a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
The snow stopped early afternoon on Monday, and Mr Blue Sky* came out. I scraped the steps and the path to my front door clean, if only for the mailman that comes up to the mail box on the porch (to fill it with junk mail every day).
*A reference to the 1977 song from Electric Light Orchestra
There were widespread snowfalls in the low elevations of Puget Sound since Sunday night. It’s a somewhat unusual weather event: the biggest February snowfall in the city in 13 years. I measured about 4 inches at my house by noon on Monday.
Overnight temperatures hovered around freezing (32 °F/ 0 °C), and daytime will only add a few degrees to that. Hopefully most of the snow will melt and not freeze again into ice. Ice makes for a lot of trouble on streets and sidewalks!
Hey, I marched in Seattle’s Trump protest march today. Offcially/ unofficially called the Women’s March Seattle, it really featured as just about as many men as women, and the signs I saw covered a very wide range of concerns with the incoming administration – all based on what President Trump ran his campaign on. By the local TV station’s estimate, there were some 130,000 people in the march here in Seattle.
Update Sun 1/22: Organizers now say the number of people in the Seattle Women’s March on Washington is estimated to have been 175,000.
It was finally warm enough* for me to venture out for a walk-about in the city today, to ‘inspect’ the construction going on in downtown Seattle.
*43°F/ 6°C .. so still pretty chilly, just not freezing !
The Seattle Sounders, our Major League Soccer team, won the 2016 championship title on Saturday night against Toronto. It was 28 °F (-2°C) at kick-off ! More than 90 minutes later it was still 0-0 and the game went into overtime. Swiss-born Sounders goalkeeper Stefan Frei made a monster save (below), and the Sounders went on to win the penalty shoot- out with the winning penalty kick by Roman Torres. Go Sounders!
It doesn’t snow every winter in Seattle – and I’m not used to snow, anyway! – so when it does snow, I run out and take some pictures. Here are two of my favorites of the pictures I took this time.
It was a cold but sunny day here in Seattle, and I chased myself out of the house in the early afternoon. The dark comes quickly (4.18 pm today), like a thief that stole the light while you were not looking. The weatherman says there may be a dusting of snow in the lowlands in the morning. I will be able to tell if he is right early on, but I will be heading out to the airport and to San Francisco one more time, in the early hours.
Here’s my local Uncle Ike’s pot shop, the one on 15th Ave here on Capitol Hill. (It’s on my way to the grocery store, but I have not set foot inside of it yet). I see on the Uncle Ike website that they have multi-lingual ‘bud tenders’ .. a good thing given the dizzying array of cannabis products listed. Cannabis comes in all kinds of incarnations : flowers, concentrates, edibles (cookies), and of course – joints. I have also learned that the two major types of cannabis plants are Indica and Sativa.
There goes November .. the year is running out on us. It’s great to be home from the road a little earlier this week. Daytime and night time temperatures are falling here as winter approaches. On Monday night the first dip below freezing is expected at 30 °F (-1.1 °C).
My three new smoke/ CO detectors from Nest have been installed (with Bryan and Gary’s help). Despite the step-by-step instructions, it was definitely not straightforward to do the connection of each of the three devices to my home network .. so this may be something the manufacturers could work on to improve.
Well, I left Seattle-Tacoma airport wet on Sunday night, and it was wet again when I returned tonight. And we have a soggy Thanksgiving weekend ahead of us (Thanksgiving is Thursday), says the weather forecasters. San Francisco airport was full of holiday weekend travelers. One mom and dad herded five small kids with strollers stacked up on a cart and roller-bag luggage strung together in threes, through the airport. ‘Wow .. quite an operation you have going there’, said my colleague admiringly.
These pictures are from my walkabout this afternoon here in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood.
It’s good to know when I’m out on the road that Thursday will come soon enough, and that I would get to go home .. and so it was today again. The Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) train station not even a block away, and catch the train to the airport. I still have not had a ride in the brand new train cars, though. I see BART’s goal is to order more than 1,000 new train cars. Whoah! So maybe sometime soon!
It was raining lightly today*, but that did not stop me from taking my Sunday afternoon walk down to Capitol Hill train station for a run to downtown to go check up on the biosphere construction. I also stopped at the Barnes & Noble bookstore downtown. Sunday afternoons are just perfect for browsing through the cornucopia of offerings on the bookstore shelves.
*It’s been a very wet October here in the Seattle area. Seattle-Tacoma Airport’s October 2016 rainfall has now exceeded the previous October monthly record of 8.96 inches.
There was a second storm on Saturday here in the Puget Sound Area. We were warned to stock up on batteries, and charge our cell phones in case of a power outage, even to stock up on water and food. Well, while there was some damage to trees and property, the storm was not as bad as predicted.
My plan in case the power went out, was to crawl in bed and wait for it to pass!
There are two great bookstores withing walking distance of the University of Washington train station : the University book store and the Amazon bookstore. There are smaller second-hand bookstores in the University District as well.
Today, I walked to the Capitol Hill station, and Bryan (friend) and I took the new light rail extension to the University of Washington. It’s a bit of a walk (a mile) to the Amazon bookstore from there, but hey, walking is good exercise, right?
On Monday mornings, I have to leave the house just a little too early to be able to take the train to the airport (so I take a taxi or Uber car instead) .. but when I come in to the airport on Thursdays, I can take the train all the way up to Capitol Hill.
I was a little shocked to see a convoy of military vehicles make their way along the Embarcadero in San Francisco during lunch time today, but then learned that it’s Fleet Week in San Francisco, and there will be fighter jets flying over the Bay and all that (the same Blue Angels that come to Seattle for Seafair in August every year). The fighter jets have been a sore subject with peace protesters in San Francisco since the mid-80s.
Hurricane Matthew was projected to make landfall at West Palm Beach in Florida just as I arrived at my home in Seattle, so I immediately turned the TV on. It seems now that the storm’s eye will stay out in the sea – but the storm surge from the ocean will still cause a lot of flooding in the low-lying areas and outer banks all along the coast.
The Alaska Way viaduct tunnel is making progress .. but still has some way to go. The tunnel dig is scheduled for completion in ‘summer 2017’ says the Wash-DOT website (I guess that means July).
Gun violence
here in the USA continues. If you do not know the numbers, let me enlighten you. 90 people are shot to death each day in the USA. 33,000 per year. As a reminder, that is eleven times the number of people killed on 9/11. Eleven times, every year. No exception.
On Friday night, five people were shot to death in a department store in Burlington, WA (pop. 8,000). The killer (I’m not a journalist, so I don’t have to say ‘suspect’) was apprehended on Saturday. He is 20 years old, a Turkish immigrant, with a history of violence. He stole the gun that he had used from his dad. He may have been looking for an ex-girlfriend (she was not at the store). There was an uproar on Twitter because the police was looking for a ‘Hispanic’ person. Agreed – Turkish or Middle-Eastern is not Hispanic, but describing him as such definitely helped in his identification and in tracking him down.
Public transport aficionados that we are, Bryan and I made a run down to the new Angle Lake light rail station that was opening on Saturday. It will be five long years before more stations will open (to the north of the University of Washington).
The new station offers a stop 1.6 miles south of Sea-Tac airport, with some 1,200 parking spaces for commuters (parking time is limited to 24 hrs and not intended for airport-bound travelers).