“What do you mean you’re not going to drink? Screw that! Your kid is just hanging out right now. It’s already fully formed.”
slightly paraphrased

A couple of weekends ago, I went up to Everett with Larry to check out Boeing. It turned out to be a nice sunny day (in the middle of a long string of overcast rainy days), so he wanted to go to a restaurant by Paine Field and watch airplanes take off and land. I had no idea he was such an airplane geek. Unfortunately, we found out that the restaurant was closed permanently when we got there.
We then headed off to look around Boeing. There were a lot of new planes outside of the hangers being painted and whatnot. We even saw a Presidential jet. I wonder how many the Executive Branch has. We decided to go to the museum by the plant although Larry had been there before. It was actually on the rather lame side; it was basically a big Boeing infomercial. There were also plant tours, but I wasn’t really interested, and Larry was only interested if he could see the 787s. However, the ticket person could not verify what the tours were looking at currently.
On the way out, we saw a much more, um, enthusiastic guy waiting around the airfield. He comes down all the time to watch the new airplanes take off and land, and he knew far more about the airport operations than probably the people who work there do. He was waiting for a new plane to leave for Dubai, and as luck would have it, we saw it leave. The planes waggle their wings “goodbye” when they leave Boeing for the last time; I was amused by that.
We then decided to go to Marymoor Park were Adlai was playing an organized Ultimate game. We stopped by Whole Foods first for a snack… only the second one I have entered… the first being in Boulder. It was nice and expensive as one might expect.
After mistakenly going to a youth girls soccer tournament, we found out where the Ultimate games were being played. On some very nice artificial turf fields… the Eastside certainly has some nice parks. We walked up right when Adlai scored a goal or whatever they call them in Ultimate. I was amused that his team were all wearing Waimea Brewing Company shirts from Kaua`i.
Larry then took me home. We took a roundabout way back threw Redmond. I was struck with how different the Eastside is from Seattle. At least where I live in Seattle anyway. Amanda was finally awake when I got home. She had been up all night in the hospital saving lives and whatnot and had been recuperating.

To continue the theme of piglet being much more interesting than her two human guardians, take a look at this alarming picture. Demon piglet does not appreciate the cell phone camera.

The little one keeps picking fights with the feral cats living in the field/old buildings across our house. Today, Amanda and I heard much screeching, and when we ran out piglet was all puffed up and angry. Earlier, Amanda had noted five cats (undoubtedly feral) hanging about the old garage/car dump nearby, and piglet probably wanted to encroach on their territory. Given that she has a warm home and plenty of food, it is hardly nice for her to pick on the poor neighboring cat posse who have to catch their bfast every morning.

Bad piglet!

Since I am not writing about my or Amanda’s life (and I really should catch up on events), let me write about piglet, since she is the center of the universe and all and we are merely fortunate she allows to bask in her presence.
Today, I noticed the little one looked a bit stiff, but I shrugged it off as a result of her romping about in the chill morning air. Later, she looked much worse and was avoiding putting weight on her right front paw. She was not interested in treats and only wanted to sleep in her new cat bed. Piglet not wanting food?!? Inconceivable! I could not see anything obvious wrong with her paw, so I took her to the Emerald City Emergency Clinic (it was after 5pm). She screamed the whole way, which I took to be a good sign.
It was a sad evening at the clinic though, and I had to wait quite a while because the vet on duty had to do an emergency surgery on a doggie. Later another very unhappy man brought in his doggie who had died on the way there, and he could not bring himself to take his companion’s body out of the front seat of his car. Sad!
As for piglet, when I had called them up earlier they had hypothesized that she had been stung by a bee or wasp (minor, but seemed a little cold for that) or had fractured a bone (bad!), but it turned out that she had been bitten by another cat! She now has a shaved right leg with evil fang marks on her. I also have more antibiotics for her. Alas, she will not understand that the nasty medicine is for her own good. As a possible precursor to the days ahead, she threw up in the car on the way home.
She did not have any other scratches or injuries to her face or ears, which surprised me if she got into a fight. I prefer to think she really laid the smack down on some invader who got a lucky shot in… maybe the murderer of our fishie friends….

Amanda and I saw the most beautiful crow ever last Saturday morning when I picked her up from UW Med after her night on call. It was very large, healthy, with absolutely perfect lustrous purple-black features. Nothing was out of place. I should have taken a picture of it, but I was stuck dumb by its corvine radiance.
There were a few other crows looking balefully at it from a distance. I sensed a lot of crow jealousy in the air.
The crow was banded, so perhaps it was a genetically created frankencrow that was released into an unsuspecting world. I prefer to think that I was merely graced by one of those special moments in life.