First I'll briefly mention the first thing I did today that was outside the home: I met up with Laney for our second-Saturday Happy Hour, and we went to The Pine Box—our second time there; the first was in November of last year. I took a lot more pictures at last year's visit. Also, Shobhit joined us last year, but he had an event of his own to go to today. It's too bad, because it would have been better for me to eat only half of the $12 12" Happy Hour pizza I ordered, but, whatever.

I think maybe we were there about three hours. We each had two drinks, and I took Laney's advice again and had only one of the specialty cocktails ($14, honestly way too much for my so-called "Naughty Toddy") and then had one of the well drinks which were only $7. And then, guess what? I nice boon for me: I asked what was in the "Seasonal Mule," and I was told I had a choice of either passion fruit or pomegranate. I ordered the latter. The bartender made my drink, and when she was done, she suddenly said, "I'm so sorry, I made the passion fruit." Then she made a jokey-sly "secret" hand position next to her mouth and said, "You want it for free?" Sure! And then the drink was far more tasty than I expected. I gave her a 30% tip.

As always, Laney and I had no shortage of things to talk about. She even read me a copy she had on her phone of a letter her mom had written to her only a couple of years before she died, and it was actually very touching. We talked about all the possibilities I still have for a 50th birthday party next year, and whether I will have it in Olympia or in Seattle. We talked about lots of family stuff. I updated her on the healing wound of my cyst removal, and the horrid phrase "beefy red tissue." Actually, somehow I misremembered this already, after only one day, and what I said to Laney was "meaty red flesh." I only saw when re-reading my blog post from this morning that it was "beefy red tissue." Gack!

Anyway. I did ask Laney if she'd have any interest in joining me for the Green Lake Pathway of Lights, which I did not expect her to say yes to, but I figured it couldn't hurt to ask. It was relatively warm today, no rain, dry. Perfect day for it! But, Laney declined.

Had Shobhit not had other plans, I'm sure he would have gone with me. He would even have walked all the way around the lake, just to get a ton of steps in. For my part, after arriving at the Green Lake Community Center, I only made it as far around the lake as the Seattle Public Theater on the northwest side of the lake—that alone was 0.8 miles. I had already walked from Roosevelt Station, which I took Light Rail to from Capitol Hill, so that total distance was 1.6 miles. Round trip, that was 3.2 miles of walking. It would have been one thing had I driven straight to the Community Center and just walked the 2.8-mile loop around the lake, but I was already walking slightly more than that distance when coming from the station, and I was not especially up for a total 4 and a half miles of walking, especially when factoring the insane crowds they had there tonight.

This event hadn't even been on my radar until Danielle mentioned it, as she'd heard there were going to be hot air balloons and was interested. She didn't realize it was in conjunction with the Pathway of Lights event until I discovered it online, and we said we might go together. But, when I texted her a reminder a few days ago, she had forgotten about the date and made other plans. But, I decided I wanted to go and check it out anyway. This is an annual holiday season event that's been going on "for over 40 years" (I can't find any source noting the exact first year), and I only just discovered that the hot air balloons have been getting inflated at it every year since 2018.

What I also did not know was that they only inflate the balloons for the first hour—4:30 to 5:30. It was nearly 6:00 when I arrived, and there were no visible balloons anywhere. What there were, were insanely thick crowds. I had hoped I could find free refreshments like at Holiday in the Park at Volunteer Park or Twinkle Twinkle Freeway Park, but all I could find were booths—several of them—with people selling things, or at least that was how it appeared. One big booth was actually a PCC booth, which I did not expect to see, though in retrospect it makes sense since Greenlake is the single neighborhood in which we have two stores. That also looked like the stuff was for sale and not free, but I could have been wrong. I didn't want to go up and say "Is this free?"

There were multiple stages set up for performances. I'm kind of amazed I had never been to this event before, as it's clearly a longstanding predecessor to Holiday in the Park or Twinkle Twinkle Freeway Park. It made me wonder if the annual events at that park will be as insane 25 years from now. Granted, Green Lake has been a beloved Seattle Park in a way the other parks are not for many years, decades even. People love that park. They love visiting it, they love cycling or jogging the path around it (hmm, I should take my bike up there sometime), and they really love just walking around it with luminarias lighting the path on the second Saturday of December.

Lots of people walk with holiday lights wrapped around themselves in one way or another. It was the closest thing there was to any lighting of the path, besides the luminarias in paper sacks which were low to the ground. It was otherwise very dark and if there were any obstruction it would have been easy to trip over or run into it. I did see a few people wearing this weird, brightly lit backpack light thing, and those were so bright it blocked out a lot of the vision of anything else around it, ironically. I hated them.

I found it overall to be kind of a madhouse event, just due to the throngs of people—all around the booths concentrated around the Community Center; virtually anywhere on the path around the lake; certainly around the Public Theater. Although in that last case, some of the crowds were added to by the people there going to see A Die Hard Christmas. In any case, I found the densely packed crowds far more frustrating than fun, and for that reason see no reason to add this one to my annual event rotation. I may still go again just next year, if I can manage to get there right at 4:30 so I can see the balloons. The crowds might even be thinner that early. I'll probably have to carefully plan next year's second-Saturday Happy Hour with Laney around it too though, in that case. But, we'll see.

[posted 9:49pm]