July 20 - Strawberry Festival & Great Coffee

First of all, let me just preface this section with a slightly absurd confession. I have spent almost this entire week anxiously awaiting the arrival of my Heelys. Since ordering them about a fortnight ago, I have been grappling with a messy combination of buyers remorse, nostalgia, and optimism, contemplating whether the shoes would even fit, and if I would be able to use them in Seattle or if they were just a ridiculous purchase. Well, the jury is still out on their long-term utility, but they arrived today and they are so cool! Definitely tricky on less flat surface, but I seem to remember overcoming this as a kid somehow, and I intend to practice. Check them out!

With that out of the way, lets go over the events of the week!

Wednesday Adventures

On Wednesday, I biked down to Fram, a combination cafe / bar in Eastlake with the best views and vibes of any cafe I have ever been to, slightly undercut by having the worst coffee I think I have had in Seattle. It still remains my happy place, but really you need to lower your expectations if you are a coffee snob. Their frose (froze? do I need an accent), on the other hand, is quite delicious and I have no doubt you could get quite zooted on it if you can somehow avoid a dehabilitating brain freeze. I happened to come by during the UK vs Argentina game, and was shocked how seriously the neighborhood was taking the world cup, I had never seen the place this full before.

I am not a huge sports watching kind of person, so I ordered an iced coffee to go and spent some time watching the ducks instead. They got surprisingly close to me, I almost wondered if I could pet them, but decided I value my fingers too much.

On my way back home, I discovered that the very end of Broadway is quite beautiful, there's an incredible view of UW and the water.

World's Greatest Coffee?

In my last entry, I failed to mention that I took a trip to Mixed Pantry last week for their "Pourover Sundays" event, where they do pourover of coffees they like. I was sort of bamboozled into going because I thought the coffee would be free, but it was still fun and I got to chat with the folks there and have a fun little outing with Carmen. The coffee they are sampling this month (and I think they said they would still be offering next month) was Guava Candy from Tomodachi Coffee in Pasadena. I thought it was good enough to buy and brought it home.

This week, I have been drinking it Every Day and think it might be the single best coffee I have ever bought. It doesn't get old! The aroma of guava is really distinctive and it has a really balanced sweetness overall that is really delicious. Shoutout to Carmen for dragging me there so I could learn about it!!

Playing Go!

For those of you who don't know, I really like playing Go. It's kind of like an older, simpler version of chess played on a bigger board that also has totally different rules. Its great, if you live anywhere near Seattle, I will give you a lesson anyday any time as an excuse to play.

ANYWAYs, this Wednesday was the Seattle Central Go Club meetup in Cap Hill and I was going to go but Carmen wanted to hang out so I was like "do YOU want to play?" and she said yes so I finally got to play with her! She annihilated me instantly with a natural 20.

It just so happened that this weekend was also the Bon Odori festival at the Seattle Betsuin Temple, which I was volunteering for with the Seattle Go Center. I used to visit them very often back when they were in the Udistrict but now that they've moved up to Phinney Ridge, I haven't had as much of an occasion to trek up there. The event was a lot of fun, I think I taught about a dozen people how to play. If any of you happen to read this, I hope you are still playing! As compensation for my time, I received a free hot dog, which was pretty good.

It's funny that this is the most Go I've played in weeks, I suppose it's self inflicted because I haven't gone to the central go club. I would love to play more! I've accepted I'll never be any sort of Go Master, but it's a great game, probably the greatest board game of all time, at least as far as classics go.

North Interurban Biking

Friday, I went on a bit of an impromptu bike ride with my friend Kevin up to the North Interurban Trail. We took the light rail to Lynnwood and then biked in a big loop. It was a fun ride, sort of unremarkable for a lot of it as a sort of generic suburban highway environment, but the Interurban itself was quite pretty and secluded and did not smell like burning rubber, which was a marked improvement from many of the roads nearby.

As an added bonus, we discovered that there is an (extraordinarily busy) Raising Cane's in Lynnwood, where we stopped to quickly scarf down dinner before catching the light rail home. This restaurant was one of the maddest madhouses I have ever seen. There were so many people, and you could see in the back that all the employees were GRINDING, yet somehow there was still a woman going around asking people if they wanted hand wipes. I don't understand how this chain operates, and yet their chicken slaps so they will keep getting my business.

I did sort of wonder if this bottom sign is AI generated though, which sucks if true ( I think it is ). Slop has really permeated every corner of the world these days. I see AI generated crap in places I would never think possible, places you think value craft and attention to detail (foreshadowing). Oh well *sigh*

Strawberries, Strawberries, o' Wherefore Art Thou, Strawberries?

Saturday morning, I canceled my usual Arboretum walking group to go check out the Vashon Island Strawberry Festival. Upon arrival, we were greeted by a home that I can only describe as having bought out the entire window catalogue at Home Depot. I mean look at it. How many distinct window shapes do you see?

I was pleasantly surprised to find out they had a shuttle running for the event, as buses on Vashon don't exactly run on a tight schedule. We spent pretty much the entire day walking around the event, which was frankly way bigger than I had possibly imagined. Being a novice reporter, I did not capture photographic evidence of this, but trust me, it was packed! There was a reasonable amount of strawberry-themed stuff, but in general, I was a bit disappointed at the strawberry-ness of it all. It was great fun nonetheless, we got spectacularly overpriced Syrian food and the biggest puff of cotton candy I have ever seen.

After a few hours walking around the event, we headed to the Dragon's Head Cider orchard, which was a sort of long walk in the beating sun, but turned out to be great fun, we sampled a bunch of different ciders they make in the traditional english style, which is to say much closer to wine than the (frankly still quite tasty) apple juice stuff we make here. They had a rather well decorated porta-potty, which everybody commented on as we experienced the effects of sampling a bunch of cider one by one.

What's Coming Up

Honestly, my schedule is extremely clear this week. I do, however, have a list of local ical calendars I subscribe to in my email client to see what's going on, so here are the ones that look cool:

As I think I mentioned in the previous one, Board Game Night at Gearhouse is every Tuesday, and they tend to be a blast!

This Sunday is Seattle Zine Fest!

That's it for me, let me know if you have any fun things to do actually because this week is looking EMPTY.

Best of the Net

I've been spending a bunch of time playing Velocidrone, as I got super into tiny fpv drone videos and happened to also stumble upon someone talking about how to get started. I like the idea that the drones are nimble, and tiny, so not as scary, but oh my GOD they are hard to control. This is why they recommend starting in a simulator, I guess!! If I had a nickel for every drone I destroyed in my 1 hour 40 minutes of flight time so far, I think I'd have like $20.

Obviously, Jimothy has taken over the web and become something of a patron saint for Seattle, vying for the top title of most beloved trash mammal with Saint Rat. I just wanted to call out some great Jimothy fan art I've seen on Bluesky:

View post on Bluesky

View post on Bluesky

View post on Bluesky

View post on Bluesky

Thank You for Reading!

I feel like I'm still nailing down the format for these, and I'm realizing I probably need to take more pictures of things while I'm out and about. Hope you all have a great week!!

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Goose