Feet are not superior to bicycles

bk3c is here in Seattle this weekend, which is nice, since I thought I probably wouldn't see him again for another year or so. I picked him up from his hotel in the early afternoon. He gave me cookies. I gave him a Tokyo mug I got for him at The Busiest Starbucks In The World. Unfortunately, though, since he's allergic to dogs, we couldn't really hang out here at the house in Ballard. Oops.

So, we went for a nice long walk to a short pier. Kind of. Basically, starting at the house here, we went to the Ballard locks via Archie McPhee, watched them raise a boat, then basically walked west as far as we could, turned right, and went up the coast past the Shilshole Marina (where we saw a huge statue of Leif Erickson and a "Got Nordic Heritage?" call for Scandinavian immigrants), and eventually got to Golden Gardens, where we were a little bit too early for the sunset, alas, but it was still really beautiful out anyway. I hadn't gone there in a while, and I certainly hadn't WALKED the entirety of it before.

To make more of a square, we walked up the huge hill to 85th St, got to 15th and 85th, and made a decision to go back to Ballard at that point... ending up at Hattie's Hat! I had my traditional chicken fried chicken and sweet potato fries and stuff, and Ben had meatloaf, and we sat in the back and watched the fish tank and it was neat. Our waiter was really funny, and when we got dessert he threatened to bring back a "scoop of blueberry pie and a slice of ice cream". Yeah. It was also yummy. Amazingly, the restaurant was also NOT crowded -- guess 6:30 on a Saturday night is still fairly early. Eh. Either way, I was so hungry after walking 6 miles or so that it wouldn't have mattered. Yeah.

We looked up some movies and decided to go see Fanboys, as well as drop by at georgejas and dgr's games party. So I borrowed Carl's car and we went over to the games party, and I gave people strawberry mochi and said hi to a lot of people. I didn't intend to get roped into games, but Ben got into a weird shuffleboard-ish board game with some volleyball friends of C&G's who we'd actually run into on the way into the party, so... when it became time to go leave for the movie, I pinged, he was happy to stay, so I got into a game of Race For The Galaxy with Josh, Justin, Miranda, and Mark. Despite never playing before I actually came in second to Miranda (34 to 31), because I got some card that let me play two planets per turn (improved somethingorother) and just filled up my board fast. You could say I raced to the galaxy.

So we never actually did go see a movie.

I played ping-pong with one of the volleyball guys -- a super-tall guy with really long arms whose name I forgot. He was really good at ping-pong and I really hadn't played in a long time but I got my reflexes back and I was really happy to play again! Dude! Ping-pong!

Around midnight we opted to go home instead of trying to play Settlers of Catan. Also I talked to one of George's coworkers who was a stats stringer for the Mariners for a while. Sounds like fun.

Gave Ben a ride back to his hotel, chatted a bit, didn't really come up with a plan for tomorrow (oops), then I came back here. Tired. Whee. At least I remembered to go put gas in the car on my way back...

The theme for the day, by the way, was "Dude, you were THERE." As in, the amount of things over the last bazillion years that one or the other of us had forgotten the other was at, is pretty staggering.