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murlough23
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Name: David
Birthday: 1/19/1978
Interests: Almost anything music related... mixing CD's, writing reviews of great (and not-so-great) bands, playing guitar and songwriting... also hiking, reading (mostly Christian non-fiction), writing stuff no one will ever read in my journal, and hanging with friends from church and college.
Expertise: Web design and database development.
Occupation: Computer related (Internet)
Industry: Government
Message: message me
Member Since:
2/10/2003
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| After nearly a week apart, the first thing that Christine and I did together was drive out to Pomona to see Mae in concert. I had actually bought tickets for us before I knew about her parents visiting and the week she'd be spending with them down in San Diego/Long Beach, so while I might have normally preferred a quiet evening in for our first night back together, I didn't want to miss what might be my last chance to see this band live. I first discovered Mae in 2005, back when The Everglow was brand new, and like many of their fans, I consider that album to be their most complete, satisfying work. We were preparing to get married that year, and when I listen to The Everglow, I get memories of peaceful moments enjoyed amidst an overall turbulent year - like the trip we took to San Luis Obispo that summer just to get away from all the stress of wedding planning. I figured the evening of nostalgia might be a good way for us to come back together.
I'd say that it did turn out to be a worthwhile evening, just a bit of a marathon one due to all the opening bands. When we got to The Glass House (still one of my favorite concert venues) and saw the schedule, we discovered that the first of the three opening bands wouldn't be coming on until 7:30, and Mae was set to play from 10:00 to 11:45. A bit of a long haul for Christine, who tends to get up earlier than I do, but also for me with my attempt to reform my sleep schedule after the time change. Beta Wolf kept us reasonably entertained with their energetic guitar rock, heavy on the solos and the long hair and skinny jeans, even though we had to laugh at the band's lead singer seeming to think he was in a more popular band than he actually was (it was all in his "rock star interaction" with the audience). Windsor Drive followed, and they stayed mostly in neutral, playing mostly mid-tempo piano rock inspired by Coldplay's more plodding moments. Finally, Terrible Things came along and proceeded to not live up to their name. They weren't as energetic as Beta Wolf, but they also had a certain edgy vibe to their brand of rock music that I found agreeable. It seemed strange to me that Mae would bring three freshman bands, none of them really proven in the music scene yet, as openers for their final tour, though I later found out that Terrible Things was a supergroup formed by the old lead singer of Taking Back Sunday. So I guess some folks recognized those guys from elsewhere.
Mae, for their part, had a bit of a rough night due to lead singer Dave Elkins getting sick the previous day, but they were determined to make the best of it and played their hearts out for over an hour and a half. I thought they got off to a bit start with the new song "Bloom", which has significance for the band as their first song written altogether after two former members returned for the final (e)vening EP and subsequent tour, but which is more mid-tempo and not really the sort of thing that gets a crowd revved up. "Anything", while one of my favorites, also suffered a bit due to the vocals being low in the mix, truncating the song's sense of elation. It was only when the band pulled out "Embers & Envelopes", the song that got the band started nearly a decade a ago, and then a string of fan favorites from The Everglow, that they really started to get the momentum going. Well-orchestrated sing-alongs on "Breakdown" and "The Ocean", while helping to fill in for Dave's weakened voice, also gave the concert a warm sense of familiarity - less the usual shtick of a rock band trying to impress an audience with their songs, and more a communal experience of reliving favorite songs together one final time. Christine might not memorize lyrics as well as I did, but with Mae, there's always a well-timed repeated phrase or even a simple "Whoa", or just an epic guitar or piano riff that makes their songs easily recognizable. I've played The Everglow a million and one times in the car, and more recently the band's (m)orning EP. She knows what this music means to me, and she seems to enjoy that energy. When the band brought out "Night/Day", their ode to greeting each new day and its challenges head on rather than "sleeping in", I just got so pumped by all of the emotional peaks that the song continually climbs to. It sort of reaffirmed my recent decision to stop being such a night owl and try to make the best of my body's weird habit of waking me up earlier in the morning than I would have liked.
While I was a bit disappointed that Mae's set was so heavy on their early fan favorite material that their one mainstream release, Singularity, was represented by only a single song ("Just Let Go", which turned out to be the apex of Dave's vocal difficulties), and also that last year's (a)fternoon EP and its more progressive, meandering songs didn't even make a showing, I had to admit that these guys were doing their darndest to hit the highlights as dictated by the fans, which meant a lot of tracks from their debut album Destination: Beautiful that I didn't know all that well, but that seemed to spark rabid cheers of excitement when they made an appearance (including the easygoing, jazz-tinged B-side, "Tisbury Lane"). People were screaming "Sun!" in particular, and that track made an appearance in semi-acoustic form as the first of four songs played during the encore. From there on, it was a flood of great memories for me as the band hit the one-two opening punch from The Everglow with the wide-eyed piano ballad "We're So Far Away", and that last loud note leading predictably, but awesomely, into the charging "Someone Else's Arms".
I honestly thought that was the end, until they whipped out the eight-minute epic "The Fisherman Song (We All Need Love)". I've adored this song since its debut a year and a half ago, especially due to how the rhythm turns from peaceful and quiet to quick and breezy, to bouncy and choppy as a man struggling to grasp the meaning of love and finish a languishing song is brought out onto the sea by a wise fisherman, who almost plays the role of a Christ figure teaching by way of a parable. It's that description of love as something given even when it isn't returned, something that lifts others up instead of being out for its own gain, that speaks volumes about the true meaning of love and yet does so skillfully, without didactically coming out and saying "This is a CHRISTIAN song!" It's there if you read between the lines. The deceptively simple conclusion, one which I might almost call trite in the hands of another band who wrote similar words, seemed to hit me with more force than it ever had as the band finished up their set and bid us a final goodnight.
Oh, I just need some understanding
I need a little love
And I want to sing my song to somebody
Who doubts what they're made of
I'd spent the week wrestling with a bit of a personal impasse, coming off of many months of frustration about future plans, about our marriage and whether we were even in agreement about how to approach the next phase of our lives together. I needed the time alone, and somewhat selfishly, I wasn't quite ready to end that and jump back into married life. I guess this can happen sometimes when you're around another person during most of your free time - the selfishness gene can kick in and you can start focusing more on whether that other person's doing their part than on when they're doing yours. I guess I needed the reminder that it's hard to expect love to be given to you when you diminish the amount you're willing to give out. Jesus seems to command that we love first, and ask questions later. Not withhold it when we're not getting what we want from the other person, or even when we're not sure how best to communicate with them. Something about that concert reset the climate between me and my wife. Perhaps unconsciously, we had both been pulling away a little bit in the preceding months. But as she grabbed my hand or massaged my shoulders during the long wait between bands, as we stood their holding each other close during the concert's more tender moments, I remembered how it used to be between us, and realized that I needed to fight to get that feeling back. Love her the way I swore to on that fateful day over five years ago, even when my selfish side says, "Just go about accomplishing your own goals whether or not she's along for the ride." I think all married couples reach their points where this becomes hard. But I don't think the kind of love Jesus talks about is always easy, so even with the people who are closest to you, there are moments where you must choose to lift them up by loving them even when it's challenging to do so.
This is what I forgot. And I thank Mae for taking those final moments on their farewell concert tour to remind me.
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| In our small group Bible Study last Thursday, we talked about the concept of "God's glory", and the request that Moses made for God to show it to him. I think there are a lot of pretty-sounding words that are very easy to throw around when describing God - words that we've used in hymns and praise songs for so long that we forget the full extent of their meaning. "Glory" is definitely one of those words. ("Awesome" would be another - since these days even dumb videos of kittehs in ur cheezburger are referred to as "awesome".) But when you look at the truly bizarre context in which this request is made and God sort of answers it, in Exodus 33, it begs the question: If we could truly see God in His full glory, would we really want to? God told Moses that no one could see it and live. The solution was a shielded glimpse of God's back. Just enough for Moses to go , "Wow, I saw part of God", while knowing the full implications of seeing God's face would be too much to bear. This is baffling. God has a face and a back, and body parts? I'd imagine this is all allegorical stuff so that a human interacting with God could grasp what was being discussed. All the same, it makes me wonder if we really understand what we're asking for.
I chuckled to myself during this study as I thought of the Third Day song, "Show Me Your Glory", which was inspired by this passage. It's one of the first worship songs that I learned how to play, and one that I generally still enjoy, not getting as overexposed as some of their other songs like "God of Wonders" (or pretty much anything by Chris Tomlin). But it's funny now, picturing an arena full of people singing along to these words:
Show me Your glory
Send down Your presence
I want to see Your face
Show me Your glory
Majesty shines about You
And I can't go on without You, Lord
What God seems to basically be saying is, "If I do this, YOUR HEAD A SPLODE." I suppose that would send a believer to heaven prematurely. They'd ultimately be pretty happy. But it's a pretty silly thing to request when the stipulation is that I can't continue living my life without it. Apparently, if I want my life as a mortal to continue until the designated time that God calls me home, then I DO NOT want to see God's full glory. If God has plans for me that haven't been fulfilled yet, like He still did for Moses when that request was made, then God's got a very good reason for shielding a person from it.
Maybe this is why God seems so hidden to us at times? Hmmm.
But why would seeing God's full glory have such an effect? I always ask these kinds of questions rather than just accepting that "the rules" work a certain way because someone says so. What's different about the nature of us and the nature of God that a human being obliterated would be the result of such an encounter?
Maybe it's sin.
Think about the entire crux (pun intended) of Christianity. All men sin. Anyone who follows the Christian faith has presumably accepted this premise. And God is sinless. These things can't exist together, or at least, not completely exposed to one another. Only perfect good can be in the presence of God. Which is none of us. Not even a Biblical hero like Moses (actually, a lot of heroes of the Bible were pretty screwed up, and he was no exception - see the transgression that later kept him out of the Promised Land he spent all those years leading his people toward). This seems a bit harsh, as much of the portrayal of God in the Old Testament can. But it also puts an interesting spin on the "hiddenness" of God. It's not God playing hard-to-get, or just toying with us. It's actually out of love. Since we can never be perfectly sinless in this mortal life, God gives us glimpses of Himself while purposefully hiding His full glory from our knowledge, that we might live long enough to learn how to be reconciled to God.
But even after one accepts the premise that Jesus saves us from what we cannot save ourselves from, and one "gets saved", as we call it, even then, God doesn't just immediately wipe us off the face of this mortal coil and take us home to live in His perfect presence. There's still stuff to do, days left to live out during which we see only by faith and by a few incredible glimpses what we will one day see in full. Sure seems like the roundabout way of reaching the goal, right? Why are we still here?
It'd be ridiculous for me to pretend to know an answer to that question, of course. I assume there's still some sort of work left for us to do, some mark to leave on the world that we will leave behind - something beyond "See ya later, suckers" and just turning our backs indifferently toward the imperfection of the world that we have contributed to. but I don't know any of this for sure, not knowing God's plans and all. Still, I'm glad that God didn't answer Moses's prayer exactly the way Moses expected him to. It would have been awesome for Moses (who I presume eventually got to see God's glory anyway), but it would have sucked for the people left to wander in the desert after they sent Moses up a hill to report back to them about what God wanted them to do.
So maybe there's something more of God that can be discovered in this lifetime - and shared - even though the fullness of that discovery will never be attained within this lifetime.
In any case, this puts an interesting spin on the phrase, "Meet your Maker".
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| I don't talk about my father too much. That's not because it's particularly painful to bring him up, but just because he's been completely out of my life since the late 90's, so I honestly don't think about him all that much these days. The latter half of my childhood could probably be seen as a textbook case of the absentee father and some of the common "daddy issues" than can plague children following a father's departure. There came a point in my life when I decided that, no matter what he had done and how hurt I felt by it at the time, I was going to live my life by the following creed: Don't blame your dad for all your problems, and don't let yourself turn into him.
Now, contrast this with the famous last words nearly everyone says at some point, whether it be about a parent they truly detest, or even about a parent they have a genuinely good relationship with who exhibits a particularly annoying quirk every once in a while: "When I have my own kids, I will NEVER do this." If your life were a modern sitcom, this statement would immediately be followed by a smash cut to you a few decades in the future, saying or doing the EXACT SAME THING to your kids that drove you up the wall when your parent did it. Which is funny if it's just one of those annoying quirks, but not so much when it's a serious problem that can throw a monkey wrench into your marriage, or that casts doubts on your ability to be a good parent. And I had one of those moments recently that caused me to finally wake up and realize: "I am at risk of becoming my dad."
I should probably qualify this by saying that my father was a lot of bad things, and I don't see myself emulating all or even most of them. But what I remember most from the time he was a big part of my life (up to about age 12, when my parents finally split for good) was that he had one hell of a temper. It generally wasn't the kind that resulted in physical abuse, outside of the occasional threat to do so. Mostly, it was just a copious amount of swearing set off by the stupidest little things. While at times it got so ridiculous as to be funny, it made him an all-around unpleasant person to spend time with. The underlying problem was that he felt he'd "been there and back", that life had kicked him to the curb, and it had left him in a state of having zero patience with anything. So, if the dog didn't obey, he swore. If electronic equipment didn't work as expected, he swore. If kids didn't cooperate, he made ridiculous threats (a few gems that stick out in my mind were the threat of being grounded and not being able to go outside for a year, and also "You'll get your face smashed about six times", which my brother and I knew we could just ignore because he never followed through on them), and when that didn't work, he swore. So yeah, I learned a lot of colorful language growing up. I was enough of a goodie-two-shoes not to go around repeating it all the time (except for with some of my school friends when I thought teachers weren't listening and wanted to prove I wasn't that much of a goodie-two-shoes), but I was also young, naive, and fairly optimistic about how my life would turn out despite the setbacks. It wasn't until I got older, and went through my own set of fairly stressful situations, and found more repetitive annoyances in life that didn't used to bug me back when I had less stress, than I noticed myself starting to emulate this pattern.
It was only recently that I started to take stock and trace this pattern back to stuff I learned from my dad. Which is not to say my problems are his fault - just that I recognize how I let myself think something was OK because it was an example I saw growing up. The real issue isn't language, so much - I can generally sidestep the worst of it to avoid offending people in most social situations. People who are around me all the time - generally my wife and my co-workers - hear me slip up more often than most others, and getting called on it by some of these folks recently has helped me to take stock. The real issue runs deeper - it's the inability to handle even the most minor inconvenience gracefully. I used to consider myself a reasonably patient person... when life seemed to be going my way. But when I'm frustrated or stressed out about some major aspect of life that isn't going the way I had hoped, I tend to take an "I don't have time for this crap" attitude with nearly everything else. I've finally started to realize that this can cause other people around me to feel unappreciated, like I'm unpleaseable. For obvious reasons, it affects my marriage most deeply. What's supposed to be an environment of grace, love, and support can feel like a gauntlet that the other person is supposed to run when one person is so impatient with life that they allow the other no margin for error. For a while, I wasn't willing to own up to this. It's only been through conversations I've had with Christine and Pastor Ken this week that it started to make sense to me.
If there's an upside to all of this, it's that I understand my dad and the choices he made a lot more than I used to. When you're a kid (or even a teenager) and your dad decides to cut his losses and exit stage left, you don't really care much about how he's feeling at that point - you just figure he's a complete monster for betraying the family. I felt that way for a while, and while I still don't hold a particularly high opinion of the man, I at least have a bit of insight into the inadequacy that he felt and the poor choice that he made to run away from responsibilities that he had convinced himself he could never get right. I can see that temptation within myself - to cut and run when it feels like the odds are stacked against me and it's too hard to be the kind of husband (and eventually, father) that God has called me to be. It just plays out differently because of the beliefs that I held about the vow I was making when chose to get married - you don't back out on this, not for NOTHING. What happens instead is that, whether I'm frustrated with something my wife and I disagree about, or whether it's some external thing that doesn't even involve her, I check out of life in general for a bit. I seem to physically be present - I'm not literally running away from anybody. But mentally, I'm just not there. I might retreat to my room to go play a computer game that is supposed to be fun, but that I inadvertently end up cursing at, or I might use TV to cover it up with some hearty laughs. Sometimes I just keep the music on all the time so that I won't have to deal with the uncomfortable silence. I've always valued being "real" and willing to talk about what's honestly on my mind at any time, but deal with that kind of disappointment in yourself for long enough, and eventually it becomes easy to make excuses to just retreat from the thought of having to deal with it. In a sense, I've been leaving without actually leaving for a while now. it makes it easy to keep up the pretense of keeping a promise - but I didn't promise my wife that I would simply spend the rest of my life being a body sitting on the couch beside her. I promised to love and cherish and care for her. Lately, I kind of suck at that.
It might be that all of this is just an honest part of the journey of faith. I used to see people as inherently good or bad, with little room for grey areas: My dad was just a BAD GUY, irredeemable and unforgivable. Now I see how a person with truly good intentions can find himself on the brink of becoming someone like him. I'm pretty sure that realizing it means God's in the process of working on me so that I never let myself get that far gone. But then, I've come to understand that God's grace alone is the only reason that I don't end up going down that same road. If I fail to understand that and just assume I'm good enough, and refuse to be teachable when life presents these hard lessons, I'll miss the point and risk suffering the same fate. I think things could have turned out differently for my dad, too, if he'd been willing to take stock and realize that the entire POINT was that he couldn't be the perfect husband and father entirely on his own, nor did anyone expect him to. I guess have to credit my mom for this one, for insisting on dragging us kids to church when I was young and for holding to a firm belief that people are people and God loves 'em all, which reminds me to this day that I'm not intrinsically any better than the next guy. Any good in me, I owe the credit to God for that. And if I dig deep, I have to admit that God doesn't believe in the existence of any lost causes, despite believing at times that my father - curently pushing 70 and probably miserably alone, wherever he is these days - doesn't deserve a shot at redemption. If I'm not too far gone, then I have to believe that he isn't, either.
I guess the point of this whole brain dump is to say to those of you who know me and/or Christine well and have a vested interest in our continued happiness - DON'T LET ME BECOME MY DAD. I'm willing to bet that I'll find a lot of common threads between my story and other people's experiences with their fathers growing up, whether those fathers were physically absent or overbearingly present. Stories of good dads do exist, and I've even met a few in person, but they seem exceedingly rare nowadays (which is why "daddy issues" are such a common trope in pretty much all forms of fiction). And maybe it's tough to take stock and realize how having a bad dad can tempt some of us to repeat the pattern, but it's by identifying that, by finding that many of us have that flawed upbringing in common, and maybe by holding one another accountable that I think, by God's grace of course, that we can beat it.
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| This is a parody of a song from Disney's Aladdin that I started working on over a year ago, to express my bewilderment over the final episode of Battlestar Galactica. I was finally inspired to finish it last night. (Spoilers abound if you haven't finished watching the series. Get to it!)
A Whole New Earth
I can lead you to Earth
Or perhaps to extinction
Hard to make the distinction
When it provokes mass suicide
But we'll get lucky next time
Soon as we nuke the villians
Then I'll play some Bob Dylan
And we'll all go for a ride
A whole new Earth!
What are the odds that we'd find two?
No nuclear fallout here
The skies are clear
It's like Animal Planet
A whole new Earth!
We'll bid our spartan life adieu
Before you get too attached
There's just one catch
We'll have to take your toys away from you
I guess that means my hybrid husband, too
Unbelievable luck
Perhaps divine intervention
Fans will gripe at conventions
Mere millennia from now
A whole new Earth!
(No more red Cylon eyes)
Some hundred thousand years ago
(No more humanoid copies)
You might think it's a cheat
But our whole fleet
Of forty thousand people all agree
A whole new Earth!
(Let's be uncivilized)
Finally the human race can grow!
(Better start making babies)
Here we'll breed Capricans
With Africans
We''ll all be one big frakked-up family
A whole new Earth!
Angels I see
You'll think it odd
But we'll make God
From a machine | | |
| After liberally overestimating the time we'd needed to catch our ferry to Vancouver Island a few days ago, I decided I was going to be a savvy traveler and show up a bit closer to "on time" to our ferry back to the States from Sidney. Victoria - and indeed the entire Pacific Northwest - proceeded to get a bit gloomy on us during our final morning in Canada, the rain slowly drizzling down, reminding tourists like us that the urge to move up there is generally one of those "seemed like a good idea at the time" sorts of things. Not that this was a big deal by any stretch. Rain in California is generally more dramatic - we just get less of it, particularly in the summer. Anyway, we killed a bit of time at a local mall, and Christine did some last-minute gift shopping for friends, and then we headed out to Sydney, just in time for me to realize that there was a long line of cars waiting to get on THE ONE FERRY BACK TO AMERICA THAT DAY. We had reservations and everything, but it turns out we came pretty dang close to forfeiting our reservation. There's another ferry back to Port Angeles from Victoria - it's not like we would have been 100% out of options. But had we missed this, the rest of our plans for the day would have been shot to hell, and Saturday and Sunday would have blurred into one big mad rush to get home.
I figured the worst was over after we waited in line to get through no less than four checkpoints to board the ferry. (A guy standing out in the rain checking reservations, another guy in a booth taking your payments for said reservations, a border patrol booth to check passports, and then finally the last point where everybody gets herded onto the ferry.) We were one of the last cars to board, and we were stuck at the back of the car deck this time as a result. Upon making our way upstairs, I realized that the Washington State Ferries - only four decks tall - weren't nearly as spacious or interesting as the BC Ferries. Christine verified this fact after waiting in line for a bit at the cafeteria and then realizing the food wasn't at all appetizing. I was planning to wait and have lunch back on American soil anyway, but I didn't know the ride across was going to be a full two hours, nearly all of it spent indoors because it was quite windy and rainy out on the observation decks in front of the ship. What I was hoping would be a scenic sail through the San Juan Islands was mostly grey, misty, and obscured in the majority of our photos by way of the auto-focus deciding that the raindrops on the ferry's windows were meant to be the subject of each photo. I'm making it sound miserable, but honestly it wasn't that bad. Just slightly boring after a while. I took the opportunity to present Christine with her card and gift, this being the date of our actual anniversary. Since I had identically-wrapped gifts that I had bought for both Christine and my Mom, I had put both in my backpack before the ferry trip, figuring I'd work out which was which then. This was when I made the fatal mistake of leaving my Mom's gift in my backpack. That'll become important later.
I figured that once we pulled into Anacortes, we were home free and we'd make it back to Seattle by mid-afternoon. I didn't anticipate the fact that we had yet to clear customs. See, I figured once they checked our passports on the Canadian side, we were good. So I was quite disheartened at the anti-climax of driving off of the boat only to spend the next 40 minutes or so in bumper-to-bumper traffic. This put us in the actual town of Anacortes close to 3 PM, with the street we needed to take to get to the deli I'd looked up for lunch blocked off by a farmer's market/street fair-type event, necessitating walking a few blocks in the rain to get some food. Remind me again why I chose to take the scenic route through the islands? (Alright, so the deli - cleverly named "Gere-a-Deli" - was actually pretty good. But we were left with no time to explore this off-the-beaten-path place that I'd decided to pass through.)
Fortunately the I-5 was mostly good to us on the way back, and we arrived in Seattle with ample time to meet up with Mark, a college friend who had been living in Seattle for several years without my knowledge of it, and who only knew we were in town due to a rare Facebook login that caused him to notice one of my status updates. The timing couldn't have been better. We got to visit on last local Seattle coffee shop (Victrola) and even take a stroll through his neighborhood (the rain mostly over with at this point) to an overlook park with generous views of downtown and southern Seattle. It's amazing how much can change in a person's life when you don't see them in 10 years - I think the last I'd heard from Mark (the two of us not having much contact info for each other and all) was a brief note of congratulations right before Christine and I got married. Now here we were, meeting up with him on our fifth wedding anniversary. The time, it flies at near-light speeds.
For our last meal in Seattle, we met up with Terri again, at a restaurant called Elysian Fields near the two stadiums just south of downtown. Since we'd last seen her while she was with a bunch of her friends, it was good to have some time for just the three of us to catch up. Getting there was a bit tricky due to a Mariners game happening that night - parking might not have been insane by L.A. standards, but then, I tend to avoid the densest parts of L.A. on most occasions exactly because of that. I proved myself to be a stupid tourist by attempting to pay for parking when it was free after 6 P.M., only for a homeless guy to helpfully speak up and advise me not to pay, after which he took the opportunity (since I didn't ignore him like he claimed most folks did) to walk up to us and go into one of those spiels about being a Vietnam Vet and needing bus fare. You know, maybe some of these guys are actually legit, but it seems like it's the same story every time. Nevertheless, the last time I got approached with such a story in L.A. and demonstrated skepticism about it, I got an earful of swearing for my trouble, and since this guy had just seen where two obvious tourists had parked, I figured it'd be prudent to just give him some money and send him on his way to - supposedly - the VA hospital in Spokane. I think the rule of traveling kicked in - I'm friendlier to strangers when I'm not in Los Angeles. Terri knew better than us that the neighborhood could be a bit sketchy, but it was worth it to sample some local "upscale pub food" and get an amusing anecdote or two on the city's history (there's a whole underground level beneath this part of town? Whoa.) Seattle seems to be treating Terri well.
Speaking of sketchy, we knew not to expect any frills at our motel down near the airport. With a flight as early as 8:30 AM, I figure there's no point paying for amenities you won't have time to use. We literally checked in, got ready for bed, slept to the extent that we could (unfamiliar place plus planes flying overheard plus people rolling their bags down the walkway outside at all hours), and checked out. Not that any of this felt "sketchy" danger-wise - just not a terribly interesting part of town to do anything other than crash on one's way to or from the airport. Seattle did its best to make sure that we had one last bit of difficulty getting to our hotel, just as it did on the first day - many streets were blocked off due to traffic from the Mariners game. No detour signs, no nothing. So we had to play "trick the GPS" again, which can be slightly unnerving when you're driving into an industrial part of an unfamiliar town on a damp, rainy evening. No matter - we found our way back to the 5 eventually, and were in bed with enough time to get... oh I don't know, maybe 6 hours of sleep. (Not all at once in my case. It was smart that I planned to only have about 5 minutes of driving on the last day.)
Day 9 almost isn't worth writing about. 8:30 was the only reasonably priced flight time we could get back to LAX on a Sunday, so I decided to just suffer through it rather than pay extra or try to turn Saturday into a marathon. We stumbled out of bed at 6:30, checked out, drove the few miles to return the rental car, and we were back at the airport by a little after 7. So far, so good... until we made it through security circa 7:45, and they flagged my backpack for a manual search. I figured it was just some sunblock I'd forgotten about or something, until they pulled out a big green package and I realized that the bottle of scented hand soap, made in Canada, a special gift for my Mom, was about to go in the garbage. Nothing I could do - no time to go back and put it in my check-in. Just one more way for me to waste money on this effin' trip! The greatest irony - there WAS sunblock in my backpack that we discovered a week later. Definitely more than three ounces of it. Great work, TSA!
Anyway, despite the setbacks at the beginning and end of the trip, the journey was well worth it, so I want to think all of the friends who helped us figure out how to make the most of our time in the northwest: Terri, Mark, Danny and Cheryl, Jennie and Dave, Keiko, and especially Lori.
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