Birth Week 2019, Day Nine: Downtime Day / at Maggie Bluffs (Birth Week Bonuses)

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So even though I already wrote all about it in yesterday's post, I thought I would include a photo of Friday night's talk between Bradley Whitford and Bill and Hillary Clinton, just for shits and giggles. Well, and because all of the photos and videos in yesterday's post were of the Argosy Locks Cruise.

That venue held 5,000 people in its audience, by the way. This proves I am a terrible judge of crowd size, because when I looked at it, I had guessed maybe a couple thousand at best. Shobhit is much better at this kind of spacial thinking, extrapolating from the one or two hundred he could see seated in each section. In any case, there was a lot of adoring Clintons fans there that night.

Just one more thought about that show. Bill is 72 and Hillary is 71. Hillary seems as sharp as she has ever been. Bill seems a little more like an old man. Don't get me wrong, he's still sharp, but for instance, he also stumbled over words, and more precisely, often mispronounced or mumbled words, in ways Hillary never did. I think it's pretty clear she will last longer than him.

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Anyway, I am still counting yesterday as an official day of my Birth Week, for two reasons: 1) I still have another Birth Week Day to do today, with Shauna; and 2) even though it was just a morning excursion to go out to eat, Maggie Bluffs is on the Elliott Bay Marina and therefore fits with the year's Boating & Waterfronts theme. Both aspects, in fact -- although we didn't get in any boats, we certainly were surrounded by a ton of them.

Shobhit and I finally decided to use one of the two $50 gift cards we got from Dad and Sherri as our Christmas gift last year, which is good for twenty different Northwest "Restaurants Unlimited" restaurants. Some time ago Shobhit and I looked at the menus online for all twenty of them, marking which ones have sufficient vegetarian options on the card. We did it in one card for Seattle, and one card for Portland for use during our anniversary stay there in June.

We also marked which ones were good for brunches, and we recalled there had been one on a waterfront. Perfect! I figured out from what was marked on the Seattle card that ths would be Maggie Bluffs. Neither of us had ever even heard of the place before getting these cards, let alone been there.

For most of the route there, you drive as though headed to the cruise ship terminal, exiting the Magnolia Bridge about halfway across. (Shobhit and I also went this way to get to the Seattle Chocolate Festival last year.) You wind up on the south shore of Magnolia, in a large parking lot behind several businesses that make the area look rather like a resort spot. I'm pretty sure I had never been to this part of Magnolia before, although I've certainly seen it from the nearby piers, where the Seattle Chocolate Festival happened, for instance.

Anyway, it was a nice day and everyone dining was seated outside, and so we did too. I only walked a little ways from our table to the nearby sidewalk to get the above shot of the marina, which included a Holland America cruise liner blocking what otherwise would have been a view of the Seattle skyline.

The food there wasn't exactly beautifully presented, but it sure was tasty, both my Bananas Foster French Toast, and also Shobhit's breakfast tacos. The place was almost shockingly reasonable in their pricing, but I suppose the same argument could be made that Dad said of the pricing at Tugboat Annie's in Olympia -- both places are similarly out of the way from downtown and sort of secluded. They also had a pretty great looking Happy Hour menu, and after I texted it to Laney we agreed we would go there for our Happy Hour in September (every location between now and then is already chosen).

Shobhit and I drove down to MacPherson's Produce on Beacon Hill after that, and did some produce shopping, then drove home. While driving up Madison Street on Capitol Hill, we passed by a guy leaning over with his pants down to his thighs, his bare ass pointed at all oncoming traffic. Shobhit thought he might be high and thinking someone might come along and fuck him in broad daylight; I told him he thinks everything is about sex far too much. I honestly wondered if the guy was about to star shitting, but in retrospect, I figure he would have been in a slightly different position for that. Maybe he was just amusing himself by mooning all oncoming traffic. One thing Shobhit and I could agree on was that maybe he was high or drunk. Who knows! All I know is we drove past a fully exposed ass.

Shobhit then had a work shift from 1:30 to 10:00, and I spent that time first taking myself to see Long Shot, the first movie I managed to get to since April 25; and once I was home and had the review written, I spent the rest of the afternoon and evening processing photos and/or writing the blog post about the Argosy Locks Cruise.

Oh, and I got my haircut on Wednesday morning, and colored it at home right after, but waited until my walk home from the movie yesterday to take the picture, right outside the West Building of the Braeburn Condos complex. So here it is, in all my receding-hairline glory.

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[posted 8:50 am]