a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
It was a beautiful, crisp, sunny day here in the northwest corner of the United States (56 °F/ 13 °C). I made my way down to Pike Place Market and the waterfront and bought a book at a second-hand book store there. Where are you from? inquired the owner. ‘Oh – South Africa’ I said, simply. My camera bag completed my appearance as an international tourist.
P.S. It’s a white Christmas in Seattle, with an inch or two of snow falling overnight in the city. White Christmases are rare in Seattle, but in 2008 four inches of snow blanketed the city on Christmas Day.
There was a thick fog hanging in the city this morning, but it was dry, and the sun came out later.
Deadlines have to be met, and time costs money – so construction on the new downtown Seattle buildings soldiers on, regardless of the season. The crews do take a break on Sundays, and then I can go check on their progress. Here are two buildings near Westlake Avenue and Denny Way.
I replaced just about all the light bulbs inside my house with light-emitting diode (LED) bulbs this year. It’s amazing: a tungsten-filament bulb that used to run at 60 Watt, can now be replaced with one that run only at 9 W! This is much better still, than the 13 W for compact fluorescent light (CFL) bulbs. General Electric is now stopping production of domestic CFL lamps in favor of LEDs.
So for Christmas lights, many home-owners can now install strings of LED lights as well. Yes, these cost more to purchase, but a lot less to operate. (Every year we see reports of home-owners that set up displays with 100,000 bulbs or more, and that ‘borrow’ electricity from their neighbors to power it all up). LEDs also last longer than traditional incandescent glass lights, and are a safer light source since the bulbs do not get as hot, and are made of epoxy, not glass.
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.
