Jelly Cakes and Starquakes

I bought Lydia a whimsical treat for her birthday. It was sort of like a if an alcoholic jell-o shot graduated from college and got a job at an art gallery. Sophisticated.

"Aperitivo Spritz Boozy Jelly Cake

The Boozy Aperitivo Spritz Cake is made with an acid-adjusted orange juice jelly accented with Prosecco, Brooklyn-made Faccia Brutto Aperitivo, and lime juice. Sweet-milk-jelly makes up the edible bouquet inside. It’s 5% ABV

We bet you’ve never seen anything like this! Founded in Brooklyn by Pastry Chef Jena Derman and master mixologist Jack Schramm, Solid Wiggles is turning out boozy gelatin-based “Jelly Cakes” that are guaranteed to make your jaw drop. These hand-crafted works of edible art are flavored with the highest quality spirits, citrus, and tropical fruits, and are sure to steal the show at any get together. They’re beautiful, delicious, a little bit boozy, and shipping nationwide!"

There was a possibility of seeing the northern lights not long after we moved to the Pacific Northwest. I naively just drove north then stood around at a dark spot late at night in the countryside and saw bupkis. Well tonight I was again alerted and this time Gondor stood ready!

I had the apps. I found a link to an outdoor webcam thing that was oriented in a way in which I could see if the damn lights were out there before I even left my couch. I had it all.

Jackpot! Now... these photos are a bit deceptive because I had to set my phone for low light and then do a long exposure. With the naked eye they looked like weird clouds and the colors were more grayish than anything. So while I consider this an end to a painful aurora borealis-less chapter of my life, I would still be interested in seeing them in a Nordic country or somewhere super north because my understanding is that the show would be more vivid.

By the time I got home I was very excited and... woke Lydia up. She was crabby about it but I made her go see the show. Who knows when the next opportunity might be.

Redmond Dining

We tried a new place for lunch today: Sages Restaurant in Redmond. It was fine.

Ernie was doing a lot of flirting with people at a nearby table.

Nearby Redmond Library was having a story time.

I'm not used to having normal people for landlords. We told them we were having an issue with standing water in one the tubs and they responded by... completely redoing both showers.

Edible and Inedible Fishes

Tickets to area attractions like the Seattle Aquarium are often pretty expensive, especially compared to the free or nearly free stuff back in St. Louis. So we often go for the year long membership option and beat the hell out of it before switching to the next thing.

For lunch we went to what is one of my favorite places in Seattle: Ba Bar University Village. I feel a bit guilty because I always order the same couple of things at this point but I just have the perfect order dialed in, ok? I got the Lemongrass Rockfish this time. It comes with a side of side tomato tamarind soup. Perfection.

Chonky man

We took Ern to a baby furniture store and he was being so cute sitting on the various chairs that we narrowly avoided buying one.

Can't Stop the Feeling

Justin Timberlake came to town pretty close to Lydia's birthday so that was a done deal.

There was some intro DJ stuff for a while as we waited for the show to begin. I think watching a sign language interpreter do "Baby Got Back" was worth the price of admission alone.

This show went pretty hard. There was a lot of giant JT heads in different stages of... maybe like authoritarianism? Like if Big Brother from 1984 could sing and dance.

This giant video cube thing was a costar of the show.

There was nothing it couldn't do.

At one point it tried to drown JT.

We were on the far end of Climate Pledge BUT this multitalented phenom had a little secondary stage that was right up in our face. 

Then the video cube decided that Justin was an angry god emperor. I don't know what we did to anger him but he brought sexy back very aggressively at this point.

Lastly the video cube transformed into a flying carpet and whisked JT back to Olympus.

Normally this would be the end of my expert coverage of this event. But there's a bit of a prologue on this one. About a month and a half later JT got pulled over for alleged drunk driving. Some reporting on the incident:

"We're also told that the cop who pulled Timberlake over "was so young that he didn't even know" who the 10-time Grammy winner was.

"He didn't recognize him or his name," our insider says.

A second source adds, "Justin said under his breath, 'This is going to ruin the tour.' The cop replied, 'What tour?' Justin said, 'The world tour.''"

So of course anytime anything bad happened to either of us the next couple of weeks we would exclaim "this is going to ruin the tour".