Independence Day 2023

[Later sent as email photo digest, at 5:49 pm] I never made any daytime plans for the Fourth of July, which in the end created an unusual sort of void, with far more idle time on my hands than I usually have. So, I spent the afternoon cleaning off my desk. What exciting news I have to share about my holiday! You might not expect that to take an afternoon, but, you might not have  a desk like mine, not cleared of its clutter—or its impressively thick layer of dust on and around said clutter—in literally years. Part of this process was organizing and filing my saved letters and (mostly) cards from the past three years, that being how long ago I performed that particular task. In that stack, I found this unwritten postcard, presumably picked up by me somewhere along the line, but I truly have no recollection of where it came from. I suppose I could have made a note of text on the back to see who produced it, but I just snapped this photo—I kind of love Guru being there looking up at me in the background—and then tossed it into my giant bag of recycling without thinking about it.

Shobhit went out campaigning for a bit, and suggested I use up the last two bananas to make banana bread while he was out. He's constantly suggesting this to burn through bananas he thinks will otherwise go bad, but before they are even barely ripe, so I resist all the time: "They're not ripe enough!" He tries to tell me bananas are "black" when they merely have a few black specks on them. He left, and I still baked the banana bread, although I was still annoyed. I was sure it wouldn't be that good: that'll show him! We only had two bananas and they weren't even really ripe, how good could it be? Well, they were also quite large bananas, I modified the recipe just slightly, and also added half a cup of chopped walnuts. It turned out absolutely delicious. Goddammit!

We headed out shortly before 7:00 p.m., on foot. At first the general idea was to go down to South Lake Union Park to watch the fireworks, as we had done that three times in the past: 2017, the first Independence Day after Shobhit returned from Los Angeles (we had done the very fun Grand Park fireworks in downtown L.A. the four consecutive years prior to that), solidifying then what I thought would become a new tradition; 2018; then, after having a house party to go to in 2019 and then of course canceled events in 2020 and 2021, we returned to South Lake Union Park in 2022. But! 2022 brought with it a new, annoying twist: the waterfront area right next to the Museum of History and Industry was now blocked off for reserved seating. The same was the case this year—$50 per seat!—and served as a bit of a deterrence to the great vantage points we'd found there previously. We actually momentarily considered just throwing caution to the wind and buying seats, but then decided it would be a waste of money. (If we want to get spendy and get some bang for our buck, so to speak, we may make a plan to get on one of the Argosy fireworks cruises next year, to do something different.) And so, on our way downtown, we got to Pine & Melrose, and I suggested we walk up Melrose to see if there were any good vantage points from there, in which case we wouldn't even have to leave Capitol Hill.

And: we found one! We found a few, actually, but after walking north on Melrose, passing through a bike path alongside the freeway and continuing up Lakeview Blvd E—until we had walked about a mile north of Pine—we found this nearly perfect spot, in a square of space offset from the sidewalk and behind the fence that overlooks both I-5 and Lake Union. The only thing that made it less than perfect was the concrete surface, but, you take what you can get. You can see a horizontal strip in the water in the above shot, to the right side of the waters of the lake—that's the barge from which the fireworks were launched. A father and his 16-year-old son wound up joining us in the space we found, which we were happy to share. The tripod was for the dad's camera.

Obligatory holiday selfie with my husband! The later it got, the more people gathered along the fence on Lakeview Blvd, but it never got truly crowded, not like it does virtually anywhere on the shores of the lake, even outside South Lake Union Park or, on the opposite and north end of the lake, Gasworks Park (where the crowding is truly nuts, as the barge is much closer to that side). It was an easy, half-hour walk home, the elevation gain half of what it would have been from the lake; it even would have been an easy drive home, which I will make a note of for future years.

Lake Union, sunset, Independence Day, 2023.

Lovely view of the north end of downtown Seattle, including the Space Needle, from our vantage point.

Unlike last year, the third year from the South Lake Union vantage point, when I kept all of four shots of actual fireworks because otherwise who cares, this year I kept about 10 of the photos I took—because of the new vantage point. Also I just really liked the look of this shot, which was taken as a "live photo," so I also saved it as a three-second video. After that, though, I deliberately took a twenty-second video of the very beginning of the show, as seen from across the freeway filled with slowing traffic.

It took a lot of patience to get fireworks shots I really liked. This one was otherwise my favorite.

I started with a shot of Guru, so I might as well end with one of Shanti: once we got home, Shobhit went to use the bathroom, and Shanti immediately crawled under here. She's never done this before. There was a lot of neighborhood fireworks happening, and we think it may have been spooking her. It's also entirely possible she went under there just for the hell of it, which seems to be the reason she does a lot of things.[posted 12:29 pm]