This is technically day 4 of the vacation, and day 2 in Seattle. Here's an update.
Went to the beach Wednesday, Newport, Oregon to be exact. It's not only a beautiful and charming coastal town, but the home of the Oregon Coast Aquarium, and more importantly for me, the Rogue Brewery. Best-friend Anthony (yes, it's like we're still 4) and I went on the tour, which was surprisingly unsatisfying. Rogue has built its reputation on being a moon-your-car rebel, but I suppose doing a tour everyday, the rebel shtick gets old. Not that I didn't appreciate the thin blonde leading the tour. She said they only make minimum wage and the company is famously cheap. Indeed - not even a complimentary tasting, as the Dogfish Head Brewery did when I did a tour over Memorial Day. But the beer taster ($5 for 4) was good, and they gave us hop flowers, which are now odorizing my room at my folks' house.
Oh, and the beach was pretty. I'll have pics up "soon," meaning before 2008. Thursday Anthony and I went riding in Corvallis, where he attends the real OSU, not that fake Rust Belt poseur. That night I drove up to Seattle. Which brings me to a main theme...
For the first time ever, my Seattle vacation is aided by an automobile. There was once a couple years ago when I drove up for a single day from Oregon, but this time I'm here for most of the rest of my trip. (I have a wedding in Portland Sunday.) And it's very different. Usually I take the bus everywhere here, which is manageable but requires a bit of planning beforehand to catch an estimated 5-6 buses a day. Knowing that this time I would have a car, I've done zero planning, and it hasn't quite worked out. I've already paid $6 for two hours of parking, which certainly beats DC, and spent quite a lot of time in traffic - 3 hours for the beach, 90 minutes for the bike ride, 3 1/2 hours from Oregon to Seattle, and now just driving around the city.
The weather up here is perfect, properly understood - about 65, and it's rained a tiny bit today. (The stereotype of a drenched Northwest is highly exaggerated - it's usually a regular pitter-patter of rain, but nothing that comes close to pouring.) I've spent a bit of time outside, hanging around Pike Place Market with an old co-worker, going to Carkeek Park on the Puget Sound in north Seattle, where my t-shirt and shorts proved inadequate, and now the Platonic form of a Seattle coffeehouse, Zoka. (Sufjan Stevens was playing when I walked in, then downtempo Radiohead, now Arcade Fire, and I'm drinking a $3 "artisan reserve" cup of coffee from behind a raised half-circle platform in the back of the room.)
The city has changed a bit since I was last here. There are cops all over the Pike Place Market region, where crime has taken a sudden turn for the worse. Three shootings happened in 2 weeks near my old office, including one in broad daylight, which sparked my old coworkers to hire private security and complain to the risk-averse Seattle cops to put some blue on the streets. The seedy porn shop (I suppose there are non-seedy versions) isn't next to the teriyaki place, whose prices have gone up a buck (it's now $5 for the standard lunch). I had lunch with the coworker at a new Thai joint in an alley, where a dude with a guitar played nursery rhymes and said "thank you!" to no one in particular, following no applause. The Market doesn't offer an hour free parking anymore and it's packed. Condos are going up everywhere. Otherwise it's the same.
It's been a weird combination of bumbling and opportunity so far. I forgot to bring my dress shirt with me to Seattle, for the Sunday wedding in Portland I'm attending with S, and since I borrowed the parents' car I can't get them to bring it to Portland. I picked up three shirts ($20 each) on a whim. My usual host, Steve, belatedly remembered he had a three-day bachelor and wedding party, and a free ticket to a Dave Matthews show halfway across the state, so instead of the Queen Anne 'hood near the school, I'll be staying with friend David in Bellevue until Sunday night.
But I've had two sort-of work offers, one explicit and one implicit, from people I knew when I went to school and worked here. The offers are both sort of in my field, and at least one could easily be telecommuting. My years-old plan to freelance or at least get some side work has not been realized thus far (passive phrasing indicates my slack-assedness), and these two opportunities, minutes apart, seem rather fortuitous. You don't get anywhere in DC without a handful of side projects - two former coworkers making lots more than me have regular writing and political gigs on the side - and it's probably time I caught up with my type-A peers. Seattle definitely brought out my lazy side - you don't really need to do anything when you live here, other than bum around coffeehouses, go biking and pretend you're looking for a job. I'm the least busy person I know in DC, and everyone just assumes I'm really busy when I don't get in touch with them for a while. More likely, I just forgot and have a low threshold for social effort. Not good.
Did you know you can make tea out of poppy seeds, legally acquired? Gets you incredibly high for 12 hours at full dose but tastes terrible, so I hear.
I'm off for a swanky happy hour. More narrative later.
