Unquiet
Things

…because “photo dump” is such a dumb, gross phrase. So what do we call it instead?

Anyhow, we escaped Florida’s end-of-summer heat by flying directly into Seattle’s heat wave, because we’re geniuses at travel planning! We first spent two nights on Vashon Island in a cottage with a composting toilet that came with mysterious instructions (helpful notes about peeing, radio silence about everything else), a yellow lab who appointed himself our personal shadow, roadside blackberries thorny, tangling and trailing in every direction (mostly the direction of our mouths), and our first glimpse of Thomas Dambo’s towering recycled-wood trolls. Also, I posed a question about that toilet over on Threads, and man oh man, some people got mad. Everybody poops! What’s the big deal?

Back in the city, that monstrous betrayer Google Maps, spent three days fibbing to us about “flat” routes that turned out to be brutal mountaineering expeditions, we watched salmon similarly fight their way up the locks while seals lounged nearby, and a seagull skulked around with a big fish hanging out of its beak, stopped by Immortal Perfumes’ charming studio, and afterward discovered the magic of the Aperol spritz slushy, and then spent a perfect temperate evening at the zoo listening to Ginger Root and Japanese Breakfast while sitting on grass with a stupidly expensive blanket we’d bought in the giftshop at the somewhat nearby National Nordic Museum (where we encountered another troll! )

I walked on the Space Needle’s glass floor despite vivid Final Destination-style disaster scenarios playing in my head, and practically next door, Dale Chihuly’s glass installations completely blindsided me—I’d never heard of him and walked in with zero expectations, only to discover that Chihuly had created these vast, glowing environments that felt more like walking through solidified light and color than looking at traditional sculpture.

I encountered one of my own books in the wild at the Frye Museum gift shop where I got to live out every author’s secret fantasy of sneaking bookmarks between its pages, we grabbed coffee at the KEXP coffee shop where Michelle Zauner interview was streaming (possibly live, which felt like perfect timing), and spent one of our final days in Ballard, hunting down bagels and gelato and breweries and pizza and one bookstore in particular where I scored a copy of Kenji López-Alt’s The Food Lab at Book Larder while nurturing the completely unhinged fantasy that my longtime Serious Eats hero – you know, the guy whose recipes saved every home cook’s risotto and chili for an entire decade – had obviously been camping out in this one Seattle bookstore all week, just patiently waiting for me specifically to wander in so he could finally discuss proper recipe development techniques. He wasn’t there, though! Rude.

And of course, we played Magic: The Gathering everywhere we went, because our dorky habits transcend geography. I got sick on my third day there, which was a huge bummer, because there were some folks we were hoping to see…but next time, Seattle! There will definitely be a next time.