I present to you, loyal readers, and you, the rest of the internet (I know you're out there. Don't make me use my book-fu), an undoubtedly trivial and banal exercise in mundanity, otherwise known as What I Did On Holiday in Seattle Today! This is the abridged version, mind. All the personal bits and anything approaching real emotion has been carefully excised because...it's personal. Yeah. This is basically a journal entry without the juicy bits and is not remotely polished. Have fun trying to fill in the blanks; your ideas will probably be better than the reality of what happened.

Today, I did something that I had been meaning to do for a long time: I went to spend the whole day in Seattle, ostensibly to read through their selection of comic books (or, perhaps more accurately, trade paperbacks of said comics), though as we shall see, “the whole day” was really only part of it. I did not spend a 24-hour period, or even the diurnal period from sunrise to sunset in one place! Ha ha! In any event, I had an adventure (though it could have benefited from more impulsivity on my part and less time spent worrying about being socially normative) with emotional ups and downs (puncutated by pablum at times)! Hurrah!

Of course, it could be argued that the surprise dentist's appointment of which I was reminded the night before my miniature road trip put a bit of a damper on things, but then I might not have had the opportunity to

That scene, along with the fact that I only had thirty minutes to get up, dressed, and out the door meant that I was unconscionably late to the dentist's. Still, I passed through the chair largely unscathed, though I did pass through the receptionist's with another surprise appointment for tomorrow to get the gaps in my teeth filled in. I don't quite remember assenting to this beforehand..

After that, I was off to Seattle. Somewhere around Discovery Bay, a Mustang with a vanity licence plate saying “CROWLEY” zoomed past me. I can only assume that he was on his way to Forks to check up on things and make sure they were still going smoothly.

I got to the Bainbridge Island ferry's parking lot with only a few minutes to spare before the sailing, which was lucky. I had brought my laptop Hex along for the ride, but neglected to bring any sort of carrying case for him (or the beef jerky and pineapple soda which I had brought), so he stayed carefully tucked under the passenger seat in my car, which I have just realized may need a name as well.

After an uneventful crossing, I arrived in Seattle and made a beeline for the library, pausing to note a small barbeque place with what I think was a pretty, redheaded waitress as a candidate for lunch, or whatever meal I would be having when I finished reading.

Upon arrival at the library, I went to the third floor and had soon accumulated a two-foot-high stack of comic books, which I brought to one of the unfashionably uncomfortable chairs in the teen section and settled in to read. The best ones I read were probably Superman: True Brit, a parody-satire coauthored by John Cleese and exploring what would have happened if baby Supes had landed in Britain, Warren Ellis's The Authority, which was a fairly novel take on the superhero genre, and a collection of Astonishing X-Men comics by Joss Whedon. I apparently really like comics when they are somehow connected to previously existing fandoms (Monty Python, , and Firefly, respectively).

For dinner (-ish), I had wanted to go to the barbecue place, but it had, for some strange reason, closed before 4:30, as had most of the restaurants in that area. I made it into a Taco Del Mar right before it too closed and escaped with a huge burrito which I was unable to finish on grounds of not wanting to pull a Mr. Creosote. The accompanying tortilla chips may have been wafer thin, but I wasn't interested. Walking down toward the ferry terminal, my attention was diverted by the sight of a used bookstore, and I promptly elected to take the sailing after the next one. Entering the store, I was delighted to see that it had a spiral staircase leading to a partial upper level (I am sadly deprived of such stairs where I come from). So I went in and went up and down the staircase for kicks, such as they are, but spent most of my time in a little room encompassing the science fiction section, among others. I immediately seized Don't Panic, a previously unknown-to-me companion to the Hitchhiker's books by (and this is the kicker) Neil Gaiman, of all people. This one took me a little bit longer, but I realized that after becoming so engrossed in it that I really ought to buy it, so I added a near-future sci-fi thriller called Dante's Equation to the first book, thus achieving a pile.

So I bought the books, left the bookstore, went to the ferry terminal, and bought my ticket. Boring stuff, really, though I did have a bit of a conversation with the bookstore's employee about the plague that is Twilight (it turned out she was from the Olympic Peninsula as well, though not nearly as close to Forks as I am).

So I had my bubble tea and ate it too. It was cantaloupe flavored.

The end.