Category: Seattle

The Seattle Times reports that the digging for the Sound Transit Light Rail expansion – adding three stations to the north – is almost done.   From the newspaper : ‘The tunnel boring contractors are only 650 feet from the finish line of a seven-mile marathon dig to extend the Light Rail tunnel from the University of Washington to Northgate’.  The tunnel-boring machine should emerge next to Husky Stadium in about 10 days.

So how much more work remains? Well, it will take five more years before the three stations open in 2021. That sure sounds like a lo-o-ong time.  One of the reasons may be funding and another limited construction time due to noise abatement considerations.

I chase myself out of the house on Saturdays and Sundays to go and enjoy the mild summer weather.  With the new Capitol Hill train station seven blocks away, I can go downtown or up to the University of Washington, and go check up on all the construction going on in the city.

The City of Seattle held its Gay Pride Parade today, and the perfect weather made for record attendance.  The Orlando tragedy of just two weeks ago may very well have contributed to more people attending as well.  The parade is the third largest in the country,  and by some estimates as many as 500,000 people lined 4th Avenue in downtown Seattle.   I made it out there for an hour or two, and below is a compilation of some of the pictures that I took.

Here are some pictures from Sunday.  It was sunny and mild, and I went downtown to check up on the construction activities there, and ended up at Pike Place Market as well.

I walked along the the Montlake Cut this afternoon, on the warmest-recorded-so-far June 5th for Seattle at 93 °F/ 34 °C.  (The temperatures are expected to cool down to the normal average high of of 68°F/ 20°C by the end of the week).

The Montlake Cut is the easternmost section of the Lake Washington Ship Canal, which passes through the City of Seattle, ultimately linking the large body of water Lake Washington to Puget Sound.   It is approximately 2,500 feet (760 m) long and 350 feet (110 m) wide. The center channel is 100 feet (30 m) wide and 30 feet (9.1 m) deep.

Our departure last night from San Francisco was delayed by 3 hours due to 60 mph winds, but I finally made it in a little after midnight.  The big maple tree in my neighbor’s back yard had been in bad shape (rot in the tree trunk, main branches) for a number of years now, and a note in my mailbox said that they had scheduled it to be taken out today.  So this morning I kept track of the activities (hard to ignore with all the chainsaw noise!), and in the space of 5 short hours or so, the whole tree had been taken down – all the way to the ground. There was a wood chipper on hand as well, to make it easy to take away the wood.   Here is a sequence of pictures.   I was sad to see the tree go, but it will certainly let in a lot more afternoon sunlight into the western rooms of my house.

I drove out to the South Lake Union on Saturday to 1. take my old camera to Glazer’s Camera (got a $300 exchange voucher for it, not bad), and 2. to finally hand in the modem that my internet service provider has been charging me $10 a month for.  (More a matter of principle than a matter of saving money.  I’m not paying $10 monthly ‘rent’ for an item that costs $80 outright!).

I thought the report of a power outage of many thousands of Seattle area homes early this morning was odd – given the perfect sunny weather we had today here.   It turned out it caused by a raccoon breaking into a substation, creating several system circuit outages. The raccoon did not survive.

Below is a pictures that I took today of Amazon’s biospheres, showing the progress that has been made in their construction.   Here are more pictures and a report from the Seattle Times.

We went to Columbia City on Wednesday night for a beer and a bite, and lucked out with the last parking spot in the lot across from our regular ‘watering hole’.  I love that lot’s parking fee ‘machine’ .. hanging in there, defiant, retro and analog, with no such fancy tech as accepting payment by mobile phone or debit card.   Paper money and coins, stuffed into a slot !

The elevated stretch of waterfront highway called the Alaskan Way Viaduct closed on Thursday night, for two weeks.  It is as a precaution for the digging of the new tunnel for State Route 99 that goes under the Viaduct at this point.   (When the tunnel has been completed, the Alaskan Way Viaduct will be demolished).   On a typical weekday some 90,000 drivers used the Alaskan Way Viaduct, and for the next two weeks there will be a lot of extra traffic using the downtown Seattle streets.  For those that can : use the bus, use the light rail, bike, walk.  Driving around in a car in downtown Seattle should only be done if there is no other option.

It was another nice spring day here in Seattle, but there is some rain on the way for Sunday night and Monday morning. I walked by the St. Nicholas* Russian Orthodox Cathedral on 13th Ave to check on the progress of its entry-way renovation, and saw that it is almost done.

*[From Wikipedia] Nicholas II was the last tzar of Russia, ruling from  Nov 1, 1894 until his forced abdication on Mar 15, 1917. His reign saw the fall of Imperial Russia from being one of the foremost great powers of the world, to economic and military collapse.

The new SR 520 Floating Bridge and Landings project has been underway since early 2012, and parts of it is really for final commissioning and use by the general public.   Bryan, Gary and I went to the official opening of the new State Route 520 Floating Bridge today.  The new bridge has been built alongside the old (which will be dismantled and recycled).  The final work on the ‘approaches’ to the bridge (the on-ramps and off-ramps) will continue, but vehicles (and pedestrians and cyclists) will be able to start to use the new bridge just a little later in April.  The west-bound lanes will open first, with the east-bound lanes to follow two weeks later.

Here are a few more pictures from my visit to the Seattle Asian Art Museum on Thursday night.  We have had a nice run of warm spring days here in Seattle, touching 70 °F (21°C) for the first time since October of last year.  70° weather usually arrives only in mid-April.