• 2:29 AM
  But first a brief reminisce

Kris and Ed at my recent birthday dinner.
(They wound up ordering steak.)

Today started with chocolate chip cookies (good!), bad hair (Helen: "Ooh.. don't pet kitty backwards."), coffee and free ride to work (good!) and guy walking into the courthouse downtown with a grenade (bad.).

The cookies came out great - creaming the butter and sugar together very thoroughly paid off. I packed them all up and took them to work in a tupperware - my pale excuse for not riding my bike today. ("The tupperware is too big and ungainly to pack on my bike!")

The hair I just brushed back and put a hair tie on. This is my second day hair, when I wake up too late to re-braid it. It loses a lot of braid integrity and I get little wisps sticking out around my neck. And little wisps coming off the top of my head. And sides. Good thing I don't have to see very many people at work, huh?

Coffee and a ride to work - this worked out really well, because Helen and I now have a tradition of having a little outing on the solstice, to celebrate the super-long day. So she dropped me off, I worked...

And then some guy with a grenade walked into the new federal courthouse. The grenade later turned out to have been defused before he arrived, but it's not like anyone could tell from the distance you'd keep from a mad guy waving a grenade around. Police shot him dead, and speculate it may have been suicide-by-cop. Much later, the bomb squad showed up to find out what was in the bag he was carrying around. (a will and a cutting board)

ELAINE THOMPSON / AP
I like that the bomb squad guy gets a matching duffle bag

So, after work Helen picked me up and we went off on a ferry boat odyssey to... nearby Bainbridge Island! There we walked up to whatever place was open for dinner, and had reasonably good meals. What we really liked was their attitude towards dessert.

One guess what we ordered. Hint: carrot cake is a breakfast food.

After dinner, though there was still light in the sky, the last regular ferry had gone, and now they came very sporadically. The next one would be in more than an hour, and we waited patiently at the dock, watching the enormous moon, the excessive number of hoses on the railings...

The blatant disregard for posted signs...

Finally, as we waited amongst the last group of spastic teenagers on the boarding tunnel, the ferry arrived, preceded by a glittering cascade of light, like a mothership out of the darkness of space. It really was incredibly neato looking.

Oh hey.. guess which slip number we were waiting at.

Solstice successfully celebrated! Tomorrow: work again. Day after: an especially difficult root canal at the endodontist. Next monday: appointment with my favorite facial surgery guy to see about removing the teeth that suck the most.