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Shobhit and I went on two different walks over the weekend, both of them pretty long walks—one of them incredibly long: on Saturday my steps count was 20,260; I hadn't even exceeded 19,000 since September, when I went to the Washington State Fair.
On that day, Shobhit and I walked
6.4 miles—a much longer walk than I typically do, and by the time we got back downtown via Jackson Street and then got up to the Central Library where I could pick up a library book, I was dead tired and uninterested in walking back up Capitol Hill to get home. We took the RapidRide G line bus back via Madison.
We did stop at some interesting spots along the way, though, the first being by far the most interesting: the Madrona Briar Patch, with its T-shaped boardwalks over a valley of greenery along Pine Street, which I first discovered while talking walks
during early covid restrictions, in April 2020. More specifically, under the boardwalks is now what's apparently called the "Valley of the Gnomes"—someone has placed a bunch of gnomes all over the greenery below and around these boardwalks, with a sign challenging us to see how many we can find.
I was certain the gnomes were not there when I walked through in 2020. Shobhit was sure they were. After doing some research online, I remain sure they weren't there in the spring of 2020—although they were there soon after. While I can find several web pages with information about the Valley of the Gnomes, including
on Atlas Obscura, none of them note the year they were installed.
The oldest reference I can find is on the Valley of the Gnomes
Yelp Page. The oldest posted review is from January 2021, so someone must have put the gnomes down there around that time. It was January 17, so it's possible someone put them there in late 2020, but not at all likely they were there in early 2020. I have done many Google searches, and narrowed down the search by date. Multiple pages come up for 2021; none for pages uploaded in 2020. So clearly I'm right!
I took eight photos while Shobhit and I were walking on Saturday, but only two of them of the gnomes. I really should have taken more, and am now making a mental note to go back and get more photos. I wasn't thinking as much about it on Saturday because we were not really dawdling and had several more miles of walking to do. If I make it the actual destination sometime soon, then I can go and get a bunch more photos, and create a dedicated photo album. Several other people online have gotten very cool photos of the gnomes, not all of which are really far away from camera access, making me realize there's a lot more than what registerd initially. Mostly they are easy to miss if you aren't paying attention.
I did take that walk again myself in 2020, a month later, in May. At that time there were children's art pieces
hanging on the boardwalk, one of which read,
When you're sad . . . THINK ABOUT CATS! It was adorable. And, again, not likely to be an artistic thing stacked on top of the gnomes, which were likely added several months later.
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Shobhit and I went on another walk yesterday, this time up 15th Avenue and then over to 19th; back to 15th at Louisa Boren Lookout; through Volunteer Park and down to Broadway back to the Capitol Hill Farmers Market before returning home. That walk was much shorter than Saturday's,
about four miles, but still: long enough, and I was still tired from the walk the day before. Plus, when we first headed out yestrday I expected a relatively quick walk, but instead we were out for nearly two hours.
Shobhit is obsessed with getting his steps in, and I get it. He regularly wants me to go on these huge walks with him though, and I don't always really want to walk that much. I know it's good for me. He also mentions how we'll be walking a ton in Washington, D.C., but that's very different. We won't be thinking so much about how much we're walking, but rather will be totally distracted from it by the points of interest we'll be walking to all over the place. Much like the Washington State Fair, it's a totally different context.
But, these past couple of days, it did also give him two Social Review points. So I guess there's that.
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— पांच हजार सात सौ निन्यानबे —
Otherwise, the weekend has been very movie-centric, and fairly Alexia-centric. On Friday she came to meet me at Pacific Place and we saw
The Amateur, which I saw with her because it seemed like her kind of movie. Laney was never interested in it, and she's off to Oregon with Jessica anyway.
Alexia and I enjoyed the movie okay, even though it was far frm perfect. She brought it up again yesterday and said she couldn't put her finger on what was "off" about it. We brainstormed a bit, and I said: "It lacks depth." She agreed that was a good way of putting it. The movie had engagingly clever plotting, but no depth—and certainly no character dimension, let alone development. It was just a revenge thriller, with very muddled moral messaging.
Alexia offered me a ride home after the movie on Monday, and I accepted. She had parked at the Amazon Spheres, and that was how I learned that
the parking garage there offers free parking every weekday after 4 p.m. An incredibly useful thing to know! Alexia said she and her friend have come a couple of times to shows at Jazz Alley (I'm not sure I've ever been there) and used this garage both times.
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I had an unusual run of three movies I went to see three days in a row last week: I saw
A Nice Indian Boy with Laney on Thursday; I saw
The Amateur with Alexia on Friday; and on Saturday, I took myself to SIFF Cinema Uptown on Lower Queen Anne to see
The Ballad of Wallace Island. It was lovely in its way, but also not particularly special. I did like the folk music if featured.
Sunday saw Alexia's return, this time for a Braeburn Condos double feature: the next in our Batman Movies Marathon. So this time we saw
Batman Forever, which is nowhere near as good as
Batman or
Batman Returns but is still relatively entertaining; and
Batman & Robin, which is a straight up abomination. Even Alexia marveled at how bad it was. I told her I had included it in our itinerary so she'd get all the jokes when we eventually watch
The LEGO Batman Movie. By the time
Batman & Robin was about three quarters over, she said, "It's a good thing we're friends!"
Alexia has a knack for coming for double features when I can't get the fucking theater to work. In the past it was projection issues, and the projector worked fine this time. I wanted to play these movies using my DVD copies, but this time the fucking DVD player would not work. So, I went back upstairs and grabbed my laptop and HDMI cable. At least I can now connect to a working public wifi, and all the Batman movies are streaming on Max. So, I just played them from there. It took some time for even that to connect properly, but finally it did, and thankfully after that everything was fine.
Alexia left after we were done, and Shobhit was watching
The Accountant. By the end of the day I had also coordinated with Alexia to book our tickets to the Crystal Mountain Gondola on Saturday, May 3 for my Birth Week. Shobhit will be coming too. I can't wait, I've wanted to go ride that gondola for ages. I've also booked the tickets to the Smith Tower with Shauna on Friday the 2nd. Things are coming together for my Birth Week. I'm so glad I'm so organized!
Anyway then Shobhit and I spent the evening watching TV: the season premiere of season 2 of
The Last of Us; this week's episode of
The Righteous Gemstones and this week's episode of
Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. All of them on Max, the best streamer out there! They should give me a commission for promoting them. It doesn't have to be much, something like thirty or forty bucks would be fine.
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[posted 12:31pm]
