Long weekend
Friday evening we met up with morthael's parents at JaK's Grill and had a very pleasant dinner while working out some tentative plans for the rest of their visit. They also passed on to me a laptop that they don't need anymore, which was a nice surprise. Yeah, it's used and not the most up-to-date, but who the hell am I to look askance at a free laptop?
Saturday morning we took Shylah to the vet again. After doing well earlier in the week, she got worse Thursday and Friday, and sealed the deal Saturday morning by wheezing and reverse-sneezing dramatically. We saw a different vet than usual, a man who tends to think out loud so it took awhile to get to his conclusion, but his feeling was that she essentially had post-nasal drip and residual congestion resulting from an upper-respiratory infection, and that the antibiotics *had* made a difference since the discharge from her nose had gone from thick and yellow-green to clear and liquid (yeah, I'm sure you all wanted to know that). The only thing to do is to clear up any residual infection, which will theoretically dry up the congestion and the post-nasal drip. So she's back on the Clavamox for two weeks (and BTW, veterinary Clavamox is freakin' expensive). The up side of all this is that she has been doing really well since Saturday evening, energetic and bouncy and very engaged with things. However, she's still refusing to eat her "normal" food most of the time, because she got spoiled having treats and chicken soup to get her to eat *something* while she was ill. At this point, I'm not going to put much effort into that--she's clearly not ill to any extent right now, and if she wants to go hungry on the gamble that she'll get something "better," that's her choice. She'll eat when the hunger overrides her desire for treats (which she has already demonstrated once).
After we took her home, we picked up the in-laws and had lunch at the Eastlake Red Robin. After that, we went down to the waterfront and strolled around for awhile. I hadn't done that in a few years, so it was a pleasant diversion, but it was typically crowded for a summery Seattle weekend afternoon, and I'd forgotten to bring a hat or a parasol, so I got a little overwhelmed and overheated.
After a couple of hours, we dropped them off, and came home to prep for the evening at the station (which involved a short nap that was still too long for the time I have available, and then scrambling frantically to get ready). For those who were worried about my fashion dilemma on this, I ended up with a rose pink crinkled voile top over a black camisole (and a black pleated netting skirt, but the skirt didn't show) with moonstone pendant and earrings. The color was good, I'm still not sure the top itself was flattering, but whatever, I sort of stopped caring by the time we left. (There is a photo of the outfit, which will eventually go up in the Project, but I haven't gotten around to dealing with it yet.)
Pledge went reasonably well. We didn't make the goal, but we did better than expected considering the state of the economy. And we had a lot of fun, especially with the radio-controlled Dalek toys which led to me laughing and shrieking with delight on-camera. I also received a compliment about my ability to be an engaging presence and adjust and adlib on the fly, which was really nice. (We actually had some specifically scripted text to use, for the first time in years--there's a new development director and he wants to do that sort of thing--but I hate things that sound "scripted," so I riffed on the concepts and wording instead of just reading them straight. Especially for the Who audience, who know what they want and why they're pledging, I think that works better than just feeding people the same scripted text multiple times.) I was pleased with how it went overall, but four and a half hours of being there, nearly two hours of which was on-air time, is definitely a big output of energy and effort for me.
Incidentally, for anyone who is absolutely dying for a taste of how these things work, the four KBTC videos on this guy's channel are from last night. They were shot in-studio--they're not the actual broadcast images--so the sound is kind of muddy, and mostly set on that one shot there that is not me and blackmaru (though some of you will recognize at least one of the people who is in the shot), and three of the four clips are nearly 10 minutes long. However, you can *hear* me at points in all of them, and in the shortest one--the "Alternating Reality Donation" one--you can see my torso and hands in the last three seconds. And you can see just how silly things generally get. So there's my odd off-kilter contribution to my own self-aggrandizement and vanity.
We left the station just after 10 p.m., but got stuck in traffic due to construction, and my post-pledge adrenaline evaporated during the delay. We had a party we wanted to go to and finally turned up just after 11 p.m., but we were both pretty wiped out after all the day's activities, and stayed for barely an hour, just picking at the remains of the food and not drinking at all. It was very nice to see people, but I was decidedly not at my best by that point.
Sunday, we were supposed to meet up with K's parents again and ride the Duck, which I will readily admit was not high on my list of desired activities. But we overslept, and he'd forgotten to turn his phone back on after we left the station, so they decided to do that without us, a decision that neither of us was particularly bothered by. We did manage to get out of the house in time to meet them at 11:30, and headed to Pioneer Square, where we had lunch at Merchants Cafe, the oldest restaurant in Seattle, and then wandered around a bit looking at shops and stopping in at Seattle Mystery Bookshop, where I had to force myself to leave behind at least a dozen things that I just can't afford right now. By this time we'd reached the recommended window for our tour time at the Underground Tour, so we returned there and waited while the place completely filled up and they ended up splitting us into four separate and completely full groups.
The Underground Tour is one of those touristy things you don't tend to do in your own town, so I had never experienced it before. It's not all that long or detailed, but it was reasonably interesting. The biggest problem is that the tour banter is larded with cheesey jokes and double entendres to engage people who apparently can't find history interesting on its own merits, and that kind of thing tends to bug me even when I'm at my best (which I decidedly wasn't by yesterday afternoon). Also, the length of the tour is set, and with a huge group a lot of time got lost in just getting everyone from one point to the next, so I really didn't have enough time to peer into the nooks and crannies and bits of documentation that could be found along the way. That said, I really did enjoy the history in it; I have, rather ironically, become more interested in my own city's history as a result of our trip to Alaska, because I got interested in gold-rush Alaska history while there, and of course a lot of the prospectors set off out of Seattle. (Indeed, the museum at the end of the tour includes some characters that featured prominently in one of the books about Alaska that I got there and enjoyed, Good Time Girls.) So this was a good sort of intro to the things I should pursue further.
After this, we walked over to the Seattle Police Museum, but K hadn't checked their operating hours and they were closed. So we walked back to the car, and went up to Queen Anne and the Kerry Park viewpoint, which is where the best-known views of Seattle are always shot from. Photos were suitably taken, and then we took a little drive around the area to admire the architecture. By that point, it was late in the afternoon, and we were all fading, so we dropped the parents off at their hotel, and headed home, where we did basically nothing for the rest of the evening.
And that was my incredibly busy (and probably only moderately interesting to others) weekend.
Oh, and as for news of today and America's Favorite Real-Life Trolls, they did indeed show up in the neighborhood this morning. (Garfield HS is two blocks from us.) Their messages are getting weirder and weirder. (See also this, which is also more or less in our neighborhood but not as close as Garfield; I didn't even realize they were going to be there. Also, someone claiming to be a Phelps hit the neighborhood blog.) However, I decided that sleep was more important than witnessing the hilarity, so I missed it all.