Saturday, November 28, 2009

Black Friday in Seattle

Amazingly enough, we woke up to blue skies and some sunshine peeking through white, fluffy clouds this morning. Remember, we are in Seattle, one of the rainiest cities on the planet. Tom & I walked around the neighborhood a bit this morning in search of a Starbuck's. One is NEVER far away from a Starbuck's when in Seattle, because this is the birthplace of the mega-chain of coffee stores. We found one about a block and a half away. While standing in line, I happened to look down at the floor and found a $10 bill. After asking the folks around us if it was theirs and all saying it wasn't, after placing our coffee order, I put it in the tip jar. The guy who took our order thought that was so cool, that he gave us our most expensive drink (Tom's Mocha Frappucino) free of charge. Tom and I have both noticed just how quickly a blessing given away comes back to revisit you in another blessing. It's the kind of cycle we both want to perpetuate.

Back to the rooms, gather the kids, then we were off to the monorail station (about 4-5 blocks away) for the ride to downtown....Westlake Center, to be exact. Not many people on the monorail, in fact, Tom and Tucker rode in the very front, next to the driver, but once downtown, there were hoards of people. There was a big parade going on which we caught bits and pieces of from the monorail and from the windows in the food court at the mall. Then into the fray to do a bit of shopping ourselves. We split up into two teams, Tom and Tucker going off to look at "guy" stuff, while Megan and I took off to check at the "girl" stuff. We popped into a store called "Bad Reputation" because they carry Ed Hardy clothing..........a line of clothing that Joe kind of likes. He has a few Ed Hardy t-shirts, but we found none here that looked like something that Joe would like. Megan was disappointed because there was no Aeropostale store in this mall so we headed outside to see what else we could find. We decided against going into Nordstrom because, while this is the Nordstrom flagship store here in Seattle, neither Megan or I really consider ourselves "Nordstrom girls".........just not our taste. We did take a quick look around in The Gap, then spied a Barnes and Noble sign. Now THIS is our kind of shopping. Books and lots of them! Megan has been seeking a book called Beautiful Creatures for a while now and our local Borders store does not have it in stock, so she wanted to look for it here and sure enough, they had it!!! So she got that and the second of a series of books that are written solely in instant message language, this one being titled TTFN (Ta Ta For Now). I fear that the next generation will not be able to spell and will speak in acronyms.

We received a call from Tom saying the Elizabet and her husband Ryan and their baby Alexander were meeting us at the pig statue at Pike's market at noon, so we headed that way so that we could spend some time with them and meet their baby for the first time. Very cute little guy and didn't fuss once!! We ate at a Mediterranean place where there seemed to be a bit of a communication break down when I placed my order. We finally got some food and visited for a bit then parted ways once again. Megan was cold (she didn't dress quite warm enough for outside walking) and wanted to head back to the room while Tom and Tucker wanted to return to the Nordstrom Rack, because their time there had been cut short due to the lunchtime meet with Elizabet and Ryan. Meg and I rode the monorail back to Seattle Center, made the short walk back to our room, where she watched some TV and I took about a two hour nap. I LOVE naps and very seldomly get or take the opportunity to take one, so this was quite a lovely treat!

Megan woke me around 5'ish so that we could all head downtown again to go to Gameworks. This is a GIANT arcade with tons of video games, old and new (I'm talking Frogger and Ms. Pacman to all the shoot up the zombie type games here). We had some old GameWorks cards that we had bought and loaded up with credits the last time we had been here (probably 5 years ago) that Megan had recently found at home somewhere so we presented these to the guy you buy credits from to see what was on them so we could decide how many more credits to buy and (here comes that blessing thing returned again), each card had about $75 worth of credits (there was a card for EACH of us, mind you) so we played games for about 2 hours and never spent an actual penny in the place!!!

We all got hungry and, rather than trying to find a restaurant, we all decided that we would be perfectly content to head back to the Metropolitan Market in our little neighborhood and grab something there to have in our rooms. Megan and I both got this yummy cold noodle with carrots, cashews, green onions and some kind of Asian type dressing, while the boys decided on a chips and salsa and guacamole feed. We settled into our respective rooms for the night, the guys watching ball games, Megan watching some Disney channel and doing some reading and I watched a couple of episodes of Numb3rs on-line. Then lights out. Another good day. Thank you, God.

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