After managing not to spend any money at all
on Tuesday, having taken a picnic lunch to Occidental Park in Pioneer Square with Shobhit via the First Hill Streetcar and then a picnic dinner to Heritage Park in Lynnwood with Shobhit and Shauna, I did spend a fair bit of money yesterday: $4 for parking plus $23.80 for two tickets (but after a 15% AAA discount!) at the Washington State History Museum. I thought I woukd be paying for dinner but Zephyr wound up very generously covering our dinner at The Old Spaghetti Factory . . . also in Lynnwood.
We still managed to save some other money yesterday too, though: at Shobhit's suggestion, we packed a meal yet again, having our lunch outside the Washington State History Museum after we were done inside. He made a lentil dish mixed with rice, peas and shredded carrots that was actually quite tasty. I brought another hot chocolate, made from the mix Ivan gave me for my birthday, kept impressively warm in the Total Wine & More-branded Yeti insulated mug Shobhit got from work. I should find a place to get myself one of those. I have insulated tumblers that were samples from work that are just as good at preserving temperature, but I love the lid on the Yeti mug the best, as it just slides back and forth with a magnet and is a lot easier to drink out of. Anyway, the point is, we didn't go out for lunch.
We did drive to Tacoma, however—the Washington State History Museum is right on the other side of the Foss Waterway, the northern side of it being where Tracy and I had taken a walk
on Friday evening. We paid for two hours of parking in the lot next to the building, accurately predicting that was all we would really need there.
Mind you, I had never been to this museum, and I wouldn't necessarily mind going back one day. It has five levels but only levels three (which is at the street entrance level) and five have exhibits; there's a big
Green Book exhibit on the fifth floor right now that we had very little time for.
Still, I took a good 11 photos of other, permanent exhibits as we made our way to my primary destination there for this visit; three of those still had to do with trains in one way or another. A couple of other memorable things on display:
a 1942 order for the internment of Japanese-American people living in Washington; and a
world map on which museum visitors can mark where they are from. It had no markers on India yet, and Shobhit fixed that, affixing one right where Delhi would be.
The
full photo album for this excursion has 36 shots in it; 18 (precisely half) of those are of the Model Railroad Display that is on the fifth floor, having been constructed by
Puget Sound Model Railroad Engineers (PSMRE) for the opening the museum itself in 1996.
Bizarrely, the Washington State History Museum's current website has literally
zero information on the Model Railroad Exhibit, even though it clearly used to—I've found several
older articles about it, with links to museum web pages about it that are now broken when you click them. I really don't get it. It's such a cool exhibit, evidently the
largest permanent model train display in the state. If that's not something they want to retain as a claim to fame, I don't know what is.
I got lots of pictures, anyway. I'd venture to say the model train display was worth the price of admission on its own ($11.90 per person with the AAA discount), although the rest of the museum is interesting too. I just think this model train display is the most exciting thing in there, and I'd probably feel that way even if I weren't in the middle of a train-themed Birth Week. I was so busy taking photos and video clips of the models themselves—there's a button you can push to make random trains run for a bit—I totally spaced all the posted information on the incredible
scale model of Tacoma's Union Station, which apparently was not finished and added to the display until
December 2018.
So we came home from Tacoma, and for the next few hours, I actually worked ahead on . . . this very blog post, which, full disclosure, I wrote all of yesterday afternoon and last night, post-dating so it would do a scheduled post this morning, when I had no time otherwise to write before leaving on an early Amtrak train to Portland. You'll have to wait to read about
that until tomorrow morning!
I also wrote the last of "Part One" of my Birth Week 2022 travelogue, and bucked my own convention by sending that out yesterday afternoon, so people would have a few days before they receive Parts One and Two; the Part Two travelogue will likely get sent out on Sunday, covering the second half of my week/trains. I even wrote the first portion of the travelogue email, going backward from what I usually do and copying and pasting part of the first half of this blog post into the email.
All of that got me past about 5 p.m., after which I had less than an hour before we were to head out again. As it happened, we met up with Lynn and Zephyr for dinner at The Old Spaghetti factory in Lynnwood—not just the same suburb we went to for Heritage Park with Shauna the night before, but literally getting off at the same freeway exit. We just turned left instead of right, and actually passed by Heritage Park on our way to The Old Spaghetti Factory.
As it happens, we had dinner at this very same Old Spaghetti Factory for my Birth Week dinner with Lynn before—five years ago,
in 2017. Lynn's son Nick was able to join us then, but Zephyr wasn't; this year it was the other way around.
With the exception of last year, when Lynn and Zephyr and I went to Spencer Island Park (and 2020, when I took a bunch of screenshots of our "virtual quarantini" virtual hangout), historically my Birth Week with Lynn is just an outing for dinner, and thus that just gets tacked onto whatever Birth Week photo album was otherwise created for that day. Well, this year again we just went out for dinner—I knew The Old Spaghetti Factory had that "trolley" seating area, and declared that qualified to be part of my "trains and railroads" theme—but, I still managed to squeeze
15 shots out of the evening. That makes it the smallest photo album of this week's Birth Week so far, beating the previous record low of 17 for Heritage Park with Shauna the night before. But, oh well. We take what we can work with.
We were probably there two and a half hours, which is pretty long to hang out just at a restaurant. They were clearly a bit understaffed and our waiter was under some stress, and Zephyr did something that might have impressed me more than anything else I've ever seen him do: he went out of his way to acknowledge to the guy that he could tell he was very busy and understaffed, but that "you're killing it." The guy clearly really appreciated that, and I thought it was very sweet of Zephyr to do. Zephyr loves to throw facetious bullshit out into conversations for sport, but he can be truly sincere when he wants to be.
I had asked our waiter to take our picture from outside the trolley so the whole thing was visible, but I asked it early on and he asked that he do it "towards the end" as he had other things to take care of. I said that was fine, but then, somewhat predictably, by the time we were winding down, he left the check at our table and then disappeared before I could remind him of the photo. We flagged down another staff member, a young lady, who happily took a few pictures for me, which I really appreciated.
They even have a
photo of the Interurban Trolley on the wall, which might very well have been a photo of the same trolley car on display at Heritage Park that we had gone to see with Shauna.
I took like three pictures from the freeway on the way home, really just to pad out the photo album. Otherwise it would have been just 12 photos.
Still, I did get some good shots at the restaurant, including a couple great ones Shobhit took for me, of Lynn and Zephyr and me at the table when we were just about done. Throught much of the dinner, Shobhit did a lot of the talking, which he often does; it's funny how he can dominate conversation when hanging out with my friends. I don't mind it so much as it lets me be lazy and not have to make an effort to keep conversation going. I still held my own for a lot of the time, don't get me wrong. It was a very pleasant visit as always, and they even invited us to come by and see their new house (which I saw last year but Shobhit hasn't seen), but Shobhit and I both wanted to get back home—we agreed we'd come by another weekend soon. Between that and dinner plans already made for August when Lynn will be in Seattle for a tattoo convention, I might actually see Lynn three times within a single calendar year for the first time since, like, probably the nineties! That would be nice.
[posted 7:00 am]
