Ernie's First Soccer Match

We were still entertaining Zoe and her boyfriend who was in town visiting.

I recently booked a cheap business class flight to Japan. Like most of the rare good airline miles redemptions still in existence, this one took some work. For one thing, I was monitoring availability on and off for a friggin' year. Finally I did some more research and learned that the airline only releases the good seats like a year in advance and 2 weeks in advance. Well thanks to my favorite baby Ernie we had a ton of wiggle room to book flights at the last minute. Even better we actually already had an Alaska trip booked, which was supposed to serve as a stepping stone for Ern so he could learn with longer and longer trips. Well we said the hell with that, canceled Alaska, and booked a flight to the land of the rising sun. "Ernie the rising son" has a ring to it actually. Anyway one of the other tricky parts of this was that to get the best deal I needed to transfer Chase points to Virgin Atlantic and then book the ANA flight through them. When I called in to Virgin and told the nice British lady what I was up to her I could hear her eyes audibly rolling back in her head so hard she might hurt herself. I'm sure losers who don't know what they are doing call in all the time and get butthurt when there's no availability. Well I have a separate online tool that I subscribe to now and again that shows the actual availability, not the phantom crap you can get when you try to use the airlines. Anyway once she saw the flights were actually there we were right as rain. I'm super excited to show my boy my favorite places in Japan.

Aunt Jennifer bought Ernie Dog this outfit so we popped it on him and sent her a few pictures. Not a moment too soon either, he won't fit into this much longer.

The olive with the yellow epaulets are giving me a African military dictator vibe. Son, you can be anything when you grow up.

We took the crew to what must be one of the few professional Seattle sport teams that I have yet to see: the OL Reign women's soccer team.

They soccered and soccered.

I was hoping to see Megan Rapinoe but I think she was gone playing in the women's World Cup.

The airshow was in town so there were a lot of fun flyovers during the game.

We made a stop at Old Stove Brewing Co — Pike Place.

Ernie checked out the gum wall.

I was getting close to the end of Hollow Knight. It's a fun one.

Amphibious Bath Baby

Today at tubby time Ernie changed into a frog baby.

After the bath he jumped back up to the rainforest trees.

Once again I won our daily foot measuring contest.

Today we took a stroll around the Elliott Bay Marina area. It's pretty fancy and there are yachts everywhere.

I'm always tempted by trash furniture. I have a problem but I like to think of the world as my furniture store.

This place was weird because it's pretty close to the city but it felt very quiet and idyllic.

There were blackberry appetizers available.

We had some dinner at Maggie Bluffs Marina Grill.

The most wondrous part of the whole day was stumbling onto this free party thing. It was sponsored by bougie companies like yacht insurance and yacht dealerships, and there was free wine and beer. Not even like a beer tasting like a whole glass.

There was even a band. I would like to live here someday. Maybe just on like a pontoon boat where I can come to shore whenever free food and booze is being served.

I've been playing some Hollow Night on Xbox. It's very Tim Burton-esque: cutesie and dark at the same time.

Furious Xbox Playing

In addition to squeezing in a lot of live experiences before the baby is born, I've also been trying to play every video game ever made.

Bethesda has an exciting new game being released soon, and while I waited I played one of their classic titles I missed the first time around: Dishonored.

I finished that game and moved on to Ghostwire: Tokyo. It's kind of like Japanese Ghostbusters. One thing that makes the game super fun is that it is entirely in Japanese which has been a good language lesson.

It's also set in what seems to be a pretty good model of the city so it's been fun to spot different landmarks that I recognize.

We can never finish an entire pizza box full of tacos but that doesn't mean that we won't stop trying.