a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
Fall has started, and the cruise ship season is winding down. (The last sailing from Seattle is Oct 10). Friends of ours left on a cruise this afternoon from the Smith Cove cruise terminal. Bryan and I went there to wave them goodbye – but we could not get quite close enough to the pier! We settled for views of the cruise ship departures from the Elliott Bay marina.
I finally went down to University Village mall to go check out Apple’s new store (and new iPhones*). There used to be a perfectly fine Apple store inside the mall, but I guess it was just not cool enough, and so they built a new stand-alone store, just steps away from where the old one was.
*I should probably upgrade my 2015 iPhone 6s at some point soon! The new camera lenses on the iPhone Xs, and the bezel-to-bezel OLED screen would be very welcome.
It’s here in downtown Seattle near Denny Way. It is the new building for Seattle Children’s Research Institute to expand into. The Institute’s scientists develop cures and therapies for childhood diseases such as cancers, sickle cell anemia and type 1 diabetes.
The Institute has grown from just 40 employees in 2006 to more than 1,500 today.
I made my way to the Seattle Central Library again today, as I do several times a week. I used to walk down to a smaller branch seven blocks from my house to get my book and newspaper fix for the day, but the Central Library has so much more material. I feel like Alice in Wonderland there.
We had beers and a bite at Fadó (say f’doe*) Irish Pub tonight. It is located in the historic Colman Building on 1st Avenue. Since it is First Thursday of the month, we could also stop in and admire art at a few of the galleries nearby, afterwards.
*An Irish term meaning ‘long ago’. It is used in Ireland to start a story -the equivalent of ‘once upon a time’.
We did another little walk in the woods today – just through a woodsy area near Paul’s house here in the Hansville area.
We went for a little hike along the beach to the lighthouse at Point No Point today.
A few of us went out to Paul’s on the Kitsap Peninsula on Saturday night, to stay over for a quick visit.
It’s Labor Day weekend – the unofficial end of summer here in the States.
The days are getting shorter, and the temperatures are getting milder (72 °F/ 22° F today).
Labor Day weekend is approaching, with the Bumbershoot music festival at Seattle Center. I feel am not a big enough live music fan to go to the festival*, but I like to check out the promotional posters every year.
*Single day ticket: $130, so one has to stay awhile – or most of the day – to make it worth the money. For the money-is-no-object aficionados there is a 3-day Emerald Pass for $750 with exclusive access to lounges and viewing areas, and complimentary cocktails.
It was a beautiful late-summer day here in Seattle (78 °F/ 26 °C).
Friends and I attended a WNBA* women’s basketball game in the Key Arena by the Space Needle.
*Women’s National Basketball Association, founded in 1996. There are 12 teams that play in the league.
This brown woodpecker is called a ‘northern flicker’ (Colaptes auratus). It spent a little time foraging for insects on my front lawn this morning. (Yes, the poor lawn is yellowed out from the three dry months of summer, but it will slowly start to green up, now that the rain is returning).
The smoky, unhealthy air that had blanketed the city since Sunday night, finally cleared up today.
There was a sprinkle of rain this morning, but I watered the garden later on in the day, as well.
Mister Blue Sky please tell us why
You had to hide away for so long (so long)
Where did we go wrong?
– Lyrics from ‘Mr. Blue Sky’ (1977), by Electric Light Orchestra
The air quality for today (and expected for tomorrow), for the Puget Sound region, is pretty much the worst on record*. Winds from the north and from the east have carried vast plumes of smoke and PM2.5 particles from the raging wildfires in Canada and Eastern Washington, to the region.
*An air quality value of 218 is reported tonight in my neck of the woods, which is in the ‘Very Unhealthy’ category.
Oops! I realized today, my library books are overdue, better take them back. I hopped on the bus to the Seattle Central Library downtown. Mission accomplished as far as returning the books, I meandered through the treasure trove of magazine racks on the 6th floor. Hmm, here’s Weyerhaeuser World magazine. I worked there for four years, when I first came to the Seattle area, so let’s see what happened in 1969.
Check it out below: a report of a student protest at the University of Washington here in Seattle. The Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) protested against American imperialism – in the time of the Vietnam war and all that, after all. This protest was specifically against Weyerhaeuser’s ‘exploitation of 12 million black South Africans’. I’m not sure if the workers deemed not to be paid fair wages, or if it was about their working conditions. It could have been both. For a long time in those years, wage earners in South Africa, especially in the mining industry, were treated very unfairly.
Anyway: the SDS splintered up and disbanded at the end of 1969, but was an important influence on student activist groups in the decades that followed. A new incarnation of SDS was founded in 2006. My advice to young people: protesting is fine and well, but the nature of the beast is : you really have to vote. Only 40% of eligible voters typically vote in midterm elections. For young people, it could be as low as half that again: 20%.
By Sunday evening the remains of the young man (Richard Russell, 29 years old), as well as the flight recorder, had been retrieved from the crash site.
The early take is that depression over financial troubles, was a major factor in the tragedy.
Here is one more picture from Volunteer Park on Friday, of the Conservatory building. The Victorian-style structure is said to be modeled loosely on The Crystal Palace in London’s Hyde Park. It was one of the first buildings to be erected on the young City of Seattle’s Volunteer Park grounds, and completed in 1912.
The Space Needle’s five year, $100 million project is complete. The original structure is still very sound, and not a lot of structural work was needed.
Instead, new floor-to-ceiling glass panels were installed, staircases were widened, and on the observation deck, floor-to-sky structural glass was added. The erstwhile solid steel floor is now ten layers of glass, designed so that the top layer can be replaced, once it gets a little worn out and scratched.
P.S. A bizarre event started to unfold at 7.32 pm tonight at Sea-Tac airport. A suicidal 29-year old man (ground service agent) took off in an empty Bombardier Q-400 from Horizon Air (a turboprop plane that can carry 76 passengers). It scared the daylights out of everyone; two F-15 jets were scrambled from Oregon, and tried to get him to land. He died when he crashed the airplane on Ketron island in south Puget Sound, some 30 miles from the airport. Miraculously, no buildings were damaged, and no one else was hurt.
Bryan and I hopped on the monorail today, at the Space Needle. It’s all of a two minute, one mile ride (for $2.50) .. but it’s a fun ride, floating above the street traffic in mid-air!
We had great Mexican food at Poquito’s here on Pike Street on Capitol Hill. The restaurant opened in 2011. The neon sign outside is much older and from the 1980’s. It was salvaged in South Seattle and given a second life after it had been taken down from a restaurant in Seattle’s Greenwood district.
