Today was a busy day for us – two parties. We drove into Seattle, and traffic was hideous, more like an evening commute than a Saturday afternoon. Fortunately, the traffic settled down after we got across the 520 bridge and turned north, because the problem was apparently a pre-season Seahawks football exhibition game, and that part of the traffic headed south.

We continued on to Ballard, where a friend was having a housewarming party. There was a pretty good-sized crowd, a bit more than half people I knew. There was lots of good food. I pigged out on pulled pork sandwiches, veggie snacks, hummus, chips, and so forth. I talked with a couple of the new-to-me people well enough to learn something interesting about them. One was a liver-and-kidney transplant patient, in good shape only about three months after the operation. The other had studied classics in school, and still remembered some of his Latin and Greek. We stuck around at the first party for a couple of hours before excusing ourselves.

Getting to our second party was a challenge, because it was downtown, entirely too close to the football game. Traffic was ugly and parking was worse. When we got to the place, I let my wife out and went to search for parking. The first parking lot I found was hard to get to because of lots of one-way streets, and turned out to be reserved until 6 pm, and $30 for the evening after that. The next one was $25, but charged sales tax separately so it was really $29.10, credit cards only.

The party itself was an Obama fund-raiser with two celebrity guests: actors Ellen Pompeo and Justin Chambers of the television series Grey's Anatomy. She plays the title character, and he plays a supporting character who has gained in prominence in recent seasons. They were both very nice mingling with the crowd. Ellen Pompeo did a speech, and Justin Chambers said a few words too.

During the mingling, my wife caught a picture of me posing with Ellen Pompeo, and I got one of my wife posing with Justin Chambers. They were both very nice about posing for pictures with people. I also got a bunch of nice non-posed pictures too, but I haven't really sorted through them all. There was good food at the party, but we weren't very hungry so we couldn't enjoy it as much as we might have.
Edit: The preceding paragraph was pretty incoherent until I edited it, a week later. I don't know whether I messed it up initially, or something just got mangled. But now it's roughly as it should have been.

These two pictures show me posing with Ellen Pompeo, and Justin Chamber posing withs my wife.

When the main events of the party wound down, we returned back to the first party. That had settled into a typical party activity with that bunch – watching silly movies. We arrived about two-thirds of the way through The Chronicles of Riddick, which wasn't very good. Next up was Dragon Wars, which was really, really awful, but bad in way that is fun to watch with group and comment on all the stupid moments. The final movie was Cloverfield, which was pretty good.

That was a long day, but fun.

Tags: film, paparazzi, party, politics