Thursday/ time to go

It’s Thursday again, and at 1.30 pm sharp it was time for me to pack up for the drive to San Francisco International airport.

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Here’s the part of the Bay Bridge complex that is closest to downtown San Francisco.
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This Air New Zealand Boeing 777 is scheduled for a 9.45 pm departure southwest across the Pacific to Aukland.  It’s a 14 hr flight.

Tuesday/ a Jimmy lunch

What’s a Jimmy lunch? Why, it’s aFullSizeRender (3) lunchbox from the sandwich franchise Jimmy Johns. I would say my lunch made for a classic American lunch : a turkey sandwich (with a pickle), a bag of chips and a cookie.   No soda pop for me, though. Too much sugar and therefore verboten.

Monday/ back to the salt mine

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From Wikipedia : The Wieliczka Salt Mine (Polish: Kopalnia soli Wieliczka), located in the town of Wieliczka in southern Poland, lies within the Kraków metropolitan area. The mine, built in the 13th century, produced table salt continuously until 2007, as one of the world’s oldest salt mines still in operation.

Weekend’s over!  .. it was back to the ‘salt mine’ for me on Monday.

I finally made it to SFO airport by 11.00 am on Monday morning, a little later than usual  .. morning fog made for an air traffic control hold for our flight.

Sunday/ back to Seattle

So .. our long weekend getaway came to an end, the way it always does.  We had some time to spare between checking out at the hotel and leaving from Portland’s Union Station, so we walked over to the Pearl District nearby.

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This is in the Pearl District, just north of downtown Portland. It has many apartment buildings and shady trees further up .. and street cars to hop on to, to go downtown with.
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Some grain silos and train cars on the track. The brown colors and the thin semi-circular line shadows made me take the picture.
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The cone shaped construction houses Tacoma’s (art) Museum of Glass.

Saturday/ more Portland

These pictures IMG_3761 smare from Saturday night.   The neon rose is from a bike repair shop on the waterfront on the Willamette river.

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Here’s the Willamette river by downtown Portland at night time. That’s an almost-full moon in the sky.
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We did not make it into the Portland Outdoor Store even though it was just a block away from the hotel.

Friday/ downtown Portland

Here are some pictures from Friday.  We found lots to look at, and things to do, close to the hotel in downtown Portland.  The weather was sunny and mild and we just went on a walkabout, stopping at different places.

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We’re on the banks of the Willamette river, and just in time to see the drawbridge open up for a barge that needs to pass through underneath.
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Here is a street car that stopped at a plaza close to the University of Portland.  I could not fit the street car in one frame and so I clicked three times instead !
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Here is Starbucks’s mug for the city of Portland, also called the City of Roses.
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This was our lunch spot, called Huber’s.  It is billed as the city’s oldest restaurant, some 178 years old.  Check out the cool lead and glass skylights.
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This is the famous Voodoo Doughnut Store. Most mornings the line of patrons stretches around the corner.
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This offering from Voodoo Doughnut has chocolate, crushed Oreo cookie and caramel on.
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We found this happy group of Portland dancers in one of the plazas in the city. They look Polish or East Euopean to me, but the sign just called them ‘The Portland dancers’.
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This is the chalkboard from Powell’s bookstore. (It is a very large and unique bookstore. If it ever closes, civilization as we know it will have come to an end).
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Friday was May 1, International Workers’ Day,and this small group made a go of it to protest working conditions, wages and the USA’s immigration policies. There was no serious confrontations or violence. (Not so in Seattle, where cars were damages and protesters and police were injured).

Thursday/ to Portland by train

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Here is the Amtrak Cascades route down to Portland. It takes 3 hrs 40 mins.
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Approaching the Tacoma Narrows bridge – two bridges actually : the old one and the new one right next to each other. The old one dates from 1950 and the new one opened in 2007. The original bridge from 1940 collapsed when winds amplified the natural frequency of the bridge movement. We were shown a clip of this when I was an engineering student in the 1980s !
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This is just a beautiful brick-red truss bridge right at Portland Station after our arrival.
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Our train was the Mt. Jefferson. The train is still south-bound and the passengers for Eugene, Oregon are already boarding.
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And here is Portland Station. Our hotel is walking distance from the station, so we did not even need to get a cab.

Five of us are making a long weekend of it a going to Portland by train, and stay in a hotel in downtown Portland and walk around and just relax.  The Amtrak Cascades train gets one there in just under 4 hours.   Yes, one can drive down in slightly less time, but the train is relaxing and there is no traffic to deal with.

Wednesday/ jacaranda blossoms

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Jacaranda blossoms from a tree right here on the corner of my street in Capitol Hill, Seattle.

I guess I knew from previous spring blooms that the tree close to my house on the corner is a jacaranda tree, but I realized it again as I walked by it on Tue night.  Man!  Did you know that? Did you forget? I asked myself. Jacaranda trees are actually native to tropical and subtropical regions, found widely in Asia, and in Nepal .. and in South Africa as well.   In fact, my home city for a few years in the 1990s in South Africa was Pretoria, which is popularly known there as ‘The Jacaranda City’.   The jacaranda trees lined the street in front of my house there, and would produce carpets of purplish blossoms that had dropped onto the sidewalk.

Tuesday/ who may marry (in the United States)?

The US4-28-2015 11-11-49 PM Supreme Court heard arguments today for and against same-sex marriage.  Has the definition of marriage changed over the last thousand years?  I would say it has. Should it change to allow gay couples to marry?  Should one State recognize the marriage from out-of-State married visitors? (Since some States in the USA allow gay couples to marry and others absolutely do not).  Here are some audio transcripts from the court, again courtesy of the New York Times.  The justices’ ruling is due in June.

Monday/ the Nepal earthquake

The death toll had climbed above 4,000 in the Nepal earthquake by Monday night.  Several historic buildings in Katmandu were destroyed (pictures below, from the New York Times).

I wanted to see where Mt Everest was located relative to the earthquake.  At least 18 people were killed when an avalanche from the earthquake hit the base camp.  Check out the great maps from the on-line edition of the New York Times, in this article Extent of the damage Nepal earthquake.

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Sunday/ the dinosaurs are coming (again)

I see it’s time for another Jurassic* Park movie this summer, the latest one set for release on June 12.   I will have to go see it in the theater for the full effect !

P.S. These geological timescales are enormous in length.  Humankind’s history goes back, oh, 5,000 years.  The Jurassic Period was some 200–145 million years ago.  During the Jurassic Period, the super-continent Pangaea started to drift apart.

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Yikes .. what a nice set of jaws those are! A ‘Sea World’ scene from a trailer of the upcoming Jurassic World movie, set for release on June 12 here in the USA.
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[From Wikipedia] The distribution of fossils across the continents is one line of evidence pointing to the existence of the super-continent Pangaea.  It formed approximately 300 million years ago and then began to break apart after about 100 million years.

Saturday/ drink your mat-cha

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A packet of matcha that I bought in Japan a long time ago. 

The Today Show of Friday morning featured matcha, a finely ground powder of specially grown and processed green tea leaves*.  Weatherman Al Roker and anchor Matt Lauer each took a sip and pulled a face.  The green tea has been around for centuries in Japan, but now gaining popularity here in the USA, especially in San Francisco.   So I would have to find a place that serve it up and try it.   I think the stuff definitely blows one’s hair back ! It looks a lot stronger than regular green tea.

*Green tea has epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG) in abundance, a polyphenol shown to pep one up and fight off diseases.

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I was intrigued by the unusual applications of the stuff : hot or cold beverage, in milk, or in desserts.

 

Friday/ new look on 16th Ave

More than a year ago, in Feb 2014, I reported that this beautiful old house on 16th Ave was being torn down.  Well, here is what was built in its place : a modern eight 2 bed-2 bath townhouses.  Four have already been sold.  The list price is $660,000.

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New townhouses at 341 16th Ave E, Seattle. Three of the eight units are visible. I like the dark blue color.

 

Thursday/ watch out for volcanoes

I saw pictures of today’s Calbuco volcano4-23-2015 10-53-40 PM eruption on TV, as I got home tonight .. so I had to check it out and see what other spectacular pictures I could find on line.   The volcano is more or less in the middle of Chile at an altitude of 6,000 ft (2,000 m) with a crater at the top that is some 1,500 ft (300 m) wide.

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Who knew there is such a thing a volcanic lightning? The eruption and flow of ash in the creates oppositely charged particles in the air similar to what happens during a thunderstorm.
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The view from the town of Puerto Varas. The townsfolk must have thought that the apocalypse had arrived.
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The ash column is about 9 miles high (15 km or 45,000 ft), a lot higher than the altitude that passenger airplane jets fly at.

 

Hump Day

Yes, IMG_7555 smcommercial from insurance company Geico has been around a long time – but this still picture from it is making the rounds here on our project.   It features a camel* that walks around the office asking cubicle workers ‘Guess what day it is?’.   Leslie – in the picture – does not even look up as she quietly says ‘It’s hump day’.   We like ‘hump day’ .. it means it’s almost Thursday, when we get to go home.  Yay!

*One-hump camels are called dromedaries, and two-hump camels are called Bactrian camels.  More than half of the world’s camel population is found in Somalia.

Tuesday/ the pressure is on

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I’ve never owned a pressure cooker! Am I missing out? We had a mishap once with a pressure cooker with beets in while I was growing up. Yikes! It made quite a mess in the kitchen.

We are rallying to get ready for the third cycle of testing for the solution we are building, and feeling the pressure.   On Tuesday I had a full day of meetings, and I just could not keep up with the e-mails pouring into my inbox.

Monday/ morning joe at SFO

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The ‘CALIFORNIA’ edition of Starbucks’s coffee mugs .. it looks deserty and hot, which is what most of California looks like, in fact. 

As soon as I arrive at San Francisco airport’s International Terminal on Monday mornings, I march over to Starbucks to get some coffee.

It helps to make me alert so that I can drive the rental car after my little early morning catnap on the airplane, is my thinking (and of course I like coffee in the morning, anyway).

Sunday/ eating out at lark

My friends and I went to Lark Restaurant tonight .. newly located in a repurposed warehouse on 10th Ave in Capitol Hill.  It’s nice to see a ‘new’ place that for once did not involve the complete demolition of the original building.  I see the restaurant bills itself as offering ‘French’ food .. but I had a very Pacific Northwestern meal of salad and salmon and that universal of desserts, a gooey and chocolate-y.  All very nice.  The ‘Old German Lager’ style beer I had was brewed in Pittsburgh and did not quite hit the mark for me, though.

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Lark on 10th Avenue in Capitol Hill. The main restaurant is downstairs with more seating upstairs.  Upstairs is where the bar called Bitter/ Raw is (strange name for a bar – no?).

 

Saturday/ a house fire nearby

There was a bad house fire just a block away from my house on Thursday morning.  The fire brigade was just clearing out by the time I got home by 7 pm on Thursday night.    An elderly lady in her nineties died in the incident and her son had to be taken to hospital.  I wanted to find out what had caused the fire, and The Capitol Hill Blog  reported that it was improperly discarded smoking materials that ignited a chair in the house.

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This is a till picture from a video clip by Adam Loving posted on the Capitol Hill Blog on Thu April 16th. This is on 16th Avenue and Republican Street on Capitol Hill.

 

Friday/ South African coins (1962)

I couldn’t resist these South African brass coins when I saw them on eBay, and so I bought them and found them in my mailbox on Thursday night.  I had them in my pocket as a young boy.  I remember the 1/2 cent coin with the two sparrows particularly well.   The 1 cent coin with the ossewa (ox wagon) was not as common.  These particular coins were not minted for long : only from 1961 to 1964, when they were replaced with a new series of coins.

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From left to right : An American dime, 1962 South African 1/2c and 1c coins (brass).
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The obverse of the South African coins with Jan van Riebeeck, a Dutch colonialist and the founder of the modern Cape Town (in 1652). ‘Eendrag maak mag’ .. stand together! says the inscription.