a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
The Seattle Aquarium biologists are hosting a ‘Sea Otter Awareness’ day this weekend. Sea otters are native to the coasts of the northern and eastern North Pacific Ocean.
Once almost hunted to extinction for their fur (the densest fur on all animals), their numbers have improved over the last century, but they are still an endangered species. Sea otters keep sea urchin populations in check, which would otherwise inflict extensive damage to kelp forest ecosystems (information from Wikipedia).
I swept fine ash from the wildfires off my deck and front porch on Wednesday. The smoky, hazy sky hung around, but on-shore breezes on Thursday should start to take care of some of the smoke. But to help the firefighters, it really needs to start raining here in the Pacific Northwest.
The sunset (7.45 pm) catches me some of these days, before I start out on my after-dinner walk, and then I have to stick to the main streets with lighting. It’s OK/ safe to walk in the dark here, but one can bump into people coming around the corner, or stumble on uneven paving! Here are two pictures from 15th Ave here on Capitol Hill.
Here in Seattle we leave behind one of the driest July-Augusts on record. The rainfall total of 0.02 inches at Seattle-Tacoma airport ties the figure for 1914.
The new school year is starting here, reminding me that Sept. 1 was called lentedag (‘spring day*’) when I was a kid in school in South Africa. To mark the day, we were allowed not to wear our school uniforms .. and I would always scratch my head as to what to wear!
*Even though the official start of spring would start later in September, same day when fall starts here in the North.
Here is tonight’s sunset in Hansville on the Kitsap Peninsula (Hood Canal side).
Do we have sharks
in Puget Sound? I wondered, when I saw a shark ‘floatie’ at a store here in Kingston on the Kitsap Peninsula. Answer: yes, some 11 species, shown on the handy guide produced by the Seattle Times. These are mostly docile sharks (no Great White), and only three are seen regularly and called ‘resident’ sharks.
I went out to Seattle’s Green Lake on Sunday night to catch a little bit of the annual ‘From Hiroshima to Hope‘ gathering there. It’s been 72 years since the world’s first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. A banner at Green Lake pointed out that barely 20 miles west of Seattle, at the Kitsap-Bangor Naval Base, one finds the largest concentration of deployed nuclear weapons in the United States. Last month, the United Nations reached its first agreement to ban nuclear weapons. But it’s complicated : Japan, alongside the nine nuclear-armed nations*, including the United States, refused to take part in the negotiations and the vote.
*United States, United Kingdom, Russia, France, China, Pakistan, India, Israel and North Korea (!). The entire Southern Hemisphere is free of nuclear weapons.
It’s Seafair weekend here in the city, a tradition since 1950 : air shows over Lake Washington, a hydroplane race, and warships at the waterfront that are open to visitors. So we went on down to the waterfront to check out the USS Michael Murphy there.
Well, we got up to 94°F (34°C) today, a new same-day record high.
There is lot of smoke is drifting down from wildfires in Canada, and the air is noticeably hazy, even at short distances.
With the haze, it’s possible to see sunspots on the sun as it rises and sets, using a telescope. (Sunspots are regions of reduced surface temperature caused by concentrations of magnetic field flux. They may last a few days or a few weeks or months, but eventually decay).
We ducked into the cool inside of a restaurant called ‘Smiths’ here on 15th Avenue tonight, for our regular Wednesday-night-beer-and-bite.
My favorite beer is a pilsener, and so I had a König Pilsener – brewed in Duisburg, Germany.
I thought the beer’s name might mean ‘the king’s beer’, but no, it’s named after brewmaster Theodor König who started brewing the beer in 1858.
Today the brewery belongs to Bitburger Braugruppe GmbH.
Their tagline is ‘Bitte ein Bit’.
It’s high summer here in Seattle, and the meteorologists say we will hit 98°F (37°C) by Thursday, before it cools down a bit. Still no rain in sight. So after a record 44″ of rain this past winter (average is 30″), we’re now headed for a record number of dry days of no rain (measured at Seattle-Tacoma airport; there was just a smidge of rain in the city last Thursday).
There is an artificial turf lawn on the outside. I could also see misters and lights on the inside of the sphere, but there is still work to be done to bring furnishing for humans into the spheres!
It’s been a great summer so far here in Seattle, with temperatures in the 70’s to low 80’s (20 to 28°C). It’s been drier than usual though, with the blue skies now closing in on a record stretch of days with no measurable rain.
King 5 (local TV station here in Seattle) is running a campaign to make residents aware of the need to be prepared for a disaster. It could be .. a Meteor | a Missile from North Korea | a Magnitude 9.0 earthquake & tsunami. I think the quake is most likely, given that we are way overdue, now 317 years into an estimated 243-year cycle (gulp) for the region’s recorded 9.0 earthquakes over the last 10,000 years. (The last 9.0 quake was in 1700 and there should have been another one by 1943!).
Below is King 5’s suggested check list. I highlighted the main topics in bold for myself. It’s very important for the supply kit to contain critical medicines, some bills of money, some food, and identification! Presumably it would be difficult or impossible to use one’s car to drive somewhere (traffic jams, road blocks). Some people would say what about needing guns or knives for self-defense? Oh my. That kind of thinking is very survivalist/ apocalyptic, not so? I don’t have a gun in the house. Maybe grab a sharp kitchen knife on the way out?
Here’s the Seattle skyline as seen from the Bainbridge ferry on Friday afternoon. I stitched together three photos, and marked it up with some of the tallest and most iconic buildings.
Here’s a basket with a ‘Take a treasure, leave a treasure sign’, that I saw on the steps to a house during my neighborhood walk last night. I wanted to contribute something, but had nothing in my pockets (other than my house key and phone). I love the idea behind the basket: that small and serendipitous items can be very interesting.
Seattle’s Yesler Way bridge was built in 1910, making it one of the oldest permanent steel roadway bridges in the city. Its new rehabilitation project is well underway and scheduled for completion in fall of this year. The $20 million project was funded by a ‘Bridging the Gap’ transportation levy (a property tax increase) passed by voters in 2006, together with a grant from the Federal Highway Bridge Program.
It was a beautiful day with a high of 74°F/23°C here in the city.
Here’s a view from the waterfront just north of Seattle downtown, out over Elliott Bay. That’s a special kind of cruise ship anchored out in the water.
I’ve been wanting to do this for a long, long time, and now I finally did it: installed an old tennis ball on a string, dangling from a rafter in my garage.
My ‘new’ (used) Camry is bigger than the one I had, and now I do not have to wonder if I left enough room at the back for the garage door to close!
It was LGBTQ Pride weekend in Seattle (as was the case in many other cities in North America).
June is recognized each year as LGBTQ Pride Month in the USA, not because the weather is nice! .. but to commemorate the Stonewall Inn event on the morning of June 28, 1969 in New York City’s Greenwich Village. Police raided the popular bar, not notable in itself for the late ’60s, but this time the patrons of the bar and on-lookers outside, fought back. There were riots for several nights after that in the Village, as well. The following year, on June 28, 1970, saw the first gay pride marches in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Chicago.
Fast forward to 2017, and here are a few colorful pictures from today’s march in Seattle. We have all come a long, long way. Happy Pride!
