Veep and Barry. Then we watched this week's episode of The Big Bang Theory, which harkened back to when the show was actually good -- they hadn't had an episode that good in ages. After that I came back to the bedroom to process the day's photos. I still haven't gotten them captioned. As I type this now, it's 10:16 am and I need to wrap this up so I can go to the store and get the requisite hair dye for my Spring Bleaching, which I'll do after having my requisite Spring Haircut at 11:00. Although some of it got irritating near the end, like any day might, all in all it was a pleasant birthday. And I'm actually glad all the rearranging of plans resulted in my still spending the day with Shobhit. This one yielded 29 shots for the full photo album of the day on Flickr. [posted 10:19 am]