Things I learned about Seattle in the 21 hours I got to spend there: 1. The entire downtown area is built on landfill, which means that the next biggish earthquake (maybe "biggish" isn't accurate, maybe "holyshitish" is the word I'm looking for) will create the possibility for liquefaction. To my thinking, this gives the entire street grid of downtown Seattle the unique opportunity to slide into the water in one whole piece. The next obvious step would be to drop 11,000,000 tons of plastic snow and a giant Simpsons-style bio-dome over it, creating the world's largest and most death-filled snow dome. 2. There are a lot of beardy guys in Seattle! Way to go with the manly facial hair, gentlemen. It looks good on you.

3. You can drive through the stabbing zone (2nd and Pike, if memory serves?) but don't get out of your car unless you actually want to get stabbed. I don't know why so many people were walking around the stabbing zone. Maybe they were all stabbers looking for stabbees, and the stabbers have a gentleman's agreement not to stab each other. It wouldn't be much of a stabbing zone if all you had was people wandering around hoping to get stabbed. I admit there may be nuances to this symbiotic lifestyle that I'm not picking up on.

4. Alice has a lot of friends in Seattle and so many of them came to our reading at Third Place Books! I used to have an old boyfriend in Seattle but he's got one of those names that's common enough to make him unGoogleable so he may not still live there. He didn't show up and surprise me with the baby he gave birth to and never told me about and now she's 25 and her name is Rory and she hates me because she only ever heard his side of the story. So that was probably good that he didn't show up with our imaginary baby to see me reading from a book I co-wrote about . . . babies.

5. I keep forgetting to take pictures of the nice people we hang out with because I'm too busy talking with them, but here's a photo of the Space Needle I took from the passenger seat of Tina's car:

It is not in the stabbing zone, but maybe if it fell over it would land in the stabbing zone, like when Itchy sawed the Space Needle in half and the top half fell over and stabbed Scratchy in the eye. Full circle on the Simpsons references! High five!

Thank you, Seattle, for a brief but excellent time. Next stops: San Francisco and Burlingame.

And thanks also, again and again, to BlogHer for sponsoring this once-in-a-lifetime book tour for our baby, Let's Panic.