Checksum Arcanius

Well, I think Jon chose the right day to invite me and Maura to the ballpark to watch Ken Griffey Junior’s first baseball playing trip back to Seattle since he was traded to the Reds. The Reds had two runs — both on solo home runs by Griffey — but the Mariners won on some late game clutch hitting and an awesome suicide squeeze play. Here is a picture I managed to capture of Griffey hitting his second home run:

It was good to see him do better than his somewhat abysmal game one performance that I watched on TV. It was also nice to see the Mariners eek out a close one. I haven’t jumped on the bandwagon yet, but I certainly haven’t given up on the season either. Thanks to Jon for getting the tickets; we all enjoyed the game:

On Saturday, in lieu of a using the beautiful day to play Frisbee, I was invited on another hike. Since Sunday’s Mariner’s game plans crapped all over my Sunday (mega)hike plans with Danielle & co, I decided to go on Saturday instead. Sure, I ended up hiking Mt. Si again, but this tiem the weather was great and some good pictures were had. The company was good too; Whitney from church brought her friend (CRAP I can’t remember her name). They were fun to hike with.

We made it to the top of the haystack this time and I took some pictures.

More hiking please!

Thursday afternoon, my mom called me at work with a wonderful proposition: An evening afloat in a kayak on Lake Washington. I couldn’t say no, so we headed out to Kirkland and put the kayaks in around 7:30 until just after 9:00. Then I picked up Maria in Redmond and we dropped her off at her frat-turned-summer-house residence in the U-District.

This afternoon, I enjoyed a leisurely bike trip with Alice around Greenlake, through Ravena park, to Gasworks Park, and back. I just fixed up her bike (all it needed was a tube patch and air), so we thought we’d take it for a spin. It was a lot of fun, hopefully I’ll get the chance to do it again soon.

Another rainy day means, of course, that I went on another hike. Just two days after hiking Mount Defiance, and just hours after returning from a DotA LAN Party, I headed to Alpental with Danielle and Josh from Frisbee and Danielle’s roommate Maiko. From there we headed up from the Snow Lake Trailhead. The hike was pretty low-key compared to Thursday’s outing, but it was still a lot of fun, and it looks like this is a crew that will be up for a lot of hikes this summer, so that is pretty exciting for me.

We left the U-district a little after 9, starting hiking around 10:30, peaked around noon, and then post-holed our way back down to source lake and then back to the car for an easy 3:30 return to the U-district.

After a few days back at work, I took the day off to finish off the Spring quarter right — with a Bioengineering Juniors (now Seniors!) barbeque after Dave’s Birthday Hike with Larry and Greg. The hike was great — we officially conquered Mount Defiance. The last I went on was Mount Si back during spring break, and it rained on us pretty hard that day. Thursday, it didn’t rain quite as hard, but it was still wet. Nevertheless, we all had a great time winding our way across and sometimes straight up the mountain. We took the main trail up (until it was covered entirely by snow, when we started improvising and going straight up), but Larry and Dave knew about a semi-secret older trail that followed the stream from the lake down the mountain. We found it and took it, and the experience was nothing short of incredible. The padded ground cover on the more forested, less traveled trail was nice for coming down as well. Unfortunately, I don’t have any pictures of the second half of the trip because my camera batteries died on the way up (way to not change them Ryan!)

As far as timing, we left Sunset Elementary just after 6:00 am, started hiking not too long after 7:00, peaked around 10:30, and were out not long after 1:00. I managed to make it to the barbecue afterwards, but I was spent and fell sound asleep not long after 9:00 that night.

Intentions don’t count in this game.

Yesterday Shai finally got to be as old as me again, and after an interesting dinner, he treated us to Spiderman 3 at Lincoln Square. I actually thought the movie was quite good — maybe a bit formulaic, but it was a formula that worked well. It shared a lot of the character subtleties that made Pirates II compelling, but fortunately lacked the overabundance of darkness of the Pirates offering. And Spiderman offered some legitimate humor, unlike Pirates which played so heavily to the legitimate humor that had been in the first movie, but lacked much if any of its own. I’ll go ahead and give the third Spidey a 4/5.