What's another word for "Thesaurus?"

Funny things can happen when you work at a school. Like today, when I heard a student ask, "What's another word for Thesaurus?" I'm not sure I've ever heard that question before.

I decided to check the source I know for that kind of question ... a thesaurus (obviously).

It's not that helpful, actually. But for the student looking for synonyms for thesaurus, here you go: glossary, language reference book, lexicon, onomasticon, reference book, sourcebook, storehouse of words, terminology, treasury of words, vocabulary, word list

Queen Latifah in Tacoma

The show was pretty darn awesome. Queen Latifah is quite a performer. She knows how to get a crowd going. And a sold-out crowd at the Pantages cheered her on.

It was very cool to see such a full crowd there. And such a different crowd that what the Pantages normally sees. Actually it was a who's who of Tacoma to some extant. I saw lots of people--City Councilmembers, loads of City staffers, merchants, restaurateurs, and a whole slew of familiar faces.

The music itself bounced around from soul to jazz to blues to some old skool hip-hop, plus a few show tunes to boot.

I wasn't sure I wanted to go, but I'm glad I did. It was a good night in downtown Tacoma.

South Sound Technology Conference

I thought I would put a short plug out there: tomorrow I'm going to be leading a discussion after the South Sound Technology Conference. I'll be talking about crafting a voice on-line and blogging "as yourself" rather than an anonymous person.

The conference is at UWT. Adam Smith will kick it off and Derek from Exit133 will be leading a panel on Civic Blogging. Here's a schedule of the day.

Looking forward to it! And maybe I'll see you there.

I'm going glassblowing at M Space!

After reading on Exit133 about being able to blow your own Christmas ornament at M Space, I was initially wary. I mean, did I really need to spend $36 on an ornament? That's more than what I spent decorating my tree last year (I did a theme tree, which a lot of people make fun of, but it's surprisingly frugal).

But then I thought, how cool. I get to a) blow glass and b) go back to M Space. I hung out there during the Twisty Cup last year to make a podcast and it was a blast to film.

So a group of 4 of us are going to go blow our own ornaments on the 8th. I think it's going to be damn cool. And also crazy hot, considering it's a hot shop. But it will be a good Tacoma activity. And if it's really cool, maybe even a holiday tradition?

Novel Writing - 82 Hours Left

So November is wrapping up, and I'm well below where I should be if I actually want to get to 50,000 words by the end of the month.

Tacoma Chickadee has been writing as well and is adding words much faster than I am, even though she was about as behind as I was yesterday. She's flying and I think she'll make it. Go Chickadee!

I just passed 35,000 words last night. With 82 hours left in November, I calculate that I would need to do 176 words an hour to make it the rest of the way. Or, if I put five hours toward it for the next 4 days I would only need to write 721 words per hour.

It doesn't seem likely that I'm going to make it. But that's cool. The last time I finished a novel was 2002. I actually used to finish one every 18 months, but I haven't done anything since college. So being 126 pages into a novel that I really like at this point feels pretty damn good. Especially since I know pretty well where it's going and get to just keep writing.

I just finished one of the most fun scenes in the second act and have a doosie of an interrogation planned. And Act III gets off with everything collapsing and falling apart before working up to the climactic scene.

Beautyman is an interesting enough character to write that I have considered having him star in another mystery novel. I'd actually gotten a good 40 pages into it a few years ago but couldn't make it work. It was trying to do too many things and wasn't succeeding at any of them. I'd worked with two different titles for that one: "Diamond Cut Diamond" or "The Marinara Murders."

I am starting to think that "Sometimes I Despair" is a little too high-brow for this book. I've thought of a couple other titles like "The Saint Killer," which I'm not a big fan of because it's too obvious. I'm also considering "The Blood of Saints" as a title, which comes from a short Biblical quotation I'm using on the serial killer's calling card. Other nominees have been "One Less Saint" and "No More Saints."

And I laughingly suggested over the weekend "The Saints Go Dying."

Perhaps you can tell by this point that the book is about an LA serial killer who's MO is to go around and kill saintly people. All the best people--the good, honorable, wonderful people--in LA are being killed and the rest of the population is being scared into not giving, not volunteering, not fighting for what's right. That is a backstory of the book, but it's one the Detective is certainly aware of as he tries to find and stop the killer.

Any titles on that list you really like? Would one grab you enough to make you pick up the book and check the back cover. At this point I almost like "The Saints Go Dying" just because it gives me one more word toward my final word count ... ;)

Just kidding.

Portland Express

I'll recap the awesome weekend quickly.

We left at 10:30 from Tacoma on the train and pulled in just before 2. We sat for about 45 minutes in front of Chambers Bay waiting for our "sister" train. I didn't know what that meant. But it's so much different than traveling by air. Three hours in an airline seat and three hours sitting at a table reading and playing Scrabble are two very different things.

We got in, walked to the hotel and then started exploring Portland's Pearl District (which is awesome!). Lots of wandering, lots of browsing, not much buying, but that's ok. We had a late dinner at a great Italian restaurant and then headed off to bed.

Sunday we had breakfast at Jake's and then spent the requisite few hours browsing Powell's. Because how could you not? And then wandered the town a bit more after that.

The train ride back made it all the worth it. It was dark, traffic looked heavy, but there we were, once again reading and playing Scrabble in the lounge car, when I could have been staring at the dark freeway feeling tired. The trip back was only 2:45, too, so not much longer than the drive would take.

It was a very cool weekend away!

The Tree is up!

Down on Broadway this year's Chistmas tree is up. It's still got the fresh limbs below it that fell when it was put up. I have fond memories of the tree ever since the winter of 2002 when I could see it out my window when I lived at the Bostwick. It's one of my favorite parts of the Christmas season. Yeah for Christmas!!

Happy Thanksgiving!

I hope you have a good one.

The Bellarmine mass and pumpkin pie social were both successes, and that's the only way to start out the long Thanksgiving weekend.

I just passed 30,000 words in my novel, so I'm feeling pretty good about that. And speaking of writing, I also got a chance to see "No Country For Old Men" before it opened at the Grand yesterday. My review is on the B Side at Exit133. It's a doosie of the movie.

Broadcasting the Problem

There's a trend that's been going on recently: publishing photos and videos of alleged criminal behavior online. And it's troubling to me.

Here's the recent Tribune article and the Erik B. blog post about some videos that came out this weekend.

I have to ask ... is this effective?

It seems that the intended goal of the videographers is to get the word out about crime in their neighborhood by posting videos on YouTube and distributing them. Clearly that phase worked, as many blogs and the Tribune have picked it up.

But why YouTube? I assume that the videos are posted for the public's consumption and not for the Tacoma Police (after all, you could just send the videos straight to them if you wanted). Why do that? Here I would assume that the videographer is fed up with the TPD and wants to get the public behind him or her to essentially shame the police into action. So the police try to fix what they might perceive as a black eye, they put more beat cops on the street, and run more patrol cars. Eventually the crime goes away.

Fair enough. It's not that I don't see the logic of the plan, and if you've spent months--if not years--feeling like the police aren't doing their job, I can understand the motivation behind it.

But let's go back to the first part: you are announcing to the world that your neighborhood has crime. So much crime you can film it from your front stoop. It's 24/7, you can literally just walk onto the street and film some crime happening right then ... now come move in to my neighborhood and shop here and go to restaurants so it becomes more vibrant.

The assumption these video posters are making is that crime is keeping people away. And it may be, I suppose. Some people might see a movie at the Grand and then see a drug deal going down on a side street and they might not be willing to come back. But it seems like a lot more people will pick up the paper tomorrow and see, wow, there's crime near the Grand and the police aren't doing anything about it. Maybe I should see a movie at the AMC in UP instead.

It feels to me that sometimes the people giving neighborhoods a bad reputation are the people most invested in seeing it succeed. I don't hear about how bad Pacific Ave is from patrons and customers, I hear it from the owners. But Suite133 is down there, I have dinner down there all the time, and I just don't see the major problems people say are there (admittedly because the problems that do occur largely happen well after I've gone to bed).

A few years ago when I was at the Grand, Marty Campbell and the Stadium Business District worked very very hard to get their neighborhood cleaned up. They had a police representative at monthly meetings. They trained store owners on how important it was to call 911. They cut bushes down that drug dealers would hide behind. They removed pay phones so dealers wouldn't call. They added small spikes to railings so dealers couldn't sit on them. And things got a lot better.

One thing they didn't do was go out and tell their customers through the Internet and the press that their neighborhood was hurting from crime.

Some of my frustration about this issue has been with the response to crime on Pacific Avenue, so I don't mean to harp on the recent videos. But these videos are of my neighborhood, and so I felt compelled to post about it. I've lived here for four years and driven by one of the worst places in town--the so-called Molester Motel on 4th & St. Helens to get to my garage. I've seen many of the problems photographed or filmed.

But the surest way to fight the problems is to get people down here and out on the street (also converting the "Molester Motel" into market rate apartments like the owner promised would be a good start too). And the surest way to keep people away is to let them watch home movies of prostitutes getting in to a john's car on the next block from the safety of their home in a suburban gated community.

I'm not saying that we should lie to people or cover things up. I'm saying ... let's just stop broadcasting it. Keep filming, by all means. It seems to scare drug dealers and johns off the street, so kudos for that. But why broadcast it? Does it really need to go on YouTube?

Something that really bugs me

Why is that when I dial a 253 and dial a 1 first that I get an error message? Correct me if I'm wrong but aren't there some places where you need to dial a 1 even if you're within your same area code? So why isn't the system smart enough to understand that I didn't need to dial the 1 that time, but I only dialed it on the off chance the number was far out?

If I do the same thing on a cell phone I don't think it flips out. But a land line gives me an error message and makes me re-dial.

How annoying.

Weekend Update

So the weekend was a good one. Friday night was low-key, with a nice dinner at Gateway to India followed by a lot of hanging out at home. Which is good because Saturday took it out of us. We worked most of the day finishing up some badly needed work to get our place ready for a small party we had Saturday night.

We took care of a few non-cleaning tasks as well, including the hanging of 5 Beautiful Angle posters that look awesome. For those who like Beautiful Angle as much as we do, we have up the "Factory" poster, "St. Patrick's Breastplate," and the classic "Save Me" on one wall, as well as the "T-Dome Flower" and "Never Enough Parking" poster on another wall.

We have other posters of theirs we'll eventually get around to framing as well, possibly rotating them out with our current selection. Those include the Blender, the Christmas Tree, the Art Chantry co-designed poster, and a few other favorites.

The party was a lot of fun, with friends from all over Tacoma as well as a couple who made the drive from Seattle. We brought in a box full of cupcakes from Hello, Cupcakes so we even had Tacoma desserts for guests.

By the time we got to today we were beat from all the cleaning and then the party itself and we missed the Philharmonic, which we'd both been looking forward to. But we did have a nice and quiet dinner out with my parents at Paddy Coynes (love the open face turkey sandwich!).

So it was a good weekend. I got some writing done as well. I'm at 26,581 words in my novel for National Write A Novel Month, which means I've only been averaging 1477 words a day--190 words less than I should be doing. If you figure that there are 250 - 300 words on a page, I'm at least 15 pages behind. But I'm starting Chapter 10 and I'm on page 93, which is pretty awesome. Even though I'm behind, I've never written so much so fast. It's quite exhilarating and I'm very excited to finish. I've had to upgrade paper clips to a large-scale clip to fit what I have so far.

Still going strong, though. I'll need a good push at Tuesday night's writing meeting and then I'll probably have to skip Black Friday in favor of catching up. But I'm cool with that.

Here Comes the Weekend

Do not despair! The weekend is here! Mary and I had tickets for a show in Seattle, but we couldn't stomach the trip after a long week so we rescheduled.

Quiet night tonight, hopefully; tomorrow we're sprucing up the place as a few friends will be coming over and it should be a little cleaner than it is. And Sunday we have tickets to the Philharmonic! Sweet.

And, of course, I'm still noveling. I'm more than a day behind, but still ... I've written 81 pages of a novel in 16 days, so I'm pretty cool with that.

Federal Way Tech Academy

I saw in yesterday's Tribune that the Federal Way School District is starting a high tech middle-school project called the Technology Access Foundation Academy at the Totem Middle School.

So this might be a good time for me to once again plug my idea for a tech high school centered at the Foss Waterway Seaport and Urban Waters. The School of Maritime Science ... I'm telling you we could rock the house with it.

The Book: Sometimes I Despair

So I passed the 20,000 word mark on my novel last night. Which unfortunately means I am still a full day behind, as I should be passing 23,300 tonight. It's likely not going to happen, but I'm keeping up the good work and just passed page 70. I backtracked a little bit, and am flushing out more of Chapter 6 & Chapter 7, and extending a key plot point until Chapter 8 (previously revealed in Chap. 6) because it was getting to be too much.

I also am liking my title more and more, so I think I'll post it here. The working title is "Sometimes I Despair." I wasn't sure how I felt about the title originally, but it's growing on me. Even though it's not narrated in the first person, it captures a feeling that Detective Beautyman is familiar with regularly when hunting the Babylon killer.

One of the reasons I didn't like it as a title at first is because it's part of a phrase from the Crash Test Dummies' "The Superman Song." Sometimes I despair the world will never see another man like him. (him being Superman). Well, there's no hero in this book that you would say that about, and since I pulled the title from it, I'm not 100% sure that it's what I want to use for this book. But it's a good working title for now.

I'll keep plugging away at it tonight. I got a lot of work done last night and I hope I can keep it up today.

Music store open at Starbucks (+ the Luncheon update)

Before the Luncheon today for the GTCF (more on that in a second) I was getting some coffee at the Starbucks at 15th & Commerce and tried out my iPhone to see if it allowed for wireless downloading of songs to my iPhone.

Amazingly, it did. I was looking for a Starbucks button to show up on the home screen, but it actually shows up inside the wireless iTunes store. It's kinda creepy. You look at the screen and it shows you what's playing, what just played, etc. I felt like my phone shouldn't know that. To test it out, I bought the Immigrant Song by Zeppelin, and learned that buying music wirelessly off the iPhone is just as addictive at Starbucks as it is with any other wireless connection. They make it fun. The song jumps into your shopping cart and it's just way too easy.

As to the Luncheon, it was pretty great. Daniel Blue performed OK Tacoma with pictures from the 365 Days project on the screens behind him. Daniel received a well-deserved standing ovation. Someone told me afterward "he had the room," and he was right on. I also enjoyed John Graham, who told interesting stories about the Foreign Service and a harrowing story of being stranded on a lifeboat in the Northern Pacific (all true stories by the way).

I would also like to link to his organization, The Giraffe Project, which encourages people to stick their neck out.

Good day, I'd say.

GTCF Luncheon at GTCTC

I'll be at the luncheon for the Greater Tacoma Community Foundation at the Greater Tacoma Convention & Trade Center. The Community Foundation does a lot of good work in the community. When I was at the Grand they were very eager to support us, which was pretty cool.

I've been to the luncheon in the past and they have brought in some great speakers. It's fun to see the donors in the same room with the arts organizations and social service organizations that receive the funding all at the same time.

Looking forward to a good day ...

Casino Royale - One Year Later

Last year I wrote: "Good scenes throughout the film. Eva Green is a classic and wonderful Bond Girl. Everything really just works. The pacing is a little off toward the end, but that can be overlooked. It's a pretty rocking moving."

Clearly I meant "rocking movie," but ah well. Anyway, we were too tired for the 2.5 hours of American Gangster and decided to stay in with a movie. I hadn't seen Casino Royale since last year in the theater but it holds up very well, I think.

Still thumbs up from this reviewer as a very solid Bond movie. I'm glad Craig is signed on for another 4 films. Although it's possible that Bond 22 is going to be delayed a bit from December 2008 because of the strike. Here's hoping not.

Friday and Saturday in Tacoma

Talk about two good nights in Tacoma. On Friday, we had happy hour burgers at the Sea Grill (cheers for a $5 burger!) and then did a double feature at the Grand (The Darjeeling Limited and Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, more on those later).

And yesterday we did a little antiquing. I found a couple antique desk lamps for Suite133 at Hamilton's Antique Mall and down on Antique Row (what's left of it anyway).

Saturday evening was spent hanging out at Corina Bakery with some cupcakes and cookies and cold 2% milk before starting to work on the Kulture Lab/Daniel Blue fashion show at Sanford & Sons and The Helm, where I helped set up lights and prep for filming. It was a pretty wild party, I gotta say.

And in between all that, I've been a writing fool. I fell behind on my novel writing this week, but after a lot of work and a late night or two I'm much closer than before, I have 16400 words (58 pages), and should add another 2,000 today if I can. Fortunately there's a writer's group Tuesday night at Suite133 starting at about 5:30, and that should definitely help me keep the pace up.

Gotta Love It

I'm watching Barack Obama's speech at last night's Democratic fundraiser in Des Moines, Iowa. It's a wonderful speech. It's 20 minutes, but it gets the crowd going and it certainly got me going.

Well worth it if you want to see what he's up to.

Tantalizing in its beauty ...

Clearly this Flexcar is down in T-Town from Seattle because Tacoma is still probably a long ways from having them come to town.

But I can dream, right? I can dream, and I can beg (or bleg, as is apparently the new term for begging on a blog).

Please Flexcar!! Please come to Tacoma!!

(Photo taken at Commencement Bay Coffee this morning)

Twittering

I'm giving a new tech gadget a try on these here pages.

It's called Twittering. What is Twitter, you ask? Well, Twitter is yet another social networking application. It's a bit like blogging and a bit like facebook, but it's got an interesting twist: you only get 140 characters to write with.

The idea is that you use Twitter on the go. You can send Twitter messages through IM or text messaging, which means that from your phone you can update Twitter with little notes about what you're doing. And Twitter in turn, updates your friends and anyone else who might be interested.

And you can follow them around.

Apparently it's quite fun. And I'm interested to try it out and see what it's like.

Twitter does have a widget that allows me to publish in the sidebar, which is why if you look a little ways down you'll see where it pulls from my Twittering and publishes it here. I'm going to play around with it for a bit and see what it's like. If you're a Twitterer, you can sign up and follow me through your Twitter account. You can set yours up to be private so just your friends can see it, but I think that defeats the ponit of this whole thing, so I'm going to have a public account for a while.

Will Washington Keep Rolling?

After the resounding defeat of Prop 1 right now, there's some big questions on the future of mass transit in the Puget Sound region.

I voted for it, reluctantly. But I'm not totally sorry to see it go.

Here's a few general thoughts I have.

John Ladenburg says that it will take them 2 years--Nov 2009--to get a plan back onto the table. I say, wait till November 2010. The Seattle to the Airport light rail route is supposed to open in December of 2009. And having that much rail actually working is going to start changing people's minds about expanding it further.

Sound Transit was critiqued by a lot of people ... but then people started riding express buses and using the commuter rail, and parking at the Dome and taking the Link into Tacoma. Once light rail to the airport is up and running, a pitch to add more light rail gets even stronger.

Also, by 2010 maybe Tacoma will have begun work on its streetcar system ... The more people see transit, the more they will be able to picture themselves using it, and they'll want to fill in the gap.

And finally, three years will give us time to switch Washington from its current sales-tax based system to income tax, which would help business and help the poor all at the same time. That will make adding 6/10ths to sales tax a little easier to swallow.

11,000 words and Counting

Earlier I shared by first line, which wasn't great I thought. But I think I like my first paragraph better:

Detective Arthur Beautyman awoke with a start at the sound of his cell phone vibrating across his desk on the other side of the room. When pressed against the side of his leg in his slacks pocket, he could barely feel it. But now at three o’clock in the morning, the vibration was powerful enough to propel it six inches across his oak desk.

Why do I like the paragraph better than the sentence? Because I think there's a kernel of truth--or at least truthiness--in it, and I hope it's enough to propel a reader forward.

So I got ahead on my novel last night. By the end of the day I needed 10,000 words and I made it to 11,000. Sweetness. Unfortunately that means I still need another 667 today ... this novel in a month business is hard.

Last night was fun, though. There were 6 of us noveling at Suite133 as part of a weekly novel writing group for National Novel Writing Month. It was fun to have a bunch of writers around drinking coffee and plugging away at their keyboards. I felt like Tacoma might be starting its very own Bloombury Group.

Even though that is most definitely a joke, I do have the sense that Tacoma has some promising literary ambitions. Mark Lindquist and "The King of Methlehem," Brent Hartinger and "Geography Club" plus his newest novel "Dreamquest."

And a lot of cool people writing with NaNoWriMo that I know (Keep it up, Chickadee!).

So maybe someday there will be a Tacoma group like there was a Bloomsbury group. And we'll all meet at Doyle's at 11:00 am and start drinking and writing and drinking and writing. It'll be awesome.

Visit The Helm!

DO Check out the Helm today. It's the last day of their show on Chauney Peck and Whiting Tennis. The artists are pretty big names and having them display in Tacoma is very cool. Even if you don't want to buy (although you should at least consider it) the art is first rate and on the cutting edge.

Alec Clayton gives it high marks on Spew today with some background on Peck as well. See what Tacoma has to offer!

Long articles about Obama

The Sunday Magazine of the New York Times has a very interesting article about Barack Obama that was published yesterday, if you're interested. Also, there's another long but great article by Andrew Sullivan, one of the best conservative writers (him and George Will) that's out there in this month's Atlantic. Fortunately they put it on line for the reading masses.

Both focus on something I'd never thought about when it came to Obama: the Vietnam war, and how his age might help us get past its wounds that keep coming back and have locked America in a fight still primarily defined by that war.

Definitely worth a read. Start with Sullivan's though.

Speaking of Transporation: Prop 1

I think I'm going to end up voting for Prop 1. The sales tax increase kills me. I hate it. Loathe it. But I really believe increasing mass transit options has got to be Priority 1.

Whatever the cost, I know that building it now will be cheaper than building it later. If there are any facts about Prop 1 I know for sure it's that one. The property will be more expensive to buy ... the labor more expensive to hire ... and the need will be greater.

I think one analogy that is useful for thinking about light rail and mass transit is that of e-mail. The first person who had e-mail didn't have much use for it. But it was more useful after the second person had it, and much more useful after 100 people were on e-mail.

Transit is much the same. The investment of billions of dollars in light rail is one thing. But each and every dollar spent after that is more and more useful because it keeps adding segments and stations and makes the system more and more useful for everyone.

In 1863 the first few miles of the London Underground opened running back and forth between two stations. It now has 253 miles of lines with 257 stations. Each additional mile of line and each additional station leveraged on the money invested 140 years ago.

How to get to Mars and back

There was some interesting information published recently about the Puget Sound's transit situation. One of them was cited in the papers regularly, and it's great to see. This is from the PI:

The number of new vehicles added each year to King County roads fell dramatically during that same period, from an average of 33,000 per year between 1980 and 1990 to just 11,000 per year between 2000 and 2006, according to calculations based on figures provided by the state Department of Licensing (DOL) in February.

That's pretty awesome information. Will that make people in Seattle more like to support Prop 1? I wonder. I have a feeling that their support is going to be pretty crucial to whether it's going to pass or not this Tuesday.

The other good piece of news is that the number of daily vehicle miles has stayed rather constant these last two years (this from the Puget Sound Regional Council). 80.1 million daily vehicle miles in 2004. 80.6 million miles in 2005. 81.5 million miles in 2006. Those are very small increments, less than 1% growth of vehicle miles per year.

But the problem is we're talking about 81,500,000 miles driven per work day in the Puget Sound region alone. That is the equivalent of Puget Sound drivers going from the Earth to Mars and back every work day. And even then we still have enough miles left over that we can do 25 round trips from the Earth to the Moon. Every work day.

That's what 81,500,000 million miles looks like.

Put it another way. Let's say the average car here gets 25 miles per gallon (they don't). And let's say gas is $3.00 per gallon (it's higher). The Puget Sound is spending $9.78 million dollars on gas every work day.

Or put it this way. Let's say that the typical driver averages 55 miles per hour (they go far slower most likely, counting the time they spend on surface streets). The Puget Sound then spends 1.48 million hours every work day.

Getting to Mars and back takes a long time I guess ...

Don't Bug Me, I'm Noveling

I don't know if "noveling" is really a word, but I'll use it here.

I'm noveling. One novel in one month as part of National Novel Writing Month. Well, 50,000 words, which would be a novel just shy of 200 pages, depending on how much dialog I have (if I stick true to form, I'll have a lot).

I'm more than 4,000 words in to it so far, which puts me on track to finish. It's a pulp mystery novel, but it's actually going pretty well. For the purposes of posterity, I'll share with you my first line:

"Detective Arthur Beautyman awoke with a start at the sound of his cell phone vibrating across his desk on the other side of the room."

I have a few problems with that sentence. Too many clauses linked together, not a lot of action. But I'm not going back to edit. Once I write, I just keep on trucking.

Wish me luck!

Day Tripping Out of Tacoma

This weekend I'll be voyaging around the Sound. Tonight it's a trip across the water to Vashon, where a small group of us will see a few art galleries (it's Vashon's art walk tonight) and have some dinner before catching the return ferry.

And tomorrow it's a trip to Seattle with dinner at the Space Needle with a family friend from The Hague. After that Mary and I will stick around and spend a little while up there.

I don't know that I have any day trips planned for Sunday, though. Maybe it's time for some sightseeing in Lakewood ...