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Friday, August 31, 2012

Pink Saturday: Pink Cars Again

There were actually more purple cars at a recent car show in our town, but since this is PINK Saturday, here are a few pink ones.


The queen waved from a Rolls Royce, of course.




Experience Music Project: Now and Then

Back to vacation pictures, because that's much more enjoyable for me than worrying about the neighborhood freaks (although Handy and I have both been researching security cameras)!

How can you top Chihuly?

If you are my sons, it's the Experience Music Project.  "Our favorite things.  Music and Sci-Fi together in the same building."  And in their opinion, the best gift shop ever!  You can't top that!

Or maybe, you can...but that's another post!

It is said that the roof of the building is supposed to look like a smashed stratocaster.  My two-man team of experts did not see the resemblance.


Here are some  NOW and THEN parallels.  August 2012...


And back to August 2004...  Oh my, Frank's almost in the same spot and I only just noticed that!


There was Hendrix (no pictures in there because a TV crew was filming their B roll), Nirvana, Stones and AC/DC.






The interactive portion was perhaps more interesting THEN.

NOW, they are accomplished musicians and complained that the guitars were out of tune.



Ooh, look at my reflection above...I just noticed THAT, too.  It's the MOM-THING'S GHOST!


THEN, they were just excited to touch big boy instruments.

THEN, Frank had recently learned to play guitar and bass.


THEN, Ernest had recently started piano lessons.


Can you say, IT SEEMS LIKE JUST YESTERDAY?

I CAN!

Thursday, August 30, 2012

Thematic Photographic: Parallelism

This week's Thematic Photographic, hosted by Carmi at Written, Inc., is parallelism.  

My literal interpretation:  the parallel tracks of the Seattle Monorail.  Tomorrow, I'll have a then and now version of parallel.  




We rode the monorail several times to get downtown and back.  Much more enjoyable than the bus tunnel, although the buses downtown were free until 7 pm which was sweet!

Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Chalked or Stalked?

A break from my road trip to rant about something in real life...

While we were on the road trip, Handy got 72-hour parking notices on two of the cars. One of them might have been sitting there that long, but the other was driven the day before.  Who the hell cares?  They're in front of our own house.  If they were sitting on blocks for months gathering leaves and cobwebs, that would be another story.

The week we got back, we found the tires drastically chalked three days in a row.  Not a neat little dab on the tread like the meter maids do, but a fierce heavy slash of chalk starting on the rim, down the tire, and out 6 inches into the street.  WTF?  On the first day, two cars around the corner were also chalked, but the subsequent days it was only us.  Fed up on the 3rd day, Handy went to the police department to complain.

Guess what?  They don't even chalk tires!  They only go out if someone complains.  And they care so little about parking violations that they won't waste an officer's time on them; they send the secretaries out to do it.  So some asshole has taken it upon him or herself to become the neighborhood parking patrol.  The police came out and checked around and no one on our block cares.   The officer didn't know who made the complaint in the first place, but of course they wouldn't tell us even if they did know.

A relative witnessed a man crouching by one of the tires earlier in the week.

The fourth morning, Saturday, there was no chalk but there was a spray of oily liquid on the windshields.

Nothing happened Sunday, but we saw a man slowly walking through the neighborhood TAKING NOTES!

Hmmmm.  So Handy did a little stakeout the past two mornings.  Someone took a walk at 5:30 but didn't act suspiciously.  No chalkings, fortunately.

What the hell is going on?  Does someone have a vendetta against us?  We don't bother anyone.  We don't even complain about the messy neighbor.  (Someone else did, because the same week as our chalking he was forced to have a bunch of his junk hauled away.  Handy told him, "I swear it wasn't us who complained!")

We've switched around our parking arrangements a bit to make it clearly obvious to this jerk that the cars are moving on a regular basis.

But I'd like to get to the bottom of this.  I'm seriously thinking of getting a surveillance system.  Anyone have an old nanny cam lying around?


Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Chihuly Garden and Glass

After pizza at Zeek's (who get 5 stars in my book as I forgot our duck tour picture there and they saved it!), we went to Chihuly Garden and Glass.  I highly recommend an evening visit as the garden is magical at night.

The colors were even more vivid in real life, if you can imagine that.









Entering the greenhouse was an overwhelmingly beautiful experience.







Breathtaking!

Monday, August 27, 2012

The Duck Tour

We got to Seattle at 4:00 and hit the ground running.  Not enough time left to tour the EMP, but since we could see the Duck Tours from our hotel window that seemed a good place to start.


It drives my sons crazy, but I can't resist the cheesy tourist photos.



I think we had the wackiest, or quackiest, tour guide.  You don't go on these tours to be serious, folks.


So here are some Seattle sights.

Are you old enough to recognize what this is?







The blue trees near the Westlake Center are meant to draw awareness to global deforestation.  The paint is supposedly water soluble but hadn't washed off since they were painted in April.


Men in Kilts?  I'd hire them.


One of the boats from Deadliest Catch.








Next trip, we're going to see the Fremont Troll close up!