Not just for the coffee

It's been hard to get excited about heading to Seattle in February. I have nothing against the city, given that my past brief acquaintance with it has consisted mostly of flying through it on beautiful summer days, the mountain bright under an early-evening full moon or gleaming against a perfect blue sky.* But I do have something against the month, multiple family birthdays and concomitant opportunities for cake notwithstanding, and the few SeaTackers I know grumble about how February is particularly dreary. I was not, as the surfers of my youth would have had it, stoked about the prospect.

HOWEVER. As has been amply established here, my affections can be bought with food. It's common knowledge that Seattle has good coffee, and I follow Orangette's lyrical descriptions of things she's made and eaten there with a voyeuristic glee, but somehow it took hearing about Mario Batali's father's Seattle-area salumeria for it to click that, you know, it might be worth it to sneak out of the hotel, umbrella in chilly paw, and hit the streets for some caloric insulation. Now the NYT has put up a Frugal Traveler article about living off the city's happy hour food, and I'm starting to feel serious hunger pangs. Cascadia's alpine martini, in particular, sounds like heaven: "a vodka martini garnished with Douglas-fir sorbet and an actual cedar frond...crisp, aromatic, inventive and cold, cold, cold." Maybe that's not the traditional remedy for the wintertime blues, but doesn't it sound lick-the-glass amazing? I could find out how the Daily Dozen Donut Company's products measure up against Krispy Kreme's (although it's clear that the name wouldn't scan right in "Doughnut Girl," the world's best song about love, junk food, and Route 1). After Weebat and Herr Professor talked me into a recent jaunt to a local crab house and thereby reminded me of how good snow crab can be, I'm a-drool at the possibility of having some of it superfresh down at the Pike Place Market. And all this is just scratching the surface of the options within an easy walk of the convention site...oh, how choirs of angels sing.

In other words, February in Seattle may well turn out to be just as grey and gloomy as the doomsayers predict, but I'm worrying less about seasonal affective disorder and more about the chance that work will keep me from eating my own body weight in three days.

*I still wonder why I was the only person the Seattle customs guy pulled out for a series of pointed questions about purchase and/or use of illegal smokeables during my Vancouver sojourn and whether had I brought anything of the sort back with me. It can't have been that serious an investigation, since he relied on the "are you telling the truth? really really?" interrogation technique rather than, you know, actually searching me, and I don't think I looked so much stoned as post-camping scruffy (granted, a fine line). I was very polite, because Customs officials have vast power to make your life a living hell, but eventually I said, "Really, I was kayaking every day for a week, I needed every bit of lung space I had, and I don't smoke anything anyway. Do you want to check my bags?" He sighed and waved me on my way to a cab (which later caught fire on the road, for reasons that the driver did not sufficiently explain). Seattle ain't responsible for any of that, though; it's just an odd story.