Snoqualmie Falls

Happy Day 53
We expanded the being-tourists-in-our own-town-for-the-sake-of-our-guests effort to the state level and took the quick trip up to Snoqualmie Falls one day, only about a 45 minute drive up into the Cascades from Seattle.  

Puget Sound Energy has a hydroelectric plant at the falls and maintains the whole site very well. It's quite accessible (compared to my previous experience with hydroelectricity in Washington state) and therefore was packed to the gills with people on this particular fair summer Saturday. 

We made the steep trek from the upper observation area to the lower one.

Given the fact that I was seven months pregnant at this point, there was definitely some huffing and puffing on the way back up, but I remember feeling pretty proud of myself for not being on my bum eating bonbons anywho. :)

Own Backyard

Happy Day 52

After a trip to Pike Place on our friends' second day in town we wandered along the waterfront to Seattle Art Museum's Olympic Sculpture Park. One of the best parts of having visitors in a place like Seattle is being forced to be tourists ourselves and actually get out and see and do all the things we've not yet gotten around to.

Written On Stone

Happy Day 51
Our first visitors of the summer were friends from home (Illinois) who came over the Fourth of July. They arrived pretty early in the morning so we fed them and then took them straight to Lincoln Park here in West Seattle for some instant PNW gratification. Lincoln Park is right on the Sound with lots of nice wooded paths in addition to the walk along the beach. Down by the water someone had left this nice sentiment behind.

Good Things in Small Vases

Happy Day 50 
This was the point in the summer when things got a little hectic. I was trying to finish up with my last bit of work before baby-induced retirement which I was hoping to begin before we played host to a series of summer visitors. Though there were plenty of happy moments and things, I just didn't always get the chance to document them. And then came baby. But I do have lots of pics from the rest of the summer and fall, some I actually tagged, some I didn't. So I'll just keep counting happy days here and am going to try to resume formal daily observation of the good stuff till I hit 100. Gratitude seems like a good thing to be reminded to practice regularly this time of year anyhow.
I think I'd been without flowers on the dining room table for awhile so I decided to fix that right quick by gathering this tiny little arrangement of astilbe, cosmos, and salvia from the garden. 

Date Night

Happy Day 49
Pizza in Seattle is bad. All but five places specialize in wood fired pizza and three of those five (estimates based on my own meticulous research) do some sort of kinda-New York style. Wood fired pizza in and of itself isn't bad, but being from the midwest, we desperately miss the deep dish and the thin and crispy and cut into little squares varieties. The remaining two pizza places here that don't do wood fired do deep dish, and one of those just didn't cut it for us. The other, Kylie's Chicago Pizza in the Fremont neighborhood is actually quite good. This was our first time trying it out and we've gone back whenever the opportunity has presented itself. Desperately wish it was located in West Seattle instead of up north (see previous post for reason).     

Besides discovering (in our humble opinion) the best pizza in Seattle, our evening also included a stroll under the Aurora Ave. Bridge to visit this guy,

the Fremont Troll.

Unexpected Happy

Happy Day 48
Traffic in Seattle is bad. Every single day. When I worked at the office of the company I was with, I had to commute from West Seattle to the northerly neighborhood of Ballard via WA 99, a good chunk of which is part of a massive construction project to take the road from elevated freeway to tunnel through downtown. And while there is technically more than one way to drive to West Seattle, the only way that makes sense when you're going to or coming from the north is over the West Seattle Bridge and onto 99 or Interstate 5, so in and around those interchanges can be a real bottleneck. On this particular day, if my memory serves me, 99 was completely shut down through downtown due to an accident so I was in the midst (along with all other 99 commuters) of trying to get to Interstate 5 to get home. I was still really hoping to not miss a happy day at this point, but pretty convinced I wasn't going to find something to be happy about. But, happily, in the Mercer median right at the on/off 5 point, one of the Department of Transportations got it right and sowed some stress relief. Maybe someone did a study that showed wild flowers in medians help prevent road rage? Worked for me.

Working Conditions

Happy Day 47
One thing I loved about my job in cultural resource management was NOT being chained to a desk in a dreary cubicle day in and day out. I got out in the field regularly, usually a construction site of some sort, but on this particular day the field consisted of the Central Seattle Public Library to conduct some research. I must say, the post-modern structure is pretty cool to behold inside and out. Though some of the earlier editions were definitely worthy of mourning the passing of. 
I am not working currently (that is, as an archaeologist). I am very much enjoying stay-at-home-mommyhood. Baby update coming up.