a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
I wish I could send some of the rain water from here, all the way down to Cape Town, South Africa. (The city of Cape Town is experiencing the worst drought in its recorded history).
Here is the Seattle area forecast for the next seven days.
It was rainy today, and so I limited my Sunday walkabout to downtown. I did manage to snap a better picture of the Macy’s Christmas star!
Black Friday has some and come, and Small Business Saturday – but I still have not done any shopping. I guess I will venture out to downtown Seattle soon to go check on the merchandise (it’s still nice to go out to the store and look at stuff) .. and I will pull the trigger on a few books, and other items, that I let lie in my Amazon cart for several days now.
Bloomberg Businessweek says the single biggest mistake a department store such as Macy’s had made, was to buy up all the other failing department stores over the years. Macy’s have now had sales declines for the last 11 quarters. Management knows they have to train sales staff better, and improve in other ways the in-store experience for the 41 million shoppers that still come into their stores every year.
I made it back to Seattle late on Thursday night, courtesy of Alaska Airlines.
There’s a friendly ‘Christmas dragon’ on a parking lot close by my house, where they sell Christmas trees every year. The trees are said to be up to 10% more expensive this year. The reason: in the 2007-2008 recession fewer trees were planted, and those are the ones now being harvested.
Microsoft’s Connector bus service started in 2007, and shuttles its employees from the Seattle side to Redmond and Bellevue. The King County public bus Route 545 does run an express service out there as well, and some say that Microsoft is taking commuters out of the public transportation system. In 2014 a small group of protesters blocked Connector buses in Capitol Hill, blaming them for ‘enabling’ local Microsoft employees to drive up property prices. (It’s complicated. There is also Amazon’s impact – and Seattle City Council policies lacking incentives for encouraging affordable housing construction. And a new tax on international buyers in Vancouver in 2016 just made Seattle more popular for these buyers as well).
Microsoft did support the ‘Yes’ initiative for ST3, the expansion of light rail service over to the East side. So in a few years, commuters to the East side will have even more options. I think it’s all good. The more buses and trains and street cars, the better.
I managed to walk down 1st Avenue from Pike Place Market to Pioneer Square today, before the rain caught up with me and I had to call it quits. I took a few pictures of the Pioneer Building. For awhile, it was the tallest building in Seattle and Washington state – from 1892 to 1904. In December 2015, the building was purchased by workspace provider Level Office. They renovated the building’s interior to create private offices and co-working space for small businesses.
A series of cloudy and rainy fronts weather is set to roll over Seattle the next several days.
So when the sun came out from under the clouds today, I said to myself: get out of the house now! go get some sun!
It’s the end of Daylight Saving Time in the USA. At 2 am we’re all* setting our clocks here in the USA back by one hour. Yay! An extra hour for the party animals that hang out in the bars until 2 am – and an extra hour of snooze time for me on Sunday morning.
*Not Hawaii, Arizona— nor the U.S. territories of American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and the Northern Mariana Islands. They do not observe DST.
I took advantage of the nice fall weather here (sunny, 60°F/ 15°C) before the next rain storm sweeps in, and went down to Seattle Art Museum (SAM) in downtown. I just checked out the artsy offerings in the museum store, and took a few pictures on the streets nearby.
I went down to South Lake Union today to check out the construction on the old Seattle Times Building’s site.
The original Seattle Times Building was completed in 1931 with offices and newspaper printing presses and all. Operations stopped there in 2011, and were moved to Bothell (some 20 miles from of Seattle). The real estate and buildings were sold in 2013 to a company from Vancouver. The developer has to preserve the exterior facade and roof of the Seattle Times Building, since these were designated a Seattle city landmark in 1996. It’s a little weird that only the exterior walls and roof of a building can be designated a landmark! .. but at least some semblance of the old building remains. The developer has already demolished all of the inside, and while the rooftop is not built on, it is getting a make-over with landscaping and seating.
Here’s a collage of pictures from my random walk around Seattle downtown this afternoon. It was sunny but only 60°F/ 15°C, so ‘light jacket’ weather. ‘Scarf weather’ is coming, sometime in November.
It was blustery and cool on the top deck of the ferry as we came in on Friday afternoon to Seattle from Bainbridge Island.
We spotted a cruise ship, unusual for October. The 2017 cruise season is now over, and the 2018 season will start in May.
Bryan and I made a run out to Kitsap peninsula for dinner with friends. We stopped at Norwegian Point to catch a little of the beautiful fall weather, and then made it down to Bainbridge Island for dinner at a restaurant-store called Via Rosa 11: great wood-fired pizza, and other Italian food.
We stayed over in the town of Omak on Wednesday night, and made our way back to Seattle on Thursday over the North Cascades* with Highway 20. It’s about a 5 hr drive without stops, to go from Omak to Twisp, Winthrop, Newhalem, Darrington and then with I-5 (or I-405) to Seattle. It was a crisp morning when we started back from Omak (47 °F/ 8°C), but back in Seattle it was a record warm day for Sept 28 at (85°F/ 29 °C).
*The Cascade Range or ‘Cascades’ is a major mountain range of western North America, extending from southern British Columbia in Canada through Washington State and Oregon and into Northern California.
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).
