I’m down in Seattle for the weekend, on account of my sister’s birthday. So after a fairly lazy morning, including some delicious pancakes made by my brother-in-law, my sister opened some presents. Then, while she her kids and my parents went out for a walk, my brother and I took the opportunity to sneak on down to Magnusson Park for a swim in Lake Washington. It was really great to swim out in ‘real’ water — I can’t recall the last time I went swimming that wasn’t in a pool — probably since last summer.
Afterwards, we dawdled around for a bit then my brother and I went on down to Pioneer Square — originally we headed down because I wanted to look in on a particular ring designer’s studio. It turned out, however, that the address in Seattle is nother more than a mailbox, and the studio itself is in Kelowna. My bad. But we made the best of it, and while following a small crowd headed south through Seattle, it occurred to us that there must be a baseball game starting up.
Sure enough, the Mariners were just about to start a game against the Chicago White Sox. We hemmed and hawed momentarily about going, then decided we definitely should — neither of us had ever been to Safeco Field, and I’d never been to a Mariners game. We bought a pair of tickets up in the nosebleeds ($16, ‘obstructed view’, but still seats), that while seperate, were fairly close. We were assured that it wouldn’t be a problem to actually find a pair of seats next to each other, and true to word, it wasn’t. So we settled on in, but not before buying a $5 pizza and a $8 beer (all USD, of course). Which left me with a meager $1 from my original $30 budget for the weekend. But that’s all good, I’ll probably be heading home tonight, and I don’t need gas.
The game started slowly. Well, quickly, depending on how you look at it, as there was little in the way of action for the first 5 innings, so it quite motored along. Come the 6th, after the Sox went ahead in the top half, the Mariners exploded for 6 in the bottom half, then added 2 more in the next inning. We left after the bottom of the 7th, with the score 8-2 Mariners, but not before, during the 7th inning stretch, we were required to stand to join in singing ‘God Bless America’, which would have been bad enough, but the singer doing the duties decided to pull out this over-wrought, Wagnerian version of the song which made it positively ominous, as opposed to merely icky.
Afterwards, we mosied on back to the car, then I had the fun experience of navigating Seattle’s freeway system, ending up on the I5 express lanes north (which was actually what I wanted), and here I am, typing these very words. Tonight, I expect we’ll have some sort of celebratory dinner (although it will be hard to match the BBQ Salmon that was cooked up last night, in celebration), and then I’ll hop back in the car to hotfoot it back home.