Jean and I headed up to Seattle on Saturday to run around the city with Meg, Craig, and four of their five kids: Tim, Dustin, Vicky, and Steven. The six of them had just returned from an Alaskan cruise and were killing two days until their flight home to Tennessee. While we see Craig nearly monthly because of his work, and saw Meg last when she and Craig visited last fall, we hadn’t seen the kids since late 2006 (possibly early 2007) so you can imagine what a change was seen in these now-teenagers.
We had a great time with them all as we ran through the EMP (Experience Music Project) museum, not so much fun in Pikes Place, and then a good time just running around the city working up an appetite for dinner before Jean and I had to head home. It was such a pleasure to be able to joke around with them all, as if not a day had passed (if you could ignore the fact that they all tower over me. Heck I think even Vicky is taller than me now, ok maybe not, but she’s getting close!).
The EMP museum was an interesting place. Jean referenced it on Twitter as being a requiem to punk, and her youth. I’d have to agree. When punk ‘artifacts’ make their way to museum exhibits, the movement is truly dead. Long live punk! Luckily there were also some cool basses squirreled away in the guitar room..
(That last picture is Craig laying down some vocals in the EMP’s sound lab. Pretty cool place to explore different instruments in a pseudo recording studio environment.)
There was also a SciFi exhibit in the same building, highlighting the Battlestar Galactica series (new and old), as well as an Avatar exhibit. Not being a fan of Scifi, most of that was lost on me, though my best photograph of the day (nearly unmodified from the camera) came from the BSG exhibit:
I’m nowhere near what anyone would call a fan of BSG, but I DID have one of these in action figure size when I was a kid. The nostalgia alone was cool enough for me; add in the dramatic lighting and I was sold on this shot.
All in all, a great weekend. The best part though: getting to hang out with Dustin, Tim, Steven, and Vicky again. I mean, it was great seeing Meg and Craig too, of course… it’d just been so long since we’d seen the kids, I couldn’t get over how much they’ve grown, and I don’t just mean physically. I adore those kids… and am overjoyed to see them growing into amazing adults.
Wow, your trip to Seattle seemed so much more fun than mine… Oh yea, I was working at a shit plant. Never mind. 😉
The EMP sounds really cool. I guess I’ll have to get back up there with more time some time.
EMP would be pretty cool for fans of Nirvana, BSG, or Avatar. I found some really cool stuff in the punk portions non-Nirvana related and the guitar room, and found some of the sound studio stuff to be fun 🙂 All said I think we onl spent 2 hours there, though we may have been able to stretch another hour out of it.