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June 1, 2000 |
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I've been thinking about why not attending Laurie's services bothered me so
much. Granted, I did have a good excuse, but I think it may have been more
than that. None of us want to see a friend pass away. Maybe it has
something to do with losing my father when I
was just nine and the fear of abandonment.
This carries on to multiple parts of my life, I suppose that's natural.
I've always prided myself on being independent and self sufficient and I've
grown very comfortable with it. I've lived without roommates for years.
The mere idea of depending on anyone makes me uneasy. Maybe that's the
reason I'm agnostic.
I suppose that I feel a little selfish that I'm thinking about me and my
life on the wake of her death, though I suppose that it's natural. People
don't like to talk about death. Everyone mourns on their own timetable. I
guess that I'm chipping away at it. Somehow I just know that one of these
days it will hit me like a ton of bricks, and there's little I can really
do to prepare.
I think Jim said it best, "This
sucks!"
Pam had an interview on my side of town today. We made plans for me to pick her up, I wasn't familiar with the address, so she sent me directions. The place was in the industrial part of town, if there is such a thing around here. Her interviews would end about 5pm, which is when I would pick her up.
The traffic to the place was moderate, not too bad really if you consider that it is 5pm on a Thursday afternoon. The weather was nice. I took the top off my car and drove there. It was a tad chilly, but not that bad if you turn the heat on the car, which is what I did.
I pulled up with the top down wearing sunglasses. It was pretty good day. She was wearing a business dress. She got in and we drove off. It must have been all of about five minutes… before it started to rain.
Oh, thank you Seattle!It wasn't raining that hard, just hard enough to have to stop and put the top back in the car. It is not so much that the weather sucks here, because technically, it is not that bad. It is just that it teases you with good things to come and they don't. That's life in Seattle.
We discussed where to go to dinner. I briefly suggested CPK (California Pizza Kitchen), but she felt like getting sushi. We ended up going to I Love Sushi. We got a table instead of sitting at the sushi bar. What kind of sushi did we have? We had a couple of spider rolls, a Rosana roll, some scallop sushi, and even tried some geoduck sushi. The geoduck sushi was a little tough, but otherwise not too bad.
Pam poured the soy sauce directly into my little dish… which, of course, was a mistake. There's a correct way to mix your soy sauce and wasabi, and this wasn't it. The most common problem with mixing soy sauce and wasabi is that you nearly always get clumps of wasabi which are entirely too tough to dissipate into a consistent sauce. This has the unfortunate side effect of making a mixture is sometimes too spicy and other times not spicy enough.
The proper way to put this together, is to start with the wasabi in the dish. You slowly add minute amounts of soy sauce. The trick is to turn it into a paste first, and then slowly add more soy sauce to the desired consistency. It is also much easier to control the consistency by adding soy sauce instead of wasabi. Sorry, I'm an engineer by nature, I try to think through the perceived problems. Besides, this is also a trick if you're trying to dissolve flour or starch into a recipe.
Yeah, much more than you really wanted to know about wasabi and soy sauce.
We stopped by the market immediately after dinner. Pam wanted to get cupcakes. Really… Cupcakes. We wandered through the market looking for the bakery, which was naturally at the opposite end of the market. Not that I was in a particular hurry, but you get the picture.
They had two types of cupcakes. Vanilla and chocolate. We're not talking the epitome of originality… what do you want? It is a market. She picked the chocolate ones.
I drove her back to her place after that. We endured the traffic across the bridge. The drivers were slowing down for imaginary traffic. There were slowdowns for absolutely no reason, save possibly the signs posted for future closures. We were crawling at about fifteen or twenty miles per hour. In other words, the traffic was running considerably better than it normally does.
Besides, I wasn't really complaining about having to drive slowly. Pam was … uhmm, distracting me.
You know… Seattle has this amazing gift for disenchanting people. The afternoon started quite nicely. Once we get to her place we realize that there isn't any parking available… well, not any guest parking anyway. Did I mention how much I dislike the parking situation in Seattle? We drove around for about ten minutes for several blocks looking for a place to park to no avail.
I ended up parking in a pay lot about three blocks from her place. We carried her backpack, purse, cupcakes, etc. Through weather that now threatened to gust us into oblivion. It's not that bad really, if you don't expect it to ever be good then there's no disappointment factor… and things around here generally aren't.
Not that I'm complaining, mind you… not at all.
As it turns out, I wasn't able to stay for too long. Pam was flying to Maine for the weekend and she hadn't packed yet. She also had a number of things to take care of before she left for the weekend. I did stay long enough to uhm… have a couple of cupcakes. Really.
June 1, 2000