The high was 94°F (34°C) here in the city today, and the air quality was not the best (wildfire smoke from Canada and eastern Washington). Bellingham to the north of Seattle recorded 100°F (38°C), a new record for any month.
Even so, early evening found me on the Lower Woodland Park tennis courts for the regular Thursday night social tennis. I made sure I had extra water and a banana to keep me going.
Update Fri 8/13: Friday’s highs here in Seattle reached 96°F (35.5°C). It is going cool down on Saturday and Sunday, thankfully.
I’m keeping my windows and doors closed on Friday and Saturday. This simulation has lots of red, the dark red and purple (the worst air quality). Vast volumes of smoky air are swirling around, from the fires in Canada, in eastern Washington, in Oregon and down in California. We need rain, but it’s several more weeks before the rainy season starts.
I discovered footage of myself on my car’s sentry video log. The ‘suspicious motion’ behind my car is me :). I am retrieving a tennis ball that had bounced out of the tennis courts by Lower Woodland Park, and landed behind my car.
When suspicious motion near the car is detected, the front & rear and left & right cameras begin recording. A lot of entries are generated simply by people parking their cars next to yours, and getting in or out of their cars.
If a significant threat is detected— a break-in or a collision— the alarm system will also activate, and the will be owner notified via the smartphone app that an incident has occurred.
I had groceries on the back seat of the car when I pulled into my garage tonight. I stepped out of the car, took the groceries out, closed the door, and put the charging cable in.
As I stepped into the house, the car reported ‘The rear driver side door has been left open’ on my phone. Well, it was open for a minute or two but I’m sure I closed it, I thought. I popped my head into the open garage door. Yup, it’s closed.
But 16 mins later the message came again, and I went and took a closer look.
Sure enough: the car was right. The door was ostensibly ‘closed’, but not latched properly (firmly). So to the car, the door was open.
I took the No 10 bus to downtown to go to the dentist this morning.
Here are a few pictures.
Looking south on 15th Avenue. Coastal Kitchenrestaurant is open but only Wednesday through Sunday. (The combination rainbow-transgender flag needs a little straightening out, but that’s OK). The former QFC grocery store building on the far left has been deserted & boarded up for a few months now. There is a non-scalable fence around the parking lot. The guy on the electric scooter is using the street (not the sidewalk: good), and wearing a helmet, also good. There are three e-scooter operators in the city: LINK, Wheels, and Lime.There are new signs at Westlake Center, for locals and tourists alike. The 1929 Macy’s building was sold in April for $580 million. The new owners plan to renovate the 85,000 sq ft-ground floor, mezzanine and second floor to accommodate new retail stores. Amazon is leasing the upper floors, but I doubt there are any workers in there. Amazon pushed back a return to the office for its workers to 2022.I love the Pacific Northwest artwork at the Arc’teryx outdoor equipment & clothing store by Westlake plaza. The moon is my favorite. (I could not find the name of the artist).On the left would be Mount Rainier, and that has to be an orca fin in Puget Sound, on the right.And finally some salmon. That’s a sockeye salmon (Oncorhynchus nerka) on the left, also called red salmon. Salmon are anadromous fish: spending most of their adult lives at sea, but return to fresh water to spawn. Catadromous fish (example: the North American eel) spend most of their lives in fresh water, then migrate to the sea to breed.Lastly, I had to go check out the completed $600 million Rainier Square Tower with its sweeping step-up side on 5th Avenue. Floors 39 to 58 at the top are ‘residences’ (apartments). The 1 bed -1.5 bath 896 sqft units start at some $4,400/ month. I’m sure a 2 bed 2 bath would be about double that. (Eek).Right across the street from Rainier Square Tower are the straight lines of this 1996 building that used to be a Red Lion hotel. I sat in its ball room in 2011, listening to my firm’s partners drone on about the value that a good brand brings to a firm (bottom line: you can charge more for your product or service than your competitors can). Then later that year in 2011, the Red Lion was sold. It was sold again in 2014, and a makeover made it into ‘Motif Seattle‘, now owned by Hyatt. Google Maps says there is a Tesla destination charger in its parking garage down below. (Destination chargers are installed by businesses and land owners for public use, but have a slower charging speed than superchargers).
Well, that was that.
The Games held in a pandemic is now over. It was getting a little too much for me: the commercial-filled coverage from NBC with the taa-ta-ra-tataa music, and my Twitter feed filled up with stories and superlatives (best ever, most medals).
Great action picture of 23-yr old Neeraj Chopra, the Indian athlete that won the first ever track and field gold medal for his country. His final throw of 87.58m was not his personal best, but good enough to win the gold. The German javelin star Johannes Vetter was also not in good form. He had thrown a second-best all-time throw of 97.76m last year. Coming into the Games, he boasted the season-best in 2021, a spectacular 96.29m. He just could not best Chopra at this event at the Games. [Photo by Reuters]
A little rain fell into the gauge at Seattle-Tacoma airport yesterday, ending the 51-day dry streak there.
There were pleasant, cool temperatures around the city today (69 °F/ 21 °C). A little bit of rain may fall later tonight and in the morning.
Summer is definitely not over, though: we are going to get into the mid-90s by Thursday, and even have to deal with wildfire smoke.
Killer cartoon by Lebanese-Swiss cartoonist Patrick Chappatte, from Der Spiegel. ‘Warming, Floods, Fires. No U-turn possible’. Yes, there is no turning back to a totally clean start, but we can still mitigate and reduce the changes we are making to the climate with our actions. That family car has no tail pipe, so I trust that means it is an electric vehicle!
Look at all the red on this map of the USA. We are averaging more than 100,000 new coronavirus cases a day, for the first time since February.
If Florida and Louisiana were countries, they would have been No 1 and No 2 in the world for Covid prevalence.
Barely a month after Washington State ‘reopened’, King County is now again red, as well (threat level: High).
I corrected/ clarified USA Today newspaper’s headline for them. I am vaccinated, and I wear my mask indoors in public spaces (again). Unvaccinated people are like drunk drivers. If you are unvaccinated, you should really stay home and not go anywhere. Sooner or later, you will get infected, and infect others: your family, your friends, co-workers, strangers. How hard is that to understand?
P.S. So now that my rant against the unvaccinated is out of the way, here is advice from Adam Grant (organizational psychologist) @AdamMGrant on Twitter, when talking to vaccine-hesitant people: How not to talk about vaccines:
Only half the population is vaccinated, and anti-vaxxers are to blame. Vaccines are safe and effective.
A better option:
Over 160 million Americans are fully vaccinated. Yes, vaccines have risks, but COVID poses greater risk.
The Dixie wildfire in Northern California has now torched 500 square miles.
More than 100 homes and much of the downtown of Greenville (pop. 1,000 or so) have burned down.
I wanted to see what the historic Gold Rush-era Sierra Lodge on Main Street used to look like, and found it on Google Streetview.
Here’s my navigation screen as I drove south on Interstate 5 towards the city in heavy traffic today. It was 2.01 pm and 85 °F (29.5 °C) outside.
I am getting more confident using the standard autopilot function of my car (that is, autosteer to stay in the lane, and using adaptive cruise control).
(Apologies for the Moiré pattern in the picture). Lots of trucks around me, and we’re down to 14 mph. (To the right of the ’14’ it says that the car’s cameras read the speed limit as 60 mph. My top speed setting is +5 mph above the speed limit. So the car will not exceed 65 mph). Autopilot keeps me centered in the lane, and keeps 3 car lengths between me and the vehicle in front of me. (The gap can be adjusted all the way up to 7 car lengths, but then you frustrate the drivers behind you, since it appears as if you’re not paying attention to the traffic in front of you!). I still have to keep my hands on the wheel, even though the car steers, accelerates & brakes by itself. There’s a motorcycle in front of me. Traffic soon ground to a halt, and the motorcyclist had to put his feet on the highway as he stopped. Then traffic ahead started moving again, and my car automatically followed. Very nice!
A few rain drops fell on the tennis courts at Woodland Park tonight, and there was thunder and lightning overhead.
There was a little bit of rain in the city as well, but none was recorded at Seattle-Tacoma airport. Today was day 50 without rain there (longest on record is 55, in 2017).
Gorgeous pinks and grays, in this twilight picture by Seattle photographer Tim Durkan @timdurkan on Twitter.
“These people need to get down to business and clean up the mess in this city,” said Joe Howard, a Black 48-year-old financial trader who lives on Capitol Hill and decried the “disorganized nonsense” of the protest zone. “I understand you want to open up society, you want a fair and equitable society, but just being airheaded about things behind a liberal ideology is not going to achieve that.”
– Gene Johnson reporting from Seattle for the Associated Press
Mayor of Seattle Jenny Durkin is stepping down after a tumultuous year of handling the Covid pandemic, Black Lives Matter protests and the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone that drew national attention.
Gun violence has become an even worse problem in Seattle in recent months, as it has in many other major cities. And then there are the encampments of homeless people in the city’s parks and on the sidewalks and under freeway overpasses that need urgent attention.
So there is a 15-way race underway for Mayor of Seattle, and Seattleites are electing two candidates in tomorrow’s primary election. The top two will face off in a general election in November.
I for one, and for once, cast my vote for more moderate or conservative (gasp!) candidates— for mayor, as well as for each of the two city council positions that were on my ballot.
Cartoon from the online edition of alternative Seattle newspaper The Stranger at thestranger.com. The caption reads: We spy with our stoned little eyes: Jenny Durkan hobnobbing with cops, Jessyn Farrell testing out some innovative childcare infrastructure, Andrew Grant Houston posing with a constituent, antifascists schooling Bruce Harrell on the field, Lorena González netting a can of tear gas, Colleen Echohawk constructing some housing, Casey Sixkiller sweeping up someone else’s personal property, and a city emerging from a pandemic to confront yet another summer of smoky skies. [Illustration by JAMES YAMASAKI]
It’s official: the rainfall for July was a T (for trace), as measured at Seattle-Tacoma airport. The weather people are promising us that it will rain on Friday, though.
Mirror, mirror, on the wall .. who is the greenest of them all? Washington State, of course. (More than a 50% ‘precipitation probability’— I think that means ‘chance of rain’— for Friday & the following 5 days, says NOAA). [Graphic by NOAA/ National Weather Service]
