The first time I come to the Seattle area and it rains all weekend. What are the chances?!
After a phenomenal experience at the big Puyallup show — thank you to the event hosts and the hundreds of great quilters I met — I’ve come here to the Sea-Tac airport. My flight is in about an hour-and-a-half, but I am at my gate and have been at my gate for a little while. Here are three rules I live by:
1. Never eat Taco Bell, ever.
2. Do not buy deodorant at the drugstore because baking soda is much better.
3. When you’re flying someplace, arrive at the airport as early as you can without camping out overnight, which makes you look like you’re homeless and require aid.
What being early to the airport does is make it impossible for you to be running late to the airport. Running late to the airport is the worst. If you like prickly heat up and down your back for an hour — or more, depending on your proximity to the airport — this is not true for you. For most of us, though, prickly heat is suboptimal. If you straight up miss your flight (e.g., oversleeping, miscalculated departure time) you’ll experience shock and denial. But to just be running late means you might be okay and it’s that “We could make it… We may actually do this…” feeling that is its own special kind of hell. Traffic, ticket counter, security lines — they’re all blocks to your goal. So I avoid all that and get to the airport two hours early. Besides, I get work done at airports because I can’t go clean the kitchen in the middle of writing emails. I can’t decide that I want to work on the couch for awhile and then fall asleep. I must stay alert.
There’s a famous food item on offer at the Puyallup State Fairgrounds. It’s the Fisher scone and there’s only one kind, and it is only sold at the Fair. You can try to make the scones yourself from the mix Fisher sells on their website, but if you want the real, warm, raspberry jam-filled deal, you need to go to Puyallup and get into the fairgrounds. The Fischer flour company started selling these scones over a hundred years ago. Everyone I met in the first hour of being at the show was like, “Didja get a scone?” and “Have ya heard about the scones?” and “Oh, you gotta get a scone while you’re here.”
Obviously, I got one. Now, I stay pretty far from gluten (this goes back a long time, now) but from time to time, I remind myself that inflammation in my janky abdomen is bad, two bites of a scone is not going to put me in the hospital. So I took that modest-sized, warm, jammy scone from the wax bag and bit into it. Wow. I took another bite. Still good. I put the half-eaten scone on the bag, took this picture, then put the leftover in my tote bag for later.
“Later” was five seconds later. Thanks for a great time, Washington state. Time to board.
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