Last long weekend in Seattle

Thursday night I went to see Michael Nesmith at the Neptune Theater. The announcement said with Scott McCaughey and Ben Gibbard, and I didn’t know exactly how it was going to work. It turned out to be a short solo acoustic opening set by McCaughey, followed by Nesmith performing, seated with a 12-string guitar and a pedal steel player – Pete Finney – and Gibbard sang on a couple of songs.

Scott McCaughey was a pleasure to watch, he joked about how he used to be better before he had his stroke, and played a kind of stream of consciousness song, him learning words again, that he says will be on a forthcoming album. The song featured the phrase “Beatles Forever” and he covered Nowhere Man. He also, appropriately, did “Davey gets the girl” from the Minus 5 Of Monkees and Men album, but I liked another Minus 5 number, “It’s Beautiful Here” more.

Nesmith wore sequined shoes, and told a lot of stories. I thought it was going to be one of those do the whole album type shows, that’s what the publicity I saw for the show said, that he’d do And the Hits Just Keep on Comin’ and he certainly did a bunch of songs off that album, The Upside of Good-Bye, Listening, Two Different Roads, The Candidate, Different Drum. But he also did Crippled Lion, with Ben Gibbard, and Joane, and Some of Shelley’s Blues.

My niece Mimi was going to come with me, but she got sick from a bad felafel, and had to stay home. I pondered how I’d sell a mobile only ticket, but it was an old crowd, and there really wasn’t anybody looking for tickets outside the show, 50 & 60+ year olds tend to not go out without preparation, so I just enjoyed having the extra space. I liked the Neptune, and I liked my seats – Ticketmaster’s algorithm thought that seats at the back of the main floor under the balcony were the best when I bought mine, but I decided to go with the front row of the balcony instead and I thought it was just about perfect. The bathrooms were upstairs, too, anyways.

Pete Finney, Michael Nesmith, Ben Gibbard

I took the bus over there, and then called a Lyft from the lobby of Seattle’s Graduate Hotel, that had me home in 15 minutes.

Friday I thought it would be nice to work in PJs for awhile, work at home at least until I had called into a meeting I had at 1:00, 3:00 back in Madison – where people were bailing because of the snow. I thought I’d record the welcome message for my online class, then go to the library & upload it, but I had screen capture software fail, the kind where you think you recorded 20 minutes and then look at the recording and you only got like 2 minutes & 42 seconds. Urrgh. I finally used something else but wasn’t really happy with it. But it’s done and ready for students to watch when the class opens Monday night.

I made some peanut butter cookies and they came out a lot better than the recordings. Used the last of a jar of this brand of peanut butter called Adams that was in fridge, and the beginning of a new one I bought. I think I remember seeing Adams highly rated in some “best natural peanut butter you can buy” list – but I didn’t pay much attention, because we don’t see it in the Midwest. And evidently Adams has been bought by Smuckers, and that’s who won in this Food52 ranking.

For my Friday night entertainment I went to see Green Book, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I read a bunch of stuff where they were saying oh yea, it’s a feel good movie, like you can cure racism by telling the story of  one white bigot and one unusual black guy who form a lasting friendship – but the acting was great and the music was great, and it was simply well made. Baby steps. Each piece of art can’t address all the woes of the world.

Right before I left to go to the movie, I made some hummus. It came out better than the recordings, too.

Hummus with tomatoes for dinner in Saturday. Had a few of the PB cookies for dessert.

Saturday Joe & Terry came for brunch. I walked down the long hill to Leschi Market and got King Arthur whole grain pancake mix and Leschi Market’s best bacon, so we could have blueberry pancakes, and bacon, and fruit, for brunch – and still had time to take Sati for a walk.

Sati in the yard

I think Mimi and I broke the SodaStream. I put a new tank of gas in it and it wasn’t working right, and we could hear something rattling around inside. I took it apart – that is, I took the new gas canister out, and put it back in, and tried to get everything nice and tight. Mimi decided to unscrew it and see what we could see. And we can’t get it back together. I ordered a new one.

SodaStream in pieces

After brunch I went to the library and got the assignments added to my online class (I have 2 classes this spring, one on public library management, that meets face to face but of course all the materials are online, and one that is all online, Information Architecture – web design). I still need to add the rubrics and make sure the assignments are showing up in the course modules, but I should be able to get that done before the class opens at 6:00 PM Central on MLK Day.

I had a nice phone chat with Rach, stopped at Starbucks, and stopped at Walgreens and bought an umbrella on the way home – it’s blue. It was raining hard but of course Walgreens was pretty packed – Saturday of a holiday weekend in Seattle, not quite Woodman’s liquor store on the Friday of a long weekend with blizzard warnings in Wisconsin, that Susan Smith was writing about the other day – but close. And of course the rain slacked off a lot by the time I got out there with my umbrella. Took one for the team.

After all that I decided to watch Juliet, Naked – it was in and out of theaters in Madison in about 5 minutes last summer, and I’d been wanting to see it. Robyn Hitchcock wrote a song for it, as did Ryan Adams, and others. I hate paying Amazon extra since I already give them $100/year for Prime (increasing to $119 for 2019), but it was only 99 cents. The timing seemed extra appropriate since it opens with Linda Ronstadt singing Different Drum.

And they finally got snow in Madison – hope there’s some left when I go back.