Seattle was fun -- hung out with Josh, Sammit, Dennis & Vicki, and Selbie (at various times and never simultaneously). Josh's apartment was a different kind of mess than usual: boxes everywhere. He claimed he'd been cleaning up a lot recently, and at first i didn't believe him, but after the first day i realized this kind of mess really was a lot cleaner than the normal kind. It was still way past the point where i would've done a panic-clean, but for some people that's not really a priority.
Greg and i arrived on Thursday night and Josh took us to a little yuppie bar with good sake and acceptable sushi. We crashed and then Friday spent most of the day finding lunch and contacting friends while Josh went to work at Avogadro (the name that constantly confuses me because of my utter devotion to advogato). Found a burrito place and got a burrito, despite my misgivings that Seattle is not known for burritos. It was extremely bland and boring until Greg showed me his discovery: they want you to put the salsa and toppings on yourself! After this revelation, the burrito was much better. Then we met up with Josh at work and Greg took a nice panorama of the Seattle skyline from their top-floor balcony.
For dinner, we met Dennis [i am forbidden to ever call him Denny again] and Vicky at a Greek place, with Sammit. The food was awesome: i got good souvlaki for the first time in probably five years. Sammit was looking a lot better than I imagined, after all his scary talk on say2 about cancer. He'd lost weight and grown a little salt-n- pepper goatee which actually made him look more cool than old.
Afterward we hung out at a cool bar called Barça which for some reason had Boddington's on tap. Talked politics and stuff for a while until our voices became hoarse, then got dragged to a bar called "Cuff" which Josh and Sammit swore up and down was not a leather bar. Inside, we found various people in leather gear, several hundred daddy bears, and a two-story tall rendition of a Tom-of-Finland style leather man. Also a couple of guys were dressed up in full football gear. Since that's not a leather bar, i wonder what the real Seattle leather bars are like.
Saturday we hung out with Selbie and went to the Seattle World's Fair fairgrounds. There was supposed to be some sort of Japanese cherry blossom festival, but all we could find was a mall that had a bad karate demonstration going on. So we popped over the Experience Music Project (EMP to those in the know) and checked out probably about 10% of it before Josh finally caught up with us (another victim of the weird cell-phone vortex over Seattle) and we talked in the bar a lot.
Even though it's very cliche, a lot of our trip to Seattle involved sitting around in various places and drinking beer or coffee. I expected the Seattle-ites to go "no! we cannot live this cliche!" but nobody did. I certainly can't complain: sitting around and drinking coffee is a great way to pass time.
That night, more bars (this time with Josh and Selbie) and then sleep and then barely catching our flight back to SFO on Sunday afternoon. The rest of the week passed in a blur, because absolutely nothing goes on at work anymore except trips to the cafe across the street, moping around, and periodic news of our attempts to get funding. I actually feel guilty when i'm doing work-related stuff (mostly patches to various python gnome modules to make them work well with reef).