Back in Seattle Again

Definitely went to Seattle more times in the last two weeks than in three months of living in Washington.  Not really a downside of entertaining family.

While my husband and I usually snack our way through Pike Place Market, with my parents in tow, we decided to go for a sit down lunch.  The Pike Brewing Company had an immense selection of brews - I had a delicious seasonal honey ale - and delicious grub.  My bratwurst was delectable.

The ultimate purpose of this Seattle trip was to see the National Geographic King Tut exhibit - for the last time in North America (now maybe you feel you need to see it as urgently as all the advertising wants us to).  The exhibit was at the Pacific Science Center, which is just about the most 60s-tastic place I have ever seen.  Totally equipped with cement everything including arch work on some of the windows. 

The exhibit was awesome and quite dramatic.  I especially liked when prior to going into what was found in the tomb a loud TV told the story of a water boy discovering the top steps of the tomb then said loudly "Now enter Tutakamun's tomb!!!".  There was a lot of really awesome intricate gold and beadwork, but the most impressive thing was the wooden furniture - a bed and chair - that Tutankamun probably used in his life.  Three thousand plus year old wood!  It was also interesting that they plastered some of the gallery walls with photographs of what the rooms of the tomb actually looked like when Howard Carter found them.  It definitely gave a better sense of the mass of goods buried with the king.

Glad the advertising made me feel the urgency to see this exhibit!  

Chihuly Glass

Famous glass artist Dale Chihuly is from Tacoma; therefore, one of the coolest things about Tacoma is the amount of Chihuly glass on display in the city.  From the obvious art museums to the less obvious college libraries to the even less obvious bar, Chihuly's glass is everywhere.

The Chihuly walking tour is a great way to see Chuhuly's glass.  We tried to start at the Tacoma Art Museum, but since I do not do thorough research, they were closed.  What we did of the Chihuly walking tour ended up being a very filled afternoon anyway.

First stop was Union Station.  What once used to be the end of the transcontinental railroad is now a federal court house.  Chihuly has five works of art there.  The first is a colorful chandelier hanging from the dome of the building.  It brings to mind the contents of a candy shop artfully strung up from the ceiling.  The Monarch Window looked a little like a school of jelly fish swimming across the glass.  At first glance, all the sculptures appeared orange, but from different angles, blues, yellows, and reds came out.  From the outside, the sculptures took on even different shades.  Why monarchs?  When the trains go by the building, the glass sculptures shake, and if the light is hitting just right, orange light flickers across the floor.  We did not experience this first hand.

Chandelier

Monarch Window

The next artwork in Union Station are many of Chihuly's drawings.  They are not drawings for drawing's sake, but instead, drawings as preparation for making glass baskets.  I find glass making fascinating in that the artist does not do all the work him or herself but has many gaffers (people who blow the glass) to help.  Chihuly used these drawings to plan out color schemes, shapes, and to illustrate the movements the gaffers had to do to create the correct shape.  The next artwork, Reeds, was the simplest and most earthy Chihuly sculpture I have ever seen.  Two simple logs with red glass reeds sticking straight up.  It was simple, but beautiful, like a log on fire.  The final sculpture in Union Station was Ikebana Lakawana.  Lakawana for the name of the steel company whose name is stamped on the building's grand window frames and Ikebana for the long flowerlike glass sculptures.  This work was a beautiful mix of soft and hard because of the circular steel grid that all of the glass Ikebana are woven onto.

Basket Drawings

Ikebana Lakawana

Next, we walked to the Bridge of Glass.  The bridge has three sections - Seaform Pavilion, Crystal Towers, and Venetian Wall.  The Seaform Pavilion is a ceiling filled with thousands of sea forms - think sea urchins and the like.  While this is at least the second time I have been to the Bridge of Glass, it is the first time I noticed the many putti or cherubs lingering throughout the ceiling of sea forms.    The second part of the bridge's artwork is two giant posts with what I can only think to describe as giant blue-green ice cubes.  They actually look a lot like rock candy.  The final artwork, is a wall of venetian vases, all different shapes with many Ikebana stemming out and around.

Seaform Pavilion

Crystal Tower

Venetian Wall

The next to last stop on the tour was the University of Washington Tacoma Library.  In the tower of the library, a room set up for quiet and group studying, is an enormous red chandelier - Chinook Red Chandelier.  It did not look very different in terms of structure from the chandelier in Union Station, but because it was all one deep red color, the physical structure of the piece was much more delineated.  

The final stop of the tour, was the Swiss Bar, one of my favorite places to get a drink in Tacoma.  The first time I went to the Swiss, I didn't even realize they had eight Chihuly sculptures!  Sitting above the South African mahogany bar (a gorgeous piece of work itself) are eight venetians, just like the giant vases on the Bridge of Glass.  The fact that this little bar in Tacoma has eight works of art from such a world-renowned sculptor is amazing in itself.  The best part is the story of how they got there.  While Chihuly and his team were working on the installation of the work in Union Station, they frequented the Swiss.  Out of the blue, Chihuly offered to bring in venetians to display above the bar.  And so it was.  And who doesn't like a tour that ends at a bar!!

Nearly the Perfect Day

I have to say, I love NOT having a car.  Relying on walking and bike riding narrows my options of where to go for lunch or which dry cleaner to choose, narrow options always being a plus for someone as indecisive as me.  It forces me to get exercise.  It allows me to take an hour to do what might have taken ten minutes with a car, meandering being a new passion of mine.  And I never have to buy gas or remember to get the oil changed.  Bliss.  Someone I am married to (I won't mention names here) questions how far I will be able to go carless when the rainy season comes.  I say, rain?  That won't stop me.

Last Thursday, I had nearly the perfect day, without a car.  A mile walk to the dry cleaners, a rest in the park to read a book, strolling through the farmer's market after NOT having to find parking OR pay for said parking, and a walk home with my produce including the most amazing raspberries I have ever tasted.  Number one benefit, exercise.  Number two, a very tired dog.  Number three, I got a tan!!!  I also got to see more of the city, talk to people I met on the sidewalk (there are some real characters to meet on the sidewalk here), and all while I had absolutely no idea what time it was.

There is only one teeny tiny thing that could make a day like this any better.

Tired Clara

A third of my $5 bouquet

No Checkmarks

I suppose the big issue with bucket lists is what happens when you finish?  Do you immediately die?  Do you move on with your life and never turn back?  I hate to view life in such a linear fashion, which is my excuse for why, prior to moving from Maine, very few items on the "Maine Bucket List" were checked off.

We did go to to Nubble Light, as mentioned previously.  We also ate the "Feed Me" at Bar Lola.  To say it was an extravagant meal is a total understatement.  Seven courses, all picked by the chef and all totally not necessarily what we would normally order off a menu.  It was not a dinner out; it was an adventure.  There was also not a scrap of food left uneaten.

While we did not physically make it to Isle Au Haut to go to Black Dinah Chocolatiers, they did (conveniently for me - I hate boat rides of almost any type) open a second location on Main Street in Blue Hill.  Hence, a rainy day trip for the most luxurious chocolate I have ever had (outside of Belgium of course).  The best was the Aztec chocolate.  Also, had a to-die-for sea-salt carmel.

I won't look at our Maine Bucket List as a failure.  After all, we still had to work, pack up our house (at the very last minute thanks to a giant bureaucratic organization that I will not mention here), attend three weddings, say goodbye to everyone we know on the East Coast, and Andy became a doctor.  Oh, and I turned 30, so there was lots of consoling drinking going on during this time.  I am avoiding my urge to look at the lack of checkmarks on this list as a downfall; instead, it is just many reasons we will return to Maine.

Maine Bucket List

With our house nearly sold, we have formulated a Maine bucket list.  Ninety-nine days left...

First stop, Nubble Light in Cape Neddick.  It is a wonder how we've driven through York dozens of times and never stopped at this super famous lighthouse.  This lighthouse is so famous that aliens somewhere may have even seen a picture of it (a photograph of the lighthouse is one of the objects loaded onto NASA's Voyager II).  It is just as you would imagine a lighthouse - quaint, isolated - and it is totally surrounded by the moat of the Atlantic!  The best part of the lighthouse is the "bucket" for carrying supplies from the mainland to the light.  I was disappointed to see that the "bucket" is not used for human transport (although it did transport a child or two to school in the past).  There has not been a lighthouse keeper since the late 80's when the light was automated, which is too bad.  I just love the Anne-of-Green-Gables-esque romanticism of a family living out on small Nubble Rock.

Your Apocalypse Viewing Guide

I consider myself a slight aficionado (not an expert) of disaster movies.  From the overdone bravado, Independence Day, to the cheesy dialog, insert any made-for-tv disaster movie title here, nothing shows the ability of vastly different people to rise above natural human greed for the good of society like a disaster movie.  These cinema gems are really an anthem to socialism.

Therefore, in preparation for the impending end of the world, I offer this brief list of educational movies.  Some of these films are by no means what would be considered apocalyptic or post-apocalypitic cinema; however, they are all madly entertaining or informative for their own reasons.  While it may seem obvious to begin with Apocalypse Now, movies such as this one will only get you accustomed to the horror you may see in the post-apacalypic world, which is a good skill-set to have, but not completely useful in your early preparation for the apocalypse.  Instead, begin with WALL-E, the 2008 Disney feature about how humans destroyed the planet then went into space to get fat.  While a lazy obese human race does seem horrible, and at times horribly probable, the movie is light and will therefore give you a "toe in the water" entrance into your future doom.

Next, 2012 because it presents every possible natural disaster in the confines of 158 minutes and really shows you how the 1% will stick it to us all.  Similarly, The Day After Tomorrow is an epic natural disaster movie complete with terrible dialog but despite the sequence of events being rather compressed, the science seems quite probable.  These two movies won't really give you an idea of how to survive, unless you have billions of dollars to build some kind of crazy ark, but they will give you an idea of the signs of impending doom and how the unprepared will fall apart and most likely die in a fit of tears.  Most importantly, they will give you a taste of how to defy authority because most likely, see comment about the 1%, those in authority will not have your best interests at heart.

To be truly prepared, you can't only focus on typical catastrophic disasters be they natural or human encouraged; you must also look at those disasters that seem like nothing at all for as T.S. Eliot writes in The Hollow Men, "This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper."  For this preparation, we must look to Contagion and I am Legend both great movies about disease caused apocalypse.  In case the apocalypse has a more biblical foundation, you should also watch Shaun of the Dead, a 2004 gem about how to deal with a zombie attack.

Once you have grasped the actual ending of society as we know it, you now must prepare for how to survive in a post-apocalyptic world.  Forget about money and learn how to shoot a gun.  Start with The Book of Eli because while the violence and plot are a slight distraction from your goal of learning to survive, you will be able to pick up some good tidbits here and there.  The ultimate education will come from The Road.  While it may frustrate you to not know how the world ends in the movie, that is really secondary to what you will learn about topics such as avoiding cannibals, cooking can goods, and adapting shopping carts for long range travel.

And maybe the end is not near, but watching these movies will at least be entertaining and if the apocalypse does happen this year, consider yourself prepared!  In the meantime, stop wasting time.  Those famous attractions you have always wanted to see, they could be underwater next year!  That expensive fashionable item you have been eyeing, pretty soon we might all be wearing rags!  The extra piece of cheesecake you don't think you should have, you will wish you ate it if you are soon living off of canned beans!

New Year's Resolution

I always like to use the period excuse, especially when it is the twelfth month of disappointment, to eat as much chocolate as I like.  Today I had a most amazing mini chocolate bar. While it was cute and small, it packed a huge punch.  Lake Champlain Chocolates' Five Star Hazelnut Chocolate Bar.  Not only was the base chocolate flavorful perfection, but it contained a half inch of gooey pasty milk chocolate topped with more solid chocolate and hazelnuts.  Definitely made my day.

Because of my 33.3333% success rate at New Year's Resolutions last year, my 2012 resolutions are easy - drink more and always wear a seatbelt (both incredibly easy to accomplish especially since I have never not worn my seat belt).  But really, my resolution is to live my life more like a dog.  The cutest black lab mix in the world, my darling Clara, is a model of carpe diem.  Despite eating the same dry balls of meat substance every single day, to Clara, every last piece of kibble is like eating the most amazing dish at a five star restaurant.  Even the shortest walk to Clara is not just a walk, but the most exciting day of her life; oh all the wonderful things to smell!  The other day my friend gave Clara the tiniest bite of roast chicken, and as she gulped it down, I could tell it was the best, THE BEST, moment of her life.  That is until the next best moment of her life.  The great things about dogs is that almost every moment of the day is the BEST moment of their lives.  Oh, to live more like a dog.