Category: Seattle

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Friday/ another ‘beta’ store

It used to be that beta* versions apply only to software, but for Amazon, it applies to their physical stores as well.  The ‘beta’ version of the store is for Amazon employees only, and then when everything is working smoothly, it is opened to the public.

I found another type of Amazon beta store in Seattle’s SoDo (south of downtown) industrial district.   It’s an Amazon Fresh Pickup store.  (Amazon Fresh Delivery has been around in select cities since 2007).   The shopper selects and pays for grocery items on Amazon.com (Amazon Prime membership is required), reserve a time for picking it up (as little as 15 minutes later), and then go pick it up.   I guess it saves time and effort as far as the selection and check-out goes, and if you were going to drive to the regular grocery store anyway, the Amazon Fresh Pickup could definitely save some time.   If the Amazon.com selection is large enough to combine trips to two or three grocery stores, that would be even better. (For those picky, picky, picky shoppers that need that specific product brand or specialty items. Yes, you know who you are!).

*’Beta’ is a pre-release version of software that is given out to a group of users to try out under real conditions.

Here’s the pickup area for the new Amazon Fresh Pickup store. The store is on the left, and that is the Starbucks headquarters building in the background.   The Pickup attendant told me that this store should be open by the end of the May to the public.
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Wednesday/ 1,358 days left

Just type ‘days until’ into Google search and it auto-fills ‘ ..2020 election’.   It knows.

The picture below shows a sign on a house here in Seattle – that I presumed was the number of days until the November 2020 election.

The home owner’s number is actually the number of days until the January 2021 presidential inauguration, though, which is correct!

And yes: we look forward to it.

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Sunday/ construction frenzy

Seattle downtown’s construction frenzy shows no sign of slowing down, with 68 projects counted this spring.

Here are a few pictures from my walkabout in downtown on Sunday afternoon.

These new glass and steel buildings are in the Denny triangle. I’m looking toward Stewart Street. The tall wedge-shaped building is the Kinects Tower, slated for completion in July; 40 stories with 357 apartments. The shorter building with its tower at the back is the Tilt49 building. Those are offices in the front, with a 36-story, 368 apartment building at the back.
Close by, construction is starting on an extension of Seattle Children’s Hospital research facility, scheduled for opening in 2019.
Here’s another completed apartment tower, this one 39 stories tall, the Cirrus Tower. One bedroom apartment rentals start at $2,500 per month.  Right in front of me is the construction site of Amazon III, which will be 38 stories tall when completed at the end of 2018.
(This is not a new building, but I like it). The two-story Washington Talking Book and Braille Library (WTBBL, pronounce Wuh-tah’-bull) is housed in a 1948 building in the Streamline Moderne style (a late type of the Art Deco architecture). The building started out as an auto dealership that sold Dodge and Plymouth vehicles. WTBBL moved into the building in 1983.
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Saturday/ the new Chimacum ferry

Bryan and I went out to Bainbridge Island on Saturday.  We spotted the new Chimakum ferry at the Seattle Waterfront.  The ferry will run on the Seattle-Bremerton route.

Washington State Ferries operates the largest ferry system in the United States. It runs ten routes serving 20 terminals located around Puget Sound and in the San Juan Islands. The agency maintains 22 vessels, carrying 24.2 million passengers in 2016.
The newest Washington state ferry, Chimacum, joined the fleet on Friday, April 7. It is the third Olympic Class ferry and can carry 144 cars and 1,500 passengers. The name Chimacum (CHIM-a-cum), honors the Chemakum tribe’s gathering place, which is now the present day town of Chimacum near Port Townsend.
This is a departure picture from the ferry Tacoma, on our way to Bainbridge Island. Look for a new building called The Mark in the background, just left of the tall black Columbia Tower, now nearing completion.
The view of the Seattle downtown skyline from way back. The cruise season is just getting started. There is a Holland America cruise ship just to the right of the Space Needle getting ready to set sail for Alaska.
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Friday/ the tulips are out

Friday was a beautiful sunny day in the city (66 °F/ 19 °C).
I finally see tulips blooming here in my neighborhood .. Seattle’s chilly winter weather meant that flowers, especially ones from bulbs like tulips and daffodils, are blooming a bit later than in past years.

Bright red tulips here on my block.
My Japanese maple is budding with beautiful colors in its new leaves.

 

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Sunday/ Amazon construction update

The city of Seattle had a decent Sunday (with sun!), and I used the opportunity to go check out the progress on the Amazon biospheres.   There is also a third Amazon tower building for which construction had started in the fall of 2016, with its completion scheduled for some time in 2018.

The three biospheres all have complete outer shells, but there is still work needed on the inside. What must surely be the city’s smallest dog park, is in the lower right of the picture : an enclosure barely bigger than my sitting room. Just behind the white containers on the left of the picture, is the foundation of Amazon Tower III, slated for completion in 2018.
Here is an artistic rendering of the three Amazon Towers. From left to right : Amazon I is the set of buildings with the red & green; Amazon II is the blue one to the right of the biospheres, and Tower III is the one on the far right, still under construction (37 floors). © Magnusson Klemencic Associates
This is the view on the north-facing side of Amazon II. There is an Amazon Go grocery concept store* on the far corner (where the yellow paneling ends) – but the store is not yet open to the public. *There are no check-out lines. The store uses technology to detect when a shopper takes an item from the shelf, and then syncs the data to the shopper’s smart phone.
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Tuesday/ Bertha sees daylight

Yay! The tunnel boring machine called Bertha, digging the State Route 99 tunnel under the city to replace Seattle’s Alaskan Way Viaduct, emerged today into the sunlight.  The tunnel is 1.7 miles (2.7 km) long.  Digging started four years ago in April 2013, but came to a halt in December 2013 when damage to the the main bearing was sustained.  It would be two years, until December 2015, before digging could resume.

So .. now the tunnel is dug, but it will still take until early 2019 before the current above-ground section of State Route 99 can be moved below ground, by using the tunnel.

The moment the tunneling machine broke into the end wall. What happens next? Well, the braces in the disassembly pit will be removed, the tunneling machine pushed forward so that the cutter head can be removed. then the rest of the machine will be taken back through the tunnel to the starting point. (The crane that can lift the very heavy machinery, is located).
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Sunday/ Puget Sound low tide

We had some sun on Sunday, and even though it was not warm! (50 °F/ 10 °C), it was still nice to get outside.  My friends Bill & Dave and I took their dogs to the beach at the edge of Puget Sound between Golden Gardens, and Carkeek Park.

1. The main picture shows the edge of Puget Sound looking southwest, more or less where the bubble no 10 is on the map.   2.  I’m no crap expert, but I think this is a dungeness crab we ran into on the beach.   3.  Just out of curiosity, I looked up the rules for catching crab on the Washington State Dept of Fisheries and Wildlife.  When the season is open, there is a limit of 5 adult males.  (For area 10 the season is closed right now).
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Saturday/ (I don’t like) April Fools’ Day

It turns out ‘fake news’ goes back a long way – in the case of fake news regarding the collapse of the Space Needle, all the way back to April Fools’ Day in 1989.   Local TV station King5 reports that an April Fools’ Day joke that year, was taken as seriously real news, in spite of a bold ‘APRIL FOOLS DAY’ caption on the fake picture that was aired.   So many people called 911 that the local 911 system was shut down.  The story made national headlines, and jokesters John Keister and Steve Wilson that put the footage together (including a hysterical ‘eyewitness’) had to apologize on air.

Fake news from April 1, 1989 : that the Space Needle had collapsed. (No such thing happened).
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Wednesday/ can confirm: sun in Seattle

This February and March have been the wettest in at least a century here in the Pacific Northwest.  So when the sun came out today, our local TV station tweeted this tongue-in-cheek picture of a sun-lit downtown Seattle.  And as I walked into my kitchen late afternoon to start with dinner, I thought Whoah! The sun is so bright!

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Thursday/ lots of rain

We have has a lot of rain (in addition to the snow), this February in the Seattle area.
From the Seattle Times : With 7.84 inches of rain for the month by 6 a.m. Thursday, February is the sixth-wettest. Wednesday was a record-setter all by itself, with 1.63 inches of rain, drowning the daily record of 0.94 inches set in 1970.
At this rate, all Seattle needs is an additional 1.28 inches to float right to the top, breaking the record for the month set in 1961, said Dustin Guy, meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Seattle.

The rain had stopped and it was a beautiful day outside on Thursday, with the air scrubbed clean from the rain, and mild temperatures ( 52 °F/ 11°C).
Check out this interesting map showing the ‘rain shadow’ here in Puget Sound. The Olympic Mountains on the Olympic Peninsula form a barrier against the moist air and precipitation that comes in from a south westerly direction from Hawaii. In some places none of the rain make it to the other side of the peninsula. I guess here in the city we’re a little in between. We get some of the rain but not nearly as much as the Olympic Peninsula.
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Saturday/ University District

The weather finally cleared up after a week of snow and rain, and I made a run out to U-District (short for ‘University District’, next to the campus of the University of Washington). My favorite store in all of Seattle is probably the University Bookstore.

This is Capitol Hill train station, now nearing its one-year anniversary, with the northbound train to the U-District on the right. It just looks as if the platforms are empty; there are several people behind me!
A book about American English asks : What do we call it when it’s raining while the sun is shining? In most of the USA there is no word but Florida & the Northeast say it’s a ‘sunshower’, and in the southeast ‘The Devil beating his Wife’.  In South Africa (in Afrikaans), we say ‘Jakkals trou met Wolf se vrou’ (Eng. Jackal marries Wolf’s wife).  In some folklore the Jackal and Wolf are sworn enemies. 
This fence is the edge of the enormous construction site for the new University District station. (It has a little art project going, on it. I will have to go back and take a night-time picture when the light strings are switched on).
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Monday/ Mr Blue Sky

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

Hey – I see blue sky from my front porch. The temperature warmed up just enough this afternoon to melt the thin layer of snow and ice left on the clean-scraped sections of the path and sidewalk. The rest of the snow will melt in the next two or three days, I think.
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Monday/ snow day in Seattle

Winter storm Maya will move across the northern United States and the Midwest through Tuesday. (Source: The Weather Channel)
Here’s a close-up of the cities and snowfalls from winter storm Maya. (Source: The Weather Channel).
Here’s a picture I took around 5.30 am this morning, of 17th Ave on Capitol Hill.
And these fir trees are in my back yard. It is 11 am on Monday and big fluffy snow flakes are sifting down.

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!

 

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Saturday/ Seattle’s protest march

Liberty and justice for all people!
This is an hour and some into the march. That is Seattle’s old Union Station in the background.

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.

And this is at the corner of 4th Ave and Washington, in lower downtown Seattle.

 

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Sunday/ construction update

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 cladding of ‘The Mark’ is progressing. The 660 ft-tall building has 44 floors and is scheduled for completion in April 2017. (I’m not an expert, but just looking at it from the outside, I think the completion will be a few months later than April!).
The three Amazon biospheres have all their panels fitted, but there is still a lot of work to be done on the inside. They are scheduled for completion in the spring of 2018.
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Saturday/ the Sounders have it

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!

 

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Friday/ snow day

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’s midnight on Thursday on 17th Ave in North Capitol Hill with its big trees, and bright white LED street lights.
This picture was taken at about 7 am this morning, at sunrise.  The snow on the cars was still soft and fluffy, and easy to clean off.
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Sunday/ cold but sunny

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.

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It was 4.10 pm when I took this picture, twilight already! – as I was making my way up East John St toward the top of Capitol Hill.

 

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Thursday/ Uncle Ike’s

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.

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Uncle Ike’s on 15th Avenue. The lights on the bare trees in front of Uncle Ike’s, and even the green light bulbs lining the roof, brings a little cheer to the gloomy gray winter sky.