Day at the Museum

Today we checked out the Museum of History & Industry that sits right on Lake Union.

This place was a nice little cheat sheet on Seattle history. I feel like since I'm new around here I have to study extra hard to be cool.

Seattle Icon

Lincoln's "Toe Truck"

"Built on a lark from a crazy idea drawn on a piece of paper," the pink Toe Truck has tickled kids since 1980, when company founder Ed Lincoln put it in a Seafair parade.

Between parades, it sat at the towing yard on Mercer, where thousands of cars passed it every day.

When Ed retired in 2005, he gave MOHAI his original Toe Truck. "A hundred years from now," he says, "the Toe Truck will still be Seattle's Toe Truck."

Microsoft. Amazon. Boring. Did you know Seattle was the 1952 birthplace of the Slinky Dog?

My favorite part of the museum was the fantastic musical about the Great Seattle Fire.

A startup name Microsoft makes waves

Paul Allen and Bill Gates-friends since high school-launched a bold venture in 1975: write a programming language for the brand-new Altair, a "personal computer" that had no software.

Would the PC just excite hobbyists? Or start a revolution? Bill and Paul bet "revolution"-and they were right. They started Microsoft in Albuquerque, home of the Altair.

In 1979, the young company moved to Bellevue, developing software for giants like IBM. Microsoft would makes lots of products, lots of money and provide lots of jobs-even before they went public in 1986.

Flat Stick in Kirkland was having a promotion where the top player at duffleboard would win Mariners tickets. Having never really played duffleboard prior, we were not victorious.