Bree comes home for a long Spring Break, arriving at SeaTac some time after midnight.
Bree takes Jan to Emerald City ComicCon. The day before she’d gone with her friend, Marina, but her plan to attend today with another friend fell through.
Bree was already planning to cosplay as Mabel Pines from the cartoon series, Gravity Falls, so she proposed that Jan attend as Mabel’s grand-uncle Stanley Pines, a.k.a. “Gruncle Stan”. Stan’s fixed wardrobe in the show is a dark suit, a red fez, a small red tie, and thick black glasses. Bree whips up a nice-looking fez and tie in no time, and knocks the lenses out of an old pair of sunglasses.
Gruncle Stan’s default expression is a combination of concern and fear, which Jan does his best to capture:
At the convention, we attend a panel discussion featuring the cast of Critical Role, Bree’s favorite D&D channel on YouTube. We spend the rest of our time at the convention walking through the exhibit hall of artists and the giant hall of merch.
Angela’s plans to go skiing are thwarted — by too much snow.
Although the Pacific Northwest has seen very little snow this winter, here at the edge of Spring the mountains are getting a fair amount. This week’s forecast predicted a blizzard bringing a ton of fresh snow today, so Angela and a friend had made plans to ski at Crystal Mountain. She’s up bright and early when she learns that snow and fallen trees have closed the road.
Meanwhile, we get the first snow of the season in our own neighborhood. It snows all morning.
Jan takes Bree shopping at Pacific Fabrics in the SoDo District so she can buy green fabric to make her prom dress. By the late afternoon, our upstairs loft is buried in scraps of green.
Later Bree discusses with Jan some mischief she’s instigated with some friends.
Jan: It sounds like you’re sowing discord…
Bree: And dresses!
Jan passes by the Arboretum wetlands on a long training walk, looping across Lake Washington and back on the floating bridges.
Bree takes advantage of her proximity to Liya, traveling to Vancouver by bus to spend two nights with her sister. Her trip falls under the family policy we instituted several years ago of funding visits between siblings.
Liya and Bree spend a busy day in Vancouver. They go ice skating:
Visit a pretty botanical conservatory:
Enjoy a tasty lunch, after which they fall into a food coma:
Visit the Vancouver Aquarium:
And finish things up with a Chinese hot pot for dinner.
Jan’s aunt Chuckie passes away at the home of her son, David, in Vermont. She was 94. Lyn is now the last of the four sisters. (The photo shows Chuckie and Lyn together when we made a family trip to Utah in 2012.)
Chuckie had always been Jan’s favorite aunt, and he’s very glad he made a trip to see her in April 2024. He brought Lyn along so the two sisters could have a final get-together, and they were overjoyed to see each other again.
Cherry blossom time at the University of Washington
Early springtime adventure. For this week’s training hike, Jan wants a long hike with more climbing. At 16 miles, the Tiger Mountain Trail is a good match: it’s the longest trail in the area, and includes a substantial 4500’ of ascent. The problem is that it’s a one-way hike, which generally means arranging for someone to drop off or pick up.
Today Jan decides to try something else: packing our electric scooter in the car, driving to the southern end of the trail, then riding the scooter up to the north end of the trail. This idea seemed perfectly reasonable the night before.
In practice this is slightly crazy, as it requires riding a scooter along the edge of a country highway very early in the morning, when nobody flying along the highway expects to see someone. Additionally, the northern terminus is not actually reachable by regular roads, only the I-90 highway. Jan’s plan counts on taking the Issaquah Preston Trail rail trail to reach the trailhead, but this ends up being a slightly sketchy ride on dirt and gravel.
With the ride safely over, Jan locks up the scooter at the northern trailhead and begins hiking south. Tiger Mountain is an extremely popular hiking area — even early in the morning there are already countless hikers. Nearly all of them are hiking loops on the north side of the mountain. After he crosses the trail’s high point (where light rain turns to light snow), the middle the forest in nearly empty until he reaches the trail loops near the southern trailhead.
Bree returns to Choate for her final term of high school. She’ll graduate at the end of May — in just over two months.
We pick up the pottery pieces we made back at a nearby studio in January. All four pieces came out nicely. (We didn’t have anything to do with the painting or glazing; we just picked what colors we wanted for our pieces.)
Jan’s two red bowls actually nest, which is convenient. And the tiny green cup Angela salvaged when her second bowl fell apart is adorable.
We march in the third No Kings protest from Cal Anderson Park in Capitol Hill to the Seattle Center. It’s a beautiful day to be outside, there’s a huge crowd and great energy.
There are the usual forgettable speeches. (One exception: a man tries to encourage people to meet their neighbors by saying, “Everyone turn around to say hello to the person behind you…” He evidently didn’t think about how that was going to work.) The park is so crowded that it takes a very long time to squeeze out of the park and onto the street to join the march.
We mostly enjoy the long walk down Pine Street to 4th Avenue to Seattle Center. Highlights include a fun marching band playing by the Paramount Theater and a large group of grim reapers each wearing a sign with a cause of death like “Global Aid Cuts”.
Another interesting long weekend training walk. Jan wants to stick closer to home this weekend but wants a walk he hasn’t done before, so he rides Seattle’s brand-new train to the Eastside. He takes the train all the way to the end of the line in Redmond, then walks back home.
After many years of planning and construction, the new line opened yesterday. One thing that makes it interesting is that it’s the world’s first train line on a floating bridge; the lake level doesn’t stay constant, so it’s miraculous that they worked out how to have the train cross smoothly onto and off of the bridge tracks.
It’s also interesting to see how it connects a set of neighborhoods on the Eastside, and how much housing and business has already grown up around the stations in anticipation of the line’s opening.