It's dark out there, but Sunday Game Night is well-lit

From: Nathan
To: Game Friends

Game Friends,

Recently UW rebuilt the Rainier Vista, which is a grassy cut through campus that points straight at Mount Rainier from the main square. The new vista connects to the bike trail and the light rail station with bridges so that pedestrians and bicyclists don’t have to wait for crosswalks across the busy roads on the perimeter of campus. Where the main part of the vista crosses over Pacific Place, the vista narrows down with sweeping curves; the bridge is fenced and there’s a railing along the inside of the fence. At night, the path is lit from underneath the railing but otherwise dark. The effect is that the whole area is bordered by thick, solid lines of light along those sweeping curves, which looks really cool.

The thing is, though, that for most of the year the sun is up when I’m walking through the vista. Now that sunset is earlier, I go through there in the dark pretty often. And what you see at night, what you don’t notice in the day, what I’m sure the architects did not intend, is that the railing makes a corner along the whole length of the fence, and every inch of that corner—all the way along the fence—is filled with a series of spiderwebs, edge to edge, and in the center of each spiderweb is a big, mean-looking Northwest spider, and each web and each spider is perfectly illuminated by the under-railing lighting so that the web shimmers as you walk by, and as the spiders walk their webs you can see the whole thing twitching. When it was light out, I know that I have walked along the railing obliviously; but now it’s dark, and we can see the spiders below, and we can’t pretend they’re not there.

Anyways. It’s not the case that my apartment, and by extension Sunday Game Night, is free of spiders. But I try to identify and remove the spiders whenever I can. Please join me at 5pm Sunday to share food and drink and play some games.

Nathan