a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
It was warm here in the city today (85 °F/ 30 °C).
Most of the Pacific Northwest has— so far— been spared the smoke from Canada that is plaguing New York City and the Northeast.
I made it down to Madison Park beach this afternoon.
A smattering of heliophiles were sunning themselves on the lawn.
There was plenty of sunlight today, but only mild temperatures (70 °F/ 21 °C).
Happy Friday.
June is Pride month. Pride Month began after the Stonewall riots, a series of gay liberation protests in 1969, and has spread outside of the United States since that time.
Here are a few photos that I took while I was on the 11.05 am Kingston-to-Edmonds ferry today.
I walked around the Seattle Waterfront this afternoon.
It is still somewhat of a work in progress.
The new Colman Dock ferry terminal is nearing completion, but several walkways and connections to the Waterfront are still under construction.
Happy Friday.
It’s Memorial Day weekend, the unofficial start of summer here in the US.
It’s also the end of Seattle Beer Week, and The Seattle Times reports that Seattle is a city full of beer snobs.
Cheers!
The galaxy gold of 13 months is gone at the top of the Space Needle— the dome now has a new coat of astronaut white.
It was cool here in Seattle today, with gray skies (high 63°F / 17 °C).
In the late afternoon, I walked down to the REI outdoor store, and on the way back, there was a little bit of drizzle.
‘This might have been the white and blue Alaska Air plane that I saw overhead in the sky today’, I thought as I saw this picture in the Seattle Times.
Here are scenes from my visit to Hood Canal on Kitsap Peninsula with friends. We drove out there on Sunday via Gig Harbor and the Tacoma-Narrows Bridge, and took the Kingston-Edmonds ferry back on Monday morning.
Photos: Tacoma-Narrows Bridge; Hood Canal kayakers; meadow buttercups; Sunday’s sunset over the very north-end of Hood Canal; the Olympic Mountains on the Olympic Peninsula, seen across a low tide level in Hood Canal; brown squirrel; bald eagle taking flight; on the Marine Vessel (ferry) Puyallup after leaving the Kingston ferry terminal; spotting the Kitsap Fast Ferry— with downtown Seattle towers and antennas in the distance, and against the backdrop of Mount Rainier capped with a lenticular cloud.
I found this pansy flower in the Thomas Street Gardens today.
In South Africa they are called gesiggies in Afrikaans (‘little faces’).
Three of the amigos had beers at the Elysian Capitol Hill Brewery.
On the way there, on 14th Avenue, I saw this vintage poster in a shop window.
The mowing is done.
The mower was moi.
Happy Friday, the first one in May.
It was a very wet day for May, but maybe Mother Nature is just getting us caught up with the rain.
Sea-Tac Airport had recorded slightly less than 12 in. of rain in the first four months of 2023, which is about 5 inches below average.
Wow!
The Seattle Kraken knocked off the defending Stanley Cup champion Colorado Avalanche by 2 goals to 1 tonight in Denver, in the seventh and final game of their first-round play-off series.
From the Seattle Times:
A blistering, second-period wrist shot by Kraken winger Oliver Bjorkstrand had stunningly put his team ahead by two and allowed followers of his second-year franchise to dare to dream the impossible.
After being outplayed most of Sunday night’s opening-round Game 7 to that point, the Kraken somehow had found themselves poised to knock out the defending Stanley Cup champions for good. And though the Colorado Avalanche eventually did mount a furious, desperation-fueled comeback, the Kraken and goalie Philipp Grubauer held on for a history-making, 2-1 victory and advanced to a second-round playoff showdown starting this week against the Dallas Stars.
– By Geoff Baker, Seattle Times staff reporter
Here is a PSA* targeted at the drivers that park their cars illegally on the shoulder of the access road to Seattle-Tacoma airport.
(They wait there for arriving passengers that they are going to pick up, deeming it too much of a hassle to use the cell phone parking lot).
Well— you can stretch your legs in the cell phone parking lot, and it is actually a lot closer to the airport than that shoulder on the access road (by up to one whole mile).
Please use the cell phone parking lot.
*Public Service Announcement
It was a lovely day with blue skies all around and 78 °F (26 °C)— a high temperature for late April.
We drop back into the normal range by Sunday, some 10 degrees cooler.
Happy Friday.
Here’s another Nineteenth Avenue Tree Canopy report: looking fine, with the green of the budding leaves on the tree limbs just starting to show.
These entrances belong to condo buildings that are all on the same street block: on 17th Avenue between East Spring Street and East Union Street.
They were all built in the late 1920s, with views of the city from the upper floors, and close to the street car line at the time that was running along Madison Street.
Behold— the Margola (Mayan detailing, 1928), the Martha Anne (Art Deco art glass & terra cotta, 1929), Carmona Apartments (Mediterranean Revival, 1929), the Betsy Ross (1928), the Fleur de Lis (French, 1927), Mayfair Manor (1928), and the Barbara Frietchie Co-op (1928).
Twenty minutes out of Bremerton, the lights cut out and they could feel the engines stop running. The lights came on a minute later, they said, and the ship’s alarm sounded twice before an announcer told passengers the ferry had lost propulsion and steering. Brace for impact, the announcer said.
There were 596 passengers and 15 crew members on the vessel.
Shortly after 8 p.m., passengers were being loaded onto Kitsap Transit fast ferries to be taken to Bremerton.
The last passengers were being offloaded shortly after 9 p.m.
– The Seattle Times, reporting that the ferry Walla Walla, headed from Bremerton to Seattle, ran aground around 4:30 p.m. Saturday in Rich Passage.
