So, sorry for the prolonged radio silence. We went on HOLIDAY! To AMERICA! I caught LURGY! For the FLIGHT HOME! Okay, done with the all-caps shouting now. Yes, we went over to see my best beloved’s family and friends, and to delight in the gorgeous sunshine that Washington State provides in March*. I’m not going to go over what we did each and every day for two reasons. One, I have a hopeless memory and we crammed the holiday pretty full of exciting goings-and-doings-and-seeings. Second, because y’all don’t want to hear about each and every family-type-thing we did with Kathryn’s Awesome Family**.
Anyhow, so among other things, we wandered around the delightful Olympia eating out at some really stunning restaurants/cafés/assorted eateries. Kathryn has oft lamented the absence of the Lemon Grass Restaurant’s Honey Walnut Prawns from our life, and having tried them, I can understand. They were quite, quite excellent. We also headed out to a great Thai restaurant which had, I think, the best Pad Thai I’ve ever had. The quality of food we ate, both home cooked and from restaurants was fantastic throughout. And I’m using far too many excited adjectives, so I’ll try and tone it down a bit (ha).
So I think the first museum we hit was the LeMay Car Museum which is large enough to start to allow even me to hit saturation point on taking in info about cars. I’ve never known a huge amount about American cars, although I’ve had a bit of a soft spot for 40s and 50s Americana, despite it’s vast size and inefficiency. What I do know is mainly skirting around the edges of Ford’s history (having had the old Escort), and also having a bit of a soft spot for the old Edsel (just for being so universally unloved). It was, unsurprisingly, really interesting learning about the evolution of the American car – which is very different to the evolution of the European car, which has tried to cram itself into our car-unfriendly towns and cities. Also, some of the sheer insanity was just joyous.
This is a Kaiser Dragon:
In many respects it’s just an ordinarily extremely chromed piece of 50’s Americana (1953, to be precise). However, it’s just taken that step further. The glovebox is personalised with the owner’s name, the seats are covered in vinyl-to-look-like-fabric-designed-by-someone-famous (who I can’t remember). The roof is not merely covered in Vinyl, but instead covered in vinyl moulded to look like bamboo. Apparently they surveyed 1950’s American housewives and asked them what they’d like in a car, and this is their composite answer…
They also had my much desired GM EV1. And the prototype for that… Both of which I would rather fancy… they’re just sat there…
Along with a selection of intriguing early electric vehicles with surprisingly large range and adequate top speeds (for the time). You can see why they would’ve been popular at the time, the charging time must have been a bit of a pig, but the reliability of it probably made up for it. I did moot the suggestion that I’d be happy to act as a ‘regular driver’ for the cars, to help them remain well maintained. They could just ship me one every few days or weeks… They didn’t seem terribly interested in that as a suggestion tho’.
One interesting outcome of this is it turns out that Kathryn rather likes 1930s and 1940s pickups. Which means that when we get to Canada, picking up something like this (1935 Ford Pickup) is not wholly unreasonable. Although it’ll ideally be an automatic. Unfortunately, that also means I might run into things like this (1948 Dodge) when we’re trying to sort the ‘sensible’ car. Although I may have learned from Chester. And may accept something more of Chester’s era. I saw a lot of 240s kicking around in WA, so that might be an option for the sensible winter car. Either that or a 4×4 (mmm, Landy). Anyhow. Yeah, so that was pretty nifty.
Another of the excellent museums we visited was the EMP Museum. We hit up the Hendrix, Art of Video Games and Sci-Fi exhibits, all of which were terribly well done. Listening to Hendrix reminded me I still don’t have Electric Ladyland (yes, I know it’s been reissued) and should obtain it forthwith. It also led to an interesting chat with Kathryn’s mum about her experiences in the 1960s. The Art of Video Games exhibit was very interesting, although I was surprised the Amiga didn’t get dropped in there, since the PC did. There were some intriguing games that I’d missed the first time around and it’s also inspired me to finally get around to getting a PS2 video cable, to reawaken the slumbering beastie. Although at this point it might actually be worth getting a PS3, as prices seem to have dropped. Mind you, waiting for the PS4 to come out will probably drop the prices substantially further… Which is handy, because if they ever get Sim City working (and available on Mac, ideally with a single player mode so that I can play it, say, when we move to the middle of no-where and have a ropey, slow, expensive internet connection) then I need to buy that. Need. Definitely.
Aaaanyhow. Whilst we were in Seattle, Kathryn and her Mom very generously assuaged my desire to ride the future
See how it’s the future? Yeah? No? You’re all fools, I tell you. Monorails are the future :-P
Apparently, the future is noisier and somewhat bumpier than I thought it would be. It was still cool, and I still get to proclaim “I RODE THE MONORAIL!” at anyone who I think might appreciate it :)
It’s the future.
On another trip we also hit up the Tacoma Art Museum, which was another excellent place to visit, and I highly recommend it. I particularly enjoyed, if enjoyed is exactly the right word for it, the retrospective of Michael Kenna’s photography. Much of the exhibit was just plain enjoyable. However, there’s a section of photographs from World War II concentration camps, which was incredible in the way it juxtaposed such normality with commentary of such horror. It was one of those exhibitions which left me feeling that ‘how can I go around delighting in this art when stuff like this happens now‘. A disconcerting sensation.
The museum also has an art studio open for general use, which is something that every museum should have (well, tech places should have maker spaces). It’s…inspiring.
Among the many non-museum (and also non-gallery) places we visited were some shops that I think deserve particular heads ups.
First up is the very lovely Rainy Day Records in Olympia.
Both Kathryn and I walked out of that shop with an enormous haul of music. Well, okay, a large haul of music – and seeing how much we were buying they chucked in my 5 gramophone records for free. For *free* I tell you! Hence my laptop now sports Rainy Day Records stickers (my laptop has been kept pristine until recently when it got some sort of mark that doesn’t want to come off). They were doubly lovely, though, on hearing that we were going to be shipping the records back to the UK, the chap carefully wrapped and packaged the (free, let me remind you) gramophones in bubble wrap and then taped that into a 12″ record shipping box… for FREE all the while sympathising about the difficulty of transporting music back from hols. They had a great selection of indie and local artists, plus a solid selection of second hand / classic vinyl. On top of which they are lovely. Totally recommended.
We also stopped by The Elliott Bay Book Company, which was as delightful as last time. Thankfully, I’d already stocked up on books at Orca Books in Olympia – and so walked away with only two or three from this store (packing our stuff to come home was a nightmare, not because we’d bought expensive stuff, but heavy stuff). The staff at Elliott bay apparently have connections to the ever awesome Mr B’s Emporium, in Bath and were incredibly friendly and chatty. Despite having moved, Elliott Bay felt (to my untutored eye) much like the previous store, even retaining it’s two level set up. I’m unutterably jealous that we don’t have anything even near it’s equivalent in Bristol. I love Mr B’s and Topping, but something with that size and space… it’s like a Cathedral of books. It makes me go quite weak at the knees, thinking about it.
And then there was a brief, but unfortunate (at least for finances) visit to The Danger Room where the chap running it possibly remembered Kathryn. He at least maintained the pretence of having done so, and was again friendly, chatty, helpful. And they had an excellent selection of graphic novels, which we ended up helping relieve him of. At least of some of them.
What else? Went to a lovely BBQ where I got a bit of a less wedding related chance to chat to some of Kathryn’s awesome friends, and meet some of their cute miniature people. Went and saw Pinniped playing… who were excellent (as expected). Sarah played at our wedding, don’tcha know. We are that posh as to have professional, awesome musicians playing at our wedding :)
I spent some time rooting a Nook simple touch, so I could use it as an e-reader for my Google Reader thus reducing the bright-lights-before-bed-time problem. Having got it working really easily we picked up another one, which absolutely declines to be rooted. I need to have a fiddle with it tomorrow and see if maybe updating it’s firmware and using different software to root it will allow success. Of course, having done this, I discover that Google reader is being retired. Trying to find RSS compatible things that will run on Android 2.1 on an e-reader is, well… tricky.
Still I should be able to enjoy it for a bit and am hoping that someone will release a nice e-ink rss reader app that syncs with something other than google reader and supports offline reading. Because those are two really quite cool features which we had.
In house news, shortly after we got back we were greeted by the cheery sound of one of our chimney pots disintegrating. I’ve no idea yet how much that might cost to fix, but it certainly wasn’t something we were expecting. It’s doubly irritating because it’s the kitchen chimney, I think, and we’ve never actually used that. Just had it swept. Feh.
In better news, my fine Russian time piece has returned from the watch repairers. It had reached the point where whilst I could set the time, and the second hand would continue merrily on its trajectory, and the hour and minute hand might start following at some random point afterwards, or sometimes not start moving at all. This made me sad. After much effort I found out about Ryte Time, and the excellent chap Stephen Burrage, who repairs Russian wrist watches and doesn’t start e-mails or conversations about them with “They’re really not worth repairing”. Whilst I understand that it’s true, in financial terms, and indeed in accuracy terms a modern watch would outpace mine substantially. A £3 watch made by some poor slave-labour child in some heavily polluting factory in China will almost certainly outperform my 1950’s Moskva. However, as it happens I don’t wear a watch all the time. I don’t wear it at work (Bare below the elbows) and whole weeks will pass where I’ll forget to put it on. So I tended to find that what happened was I bought a new battery for my nice watch, and then…. it died. This watch requires no batteries. A massive EMP could go off, and my watch would still tell the time. It would have very little relevance, and I’d probably be dead in the vast food shortages that would follow. But my watch (and, until not that long ago, my car) would still work. Err, yes, rant (and tangent) over.
So I found this chap who cheerfully quoted me a very reasonable sum for servicing and polishing the quartz and relumeing the hands. This was particularly good news as the hour hand (I’m not sure if you can see it very well in the before shot below) had gone very brown. It was also probably decaying into something hideously radioactive, but hey. The quartz glass was terribly scratched making viewing the face from any kind of angle pretty much a non-starter.
Before:
So I popped it in the post to him, and he sent back some polite caveats about how he didn’t want to do too much to it because the face is not in great shape (which it’s not) and he’d do his best with polishing it and the hands…But that he felt it was servicable. I doubt the poor watch’s been serviced in its life, so this was quite a novel experience for it, I imagine. And now it cheerfully ticks away. It’s run on and off for 60 years and still, having been serviced keeps good time. The quartz still has a couple of very small marks on it (I suspect imperfections in the short-lived Moskva factory’s production processes) and the hands have some corrosion, but overall it’s quietly transformed. I’m quite delighted with it.
So yay.
And that, my loves, was our holiday (glossing over the flight home during which I suffered from hideous lurgy).
* Yes, most people, on hearing that we were going to the ‘States said we should enjoy the sunshine. Granted, we had two days which were clear and bright and not quite cold. But the weather was pretty much the same as here.
** Who put us up in their house on the side of a mountain with a view of another mountain and who lent us a car so we could tool around Washington State to our heart’s content, among many other awesome things they did, most of which I’m not going to mention, because they’re family.
