Friday
Friday morning, Alex and the girls have the day off work and school, but the wet weather doesn’t encourage us to venture out.
Maggi however wants to buy Sadie her birthday present and that means a visit to University Village. We all set off in the Rivian, a really comfortable 7 seater electric car, and as we approach the mall we encounter a fairly major traffic jam.
The Washington Husky American Football team are playing at 6 pm but their fans arrive 5 hours earlier to tailgate. Tailgating involves arriving at an American football game very early and having a picnic in the car park. We drove passed the car park at 1 pm and found it already half full with 5 hours to go before the match start.
At University Village we immediately walked to the Japanese Restaurant called Bamboo Sushi where we have eaten before. The quality of the miso soup, and the other food put our Carmel Sushi Heaven to shame. Alex ordered perfectly on behalf of the 5 of us and we left nothing without feeling hungry at the end.
After the meal the girls set off for the shops while I had a little look around the Apple Shop. The Mac mini takes my fancy but I’m not sure what I would do with it. Perhaps have my own LLM running on it. The good thing about shopping at University Village when it’s raining is that you’ll find a large umbrella outside most shops so you can walk around in the rain without getting wet. We needed the umbrellas to ward off the heavy drizzle.
I found out by chance that Maggi had not only bought Sadie her birthday present(s) but also a short made from hemp, which looked a bit like denim. The shape and cut didn’t impress me but I said nothing.
After the trip to University Village Alex dropped Maggi and me off at Wholefoods where we bought dinner for the evening. Maggi made the macaroni cheese that evening and we had a quiet time in.
Saturday
Sadie’s birthday. I woke fairly early and found Lee, the guy who helps look after the house, already here and putting together a display of birthday presents and a background display, which you can see in the photo below. While he decorated part of the room I watched a recording of Arsenal’s 2-1 win over Leeds. The game had few highlights and I think Leeds had more goal chances than the Gunners, and when they went ahead in the second half I worried that Arsenal might not be able to pull it off. However a goal a couple of minutes later from Calafiori brought them back level and a brilliant team goal finished by Guimarães made the game acceptable.
When she descended from her room we had the birthday ceremony featuring the usual song and the opening of presents. She probably had far too many presents than she deserved.
Greg returned just before lunch looking a bit worse for the delayed flight back from the UK where he had spent the last week on business.
Later in the afternoon we drove with Alex and Carrie to a sports ground near the airport and watched Carrie playing football. She didn’t play all the time each half she had to sit out the 20 minutes. By the time the game had finished the floodlights had come on and it became increasingly cold. Then it started to rain and fortunately at that point the referee blew the whistle for full time.
We returned back home and exited almost straight away to Betty’s at the other end of Queen Anne for dinner with 3 of Sadie’s friends as well as Carrie and Rio. After our meal at Betty’s we came back and separated into our rooms.
Sunday
Not quite a day of rest. Maggi and I took Bennett for a walk down to the canal and back again. Then Greg, Carrie and myself set of for Lumen Field to watch the Seattle Seahawks against the San Francisco 49’ers. Greg gave me a Seahawks t-shirt and we decided to go to the stadium via Lime Bike.
I downloaded the app. Fortunately 3 bikes happened to be located round the corner. After a bit of fiddling I managed to work out how to use the app and get the bike to work.
I set off feeling very unsteady. The bike seemed to accelerate more than I expected and so I felt a little bit out of control. Greg led the way and we cycled up the hill and then down the other side towards 15th Ave. When I say cycled, we didn’t have any pedals on these bikes they were 100% electric. Tentatively I descended Dravus, across 15th to the cycle path that goes all the way into Seattle.
What a lovely way to travel into downtown Seattle along the seashore through several parks and then we arrived at the Lumens Field stadium. For some reason we couldn’t park these bikes at the stadium but had to push them back to another spot further away.
The 3 of us then made our way into the arena and we arrived just after 12:30 so we still had almost 1 hour to go before the match actually started. Greg bought drinks and a hot dog all round. We ate the dogs before we started to climb to our seats. As soon as we had hands free we started the climb upwards to the spot where we would watch the game.
We looked down a long way to see the field of play. I can’t say the match excited me. I didn’t really care which team won and I found the whole 3 ½ of sitting in our places a little too tedious as we only had 1 hour of game time, The rest of the proceedings are dominated by breaks for ads.
At one break of play, and there are many, I went to the restroom and found quite a few people just wandering around not particularly interested in the match, but just chatting. The game time is one hour but the match lasted 3 hours 45 minutes. The whole affair is peppered with stoppages of one sort or another but principally for ads both on the television coverage and in the stadium.
We left and found bikes to take us back. We stopped just short of 15th avenue to watch Sadie in the last few minutes of her soccer match and Alex drove us home.
In the evening Helen and King came over with their two children Riley and Connor for supper. They arrived at 6:30 pm and left at 9:30 pm.