Free fries

The weather the past week has been pretty fantastic, so I spent a lot of this past Saturday outside. In the evening I went to the Mariners-Yankees game (Yanks spanked the home team 7-2 in a fairly uninteresting game), but I spent most of the day on a hike of Mount Si. Or, at least while we were driving there I thought we were going to do Mount Si, which had me a little nervous. My friends Chris and Sarah do pretty much every extreme sport known to man and they rate Mount Si as "fairly strenuous", and while I'm getting in better shape, I'm not sure I'm up for fairly strenuous yet.

Luckily, neither were my hiking companions, who directed us to Little Si, which is a much easier hike and was quite pleasant given the weather. Here are some pictures from the top of Little Si:


The handsome devil with the sunglasses is, of course, me. You'll note that I'm pretty much completely draped in technical wear, but I still found reason to hit REI on Sunday. I mean, it was their anniversary sale. You'll also note that I'm looking a bit shaggy, but I managed to get a haircut after the hike.

Anyways, the title of this post is "Free Fries". Mount Si is in North Bend, which is notable for having something to do with Twin Peaks. (It's also not very far from Roslyn, WA, which is the fabled Cicely, Alaska from Northern Exposure [which, oddly, is on one of the HD channels out here]). North Bend has a restaurant that offers unlimited french fries if you eat their Mount Si Burger. Now you might expect this to be a difficult task, but it's simply two 1/3 pound patties with cheese. I was nearly convinced into eating it and thus earning the table unlimited fries. I figure there are better competitive eating deals than that, so in the end, there were no free fries.

Seconds, Returns, and Leftovers

In one of my college writing classes, we did an exercise where we wrote the same story from the points of view of two different characters in the story. It was fun, but it put a lot of pressure on the second point of view. Most of them turned out to be crap, and added little to the story. The same could probably be said of my blog posts.

While TC was clawing his way back to even on the blackjack tables at Tulalip this weekend, I was in the poker room, which was delightfully non-smoking. I hate hearing about people's poker stories, especially their bad losses, so I won't bore you with the minutae of my hands. (Here's how all poker stories go, by the way: "I had the best hand and I put tons of money into the pot and then this guy got totally lucky and I lost." You've now heard every poker story ever told.) Anyway, it turned out to be a fun session because when I stood up, I had more money than when I sat down. Any time that happens, I consider it a success.

As for REI, my family has had a membership for more than 20 years. Some of my earliest memories of Utah are of ratting around the store with my brother while my parents browsed. I decided years ago that that's where I'd want to register when I got married. I don't need sterling silver placesettings or martini shakers or candelabras, thank you. But a kayak? Or a climbing harness? Or a waterproof/breathable soft shell jacket for spring trail running? Yes, please. I'm a big fan of REI. One of the few ways that REI could be more perfect is if it was a leggy brunette that dug Chinese dudes.

So even though I knew that the Seattle REI was the flagship store, I was impressed by just how awesome it was. Here's what the interior and back entrance look like. What you can't see in the second picture (that's a 30-foot waterfall) is the bike trail that wraps around the property. For people to test out bikes, of course. Oh, and there was a sale.

I think I rooted through every sale bin they had there, which were chock full of things I don't need and only kind of want, but was still willing to buy. I'm lucky to have walked out with only a pair of biking shorts (baggy, not spandex, though the padding still makes me feel like I'm wearing a diaper. Not that I remember what that feels like).

And those technical jeans that Tyler mentioned? We got them right here. Maybe if that homeless dude who sat next to Tyler had been wearing these, he would have kept them on.

Gear

I think my first post discussed the way people dress out here, specifically that girls looked kind of trashy and that dudes look kind of fratty. I'm not taking that back, but I'm modifying it.

The folks in this city dress like they just walked out of a dressing room at REI. Everybody has great technical gear (to borrow Huan's phrase). No one wears anything that is bulky or cotton (except jeans, and people probably have really fancy technical jeans that I don't know about yet). They wear layers and layers of wind and water resistant materials. They wear a lot of fleece, not as a jacket but as a sweater. I looked around the bus the other morning and I'm pretty sure I was the only one not wearing North Face. I was wearing Marmot. Anyways, its very intimidating because I know that I'm a bit of a poseur when it comes to technical gear... I own plenty, but I rarely put it to use in a technical sense.

Also, a lot of girls out here have taken to wearing the high black leather boot, which get a strong thumbs up from me. And Huan.