After 2+ years of COVID isolation, I’m going to have three visitors from far-flung places in the near future. Soooo looking forward to them!

 

I have had a single visit from afar in over two years, and that was only for part of one day when Roger D. Noriega and his daughter flew up to Seattle to take in a baseball game in Seattle. They spent a precious few hours with me before the game got underway. It wasn’t enough, but it felt like a breath of fresh air.

 

In August, my kiwi friend Helen Schofield is flying up from Auckland New Zealand to spend two weeks in my neck of the woods with me. In October, my EVER NEW co-host Hannah McCrane is going to fly over from New Jersey to spend at least a week, maybe more, with me. And Roger will be back sometime soon (June or July) and  October for a weekend or maybe more. He loves the beauty of this area and wants to explore it.

 

Northwest Trek, Pike Place Market and the Space Needle

 

I know Helen  and I will be going to Northwest Trek as part of our local excursions. Helen also wants to visit grocery stores and malls to see what those are like here in the United States.

 

And we’ll be going on some Seattle excursions, probably, too. Most likely we’ll take in the famous Pike’s Place Market and the Space Needle, which has a fresh coat of orange paint (like in the 1960’s) to commemorate its 60th anniversary of blessing Seattle’s skyline.

 

Helen wanted to go to a Native American powwow but none are scheduled nearby (yet) for the time she’ll be here, so I’ve signed up to be notified if one is scheduled for mid-August.  If there isn’t one, we can attend one virtually at the above link.

 

We may even drive as far afield at Mount St Helens, the Olympic Peninsula Rainforest, and the Gingko Petrified Forest.  We’ll see!  (If we go to the rainforest, Helen’s daughter will be green with envy, as we’ll probably drive into Forks, where they have an annual Forever Twilight Festival. Helen won’t be here long enough to attend that, though…)

 

1960 Seattle World’s Fair

 

I was nine years old when the Seattle World’s Fair was underway in 1960. I remember Mom and Dad driving us up for our first look at the Space Needle after it was finished. Mom was doing her absolute best trying to point it out to me, but since I had never seen an image of it before, I was looking for something that looked like a NEEDLE, not for a structure that looked like a fancy tower with a spacecraft-looking “saucer” atop it, so Mom was saying, “See it? It’s right there, Kris!”  and I was saying, “No!”  She couldn’t believe I wasn’t seeing it!  I was seeing it, but I didn’t know what I was seeing!

 

And when we attended the Fair, I remember riding in the Bubbleator (a glass-enclosed bubble-shaped elevator) and the joke that went something like this:

“A little girl disappeared at the Seattle World’s Fair!”

“Oh, no! What happened?”

“The Bubbleator!” (“The Bubble Ate Her!”)

 

I also remember a demonstrator extolling the virtues of a new-fangled appliance: a microwave

 

We were standing watching the demo. Mom was skeptical that an oven could cook food any faster than a stove. The man could see the skepticism on her face and invited her to step up and touch a frozen (or ice cold) hot dog to verify its present condition. She did that, and he popped it into a microwave, nuked it for a very short time, and then had her touch it again.  She was flabbergasted!  As we drove home, she said, “We’ll never get those in our lifetime. And they’ll cost a fortune.”

 

Our first microwave cost close to $700 (which was a helluva lot of money in the 1960’s, the equivalent of $6,837.04 today), as I recall, and we had one before ten years elapsed.  Mom thought it was well worth the price, to be able to cook meals faster than ever before in her life.  It truly revolutionized cooking times!  (Incidentally, DeForest and Carolyn Kelley never bought one. I was astounded by that. But then, they weren’t driven people who needed efficient cooking three times a day in the way families with kids do. They were utterly content with the status quo. They also never had a computer or a even typewriter with an automatic return carriage, backspace erasure, and justified margins. So much for sci-fi in the Kelley household! They didn’t even have modern conveniences except for an ages-old toaster oven.)

 

Anyway, it’s going to be a busier and happier place around here when my friends get to town! WOO HOO!!!!