Sports!

Despite being inhabited by relatively fit and athletic people, hosting three professional franchises and being home to a pretty big university, Seattle would not strike anyone as a "sports" town. Like most major cities people are rabid about football. Locals care about the Mariners until they fall out of contention in July (about three months after my Orioles have fallen out of contention back East), and after that the crowds are mostly Japanese tourists excited to see Ichiro. The Sonics get so little love that they are going to get moved to Oklahoma City.

Anyways, I'm a big sports fan. Back in DC I would usually go to a couple of Redskins games (thanks to my friend Todd's parents), maybe a baseball game or two, and a Wizards/Caps/Georgetown game if I could luck into Capital One's box seats. If you look at my sports attendance in 2007 you'd notice a difference:

• Three Seahawks games;
• One UW football game;
• One UW basketball game;
• 10 Sonics games (3 pre-Durant, 7 post-Durant);
• Five Mariners games

That's 20 sporting events in 12 months. I feel like that's a lot. I was talking with the girl who cuts my hair on Friday about how hard it is to make same-sex friends in a new city. She is young and hip and "Myspaced" someone, which I think means that she met someone randomly on Myspace who ended up as her best friend. Anyways, we were talking about the awkwardness of the "friend date", and got to talking about how men have sporting events, which are nearly perfectly designed for man-dates (firm stopping times, requires paying attention to something else making silence okay, excuse to drink obnoxious quantities of beer, etc). We couldn't decide if there was a female equivalent, although she thought shopping could qualify.

I was hoping to have a lot more to say other than "I went to a lot of sporting events" last year, but it turns out that I've got nothing. But I do have Sonics/Jazz tickets in two weeks if anyone is interested.

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.