Transit-ioning

TEST RUN: Today we invested four hours in making sure CJ can get to and from his college campus by himself and on time.  

Our test run started at the end of our block, where we waited for a Via driver to take us to the light rail station in Rainier Beach. Via is a newly-expanded service for King County transit riders in some neighborhoods, including ours, thankfully. It's like an Uber or a Lyft, but much, MUCH cheaper - just the price of a bus ticket.

We climbed into the car at about 10 a.m. The driver took us to the rail station, but I have to say, I wasn't super pleased about the entire experience. The driver's cell phone rang when we were about 1/3 of the way to our destination. He not only answered the call, he proceeded to have a personal phone conversation for the entire rest of the trip, holding his cell phone in his left hand while he drove us with his other hand. That is against the law (with good reason) in the state of Washington. 

To quote the Washington Traffic Safety Commission:

Distracted driving is the act of driving while engaged in other activities that take the driver’s attention away from the road.

In the state of Washington, it is against the law to hold your cell phone while you are driving.

I've already sent in a comment via the Metro King County website. I told them not only was their driver's action illegal, I thought it was especially poor form because there were two teenagers in the car, including Annabelle, who just finished driver's education training and it has been hammered into her head by that and me that you don't use your cell phone while you're driving. 

Fortunately, we survived our Via trip. :) Then, it was on the train to the stadium district in south Seattle. Annabelle has an Orca card that lets her ride the metro area's various forms of mass transit for free. CJ will have one once his school starts, but in the meantime, I downloaded an app that allowed me to buy our tickets ahead of time. 

After we got off the train, we knew we had to get on a Sound Transit bus to Tacoma, but we weren't entirely sure where the bus stop was. Fortunately for us, a woman about my age saw us staring at the transit systems map and asked if we needed any help. I told her we were trying to catch a bus to Tacoma, and she said she was also doing that, so we followed her to the bus stop. 

It was a quick and easy ride, with just a couple stops in south Seattle before we hopped on the freeway and went right to UW Tacoma's doorstep.

I thought the upholstery on the bus looked like a 1980s pattern. Annabelle noted that it was actually a map of the greater Seattle area. 

One thing we learned today is that you have to request your stop. It doesn't just happen. It was good to learn that on the dry run, so now CJ knows that for the live drill.

Once we were off the bus, we walked the UW campus until we found the building (J) where CJ will be taking his one and only in-person class (American Architecture) this fall.

While walking the campus, we found memorial for a former Japanese language school that used to be on the now-UW Tacoma site.

In pretty short order, we found the building where CJ's class will be held. 

Boy was he pleased to see that the end of the building is occupied by a Zeke's pizza place.

We had some slices on their patio before heading back to the bus stop for the trip north.

All in all, a successful journey, and now there's one less thing to worry about regarding the back-to-school to-do list.

Blooms and Bites

BLOOM AND GROW: Last week, we got to do a little crafting for a back-to-school gathering for teachers and staff at the kids' former school. 

It was a garden party, and the theme was 'bloom and grow.'

Annabelle used her Cricut to cut out letters, which we mounted on a mesh background. 

She also made some tags for the teachers' grab bags. 

They were fun projects. We miss doing stuff like this. It used to be a near daily occurrence, it seems like. 

FAIR FOOD: The fourth Saturday in August was our most recent Teen Feed date. Since it was just a few days before the Washington State Fair opens, we went with a fair food theme for some fun. 

The Italian sodas looked tasty!

We had big, beautiful ears of locally-grown corn, bathed in butter and salted just so.

We had caramel apples - not the big, whole kind. Instead of whole apples, we sliced them up and drizzled them in caramel sauce.

Scones are a staple of the Washington State Fair. Fisher scones have been sold there for over 100 years. I contacted the Fisher scone people and they sold us a commercial sized box of scone mix at a greatly discounted price. It let us cook up about 8 dozen scones.

The main entree was corn dogs. Not the most high falutin' food, but the Teen Feed crowd liked them.

One thing I didn't like was the oven on site and how it cooked the corn dogs. It's a big commercial convection oven, and for whatever reason, it was turning the corn dogs too brown and crispy on the outside but still frozen like a Popsicle on the inside. Not good. 

So, Annabelle put some in the microwave. And then forgot about them. This is what that looks like.  

In the end, everything went mostly OK and we made over 80 meals.

SALSA: Our garden is on its last legs, pumping out the last bits of produce. 

Our pretty little dark purple peppers joined pounds of tomatillos in some salsa I canned on Sunday.

VISITOR: The kids and I came home from an errand a couple of days ago. Imagine our surprise to find this slinking around our floor in the kitchen. 

                                                   

CJ managed to corral it using a cake lifter and a colander and released it back to the 'wild' (our backyard).

CREEPY: Speaking of creepy crawly critter, my latest woe-is-me chapter involves a sneaky spider. On Saturday, I felt an itch on up upper right arm and felt a little spot. I figured it was a mosquito bite. Turns out I figured wrong. I felt sick all day long and didn't know why. 

Later that day, the bite site swelled up to the size of a hard boiled egg and turned black and blue, which was when I realized it was more likely a spider bite. This is what it looked like six days in. Pretty, no? 

Psycho

VIVA LAS VEGAS:  In what has become the new normal, I am woefully behind with this blog. 

So behind that I have to go back a couple plus weeks to tell you about an adventure CJ had semi-recently.

He flew solo down to Las Vegas, where his oldest brother Rick lives with his wife Rachel and a pair of adorable Dobermans (or is it Dobermen?), Pretzel and Marzipan.

Marzipan is still a pup, and she took a shining to CJ. 

Family and furry friends aside, another big magnet for CJ's trip was a death metal concert event called Psycho Las Vegas. It was held at the Mandalay Bay resort.

CJ was on his own for the event, and I was a bit surprised by his lack of planning. He was texting me saying he couldn't find various stages or the schedule, etc. So I found myself thousands of miles away, using the magic of the Internet to help him navigate.

I sent him screen shots of schedules and a map of the resort.

I also helped him navigate the airports from afar.

It didn't help that it sounded like the event was not the most organized. There were numerous cancellations, including on the day of the show CJ went to.

He did manage to finally find his way around the resort and to the various stages where the entertainment was taking place.

For a couple of sets, he wound up pretty close to the action.

He wound up making his way back to Rick and Rachel's via an Uber about midnight after 12 hours of metal.

Other highlights of his trip included food. 

Lots and lots of food. Check out his ridiculous hot dog, below.

I can't believe he ate the whole thing!

Out of the Loop

CAKE AND COOKIES: We have been baking and making a *lot* this past month. Our latest big project was a cake for a friend's son's birthday. He wanted a "Space Jam" theme (after the two animated movies of the same title). 

The cake itself was pretty straightforward. Three layers of vanilla cake stacked, and then airbrush painted in blue tones. 

The basketball atop it was a big Rice Krispies treat covered in our fondant. To support the weight of the ball, we had three straws in the cake tier, and then to help keep the basketball in place, there was a rod sticking up from the cake tier into the basketball.

For even more fun, we complimented the cake with Space Jam cookies. Most featured Looney Tunes characters, who star in the latest movie along with NBA star LeBron James. 

Annabelle did the outlining of the characters and I colored them in.  Isn't her LeBron amazing?

We hope the birthday boy enjoyed his cake!

HANDY: Annabelle is in her last week of work as a lunch program worker for Seattle Parks and Recreation. She'll be sorry to see it end. She has really enjoyed the experience, and I have no doubt they have enjoyed having her there. I'm pretty certain she's the only new hire that has actually been at work every day she was scheduled for the entire shift.

One of the things she's spent a lot of time working on is making how to videos for kids to complete crafts at home. 

If you want to check some of them out, go to the White Center Teen Program's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs66llYibYe35_i77FH-sRA

Below is one of the videos Annabelle and her team recently complete. It's about how to paint a Pokemon Jigglypuff character on a rock. (She wasn't pleased with the quality of paint she had to use, by the way.)

 

THE EYES HAVE IT: Nine days. I do believe this is the longest stretch I've ever gone without a post since staring this blog.

It's true that since COVID hit and we're not out and about nearly as much as we used to be that I don't post as often. However, this post is especially overdue because of my continued bad luck health wise. The latest challenge involves my left eye.

To sum it up, I'll just go ahead and quote the optometrist I saw yesterday. "You ripped your whole cornea off!"

Those are words you never want to hear from an eye doctor.

Fortunately, she was a tad hyperbolic. The *whole* thing isn't ripped off, 'just' the top half is severely torn/detached. 

Talk about bad luck.

It is just bad luck. It happened in my sleep Sunday night/Monday morning. I just woke up in intense pain and it got worse as the day went on.  By Monday early afternoon, I was walking around the house with my left eye closed, sunglasses on and a towel over my head, any light hurt so bad. Even laying on the couch downstairs in the dark basement, with sunglasses on and both eyes closed, when Christian switched to a different view on his computer screen to an image with a lot of bright white, I winced and groaned with the slightest of pupil dilations.  

We decided an urgent care visit was in order. The first place we went was full (likely 'thanks' to COVID's delta strain), but I got into a new Zoom Care in Tukwila. The young PA put some dye in my eye, looked at it with a UV light, and said she could see an abrasion. She said she didn't have good eye tools though, and referred me to an eye doctor, and said to go within 48 hours. She gave me some antibiotic drops and I was on my way.

Unfortunately, things weren't much better by Tuesday, so I made an appointment for Wednesday at a place in Tukwila. The young optometrist pretty much recoiled when she looked at my eye with her naked eyes. And then after she put some dye in and did the exam with the fancy equipment, that's when she declared, "You ripped your whole cornea off!"

That was a little shocking. No wonder it hurt so much, ha ha.

Regarding the injury, I am going to go ahead and guess it had something to do with all the smoke in the air recently. I'm really sensitive to it, especially my left eye. That, and it has been hot, so we've had a floor fan in our room at night, basically pointed at my face. I'm guessing my eye got inflamed and dried out, fused to the eyelid, and then ripped. The optometrist agreed that was likely. 

She said it's starting to heal, but because it's such a jagged tear, it won't be a nice clean scar, and I'll be more prone to doing that in the future. Super. She gave me some steroid eyedrops to help with the healing. Of course now my eye hurts again due to all the poking and prodding. 🙁

After my appointment I messaged my sister to let her know what happened. Coincidentally, she was on the way to her eye doctor for a routine check up. "I'll have to tell him this!" she declared. 

Later, she reported that the very first thing at her visit, she and her husband had to fill out an eye dryness survey - something they've never done before. She said she told her doctor what had happened to me, and "he said smoke, dry air - especially from fans - are a real hazard for this exact problem now."

Bingo!

She also reported, "My doctor said there are more nerves there than anywhere else in the body and that the pain is worse than childbirth."

I would actually have to agree with that, as well. If we hadn't had some Tylenol 3 'in stock' (leftovers from a procedure where it wasn't used post op), I think I would have wound up in the emergency room. I have never taken Tylenol 3 before in my life, but in 24 hours I took three of them to try to help with the pain.

I am not gonna lie, I have been singing the chorus to this song over the past few days.

But enough about me. :)

Recent Doings

MORE, MORE, MORE: Our kitchen has been a mess for what seems like weeks now. There has been one project after another. The latest was a couple dozen custom cookies for Christian's dad's memorial this past weekend.

Per usual, the project started with a plan. We cane up with a dozen or so different designs to represent aspects of his life. He spent most of his years in Lake Oswego, Oregon, so that fact played out in butter and sugar. 

He loved photography, so we made several little slide cookies. Annabelle painted tiny photos (a sunset, flowers, a boat on a lake, the forest, Mt. Hood and more) and I made Kodachrome frames to go around them, so they'd look like little slides. I wish I had a group photo of those cookies, up close. They were terrific. We also made some camera cookies. unfortunately, the detail on those don't show up very well, given that it's black on black. 

He was an Oregon Ducks football fan, played the banjo, was a good cook, loved his vintage wooden boat and had some funny Danish sayings. So we tried to capture all of those things on cookies. 

We probably each spent 10 hours on Saturday making them, so that's 20 hours combined. A lot of work, but time well spent. The cookies were a hit and disappeared quickly at the memorial, which was a lovely event on the shore of Lake Oswego.

While we were cookie-ing, Christian was cobbler-ing. We had a dinner party to go to on Saturday night, and one of our contributions was dessert. I wanted to take advantage of the fact we're surrounded by ripe blackberries, so I found a recipe for a peach and blackberry cobbler. Christian worked hard and made it entirely by himself. 

The recipe was good, but it could have benefitted from some cinnamon and some corn starch in with the fruit, IMHO.

It certainly looked terrific!

DOUBLING UP: A couple of weeks ago, CJ received his diploma for his associate's degree from South Seattle College. 

A couple of days ago he got a bonus diploma - his high school diploma, also from South Seattle College. 

We didn't know this was even a possibility until a couple of weeks ago, when the Renton High School registrar let us know that CJ was eligible to get a high school diploma from South Seattle under the Revised Code of Washington. 

Specifically, from app.leg.wa.gov, "RCW 28B.50.535

Community or technical college—Issuance of high school diploma or certificate.

A community or technical college may issue a high school diploma or certificate as provided under this section.

(1) An individual who satisfactorily meets the requirements for high school completion shall be awarded a diploma from the college, subject to rules adopted by the superintendent of public instruction and the state board of education.

(2) An individual sixteen years or older or enrolled through the option established under RCW 28A.600.310 through 28A.600.400, who satisfactorily completes an associate degree through a community or technical college, including an associate of arts degree, associate of science degree, associate of technology degree, or associate in applied science degree, shall be awarded a diploma from the college upon written request from the student. Individuals under twenty-one years of age under this subsection are eligible for funding provided under chapter 28A.150 RCW."

Renton High School seemed very eager to be able to count CJ as a high school graduate, and it's certainly better to have an official high school diploma than not, so we were happy to request one, and had it within a week. So happy graduation to CJ again! 

CENTERED: We have been (mostly) enjoying a string of hot weather, and one day last week we made a pilgrimage to the International Fountain at Seattle Center. That has been an annual tradition of ours for as long as we've lived in Seattle, save for last summer, when the fountain was off so as not to attract crowds during COVID. 

CJ ran around exuberantly just like he did a dozen years ago. It's definitely one of his happy places. 

Meanwhile, just west of the fountain, the new Kraken arena is nearing completion. We're season ticket holders and certainly looking forward to getting into building for some fun times ahead!

In another happy development, there is now a Wing Dome restaurant location inside the Armory on Seattle Center grounds. That's about CJ's favorite restaurant, so it was a great day for him.