Todd says ‘Le Fromage se tres bien!‘ a lot. But I think what he means to say is ‘Ce fromage est impressionnant’! (‘this cheese is awesome’)
I was not about to miss my favorite Seattle festival a couple of weekends ago, so we dropped everything on Sunday afternoon to face the slightly smaller 2nd day crowd.
The tourist mobs aren’t fun and the lines don’t move very fast—or at all—but I will fight tooth and nail to get me some of that dairy goodness.
Ok, not really ‘fight’ per say, but we’ve come to learn that the proper Seattle way to get your cheese is to forego the lines and cut right in and grab your sample(s). If everyone did this, things would move so much faster. Trust me.
Hey, we never claimed to be very polite when free cheese is involved. You live, you learn. And this is what we’ve learned from the past several years:
There’s not enough time to try every cheese, so don’t even attempt this feat. Don’t go on a full stomach—or an empty stomach, for that matter. You’ll make yourself sick either way.
Toothpick in hand, slip in line (but say ‘excuse me’), grab your cheeses, step back to savor the goodness and move on to the next vendor that sounds appealing.
If there’s more than one of you, split up. Use both ends of the toothpick and quickly stab multiple pieces to take back to your comrades waiting in the less crowded area. Sometimes you can only get one sample of each cheese, so that’s when you divide them up and describe the tastes to each other. Sharing is caring.
Skip the stuff you can find at the grocery store and go for the local farmers and interesting sounding varieties that you can’t find at Safeway. Mozzarella? No thanks. I already know what you taste like*.
*disclaimer: I will eat as many goat cheeses as I possibly can get my hands on because goat cheese is the best cheese in the whole wide world. There, I said it.
Have plenty of cash on you. When you find a cheese you love at first bite, buy it immediately.
We obviously didn’t take enough cash with us because we only came home with two cheeses. A raw milk artisan cheese and a goat cheese, duh. But we also bought some Confectional cheesecakes, muscat grapes and rhubarb, all off which were devoured shortly thereafter.
The cheeses? They’re still in the fridge, waiting for a sunny day picnic and a flaky baguette.
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Other activities have included the culmination of Girls on the Run spring season and the 5K run. I had a different girl and different base location this time, and I enjoyed them both even more than last fall. I love this program.
We also found ourselves being offered free Mariners tickets a couple days apart, and who can pass up a free baseball game, let alone two? Not us, even if we’re not the most winningest team this season.
This was my first time being there with the dome closed. The second game they ended up closing it halfway through the game. That felt very much like the movie Independence Day. 
The Saturday night game we got free t-shirts but lost the game. The Tuesday night game we had even better seats, were there with a couple friends, and I savored my once a year hotdog. And we won!
I think we might be getting spoiled, it’ll be hard for me to go back to the cheap seats.