Dry Ice Factory

I don't go to Vanguard parties much anymore, but on Saturday it was at janeehawkins's, which of course is a nostalgia trip for those of us of a certain age. So I put on my Vanguard disguise (a.k.a. the clothes I'd been wearing all day) and headed on over. Amongst other things, it allowed me to return the DVD of Jerry Springer: The Opera that I had borrowed from roadnotes (thanks again, it was brilliant!), and to bring some of jimtrash's Tiny TAFFzines and some TAFF ballots, which Jane had promised to flog because she was so entertained by the Tiny TAFFzines I had mailed to her. It was a pretty small party, with many notable figures Missing In Action (no Jerry & Suzle, no Andy and Carrie, no Ulrika and Hal), but I guess that's not unusual these days. Although Frank (of Frank & Molly) said that the last one they hosted was quite a bit bigger, so I guess it still waxes and wanes. Jane had just taken a course in soldering at a maker space on Capitol Hill and has become fascinated with the 3D printers on offer there, so she showed some videos of the printers in action and showed off a few objects that had been printed on them. Very cool! At some point five of us retired downstairs to smoke a little smoke. There was a time when the smoking room would have been full of people madly puffing away on various smokables, but that would have been a time when I still smoked cigarettes, which I don't really miss. Actually I don't remember seeing Jane smoke any tobacco this time, so now I wonder whether she's quit too. Well, it was great to chat with kate_schaefer and jackwilliambell just like old times, and there was John D. Berry and Vonda McIntyre and a number of other familiar faces, as well as one new person who came with Janice Murray but left before I got a chance to talk to her.

So that was the old tradition, and a very pleasant tradition it was. On the new front, I have now walked to SIFF Uptown in Lower Queen Anne three times on the weekend to see a movie. It's about three miles from our house and takes me an hour. So far I've always walked there via Westlake and Mercer (always running into a crowd entering or leaving the opera house), then I return home by climbing up and over Queen Anne on Queen Anne Avenue, with a stop at the Hilltop Ale House for a pint and a shot of Crown Royal along the way. The last two times I've done this, I've gotten to the area early enough to eat something in one of the restaurants near the theater, have a coffee at Uptown Espresso, and read a book. Yesterday I was reading Diana Wynne Jones' Hexwood, which is certainly weird and intriguing and very meta so far. The movie I saw was Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder, which was the one 3D movie he made and was being shown in that format. Anyway, this new tradition is a fine thing, and I hope I can continue with it, although it depends on SIFF continuing to show movies I want to see. They've been on quite a roll lately. I can't remember how long ago SIFF acquired the Uptown, but they are really turning it into something special for film freaks. One nice thing about this new tradition is I've gotten to know both Lower and Upper Queen Anne quite a bit better than before. The upper parts have always seemed like an island on top of the world, isolated from the rest of the city because you never go through it on the way to anywhere else. Never say never, because now I've found a reason to pass through and to stop at the local watering hole to read a few pages and observe the local wildlife. All in the service of getting more walking in and thus maintaining some semblance of health. Life is good.

Yesterday I walked to the Harvard Exit to see The Artist. When I first thought of walking, I was thinking I'd go by way of the University District. I wasn't sure what would be the best way to go up the hill, so I checked Google Maps. To my surprise, Google suggested that I walk down Westlake instead and cut over at South Lake Union. This route had never even occurred to me, but it did indeed look shorter on the map.

So I walked down to the Center for Wooden Boats in South Lake Union. I hadn't really understood the route up the hill that Google Maps had shown, so I looked it up again on my phone. It sent me up through the cancer care campus and then onto a road I'm not sure I've ever been on before. Well, I call it road, but it's really more of an overpass that goes over the freeway. It's called Lakeview, and that's because it throws you way up in the air where you get an outstanding view of Lake Union. Unfortunately it also triggered my fear of heights, and I started feeling strong pangs of vertigo. But by golly it got me where I needed to go. After a stiff climb up Belmont, there was the theater.

So that was a voyage of discovery, even if it made me a little weak in the knees. I kept thinking, "Please, giant earthquake, don't hit now!"