Our Christmas Eve Tradition

So, today we were both off work so we were able to indulge in what has, over the past few years, become our Christmas Eve tradition. Today's one of our feast days, when we depart from our usual low-carb (Atkins) diet and feel free to eat whatever we want. After a pleasant breakfast at Wild Wheat, our favorite local (Kent) restaurant, we drove over to the park-&-ride in Tukwila and took the new SoundTransit train all the way to the end of the line, Westlake Station. This being our third trip on the new train, we are now confirmed fans of Seattle's new, long-overdue, mass transit.

From the downtown station we walked the few blocks over to the Pike Place Market, where we proceeded to poke about for the next few hours, enjoying some street food in the process. Among the places we visited were Mersker's Maps, where I bought not one but two moon-calendars* and looked over some maps of England and Ireland, thinking ahead to our next trip over there in a few years (two & a half years & counting) and trying to find the Bilbo river (in Ireland) and village of Bilbo (in Scotland) I'd recently read about. We also visited Quality Cheese, where we picked up my favorite English cheeses: Cheshire and Double Gloucester and Wensleydale, plus a little St. Andre for variety,** then Frank's produce, where we got a selection of vegetables & fruit, our contribution to Christmas Day dinner. Other stops included Mee Sum for some crab rangoon and sesame balls, Becher's Cheese for some of their signature macaroni and cheese, and a brief stop for a cup of tea apiece (yunnan) at the Perennial Tea Room in Post Alley. Also adding to the experience were a lot of good-humored people, quite a few buskers, and an annoying mime dressed like a Michael Jackson robot. The strangest instrument I saw was a bassoon -- I've never seen a busker with a bassoon before, and had some interest in this as a fellow woodwindist, but he was just setting up when we walked by so I have no idea how good he was or what he played. About the only busker I didn't chip in a bit for was the one with the ukelele singing one of my least favorite songs.

That evening there was cooking (cut corn on my part), and the next day much enjoyment at a Christmas gathering at a friend's (friends') house, where we got to see both folks we hardly ever see except at gatherings like this and others we see almost every game night.

The day after that was uneventful, which was nice, and ended in a well-attended Call of Cthulhu session (seven investigators), the second scenario in a Miskatonic campaign I'm running. They played well and were all alive and sane when we broke for the night; we'll see if their luck holds in the second session, which will probably be this weekend.

And, after that, I was strickened with a cold that's laid me low for days -- hence the lag in postings. All better now, I hope.

--John R.

current reading: THE HOBBITONIAN ANTHOLOGY, THE LOST STRADIVARIUS.

current anime: SCHOOL RUMBLE (season two), EL CAZADOR DE LA BRUJA

*the link to this product is here ( http://www.celestialproducts.com/Products/MLIGHT.asp ), but the image shown doesn't do justice to how neat this poster-calendar is: each day is represented with an image of the moon in its appropriate phase, and all 365 days are shown at the same time. Ours hangs on the landing by the window through which we can watch the moonrise when it's full or gibbous.

**the St. Andre, mysteriously enough, was nowhere to be found when we got home. I hope whoever found it wherever it wound up enjoyed it; shame if it went to waste.

Ridin' the Train

Today, we took the new commuter train (Sound Transit) down to the Market. 

As I may have mentioned before, this was not our first attempt to check out what the new train system is like. But since it doesn't run as far as Kent--at least not now, in its earliest phase--we had to drive to the nearest station (Tukwila). The last time we tried this, the park & ride was so much  more than full that after ten minutes or so of futile circling we gave it up as a bad job and decided to try again another day. Later we realized that there must have been a game or something that day. So, this weekend we decided not to try for it on Saturday (when we heard there were not one but two games downtown), as had been the original plan, but instead to shoot for Sunday.

The plan worked. The friendly, helpful guard at Tukwila Station wasn't able to show us how to buy an Orca card apiece (a re-usable rail pass you simply keep charging up) from the vending machine,  so we eventually just bought normal round-trip tickets instead. The train, which runs every fifteen minutes, had a fair number of people on it (this would have been about two in the afternoon) but wasn't crowded. I thought I might have some bad moments, since where we got on it's very much an elevated train, running along raised tracks a good two-three stories in the air (the reason I've never ridden the monorail), but it wasn't as bad as I expected. And soon it worked its way down to the valley floor, running not along I-5 but pretty much parallel to Martin Luther King drive for most of the way, until it turned west in order to pass near the stadiums and then back north to reach downtown. 

We got off at the end of the line, Westlake Station, and walked the few remaining blocks west to reach Pike Place Market.  Our first stop was by Mesker's Maps, where I looked at their spyglass as a possible replacement for the monocular (verdict: v. neat, but the magnification seemed to be less than what I had already). It'd been a while since we were down here, so we most hit the usual suspects: a stop by Market Spice for me to stock up on Northwest Breakfast tea, along with trying three others (one we'd had before, the other two experiments); Janice bought a salt cellar. From there we went to the chocolate shop just south of the main market to buy some sugar-free chocolate. Then it was on to the cheese shop (Quality Cheese), where I picked up seven different cheeses, mostly English (Wensleydale, Cheshire, Double Gloucester, Cotswold, Red Leicester, that 'five shires' cheese, and a little Camembert). A final stop by the nearby vegetable & fruit stands completed our business, but we stopped in at a little bookstore for a poke as well. 

After that, it was a short walk back (uphill this time, though) to Westlake Station, then a short wait for the train, then a pleasant ride back to the carpark. All highly satisfactory. I imagine once they complete the next link, so that the train runs all the way from downtown to the airport, business will pick up considerably. Now if they'll just run a line out to SouthCenter Mall, and another one up to the University District, we'll really be in business.

So: public transport that doesn't take up space on the highway. It's kind of like 19th century trolley technology come again. Hooray. 

P.S.:  The Market wouldn't be The Market without folks selling Real Change, an always-interesting glimpse into how the other half lives (it's sold by the homeless so they can earn money rather than panhandling); the topic of the month, not surprisingly, seems to be the health care debate (i.e., why do we have the thirtieth best health care system in the world, not the best?*). But I also picked up another free paper from a stack in the market, the September 09 issue of NEW SPIRIT JOURNAL, and skimmed its article on angelology, from which I 'learned' that in addition to familiar archangels such as Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael, folks are now claiming to have contacted Purlimiek, archangel of Nature, and Fhelyai, the archangel "who looks after the animal kingdom" -- the reason being that "Our frequency has become faster and . . . we can [now] tune into the faster frequency angels". Well, that explains that. 

Finally, there's always a variety of buskers at the Market; I had to give a little to the guy in the fez playing "Mrs. Brown, You've Got a Lovely Daughter". To play Herman's Hermits, on a ukulele, in a fez, in public: now there's chutzpah.

*I suspect the answer will be simple: we're not willing to spend enough money to have the best when thirtieth best will do.