FYI

I am going to start an on-going list.

Situations Where You Should Tip Your Tour Guide Whether or Not You Enjoyed Your Tour Guide's Overly Sarcastic Tour of Seattle

• Your four-year-old pees on the floor of the tour vehicle

Numbers for 8/18/07

Total number of $2 bills I've received as tips so far this season: 3
Number of dollars I am considering donating to MoveOn.org to get a t-shirt that says "Karl Rove ruined my country and all I got was this lousy t-shirt": 25
Ratio of Subways to McDonalds in Seattle: 2:1
Height of the Space Needle (in feet): 605
Number of horsepower it takes to turn the revolving restaurant at the top of the Space Needle: 1
How many times I played "L.O.P.O (the Y.M.C.A. in German)" today: 4
The amount of pleasure this gave me: unquantifiable
The amount of fun that the average passenger on my Duck took from same experience (on a scale of 1-10*): 2.29
Number of hits to the non-blog since 31 Jan 2007: 2,139
Estimated percentage of those hits that were me checking for comments: 57%



*For reference, 1 is as much fun as you might have during an average root canal and 10 would be attending a free outdoor concert in Freeport, ME featuring Brandi Carlile and the Indigo Girls

Sunset

There was an amazing sunset tonight but I didn't have my camera with me as I walked down the hill to Blue Moon Burgers. My plan was to get a burger & beer and sit there and read for a while since I'd spent the past four nights hanging out in my room by myself and figured that if I was going to hang out by myself again tonight I needed to get out of the house at least.

The plan was going well. Like I mentioned before, I caught a glimpse of an awesome sunset. The cheeseburger was good, they had Sam Adams Summer Ale on tap, and I was sitting outside reading the Seattle Weekly when I saw that The Be Good Tanyas were playing at the Zoo (like a mile from my house) tonight. There was no showtime listed, and at this point it was 8:37 pm, but I thought if I ran home, jumped on my bike, I could make it for the second half at least. So I chug the rest of my beer, speedwalk home, look it up online and the zoo shows start at 6 pm and end "no later than 8:30 pm." Damn, now I am so disappointed about having missed it.

This photo is from camping trip #1 to Deception Pass.

Yet Another Employee Review

CAPT SPARROW (CECILIA)

AUGUST EVALUATION

8/8/07 WED 4:30PM

OVERALL:

Every tour of Capt Sparrow’s gets better and better. She did it again. In past tours, her strongest asset was her likeability and her weakness was a lack of levity. She has make great gains. She added a little more humor, cheerleading and music placement for clapping, dancing, etc. As her confidence grows, so does her tour. Very well done.

GOOD STUFF:

Info was accurate, complete and delivered in a fresh and interesting way. Her energy is going up and up. Her music placement is on the money as are her music choices. Good baseball bit. Dry, but funny humor throughout. Great interaction with child on the water.

Great recap near end. Strong close.

STUFF TO WORK ON:

The biggest thing is the open. It was humorous, but a little low energy. It should explode with energy and noise. No Underground info given in Pioneer Square. Probably an oversight.

ACTION PLAN:

• Concentrate on an energetic, fun and noisy open.
• Congratulate yourself on steady and effective progress. Well done.

Bumper Stickers

The other day I saw a white van with a bumper sticker on the back that said "One Less Fixed Gear." It was amazing.

KAYAKING

is my new favorite thing.

Rabbit

I'm kind of in the habit now of posting every night, so I guess I'll keep doing it for the time being. Especially because I have nothing else to do right now since Pam is buying a plane ticket (which obviously includes verbally listing the pros and cons of each flight option) and I don't have a TV.

It's been almost a year now since I've been without television. All in all, it's been good and I think I've definitely read more than I would have. But I've also watched more DVDs, which requires the same lack of brain activity but in a weird way, watching TV alone makes me feel more connected to the world then any other activity I would do alone in my room, which is how I spent a large percentage of my evenings over the last year. I was thinking the other day that it might be fun to watch Will and Grace or Friends sometime. Those were the two shows that I completely overdosed on last year when I watched far too much TV and despite having access to way too many channels on DirectTV, there was usually nothing else on other than reruns of those shows. In fact, I once had a dream that was a Will and Grace episode. I also once wrote an Indigo Girls song in my dream.

I realized that I am essentially living in a dorm room right now. I don't usually realize that I am not living in a real house or apartment because I am living in a real house in the sense that Diana and Kelli upstairs have a normal house with multiple rooms and even a washer/dryer. But I live in a room in the basement, so it's actually weirder than living in a dorm room or a studio because while it is not attached to the real house, it's also not in an apartment building. I don't really think about this except when the pizza delivery guy comes (which happens frequently since part of living in a room means I don't have much of a kitchen) because the "front door," which is like six inches away from my bed, opens up to show four bikes, and bureau, and a microwave and mini-fridge, which are all things that are normally found in separate rooms.

My days off are starting to follow a definite pattern: wake up, bike to library, bike to bank, feel sketchy about depositing wads of ones that I take out of a ziploc bag, buy cupcake, bike to Golden Gardens, lie on beach and read, consume cupcake, run into freezing Puget Sound, dunk, run out, read some more and deepen my hot sunglasses tan, bike home.

The reason this post is called "Rabbit" is because it rhymes with "habit."

Random

So today is the last day of July. Well, technically it is now the first day of August, but I need to post the final post for post-a-day July. I don't think August will be a repeat. In fact, I might take a little break from the blog and work on producing a zine. Haha, I just realized how ridiculous that sounded. Seriously, though, I think it would be fun. I'll keep you posted.

A choice bit of dialogue from my last tour today:

[Context: I have just played the song "Tequila,"* which is my favorite one to quack along to. Yes.]

Adam (a very talkative/obnoxious twelve-year old British boy who sort of reminded me of one of the kids in Willy Wonka, or maybe a combination of several): But isn't tequila a beer?

Me (Capt. Quack Sparrow): No. It's a liquor.

*For those of you not familiar with the song, it is a catchy instrumental piece with a single lyric--"tequila" yelled after each chorus.


But as a P.S. Inquiring minds (Alisa) want to know, who is Bob?
Well, he was the random man that was hanging out at the sailboat rental place who happened to have a boat that he didn't like to sail by himself (which we assumed was because it was a larger boat that would be difficult to manage especially on a windy day, but it was really because he didn't really know how to sail it--not that he told us this, but it was a fun fact that we found out as we were rigging the boat with the first clue being that tying off lines on a cleat was clearly not a motion that was second-nature for him.)