Well well well. If it isn't another Leaflet reader. Look at you, reading posts. on Leaflet dot pub. This week has been, well, certainly 7 days. Really more like 7 days and one hour, because they shoved a cheeky extra hour into this week. I am quite confident that I made excellent use of that hour and did not squander it in some sort of mindless stupor.

What I've Been Up To

I am not going to lie okay, it's been a pretty uneventful week. I am sort of embarrassed looking back, like what was I doing. I think I sort of spent the entire week in fear of Halloween, which sounds ridiculous, but I was thinking like "wow I am going to need to get a costume" all week. But in the end, I didn't need a costume, because I simply did not attend any halloween engagements. In hindsight this feels a little lame, so I am mentally committing to do something next year.

On Tuesday, girlgoose and I decided pretty last minute to go to a trivia night at the nearby Hopvine Pub. Our frantic efforts to assemble a team were not entirely successful, however did #bless us with his presence. As a formidable trivia force majeure, we managed to easily lock down a five way tie for third place. Not to brag, but we did this with only three to five hints from the bartenders, so I think we're sort of trivia masters or something. They had this cornbread "shepherds pie", which was so good we tried to order another one, but unfortunately our cracked trivia advisor ordered the last one, so I resorted to staring ungrily at his bowl hoping to be offered scraps. I took precisely one photo that entire evening, and it was of this insane mural they had for sale on the wall. I genuinely think $750 is kind of a steal.

gorgeous gorgeous painting of bender from futurama smoking a cigar in a sort of stained glass style, in an incredibly ornate shield-shaped frame. it's selling for $750 as listed on a small purple index card stuck to the wall.

Wednesday, and I got breakfast and coffee at Seasmith Coffee, and spent some time talking through plans for the rest of the week. Very exciting things are coming to soon! We had a few technical issues, but are getting things smoothed out and hoping to have a billing service soon so we can offer higher limits (and make money). They had a pretty good drink called a "mapleine" mocha, made from a type of artificial maple flavoring that apparently is nostalgic in Seattle. I have still have much to learn about this wonderful place. The mocha was good, pretty sweet, but I guess that is what you get when you order a mocha.

Menu showing a description of various drinks at Seasmith Cafe. The drink I got is described is "An ode to Seatt'es Iconic spice company Crescent, who first invented the maple flavored syrup Mapleine that was Seattle's beloved flavor in the early 1900's. Our Mapleine mocha is made from Mapleine, brown sugar, organic cane juice & K'ul dark chocolate."

At night, my friends and got Pho at Pho Than Brothers and then checked out the outwardly imposing, but internally pretty cool Northwest Liquor Store. We were going to go hang out on a rooftop, but unfortunately it started raining, so we ended up experimenting with cursed Malort drinks and chatting indoors for a bit. It tastes worse than I remember, but still not as bad as people say it is.

green bottle of matcha liqueur by a company called "Yoshi", freaky stuff. also there is a "BROVO" douglass fir liquer, which i actually did not see, but i kind of want to get now.
blurry picture of an arm holding a bottle that says "felix bigallet" China - China. what a name.
Malort Minis! Yuck! Tastes like 2020! Prank your friends! Not to be outdone, my friend bought a Malort Maxi.

Saturday was ~halloween~ but also my very important weekly1 Arboretum Walk. This week we had 10 RSVPs and only 2 rsvps besides me, which might be a new record low attendance percentage. However the walk was beautiful, and in the morning, the sun broke through the morning fog to bathe the Earth in a hazy golden glow. I also learned that one of my (2) walk attendees had just played a poker game with Phil Gordon, which I thought was crazy.

picture of a number of parked cars on the side of a street, taken out of a bus. the sunlight on the right is passing through a dissipating fog creating yellow beams of light that bathe everything in a heavenly glow.

At night, I sort of surprisingly went from no plans to an inbox flooded with event invites. First, I got dinner at Von's 1000 Spirits with , and some friends (hi michelle, thank u for sharing pizza). I had some lemon pasta thing and meatballs. It was pretty good! Their happy hour prices for pizza were pretty impressive (because we ate at 4:30) so their regular pizza was like 50% off. It seemed like a place that really caters to locals too, as they have a 25% discount for lunch with a Washington state ID (during the week). Was a lot of fun, but I wouldn't say I was blown away by the food, Artusi happy hour probably a better deal if you are a pasta enthusiast.

picture of a pink "blackberry" drink sitting on a wooden table in front of a small cast iron dish of meatballs. Michelle and I just sat there waiting for someone else to eat the meatballs, but my friends are apparently fake meatball fans.

I was mostly excited to do a lowkey walk around the neighborhood with my friends, which I did, but ended up too tired afterwards to schlep out to some other party. Perhaps I am getting old, but also my family has always downplayed Halloween very hard, so I am always struggling to muster any enthusiasm for the holiday other than occasionally seeing a really banger costume and being like "oh my goodness look at that thing i like!". Anyways, the walk was a lot of fun, we basically zig-zagged through the volunteer-park adjacent area where all the rich people compete to have the best decorations. Probably the winner for me was the Meat Market, if only because it seemed way too morbid for children and the fact they were literally giving out beef tartare.

freaky looking window with shadowy person figures and bloody handprints all over what seem to be transparent plastic blinds. DO NOT ENTER is written on one of the windows in a drippy red color
simple smiling jack o lantern sitting on a porch with no other visible decorations. it is oddly spooky in it's simplicity.
Single tombstone in a graveyard full of various funny custom graves. This one reads "Here lies our democracy. born july 4 1776 died january 6 2021. Death by a thousand cuts"
We install holiday lights sign. Looks like the local decorators are getting a head start for the christmas season.
Picture of a street at night with large trees all around, people are walking on the street amongst the parked cars. Someone (it's kevin) is taking a photo, but as I was walking at night, he is a strange blurry phantasm.
This house set up an entire "meat market" tent in front of them, with a massive lit up sign, a number of small signs on the fence like "have a heart", and various ornate displays of fake meat. It's not particularly visible here but a person in the tent was handing out "beef" tartare. Wouldn't it be crazy if it was actually human meat, though.
Wall of fake shrink wrapped meat with a Food Safety Scorecard based on the Seattle Public Health ones that says "FOOD SAFETY RATING: TOXIC" in red
Canibal's Meat Market Community board showing a bunch of seemingly AI-generated ads related to butchering humans.
big sign on a bush that says "FIND JIMOTHY AT SOME 2026 BIG EVENTS. How many Jimothys can you find?" with a small paper cut out of jimoty. I personally did not find even a single Jimothy, and do not know what events they were referencing here.

I ended up being pretty pooped from our neighborhood waddling, it turns out Capitol Hill is *not flat*, so we had to go up and down quite a bit, and there were huge crowds on the sidewalks. There was one block (see middle photo above) where they closed off the roads and it was super nice to walk in the street, but unfortunately most of the night we were swimming in a sea of costumed bodies. One real highlight of the night was a woman in a very convincing Elizabeth Holmes costume coming up to us with a GameCube and asking if I wanted my blood tested, resulting in this excellent interaction:

business goose🪿's avatar
4d

elizabeth holmes told me i have chlamydia tonight

Girlgoose and I decided to stay in afterward and rewatched the entirety of Over the Garden Wall. I get so emotional over that show every time. It's such a masterpiece, I remember when it was first coming out while I was still a kid2, I thought it was so strange. I was however pretty hooked from the first episode, and I think I might have missed a few. Ah, the joys of the pre-streaming era. Anyways, it was a very cozy night. This show will never get old!!!

picture of my tv during an episode of the excellent short series "Over the Garden Wall". In this photo, there is greg, a little boy in green overalls with a teapot on his head, and a man with an ornate maroon suit, they are standing in a lush greenhouse with a talking horse in the background and the caption says "for testing new teas"

Sundays I usually reserve mostly for housekeeping and this weekend was no different. I will say the poker night we had was insanely violent, and we managed to see every hand in poker besides a straight. It's still sort of wild to me that nobody got a straight, but I think this was in part because got coolered so many times we wrapped up a bit earlier than usual. Here are some funny poker hands:

picture of a board of poker cards reading from left to right 9d Qd 2s 6c Kd, with a pair of cards reading Jd 10d This photo was taken shortly after one poker player said "i don't believe you have a straight" and then this player said "youre right, I have a straight flush"
this was a hand I was in where the board reads Kc As 9c Kd 2h and my cards are Ks Kh. My friend said "what do you have a king or something" and I got to flip them over and say, well actually, I have two kings. BOOM QUADS.
Cursed poker hand where the board is 8d 7c 6c 8c 8h, giving the possibility for straights, flushes, straight flushes, or quads. The winner got 6d As, which is a mere full house, the loser got off easy.

And that wraps up the week! Not super much to report. With the benefit of FUTURE SIGHT (delaying this newsletter for two days) I can say the next edition will certainly be more interesting and eventful.

I Saw the Signs

Signs-wise, last week was a treasure trove. Check out these bad boys.

sign on a post that says "the economy is doing great!" "the food is safe to eat!" with a screengrab from you can see everything.
picture of the foxglove inn, a hotel which is surprisingly tucked away in the middle of capitol hill!?
picture of the office directory at a weird liminal-space building next to the liquor store on capitol hill
cute painting of an orca voting laminated and stapled to a wooden light pole
painting of a bunch of birds carrying ballots to a ballot box, also stapled to a light pole in montlake
light up sign attached to an ornate looking old building, it reads "R Lease", with an arrow pointing down and to the right reading "COINS"
black wall with writing in white text that reads "STOP WRITEING ON MY BLACK WALL!!!" and then purple and yellow writing underneath it that says "This is Kevin's spot", with "market" crossed out
extremely red photo taken at night of a no parking sign with tape and black spray paint that says "No parking From Now to END of TIME"

Okay now that they're all together like this, they feel a lot less impressive...

What's Coming Up

Best of the Net

Promised Cat Pictures

Yesterday was, if you were somehow unaware, election day in the USA, so I ended up staying up extremely late scrolling the Bluesky joy posts instead of writing this. I did promise that I would provide some kitty photos as a consolation prize, so here they are!

Percy (legal name Persimmon) meets a real Persimmon fruit for the first time. I don't think he liked it.
Charli humbly requests you to draw her like one of her french girls

If you have cat photos of your own to share, drop them here!

SHOW ME YOUR CATS

Thank you for reading!

I've been writing these Waddlin' blogs for a while, so I was wondering if you have any questions for me, things you want to see covered in future Waddlin' articles, favorite posts from the week. Drop your errata below, and I look forward to reading it! (atmosphere account needed, you can make one here or on bluesky)

with an Atmosphere account to ask a question