Dear Diary,
In September 2024, I began a series of hikes, and at the same time compiled "Past hikes of North Seattle parks in these pages", meant as a complement to a document I circulate (in particular at that time) as a publication history. It was also an admission that nothing I write in you any more, dear Diary, gets much read; that our best days appear to be behind us now.
One reason for those hikes in September 2024 was to find out whether more people would read if I actually wrote about parks. But, possibly because I'd chosen mystifying titles, few people read the resulting pages either. So it was easy to transfer the time I'd intended to devote to them to the page I'd planned about the buses.
In December 2024, I added a section to the "Past Hikes" page covering the September 2024 hikes. Since then, it's dawned on me, nobody will have seen that section either. So here it is, mildly edited:
And I've had basically no interest, this month [i.e. December], in finding out what's happening to park restrooms this winter. I'm sorry, dear Diary, but not actually sorry enough to go hiking in the rain. As other pages in you from earlier this year mention, I'm now in school, trying to put ever more distance between myself and homelessness, and this right now [i.e. December 2024] is my last long break before August. [This right now, February 2025, isn't a long break. It's a short break before an exam.]
Perhaps then [i.e., in August 2025], I'll do what I tried to do this past September: find what I called then and still would call a "baseline". Find out how the parks are operating in summer, so that if that winter I hike them again, I'll be able to tell what's different. For that matter, locating water fountains (which are rather more mobile than restrooms) while the weather is nice. If I can get that done next August and September [2025], I can in turn realistically do winter hikes, after I graduate, next December.
Anyway. Here are the two pages:
The first covers most of the parks in NW, the second a couple of parks in far north Seattle.
And while you've probably figured out the point, dear Diary, in case those titles confuse any more readers, you might as well tell them that after my happening on Thyme Patch Park on the first hike, I decided to call the rest of the pages after parks without plumbing that I hadn't visited for way too long. The second page's title hammers on something I've mentioned to you before, that Seattle actually has parks (those exact two), not that far away, built on reservoir land, but without their own plumbing.
Well, good night, and good days and nights until we meet again, dear Diary.
End of what I wrote in December 2024. Near as I can tell, it's still all more or less true. So again, dear Diary, happy days and nights and probably months, until we meet again.
