It Started with a Journal

I just dropped ropo off at the airport. We went to one last HPB right before (in Tukwila), because we're nutty that way. Seattle is so sad she's leaving that it is crying copiously (aka, POURING RAIN). Goodbye, summer ... I hardly knew ye. /weepeth

During her stay, we:

* Went to Whidbey Island
* Gorged ourselves on lots of meals, many of which involved too much pasta
* Nearly got a speeding ticket
* Made 3 kinds of ice cream
* Almost had to spend the night at the Mukilteo lighthouse
* Went to West Seattle
* Finished jade_okelani's photo competition
* Got pictures of many out-of-state license plates that I didn't already have (we want to photograph all 50 states, but realize we'll probably never get Hawaii)
* Woke up a lot in the middle of the night when Talis would bark his head off hearing noises (aka Robbie getting up to use the bathroom)
* Made 2 homecooked meals
* Finished a 1,000-piece puzzle (with the help of romanticalgirl, who came over for dinner and was conscripted into puzzle slavery)
* Finished S1-3 of How I Met Your Mother (well okay, I did)
* Bought lots of books (me mostly of the cookbook variety plus Ursula le Guin's Earthsea quartet and George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series)
* Got bitten on the neck several places by bugs (well okay, I did)
* Had dinner with more lovely people - corianderstem, leiliaxf, breyer and the latter's brother and bro's friend
* Went to the Washington State Arboretum
* Saw Wicked


( Long post, text and picture intensive. )

And that is all for the pictorial of the last week or so. I was all sad about sending Robbie to the airport, but then we received a gift from on high: A HAWAII LICENSE PLATE!!! (I started writing the list above before sending her to the airport.) Robbie has been saying forever that she doesn't even know why we're bothering with the license plate game, because we'll never find anyone who's shipped their car from Hawaii to the mainland. And yet someone did, and they passed by us on the freeway. She'd just dug out my chapstick from the armrest compartment for me, and we both saw the plate at the same time. We both let out huge *GASPS* and then she was fumbling for her camera. So even though Robbie leaving was a sad thing, it was tempered by the most excellent license plate find. (In fact, right before that we got a North Dakota one, which we were pretty stoked about, but it was nothing compared to our joy over Hawaii. Yeah, yeah, we are total dorks.)