Seven o'clock in the morning to six in the evening is no joke, especially since my regular workday is this Fantasyland seven-hour thing that is reason the nth for me to cling to Dot Org with my dying breath. Registration released me at 4 when Yet More needed to be done to the report.
Since I am a research analyst I may now have remote access to the file servers, but that process is not automatic and required my running the right person to earth and asking that he set me up, which took him about 30 seconds but is not what he attends the Big Top to do. I tweaked this and made that pretty and so forth and finally it was Perfect and loosed upon the world and I was free.
Officially I was supposed to go to the social event but realistically there was not a chance in hell, given that it required shuttle busses, crossing the threshold of a professional sports venue, and mingling among people I do not know. I missed that chance to meet CoolBoss's squeeze, but hieing myself to Elliot Bay Books was much more important and gratifying.
Unofficially I had tentative plans to meet my high school classmate MEWN but realistically there was not much chance of that either, since my dearest wish was not her company but solitude. She understood this fully ("especially after a conference, ick!") which is why her company is so worth seeking out and off I went to Pioneer Square.
First I stopped in Magic Mouse. I might not have browsed in the store so long if I had not almost upon entry spotted and seized a nearly-life-sized emperor penguin. I clutched him to myself and laid my cheek on his head and if it wasn't a real bird or a real dog I know it did its best anyway.
When I transferred wallet-y stuff to my purse I took my booklists with me. And so, in Elliot Bay Books, I cut a swath. Hot damn, it beats the Tattered Cover--both stores combined--all hollow, and probably the third one, whose existence I ignore since it is in The Land of Beige All the Same (Highlands Ranch), even hollower. In the LoDo TC recently, there was no William Styron, no Erskine Caldwell, and only A.S. Byatt's most recent title and not even her Booker winner, not even with a movie cover. The new fiction titles in Elliot Bay, and oh, its YA section, were several and varied and, best of all, at least a third unknown to me.
I restrained myself in the new section except for Thomas Pakenham's The World's Most Remarkable Trees because I could think of nothing more comforting (than a dog, a buddy, or a plush penguin) than a book about trees. In the used section, I found Regeneration, All the Pretty Horses, A Pale View of the Hills, and Breakfast at Tiffany's, without any of which no library is complete, and Upon the Head of a Goat for my other life goal (besides always having skinned knees) of reading all the Newberys. Then a present for my sister, and then I stopped. I had packed pretty minimally so I could fly stand-by, leaving RDC to haul some of my vacation gear, and as yet I had no idea how to get any of this home.
What the hell kind of great city has interesting parking garages? No I didn't note the address, but somewhere near Pioneer Square is a parking garage built into a descending triangular intersection. It looks almost like sculpture.
I read the Newbery Honor book with my dinner (a mushroomy pasta dish on the patio of a little Italian place better in service, setting, and food than I expected anywhere in the touristy area I was in to have), stopped in a nightclub briefly when I heard live jazz and saw people dancing, and taxied back.
Could I have walked? It wasn't quite dark yet--an indication of how much farther north Seattle is than Denver--and that area of the city is laid out in a grid, but it was dusk and would be dark before I got home, and it was an unfamiliar city, and, this being the primary reason, the Dansko Alexa sandals in black that I bought specifically because I've lived in the brown ones all summer and needed a comfortable shoe for the Big Top with illusions of looking slightly more professional, were murder. Each pair is individually made and despite being the same pattern and size, these black ones are vicious. I wonder if I complained to Dansko whether the company would care.
And they I stayed up until I finished Goat. Not on purpose, and I lay awake even after I finished, because, clearly, my body hates me.
I remember in Maus Vladek Spiegelmann's describing the hundreds of thousands of Hungarians Jews being brought to Auschwitz and murdered immediately. This is one family's story. I knew nothing about Hungary before and during WWII or its preceding war with Ukraine. Yes, Aranka Siegal's book is for (older) children and is fiction, but it's also her own experience and shows the Holocaust from a perspective I didn't have before.