Skiing for a Crowd

We scaled the Cascade Mountains on a sunny Sunday to utilize our season ski pass at the Summit at Snoqualmie.

We learned a hard lesson about coming to this place on weekends, as opposed to nights after work. The line for the ski lift was crazy long.

I'm making slow progress. One thing that is kind of a bummer is that you need to constantly turn in order to slow yourself down. Fine. But if you suck at turning and do it too slowly, you'll end up going too fast to turn at all and lose control. Quite a predicament.

The sight of 4 year old girls flying past me is especially emasculating. They don't weigh anything so it probably doesn't even hurt when they fall. Screw them and screw gravity.

As a reward to myself for surviving yet another mountainy murder attempt from Lydia, I tasted of some the beers I brought home from our visit to Tacoma's Sig Brewing Co.

Tacoma: the Aroma of Fun

Before we moved to Washington we looked into living in Tacoma as a way to cut living expenses so it's amusing to think about what our life might be like now if we had. I'm extremely happy we went with Kirkland. 

One of the funnier reasons that I'm glad I don't live in Tacoma is the famous Tacoma Aroma, a sulfury stink that people blame on the Simpson Tacoma Kraft pulp and paper mill. Wiki: "During a concert stop at the Tacoma Dome in the mid-1980s, Bruce Springsteen reported the odor was so overwhelming that he was forced to leave town early."

Today our main objective was to visit the Washington State History Museum, which lives in a building adjacent to the 1911 Union Station building.

Puget Sound was named after Captain Vancouver's lieutenant.

There was a good section about the various industries that helped the area grow. Lumber was a big one, and I think that's a reason the airplane industry succeeded here as well, since planes were initially made of wood.

Dale Chihuly was born in Tacoma and they seem pretty excited about that fact. That conical thing is the Museum of Glass, and we crossed the Chihuly Bridge of Glass to get over there.

There's a courthouse operating out of Union Station now.

We did a little brewery crawl after that, starting at E9 Brewing Co.

7 Seas Brewing was one of my favorites, as they had a lot of cool historical objects to look at and the beer featured some fun flavors.

Sig Brewing Company

They had a fun little wood fired oven happening back there.

I watched some video about the making of Myst and got fascinated with the 1993 game all over again. I don't think I ever beat it back in the day so I roped Seago into playing it with me.

Things got out of hand and we stayed up super late playing it.