Category: Seattle

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.