Salt Touched

Blue skies, sunshine
What a day to take a walk in the park
Ice cream, day dream
Till the sky becomes a blanket of stars
What a day for pickin’ daisies
And lots of red balloons
~ Spanky and Our Gang “Lazy Day”

The best days are totally unpredictable. What was thought to be just a coffee date can turn into something – just…multiple shades of excellent.

I woke up this morning very tempted to just stay in bed, since I didn’t have to teach until one and there was nothing making me get up. But Amras and I did have plans, had in fact had plans for days, and after last week’s corporate invasion we were both in need of simply getting off the ship.

The air, you see, is just really different outside, and we’d had little chance to go shore-side lately.

Pike Street Market it just as quirky and labyrinthine as I remember it being when I was last able to visit it at least seven years ago, but before we could even think of exploring it properly, we really had to eat, and possibly get some caffeine into our blood stream.

What? It was early!

Besides, Seattle literally invented Starbucks; it seemed almost sacrilege not to have coffee there

That said, the line for the first ever Starbucks was ridiculously long, as was almost everywhere else, but eventually we found a little delicatessen that was only lightly crowded and offered some utterly sinful breakfast sandwiches (mmm warm croissants with bacon omelet filling, nomnomnom) and an equally yummy caramel latte (again, hey it’s Seattle). Once we’d consumed food we were a little more prepared for delving into the maze that is Pike Street.

Minnowing our way through flower sellers and handicrafts, and avoiding the world famous fish sellers, we eventually made our way down to the lower levels – which have always been my favourite. The crowds down there are lighter and the shops are the kind you can easily lose yourself in just for fun.

There’s a bookseller there that sells almost nothing but second hand sci-fi and fantasy novels. I could spend hours in there, and no doubt most of my paycheque, perhaps several paycheques. But this time the window to said bookseller took me a little bit by surprise. You see, sharing the space with the books was something else…ventriloquist puppets.

Not just any ventriloquist puppets – one of them was a clown! A totally stereotypical creepy clown! At this I stopped dead in the walkway.

Gah! Why would anyone DO that? Why would anyone think that was a good idea?

Do what?

Make a ventriloquist clown! That’s taking one creepy thing and adding it to another creepy thing to make an ultra-creepy thing! And that’s just so wrong!

While Amras was still transfixed by the still-so-wrong puppet residents of the window, I grabbed his unsuspecting hand and pulled him into the book store; where the proprietor sang his transactions to his customers (yeah, people are wonderfully weird on the west coast), and where I was incredibly restrained and only bought one book. Just one, but I’ve been looking for it and meaning to get it, and hey I don’t work in a library anymore, I have to get my books somewhere! I can’t not have books!

The candy shoppe Amras wanted to take me too wasn’t open yet so we ambled through bric-a-brak stores that sold everything from costume jewellery decorated with fire opals to incense and china shops with beautiful figurines in the windows until eventually we found the other shop I had forgotten all about. You see, Pike’s Street has a magic shop, a relatively good sized one.

Stationed outside the magic shop is an old gypsy woman in a class glass half-case, her gnarled hands perpetually crooked over a deck of cards. Feed two quarters into the slots at the bottom of the case and she will move her aching robotic fingertips over her never-changing cards and spit out a fortune card from the slot under the coin drop. She told me I would receive a letter from someone I love, and that I loved to sing and dance through life. She was right about the second part, we’ll see about the letter.

The magic shop also sells juggling equipment, which reminded me that I didn’t really have any anymore, as mice had eaten my good juggling balls last year. So, after saying a warm hello to the guest entertainer who was also hanging out in the magic shop for the day (and getting to see some pretty amazing sleight of hand), I wandered over to the rack of diablos and Higgens Bros equipment.

I usually buy Higgens Bros, at least I used to, back when I bought juggling equipment at all. There were some nice ones there, in the traditional primary circus colours, but it was the ones next to them – branded by Cirque De Solei, that caught my eye with their silvers blacks and purples. So I grabbed them and trotted back to the counter.

I usually buy Higgens Brothers, but these are just so much prettier!

Oh yeah, actually these are really nice, want to give them a try first?

Sure! That’d be awesome.

So the clerk popped open the plastic casing and handed the set over. At this point the guest ent who was still hanging out at the counter, and whom Amras and I have both known for many seasons now, looked at me

I didn’t know you juggled Shaughnessy

Yeah, well, I used to. I’m way out of practice

I weighed the multicoloured spheres in my hands and then spun them out into the standard cascade. And lo, it actually came back, perhaps not quite as easy as riding a bike, but it came back. I heard Amras laugh behind me as I flipped the set into the beginnings of an inside cascade.

Oh yeah, she’s totally out of practice

At which point I tried something too complicated and the first ball dropped

Ye-ah, well I’ve lost my mill’s mess if nothing else

I had no idea you juggled!

It’s my Dad’s fault. I was already singing and dancing when I was a kid, and he told me when I was about ten or eleven I guess, that one day I would be in the final cut of an audition, with a bunch of girls who were all exactly like me. And that the director would say something like “Ok, you’re all good, your all talented, you can all sing you can all dance but who where can…oh I dunno…juggle?” and it would be the girl who broke out a three ball pattern that got the gig. So…eventually I learned to juggle.

That…is awesome

Well he’s always said that he wishes he’d said something more useful, like ballet or piano!

Which just made everyone, including me, laugh.

I tucked my purchase into a bag, and followed Amras to the now open candy shoppe, where he insisted on buying bubble gum – despite the fact that I kept telling him that the fact that I can’t blow bubble gum bubbles is one of the greatest humiliations of my life.

But really! I can’t even blow bubble gum bubbles!

Just follow me

So I pop the bright pink strip of hubba bubba into my mouth and follow him down stairways and around corners until we finally get to what turned out to be our destination

So, this is post alley

I’d heard of Post Alley, but I’d never seen it. It’s more commonly known as Bubble Gum Alley, because for reasons no one knows – for years now people have been sticking their bubble gum on the wall there. The walls are a mass of crazy rubbery colour, and while there is an ick factor involved, it’s also oddly fascinating. So, I’ve now added a bright pink patch of bubble gum to bubble gum alley.

So that was my nerdy thing to do today

That…was just goofy and cool.

Then we turned another corner and I almost started to jump up and down

They have a ferris wheel!

Looks like

The “Seattle Great Wheel” is not a “Ferris” wheel technically, it’s an observation wheel, like the London Eye only smaller, but I like those better as the pods are enclosed and don’t rock. So we headed in that direction and ended up on fisherman’s wharf, which is Seattle’s equivalent of a boardwalk. In the shadow of the wheel, I saw something else.

Oo look! Ride! Eeep! That’s a soaring ride! Those are so awesome

So when we reached the ticket booth I was planning on just getting tickets for the wheel, and maybe coming back another day for the rest, but Amras proved that once in a while he can still surprise me for the better

How long is the Wings over Washington thing?

About twenty minutes

Okay….two for each please

The last time I was on a “soaring” ride (and that’s not actually what they’re called, it’s just what I call them) was in Cali where they have “Soarin’ over California” (which has now been revamped into “Soarin’ Round the World, but I digress again). Wings over Washington is the same basic concept, but obviously featuring a much different location. But I still felt like a little kid waiting in that line.

The introductory spiel was high tech and involved some very fun representations of native American masks and such, and, of course, set up the frame story

They say that if you are out on a night where the moon is bright and the stars are clear, the spirit of the great thunderbird will appear and sweep you off on a journey that will show you the true spirit of Washington, but heh, it’s just a legend

And then we proceeded into the theatre.

And yeah, it’s a theatre, but not a theatre like you normally think of the term

Back row please

Amras looked vaguely puzzled at that

Back row?

You ever been on a soarin’ ride before hun?

Nope

Trust me, it’s not going to matter a bit that we’re in the back row

I looked up at the attendant after storing my bags and such in the pouch under the seat

Shoes off?

I saw her eyes flick down to check that my shoes weren’t slip ons

Nope, those can stay

So I strapped myself in and looked straight ahead, and then the ride started and we were swept upwards as the seats rose to vertical, our feet dangling in mid-air and a giant eagle spread its wings from behind a totem pole and sped off in front of us. Out over pine forests (where the scent of the tree actually tickled your nose) over gloriously breaching orcas (which actually splashed you), past airplanes and over Mt St Helens, before dropping lightly back to the earth as the thunderbird went back from whence it came.

So…awesome. My cheeks actually ached from smiling so much.

We emerged, blinking, into the bright west coast sunlight, snapped some more silly photos and – most importantly – picked up cotton candy (blue, yum) and headed for the Great Wheel; once again finding ourselves high above the Seattle streets, only this time not just virtually – watching a huge sea lion play in the shadow of the wheel on the water, looking no bigger than a child’s toy. By the way? Cotton candy absolutely tastes better on a ferris wheel.

Unfortunately we were swiftly running out of time, and I often do get a tad…testy if I think I’m going to be late (especially since I had corporate coming onboard that day) but we had time for one more stop. You see, I try never to miss a Hard Rock Café – when I get my own place I’ll be able to serve at least six people with matching HRC martini glasses from different locations around the world. Although we didn’t have time to eat (or money to shop!) we at least did have time to see the one display there that impressed even me: carefully displayed behind thick glass; one of Jimmi Hendrix’s original Stratocaster guitars.

That…is just pretty cool to see.

When we returned to the ship I zipped up to the computer classroom and met with my boss to finish (or at least work on) upgrading the computers as they are all getting a new software rollout this cruise, and, along the way, got confirmation that the way I’m teaching the classes? Is exactly how they’re supposed to be taught. And that’s a pretty awesome thing to have confirmed, considering that he’s my corporate level supervisor.

I have my first class on embarkation days at 7:30 in the evening, and it’s always hit and miss whether or not anyone is even going to show up let alone what kind of a mood they’ll be in when they get there as they’ve usually been travelling most of the day.  This particular group of people came in in already medium to high dungeon, already dead set against the operating system I was supposed to teach them about. This is never a good start, especially when one of them starts making audible derogatory remarks from the front row before I’ve even really gotten more than five minutes into the class.!

At this point I had a limited number of choices, and only a few seconds to make one in. I could have called her out, I could have asked her to leave, and I could have let it visibly upset me; all of which are things that I would have done not too long ago. Fortunately, recent events have bolstered my self-esteem rather a lot, and I had just come off a really fantastic day of cotton candy and bubble gum and flying over Washington, so I wasn’t going to let someone have the satisfaction of ruining my class. So I rolled the opposite way, and went for comedy – blatantly swiping a few of the tricks I saw the fellow I had helping me from corporate last week.

And by the end of that class? I had every single person laughing, applauding, expressing gratitude, and admitting that “maybe they were wrong about this whole upgrade thing being a horror”….

First class. First 45 minutes. Yes, I am very good at my job.

This? This was definitely one of those supercalifragilistic days.