Day 10, Thursday, February 7th, 2013

Our tenth day in Seattle saw the sun peek through the normal overcast skies, and in fact, stay peeked for the day entire.

I can sort of see the rationale behind the complaints of the locals, where it concerns weather. If you ask a native Seattelite (Seattelan? Seattician?) about the weather here, they invariably complain about the grey skies, the fog, the frequent rain and the drizzle. Coming here from Saskatchewan, just as February was about to slip its backyard chain and come howling over the fence with its icy teeth bared, your first impression is certainly not one that would inspire you to complaint. That being said, after nine days of not-insignificant cloud cover, seeing the sun was a lot like seeing an old friend.

So anyway, it was sunny.

We whistled for a cab and when it came near, the license plate was a series of numbers and letters and no dice hung from the mirror. If anything I could see that this cab was standard issue, and I said to the cabbie, "Hi, could you please take us to 21701 76th Ave W in Edmunds?"

Fifteen minutes later, we pulled up outside the UW Regional Heart Centre, in Edmunds, WA. It's part of the Stevens Health Center Building, which houses multiple facilities. I was there for an EKG, which takes somewhere in the vicinity of an hour. My tech's name was Joanna, and she was very friendly, and extremely efficient and proficient with the EKG apparatus and complex keyboard interface. I spent the time topless, with gel on my chest, being prodded by a wand; at the end, I was given a washcloth to clean myself up. In retrospect, that all sounds rather dirty.

We cabbed it from there straight to the Space Needle, having that free pass to use. Our cab driver was an interesting old stoner, long hair and all. He was missing a few teeth, had a bit of a pointy-rat face, and was more wiry than just skinny. We chatted with him the entire way back, and he had an interesting story for everything, and a method of delivery that involved his whole body. He had character coming out of every orifice the human body traditionally sports.

He dropped us off right in front of the space needle, in a spot that I'm fairly certain no one was meant to park in for any period of time at all, it essentially being the middle of the paved walk to the front door. And there we were: the Seattle Space Needle. Built for the 1962 World's Fair, and a tourist hotspot ever since. We chose to eat at the SkyCity restaurant, which was actually pretty damn good. Mom took six, maybe seven hundred pictures with her iPad as we rotated around. The SkyCity restaurant's seating is on a section that rotates around the Space Needle once every 45 minutes or so, giving you the full panorama of Seattle. Lots of the buildings in the immediate area had things on their rooftops that were meant to be seen only from the top of the Needle.

When we'd touristed enough, we took a look through the gift shop, and then we walked home, stopping only for red lights, cars, construction, and a Walgreen's. Having had a late lunch, we didn't really eat supper, though I made sure to cram a quick snack in at six thirty pm, because I had a procedure scheduled at 6:45 am the following morning, which I wasn't allowed to eat twelve hours prior to.

I subscribed to American Netflix that night (and Andy linked me to his Plex server), so the rest of the night was spent on passive media consumption, which was actually a pleasant change of pace. Mom watched Grey's Anatomy on the room's TV, I watched Justice League: Doom on my laptop. We are stereotypes.

A new study has found that six out of seven dwarves aren't Happy.