Gender and Kraken Lack of Talent Revealed

Ultrasounds are fun because I get to see what's going on in there with the alleged Troll.

Very annoyingly the ultrasounds show as video but all they give you to take home are still pictures. I was going to just hold my phone up to the screen to take video but got scolded. Pretty ridiculous if you ask me.

I was so mad about that I started researching private ultrasound places that aren't scared of the exciting advances that have taken place in audio visual formats in the last 40 years.

We also picked up the baby's gender from a different office that does blood work. We didn't want to know the Troll's gender until we got genetic testing and some other testing done. I wanted to make sure it was a human baby and not like a rabbit or alligator or whatever. I'm not a doctor but I assume these things happen.

When we opened the envelope it was revealed that we weren't having a Troll at all but a baby boy named Ernie! What a relief. Ernesto is my great grandfather who left Italy for America, and I've been learning a lot about his life over the past few years while preparing my application for Italian citizenship. If everything goes according to plan Baby Ernie will be getting Italian citizenship too, so I thought naming them the same thing would be a fun source of future confusion.

Lydia suspiciously picked a hospital that is walking distance to her favorite ice cream place. What a coincidence. Salt & Straw had some very weird flavors on deck to celebrate Halloween.

Don Bugito’s Creepy Crawly Critters featured "chocolate-covered crickets and toffee-brittle mealworms."

Ernie has a lot of forest fires to look forward to.

At night we headed to Climate Pledge Arena where even some of the hardest working employees end up getting fired. Essentially my rule at this point is to go to every game in Seattle that features a St. Louis team.

The Seattle Kraken's opening show thing has evolved quite a bit since last season. There's even a neon tentacle thing that lowers from the ceiling.

 Recently retired Sue Bird was in attendance with her fiance Megan Rapinoe.

Ultimately St. Louis prevailed and sent the Seattle bums packing. Sad.

There's one less troll in my life now, but I'll always have Buoy.

A Fancy Parking Garage

I worked another event at Climate Pledge Arena today. The Kraken played the Vancouver Canucks. For those of you keeping track at home this was my third day in a row working an event which I think is a record for me. This job involves so much time on my feet that they hurt pretty bad the next morning. It turns out it's a cumulative effect.

I don't usually get stationed in the VIP parking garage but I actually kind of like it. There are less people around to tell you what to do, and it's the easiest work. You pretty much just stand around, ask people what seat they're headed to, and radio it to a person who will then escort them to their seat if they wish. At this point the regulars already know where they're going so they usually decline this offer. The players park here as well so I get to see them pretty regularly. Not because I can recognize many of their faces but because they all dress in fancy clothes and have the same shaggy haircut.

After the game I saw a new event: the TSA set up a little security station next to the team bus to check the Canadians out before they left the country.

Part of this assignment is also BSing with the valets. I told them I didn't know any of the players and they whipped out a nice little cheat sheet. They are really living the life out here. There's so little for them to do once the game starts that they had a little laptop they were watching a movie on.

Today I spoke briefly to Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon. You can tell he's the fanciest of them all because he has a driver/bodyguard sort of dude who follows him around, he has a fancy... I want to say Mercedes SUV with a light up hood ornament. His driver also doesn't park the car in an actual spot, he just sort of parks it next to the wall almost blocking everyone else. He also always lets out his passengers then wheels it around so that it is facing toward the exit. I wonder if that's some sort of tactical thing so he can escape quicker if necessary. I had assumed that he was just there because Amazon is the naming sponsor of the arena and Amazon also rents out a couple of the suites, but it turns out he's also a minority owner of the team.

It was really cold out there in the garage, and one guest refused to come out and get her car, so I just kept waiting. Eventually even the valets left so I took that as my sign to leave too. When I got back to where the rest of my team was I realized that they were all gone and had forgotten about me. Nice.

Ruskie Michael Jordan

The hiking continued near Mercer Slough Environmental Education Center.

There are weird white berries in the area that I assume would double kill me.

We had a good laugh about how much richer people are out here than Missouri when we spotted this wine storage business. Help! I have too much wine! I have a place to store my wine back in St. Louis called Schnucks.

Then it was back to the hospitality grindstone. The beatings will continue until morale improves!

Today the challenger was the Washington Capitals.

One of the tunnel clubs features a bedazzled WNBA basketball. Can never have too many of those, I say.

Some of the teams like to warm up by playing little games in the hallway. This can be quite the spectacle because the rich fans walk through here as well and want to gawk. Maybe the ultimate crime, possibly punishable by death, would be to take pictures of them.

I don't know that much about hockey, and even less about any players that aren't on the St. Louis Blues, but I did notice that one of the Capitals players was wearing a hoodie that read "Well I'm not Michael Jordan" on the back. I was intrigued so googled it and this was Alexander Ovechkin, a Russian who is "widely regarded as one of the greatest goal scorers of all time and holds the record for the most power play goals in NHL history".

I Don't Give a Duck

Today was another day in paradise being my usual hospitable ambassadorial self watching rich people cheer Canadians punch each other in the face.

I will admit that I was slightly excited that the visiting team was the Mighty Ducks. Fun fact: the real life NHL team was actually founded in 1993 by the Walt Disney Company, who then sold the franchise off in 2005.

I know that if I just get handed enough arena schematics that I will someday be able to answer every question these people can come up with.

There's the damn Green Room the players' families keep asking me about. Listen lady I doubt you even bought a ticket to get in here so why don't you use your millions to buy a compass.

I will definitely memorize all of the different 2021-2022 Seattle Kraken Seasonal Credentials. Thank you for bringing this to my attention.

Today was actually special in that I was stationed on the east side of the stadium where's the NHL locker rooms are. This is both way cooler and way more of a pain in the ass for both myself and the guests. Anytime the players are moving between the ice and their lockers they are using the tunnels from which the tunnel clubs get their names. Due to covid the players are supposed to be in some sort of bubble and separated from the fans. So in order to control this situation we are constantly enforcing lockdowns to keep everything legit. There is also a large section of the backstage type area that some genius has decided is off limits either to me. So if I'm on the close end of the circle sometimes I have to walk all the way back the opposite way around the circle to get what would be three steps ahead of me, if that makes any sense. My boss and the literature officially refers to this hallway as "lava" which adds a childish nature to the already annoying rule. The rules have really been piling up here I feel like. As the wild west nature of the operation starts to calm down the killjoys have gone to work ringing every last bit of enjoyment out of everything. At one point they decided that my rich guests can buy alcohol all game, and can drink it in their suite, but the cannot walk it 10 steps to their seat to watch the game. Being rich people who paid a ton to be there, they often get pissy when I try to police them. So, I do not try to police them. Problem solved I think. Another stupid alcohol rule: I think the rich people areas are the only ones that sell hard alcohol. Poor people cannot be trusted with the devil elixir and so I'm supposed to police my rich people walking to the elevator with drinks containing hard alcohol. Minus taking a sip of that pink thing you are carrying, I do not know if it's wine or a cosmo and I can assure you I do not care. I'm almost certain at this point I am breaking more rules every day than I am following.

One of the fun parts of being on the action side is that there are more workers of various stripes to talk to. Then news crew people who interview the players are very rude in my experience, even the camera guys think they're too cool to chat so I avoid them. Yes you point a camera sweaty men missing teeth all day, you are very cool and talented I'm sure. I spend a lot of time talking to the security and police who enforce the lockdown. The security people I kind of feel bad about because I think I made like $10/hr more than them to essentially both stare at the same wall in different uniforms. I thought it was fun to see the goalie's I guess spare masks sitting in the hallway behind their little bench. Those metal tube things behind that is a glove warmer/drier thing that they put their gloves on.

Player interview area. One thing that's fun is the players are all friends with the guys on the other teams. Maybe our team especially because in the NHL expansion teams are made from like a garage sale of stealing players from other teams. So everyone is from somewhere. OMG just like me! Anyway they'll hang around in the hallway and wait for their friends to come out of the opposing locker room. Join me, fellow wall starer. I had some small illicit conversations with a few of them. I know I'm supposed to be seen, not heard, but arrest me I guess.

I do like a good hockey fight.

Another group of people that I stand around and BS with are the low level NHL employees. I actually had a really interesting conversation with the puck boy about the different kinds of pucks. I think some of them have like a RFID chip that automatically tracks the position of the puck and maybe who has possession of it type stats at the same time. I thought that was cool. I was tempted to try to bum some pucks out of them but... I don't want pucks and would probably end up throwing them away anyway. Sort of like I throw away my time telling people where the bathroom is for 8 hours a day. Anyway...

Hockey Shine Starts to Wear Thin

More coolers kept coming in the mail from drawings we'd won. Why don't I ever win drawings for... money?

They were actually pretty nice but I am the owner of a refrigerator.

The commute to these hockey games for my night job started to get old fast. It could take me an hour to get from Kirkland to Climate Pledge Arena, which of course was unpaid labor. It's completely my own fault for signing up for a job that's so far from home, but I don't think I realized what the drive was going to be like. To top it off today the monorail was closed so I think I ended up walking again.

I followed the tracks to the big needle in the sky.

There was some political discourse along the way.

Today the Kraken were up against the Buffalo Sabres. I don't think they play together as much because they are in different... conferences or whatever but I hope that I get to work a game against the St. Louis Blues.

They finally started putting more signage up in the place to help alleviate the constant lostness that people experience in this building, who then turn around and make that my problem by asking me a ton of questions. One challenge was that I always worked in the same couple of places on the ground floor, so my knowledge really got shakey the farther from there I got. People could be kind of rude about it if I didn't know the exact answer to every single inquiry. I got more that one "don't you work here" snide remarks. It got to the point where I stopped going upstairs at all unless I had my jacket covering my uniform.

I heard multiple times that the Arena was having trouble hiring enough ushers in particular. As the started hiring more they started taking over more of our role in the suites as well. This was nice because then we had less work to do, but at a certain point I felt like I didn't really have much of a purpose. The guests in the suites figured everything out eventually and then I sort of turned into a guard who just stood around doing not very much. My boss Agmar got meaner as time went on as well. I feel like she thought she was above us as a full time office worker, and we were just part timer grunts that she could belittle. This especially annoyed me as this was just a fun part time job for me and I wasn't interested in second class citizenship. She scolded me for leaning against a wall while "guarding" one time, and she scolded me for sitting on a chair in the loading dock because a guest might see me. It wasn't unheard of for me to stand 8 hours in a night, and sometimes I would work a few nights in a row. It would be kind of painful to walk by the end of the night, and it was especially jarring when I would wake up in the morning and my feet would still sting from the night before. It was definitely a humbling experience that has greatly increased my empathy for service workers. This is turning into quite the rant paragraph but it's reminding me of more annoyances. When we applied the arena company said that we would get meals provided, which ended up not being true. The concessions at the arena are outrageously priced, so it felt a bit harsh to expect these people to be able to afford to eat here. I got breaks but the breakroom could be far enough away from my post that it felt like the break was about over by the time I sat down. I was still having fun so I didn't think any of these issues were worth quitting over. Not yet anyway.

The usher people finally got signs and started policing the tunnel to the seats, making people wait until the puck was out of play out of consideration for the other fans. Well these were rich people who'd paid a lot to be here, and so were not always happy with being made to wait. More than once I saw guests just blow right past this request.

The guests were all kind for the most part but there was a huge power gap in play which I did my best to avoid. Agmar gave us lots of rules to enforce, such as restricting alcohol in the seats after a certain time, but I felt like I had no power with which to enforce. Plus I viewed my role as a facilitator of good times not as some underpaid policeman. I might inform people of the rules but if they chose not to follow them that was not on me.

Some of the suite's tvs had issues.

St. Louis has attractive women shovel the ice in between periods. The Kraken has multigendered people dressed in overalls like dock workers doing this job.

My day doesn't generally end until the last rich person in my zone decides to go home, even if the event is over. This provided even more time to stare at the wall and wait. I was amused by how many people left their beers for the cleaning crew to deal with.