Maura's Illuminated Manuscript

I have a little craft project I want to do, and I wanted to buy materials from a business that isn't gross, so I decided to ride my bike to Michael's in the Interbay neighborhood.

"Neighborhood" is a bit of a misnomer: the area has a whole lot of industrial, marine, and large retail businesses, plus a freight railyard and golf course. The residents of any of the nearby homes could credibly claim to live in Queen Anne to the east or Magnolia to the west; that's what I'd do if I were trying to sell such a place. If you live just north of Interbay, I'm pretty sure your place is a (house?)boat.

So you might expect that with a different kind of neighborhood comes a different kind of bike trail. Sure enough, once you get away from the ship canal there are tents, street art, a train carrying several 737 fuselages, a small unofficial skate park made from Jersey barriers, and a bunch of jogs and bends that aren't too well marked. There's even one section that's so narrow, and boxed in by two fences, that there are signs telling cyclists to dismount.

I ended up riding past the former site of the Wet Spot CSPC, now a storage facility. Sadness.

The ride is mostly lovely all the way from the ship canal to pier 91 on Elliott Bay, but I didn't want to go to Elliott Bay, remember? I wanted to go to a store whose access, like the others, is on Elliott Ave. That means riding your bike over the train tracks on one of two or three viaducts that were so not designed with bikes in mind. I'm glad it was Sunday morning and therefore traffic was light.

Stopped for groceries next to the canal. Cranked up the hill half a mile home. Uff da! But there was a vegan club sandwich at the end of it.

The latex gang was to meet at Nectar for an eighties night, but I turned out to be a small gang: just yours truly, who lives just up the hill, plus the two organizers. Nevertheless, I had an excellent time. Well worth the time needed to wriggle into a latex LBD. And in a minor Christmas miracle, my son just happened to appear right behind me and gave me a ride down the hill. He was grocery shopping. Aw.

The music, etc.? Xtra cheezy. I loved it. Flashbacks to both my college dorm and my cross-country drive, boy howdy! There may have been... overindulgence. Indeed, the median age was somewhat older than the usual techno show, so things got rolling earlier and everyone seemed to be drinking more.

Tonight? A certain elder goth's annual Xmas party in Ballard, which if last year was any indication will have lethal quantities of excellent eats that contain sugar.

You might think a Christmas party couldn't come as a surprise, but if so you don't know Funny Lady. With three hours' notice she texted friends to come to her place in Georgetown for a "brunch for dinner" Christmas party.

Sure enough, there were grits with Velveeta, a "mountain of bacon", homemade donuts & holes, pancakes, scrambled eggs, and mimosas. Funny Lady is more southern than I am, you see, and had the urge to fry a bunch of food.

Pity it's going to start raining before I have time to ride my bike across Lake Washington again.

Anyway, I had a lovely time, including seeing a certain troubled youth from Lambert House! She seemed to be in a much better mental state. It's a little surprising that she knows Funny Lady given her age, but then again, FL knows everybody.

Funny thing about Funny Lady: she gets anxious when I propose taking transit from her place to mine, and did even when that was a much shorter trip. She's even threatened to pay for a ride share for me. Jeez, I make transit trips like that and even longer ones at all hours pretty regularly. Mind you, if it's late enough I just want to go to bed, so I used Funny Lady as an excuse last night to get home faster. But I took the bus* to her house and in my heart I'm a good mass transit communist.



*The 5 to the 124. Ba da boom, ba da bing. I got to see how cool the few blocks around FL's house are.

So I woke up at 0330 or so due to a vivid dream, then tossed and turned for over an hour. Nothing unusual about that, you say, but here was ticket back to dreamland: turning off my morning alarm. I got an extra hour plus of sleep, and I still made it to work on time. This isn't the first time that I've managed this.

Am I unique this way? Does the threat of loud beepiness at 0600 mess with your early morning sleep as well?

Friday: leather dyke munch. Spread the joyous news of my impending surgery, chatted with much a cute, younger, and sadly taken trans woman. Yeah, bonding with other trans girls over all our stuff is a thing I do a lot, without really meaning to. And it usually reminds me of the many ways in which I've been lucky. I didn't stick around long enough to get my boots blacked because...

...I had a ticket to the Cascadia mini-festival in Fremont. Yes, just down the hill from home. Nectar became the First Church of House Music, Orthodox, which is usually my jam, but I wasn't feeling it too much, even with the esteemed Mark Farina DJing. I bailed at midnight headed uphill, and managed to turn my light out before 0200. I think I only had enough juice in me for one event on Friday night, and it was the first one.

Saturday: got sugared, got pho, got hairs did, and got a desperately needed nap before heading for aaminahlefae's solstice party, wherein were many elder goths. 'Nuther words, it was cosy.

I'd just gotten long-awaited silver cowboy boots from Stetson, so naturally I had to go full cowgirl, with the pink circle skirt with the black floral pattern & ruffles with a square dance petticoat, both of which I got from cupcake_goth, and the blouse with the ribbon & lace applique at the shoulders that I think is inspired by Jessica McClintock. Yeah, I knowingly wore pink to a party where nearly everyone else was in Christmas colors. Because punk or something?

And now for something completely different: consumerism. In addition to yesterday's boots, in the last couple of days I've gotten or will get:

• A nearly spherical night stand lamp that I won't knock over in the dark, from IKEA.
• A glass measuring cup from IKEA so I could get the free shipping. How did I go this long without one? Charlie don't bake, that's how.
• A manual juicer, also from IKEA. I can't have lemon seeds in my chicken tagine.
• An SAE-to-USB converter so I can charge stuff with my little 10W solar panel. That should come in handy at )'(.

Last night I dreamt that a totally hot younger brunette woman was into me, and we were about to have sexy times. But first she wanted to tidy up her room and put away her recreational drugs, and of course I helped. And then I woke up.

This may be the most me dream ever.

I just measured my dining area table. It comes as both a disappointment and a relief that I don't have enough space, not even close, for that fabulous dining set by John Kirschbaum. Oh, and I probably can't afford anything by Elizabeth Gahan and still pay surgery-related expenses.

Speaking of expeneses, I do believe I've found a group that I want to camp with at Burning Man, no ambivalence necessary. Yes, I've dug out my packing list of doom.

I put on the big blue dress from Gallery Serpentine that I got for my tenth rebirthday and hit the Wildrose last night. It was a small but merry gathering including Tacoma Girl, A from the Merc, and A's sweetie J, not to be confused with J-the-dancing-fiend whom I usually see at the Merc with A.

The Wildrose is a pretty good place to be a dirty old woman. Ahem.

People bought me drinks and I drank them, but adequate hydration and sleeping past 1100 this morning allowed me to, like, not suffer today. Tacoma Girl took me to Lost Lake, which is still a fantastic place to get fish & chips & relative sobriety. Luckily, we were in & out well before the rush that happens when the bars stop serving, i.e. 0100.

I've finished my pre-surgery to-do list. On to the packing list!

I put the funk in executive function. Fear me.

Edited to add: I just finished the packing list.

First a preface. I've written here several times about going up Aurora Ave., AKA State Road 99. It's a thirty-mile strip of car culture hell that extends from not quite downtown Seattle north into Snohomish County. It's basically a long, narrow blight zone that'll make anyone with any esthetic sensibility at all want to stick forks in their eyes.

But what if the stores were bigger and the place looked less seedy, as I've heard Aurora did fifty or sixty years ago? What you would have then is Federal Way, WA, about eight miles south of SEA airport, which is in turn well south of Seattle.

Sure, it isn't as soul-crushing as Aurora, but why even go there*? Because as of yesterday it's the end of the line for Sound Transit light rail's 1 line! That's right, three bucks and an hour get you from Seattle's U District all the way to Federal Way.

Assuming, of course, that some fool driving on Rainier Ave., the longer of the two at-grade sections of the 1 line, doesn't get in a wreck. I spent half an hour at Sodo looking around at my fellow passengers, texting the Tickler to let them know I'd be late for dinner, and wondering what was going on later at the Monkey Loft a few blocks away. Those at-grade sections, by the way, are the reason we can't automate our light rail as Vancouver did theirs. If I were Imperatrix Mundi they'd be elevated or, better, in cut-and-cover tunnels, and the NIMBYs would get mulched.

But! Onward and southward eventually to three new stations: Kent/Des Moines**, which is one block from Highline College. College kids are transit users, so the location of that station is absolutely correct. The next station is Star Lake; I hadn't known Star Lake existed until I read about the new stations. I guess they had to put a station somewhere.

And then Federal Way, where they put the station on the eastern edge of an agglomeration of big box stores and strip malls. The urbanist in me wishes they'd put it in the middle, but Sound Transit built a parking garage for the station. I can think of two reasons for this: we can expect Federal Way to be the end of the line for a long time, and it's so damn sprawly out there that suburbanites are justified in clinging to their cars for the last few miles. The sensible place for a parking garage is in a less crowded spot right next to I-5, right where it is.

Indeed, even before this latest extension, much of the 1 line's route at the northern and southern ends hugged I-5. It was probably the easiest place to get the rights of way; I know that's why there's no light rail on Aurora.

Is there new housing in Federal Way within walking distance of the station? Yup. Sanity comes to the suburbs, bit by bit.

How long did it take the Tickler to drive from their place in Tacoma to pick me up? Twenty-two minutes, baby. The drive from their place to mine is nearly ninety minutes in early evening traffic.

But! What's actually in Federal Way? Strip malls! Including one about fifteen blocks from the train station where nearly every business is Korean, including about half a dozen restaurants. The Tickler had done their homework and selected one for us named Moobongri. Not fancy, and not barbecue***, with Korean balads on the TV, but all about the tasty noodle soups. I wasn't brave enough to order the pork blood sausage, but the Tickler was. It's a bit chewy, so they ended up eating extra banchan. Would nom again, or would nom again at any of the gazillion neighboring restaurants. Ironically, parking is a bit tight there, so carpool.

But that was the early evening. What about the rest of the evening? I ended up taking the train to the bus to Ballard, where I shook my booty to a lady DJ named Leira and Riz Rollins. Lovely choonz but I went home at midnight because I'd woken up early and my third cup of caffeine was wearing off.

Fun fact: this has been a booze-free weekend by accident. I admit to feeling a lot perkier than I usually do on Sunday morning.



*Ms. Zappy's office was there. That's the only reason I'm familiar with the place.
**I had a friend who lived in Des Moines long ago. Pity she isn't still in this area.
***Korean barbecue really calls for a party of at least four. It's big food.