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.

Back at Hockey

Covid really jacked up the NHL schedule and I feel like I hadn't worked a Kraken game in a while.

There was evidence of tomorrow's New Year's Eve show featuring Dave Chappelle.

The Calgary Flames were today's bad guys.

There had been what I think were pieces of this giant tentacle thing in the hallway backstage for a while so I was interested in what it was going to look like. The team still wasn't using it as part of the opening show though so I was left wondering.

Back home I relaxed by the fire in my brand new Kraken sweater. It was a pretty expensive splurge but at least I got an employee discount.

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".

Hawks and Salmon

Before I started this insane job I'd been to like three hockey games in my life. Now I'm getting my arm twisted to go to them everyday in some sort of sick mode of torture. How many Canadians does a man see before he loses his mind? 

"Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the Canada, the Canada gazes also into you." – Friedrich Nietzsche

Today's game was fun because it was against the Chicago Blackhawks. Chicago is full of poo poo people that deserve my scorn, so I felt it was important that I be there today.

When the Kraken win, which is not often, the players of the game will throw these plush autographed salmon over the glass to the fans. Well that's where all the rich people sit so the fish end up laying around like trophies back in their tunnel club suite lairs.

The fish throwing thing is a reference to the fish throwing happening at Pike Place Market. Seattle-native Macklemore raps about it in "Downtown".

I like the comically large luggage that the away teams use to move all their gear.

Don't steal it John. You'll never get away with it.

There's a shuttle that we take back to the parking garage, but this time I followed a couple random workers who acted like the bus was faster. It was not. The end of the night is another sort of sad demeaning part of working at this weird job. You're tired, you're feet hurt, it's 1 am and you have to work in the morning. All of the fans and most of the staff are long gone but you had to stay late to watch rich people drink beer, so now public transport is done for the night. The only choice then left is this sad single shuttle bus that you have no way to know when will arrive or if it will at all. Calling an Uber will burn off and hour or two of the money you just busted your butt to make in the first place. It's downtown at night in a major city and the street people are out shambling around. I think about quitting all the time but there's always another concert in the distance that I think if I could just last long enough to see that it will make it all worthwhile.

Continuing to get yelled at for leaning against a wall or looking at my cellphone is even more ridiculous due to the fact that I just accepted a position at Microsoft. Part of me is like "do you know who I am?!?" and then that's quickly followed by guilt for thinking I'm too good to do work that a lot of Americans are stuck with. I'm definitely building a lot of empathy for the working man. I sort of hate this but in the end I'm just a tourist and can stop at anytime. One of my coworkers said he was looking for more hours because he just got married and had extra bills to pay. Oh man.