Category: Seattle

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.

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).

The latest Bloomberg Businessweek has an extensive article on the American electorate, and the different demographic groups that will vote in the upcoming election ..    Check it out here.    There is also an article about the suburban city of Tukwila south of Seattle, the population of which has 40% refugees.  Wow, I thought, I never knew that.

From the article: Saar’s Super Saver Foods have risen about 16 percent in the past year as the market diversified its offerings to cater to Tukwila’s immigrant community. “When people come in, see the store, and then go tell their friends or their family, ‘Hey, they got this, this, this,’ I think that’s what’s really driven the growth,” he says. The store now sells almost 45,000 different products. “A lot of items surprise us,” he says. “One of the big ones in our Middle Eastern section is actually dates. I thought a date was a date, but there’s five, six varieties of dates, and we sell just a ton of them. We make sure we have the lowest price on them.”

My mom used to buy dried dates for us in South Africa, pressed into little ‘bricks’ (she made Rice Krispie balls with them.  Rice Krispies, and sticky dates, rolled in shredded coconut. Hmm). I need to go check out that store.

On September 9th a 9-10 ton ice cube, with 80 inch (6.7 ft) sides, is going to be placed in Occidental Park in downtown Seattle.  The temporary ‘art’ installation is designed by Seattle architecture firm Olson Kundig (OK), and will ‘showcase the stages of the natural water cycle as the ice shifts from opaque to translucent’.   I see weather blogger Cliff Mass has issued a challenge to his readers : to estimate the amount of time it will take for the cube to melt.   Hmm.  Some of the calculation will involve very well known parameters, such as the Specific Heat Capacity* of Ice (2.108 kJ/kgK) and the Latent Heat of Melting** (334 kJ/kg).  What one would have to estimate: what the starting temperature of the block of ice will be (it could be well below freezing), and what the surrounding temperature will be.

*The energy required to raise the temperature of one unit of mass of a given substance by a given amount (usually one degree).
**The energy it takes to melt ice and make it into water, with no temperature change.

I went down to Lake Union on late Saturday afternoon to check out how Lake Union Park was coming along. (Also: Google is slated to build new Seattle campus buildings starting in 2017 there, a stone’s throw from the Lake).  The park looks OK; I would say it still needs some big trees, though.  The pond and surroundings with the Canadian geese is more or less under control. (The geese are notorious for making a big mess with their droppings!).

It was nice to catch two floatplanes on the maneuvering on the lake, one from Kenmore Air, and one from the local TV station.

August has run out all its 31 days. The days are getting shorter, and weather is cooling down.