Art on the town

Tonight was First Thursday at the Seattle Art Museum (a.k.a. SAM) and since M & I had been planning to go see their Alexander Calder exhibit, it seemed like the perfect excuse to go. (The only thing better than art is free art… ) I caught the bus from work to meet M & T who drove over together. While I was waiting, I snapped a picture of these cool car sculptures they had hanging over the lobby:

On the same floor as our Calder exhibit, there was a Michelangelo exhibit. The ticket taker helpfully informed us of what rooms contained which artist. I found this amusing because it’s hard to imagine two artists that would be easier to tell apart, but whatever. I also loved the sign above the entrance, which I tried to photograph (and promptly learned there was no photography of any kind) so you’ll have to settle for this “artsy” one:

(A quick rant here: I understand why photography isn’t allowed for some artists/exhibits – i.e. watercolors, older works, etc. where even the 10% of flashes that go off would definitely damage the work, but metal sculpture? Really? I love photographing works to inspire me later, so it was most annoying not to be able to take NON-FLASH pictures. GRRRRRR!!!)

Anyhoo, the Calder exhibit was wonderful. I wished it was twice as big, but wonderful nonetheless. It was fun to watch people watch his sculptures. Everyone just sort of slows down in the presence of a giant floating mobile. It’s awesome. Particularly enjoyable was a little baby who was mesmerized and stared at the sculptures, completely enraptured. They had a nice range of his work and displayed them really well – a number of pieces had strong front lighting that would cast shadows onto the floor and wall behind the piece, which really added to their impact. Two thumbs up, even with the large crowds.

Less wonderful and far more head-scratch inducing was the Michelangelo exhibit. According to the bus ads and billboards around town, it was supposed to be an exhibit highlighting 12 extant sketches that the artist had intended to destroy. Unfortunately, these particularly sketches really should have been destroyed or at the very least not had an exhibit built around them. They were basically drawings of a hand/a foot/a femur of a minor figure in the far upper left hand corner of a panel on the Sistene chapel. But the best part was to pad the exhibit, they had these completely random/vaguely Michelangelo-related objects. For example, an entire room of pictures and pieces of the house his great-grandnephew remodeled 100 years after the artists death. (???!!!)

My favorite was a model of the cart they used to move David into the Academia, complete with scale model of David in the cart (and next to a large poster of David, lest you not realize that’s just a model… ) The little plaque accompanying the cart was written in the craziest style I’ve ever seen. Allow me to paraphrase: “Here we see a scale model of the cart that was used to move the statue of David from the Pitti Palace to the Academia. How did they get the statue into the cart? (Using ropes and pulleys) Was it heavy? (Yes, it took a long time) What is the statue made of? (Marble quarried from NameOfPlace) Wasn’t that dangerous? (Yes, many people were killed or maimed.)” and so on… The whole thing reminded me of one of those weird museums they have in small towns where something of interest happened or someone famous lived once upon a time.

We also wandered around the contemporary pieces and saw an exhibit of Imogen Cunningham’s photography, which was cool — especially since she’s one of M’s favorite photographers. I was really sad I couldn’t take pictures of the contemporary work, since there were a few awesome pieces (awesome in their hilarious absurdity for the most part… ) So, I scoured the internet and found my two favorites. First up is an unfortunately tiny picture of Jeff Koons’ St. John the Baptist:

For those who aren’t up on their art history, this is a gaudy gold-plated ceramic statue based on Leonardo Da Vinci’s painting:

(Photo courtesy of Wikipedia)

(No, I have no idea why the Koons’ statue is holding a pig and a penguin. I’m sure there’s a reason… ) My other favorite was surreptitiously photographed by someone on Flickr and is Maus and Mann by Katharina Fritsch:

(Yes, that’s a giant mouse/rat on top of a pillow and a mannequin… ) Behind this piece was this amazing robe made out of thousands of military dog tags, but I remember neither the artist nor the name, so you’ll have to visit the museum to check that out for yourself. Or maybe google “Giant robe made of dog tags.” That might be fun regardless…

Afterward, we headed for the exit. While we were waiting for the elevator, I snapped this cute picture of T:

And this little detail of the mural above the elevator (words to live by, no?):

Filled with cultury goodness, we headed over to J’s office to pick him up and then over to Brouwers for some beer and moule-frites. MMMMMMM! Good food, lots of laughing with friends. Not bad for a Thursday!

Sunday in the ‘hood with T

There’s nothing quite like having an unexpected free morning. Especially on a beautiful sunny day. After a leisurely morning eating the breakfast I would have been eating while camping — bacon, pancakes and eggs. (Oh yeah!) After some quality gorging, followed by some quality laying on the couch, I decided we should go for a little walk down to the Farmer’s Market followed by a little more walking around the neighborhood.

The Farmer’s Market was a zoo (not surprising, given the weather) so we kept walking until we came to the Ballard Locks (officially called Hiram M. Chittenden Locks) I’ve managed to live in Seattle for a cumulative four years without ever seeing them, so today seemed like a good day to check them out. Tucked in the middle of a pretty botanical garden, the locks are pretty cool. There are two sections that boats go through on their way to/from the Puget Sound to Salmon Bay. Tons of tourist gather to watch the process:

Here the doors are opening to let some boats out:

Poor kayakers waiting for their turn:

Looking down the canal toward Puget Sound. You can’t quite tell from this photo, but there were tons of boats lined up, waiting their turn to go through the locks:

On both sides there are these terraced lawns where you can sit and watch the boats go by. (Or roll down them if you’re young and/or so inclined… )

T and I sat in the sunshine for a while, watching the boats go by:

After sitting around for a while, we wandered back. There were tons of salmon jumping in one of the channels, which was pretty amazing to see. It seems so counter-productive, but very entertaining to watch big silver fish fly through the air. Then we hit the farmer’s market again to get some crepes. (Oh yes, the post-race debauchery just goes on and on… ) All in all, a most enjoyable Sunday.

Wanna make God laugh?

Tell him your plans… My father-in-law said this (and if you know anything about my father-in-law, you know how ironic that is.) This weekend was an excellent example of this statement in action. We awoke to a blustery, rainy Saturday morning. We had to call the skydiving place to make sure they were jumping today, even though we were reasonably sure that they weren’t. Unfortunately, we were correct. It was a huge bummer, so we decided to brighten our days with a little trip to Besalu:

Since I had some free time on my hands, I offered to accompany M to her packet pick-up and allow T to have some nag-free computer time. I’m no where near the photo-journalist that she is, but I tried to capture the awesome registration moments:

M was coming down with cold and feeling a little anxious about her race tomorrow, but she still rocked the super-cute race shirt:

(Side note – that is a size LARGE. I think Trek might want to rethink vendors for next year, as I’d need a XL and a lot of women there would need even larger sizes. Hardly an empowering way to go into your first triathlon. I’m just sayin… )

We also got to watch Sally Edwards hype the crowd:

And of course when they brought up all of the Team Survivor folks, my eyes teared up. There’s nothing like a stage full of cancer survivors to put your petty complaints into perspective. After some “You go girlfriends” and high-fives, we hit the road.

The rest of the day was spent with a nice misty run out to the sculpture garden and back followed by the movie (500) Days of Summer, which if you haven’t seen, I highly recommend. It wasn’t the day I was planning, but still very enjoyable.

The forty-year old husband

Today is T’s 40th birthday. He’s not super excited about it, mostly because he’s currently going to school and pouring coffee at the local Safeway Starbucks. So, my mission was to make him have a great birthday weekend and hopefully make him feel better about the big four-oh. I had an awesome present in store that, if the boy didn’t figure it out, would be pretty much the best birthday surprise ever. (Don’t worry, it will all be revealed soon… )

First on the agenda, we were going out for a delicious dinner with our closest friends. I picked a restaurant that was highly rated by Yelp and personally recommended by two coworkers: Restaurant Zoe. It was cool to get dressed up and go out for a fancy dinner, as we don’t do that very often any more. We met up at M’s house, so we could carpool and had a pre-dinner glass of beer. We also got to admire Fergus’ handiwork on T’s present:

Isn’t he such a good kitty? Anyone can have a normal present, but a present personally chomped on by Fergus? Now, that’s special! And with that, we were off to dinner:

Oh, Restaurant Zoe, I think I’m in love with you. For anyone who is in Seattle and wants a delicious meal, I heartily recommend them. The ambiance is lovely, the service was fantastic and the food… oh, the delightful food:

I didn’t take pictures of all the food, but it was as lovely as it was delicious. (Pictured above: Fresh Ricotta Gnudi with a beet sauce. Mmmmm… ) M was nice enough to snap a picture of the birthday boy and yours truly:

(We clean up pretty well, don’t we?) We ate a ridiculous amount of food and the waitress brought out a complementary cheese plate for T’s birthday (and to apologize for a mix-up with J’s order)

They put the world’s best birthday candle on the plate. Seriously, it melted down to the plate with the tiniest amount of melted wax at the bottom. Here’s M admiring the amazing candle:

It was a lovely evening, all thanks to T getting a year older…

Afterward, we hauled our over-stuffed selves back to M & J’s house for some present opening.

M & J got T a clay oven to bake bread in. (I love presents that mean I get more fresh baked bread, so thanks from both of us!) I didn’t get too many pictures, so hopefully M will share some of hers:

Finally, it was time for T to open my present. In addition to a cute little notebook for him to use for school, I’d wrapped up a little box with a postcard informing him that he was going skydiving tomorrow morning. He was so excited, as he’s been wanting to go skydiving forever and he was totally surprised, which was pretty cool.

So far, his 40th year is off to a good start. Stay tuned to hear about T’s big skydiving adventure…

Seattle Century

I had a race rehearsal ride on my training schedule for this weekend, which is basically do a bike ride that lasts as long as you expect the Ironman bike leg to last. Since my long rides have been maxing out at 75 miles, I decided to find an organized ride to join for this part of my training. Luckily, the Seattle Century was scheduled for that same weekend so I signed up. I was excited to have a course already figured out for me, as well as aid stations where I could refill my water/eat and not have to carry so much on the bike. The unfortunate part of the timing was that we were also scheduled to go down to Florence that same weekend with Susan. Since those plans had been made long before this popped up, I just decided that we were going to suck it up and leave for Florence after I finished the ride. It was going to be a long day!

I left my house around 6:30 am, a little later than I wanted to but still early enough to feel okay about it. I unfortunately missed the turnoff to Magnuson Park, where the ride was scheduled to start, so I got to do a little riding against the current as I headed back against the stream of riders to the start line. D’oh! Once there, I parked my bike next to the weirdest bike saddle I’ve ever seen:

Seriously, that thing can’t be comfortable! The mood was festive at the start line:

I got my race number, took advantage of there being actual bathrooms and then hit the road. The ride starts on the Burke Gilman, so it was nice, flat and familiar. I skipped the first aid station at mile 12 (!!) and passed a surprising number of people who stopped for it. My plan was to hit every other aid station unless I needed to stop, so I pulled into Marymoor park to refill water and grab a quick snack. The aid station was next to the Velodrome, which was cool and had some guy roller dancing, which amused me:

It’s always nice when the freaks collide!   As the day went on, it got hotter and hillier so I didn’t take any more photos (sorry!) and hit more aid stations than originally planned. But all in all, it was a good day. I took it a little easier than I could have, since this was a good thirty miles longer than my previous long rides. I felt fine all the way through, got to pass some people on some hills and generally felt pretty good about the fact that I can in fact ride over a hundred miles. The route was pretty well marked, except for a few sections in Issaquah and Bellevue where I had to dig out my route sheet and wasn’t too terribly crowded. They also had a really yummy post-race lunch with beer for those who weren’t driving to Florence. If you are ever looking for a nice organized ride in the Seattle area, I highly recommend it.

T picked me up at the finish line and after a quick shower and frenzied packing of bags, we hit the road. There was some sort of parade in Seattle that closed all sorts of major streets so it took us forever to get to the freeway. It was definitely going to be a long day. I drove the first leg before I got too tired and T entertained himself by taking pictures:

It’s almost like being there! I finally crashed somewhere around the Oregon border and T took over the driving duties, getting us to Florence somewhere around 1 am. God bless his night-owl ways!

West Seattle Saturday

This evening, I convinced T for a trip over to West Seattle to swim in Colman Pool. (The awesome pool referred to in this post.) T hasn’t been swimming in a while, what with being busy at school and all, so he was less excited about the expedition than I was:

It was a largely uneventful swim, except for one notable exception where T,  swimming toward me got a little too wild with his arm motions (and a little too far in the center of the lane) and accidently punched me right in the nose. (Let me tell you, that really smarts!) To his credit, he felt terrible and apologized profusely. (I think he was relieved I didn’t punch him back on the return trip!) Oh well, I guess it’s good practice for the swim start at Ironman Canada…

Otherwise, the swim was great. T did well and more importantly was willing to wait for me to finish swimming my much longer set. Afterward, we walked back through Lincoln Park and let the dogs out for a little frolic in the park:

Both of us were starving after all of the swimming, so we decided to treat ourselves to a little Alki indulgence:

It wasn’t the healthiest recovery meal, but I will admit it was pretty tasty. We walked around Alki a little bit and then headed back from home. We made a brief stop for cupcakes, where I saw this awesome sign (doesn’t it bring to mind a Monty Python sketch?)

All in all, it was a really fun Saturday evening.

Showering a cyclone

Today we were blessed with a visit from Ms. Cyclone, who was in town for business and came up a little bit early so we could hang out. Ms. Cyclone is also part of the Year of the Baby, pregnant with a daughter. I miss having Ms. Cyclone up in Seattle and hanging out with her, so I wanted to do something fun for the few hours we had to hang out. I thought it would be fun to do something “baby showeresque” to celebrate her pregnancy, but still low-key and fun.

So, M & I kicked things off with a cooing, squealing trip to Target earlier in the week. (Apologies to the shoppers/workers at the Northgate Target for all of that ruckus… ) Then for our main event, we decided to have a picnic at Golden Gardens. The weather wasn’t as sunny and warm as it’s been all week, but it was still good picnic weather. The gang was in rare form:

And my camera still hates T:

But the food was awesome and plentiful, with homemade bread provided by T, some awesome mac & cheese from M&J, a bunch of other yummy things, including cupcakes for dessert.

And most importantly, creepy baby-themed toppers:

Ms. Cyclone seemed to have a good time and appreciated our take on the baby shower, sarcastic card included.

It’s hard to believe that the next time we see her, she’s going to be a mother. Crazy talk.

Another year older

Today was my 39th birthday, just a whisper away from 40. I don’t really think about how old I am until my birthday rolls around. In fact, when someone asks my age, I usually have to think about it. I figure, if you don’t act your age and you don’t feel as old as you are, then it doesn’t matter. That’s this year’s theory anyway, we’ll see what happens next year when I’m staring down the barrel of a whole new decade.

My work life has been crazy busy, trying to launch three new websites, but my co-workers were still able to find time to make a fuss over me. They decorated my office with this creepy balloon:

and these pretty flowers (both of which were photographed in my dining room, because I didn’t think to bring my camera to work)

They also bought lunch and had a little sundae party for me in the afternoon. Quite an impressive amount of fuss, to be sure. Then when I got home, T picked up the birthday baton and ran with it. When I opened his present, I was presented with this:

The box is from a Tazo tea display he’d gotten from work, and when I opened the little presents, each was a playing card with a post-it note giving me a clue of where to look for my present. This is the whole group:

So, as I looked around the house for my present, T followed me around looking smug/sinister:

Finally, I found the correct clue and uncovered two awesome posters that I’d seen in a shop down the street from our house. They’re basically typographic maps of cities and he’d selected my two favorites: Brooklyn & Seattle. Here Smokey Joe is doing his best Vanna White. (Unfortunately, he sucks at it… )

Cool, right? After all of the present opening, it was time to meet up with M and J for some dinner at one of my favorite neighborhood restaurants La Carta Oaxaca. It’s quite a testament to our friendship that M was willing to put aside her dislike of mexican food to celebrate my birthday, a fact I certainly appreciate. We started off with some delicious margaritas while we waited for a patio table to open up, since it was a gorgeous evening.

I ordinarily don’t like to be one of those people snapping pictures in restaurants, but tonight I made an exception. (I blame the margarita) Here’s M being silly:

and cute, while T picks up the silly…

And here’s T, drinking my “pink margarita” after disparaging it:

And a few shots of J & M, please note the couple behind them who were engaged in a fight on what turned out to be his birthday. (I didn’t hear about this until they’d left. My favorite quote: “I hear that, BUT… “)

One of the perks of hanging out with a talented photographer type is that you get super-awesome pictures to put on your blog. Here’s M’s picture of my margarita and appetizer:

And a shot of me:

The food was delicious, as always. I had the chicken mole, which was superb:

And I loved the final bill, it really says it all, doesn’t it?

After dinner, we stopped off to grab some more food for M, since she didn’t really like her dinner. While we were waiting, she snapped these pics of T & I goofing around:

What can I say, we’re silly people. We finished the evening with cupcakes and RockBand. All in all, it was an awesome birthday and a fabulous way to kick off my 39th year.

Happy Birthday, Erin!

My friend Erin was in town to celebrate the big 4-0. As you can see here, she looks fantastic:

Her shindig was at Black Bottle, a very cool wine bar in Belltown. There was good wine, good food and some fabulous friends. Below, two Jennifers from our tri group:

I was having a hard time getting my camera to take decent pics, but also in attendance were Erin’s boyfriend David, Jennifer’s husband Bryan, my husband T, Erin’s mom, her friends Sue + hubby and her friend Timmion. And perhaps most importantly there was cake, lots and lots of cake:

We sang happy birthday and had the birthday girl blow out some candles:

It was a lovely evening, as you can see by the group photo below:

Happy birthday, Erin! Thanks for an awesome evening. I think you’re off to an excellent start…

Urban windfall

So, last night as we’re driving home we get a call from M. Apparently, her neighbor is moving and has a washer/dryer combo machine for free in the front yard. For those of you who aren’t city dwellers, this is one of the perks of urban living – when people get sick or things or don’t want to move them, they often just drag them to the curb and put a sign saying “Free” on them. It’s a pretty sweet deal for everyone – people get stuff/people get rid of stuff, win/win.

I was especially excited because I’d been really missing our in-apartment laundry facilities. We have a coin operated washer & dryer downstairs, which works pretty well, but there’s nothing quite as nice as being able to just throw a load in when you want and not have to find quarters, put shoes on, hope no one else is doing laundry, etc, etc, etc. We were excited that it was still there when we arrived and we set about figuring out how to get it home.

After some impressive maneuvering from T, we managed to wrestle it into the Saturn:

M was kind enough to drive me home and with the promise of Rock Band, we also talked her husband J into helping us carry it up the stairs.

The boys managed to muscle it up the stairs and into our little storage closet with laundry hookups. We need to pick up a hose to connect it to the water supply before we can officially test it, but it powered up and the dryer spun when we tested that, so I’m hopeful that we will soon have a functional washer/dryer in our apartment. Here’s our new baby in it’s new home, I can’t wait to fill it with sweaty running clothes!