Today we dropped by the Seattle car show, and checked out some of the new cars that are coming out. This isn't like the Detroit auto show, so nothing too fancy, only a couple concepts were shown, the rest are production vehicles. The picture is of a Mercedes SLR McLaren. My favourite is the BMW M6, now if only I had $100k burning a hole in my pocket.

The City Market, our favourite local ghetto market, puts out a new sign everyday, and today's didn't disappoint, poking fun at the Foley scandal. Also, since Halloween falls on a weekday this year, Saturday was the day for themed parties, and we're no different. A thanks to Marques for hosting.

FareStart is a charity that gives food services training to those in need, but every Thursday night they also have a Guest Chef program where a chef from a local restaurant comes and teaches the students to prepare a 3 course meal for the patrons. I was there today, the food was pretty good, and it's for a good cause.

Seattle's new tourism slogan: metronatural. I guess it's slightly better than the old one: Sea@L.

It's probably the last nice weekend for the rest of the year, but it was beautiful. I went for a bike ride around Mercer Island, and this is from the west side of the island, looking back at Seattle.

Today we participated in Seattle's urban golf event, which mixes random fun with dressing up, golf clubs, bars, foam golf balls, and sometimes the police. After a long day of golfing, we went to see the T-Birds play (they lost in shoot-outs), and finished off the night in Belltown.

I see this little piece of graffiti everyday at the bus stop. I also see it around town at random places. Today I finally took a picture.

One of the perils of shopping via catalog is that you get a lot of paper spam. It's died down a little lately (maybe they realized I'm not their best customer), but with the holidays coming, I'm weary that I will be once again inundated by the onslaught of catalogs. But today I got something peculiar. Maybe it's because I have an ambiguous first name, or maybe it's just a particularly bad example of (mis)targeted advertising. But in case you didn't know, title nine is all about women's participation in sports. Why I would need such a catalog, I have no idea.

Last weekend, when we went to the farm, I picked up a little pumpkin with a long stem. Tonight, I got a little bored, and started carving it, and this is the result. It's the Chinese character for ghost.

Every Tuesday, this little restaurant 4 blocks away always has a great deal with $7 bottles of wine, and a multitude of tapas dishes, kinda like dim sum, but Italian. Apparently, they also have wood letter blocks.

The weather is turning cold, the skies are grey, and the rain is here to stay, which means it's perfect hot pot weather. So we went to our favourite hot pot spot, and devoured on unlimited beef, lamb, cabbage, tofu ... Now I'm digesting on the couch.

Halloween is fast approaching, and wow, just wow,

We planned on going to a farm to do some apple picking, but we got lost along the way, and ended up at Snoqualmie Falls, which is not such a bad detour. We did finally get to the farm, only to find out that the internet lied to us, and it wasn't an apple orchard (they had about a dozen apple trees). So we ended up with some pumpkins instead.

These stencils are all over the place in the neighbourhood where I live. I'm not sure which lake they're referring to (Union, Washington, or maybe even the Sound - which is technically not a lake), or even if the sign is real or not. Regardless, don't dump any waste cause fishes are important to the environment and stuff.

Today at work, a coworker randomly shouted out "there's a bunch of tractors on the road". I ran over to the window, and there it was, a bunch of tractors on 4th Ave., escorted by a squad of motorcycle police. Apparently, this was a rally for "Yes for I-933".

There is a lot of controversy on Initiative 933 in Washington state, which deals with property rights, and wants to introduce legislation that makes government compensate land owners if environmental concerns/other bylaws prohibit a landowner's ability to use it to his/her liking. And if I could vote, I might actually care.

More pics here.

It seems I've been travelling back east a lot lately, even though it's only been twice this year, but both times were in the last month and a half, so it seems like a lot in my short to mid term memory.

Normally I'm not a big fan of having to travel to Toronto, mostly because of the flight times. You pretty much spend two days just travelling. This time, I had to get the earlier direct flight, which leaves at 8 am. This brought me to the airport at 5:45, and I ended up checking my luggage, even though it's only a weekend bag, simply because I didn't want to deal with the whole liquid/gel/whatever that the TSA is imposing on us travellers.

When I got into the TDot, Kevin picked me up, and we went to his dad's canoe launch (it sounds weird, but when you spend a year building a canoe, you'd want to have a celebration too, and it was a good looking canoe). Afterwards, we met up with some old friends Kristy and Heather, and Jenn for a night out in Toronto that was followed by some 2 am sushi.

The next day I attended my cousin's wedding, which involved a lot of food (good Chinese food), and some impromptu kareoke.

On Sunday I had some dim sum (which I haven't had in a long time, but desperately wanted to) with the family, and got dropped at the airport, only to wait in another 5 lines before drowsily arriving in Seattle.

It's good I don't have any travel plans for the near future, it'll save me some time, and some money.