Month: August 2009

The Last Day of Vacation in Seattle

Saturday 8/8/09

 

Last Day

Up and awake and watching Discovery Network Shark Week.  The clock is ticking.  Today is our last day together in Seattle.  Tomorrow The Husband returns to work in New York City and My Kid and I continue on to two weeks with My Parents in Montana.  Last year the husband was able to take enough time to come to Montana with us (but the Seattle leg was cut short).  It’s so frustrating trying to combine parental obligations with a family vacation and also trying to see old friends in the city where we used to live.  We never get to succeed in doing it all.  I think we’re starting to feel that “sandwich generation” squeeze.

 

more Saturday 8/8/09

The pressure mounts on the last day of vacation, the last day of summer vacation for The Husband.  We left the Westin Hotel (the one that looks like 2 round nuclear plant cooling towers) for a walk to Pike Place Market.  I guess I was fantasizing when I thought we could eat them for breakfast every day of the vacation– on that first day when we took our walk from the other hotel through Pioneer Square to Pike Place Market the Nordstrom Rack and the rest of downtown in our relaxed “here we are again in old familiar–and also different since we lived here–traveling home to Seattle city day.

 

Today, we walked again to Pike Place market where we ate crumpets covered with yummy sweet and savory foods and unlimited mugs of tea (and we bought a dozen crumpets for his mother and my mother). We passed Goldmine Jewlery where our wedding bands were made.  I would have stopped but there was a “back in a minute” post-it on the door and as I said the clock was ticking. The thought crossed my mind, wouldn’t it be lovely to have her design a tiny gold ring for our little princess–maybe when she is older…  Then we walked on to Pioneer Square to take My Kid to Magic Mouse Toys.  She enjoyed her time there very much but didn’t find anything she needed to buy today.  Amazing.  My Kid can show amazing restraint.  (I mean come on, we were vulnerable parents feeling the pressure of a vacation ending, we probably would have bought anything if it brought a smile…)

 

We didn’t get to the pool today.  We never made it to the Pacific Science Center.  We never went for a boat ride.  There are friends we’d hoped to see who we never got to see.  Now our time is up.  When The Husband talked to his mom on the cell phone about all she thought still needed to be done there was so much tension that I ended up with significant shoulder pain from carrying the same purse I’ve been carrying around all week long.

 

We went up to The Mother-In-Law’s apartment to work on THE LIST.  We took some old chairs to Good Will and waited in line to drop them off.  We took some stuff to the UPS package express store and paid $100 to ship it to Brooklyn even though we don’t want most of it that is still the easiest way to deal because we are out of time.  (that list had 14 items on it when I looked–just sayin’)

 

Finally…

 

For dinner we had reservations at Etta’s, the Tom Douglas restaurant.  Our kid didn’t like the not-so-great-tasting-of-hamburger-grill crab cakes we got from the hotel room service last night and The Husband wanted to change her mind.  She wasn’t impressed with the Tom Douglas crabcakes either but that’s OK because we inhaled what she didn’t eat.  AND  My Kid ordered half a Dungeness crab for her dinner and ate it all by herself!!!  It was so good that when My Kid and The Mother-In-Law ordered desert The Husband and I split another half Dungeness crab.  It’s so much better than lobster or any other kind of crab even King crab.  Dungeness crab is the best shellfish either of us have ever had and it is not available on the East Coast.  Our meal was over $200.  But it was that time versus money thing and The Husband’s vacation time is so short and so not relaxing, we have to enjoy what we can.  We enjoyed the seafood at Etta’s restaurant in Pike Place Market very much.  

 

After The Husband dropped My Kid and I off at the hotel and drove his mom and her car home and returned in a taxi (more cash up front that seems extravagant to my people of origin who drive their own cars and carry their own food) he said his mom said something that acknowledged that he may not have had as nice a time as he might have had because of the numerous errands he succeeded in accomplishing for his mother.

Running Out of Time

 

I thought we would spend some time at the Pacific Science Center with My Kid.  But, that didn’t happen.  We enjoyed hanging out in the hotel room as a family until it was time for The Husband to go have lunch with a former work colleague.  My Kid and I went swimming in the hotel pool.  Then when The Husband met us at the pool so I could go meet an old friend, My Kid decided to get out of the pool.  Then she decided she wanted to ride out to the sewing machine repair shop at the far North end city limit with a drive-throu McDonald’s thrown in for fun.  The errand took so long that they didn’t get back downtown in time to visit Seattle Center and the Pacific Science Center.  Instead they met me at the wine bar where I was with my friend who hadn’t seen Ken since our wedding.  I think I stopped by her office with my new baby once.  My new baby is going into 4th grade.  We had some catching up to do.  We talked about the summer she played my older sister in both Gypsy and Fiddler on the Roof  and the same actress played our mother in both musicals performed under a circus tent in an asphalt parking lot in Missoula, Montana

 

When The Husband and My Kid showed up at the wine bar where we were sitting with our happy hour flights of Italian red and truffle flavored popcorn (eyes rolling yeah I know) we talked a little more and then we went up to The Mother-In-Law’s apartment to deliver the repaired surger and for The Husband to program the new phone and hang pictures and some other small chores.  We were at her apartment long enough for My Kid to watch the entire movie Mousehunt.  At 10 p m we had to leave even though there were still more things on The Mother-In-Law’s to do list because my kid hadn’t had dinner yet.  We parked downtown and thought we could find a restaurant downtown but the kitchens were closed so we went back to the hotel and ordered room service.  The Husband walked two blocks to buy beverages at  Ralph’s grocery on 4th Ave. where we used to buy food so often on the way to rehearsals or shows when we worked at Annex.  I remember shopping for snacks at Ralph’s once to eat while hanging out with one of my many housemates from that big white house on Queen Anne Hill.  He was an engineer at Bad Animals music studio at the time.  I think he moved to Austin, Texas to be a musician.  I wonder if he found success.

 

I had a nice visit with an old friend  from the same Montana hometown as the theatre friend we had lunch with the day before.  They weren’t friends growing up but they had siblings who were in the same class.   Remember when 2 or 3 years difference in age meant you wouldn’t even have cause to meet or talk to a person.   Some of the parents of my daughter’s classmates are probably younger than anyone I ever babysat.  Thoughts of who were we as children growing up in 1970’s Montana, then making the decisions to become actors and life for all of us beyond that which now includes aging parents.

 

Today will go quickly, we have to make a promised stop at Magic Mouse Toys in Pioneer Square.  We’ll start with breakfast (or brunch or lunch depending on how long it takes us to get up and out of here) in Pike Place Market and check out the stuffed animal store My Kid saw last night when we were looking for a restaurant.  She’s looking for a toy lemur but the ones we’ve found so far are apparently the wrong breed.  (She’s looking for one that looks like “Mort” from The Penguins of Madagascar.  It’s a search that began on Sunday at the Woodland Park Zoo on a day spent with The Husband’s father.  (Yes in addition to juggling work and family and friends and sightseeing The Husband must carefully coordinate the time he spends with each of his divorced parents.)

 

There are more errands to run and things to fix and check off the list of things for The Husband to do for The Mother-In-Law.  At least it is Saturday and The Husband won’t be dialing into his office.

Room Service

Friday 8/7/09

 

We’re moving slowly today.  I was awake at 7:30 am but those people I travel with weren’t.  I ended up reading for a while (The Husband’s copy of The Fall of the House of Bush.)  My book is Suzanna Clarke’s A House in Fez about restoring a house in Morocco but I wasn’t in the mood to read about houses after visiting our friends sweet home last night, stepping into the life we might have been living if we had stayed in Seattle and continued the life we started when we bought our little house near Seattle U.  

 

After we got back to the hotel, My Kid was hungry (as she seems to be every 2 hours these days) so we took a short walk to Palace Kitchen, the Tom Douglas restaurant with the late-night kitchen we used to frequent when The Husband was started making decent money while we were still doing theatre at Annex.  So there were memories.

 

Now it’s after ten and we have ordered some room service because My Kid is hungry and The Husband and I are both on our laptops and not moving quickly at all.  

 

In preparation for the end of this leg of the vacation…The Husband is giving My Kid all her chargers (Nintendo DS et all) to put into her luggage because we’re going on to Montana for two weeks with the other grandparents and The Husband is going back to work.  Sigh.

 

Yeah!  A phone call from an old friend.  I’m going to have coffee today with someone I know from both Montana and Seattle!

 

The day is shaping up with plans for swimming and lunch and Seattle Center and more time with The Mother-In-Law.  But for now we are still in the hotel room content with cartoons on the TV and real live window washers on the office building across the street.

 

 

 

Alternate Realities

 

Thursday 8/6/09

 

We had breakfast at Voula’s on Northlake Way–yum–with an old theatre friend who is planning her big move to NYC this fall–Yeah!  I’m looking forward to having this friend in New York.  We’re the same age.  We’re both from Montana.  We’re both actresses.  We both have one daughter (but her’s is finishing college)   We’re doing the same things with our lives just in different order

 

After a stop at University Village (where My Kid continued her search for a purse–what is that about?) We returned to our hotel for a swim before going to dinner at our friends’ house.  Their bathroom has an old clawfoot tub like the one we installed after having a new clawfoot made to order at a foundry and possibly the same pedestal sink we’d put in our house.  Grass and plants, a worm bin and a garden hose.– A front door AND a kitchen door!– These things become amazing to an apartment dweller. They have a 3-year-old we haven’t seen since she was a baby.  I can’t believe we thought (everybody thought) we needed to send our little girl to preschool when she was that big.  We thought she was so mature in comparison to a baby, but 3-year-olds are still so little.  The little face twisted into tears instantly distracted by the next thing–so funny.  Our 9-year-old gazelle-like tween-in-training is a different species entirely.

 

Deception Pass

 

Wednesday 8/5/09

 

After a late start we got on the road for a day trip to Deception Pass State Park.  We chose a northern destination because we had to drop off The Mother-In-Law’s surger at the old school sewing machine repair shop at 200th and Aurora.  There were some beautiful old singer treadle sewing machines there.

 

Then, on the road for a long drive.  My city kid continues to be amazed that she falls asleep every time we buckle into a car and go for a long drive.

 

Driving North on I-5 from Seattle brought back so many memories, Annex Retreats, trips to Port Townsend and Orcas Island, that school show job I had touring elementary schools of the I-5 corridor in the utility company musical.

 

I remember going through Deception Pass on the Spirit of Discovery.   The CSR’s had just finished setting the table for lunch and the boat hit a whirlpool just right and tipped sideways enough for all the dishes and glasses to slide off the fully set tables.  

 

My Kid played in the sand at Admiralty Inlet while I felt a little sentimental and sad.  Why did I ever stop working on the boats that went up and down the Inside Passage?  What was I thinking?

 

There was to be an alternate life in Seattle where car trips and outdoor activities are almost effortless.  Oh well.

 

We had dinner at an Italian restaurant in Mount Vernon and then drove home under one of the most beautiful full moons I have ever seen.


old friends and new creative work

8/4/09

 

The highlight of the day fro My Kid and The Mother-In-Law was lunch at the Rainforest Cafe in Southcenter Mall which has been inexplicably renamed “Westfield”.  As an aspiring downtown Seattle creative person I never went to that mall.  Then when we got pregnant and had a baby we started to go there frequently because of the nearby Babies R Us.

 

The Rainforest Cafe, impressed my kid to the point that it is now her second favorite restaurant after Dave and Busters (beating out Bubba Gump Shrimp).  The drinks were too sweet and the food too heavy.  But hey there were anamatronic monkeys, elephants and snakes, with live sharks in the saltwater fish tanks.  And the dessert brownie volcano was topped with a lit sparkler!  Other than that the mall was a bad mall according to My Kid did not get anything.  She couldn’t  even any clip-on earrings at Claires, her favorite mall store.  I looked at handbags, but I did not buy one.  She was upset that they were all over $100 and therefore not anything she could expect to get so she stopped enjoying the mall.  The only person who got anything at all was The Husband who purchased a much needed pair of casual sneakers to wear during the rest of the vacation.  And it must be remembered, My Kid did get the giant special frog-head glass with a toy in the bottom compartment at the Rainforest Cafe so it wasn’t like she was leaving completely empty handed.  But, her emotional state may have been entirely unrelated to the mall experience.  In the car her child’s piped up from the back seat asking if this was Tuesday:  

 

“Today is Eliza’s birthday and today is the day I’ll never see Mutessi ever again.”  

 

She was thinking about neighborhood friends back in Brooklyn,  one lives on our block, the other is moving to Uganda.

 

Because My Kid’s dark mood plans were changed and I hoped out of the car alone at the Northwest Film Forum while The Husband took My Kid and The Mother-In-Law to Uwagimaya to look for novelty erasers and snacks.  Then back to her apartment to make small repairs while I watched the evening of short films about water commissioned by the Seattle Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs with Seattle Public Utilities;


  “The projects reflect SPU’s management of the complete cycle of hydrology for Seattle’s water resources from drinking water through drainage, and Restore Our Waters, the city’s initiative to protect and restore Seattle’s urban waterways.”

 

Everything in the Northwest is green.  Even one of our old theatre friends now works promoting sustainable agriculture.

 

There were 5 films.  SJ Chiro (our Annex Friend) created a fairy tale based on a story by Brett Fetzer (another Annex Friend) narrated by Susanna Burney (another Annex Friend)  Cynthia Whalen (another Annex Friend) was in it.  Other people we knew from our time at Annex worked on the film and some were at the screening and it was good to see them and go to Eleseyan afterwards for some yummy Seattle microbrew.

 

But, I was filled with mommy guilt throughout entire film event.  My Kid would have enjoyed the short films, especially the stop action animation piece in which the role of water was played by clear glass marbles and the two live-action stories featuring children near her own age.  I wish she had been there to see some kids on screen from outside the Disney Studio stable and I was blaming myself for not monitoring everyones protein, rest and happiness levels in the hours ahead of 7:00pm in order  to alter the balance of my child so that we could have gone as a family to see the films and friends.  Besides, there were some friends’ kids in the audience she might have played with.

 

Two of the films featured novelty photography and modern dancers in the rain which reminded me why I was hesitant to major the arts while at the University of Montana.

 

 SJ Chiro’s films and Kendall Cornell’s latest work Clown Axioms both rely on fairy tale imagery and that is exciting to me.

Sometimes the simple things take me so long, like logging onto the internet using the hotel’s wifi connection that by the time I have my Clownmommy dashboard on the screen I forgot what I had intended to write about.

I don’t know how much of my “writing time” I wasted hitting buttons and guessing at the procedure for logging in from a different connection.  I ended up calling The Husband on the phone and having him walk me through the simple procedure that I ought to have down by now.  But, I don’t.  Story of my life–and that’s why I am a clown.  The movements are too small though, getting frustrated in front of a laptop, it would have to be so subtle, so underplayed.  Maybe it could work on film, certainly not on stage.  In either case it would be a pretty boring piece to watch.  (I do have a performance date in the fall…will I do something completely new or rework something I’ve already tried…)

While I am trying to remember what brilliant mommy thoughts I had that are now lost I am overhearing parts of the conversation of the two men at the set of couches next to my own seating arrangement here in the lobby of the Westin.  One of the men seems to be ordering custom made shirts and possibly other clothing from the other man.  It seems to be a regular event as the salesman type in a suit said to the other man in shirtsleeves “See you in September.”  And they both made references to “last time.”  I think that’s how Obama gets his clothes.  Fascinating.  Most of my clothes come from the sale racks at discount stores. 

Speaking of clothes, I have been looking at the clothes of the people on the street her in Seattle.  So much khaki, such baggy clothes.  It was a difference I noticed right away when we moved to New York and there was so much black and the clothes were so much tighter, even on people who weren’t athlete thin.  There is also more bright  color in New York.  Seattle people wear muted earth tones.  When we come back each summer I start to feel dressed wrong in Seattle, but by the time I am in Missoula I start out feeling so uncomfortable I inevitably buy items like Tevas or shorts that I proceed to wear nearly every day of my visit home and never wear again back in New York.  But I did notice a Gucci and Louis Vitton stores right across the street from each other near the 5th Avenue theatre in Downtown Seattle.  That was a bit disorienting.

 I see the thin young people riding their bikes and am then startled to see myself, a middle-aged mom type, reflected in a window, not at all the person I was when I lived her as an aspiring actress riding a bike while wearing Dock Martin boots with black leggings under a skirt, oversized T and flannel shirts.  Yeah that.  I also learned from another out of work actor that if you got a very large Starbucks coffee off the day you could doctor it up with vanilla and cinnamon and milk and it tasted like a latte and with enough milk it was a fine stand in for a meal all for less than $2.  

That period of my life came completely to an end when The Husband, Baby and I flew back to Seattle from NYC where we had lived for only a couple of months for the final Annex party in the theatre space at 1916 Fourth Avenue.  We stayed at the Kings Inn under the Monorail tracks on 5th Avenue.  In preparation for the trip I pushed my stroller around Macy’s in Fulton Mall and Marshall’s at Atlantic center struggling to find something “presentable. .  Presentable was a disappointing goal for such an emotionally charged special event.    I was still nursing so I ended up with a easy access stretchy polyester  top and skirt outfit for the party, a far cry from the slip-like or corset containing Betsy Johnson dresses I had worn to previous Annex-related events that were part of the courtship that led to our wedding here in Seattle over 10 years ago.

And my alone time has once again come to an end, The Husband, My Kid and The Mother-In-Law will be here in a few moments and we’re going to drive to a mall.

a moment or so

I’m sitting here ALONE  in the bar in the lobby of the Westin, the hotel that looks like a silo, in downtown Seattle.  I have in front of me my laptop which I haven’t touched since we got off the plane and a pretty lemondrop martini.  The Husband took My Kid for a walk so I could have some time to myself.  But,  I’ve been checking my e-mail and facebook which is good because we’re trying to hook up with some old friends while we are in Seattle.  (And of course there was at least one e-mail from someone who used to live in Brooklyn, back home to visit their relatives checking to see if we’re around to get together, and we’re not…) Though I have been here, at this table with my laptop, for some time I have not yet written the blog that I sat down here intending to write.  There is so much to process.  This is the city where The Husband and I met working in the same theatre.  This is where we became engaged, got married, had a baby, bought a house  (I felt tears trying to well up behind my eyes this morning at Home Depot, where we drove The Husband’s mother on an errand for some shelf brackets for her apartment, because we spent so much time at Home Depot with our little baby, right after we bought our little house that needed so much work, as we lay the groundwork for the life that we ended up not living in Seattle.  I had selected my paint chips…

AND THERE’S MY CELLPHONE RINGING!

“Mom.  Dad fell asleep.”

“Are you in the room?”

“Yeah.”

“OK.  I’ll be up in a little while and then we’ll go swimming.”

and that’s all she wrote

more cool friends moving away

The day before we left for Seattle there was a party for neighborhood friends who are moving to Uganda.  I was shocked by how tall were these little girls, all going into 4th grade, My Kid among them.  We met when they were babies and our talk was about diapers and strollers and weaning and we were lucky to put 2 sentences together in an hour long playdate.  Now the kids go off on their own and amuse themselves.  One mom calls it the sweet spot.  They’re still young enough to want to be seen with you but when they are with other kids watching them can be effortless for hours at a time.

My daughters childhood in Brooklyn flashes before my eyes.

Ssanyu and Mutessi were one of the first Mommy-Baby pairs I met when I started walking around and exploring our new neighborhood of Forte Greene, Brooklyn in May and June of 2001.

At the hotel in Seattle I awake at 3:00 am so sad that our friends are moving away.  So sad that our babies have been vaporized into almost-tweens.

travel day

something for my blog because I can’t get online at the airport Thursday July 30, 6:05pm JetBlue

 

 

6:05  We’re in the JetBlue terminal, sitting “outside” in the middle of the concourse in front of 5IVESTEAK.  I am alone at the table at the moment.  Ken and Miya have gone to MUJI to buy pens.  Here they come.  My Kid is very excited about her penpencil.

 

It has been a long day for all of us and we aren’t even on the plane for our cross country flight yet.

 

We’re eating very expensive food because we need to eat NOW.  

 

I think

 

I don’t know what I think

 

7:22  We are on our delayed flight which is still boarding.  A completely full flight.  “Please people sit in your assigned seat.  We have a completely full plane.”  This is going to be loads of fun.

 

The way we travel; the three of us each with a carry-on rolling bag and shoulder bags.  My parents pack a car with a cooler and thermos and lots of reading material, blankets and extra jackets.

 

I’m wondering what I am going to do in Montana if it’s chilly with only one pair of mid-calf pants, not socks and no jacket.

 

Traveling like this we have to buy everything we need to eat and drink.

 

If you drive in the summer in Montana you have to have (or at least you did when I was a kid) a bucket, an axe and a shovel in your car at all times in case you need to help put out a fire.

 

Baggage.