Welcome to 2002! We actually made it through, despite everything that went on this year…kinda cool, huh? I’ve been having a nice relaxing weekend, which has been great — much as I enjoyed last weekend’s trip to Alaska for Christmas, it’s nice to have four days in a row that I could just kick back and relax, with no real plans or schedule. The visit was great, but as is typical for such things, it was pretty mile-a-minute for most of the time I was there.
Candice and I have been spending a lot of the weekend just wandering around and seeing some of the city around us. Since her truck is out at the college campus right now, we’re limited to what we can find on foot…which is actually a fair amount, since I live so close to downtown Seattle. Saturday we hopped on the Bainbridge ferry, since I hadn’t been on any of the ferries yet and they offer some really nice views of the city. The Bainbridge run is one of the shorter runs, just a half hour or so each way, and we just took the ferry out and back without exploring any of Bainbridge Island at all. We may do some exploring of the islands later this summer, though.
Yesterday Candice and I met up with Rick to go out to dinner with three of Candice’s friends from school — Tim, Laura, and Heather — at Red Robin down on the waterfront. It took Candice and I a bit of a hike to get there, as we weren’t exactly sure where on the waterfront the restaurant was, but we found it eventually, and were only about 15 minutes behind everyone else, so we weren’t too late. After dinner there, Tim, Laura and Heather headed off to take a ferry trip of their own, and Candice, Rick and I went back up to 1st Ave. to grab the #18 bus out to Ballard. Casey and Dez were having a New Years Eve party out at their place, so the three of us stopped by there for about an hour. Was a very interesting little party…the crowd pretty much split into Dez and her friends on one side, and Casey and Jen (Casey’s fiancee) and her friends on the other. Jen and Dez haven’t been getting along for a while, and it lent a little bit of tension to the proceedings…a shame, but what can ya do, right? Drama….
After about an hour, Candice, Rick, Chad, Don and I headed out and caught the #18 bus back downtown to Rick’s apartment. He lives right at the intersection of 1st and Denney, just a copule blocks away from the Seattle Center, so we had a pretty good view of the Space Needle and the fireworks display there. We all headed up to the roof of his apartment building just a bit before midnight, and then proceeded to watch the Space Needle explode! It was actually a really neat display — I’d just been told that they launch fireworks off of the roof of the Needle. They certainly do that, but they also have fireworks going off all up and down the height of the Needle, and where New York uses the dropping ball in Times Square for the countdown, the Needle uses a brightly lit elevator rising to the top of the Needle with fireworks flying off behind it as it rises.
And that’s about it for now. Today’s the last day of the weekend break, and Candice and I are about to bus out to Bellevue to catch a movie…possibly either Oceans Eleven or Vanilla Sky. Until later….